THE GOAT STORY
The road from Crazy to Normal is not clearly marked, and the signs that do exist are not written in my mother tongue. But I am learning to take the highway, to stay out of the ditches, and guided by the confidence of my memories, to make my way carefully each day.
I was thrust onto this planet on January 8, 1959, destined, or so my mother claimed, to share my birthday with Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. She interpreted this quirk of fate as a sign that I, too, would someday be famous. Of course, I learned later that Nixon was really born on the ninth, but details like that were never important to Mamma. Her version was more interesting, I suppose, because people have long been fascinated by the idea of the brooding politician and the handsome rocker together. In fact, the well-known photo of the two men, taken when Elvis visited Nixon in the Whitehouse in 1970, is the number one requested item in the National Archives. Mentally, I have tried to wedge myself between them, to imagine myself into the bizarre scene, but it isn’t a comfortable fit. And, well, to be honest, I have never really felt like I really fit in anywhere.
Maybe that’s why Mamma was always slightly altering the truth, to make me feel like I could belong. Or maybe she just told me what she thought I wanted to hear to shut me up. The problem is, over time, I came to disbelieve much of what she proclaimed as my personal history. Her strategically skewed information and subtle inconsistencies have even led me to suspect that she wasn’t actually sure when I was born. Sometimes I think I just sort of slipped out… unnoticed… and she later threw me a sign.
When I would ask her about the day of my birth, all she had was a vague tale. I would ask her what the weather was like, and she would try to sidetrack me with random information, like, “I missed dinner that night…” and “the doctor wore a turquoise smock.”
But there were things I wanted to know that I never asked. Like whether it hurt to have a baby, and if it was embarrassing to be bare from the waist down with only one of those split-up-the-back hospital gowns to offer minimal cover. Or whether the first sounds I heard described pain or joy. And whether anyone listened with me.
I never asked her, and she certainly never told me, if she really wanted to hold me, or if she just felt like she had to because I wouldn’t stop crying and was a couple of weeks premature and allergic to cow’s milk. And the story goes…the nurses said I looked like a princess wrapped in my pink blanket. I, however, imagine myself propped uncertainly like a pastel papoose on the hospital bed beside her.
I suspect she couldn’t remember the actual facts and that she fabricated the day of my birth. I’m no Capricorn. Oh, Mamma was always telling me stories about how the goat was the perfect sign for me. She would mention characteristics like balance and harmony, and she would tell me that I was naturally reserved. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I imagined saving myself for some unimaginable future.
To be honest, Mamma and I had a hard time connecting. There are so many things I wish I had asked her while she could still answer, before her life became the aftermath of a massive, wet stroke that drowned her brain, disconnected her personality, and virtually severed her vocal chords. But you never know when life will suddenly change. You never know when relationships will stop existing in terms of today, and tomorrow… and someday. When all you’ll have to carry with you on your journey through this mystery are your haphazardly catalogued memories.
Looking back, I can’t really say I was an unhappy child; I just had this strange sense of inevitable ripeness, of looming expectancy. I was truly convinced that something would happen to change my life, that some kind of dramatic intervention would shake me free of my roots, and that from that day forward I would be able to live the life I was destined to live. During the spring after my fifth birthday (it just happened to be a leap year…), several memorable episodes did indeed disrupt the steady flow of my life. Unexpected events mysteriously fell into my days like stones freshly fallen from heaven, and I was convinced over and again that each meteoric occurrence would surely be the one to mark the change.
It all began on March 13th (a Friday, of course) when my brother exploded a television on my outstretched legs. He was older. It was a portable. And he liked to play behind the scenes, changing hues and making the characters squirm, creating calamity by turning the knobs all at once. But while he was back there playing TV technician and making me hold a hand-mirror so he could see the screen, he tripped over the cord and brought the whole show down on me. I caught the brunt of it on my knee with a flash of blinding light. Then there is a gap in my memory. The next thing I knew, a doctor was rhythmically wrapping gauze around my leg and similarly layering scold upon scold onto my brother for his reckless behavior. A week later I ran through a plate glass door.
Slowed only slightly by corners and rote-learned rules such as, “Don’t run in the house,” I plowed through the virtually invisible pane and immediately reflected on the shimmering shards falling around me that I must not be a particularly breakable child.
Then a few days later, my mother’s car, a cherry red convertible with a white top and lots of chrome, was rear-ended as we sat at a light. Those were the days before children were required to be strapped to the seat, and every driving mother’s instinct made her right arm extend as sharply as an automaton’s at every unexpected swerve or stop. I remember with an accuracy inspired by kinesthetic imprinting the way the doors of the car flew open like the wings of a large, startled cardinal, and the way my mother reflexively grabbed my wrist as my body, sans seatbelt, was flung purposefully out the opening and seemingly floated toward the road. Stretched horizontally and dangling whole-bodied over the pavement, I watched the painted-on stripes streak by meaningfully like slow motion commercials… one by one… one by one… one by one… as I danced across the rain slick intersection of Front and Beckham.
