Dirty Secret (30 page)

Except this time, she's not. As I walk up, she's sitting on a bench digging through a wrinkled paper bag.

“Hi, honey!” She's wearing black leggings and a blousy turquoise shirt, with her keys on the orange plastic coil around her neck. She sees me looking at the plastic coil, removes it, then shoves it into the black fanny pack she sometimes slings purse-style over her shoulder.

I sit down next to her and she asks how my dad is.

“The same, basically. And he's tired because he's not sleeping well.”

“Tell him to take an antihistamine about half an hour before bed. Twenty-five milligrams. We gave it to patients at the nursing home all the time.” She slips a thin cardboard box from the paper bag she'd been digging through. “And now, I have some things to show you.” The box is about the size of a deck of cards, and from it, she slides out a foil sheet and hands it to me. “It's ivermectin.”

The river blindness cure that's used off-label for scabies. The foil sheet is separated into squares, with perforated edges between them. Each square holds something about the size of half an aspirin. “Where'd you get this?”

“From Dr. Paulsen. I remembered that your doctor wouldn't give it to you. Well, now I have some for all of us.”

“That's great, thank you.” Why didn't I think to ask her? It didn't even occur to me.

“I told him I needed it for you and Dave and your dad and Sandy. But what I'm really going to do is test it out on myself first. If it works, then I'll give it to everyone. Although I decided that since you and Dave will be in Italy, I should give it to you now. I'll give you enough for three doses each.”

“But you're only supposed to take it once.”

She giggles. “I've been taking it every day for the last five days.”

“Mom . . .”

“It's okay. I know it's safe. Now, let's figure out how many of these pills I have to give you. The dosage depends on how much the person weighs, but it's in kilograms. Dave is easy—he should take the same number of pills I take, which is twelve.”

“Why should he take the same amount as you?”

“Because, I hate to tell you this, but I think we weigh about the same amount.”

She does look at about her plumpest point. But still. “He's six feet tall. You're not even five feet. How could you weigh the same amount?”

“Believe me, we do,” she says. “Now how much do you weigh?”

I tell her and from her fanny pack she pulls out a pencil, the tiny kind you get at IKEA or a miniature golf course. Using her thigh as a writing surface, she starts jotting something on the paper bag. Before I can see what it is, she crosses it out. “Okay, okay, let me think . . .”

“How many pounds are in a kilogram? That's all you need to know.”

“Two something, I think, but wait, just let me think here . . . let's see, let's see, if I take twelve pills”—she writes the numerals
one, two, three, four, all the way up to twelve, then methodically circles each number a few times—“Let's see, twelve pills, then eleven pills, then ten pills . . .” She starts mumbling and I can't make out what she's saying. She crosses the numbers out, making big Xs through each of them, then lifts her pencil and freezes. Only her lips are moving. I feel like I'm watching a movie where a mad scientist scribbles a million different formulas on a chalkboard and at the end, proves something that will save the world.

She's still mumbling, but now it's loud enough that I can hear: “. . . twelve pills, ten pills, no
eleven
pills or wait, no, twelve pills for two and seven, no, eight for—”

“Mom!” I grab her wrist. I'm honestly a little frightened.

Because of the bugs and my dad's medical problems, I've hardly been thinking about my mother's hoarding. But I know that these scrambled thoughts are part of it. Hoarding is partly an information processing problem—the inability to make a decision, convoluted categorization, and memory deficits that hoarders contend with all fall under that umbrella—and what I've just witnessed is an example of seriously flawed information processing. I feel like I crawled inside my mother's brain for a second and came upon a terrifying place. No wonder she can't keep her house organized.

“Mom,” I say, softer this time. “Come back to earth, okay?”

“Okay, honey, sorry.” She sounds embarrassed and distracted. She looks up at the tree above us, then puts the pencil against the paper again and writes the number eight. “Jessie, you need to take eight pills.”

