Authors: Victoria Zackheim
And then I remembered. Late the night before, my mother’s mother had arrived from Australia and was staying in the guest room on the second floor. I’d only met her once when I was three, my siblings never, because she was an expat, a traveler, a woman we heard about at bedtime. She’d come home to the States because her second husband, Eric, had died suddenly while mowing his Australian lawn in his Australian town. In Australia. She was sick, she was dead, she was naked.
Had my father called my mother at work? The siren of
the ambulance was distant, like yet another suburban moan, and the years I had on my siblings alerted me first that it was headed toward us, our home. Their tears had subsided, and Alex was actually eyeing the swings as the siren got louder, more crisp. My sister stepped closer to the house, knowing that the ambulance was headed for us. She turned to me, and I could see her bottom teeth, which was odd since I didn’t recognize them, so small, so hidden by her normal smile. She moved farther across the lawn, back to the house, and I loudly said, “Leap frog,” to which Alex hit the dirt in gleeful anticipation of being hopped. I put my palms flat on his back and jumped over him, feigning a giggle, so much fun.
“Your turn! Jump over me now, buddy.”
Rachel said, “Look,” and there was no more hiding the loud red lights and screaming siren in our driveway, screeching to a stop behind the Lincoln. Paramedics hustled up our porch steps, and we all saw the front door swing wide.
The house was quiet as both my siblings squeaked, too scared to cry, and I heard familiar sounds over our neighbor’s fence, a bark, a slammed screen door, as if no one had told the rest of the world that we were finished, ruined, slotted to suffer like families on the news.
The three of us stood in the driveway and stared at our tightly wrapped grandmother on the stretcher with orange straps. Defeated and pale, her white hair was matted and frayed, her eyelids closed. My father leaned down to her and said something in her ear before the men lifted her inside the ambulance. I don’t think she heard what he said.
She’d scribbled love letters as the pills took effect, and
I saw them that evening as my mom and dad pieced them together, searching for information that would never come from her lips. Her dire words drooped off the lines of her powder-blue stationery and came to a scribbled ending at the bottom of the page. I rested my cheek against my mother’s shoulder as she taped the torn edges of the note.
I didn’t enter the room where it happened for months after my grandmother died. Like a roped-off crime scene, our guest room held a haunting beam that I could sometimes see beneath the crack in my bedroom door, just down the hall.
Ellio’s pizza and the zoinks! and zowies! of a fast bird and a coyote strapped to a torpedo would forever remind me of my grandma’s final minutes. I knew now about a sadness so vicious and unrelenting that a woman who loved us took her own life, as her daughter’s children frolicked like puppies beneath her.
The cartoon was a facade, as were the vacuum, swing set, and shifting sky. A few weeks later I found myself sitting in front of the TV, blowing on my pizza as my siblings chased each other, falling into a tangle of little arms and sneakers. Janice was vacuuming, and the Road Runner had tied an anvil to a grand piano and strapped a rocket to it all, preparing to light the fuse.
“Beep-beep,” he said, and Janice unplugged the vacuum.
I stood from the couch, and got on my toes to see if my dad’s car was in the driveway. It wasn’t. In fact there was no sound at all, except the very gentle tapping of the rhododendrons bumping against the glass.
In 1980, I wrote my second stage play. My first was under submission to the Eugene O’Neill Festival, and I was not yet aware that it would become a finalist. My new play was about the death grip of a mother-daughter relationship. In my story, the daughter couldn’t become her own person until she broke away from her controlling and competitive mother. The daughter resentfully works in the mother’s chic clothing boutique, and their fragile relationship unravels when the daughter moves away and starts a new life. Years later, on the eve of winning an award for her first novel, she receives a call that her mother, unable to cope with her daughter’s independence, has attempted suicide and has called her to her bedside.
