Authors: Sandra Novack
Somewhere in the distance, the Jetta’s engine guns again. Georgie is there, still up the road, and I am here, at home, still trying to figure out our progress. I think,
progressive backpedaling
, maybe, and write this term down so that I remember to run it by Dr. Mulvaney at Tuesday’s session, after Georgie huffs out in his usual way, and she and I debrief. I am very into those debriefings. I take meticulous notes, as meticulous as my brother’s plans for Memphis. In his room, Georgie has a large map of the United States hanging on the wall, with red lines plotted over all the major highway markers that lead him to Memphis. He has calculated distances and miles, has marked each failed attempt with a push pin until there are a cluster of push pins surrounding the road on which we live.
Why Memphis? The truth is, I have no answer. Perhaps some queer love of Elvis blooms in Georgie’s heart. Perhaps the muddy waters of the Mississippi beckon him. Perhaps he wants to learn the blues. He has never been to Memphis. He has never once expressed an interest in Elvis. I’ve asked, of course, and he
tells me to mind my own business, so there is that. My mind unravels possibilities, none of which Georgie will confirm or deny.
I write down,
co-conspirator
? I write down, for Dr. Mulvaney,
glommed leaf blower
and
kidnapped dog
. These things I can explain, more or less. Someday I fear I will be forced to explain
Georgie
, which I cannot do. I cannot explain him at all. I cannot explain him because the truth is—the truth of it all is—I no longer know my brother. I think with mild irritation that passersby will probably see my brother out tonight on some desolate ribbon of road and wonder—Who is this man? What is he doing? And how
could
I explain? Possibly the passersby might wonder if the dog isn’t in a spot of trouble, some kind of trouble that maybe a leaf blower could put an end to.
How was Winston killed, Officer? My brother blew my dog to death
.
A
FTER A CUP
of coffee, we head outside. Elle is a good wife with a good heart and insists on coming. She pulls her jean jacket tighter when the wind blows, and she tries to make light of our nightly excursions. She tells me, “It’s like having a baby, Bud, only without all the fun and sex.” Then she shimmies her thin hips and sings an Elvis song. She curls her lip and bellows in a deep, exaggerated tenor:
I know my baby loves me
…
In the middle of singing, her foot twists and she flails her arms forward. Elle is a woman with a generally boisterous, robust nature, but she can be a real klutz, too.
“Careful,” I say, catching her.
She shakes her head. “I’m losing it, Bud.” Then she gives me her frequent and now tiring refrain, which is that she thought
the first year of marriage was supposed to be the happy honeymoon. “The whole year,” she says wistfully, her voice too loud. “Imagine.”
I say nothing. It is a too-cold night, too cold, I think, for saying anything that might hurt. Rain hits the trees. The air smells sweet from dying leaves. It is dark and damp, the grass brown and soggy. We walk past the Halloween display in our yard: three drenched ghosts hang from a cedar tree, their painted mouths contorted to scare neighborhood children. Under the tree are mounds of dirt and Styrofoam gravestones that say “I.B. Dying” and “U.B. Watching.” The gravestones were Georgie’s idea. When we put them up, Elle said they were ridiculously morbid.
“Poor Georgie,” she says, surveying them now. “All conspiracy and disaster.”
“It was funny,” I say. Anyway, I tell her she won’t be saying poor Georgie tomorrow when she is falling asleep over toast and coffee, nursing puffy eyes. Elle—her real name is Ellen, but she’s preferred Elle since being promoted to manager—starts her shift at 8 a.m., stacking thin, expensive lipsticks and hypoallergenic powder puffs at Macy’s. If she’s groggy in the morning and doesn’t look good, it’s bad for sales.
I know my baby loves me
…
She mutilates the rest of the words. She’s too young for Elvis, really, too young to know the song by heart. We take Elle’s Bronco and head out the driveway, up past the neatly clipped hedges, the houses with the lights now on. Turning, I peer both ways down the road. Next to me, Elle hums Elvis tunes and draws fat men on the fogged-up window with her pinkie. “Right or left?” I ask.
“He mostly goes left here,” she says.
“Left, then, it is.”
