Swallow the Ocean (19 page)

What I did do was scour bookstores for information on psychology and mental illness. I was drawn, over and over, to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
in the school library. The first time I hefted the book from the shelf, checking to make sure no one was looking, I sat at the back of the library, as if I were doing something dirty. I thumbed through the pages, my heart pounding, until I found what I was looking for. The entry was cold comfort. Most of it I already knew: the symptoms, the categories, the prognosis, embarrassing, awful, and grim, respectively. Then there was a section on genetics. I’d gotten wind of this already, but the statistics stunned me: the children of schizophrenics had a 30 percent chance of inheriting the disease. Thirty percent. Almost one in three. I was one of three—bookish, solitary, I even looked the most like my mother. I knew, just knew, that if anyone were taking bets back then, they’d have bet on me.

My sisters and I would visit my mother’s parents in Denver every couple of years. What I remember best about those visits is morning chats with my grandmother at her kitchen table in the long, slow hours between breakfast and lunch, while my grandfather was out. The smell of bacon, the fat still solidifying in the frying pan on the stove, lingered in the air. Their house was always over-climatized, too cold in summer, too warm in winter. Sadie kept the television on low. The sound of Phil Donahue pestering his audience made a companionable hum in the room.

When conversation turned to my mother, as it inevitably did, Sadie would bring out the pictures2just can’t imagine how much potential your mother had . . .” Her voice would catch in her throat; a few tears would gather in the corners of her very blue eyes and roll over the loose skin of her cheeks. Sitting across from her, I would fiddle with the pink packets of arti-ficial sweetener she kept on the table for coffee and iced tea. I lined and realigned them in their dish. We would sit, transfixed in silence for a few moments. There were no words for the loss that lay always between us. It bound us and, sometimes, made it hard to be together. As my sisters and I grew older and came to resemble my mother, it was impossible for Sadie to look at us without thinking of my mother. I can say this for Sadie: she never avoided the pain. She let her sorrow show.

My grandfather was considerably more stoic, but the loss was just as devastating. I have a letter he wrote to my mother in 1979—two years after my father gained custody of my sisters and me. He wrote to my mother via her bank, which was for many years the only point of contact any of us had for her.

“Sally,” he wrote, “I have spent many hours thinking about our past relationships and can think of things I have done that would be changed if it were possible. But, whatever I might have done to alienate you, forgive me. Mother and I want so much to be in touch with you.”

He and my grandmother were flying to San Francisco for three days in hopes that she would contact them. He closed the letter by giving her the phone number of the Holiday Inn where they would be staying. “We will be waiting for your call.”

My grandparents were both close to seventy by then. I’m guessing they sat in their hotel room all weekend, and the call never came.

My mother’s family did eventually manage to reestablish contact with her. My uncle and my grandparents visited San Francisco periodically, and she would meet them for dinner. But that was all she’d allow. Until she died, my grandmother always sent my mother gifts for birthdays and Christmas and regular letters full of family news. I have no idea if my mother opened them.

I didn’t see my mother from the time I was eleven until I was twenty-three. I finished high school somehow, then college with considerably more success, without a word from her. I was always a good student, and as soon as I went to college, again almost overnight, I shed the shyness that had shackled me for six years. I held a part of myself in reserve, but I learned to live in the world. I felt, not unlike I had as a small child, that there was a great disconnect between my inner and outer life. There was the daily business of classes and friends, of romances and campus politics, and then, set completely apart, was my inner world, a large share of which was dedicated to my mother. I locked myself into a grief that seemed to be the only thing that still tied me to her.

Once on a road trip to Chesapeake Bay with college friends, we found an old wooden swing set along the road. The swing faced west. The sun was low in the sky. As I pumped my legs into the air, my feet stretched up and out over the water, I had the feeling I was swinging straight into the sun. It came to me in that moment with a rare and physical certainty that my capacity for joy was as deep as my capacity for sorrow.

After I graduated from college, my sisters and I did reestablish tenuous contact with my mother via the bank. We were grown, and she was no longer the wrathful specter of my memory and imagination. Smaller, meeker, harmless, she was not better, just calm.

