When the pep talk mantra doesn't work
It was a day of little triumphs, like the amazing feeling of getting a fidgeting, recalcitrant first grader to push through words she thought she couldn’t read. Every time she did it and I told her see, I knew you could do it, she giggled with surprise (at her abilities? at my goofiness?). We ended the session with a high five and I thought: this is the kind of stuff that makes me feel good.
It was a day of strangeness. I had my monthly medication check-in with the psychiatrist. We made Mad Men psychiatry jokes and talked about the good parts of being an introvert, and then my worries about my son’s social contentment, which are all mixed up with feelings about my social issues as a kid. It’s waking me up at 1:00 a.m., these worries, despite my constant pep talks to myself: he’s fine, there is nothing wrong with him, there was nothing wrong with you, think of all the support he has that you didn’t, he will get through childhood relatively unscathed, he’s only six, etc. etc. I was clearly fighting back tears when we spoke, which is when she asked me the salient questions. Have I been crying a lot lately? (Kind of, but for what feels like good reasons.) Any suicidal thoughts? (Absolutely not.) Usually she asks me what I think we should do with my medication. This time she made the decision to stick with my usual dosage.
There was money stress, figuring out how we were going to pay our property tax and its surprise supplementals, making sure our monthly bills were paid, doing the accounting for the next six months, complete with emergency savings plan.
Then there was the regular Thursday play date with the boy’s good friend, except something is happening to their friendship and I don’t know what to do about it. Actually, I know I can’t do anything about it. I can see what was once close fading in front of me and again my insides stir up, they tighten. It’s like I have tangled wires in my gut. They fight about everything, these two opinionated personalities that want to control the agenda in different ways. I intervene because I have to. I play monster to make them laugh and keep the peace. I want it to be easy, or at least I want to know that when this ends (if this ends) that my boy has someone else he can be comfortable with and I worry again that his social life will never be easy. How can I give him the tools to make it better for himself?
Finally, at dinnertime, with the takeout from Gregoire, my post-5:00 p.m. beer making me groggy, my everything is fine/don’t want to wallow in worry attitude not working very well, I told my son about my first grade best friend and our huge fights, the way I was jealous of her closeness with the neighbor girl, and how it got better as we got older. There was a Halloween tie-in, the story about her Halloween visit to our apartment in fourth grade when my mother followed trick-or-treating with an ill-advised reading of Edgar Allen Poe’s Murders at the Rue Morgue.
Do you have any more stories about Halloween to tell me, he asked. He’s heard them all before, but I told them again with more detail. Halloween 1976, second grade, was where my mother wanted me to wear a mask and I didn’t, because I was dressed up as a Colonial girl and Colonial girls didn’t wear masks. She refused to let me trick-or-treat without one, so I sat at home and watched the kids in their costumes, my chest tight and the streaks of dried tears still on my unmasked face (Nana was very stressed back then, the explanation always goes, and it is absolutely true). Halloween 1980, sixth grade, was where my best friend and I wandered along a windy unlit country road to get to another neighborhood and I worried about deer stampeding when I should have worried more about being hit by a car.
I don’t know how it happened, but the boy started getting teary and then I did, too, and when I walked over to hug him, I knocked my knee into his chair in a very painful way. After that, I put on pajamas and took to my bed. My husband kindly did the rest of the evening routine while I read magazines and stared at my computer.
And at 1:00 a.m., the worries spilled out again. They woke me up with their relentless whining. I concentrated on my breathing. I let thoughts of the closeness of others comfort me, and, eventually, I fell back asleep.
Image: The boy this summer.
