Monster - 2. History

My mother’s madness has an architecture. Its symptoms, as I have seen them during my nineteen years, are terrible and various, with the layered complexity of aged bordeaux. I can trace the thread of the origins of that madness at least as far back as her childhood, but there can be little doubt that they extend much further, the first cogs antedating Milton. It’s easy for me to imagine that there was, perhaps, an original matriarch sputtering madness in a dead European language from under a wide-brimmed hat. One or all of her children carried forth her madness to their children, their grandchildren, their great-grandchildren, until it dis- and re-appeared without pattern or reason only to afflict my mother (and to a lesser degree myself) over a distance of years and oceans.

Swollen syntax and crowding of metaphors: forgive me, reader, I too show the symptoms of my mother’s madness, and I cannot help when they bubble up in my voice. If I were short-sighted enough, I could believe that the symptoms would die with me, but they will resurface elsewhere: stranger shores, nameless cousins.

I can tell you though, I can show you some of my mother’s symptoms as I first witnessed them between cupboard and knife block, so that you might understand why Riley’s feet irreversibly left the ground.

“Electric neck hair and distrust of wide-eyed peripheral vision whose object is a horror movie,” my mother said to me as I sat on the kitchen counter when I was eight. “My sister, Darci; your aunt, Darci; she and I, twelve and ten, were up late one night watching a horror movie. All day we had been playing that game. We had been playing that game where a clever young voice cries ‘What is that?’ with outstretched finger, and then ‘Made you look,’ when the other turns to see. All day my sister and I had been playing that game until we sat down late at night to watch a horror movie.

“That is why my sister, Darci, your aunt, Darci, did not look when our mother, your grandmother, fell past the window from her room above. A specter fell past the window in a white gown and I pointed and said, ‘Darci! Darci, look! I think Mom just fell out of the window.

“‘I’m not falling for that again,’ said your stubborn aunt. ‘We’re done playing that game. We’re watching a scary movie now.’ Behind her, my terrible mother whom I detest with the unflinching female rage of the sirens who sought Odysseus stood up in her white gown outside the window, rocking back and forth in befuddlement and rage. It is then that your aunt turned to look. ‘Helene!’ she said to me. ‘Helene, Mom fell out the window! You weren’t kidding me! Mom really fell out the window!’

“Together we, your aunt and I, that is, my sister and I, ran upstairs to tell our father that mother had fallen out the window. We shook him in his bed, ‘Wake up, father,’ we said, ‘Wake up! Mother has fallen out of the window!’ Meanwhile, the curtain of the window mother had jumped out of swelled in the breeze like pregnancy or cancer or any of those other growing things which kill women.

“Our father opened his eyes at last, so we repeated one more time, “Father, mother jumped out of the window.’

“‘Well, shut the window then,’ he said.

“‘But father…’ we said, knowing only his eyes were awake.

“‘Nevermind, girls. Get to bed,’ said a voice from behind us. We turned to see our mother framed in the doorway of our parents’ bedroom, a trail of blood leading from the far stairwell, through the dim hall, and to her swaying imperious figure. ‘To bed, girls,’ she said.

“The next day mother was drunk before sunrise, stretched out on the couch in the living room with her toes bandaged together. She held her head high the way she always did when, having drank too much before bed the previous day, she had triggered whatever demon in her possesses her body when she is asleep and makes her do all manner of things: dump buckets of water on me when I am asleep and slap my face; piss in a closet like a dumb feline; or begin baking something and fall asleep while it burns, setting off all the fire alarms in the house. She made her embarrassment, the embarrassment of a fire-blooded Irish woman with whiskey sweat, our problem. And so, when we came downstairs, my sister and I, we knew that she was embarrassed, drunk, and hell-bent on reminding us that through some kind of metaphysics of blindness and veneration, it was our duty not to see her at her lowest, to black out our vision as she blacked out her consciousness.

“‘Things are going to change around here,’ she said as she always said. ‘You girls are going to start earning your keep.’

“And so she put us to work. She put us to work fixing her breakfast, cleaning the dishes, scrubbing stains off of the kitchen grout which only she could see, cleaning out the stove, fetching wheelbarrow-loads of rocks from the back woods for her garden, moving pieces of furniture in the basement to see if any spiders needed extermination, and climbing high on a ladder to polish the chandelier in the foyer. When we had finished those things and dozens besides, my sister and I began to make an early supper in the kitchen. At the stove, my sister, your aunt, Darci, as I’ve said, made the mistake which cost us that night. It was a cup. She fumbled a cup which, in her jester’s act of flailing arms and drawn-back lips to catch it, made us laugh. It was a short laugh, stifled out of fear of the monster in the living room.