Some case history: Since the onset of Georgie’s illness, six years ago, he has gotten, each year, progressively worse. He has not held a job since he was fired from the car wash for threatening the manager with a good hose throttling. He has not had a girlfriend since he was twenty-four and dated a creamy-skinned girl named Rose, who dumped him when Georgie started becoming agitated and accusing her of stealing his money, and of buying too many dishes. Last I heard she’d met another man, married, and had a baby. If Georgie misses her, he seldom says.
In general—and as Dr. Mulvaney knows—my brother believes everyone lies to cover up “the truth.” He thinks that his medicine is laced with mind-altering substances. He is certain our mother pricked him with a pin when he was two. He believes our father abandoned us, when in fact our father died of a complication after surgery. Georgie thinks the mafia is working with the government, and that I, in turn, am working for the government and the mafia, that prep school is an elaborate cover-up for racketeering. He has called me, several times, a flat-out traitor to a cause I had no idea I belonged to, a cause which I cannot even name.
Well, that is that.
Dr. Mulvaney likes to explain all of this to me in clearly delineated terms. She uses terms such as
cycling
,
word salad
,
onset years
,
paranoia
. I am so full of her lingo. We talk about neurotransmitters and serotonin, the success of new medications, the alternatives of mental institutions, the progress of shock therapy. “Shock therapy progress,” I say, nodding. “Imagine that!” I chart Georgie’s behavior and tell her about his appetite, his moods, how many of his pills I found stashed under his mattress this week, or how many managed to find their way into the
toilet—all that scientific progress down the drain. Listening, Dr. Mulvaney sits behind a large oak desk, and she sometimes taps her pen, because she is a woman with very little patience. And behind her there’s a photograph of her family—a photo of her husband and two sons, all in identical red sweaters too thick around the neck; and her sons’ eyes are dark like hers, and their foreheads are round and shiny—and she leans back and says, somewhat exhaustedly, “Your brother’s life is not your life.” She says, “There are always other options.”
I stare at those boys, those boys in their ghastly red sweaters and their pudgy arms looped around each other and their broad, smiling faces, and I think, Fuck you, Dr. Mulvaney.
Elle, bored with her Elvis drawings, turns from the fat men on the window. She is usually quiet on these trips. I can barely stand to think of all those things she might be thinking, how her thoughts and worries and dread might compound my own.
“You need new windshield wipers,” I say. “I’ll replace them this weekend.”
“Is that it?” she asks. “Is that what you were thinking about just now?” She pulls her jean jacket tighter and rips a loose thread from her sleeve. She stares straight ahead, in an absent way.
“Safety first,” I tell her. “That’s what I was thinking exactly. You know me. I’m an open book.”
She
tsks
this, rolls her eyes. “That’ll be the day.” It would be nice, she tells me, if anyone were as open as a book. She hums again, more to herself, and the entire space in the truck seems to shrink down to the size of a pebble. Finally, she says, “You know, though, we should talk more about Georgie’s future, because lots of people are sick, Bud. There’s help for sick people. I mean, it’s just like Dr. Mulvaney says … there’s help for Georgie.”
“Thanks, Elle,” I say. “But lots of people aren’t my brother.”
“My Aunt Zelda was mentally ill—you knew that, didn’t you? When I was young, she would tell me she’d laced all the silverware with poison. Honestly, that woman could scare Jesus,
and
I think her house was haunted, but that’s an entirely different story. Every time I saw a fork on the table, I thought, I’m going to die if I touch it. Mom always said, ‘God, Ellen, don’t touch the silverware. You never know about people.’ ”
“I’m glad we can still make light of things,” I tell her. “Humor, after all, is a
healthy defense mechanism.
”
“Please,” Elle says. “It was hardly funny. We were scared of Zelda. My poor mother tried to take care of her, but she was miserable and all of her kids, including me, were miserable in the process.”
“Elle,” I say. “Are you trying to nettle me?”
Elle ignores this. “Eventually, Zelda jumped from the second story of her house, broke her leg, and died of a blood clot, and my mother nearly had a breakdown of her own, she felt so guilty. At her funeral, my mother told everyone Zelda loved children.
Compensation
, yet another defense mechanism, Bud. Think about it.”
“I’m thinking,” I say, and I peer below the line of foggy glass. “I don’t think you ever told me about Zelda.”
“I’m an open book,” she says. She turns the heater up to high and rubs her hands together. She scans the streets we pass, looking for signs of Georgie.
“I don’t see him,” I say, and I crank the window. At this hour, the streets are quiet. Cars are parked. The lights in the long line of homes are extinguished. “He might get to Memphis yet.”