“All right.” When she leaned forward I caught a glimpse of something on her chest, up near the front of her shoulder. “What was that thing I saw on your . . .” I tap the upper front part of my shoulder to show her. “I thought I saw something there.”

My mom pulls out her shirt, looks down. “Oh, that? That's just a chemical burn.”

“A
what
kind of burn?”

She tugs it down to show me: It looks like old, mangled skin, like my dad's wrecked fingernail from the car accident.

“I just put a little too much bleach in the bath one time,” she says.

“You're still taking baths in bleach? I thought you stopped doing that.”

“Well, I need to get rid of these things, don't I?”

I put my head in my hands and let out a small groan. I can't believe this is my life. If someone had told me six months ago that soon I'd be sitting on a park bench arguing with my mother about bleach baths while she doled out off-label drugs for a parasite, I never would have believed it. This whole thing is completely absurd.

“I know you feel guilty about the bugs, Mom, but
please
stop punishing yourself.”

“I'll be okay. Now listen. I'm giving you twenty-four pills for you, and thirty-six pills for Dave. That's three doses each.”

She starts struggling to separate the pills—she can't seem to tear the perforated edges of the blister pack apart. Finally she gets one. “Here, Jessie, one . . .” she says and hands it to me. She starts tearing off another.

“Wait a minute.” I take one of the sheets and count the pills on it. “There are twelve pills on each of these. So if David needs thirty-six pills, give me three sheets for him. And two sheets for me.”

“Okay,” she says and reaches into the paper bag, presumably for another box of the pills. “Oh! I want you to look at this.” She gives me a handwritten letter. No, it's a copy of a handwritten
letter. “It's the letter I wrote to the judge who dismissed my lawsuit. I'm appealing his decision.”

“Please tell me you didn't send a handwritten letter to the judge.”

“Why shouldn't I?”

“Um, because it makes you look like a crazy person?”

“Ha!” she laughs. “Just read it and tell me if I get my point across. I spent a lot of time on that letter.”

I can tell she did because there are words crossed out and then rewritten in the margins—whole sentences even. But all in all, it's a pretty good letter. And I tell her that.

“Thank you,” she says.

I'm starting to feel antsy just sitting here on this bench. It's not even facing the park, but a busyish street. “Do you feel like walking through the park, Mom?”

“Sure, honey. I could use the exercise,” she says and scrambles to her feet. “I haven't been able to go to the Y at all because it would ruin my experiment with the baths and the lindane.”

We walk over the winding cement path through the park. My mom has her fanny pack strung diagonally across her chest and the paper sack clutched under her arm like an evening bag. But after just a few minutes, she grabs my arm and leans all of her weight on me.

“What is it? Are you okay?”

She's huffing and puffing. “I just need a minute.”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “Maybe it's too hot out for a walk. Come over here, Mom.” I pull her a few feet off the path, into the shade underneath a big oak tree. It's a sunny day, at least eighty degrees, and of course we're both wearing long sleeves and long pants because of the bugs. No wonder she's overheated.

We stand there while she catches her breath. She cools herself by pulling her shirt forward and away from her chest, in a fanning motion.

I catch another glimpse of her bleach burn. It looks like molted snakeskin. A shudder ripples through me. Just imagining one of those creatures is enough to send me into a panic.

“Can I ask you something, Mom?”

“You can ask me anything.”

“Why have you always teased me about snakes?”

“What . . . what are you talking about?”

“You know. The rubber ones you put in my Christmas stockings, the plastic ones you leave lying around for me to find. The basement? Mom. Come on.”

A bicyclist goes by on the path, his spokes glinting in the bright sun. My mother follows him with her gaze.

“Mom?”

“I don't know what you mean,” she says.

I step directly in front of her so we're facing each other. “You don't remember saying, ‘Don't go down to the basement. There are snakes this big'”—I hold up my hands in a big circle—“‘that will bite you.'”