She still wouldn’t tell us where she lived. We knew, though, because years earlier my father had enlisted the help of a friend, who trailed her from her bank to a residential hotel in the Tenderloin, in the grimy heart of San Francisco. From time to time over the years, my father had discreetly checked in with the manager of the hotel to make sure she was still there.

Since we didn’t want to alert her to the fact that we knew where she was, we still used the bank to contact her. Once or twice a year, to arrange to meet her for dinner, one of us had to drive out to the Wells Fargo near the end of Geary Boulevard, where she’d had her savings account for the past thirty years. We’d wait for her to show up—a specter in a beige trench coat. That we could count on. Like clockwork, every second Friday between five and six o’clock, she’d go to withdraw just enough cash to cover her expenses.

When it was my turn to stake out the bank, I’d try to time it just right. Getting there late, missing her, or not knowing if I’d missed her and having to gird myself for a second trip, was awful. Waiting was awful too, so I’d get there at the last possible moment.

She lived alone, shrinking further and further into herself with each passing year, like an imploded star. She remained, willfully, outside the mental health establishment. She has never, as far as I know, taken medication. She’s kept to herself, stayed out of trouble, and refused any help. She had enough money to live on—but she parsed it out, taking only the bare minimum. By the time she was in her sixties and I was in my thirties, her illness made no material claim on my life. It was only when I’d get in the car to go meet her, when I began to imagine how much further she would have deteriorated this time, when I felt a familiar leadenness in my limbs, that the full psychic weight of the situation was upon me.

Her bank was out in the Richmond District, where I grew up—San Francisco’s most westerly, fog-prone neighborhood. Even though she didn’t live out there anymore, she was a creature of deep habit, and she never changed banks. The bank had changed on her, though. Her account had once been across the street, but the Crocker Bank, with its sturdy old San Francisco name, was now long gone, gobbled up by Wells Fargo in the 1980s. After the buy-out, my mother’s account had been transferred across the street to a sleek, modern outpost of the Wells Fargo behemoth.

I found an open meter in front of Joe’s Place a block from the bank and scrounged for quarters, feeling rushed, nervous, and vaguely remiss. Joe’s Place was just across the street from Gaspare’s, formerly Vince’s, our old Italian standby. Joe’s Place hadn’t changed: same steamed windows, same tilted ice cream cone on the neon sign, same waffle cones behind the counter. We’d gone for ice cream after dinner at Vince’s nearly every week from the time I was five until I was eleven, first with both parents, then just with my father when he came to get us on weekends. Now, the scent of those waffle cones rose to meet me on the sidewalk, carrying a wave of nostalgia so dense it stopped me in my tracks. I could see myself trying to peer up over the counter, having to squint to see the flavors listed on the wall. Orange sherbet, or peppermint stick? I shook off the memory. Right then, I didn’t want to feel that small.

Generations of tellers had come and gone from this Wells Fargo. Then came the ATM outside, which made most of their jobs obsolete. More recently, to lure the clients back in or save on rent, they’d put a Starbucks in the lobby. The tellers stood behind a long counter at the back of the building. Up front to the right was a dry cleaner’s and to the left the Starbucks—counter, fireplace, seating area, and all.

I got in the coffee line and was grateful once again for the minor miracle this Starbucks represented. I was mercifully inconspicuous in my task. A girl in front of me ordered a caramel latte; she was a friend of the girl behind the counter. They were both teenagers, Asian, chatty. My foot tapped in what probably looked like impatience. I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure my mother didn’t slip past me. When finally my mocha was pushed across the drink shelf to me, I clutched it gratefully and sought out a table near the window.

I pulled out a book, a prop really, because I wouldn’t be able to read. Instead I watched out the full-length window for the 38 Geary coming from downtown. Each time a bus pulled away, I searched for her trench coat among the passengers left standing on the curb in the small cloud of diesel. It was winter, dark before six, and had been raining all day. I checked my watch—5:25. I pulled out my journal, wrote the date, wrote
Wells Fargo,
underlined it, tapped my foot. On the street the cars rushed by, four lanes of traffic, tires flickering over the wet pavement. I stared down at the journal. I let it fall closed, and reached for the cell phone in my bag. I pressed the speed dial and called Sara to talk me through.