In 2002, I was nominated for an Edgar Award for a film I wrote and produced. Days before, when I was to fly from Los Angeles, where I lived, to New York City to attend the black-tie event, I was awakened at the crack of dawn by a telephone call from a nurse in Florida with the news that my mother
and
my father had attempted suicide. In fact, they had made three attempts, all in the space of several hours, and failed, which is why they were in the hospital, rather than the morgue.
My mother was the de facto ringleader in the
folie à deux
that was my parents’ marriage. When my eldest niece was ten years old, she asked the question that haunted me: what would happen to the remaining grandparent when the other one died? She felt certain one couldn’t exist without the other. I was amazed that a child of ten could articulate my deepest fear and that someone so young, a child who saw my parents as infrequently as she did—perhaps twice a year—could sense the depth of their symbiosis.
My mother was a drama queen. Her death, or the threat of it, was perennially on the table. I remember her talking about putting her head in the oven or chiding me for digging her an early grave when I was a kid. As we both got older, the frequency of intimidations and threats of suicide increased, with my father joining her in the refrain.
My father was fun loving and easy going when I was growing up, but with age he became increasingly depressed and angry. The differences in my parents’ personalities grew less distinguishable, until they seemed to merge into one. Like my mother, my father felt wronged and unappreciated. Together they struck back at the people and institutions they felt failed them by writing poison-pen letters, filing lawsuits, and picketing businesses.
The nurse on the phone informed me that the first of their three attempts occurred when they swallowed all the prescription medications in their house. At age eighty-seven and eighty-four respectively, my father and mother were in relatively good health. They had their share of ailments, and
my father had come through a recent bout of colon cancer. Yet he hadn’t had to endure chemotherapy or radiation and was given a 100 percent clean bill of health. Their maladies—high blood pressure, cholesterol, glaucoma, and so on—were common for people of their age. And although the required medications were expensive, they weren’t lethal.
When the meds failed to achieve the desired effect, my parents moved into the closed garage, where they got into the car, turned on the ignition, and waited. Nothing happened. Finally, they returned to the house and, after a brief discussion, decided to slit their wrists. My mother couldn’t bring herself to do it and pleaded with my father to do it for her. He refused. They found the sharpest kitchen knife, which most likely had been purchased at the ninety-nine-cent store years earlier and could barely cut paper, and attempted to slit their wrists. My mother cut vertically rather than horizontally, and neither of them cut deeply enough to sever a vein. All they succeeded in doing was making a bloody mess on the kitchen floor. They bled, waited, and bled some more, but they didn’t die. That’s when my father called 911.
As I spoke to the nurse, I inquired with apprehension about their conditions, expecting the nurse to say they were in comas or straitjackets. Instead, I was put through to my father, who sounded exactly as he might have sounded had I called in the middle of dinner. The timbre of his voice lent credibility to his claim that the entire incident was a “mistake.” As we spoke, we were interrupted by my mother’s voice on the extension.
With the three of us on the phone, they began to argue,
each disputing the facts surrounding their misguided suicide attempts. Here they were, literally in lockdown and under twenty-four-hour surveillance for having committed what the state of Florida deemed a crime, and they were fighting over whether it was his idea or hers. Had it been up to either of them, they would’ve simply checked out of what they seemed to think was an overpriced hotel with bad interior design and crappy food. And just try and get a night’s sleep! Fortunately, they couldn’t simply get up and walk: they were confined to the psychiatric wing.
It was surreal.
My mother’s childhood, like my father’s and others of their generation, was defined by the Great Depression. She grew up in brutal poverty wearing paper shoes to her school graduation. She was an only child in a loveless marriage. A photograph of her at age eight hanging on a wall in our home depicts a lonely little girl whose sad eyes had yet to dance with joy or laughter. Although it’s sometimes hard to reconcile the bitter, angry person he was at the end of his life with the beloved funny man who would entertain the kids on our block with songs and stories when I was a child, my father’s sense of humor was what first attracted her to him. Their fifty-plus-year marriage was an amalgam of love, loyalty, resentment, and utter devotion.
