Swallow the Ocean (7 page)

Chapter Six

ALL THAT YEAR my mother would sit for hours in that high-backed armchair by the window in the living room, her legs tucked up under her. A well-worn paperback—on telepathy, or Edgar Cayce, or transcendental meditation—rested open on the arm of the chair. She studied the paranormal: reincarnation, Ouija boards, the lost island of Atlantis. She read Cayce again and again. I can imagine how she felt when the words of the books she read first sprang off the page, when they seemed to speak directly to her. For her it must have been that much more intense, more powerful than anything she’d known before, gaining speed and frequency until eventually she didn’t need to read. The trail of words continued in her head. Then she spent her days chasing the flushed colors of her thoughts.

It was not a question of not seeing the forest for the trees—because she saw all that, the pine needles, the branches, the trunks, and the forest. Beyond that she saw the way the light flooded the forest canopy. And then the even deeper, untold meaning, the connection of the trees to the light and the branches to the needles. Everything was revealed. Unspeakable. Because the problem was. The problem was that the speed of thought was so much faster than the speed of words, the senses faster than thought, the speed of light faster still. And words hopelessly lumbering behind. There was sound. There was vision. There was light, and there were voices close by.

As she looked out across the cluttered room, everything she saw was alert with meaning—the royal blue of the carpets she had chosen, the orange of the bridge through the window, the fog just beginning to stream up the Bay—a world of color too bold, sound too sharp, every sensation overwrought. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible. Was it easier for her when the fog rolled in for the afternoons, blanching the brilliant light?

She felt waves of power streaming from every object in that room: the clothes she wore, the food she ate, the things people gave her, the things she gave them. The objects around her created a current so complex, sometimes she could not navigate the room. Even if she wanted to go and stand at the window, she could not. She was locked in the tight embrace of the chair.

Garbage was a terrible vulnerability. The mail an unending burden. Bills, solicitations, junk mail, newspapers. They kept coming, and she could throw nothing away. The envelopes had her name,
Mrs. Russell B. Flynn
, printed in stark black ink across the front. She could not simply put them in the garbage and allow them to be taken away. To do so would open up a path that led straight back to her, a channel to her core. If matter could not be destroyed, how then could you ever extinguish the trails of influence that lingered on the things you touched? Forward and backward, we are linked in an unending chain, bound to everyone who’s ever touched what we touch, to anyone who touches the things we touch after us. This is how evil circulates. This is how influence is exercised in the world.

Something fluttered at the edge of her vision. She turned her head sharply to the left. A hummingbird was feeding at the honeysuckle that grew beneath the window. She watched the emerald of his body, a steady form inside the rapid fluttering of his wings. She waited for them—now that the weather was warmer, they came everyday. Messengers. Lingering, suspended in the air, beating out a signal.

She’d been right to come here. The hummingbirds, the bridge. Proof. She knew she’d be girded here. This house, this room, this chair, the city, her fortress. She must operate from strength. She must cut her ties. The past was falling away, leaving a scaffold of stark connections. She had to make the connections. This bridge that came and went in and out of sight, blanketed by fog each day, had opened for its first test drive on May 10, 1937, the day she was born. Coincidence? No. They were bound. Daily she bore the weight of the cars across her spine. Daily they pressed against her, the good bearing her up, the bad wearing her down.

A battle was being waged, hidden from her before, hidden from other people still. The confirmation was in her dreams. On the television. In the newspapers. She’d always felt it, sensed a structure, a shape behind things. Now she knew. The world was in the thrall of a malevolent force. Proof. These battles on the street between young and old. Proof. Tear gas. Riots. Assassinations. Proof. And flame. The war. Babies, running naked in the burning light. Proof.

No one had any idea who she was. A laugh slipped through her lips as she thought of this. Cayce hadn’t come this far. In the end he’d been weak. She was stronger. Stronger than he’d ever been. She’d come to the source. The very source. And they had spoken to her. They had told her who she was.