I’ve long understood that schizophrenia is a disease that entails changes to the brain, that it’s chemical, that it’s physical, like cancer or diabetes. You hear of a person battling cancer. You even hear of a person battling alcoholism. But even today, with the rising awareness of the physiological basis of mental illness, it’s still more common to say a person
is
schizophrenic, rather than that she’s battling schizophrenia. With cancer, in the mind’s eye we see the person, whole and healthy, fight-ing an invasion of malignant cells. With alcoholism, there’s the person and there’s the bottle. They’re separate and at odds, or bound in a dance to the death, but still distinct. Schizophrenia wraps itself so tightly around the personality of the sufferer that the person and the illness look like one. We cannot see the partner in this dance.

I’m now at least ten years older than my mother was when she first began to show signs of her illness. Even by my most conservative calculation, I’ve aged beyond the period of risk. Also, the statistics on the likelihood of inheriting schizophrenia have been revised. The last time I looked, the odds of falling ill if you have one parent who suffers from the disease were 12 percent. The books are much more tactful these days; in the next breath, they always point out this means you have an 88 percent chance of
not
inheriting the disease.

Still. A few years ago at a writers’ conference in Oregon, I was staying in a college dorm room. I put my glasses on the bedside table. I reached to turn off the lamp. I opened my eyes and the ceiling had become a three-dimensional web of light. I blinked hard. It wouldn’t go away. Panic seized me.
God, no
. I hurled my body towards the lamp, grabbing for my glasses in the dark. The florescent light flooded the room. Through my thick lenses I peered up. Even in the light, I could still see the broad white lines crisscrossing the ceiling, rounding the wooden beams, giving dimension to the web. Glow-in-the-dark paint. Dormitory interior décor.

Sara picked up on the third ring. “I’m at the bank,” I said.

“She isn’t there yet?”

“No.”

I could hear Sara making dinner for her kids: the sizzle of something frying, the spatula scraping the pan, the TV news, and my niece asking questions in the background.

“Got your coffee?”

“Yes,” I said.

Then we talked about the Starbucks, which we couldn’t get over. “You remember before?” Sara asked. “How we had to hang around in the lobby and the security guard would come over and ask what we wanted?” I groaned. I remembered. It felt significant, naggingly so, and paltry, at the same time. My mother was crazy; she was not going to get better. There was almost nothing we could do to help her. She wouldn’t even tell us where she lived. To see her we had to drive out to this lonely branch of Wells Fargo. But then there was this Starbucks—as if whatever force was organizing the universe had tossed us a crumb:
Can’t
help you with the big stuff, but
I’ll
put a Starbucks in
the bank so
you’ll
be comfortable while you wait
.

Sara and I were still talking when I caught sight of the trench coat: beige, full-length, billowing in the wind, instantly recognizable. My mother, now sixty-six but looking at least ten years older, was crossing the intersection. She glanced quickly back over her shoulder. Her gait was stiff, a little uneven, as if one leg had become shorter than the other. It was always like this. Just when I was about to give up, when I’d decided that she must surely have come the week before, she appeared. My heart jumped. “Oh shit,” I said to Sara, “gotta go.”

“Call me after,” Sara said, hanging up.

I went outside, and we met on the sidewalk. “Mom,” I said. She looked up. She took a little step back, then said hello. She used my name, which startled me. She used my name so rarely, I sometimes wondered if she could even tell my sisters and me apart.

“We wondered if you wanted to meet for dinner?” I said. The words came out quite naturally. A calm, efficient part of me took over. Managed. But as I stood there, face-to-face with her, I couldn’t help but take in how sallow her skin was. Her once-dark hair was nearly all gray, her scalp visible along a wide swath of her part. She was thin now, having lost all the extra weight she’d carried when we were kids. Her skin sagged over sunken cheeks. My sisters would ask how she looked. “Worse,” I’d have to report, “much worse.”