Swallow the Ocean (13 page)

Chapter Twelve

MY FATHER SAT on the blue corduroy sofa in the front room of his apartment, his long legs reaching easily to the floor. I sat across from him on a wide green armchair, one he had dragged from 24th Avenue, and then to each of the three different apartments he’d lived in since he moved out, until he finally settled here on Jackson Street. It was Sunday afternoon, and my father and I were having one of many long conversations we would have in this room. I was ten years old.

“What does it mean?” I asked him, squinting, trying to bring the word into focus. He had to repeat “schizophrenia” several times before I could pronounce it. It was long and strange and frankly ugly. Even so, I had a feeling it was something I could hang onto, something I could rebuild my world around.

“It means someone can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not.”

I nodded. Yes, that was it. “She talks to devils,” I said, “to JFK.”

He nodded sharply. I could see he didn’t want to hear anymore. He wasn’t fascinated by the details as I was. He’d put up a wall against my mother’s internal world a long time ago. Instead, he told me about the disease.

I was taken with the comforting illusion that if you can name something, you understand it. That if you can name something, you’re close to controlling it. And, most definitely, that if you can name something, you are no longer part of it. My mother couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t, but I could. Here I was, talking with my father like a grownup, planted firmly on his side of sanity, even if my feet didn’t yet reach the floor. Schizophrenia: that word clanked like a prison door being pulled shut behind me. I was getting out; my mother wasn’t.

“There are several different kinds of schizophrenia,” he said. “Your mother’s a paranoid schizophrenic.”

Paranoid
was a word I already knew. The two words together were doubly ugly.

Not knowing she was sick was one of the symptoms. Thinking everyone was fighting against her was another. So were hearing voices, being disorganized, and being angry.

“The only way for me to win custody of you guys is for me to prove that your mother is an unfit parent. That means putting this all out there. I didn’t want to do that last time around. I didn’t want it to get ugly.”

I nodded, though I had no idea what “ugly” might be.

The first time around he’d assumed that anyone—judge, child care worker, or otherwise—who spoke with my mother for fifteen minutes would understand what was going on. And surely, he’d thought, when Mr. Judson visited our apartment—regardless of anything my sisters and I said—it would be enough.

My father had vastly underestimated how predisposed the courts were to keeping children with their mothers in 1977. And how blinding this predisposition could be. He’d also underestimated how very presentable, how calmly convincing my mother could still be to outsiders when she chose.

The day the judge had heard the suit, my father and my mother met with the judge in his chambers. My father came with his lawyer; my mother represented herself. The judge had the report from Mr. Judson in front of him. As he read from it, my father grew increasingly alarmed. Clearly, the judge had already made up his mind to award custody to my mother. So my father, shocked and caught off guard, lost his cool, while my mother sat calmly in her chair, letting him ruin his own case.

“Your mother was so clever,” my father told me. “She played the judge by bringing up that trip to Stinson Beach.”

I nodded, feeling sheepish. A couple of months earlier, we’d stayed overnight at the beach with friends who had only one spare bedroom. My sisters and I, and Jeni and my father, had all slept in the same room. My mother had, of course, wrenched this information from us when we came home. Now I felt guilty for having told.

The judge, who was in his seventies, had been appalled. Moreover, my father’s cohabitation with Jeni upset him so much that in addition to awarding custody to my mother, he went out of his way to stipulate in his final ruling that Jeni should not be present when we stayed with my father on weekends.

The only good news was that the judge had ordered psychological evaluations of all of us. But even that was not necessarily aimed at my mother. In the judge’s chambers that day, when he realized he was going to lose, my father had gone ballistic, yelling at the judge and demanding that he do a psychological evaluation of my mother. “All right, Mr. Flynn,” the judge had finally said. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’m ordering psychiatric evaluations for all of you, for Mrs. Flynn, for your children, and
for
you
.”

My father assured me this would change the tide. “Once a psychiatrist talks to your mother, everything’s gonna turn.”