At first she’d resisted. She hadn’t known who was speaking. She’d been terrified by their persistence, the shocking things they said. But now she could distinguish the higher voices, the ones that praised her, from the others, the bitter whisperers who laughed at her, at the paltry shape of her life. In the beginning she’d thought she would dissolve before all their noise and chatter. The constant harassment. Now she took the tight fizzle of their hissing whispers and drew them out, like a piece of gum stretched between her fingers. She pulled them so thin that they, not she, dissolved. This was her task. Her mission. Time. It took time. Darkness. And quiet. She needed the children to go to school. She needed the shades drawn against the sunlight. She needed the fog to cover the house.

Her eyes fixed on the hummingbird hovering below the window. She rocked in the chair. Her arms held her breasts tight against her chest. The motion brought her close to the source of her strength. She listened for the voices. Rocking, she entered the space before her. Rocking, space opened through the fil-tered light. Let it come, she thought. Let it come.

At this time, my father’s friend Joe—now married and with two daughters of his own—lived in Santa Rosa, about an hour north of San Francisco. Joe was the only person my father confided in about my mother’s condition. Every couple of weeks they’d meet at a bar halfway between Santa Rosa and the city. Joe has described these conversations to me: my father running through his options, which seemed to be narrowing, and all seemed to be bad, while Joe listened, nodding, waiting for my father to slowly circle towards the decision he had clearly already made in his bones.

I imagine them sitting in a booth, in a darkened corner of the bar, drinking Heinekens in the dark green bottle.

“Sally’s crazy,” my father says. He’s said it so many times, in so many ways, it draws no response from Joe. Both of them know by now that in addition to all the things men generally mean when they say this about their wives—exasperation, incomprehension—it is also a statement of fact, the cold, hard, truth.

“I’m the focus of all her anger,” my father says. “If I leave, maybe she’ll calm down.”

Joe nods.

My father returns to his hope that my mother’s family, her brothers and her parents, who had all moved to Colorado a couple of years earlier, will be shaken into action if he leaves. That her parents, with whom she talks by phone every week, and who have so far tended to view my mother’s troubles as marital, not mental, would intervene and succeed where he has failed. “Come out here. Make her get some help.”

Not that he believes anymore—really believes—anyone can
make
her get help. She was a fixed and stubborn woman when they met. The more ill she becomes, the more unmovable she is. He’s prodded, begged, and demanded that she see someone for the past two years. Nothing’s moved her. Once, just once, he convinced her to let the minister from our church come over for a talk. The man sat on the living room couch facing my mother for fifteen minutes, mildly suggesting some marital counseling. My mother exploded, then hounded him out the door. After that we stopped going to church, cutting off the last outlet, the last group of people outside the family with whom she’d had contact.

My father came to a desperate two-part ultimatum:
Get some
help, and clean up the house, or
I’m
leaving
. It was a full year later and she’d barely roused herself from the living room chair.

But still.

“I can’t leave the girls,” he says, shaking his head. “For god’s sake, how can I leave them there?” he asks, as if Joe has any kind of answer to this.

Taking us with him is not a real option. My father explains to me now, “She was still so good with you guys. I couldn’t imagine taking you away from her then.”

But mostly he doesn’t think of taking us because we are still more hers than his. She knows it, he knows it, and we know it.

And then there are the circular, sodden questions that have to be asked until all hope is pounded out of them. “She’s so smart, for Christ’s sake,” he says, “she’s got to come out of this. Don’t you think?”

Joe says the reasonable things. Time. Doctors. Hospitals. Medication.

“She’s never taken a goddamn aspirin the whole time I’ve known her. Who the hell’s going to get her to take medication?”

Before they leave, as he leans against the bar, waiting for change, my father turns to Joe and says, “She’ll be OK for money. I’ll always take care of that.”

My own memories of this time are sketchy. The main things are that the apartment was always messy, my mother was always home, and my father was always angry. The mess didn’t bother me. But when my father came home from work, the piles of newspapers, the games and toys we’d played with and abandoned throughout the day, the dishes from our snacks in the living room, many more dishes piled in the sink in the kitchen, suddenly looked bad. “Clean up this goddamn mess,” he’d say, glowering at us from the couch while we scampered around, snatching up our dolls, gathering Monopoly money, stashing newspapers and magazines under the TV cart. It didn’t help. The mess was implacable, and so was his anger.