When people ask me why my parents attempted suicide, I usually say that it was depression. The truth is, it was a temper tantrum gone awry. Their bags were packed. They were
on their way from Florida to Detroit, our hometown, with the intention of moving back for the third time. It was the middle of the night, and they were facing a ninety-minute drive to the Tampa airport and another hour waiting to pass through security.
This would’ve been the sixteenth or seventeenth move for my parents since retiring. They had spent two decades moving back and forth between Detroit, Florida, and Los Angeles. And once they settled in those cities, they proceeded to move within them. My mother was an interior designer, so it was assumed that she did it for business. To an outside observer, it might look like they were searching for the meaning of life, when in fact they were actually running from it.
On this particular night, facing the prospect of uprooting themselves yet again, my father was loading the suitcases into the car when my mother said she was too tired to face what was ahead. Rather than go back to bed, they opted for the Big Sleep. Out came the pills, and the madness began. It was that impetuosity, that spontaneous reckless behavior, and actions predicated on a whim that were at the root of the countless bad decisions my parents made over their lifetime, decisions that led them to run frantically around their house at four in the morning, a house they had just built and moved into, on their way to finding a new house in another part of the country.
A dangerous blend of fatigue, age, fear, a shrinking bank account, and profound neuroses caused them to suddenly change course and decide to end it all. What better way to punish the people they deemed responsible for their circumstances? They had just lost another lawsuit, one in which they
invested what little remained in their savings; they were angry at the judge and the neighbors they had sued; they were angry at my brother for not agreeing to cosign on a new mortgage for them in Detroit; and they were angry at me because they were always angry at me.
They wanted to get our attention. And no amount of love from their children, grandchildren, or many friends satiated that need. My parents were determined to self-destruct.
My father used to tease my mother and say she was Japanese, because of her preoccupation with appearances and saving face. “What will [fill in the blank with a name] think?” was a mantra I heard as frequently as “Look before crossing the street.” Growing up in the years before air-conditioning meant opening a window. My mother would scurry around the kitchen during dinner, a stifling heat outside, and close the windows to prevent our neighbors from hearing what might be construed as a small conflict or bad manners.
But there was no closing a window on this. Not only did their neighbors in Florida know, but their former neighbors in Michigan and Los Angeles found out through the snowbird hotline. There’s nothing like a crisis or gossip to unite the flock. And, to my utter disbelief, neither parent felt the slightest bit of shame. To the contrary, my father had even taken a moment between the pills and the failed asphyxiation to compose a short note to my brother and me, saying we were great disappointments. It was as though they had been liberated from social conventions and now felt free to brazenly display their pain and vengeance.
Like the character in my play, I chose to attend the awards
ceremony rather than rush to my parents’ bedside. I asked my brother, who lived with his family in San Francisco, to go in my place. (Whereas I was enmeshed with my parents and spent many years and thousands of dollars in therapy pursuing a relationship with my parents, he remained physically and emotionally estranged from them. During college, he distanced himself as far away in the United States as geography would permit.)
My brother didn’t want to go but must have felt some sense of obligation and agreed to make the trip. I knew that his appearance would bolster their spirits, because it would be unexpected. They knew I’d show up; I was the girl, and gender determined the balance of relationships in our family. Being a girl, I was a known entity to my mother. She could take me shopping, show me how to dress, how to wear my hair and makeup, and the rest of the time anguish about the kind of man I would marry. But my brother was a mystery to her.
She once recounted the first time she saw him—or rather this foreign object called a penis—and she was terrified. What to say or do with a creature who bore this appendage? The only memory I have of my mother relating to my brother is when she’d drag him to the boys’ store in our neighborhood and outfit him with new clothes.
By the time my brother arrived in Florida, my parents had been separated and were on different floors. Although it wasn’t initially apparent, that very act was enough to sever the cord. My father seemed to be doing well, but then he fell out of bed in the middle of the night in an attempt to go to the bathroom. A subsequent physical examination, x-rays, and other
tests didn’t turn up any injuries, yet he inexplicably lost his ability to speak coherently.