But I still had the bandage on my knee from the TV incident, and miraculously, as my mother said, the exposed remainder of my legs picked up only minor scratches and scrapes. Mamma got whiplash and was supposed to wear a very unattractive neck brace for several weeks, but I don’t remember her wearing it at all.
My brother later confessed that he wished he had been the one to go down in family lore as being dramatically almost-slung-from-the-car. But his only claim to fame that day was that he wet his pants and put his foot in the cherry-topped custard pie that had been riding in the back floorboard.
Needless to say, by this time I was starting to feel invincible. I was filled with visions of becoming a real-life super hero and more than eager to identify and perfect any superhuman abilities that might pop up.
As a quiet child, I was naturally drawn to the idea of invisibility, so I began to practice moving about the house each day with the goal of not being seen. Since I spent a lot of time alone, this was not very difficult, thus it reinforced the notion, at least in my mind, that I was getting better and better at blending magically into my surroundings.
Evidently I was having some success, because a week or so later, while I was riding my bicycle, I was run over by a woman who claimed she simply didn’t see me! The crazy thing was I got run over because I was being too careful. Determined to obey my mother’s advice to watch where I was going, I hadn’t had my training wheels off very long and was pedaling just fast enough to stay upright when a woman driving a large white sedan backed out of her driveway, clipped me with her fender, threw me for the proverbial loop, and crushed my back tire under her much larger radial. The surprise must have made me suddenly visible, because I remember seeing her shocked face in the rearview mirror on the driver’s side of the car as I lay pinned under the frame of my mangled bike.
By the time she pulled forward a few feet and got out of her car, I had brushed myself off and was inspecting the damage to my already battered legs. Then I saw the crumpled bicycle. The woman kept asking me over and over in frantic couplets, “Are you okay? Are you okay?” Then, “What’s your name? What’s your name?”
She probably thought she had stricken a deaf mute, or that perhaps I was in shock when I didn’t answer, but to be honest, I was too pissed off to speak. She had just crunched my only means of independent travel, scraped the toe of my new blue Keds, not to mention almost flattening me under her wheel. Besides, I knew my mother was going to be really mad.
Without saying a word, I picked up my bike and began making my way back home. It wasn’t an easy trip, as a few of the spokes on my back wheel were sticking out like whiskers and kept getting stuck in the now-narrowed-frame. I had to pretty much drag the bike beside me. With my eyebrows deliberately lowered, I glared at the woman beside her pristine white car. She just looked at me with disbelief as the bike and I went limping past. She had no choice really but to let me walk away. I guess she must have gotten back in her car and driven off, because when I looked back as I turned the corner, both she and her car were gone.
I was right about Mamma being mad. She took one look at my irreparably wrecked yellow and white Schwinn, put her hands on her hips, and demanded, “What have you done now?” I don't know how she thought I could have somehow pancaked my bike on my own, but she didn’t seem to want to believe that I had actually been run over.
I was grounded for a week. That meant I was not allowed to play outside, could watch no TV, and I’m sure my mother would have smacked me if I had somehow found a new way to hurt myself. At the time it seemed like my best plan was to lay low and resume my pursuit of invisibility. It was the perfect super trait for me to acquire. I had always been a low profile sort of kid, keenly disturbed by people who lived life as though it were a performance, especially mothers who were like that with their kids. Not the ones who were obsessed with their own appearances, but more particularly those moms who couldn’t have a normal exchange with their offspring without looking around to see who was looking at them.
At least Mamma wasn’t like that. In fact, I am pretty sure there were several occasions when she forgot me entirely. We weren’t very close, and the more time I was forced to spend in her vicinity that week, the more I realized just how little she knew the real me.
I decided it was best to spend my time alone. By day three of my incarceration, I discovered that I could climb into the empty bookcase in our den and crawl unimpeded from one end of the room to the other. I decided the cave-like atmosphere was the perfect place to read. So each morning I would disappear into the cabinet with my book, my flashlight, a red satin tufted pillow, and a lunch-kit packed with snacks. I hadn’t been reading very long, but was slowly making my way through the nursery rhymes and fairy tales in the gold-trimmed volumes of the Childcraft series.
At first my mother thought it was funny that I would want to get in the cabinet and close the door behind me. She suggested with a smirk that my closet would be more comfortable. But I was perfectly content where I was. And I guess she had better things to worry about, because she was content to leave me alone. I spent a lot of time reading in the cupboard, and I discovered that if I stayed there long enough, my mother was quite likely to forget where I was. I would hear her wandering through the house calling, first quietly, then more aggressively, the single syllable that was my middle name.
“Lee? Lee? Lee?” Slipping up an inquisitive octave from the first vowel to the second, she sounded somewhat like a confused, tropical bird. Of course, I never answered. Eventually her voice would grow frantic, then she would suddenly remember… I knew when she stopped calling that she was about to jerk open one of the cabinet doors and order me to, “Come out of there! This instant!”
