The painting above is a detail, slightly smaller than life size, from my portrait of my mother which is titled A Revisionist History of Glenda. The story below is one of many I have written about my mother in which I try not to revise history. It is a last attempt to connect with her memory in some meaningful way without glossing over the truth, at least the truth as well as I can remember it...
A SUDDEN WILLINGNESS TO SLEEP
When my brother and I were young, it was not unusual for one of us to find my mother passed out, usually on the kitchen floor.
How would you describe the dizziness that you felt before fainting? Did you feel light-headed, off-balance, or like the room was spinning?
I don’t know what caused the fainting. I thought it might be because she was pregnant, but even after she gave birth to my sister, the fainting continued. It must have been a reaction to the violence in our house.
She and my stepfather fought sometimes. It was the kind of fighting that started with yelling and often escalated to him hitting her. On at least one occasion, she pulled out a butcher knife to back him off. I’m pretty sure it was the time she told my brother and me, in the heat of the argument, that he had “slept with” (a term I didn’t understand at the time) our housekeeper. Looking back, I’ve often wondered why she didn’t go for the knife before he hit her…but I was never the kind of kid to ask such questions.
It was usually the day after the fight scene that we found her on the floor.
When you regained consciousness were you aware of your surroundings or were you confused?
The first time I saw her crumpled on the white tile, she was on her stomach with her hips and lower body turned uncomfortably to one side. Her arms were loosely curled about her head, tensionless hands palms down, and her right cheek was flattened against the pale, horizontal plane. I thought at first that she was asleep, but her face didn’t have the slack look that sleep brings. And when I tried to wake her, she didn’t seem quite able to open her eyes. (I had just started taking swimming lessons, and saw a similarity in her posture to the way I must have looked when I practiced the dead man’s float. The way her torso was scrunched up and turned sideways definitely mimicked my style. According to my swimming teacher, that telltale gesture was because I refused to relax…)
Two and a half years my senior, and obviously more experienced with such situations, my brother knew to get a cold washcloth and blot Mamma’s face until she came back to us. This pattern of discovery and resuscitation went on for years, and other than the occasional black eye or bruised jaw, she showed no lasting signs of wear or tear.
Did you experience chest pain or heart palpitations when you fainted?
Maybe it was because I sort of got used to seeing her that way, but sometimes when we found her, I almost felt like she was pretending to faint in order to get attention. We did feel sorry for her when she fought with my stepfather. She didn’t really ever seem to be at fault, and we thought he was mean to her. But after a while, we wondered why she didn’t just pack us up and leave him. (She had been married before to a mean man and she had left him.) We weren’t sure if the fainting was an attempt to keep the tide of our emotions predictably surging in her direction or if she was just trying to keep everyone afloat a little longer.
They didn’t fight all the time. And we were always reassured afterward that things would be okay. We learned with time that this was merely parent talk, a coded message sent not so much to keep us from worrying, but to keep us from telling anyone about the fights. I guess you could say my brother and I grew up in a house of secrets. It was as though each member of the family lived in an iridescent bubble of potential sealed off from the rest of the household, and most decidedly from the rest of the world. I grew up not completely understanding the dynamics of the situation, yet somehow convinced there was no real point in asking questions. Something told me I had all of the answers if I could just be very quiet and listen for them. So I stayed quiet.
The only one I ever really talked to was my brother. Being older than me, Bubba was naturally more confident, and I looked up to him worshipfully. He didn’t like to spend much time alone, and our household wasn’t the kind where our friends were welcome without making an appointment, so to speak, by way of our mothers. So by way of default, I was Bubba’s primary companion, and at least on the weekends, he was my primary caregiver.
We lived in a beautiful, new house that had recently been showcased in the Tyler Parade of Homes, and everyone had his or her own bedroom. But I liked Bubba’s room best. And when he didn’t have anything better to do, he was willing to spend time with me there. We were strongly discouraged from messing up the common areas of the house, such as the living room, the family room, the glass-walled atrium filled with artificial plants… and my room was much too frilly for adventure. Besides, Bubba had his own TV, so we usually ended up playing there, and as long as we didn’t make too much noise, we were pretty much left alone. Except for naptime.
During the week I usually lay down with Juanita for a half hour or so, and often dozed off as she rubbed my head. And usually on Saturdays, when Bubba was home from school, we were required to take an afternoon nap. Neither one of us really felt a pressing need to sleep in the daytime, but we were still forced by Mamma, or the maid, or whoever was on duty, to “just lay there for a while and rest.”