Halloween, 1972
She and Paul shepherd you into a blank-faced building with a mirrored lobby. There is a gorilla in the elevator. He stands upright and powerful with black fur that tufts over his arms and legs. You dig into your mother’s thigh with angel nails. “It’s all right. It’s just a costume,” she says and the gorilla, with some difficulty, removes his head to reveal another one underneath. “See?” he says. “Just a costume.” Your heart flip-flops. The gorilla struggles to replace his head and turns toward you, ape face askew and fixed in a lipless grin. He attempts to give the thumbs-up sign with a rubbery hand. “Shit. How am I supposed to hold a drink with this,” he says, tugging awkwardly at his digits. More people collect in the elevator: a flapper, a man in a Nixon mask, a woman mimicking the hangdog face and lanky body of Cher. Paul, making a joke, has dressed in prison stripes, while your mother has Cleopatra-flat hair and a beige tunic with gold accents.
You flow out with the crowd toward a door in the hallway. It swings open and Catwoman steps out, revealing a room cloudy with smoke and conversation muffled by faux fur and latex. She reaches out with heavily lacquered nails and rakes the hair under your halo. People are always touching your hair, cooing over your thick blonde ringlets as though you were a doll.
The gorilla closes the door.
This is an excerpt of a work in progress. The entire piece isn't written in second person, just those bits of dredged-up memory. For another Halloween story, read The orangutan did it.
Image: Man in gorilla costume from Compassionate Spirit.
It's all over until next year
The kid, in non-Sam Kinison mode.
Soon to come: a change of pace with November's blog of the month and another set of recipes in Vegetarian TImes!
The orangutan did it
Photo of Gertrude Stein from Ovation TV.
I was possibly the only seven year old in the world whose mother read Gertrude Stein out loud to her. At the kitchen table Mom would puzzle through the books she checked out of the Wilmington Public Library, boring her reluctant audience of one. It became a joke between us, the dazed child resting her head on the table, lulled into submission by the tediousness of Gertrude Stein. “A cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger,” I would tease Mom, and we’d laugh.
So it shouldn’t have been a surprise when she picked an Edgar Allen Poe story as a Halloween treat for two nine-year-olds. We were living in Newark, Delaware, in a one-bedroom, student family housing apartment. My friend Marie was spending the night and we did the rounds of our complex. Many neighbors didn’t expect trick or treaters, and the ones that did weren’t passing out Hersey bars or KitKats. There were several international families living there and I remember getting strange candies, sweet wafers, little trinkets.
Most people didn’t even open their doors, like the hulking single guy who now lived in my friend Belinda’s old apartment (student family housing?). Belinda had lived there with her mother and younger sister and we had spent most of the previous summer together, organizing skits in the little playground and running around the adjacent field where the University of Delaware marching band held their practices. A long scar traced the length of Belinda’s chest, the mark of two surgeries to correct a congenital heart condition. She had another round of operations scheduled in a couple of years. Though Belinda didn’t seem particularly fragile, I wanted to protect her from harm. When she and her family moved to Michigan in late August, we were both bereft and worried about dealing with new schools on our own.
I wanted to go to her apartment, stare down the guy I blamed for her move, get a little restitution Halloween candy. MaryAnn and I walked up the stairs through the dreary light of humming florescents, up one flight to Belinda's place. The strings of my Cousin It costume kept getting under my feet as they brushed against each stair. The hulk's television was on, blaring some sports event. “Trick or treat!” I yelled, pounding on the hollow metal door. No response. Marie looked at me skeptically through her Wonder Woman mask. “Let’s just go back to your place.”
Poster available from All Posters.
Maybe my mother decided to read “Murders in the Rue Morgue” to help us get over our candy haul doldrums. Perhaps she was hoping for a good, old-fashioned Halloween scare. The story, written in 1841, starts slowly (so slowly that she couldn’t have possibly started at the beginning. Even a nine-year-old raised on Gertrude Stein would have protested), but it sped up when she got to the crime scene. Two women have been brutally murdered. Here is the description of one of the corpses, courtesy of the Poe Museum:
We didn't get very far through the story before Marie became hysterical. She was frightened. She wanted to go home. Finally, Mom called her parents and they picked up my friend half an hour later."After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated --the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity. "To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew."
She never spent the night at my place again.