Riding Fury Home Read online

  After Dad left, Mom started sleeping downstairs in the study. Upstairs in my bed I worried about fire, slept with my nostrils flared for the smell of a smoldering mattress. With Mom that far away, I had to listen hard. My body became a tuning fork; even in sleep, my ears stayed alert for the stagger and thud of Mom’s falling on the uncarpeted floor in her midnight forays to the toilet. I’d jolt up in response, racing downstairs to haul Mom up off the floor, grabbing her under the armpits. With one of her arms over my shoulder, we’d lurch to the bathroom and back to her bed.

  Once under the covers, if Mom was restless or insisting on a cigarette, I started to do something my father had not done: crawl in bed next to her. I bribed her with a promise. “Lie down, Mom. I’ll help you get to sleep.” She’d turn on her side and I would spoon behind her, stroking her damp, sweaty hair, singing quietly. If I started to doze, I was startled awake as soon as Mom fell asleep. Your mother has a deviated septum, Dad had said when I asked about her incredibly loud snoring. Her snores rattled sleep from me. I’d slip out from under the covers and stumble upstairs. So tired.

  Back in my bed, the spirals of sleep pulled on me, but trees creaked as the wind came up. The faces of wolves hovered at my second story window, just out of sight. Some part of me knew they weren’t real. A branch hit my window, and I stifled a scream. No matter how piercing my yell, I knew Mom would never hear me. She was totally deaf in one ear, and she was sleeping the death sleep of Doriden. Better to huddle under the covers, clamped and shivering, than to give voice to fear.

  DURING THE DAY, MOM was relatively able—sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on what, I never knew. Her daytime medications, the sedatives and tranquilizers, didn’t knock her down into staggering oblivion like the nightly sleeping pills. She managed to keep us fed. After school, I came home to my mother’s kiss, her welcome of “Hi, darling,” and a snack—apple slices with Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese, Pepperidge Farm goldfish, and a glass of milk, or sour cream and blueberries sprinkled with sugar. Then there was my after-school routine of doing homework and a half hour of piano practice, after which I would run over to Barbie’s—two houses away—and play until dinner.

  When we were alone, the protectiveness I felt toward my mother around others ebbed away. The anger that I tried to bury would erupt, but only at insignificant matters. I hated the noises Mom made when she ate. Her teeth had rotted while she was in the hospital, and the dentist there had extracted all her upper and some lower teeth. She had come home, at thirty-eight, with a full upper set of dentures and a partial bridge. The false teeth clicked as she chewed. Sometimes I’d yell, “What are you, a pig!?” When she simply shrugged, or her eyes got moist with tears, I felt terribly guilty. But I couldn’t seem to stop my nasty remarks.

  Sometimes on the weekends, we would go to the movies in Princeton. Once, Mom and I were breezing along River Road, a windy two-lane. It was a crisp fall afternoon and we were going to a matinee. My mother was in a reasonably good mood, and her driving phobia hadn’t kicked in, so I relaxed in the passenger seat of our Hudson and watched the orange and gold foliage pass by, trailing my hand out the side of the car, feeling the rush of air. As always, my mother was smoking a cigarette. When she was down to the filter, she stabbed it in the ashtray with her right hand, her left hand on the wheel; then, flinging her right arm across her chest, she flicked the butt out the window. This interrupted my reverie because I had to dig another Tareyton out of her purse while she punched in the cigarette lighter.

  Princeton’s only movie theater stood in the center of the small, neat upper-class town with its Gothic university buildings. It was almost as if a cloak of hush had been draped over the town, an air of restraint epitomized in the muted plaids and dull tans of expensive preppie outfits. It made me feel especially conscious to act right and not stick out.

  We parked in the lot behind the theater, stopped in the lobby for refreshments. When the theater lights dimmed, I was swept into the cinema world—the aroma of salty butter, the crunch of popcorn, the sweetness of Coca-Cola, the sound of Raisinets running along their cardboard container into my hand.