“I . . . I can't believe I did that,” she says, almost in a whisper.

“Well, believe it, because you did. And now I'm terrified of them.”

I feel a little sorry for her because she was just so winded and now she looks genuinely distressed, but there's no way I'm going to tell her that her snake-teasing was no big deal.
Hey, no problem, it's all good!

Ever since Roger died, about once a year she'll say, “I really regret the way I was to you kids. I wasn't the best mother and I'm sorry.” I always tell her that she was a better mother (we both use the past tense) than her mother was, and how could she know any
better when she had such a terrible childhood, she didn't have a good example, blah, blah, blah—all the things she's told me many times. In other words, I let her off the hook immediately.

This time, I'm not going to do that.

“It's the weirdest thing,” she says, staring off into the distance as if she's reading from a faraway screen.

“What is?”

“My mother did the same thing to me. About dogs. She used to say, ‘Don't go across the street; there are dogs over there that will bite you.'”

I've never thought about why my mom was so afraid of dogs. Why haven't I ever asked?

My mom looks guilty, ashamed. “My mother did it so I wouldn't cross the street and get hit by a car . . .” She trails off. Half a second later it's like a switch has gone off inside her: “Oh, Jessie! That must be why I did it! I told you there were snakes in the basement so you wouldn't try to go down the stairs and fall down. I was protecting you!”

“There's one problem,” I say. “I'm almost forty years old. I'm not in danger of falling down your basement stairs.”

“Well. I guess it's just something I picked up from my mother, then,” she says, as if declaring the conversation over. But I don't want it to be.

“You see how it affected me, though, right? The same way you're afraid of dogs is how I feel about snakes. That's why I've asked you so many times to stop.”

“I guess I didn't remember.”

I don't see how that could be true, but I'll let it go.

“You'll remember now, though, right, Mom?”

“Yes. I will.”

After all these years I've succeeded in getting her to stop hoarding something: She's finally willing to discard the idea
that the snake-teasing was funny. And to me, that feels like a major accomplishment.

MY DAD AND
Sandy return from the doctor's appointment with reassuring news: Despite his pain, everything looks good and my dad is on track for a full recovery. They've procured a prescription for the sulfur lotion, too. The only place that can prepare it is something called a “compound pharmacy” and there's just one in the Minneapolis area. It's in a distant suburb and closes at 4:00. And it's 4:15.

“I'm going to try calling, in case,” I say, snatching the prescription from my dad's hand and running back to his office where the phone number of the pharmacy is still up on his computer. After five long rings, an answering machine picks up. Closed.

“So how did it go with your mom today?” my dad asks when I come back into the kitchen.

I decide not to mention the snake-teasing conversation. I'm pretty sure it would upset him.

“It was good. She says taking an antihistamine before bed will help you sleep. Twenty-five milligrams. That's what she did for patients at the nursing home.”

“Really? Like Benadryl?” my dad says. “I think we might have some. Can you go check on that shelf in the closet next to my office?”

I go look and sure enough, there's an unopened box.

“I might try that tonight,” my dad says.

“I might, too,” I say.

THE NEXT DAY
Sandy gets the sulfur lotion. I'm so excited to try it that I go to bed early that night, so I can put it on as soon
as possible. It's not really that messy; it's lotion after all, not Vaseline—though it does smell pretty rotten egg-ish.

Immediately, the itching lessens. And by the morning, it's almost gone. No new bites either. My dad and Sandy both feel better, too.

Finally, a glimmer of hope.

After the second night of the sulfur lotion, I'm convinced that it's going to cure us. Not only have I had no new bites and almost no itching, but the sulfur seems to have a healing effect on my skin; the red marks I've had for months around my hip bones and on my chest are starting to clear up already.

When I call my mom, I tell her to stop all the nonsense and to get some of this lotion instead. “I don't think so, honey,” she says. “I feel like my experiment is paying off. Little by little these bastards are dying. I can tell.”