Sometimes he came home wounded. He’d broken and sprained his ankles so many times playing sports in high school that once a group of medical students looking at his x-rays had decided that surely he couldn’t walk. This didn’t stop him from playing pickup basketball games at the playground down the block with guys ten and fifteen years younger than he was. These were tough games, fast and furious, no fouls called. Somebody always managed to come down on one of his ankles, neatly converting his psychic pain to physical injury.

He sat in the dining room with a pan of steaming water in front of him. I watched him from the living room. He pulled off his socks one at a time, wincing. Then slowly he peeled back the tight elastic braces he wore for sports. The skin underneath the braces did not match the rest of him. It was very white, and the dark hair that covered his legs didn’t grow there. I stifled the urge to ask him if it hurt. I knew from experience that pain just made him another kind of mad. When he lowered his feet into the hot water, he made a noise that made me jump. The puffy skin around his ankle turned bright red. Then he put his feet in a pan of cold water and the skin went purple and blue.

Odd as it may seem, I don’t remember being aware that anything was wrong with my mother. Perhaps that’s because the one thing she kept up was being a mother. She still got my sisters and me off to school each day. Late, maybe, but off. Every day as I went out the back door, with the lunch she’d made me in my hand, she’d say, “Be a good girl at school today.” As if I were ever anything but. When I got home, she was there in the living room, in her chair. Waiting, I thought. She still pored over my report cards and helped me with school projects. I took ballet lessons, and she came to the recitals. She drove Sara and me to the park every week for horseback riding lessons over the summer. She made dinner, and she still read to us from the Bible every night—still determined to get through the whole of it that year. Some stories she returned to again and again. There in the new apartment, the three of us circled around her on the floor in the living room, she read us the story of Jacob’s Ladder. I don’t remember exactly what she told us about this story, only that it mattered to her deeply. The images of Jacob climbing a ladder to the sky, and wrestling with an angel all night, have stayed with me to this day.

Each night she knelt with me and Amy by the side of our bunk beds in the room we shared. We recited the Lord’s Prayer together. She kissed us and turned out the lights. She was never incoherent, and her anger, though scary, was aimed only at my father. She never yelled at us, not back then.

Still, when I put the school photos from first grade and second grade side by side, I can see a difference. In the first-grade photo I am a confident, smiling girl, dressed in a red jumper and white blouse, looking straight into the camera. In the second-grade photo, I’m not smiling. My mother doesn’t seem to have made a special effort to dress me for picture day. My navy blue blouse is unbuttoned at the neck, hanging loosely against my pale skin. My head is tilted down and to the side. My eyes look overlarge, weighing down my whole face.

The fissure between my parents deepened. How could it not? They’d wrangled for years over the question of her getting help; the harder he pushed, the more she backed away, eyeing him with suspicion all the while.

As long as they’d been together they’d woken each morning and told each other their dreams. By now my mother used dreams, his and hers, to guide all decisions. My father says his dreams were by then so dark, so demon-haunted, he feared he would follow her right over the edge. That fear, more than anything, pushed him out the door. One morning he told her he wasn’t going to talk about dreams anymore. He wasn’t even going to think about them. And, he claims, he did not remember another dream for fifteen years.

Bad as this was for my father, my mother’s terror must have been greater. She told me later she believed my father was the devil. No, that’s not quite right. She didn’t use the word
devil
. She said he was on the side of evil, more of a cohort, a higher- up in the devil’s minions. How does that happen? How do you come to believe your husband of twelve years is in league with the devil?

Maybe it was one morning as she lay in bed watching him dress for work. Her eyes track him as he chooses a suit from the closet. He places the narrow tie around his neck. She examines the set of his jaw, the squint of his eyes, the shape of his hands as he knots the tie. Suddenly she jolts forward in terror. He turns to her, his face a tight mask, and behind that, nothing. It’s all she can do to remain still while he bends and places a glancing kiss on her forehead. He turns and walks out of the room.