  After a matinee, there was always the shock to find it still daylight. But that was nothing compared with what Mom and I found when we got to our car. Firemen in their black helmets and yellow raincoats had pulled the back seat onto the parking lot asphalt, and they were just finishing spraying it with fire extinguishers. Stinking black smoke wafted up. The seat was incinerated, and I could see its metal springs poking through the charred padding. Our car was a spectacle, and a cluster of people was gawking in silence.

  One of the firemen came over to my mother, as we stood staring at the car seat. “Ma’am, this your car?”

  Mom nodded and smiled weakly.

  “Did you have a lit cigarette that you didn’t put out properly?”

  Shame flamed in me, prickling my skin.

  “I thought I had,” she answered. “I stubbed it out and threw it out the window.”

  “Well, Ma’am, be more careful next time.” He stated the obvious, like my mother was some kind of simpleton. I wanted to escape, disappear. Here we were again, Mom and me, standing out, looking weird. Is it both of us, or just my mother?

  As the spectators began to drift away, the firemen loaded the charred frame of the seat into its place in the back of our car. The one who had talked to Mom raised his hand to his brim and wiggled his hat at Mom before they left.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Mom said.

  ON SATURDAYS, GRANDMA MIRIAM and Grandpa Isidor often showed up, not in Grandpa’s green grocery van, but gliding down our driveway in their huge boat of an Oldsmobile. Grandma was too elegant to ride in a van. They always came with groceries from Grandpa’s store, and the makings of brunch from Tabach-nick’s, a Jewish deli near their house.

  One Saturday, they bustled in, Grandpa unpacking the groceries into our fridge and freezer, while Grandma set out the spread of lox, bagels, cream cheese, whitefish, pickled herring, potato salad, and coleslaw. Like every visit, Grandma looked Mom over, frowning. Most days, Mom wore a dirty gray sweatshirt over jeans or sweatpants. Grandma prided herself in being a sharp dresser. She encased her fleshy torso in a full-length girdle, over which she wore fitted dresses, always adorned with a necklace and matching earrings. “Why don’t you fix yourself up, Gloria?”

  Mom glared at her. “We’re not going to the opera here. Don’t forget, Pop and I are going to work on the yard.”

  As soon as brunch was over, Mom, Grandpa, and I went outside. Grandpa did the heavier chores: cutting back blackberry vines, bleeding air from the well, chopping firewood from the now-seasoned black walnut tree a groundhog had felled. His bald head would shine with sweat as he swung the axe, splitting logs. Grandpa was not a talker. Once, I had asked what his life had been like, before, in Poland. But all he said was, “We were ignorant peasants. We knew nothing. There’s nothing to tell.” Now, I found comfort in Grandpa’s steady practicality, his silence, the swish and whap of the axe hitting wood.

  Nearby, Mom and I had our own project, planting pachysandra against the front of the house. Mom and I each knelt with our trowels, digging little holes in the earth. Aunt Rita, an avid gardener, had donated the groundcover from her large suburban garden. The pachysandra had fluted, dark green leaves and a single root. Over and over, Mom and I repeated the same action: twisting the root into a tight circle, holding it that way with one hand in the hole while troweling dirt with the other, then, with two hands, leaning into the dirt with the weight of our bodies, pressing it down. It was a boring and soothing task. I daydreamed as we planted, relaxing in the safety of the mundane.

  Inside the house, Grandma had a pot roast baking in the oven. While it cooked, she straightened up the disorder of our daily life, the clutter of newspapers left on the floor, the unopened mail. We had an early dinner together, and before she and Grandpa left, she’d look around the tidied-up house and say, “There, isn’t that better
!” as if all would be well.

  SOMETIMES GRANDMA stayed with us overnight. She slept upstairs in my parents’ bedroom, which Mom had vacated. I worried that she would hear Mom at night, but Grandma was a sound sleeper. I could creep downstairs and haul Mom back to bed without Grandma ever knowing.

  The first overnight, after breakfast, Grandma announced we were going to do the laundry. “Go get your sheets,” she told me.

  “I don’t have any,” I told her, smiling.

  “What?” she asked.

  I told Grandma proudly my ingenious method of bedmaking. On top of my bed, there was an orange corduroy bedspread, looking prim and neat. There were no sheets underneath it. Instead, I slept on top of the orange spread with the comforter over me that I pulled out of the closet just before going to sleep. In the morning, I threw the comforter in a wad back in my closet. My plan meant that I never had to make the bed and no sheets had to be washed.