I nodded, kicking my feet a little against the chair.

“It’s going to take some time,” he said. “You’re going to have to be patient.”

I was
it
. I hovered on the concrete patio in front of our building, glancing quickly back at the cans. Bent and weak around the middle from so much kicking, they were stacked in a precarious pyramid. I’d placed them where four lines of the concrete squares of the patio came together like Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. But slightly off-center—so anyone charging down the sidewalk wouldn’t have a straight shot. They’d have to slow down and swerve at the last minute, giving me a few extra seconds to beat them to the cans.

I could feel them out there. When I’d counted out the numbers, my voice echoing through the neighborhood, I’d heard most of them run left. But they could crawl down into the street, circle around, and come up on my right. I had to cover both fronts. I walked to the edge of the patio, stopping every three feet to look over my shoulder. I froze to listen for movement, for breathing, for the first footfall. Then suddenly, I made a fast break, ran to the edge of the patio, and leaned over the wall to look down into the street to see if anybody was plastered against the garage. Nothing moved in the street below. The white chalk of the stucco wall was imprinted on my stomach when I stood back up.

As I turned, I caught a flash of red, halfway down the block. Theo slipped behind a hedge as he advanced one bush closer to the cans. Then we were both running. He knew I’d seen him and made a break for the cans. His feet, in long tennis shoes, slapped against the pavement. I was squatting on the ground, clanking the can for the third time when he kicked into my hand. I pulled back. His foot crashed into the bottom two cans. The little kids jumped up and began to scatter. But I still had the top can in my hand. Theo played fair. He sat down on the steps and yelled for the other kids to come back.

I’d already caught the little kids. I’d picked them off fast, sensing them before I saw them, moving from bush to bush, noisy in their stealth. Amy, Allison, Eleanor, Willy, and Frances were huddled on the steps leading up to our apartment building, watching me, waiting for someone to come blasting in and set them free. In most games you only had to catch one person, then they were
it
, and you got to join the fleeing crowd. In kick-the-can you had to catch everyone. You had to catch sight of them, run to the cans, and call out their names while tapping the top can three times. Even then, anyone left in the field could come flying in, kick over the cans, and free all the prisoners.

Willy had made a wild break for the cans almost as soon as I’d finished counting. I hadn’t even had any prisoners. He did it for the pure thrill. I’d beaten him easily to the cans. What do you do with dumb boy energy like that?

I’d wanted to catch Sara or Theo or Steven first. When a little kid like Willy was
it
, the game usually broke down. The cans would get kicked over and over, the kid would get weary and hopeless, and end up going home crying, with the boys stalking behind him chanting,
Can’t
take it,
Can’t
take it
until Sara made them stop.

We’d been outside since we got home from school. We tied sweatshirts around our waists, stretching the cotton sleeves into tight knots, so that when the fog came in we wouldn’t have to go inside. My mother stayed in; we went out, slipping through the back hall, past Sara’s room, past the newspapers she read every day but could not bring herself to dispose of, folded, stacked, then heaped knee-high, then thigh-high, then waist-high all the way to the door.

We’d grown up some—I was ten, Sara was thirteen—enough to befriend the boys down the block, which would have been impossible a year earlier. We’d kept mostly to ourselves since moving to 24th Avenue, playing Chinese jump rope on the patio, sometimes with friends from school—our friends couldn’t go inside the house, but the patio in front of our building, this square of concrete where the sidewalk opened up, twenty feet by twenty feet, gave us a place to be. Or we’d ride our bikes quietly down the block. And the boys would careen past us on their bikes, coming so close they’d almost knock us over, but they never said a word.

The neighborhood girls our age had rejected us. We didn’t go to private school; that was probably the main thing. But handmade clothes, preternatural shyness, and whatever rumors about my mother circulated in the neighborhood couldn’t have helped.

Sometime over the previous summer, our games started to overlap with the boys’. No one said hello, no introductions. One day we were all just playing SPUD together in the cul-de-sac at the foot of 24th Avenue. Then we taught them the game we’d brought back from Denver the year before.