“A dream come true,” Elle says, with a hint of bitterness. “Happy ending. Unlike Zelda.”
“What the hell is your point, Elle?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Just talking. Just saying my mother thought she could handle things, and really it didn’t help her, or her kids, or Zelda. Everything just fell apart anyway, despite all her good intentions.” She folds her arms, waits, thinking. Then she adds, more tentatively, “Did you know there were times when Georgie first came to live with us that I’d stay at work longer so I didn’t have to come home?”
This surprises me. “I thought you were doing inventory.”
“I think Georgie indirectly earned me a promotion,” Elle continues. She leans back and pens circles with her pinkie again.
The sky is pitch black, and a heavy rain pelts the windshield. All night, it has been raining, alternating between chilly downpours and slow, damp drizzles. I search for the moon, the great gaping hole shot through the night, but it is gone.
I would like to tell Elle, if I could, that she should have seen Georgie before he started these trips to Memphis. I would like to tell her that it wasn’t always like this, looking out for Georgie, bringing him home, placing two pills in each compartment of the week-long pill dispenser, only to empty and fill the container again. It wasn’t always about yelling and fights and broken knickknacks and holes in the walls. There was a time—Georgie and me, my mother and father—when all of us were happy, when we sat together at dinner and talked about school and our day, when we vacationed in Florida and picnicked on the beach, our toes buried in the hot sand. There was a time we held no grudges, no hatred. But Elle would only smile, and her smile would say—as her smile most often seems to say—that she had heard enough. She should have seen my brother, though, I might insist, when he was still well enough and strong, when during the last football game of the season, he
broke through the stronghold of the opposing players and bolted down the field to score the winning touchdown. He took off his helmet, his face red and moist from exertion. The crowd clamored in a raw, energetic way, “We Will Rock You” reverberating through the bleachers, and my heart swelled as Georgie, gap-toothed, grinned and raised his arms in victory. His teammates crowded around him and hoisted him in the air. They carried him from the field. Georgie ambled home that night, drunk on cheap beer, a cheerleader on his arm. My brother said, “You want some of this, Buddy?” I could only grin, wanting everything that my brother had.
I would like to tell Elle all of this. “He’s my brother,” I say instead.
I drive slowly. What is the rush, really? I look for Georgie. He has managed to escape our subdivision and drive out, past the local grocery store, the nail salon, and the car wash where he once worked. This is progress in clearly delineated terms, and this thought, as well as others, squeezes at me until I feel I can no longer breathe. “Truthfully, I don’t know how my mother took care of him,” I say.
Elle angles her head and studies me. She says, “Your mother knew what she could and couldn’t do, Bud. That’s the first step in caring for anyone. And, anyway, he wasn’t as bad then, with your mother.”
“So you’re saying I make things worse?”
“I’m not saying anything,” Elle tells me. “He’s just worse, that’s all. Who knows why.”
A
BOUT TEN MILES
from our house, on a winding stretch of road that leads to the Blue Route, I spot Georgie’s souped-up
Jetta with its one white door, an otherwise blue exterior, and bumper stickers that say
Supporter of the Fraternal Order of Police
and
Drug Free America
. The car has skidded off the embankment and hit a tree. The hood is clipped, pushed in. Black tire marks snake out from the rear wheels. George is off, at some distance from his car. Down the road, he walks under streetlights, an overhang of trees.
“Jesus,” Elle says, surveying the scene. She shifts irritably, then rummages through her purse for her cell.
“Don’t,” I say, as she flips open the phone. I rest my hand on her thigh but she brushes it away. “It’s nothing. We can handle it.”
“Handle it?”
“You want the police involved?” I ask. “So we can add another two hours out here?”
She seems to consider this before closing her phone. My stomach flutters, and it’s as if there is, somewhere deep inside me, a great frenzy of bats set into motion. My heart beats wildly. Down the street, my brother appears nonplussed. He’s abandoned the car, abandoned Winston, who is in the backseat nervously barking and scraping at the window. The leaf blower is anchored around Georgie and he blasts it full throttle, creating a whirring noise that I am certain will wake the people in the neighboring houses. I pull the Bronco off into the gravel, shut off the engine, get out, and call to my brother. Winston whimpers, barks. “Christ,” Elle says.