And she always opened one of the doors far away from where I was ensconced with my books, as though instinctively she didn’t trust herself to get too close to me. Then, having effectively illuminated the dark atmosphere of my lair, she would forcibly slam the door, spectacularly shutting off the rectangular sidelight she had just created, and stand there rapidly tapping her toe on the parquet tiles until I crawled out. We were both pretty glad when I was no longer grounded.
Once I was free again, I discovered that my brother would let me ride his bike in order to keep me from following him and his friends around. (But he insisted on clothes-pinning several baseball cards to the spokes so I would make enough noise to be noticed. He said he didn’t want his bicycle to end up like mine…) So, under the command of my mother to not get “out of sight of the house,” as though it were some sort of benevolent being that could protect me, I circled the neighborhood for hours each day, singing loudly to hear myself over the flicking sound of baseball cards, singing to myself, and thinking about thinking.
Even though I liked to be alone, I admit I sometimes got lonely. And every once in a while, a feeling of unexplained fearfulness came over me, and I felt as though someone was watching me. That’s about the time Bruce came into my life.
My brother had recently joined the Cub Scouts, and Bruce was the oldest boy in the troop. Since my mom was the Den Mother, I got to attend all of the meetings. It was almost like I was the mascot or something. I had known most of the boys my entire life and they generally ignored me. Everyone, that is, except Bruce. Bruce loved me. I’m not sure how I knew that at the age of five, but I did. He was very protective of me and I was drawn to him. He was a lot bigger than the other boys, and like me, he was the quiet type. So I decided I would love him back, and as a result, I was very protective of him.
I recall one incident involving Bruce, my mother, and the Weebelos that almost forced me to leave home. At the beginning of each meeting, the Den Mother was supposed to lead the boys in an engaging group activity designed to introduce a specific
skill or reinforce some aspect of their code. Most of the games just seemed like games to me and I never got much out of them. But at one meeting in particular, Mamma crossed the line when she singled out Bruce to teach him a lesson about trust.
Because he was the biggest and the bravest, she and the other boys chose Bruce to take off his shoes and walk blindfolded across a floor dotted with set mousetraps. The goal of the game was for him to trust his fellow scouts to talk him safely through the simulated minefield. No sooner than Bruce had his shoes off and his blindfold on, Mamma held up a sign instructing the other scouts to silently pick up their mousetraps. She then prompted them with more posters to pretend to lead the obviously frightened Bruce across the floor, periodically setting off traps dangerously close to his vulnerable feet. When he finally reached the other side, he took off his blindfold, only to discover that he had been played for a fool.
Clustered together like consonants in compound words, the boys and Mamma were howling with laughter. But Bruce wasn’t laughing. And neither was I. For a week after that meeting, I refused to talk to my mother. No matter how much she threatened or begged, I was silent.
Not wanting to be around her or my brother, I spent most of each day circling the block on my borrowed bike, singing songs I had memorized from my collection of standards, never out of sight of the house, and never out of sight of Bruce, whom I now imagined sat on the roof beside the chimney keeping a watchful eye over me. For years after that, if I felt frightened or lonely, I would conjure up Bruce. It’s not like I talked to him or anything like that; we just kept each other company.
That week, when I wouldn’t talk to her, Mamma kept trying to draw my attention away from my anger. Every night while I was getting ready for bed, she told me stories about me being born and about how having a daughter like me had changed her life! She told me that in ancient times the sign of the Capricorn was a creature, which was half goat and half sea serpent, a mythical being that we eventually came to know as the mermaid. Though I wouldn’t break my self-imposed vow of silence, I was fascinated by her stories and let her words pour over me. She told me about one mermaid in particular named Melusina, how she looked like a woman during the week, but on the weekends when she took her bath in private, she would unfurl her fishlike tail. But I must have fallen asleep, because I am always left with a hollow feeling when I try to remember how the story ended.
Eventually I got over being angry with my mother. A few weeks later she told me Bruce had moved and would not be coming to any more scout meetings. I could tell by the way she watched me when she told me, and by the quiet tone of her voice, that she knew the news would make me sad, and that in her way, she was sorry.
The next day as I circled the block, I thought about mermaids, about Bruce, about the powers of privacy, and my relationship with my mother. As I grew more confident on the bike, I pedaled faster and watched the stones in the pavement below going past and past in a blur, until each individual was merely part of the next.
I like to think the doctor wore blue on the day I was born, a shade of blue exactly the color of Mamma’s eyes. Better yet, I like to imagine that I came to my mother, not like an ordinary child, but like an idea, falling from the sky in the middle of the night. I like to think I was just the way she would have wanted me to be, perfectly imagined and never a disappointment.
Even today, when my need for answers outweighs my need for independence, I talk to Mamma in my head. I reach deep for the comfort of my memories… and I ask, “Was the sky blue that day? Was it January blue? Will you tell me the goat story again?”