“‘I’ll teach you to laugh at me, girls,’ said my mother, stepping into the kitchen. ‘Wait until your father sees what you’ve done.’

“My sister and I looked back at her, frozen, slack-jawed, waiting to see what she would do, watching her imagine what she could do. ‘Wait until your father sees…’

“With a dumb animal grunt she knocked over a large vase, startling herself with the crash it made once it hit the kitchen floor. I started, I started before my sister, your aunt, I started to try to clean up the mess before my sister did, but my mother stopped me. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Leave this. Leave this to show your father what you’ve done,’ she said, standing in the center of the vase shards, glowing under the overhead kitchen light in her gown with her palms upturned like Jesus on water.

“And it was soon after that our father did come home, opening the door and coming into the kitchen with heavy, purposeful, male strides. My mother, that actor, that witch, that mimic, had already begun to manufacture tears. ‘Look what these girls have done,’ she said. ‘I work all day, cleaning for them, preparing them food, and they ridicule me. They mock me. They break our fine things and laugh. What is wrong with these girls? Can you not put some sense into these girls?’ she said, working herself up into a wail.

“For the next hour, the entirety of the next hour which to a girl of ten and a girl of twelve under punishment for no wrong seemed like the grey wall at the edge of eternity, for that hour our father knocked us senseless in an effort to put sense into us. ‘You girls,’ he said. ‘I work all day and come home to see you girls have done this?’ Remember this, Michael. Remember this so that you might understand how I could be to you if I so chose. Remember that my father took two heavy strides toward us and grabbed the back of our heads by our thin ponytails so that he could smack our foreheads together. Can you imagine, Michael? Can you imagine the sickening double-smack of your skull against your sister’s as you cry out in injustice and pain to those who think you deserve it? Oh, he smacked our skulls together, and turned on the stove burners and reminded us: ‘Do you see what I can do to you? Do you understand, girls, that if you do any of this shit again, I will press your faces into these burners?’ He held our faces over them so that we were afraid to move for fear of slipping onto them, and afraid not to in case he might let go, forced at the ages of ten and twelve to conceive and negotiate an impossible middle passage between movement and non-movement. He knocked us over then, with heavy punches to our stomachs he knocked us to the floor so that he could scoop. He scooped us, one by one, back and forth, me and Darci, myself and your aunt, he scooped one of us, threw one of us at the wall to bounce off and hit the floor, and then scooped the other and did the same to her. He did it endlessly until our knees had bounced off of the tile floor so much that we were sure they would crack in three directions like ice blocks cleft by stakes. When it was done, my sister and I, your aunt and your very mother standing here, we just lay on the ground sobbing as your grandmother starred at us in her gown: arms crossed under her breasts, looking down her nose at her daughters, unpardonably steady.

“One usually learns, growing up, that the guilty deserve punishment, the guilty become punished; what most do not learn is that the relationship can easily and with the same fluidity revserse itself: the punished can become guilty. And so did my sister and I. We became guilty, sobbing on tile under the unequivocating lights we had cleaned earlier that day. We felt the guilt seep in through the punishment.”

By the end of my mother Helene’s story, an episode of hers like so many others, she had begun to sob and reach for cheap white zinfandel. I sat on the counter, between the knife block and the cupboards, quiet, eight, learning about family. I did not cry. I never cried during my mother’s rages.

The secret is “normal.” Imagine this common late-adolescent discussion: two pseudo-intellectuals fancy themselves brilliant once they determine, together and whole-heartedly, that “normal” is subjective, constructed, essentially non-essential. What they fault short of, what they do not realize, is that there is such a thing as “normal,” even if it is different for everyone.

“Normal” is, quite simply, what you experience in your first years of life. Because my mother sobbed through horrible, involute monologues regularly throughout my first years, I understood it as normal. Ah, I thought, so this is what it means to be a woman.

If I self-diagnose, I say it explains so much: why I never cried for her agonies, why I could only love my own sex, why in my later years she made so many accusations of my coldness, why I may be so cold, why I will never know.

Even those diagnoses are suspect. I am, in these final hours as I write this, trying to determine if any of my thoughts have value, or if they are only the misguided cognitive processes of an abomination.