Steven, Kevin, and Willy lived down there, in the hulking house at the bottom of the hill, the one whose driveway you were spit out into if you rode your big wheel straight down the alley at the end of our block. They were rich. We all knew that because of the size of their house, which was almost as much of an embarrassment to them as ours was to us.

I’d been in their house a handful of times. A big silent entryway led to a hallway and then a kitchen with an island in the middle and counters all the way around, shiny appliances, and Spanish tiles. In one room there was a huge leather couch. That’s where they’d sit, scrunched down into the folds, staring at the TV, one hand lost inside a box of Cocoa Puffs. I’d never seen their parents up close—I’d seen them getting in or out of the car in the driveway—in the house there was just the Spanish-speaking maid, shooing them from the refrigerator.

At Steven’s house we’d set up the electric race-car track so it ended in midair, high off the ground like an unfinished highway overpass. We’d get the cars whipping around the track and then launch them off the end. Those little matchbox cars flew across the living room.

Steven had a GI Joe. I watched as he walked his doll across the floor, moving one leg and then the other forward in an awkward march. With each step his torso began to lean back, like he was trying to get under a limbo bar. Steven had to keep straightening him out—jerking the body back up on top of the moving legs. GI Joe was so literal. Hard, stocky, lethal. It never occurred to me to move any of my dolls that way. Their pale legs floated under gathered skirts and petticoats as they moved through the air, gliding across the room. Their feet touched the ground only when they got where they were going.

The games at Steven’s house were straightforward. How fast can you run? How far can you shoot that car across the room? How long can you let the big wheel roll out of control? No plot, no romance, but then these rooms were not heavy either, at least not with any form of anguish I could recognize.

The six of us made up the core group. The strays we’d taken on—Allison and Aidan, whom Sara babysat for, the Peabody sisters from down the block, Frances from the apartment across the hall who was weirder than any of us because his parents didn’t have a TV, and sent him to the French American school—filled out the gang.

We played kick-the-can and capture the flag all summer, climbing through everybody’s backyards. Even after school started, we’d meet up when we got home in the afternoons. For Halloween we made a haunted house in the basement of our apartment building, hanging cobwebs and dressing the little kids up like ghouls—we gave Frances a Dracula costume and made him come up out of the dryer, teeth bared, when kids came in. We put on little plays in the garden behind the apartment building, sketches whose humor depended primarily on cross-dressing—Steven in a white wig made from a mop head as Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. We charged a dollar entrance, and everybody’s parents came, even my mother.

We raced big wheels down 24th Avenue. The hill was steep, and big wheels had no brakes or steering—not when you went that fast. You’d just hold your legs in the air, clear of the pedals, and let it roll. The only way to stop was to shift your weight, lean into the turn at the bottom of the hill, and roll to a halt on the flat part of West Clay Park. If you didn’t make the turn, you had to roll off the big wheel or crash. Like sledding on concrete. Sara would stand at the bottom of the hill, a bandana for a flag in hand, stopping traffic. She’d calmly explain to the drivers that they would have to wait until the racers were down.

For a year and a half, maybe two, we owned that block. We played outside summer, fall, and winter until well after dark. We didn’t ask each other any questions. Boys can be kind that way, at least until they turn mean.

Theo sat on the top step, his long legs tilting up towards his chin, brown hair hanging down to his shoulders. I walked slowly to the far end of the patio. I was more tense now; I had something worth protecting. I watched Theo out of the corner of my eye to see if he’d give away anyone’s hiding place with a glance down the street. Theo, who lived directly behind us on 25th Avenue and climbed through our backyard to play with us every day, rounded out our gang. He was a year older than I was; Steven was exactly my age. In the back of my mind, I knew Sara was too old for them and Amy too young, so if it was going to be someone, it had to be me. Today I liked Theo. Other days I liked Steven. It was a constant shuffle. Not that it mattered. I’d never tell anyone, and we never let on that anything like that mattered anyway.