  “Let’s go see,” Grandma said. Her tight face made my chest clench up.

  Upstairs, Grandma had me drag the comforter from the closet and drape it across the bed. As we stared at it together, I suddenly saw how frayed it had become, and a bit blackened. It had been a present from Grandma, and had once been a glowing gold satin, soft as a lamb’s nose. My grandmother’s horror struck a chord of shame in me, as if she had discovered the secret chaos under the exterior of things—We’re not normal, me and Mom. And it reinforced my unspoken rule: Don’t bring anyone home, don’t let them see Mom. Suddenly, I saw that I was patching things together, and I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

  That morning, Grandma taught me how to make a bed properly. She demonstrated how to put a pillowcase on and how to make hospital corners with the top sheet, tucking it just so. But that night, after Grandma went home, I left the sheets on the bed, covered by the bedspread, and resumed my old method. To sleep, I needed that comforter right against my skin.

  ONE TIME, GRANDMA stayed with us over a whole weekend. When Grandpa came to pick her up on Sunday, Grandma and I were standing on the red concrete landing outside our front door while Grandpa put her bags in the trunk. Mom was somewhere in the house. I watched Grandpa open the passenger door for Grandma. He revved the engine and I raised my hand to wave goodbye. As their car started up the driveway, something broke loose in me, and I found myself running after their car, screaming, “STOP! COME BACK! STOP!”

  Grandpa braked and I ran to Grandma’s door. She opened it and looked at me, squinting, her forehead creased. “What is it?”

  “Don’t go-o-o!” I was crying.

  Grandma sounded tired as she said, “Isidor, get my things from the trunk.” She got out and patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry; I’ll stay with you.”

  And for a few days, she did.

  EVERY FEW WEEKS, when I reached into our postal box in the Biddle’s musty porch that served as the Millstone post office, my hand pulled out a blue envelope with foreign stamps and PAR AVION printed in the lower left corner. Dad! My body fluttering, I raced home along the slate sidewalk and in the front door, yelling, “Mom! Mom! A letter from Dad!” I ignored her unsmiling face, her lack of excitement as she took the letter and slowly unfolded it, laying it open on our dining table, where we both leaned over, reading it to ourselves.

  Dad’s familiar handwriting looping across the blue paper brought an ache to my chest, but his writing was dry and matter-of-fact: He told about his fellow scientists at the research project, his visits to museums, plays, and concerts in London. I tried to picture him at these British haunts, but the images were blurry. We couldn’t call him, because he had no phone in his rooming house, and even if he did, international calls cost too much.

  Mom and I wrote him back, sharing the aerogram, the thinnest of blue paper that folded into its self-made envelope. I wrote Dad about my science fair project making natural dyes using grapes, walnut bark, and goldenrod pollen; about how I had caught a little sunfish from our dock, watched the beautiful iridescent fish swim in our bathtub, and then brought him back in my pail to his home in the river. But there was one thing I never wrote about: how hard things were with Mom. Somehow, I’d gotten that my father didn’t want to hear the truth. My job was to protect him from Mom, and Mom from everyone.

  RELIGIOUS STUDENTS FROM Zarephath, a nearby evangelical Christian community with its own college, sometimes volunteered to spend time during the day with Mom. They believed in good deeds. The teachers knew my mother from her days studying Latin at their school. The volunteers always left before I got home. Once, I found a remnant from a visit. On the piano, someone had left the sheet music to “Jesus Loves Me.”

  Apparently that day’s volunteer had played Christian hymns for Mom with missionary zeal and encouraged her to sing along.

  “Mom, you didn’t sing this, did you?”

  She just shrugged.

  Rage flooded me. It wasn’t right—just because Mom needed help, those Christians thought they could push their beliefs on her. It seemed so unfair to put pressure on a vulnerable person. We were beggars and couldn’t be choosers, and the awareness of our dependency enraged me more.

  Chapter 13. Barbie

  NOT LONG AFTER MY BEST friends Kim and Sharon left for California, I started spending a lot more time with Barbie.

  I didn’t like Barbie that much, but I was desperate for a friend. As it turned out, our friendship was easy. Barbie had a physical prowess that surpassed mine, and a fearless streak that pushed me in our adventures. She had a small, compact body, a perky, upturned nose, and nonstop energy. We became adventurers together: building forts in the woods, riding our bikes for miles through the neighboring dairyland. She nimbly crossed logs suspended over streams, and I followed, my quaking legs inching along, my arms out for balance, as she waited for me to catch up. In the summer, I leapt screaming from her family’s rope hung from a tree on the riverbank into the Millstone River.

  On rainy days, we played board games and cards: Clue, Monopoly, Go Fish. On Halloween, she thought up pranks that I joined: We sat in a tree and dropped water balloons on kids in their Halloween costumes, stifling our giggles as they screamed; we ran a dummy made of old clothes stuffed with newspaper up the post office flagpole. In the fall, we raked leaf mazes and played tag in our creations with her sister and brother, and took turns jumping in a huge pile of leaves. In the winter, we skated on the local pond, racing at each other, joining hands, and spinning in a circle.

  The year my father was gone, I tried to never have Barbie over. If she and I had to get something from my house, I would race in and out as fast as possible. I prayed that Mom would be secluded in the back room, out of sight.

  At Barbie’s, I surrendered to child’s play, completely absorbed in Kick the Can or Monopoly, my body tingling from running or my attention focused on the roll of the dice and moving my plastic token. But somewhere in me lived my other life, held in a breathless tension of what couldn’t be said: how every night I put my mother to bed, how I fought her to stub out her cigarette, how I hovered all night half-awake, listening for her to fall on her way to the bathroom. My secret, hidden life.

  Every now and then, right in the midst of the hardest play—say when I was It, racing after Barbie or her little sister Cheryl Ann—my other self would creep up on me and take me by the throat. Breathless, I’d stop in my tracks, halted by an inexpressible anxiety. “Gotta go,” I’d say to a puzzled Barbie.

  I’d take off running and wouldn’t stop until I’d torn into the house, yelling, “Mom, Mom are you okay?” and she answered me.

  Chapter 14. Undertow

  I WOKE TO THE SOUND OF knocking coming from somewhere below me. I stumbled out of bed and down the stairs, shivering and flicking on lights as I went. The knocking became pounding, not at the front of the house, but at the back. My heart raced as I neared the door.

  I turned on the outside light and looked through the glass of the French door. The light made the snow gleam a cold blue. I opened the door. O
ur next-door neighbor, Mr. Jansen, was holding my mother, who stood swaying and shivering in her dripping pajamas.

  Mr. Jansen was saying something, but at first it was as if a roaring filled my ears. All I could hear was the creak, creak of the black walnut trees that lined the path to the river, their tall thin trunks swaying in the winter wind. Then his words finally reached me. “ . . . and I found her down at the river; guess she jumped in,” he said simply. He was a tall, thin man, and my mother seemed very little huddling hunched and sodden under his arm. He said nothing more, holding her out with his long arms as if offering a gift, launching her toward me. My arms were stiff like two bowling pins as I caught her there inside the doorway, the frigid winter air swirling around us.

  I stared at Mr. Jansen. Words formed inside me, filled me. I wanted to ask, What should I do?

  But Mr. Jansen was backing away. His eyes would not meet mine. My mind was scrambling to think: Could I ask him to help me put her to bed or give her a bath? But he was a man; he should not see my mother naked. Silence crackled between us. As he walked away, I would not cry out, Help!

  INSIDE ME THERE WAS just a cold sensation of tightness, as if all of my muscles had drawn inward, as if my breath were a tiny moth beating its wings in my chest. Just do whatever has to be done.

  I managed to get my mother upstairs, hauling her with one of her arms over my shoulder, my other arm around her waist. I’d decided to run a warm bath. I dumped her on the toilet and struggled with her to remove the soaked pajamas. Her lips were blue, her teeth chattering nonstop. I didn’t know if the hot water would shock her, so I made the bath mildly warm. Pressing her hand on my shoulder, she dipped her foot in, then screamed slurrily, “Isss bloody burning hot!”