My room was bright with sheer white curtains that let in most of the sun. And since I didn’t like my room (it would have been tolerable if my bed had a canopy, but Mamma said they attracted too much dust) I tried to convince Mamma that I was completely unable to sleep there during the daytime. (I had learned at a very early age that if I complicated the issues enough and just kept talking, I could convince her of almost anything.) I would propose elaborate scenarios and chatter on about things like remodeling my room. In a detached voice that told me she was paying more attention to putting on her makeup than she was to my plan, she said we couldn’t change my curtains because they wouldn’t match the rest of the window treatments on the front of the house. So I proposed putting tinfoil on the windows (I had recently discovered this technique and, believing it to be a necessary step toward the space age, was fascinated by the reflective possibilities…) Mamma practically swooned.
I told her she could buy me one of those satin sleeping masks, the kind that movie stars wear. At that point I stretched out on my back on her bed, crossed my arms over my chest like a corpse, snored like a stooge, and played out the act of napping in my imaginary mask… then I sprang up dramatically and warned her there was always the chance I would forget to take it off when I awoke and somehow wander out of my room, out of the house, into the street, and “what good would all of those years of naps do me if I got hit by a car?”
When I would go off on these practically unpunctuated tirades, my mother would try to ignore me at first, but I could be relentless in a quiet, dogged way, and almost always got what I wanted eventually. So, I was allowed to take my naps in Bubba’s room.
His room was darker and much cozier than mine. Whereas mine had bare, white walls, snowy linens, and pale, glass-protected, French Provencial furniture, his had rust-colored corduroy, dark oak paneling, lots of book-filled shelves, and a subdued atmosphere like that of a perpetually rainy day. But the best part was his headboard. It was a cabinet of sorts, a rectangular box that stretched the width of the bed, and it had two sliding doors across the front. When both doors were pushed all the way to the center, they neatly overlapped, leaving just enough room on each side for us to squirm our heads and shoulders into the openings, and just enough light for us see each other’s faces at opposite ends of the tunnel. It was a crawl space for secrets. And it carried our whispered words back and forth from one end to the other as effectively as if we were two tin cans connected by a string. When we were in there, I always felt as though we had stumbled upon a communication invention as conversely primitive as it was amazing.
As equally amazing was the fact that Mamma didn’t seem to care that we liked to cram our heads into the headboard. She would come in to check on us, turn the radio on almost silently to the “piano music station” to provide us with a little ambient sound (she was always one for setting the right mood) and pull the door almost shut behind her, leaving it was open just a crack--“In case I want to take a peek at you; that way I won’t wake you.”
Mostly we talked about silly things at naptime like whether or not we really brushed our teeth, or what we would take on our next trip to the woods. Sometimes we pretended we were characters from television shows. Bubba’s favorite was Rin Tin Tin and Rusty, but I wasn’t crazy about that one because I always had to be the dog. When it was my turn to choose, I always wanted him to be Maxwell Smart, so I could be Agent 99. I especially liked to pretend we were in the “cone of silence.”
Sometimes we were more focused and made plans about things we would do when we got older. Bubba wanted to be a fireman or a policeman. (He would someday become both.) I guess he liked professions that offered the bonus of a uniform. I just couldn’t seem to lock myself down on any specific vocational plans. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be an astronaut, a ballerina, a stewardess or an accordion player.
But the limited circumstances of my life up to that point were definitely helping me narrow the spectrum of my career choices. I didn’t really know enough about the space program to adequately fuel my imagination, and my mother couldn’t seem to find the time to take me to dance lessons. And while I definitely liked the idea of being a flight attendant, I had flown a couple of times and was beginning to think it might get boring after a while. But I was truly hooked on the notion of playing the accordion.
I had been virtually steeped in the Lawrence Welk Show since birth, and for a while, wanted desperately to become one of the Lennon Sisters. (But, as my brother pointed out, I was way too young and would probably not stay blond forever…) Besides, I was truly enthralled with the kinesthetic energy that accompanied the accordion. I had accumulated quite a collection of polka records (given to me by the sympathetic music lovers in my extended family), so when I was forced to play in my room, I would lope about the pristine space to a 2/4 beat, playing a pretend accordion I had fabricated out of two shoe boxes and a wad of duct tape. With my right hand splayed across the cartoon face of an inked Hush Puppy, I manipulated imaginary keys, while the fingers of my left hand pushed crayon-drawn buttons and I rhythmically squeezed the instrument’s crudely constructed bellows. Not surprisingly, no one seemed to understand my obsession, and my mother assured me quite emphatically that not only was the accordion impractical, it absolutely was not an instrument suitable for a girl. She must have been right, because I have yet to possess a squeezebox…
Bubba and I eventually outgrew our headboard conversations, but we still spent time talking about the future. Sometimes when we were upset by one of Mamma’s and Daddy’s fights, we ached to leave home. And though we still felt more sympathetic toward her (he, after all, was the one we were most afraid of), when she failed time after time to follow through on our evacuation plans, we decided we could live without her, too, if we had to.
But still, she fainted every once in a while. Bubba said he thought it was because of the pills she was taking. I had seen the twin yellow moons set each morning by my stepfather against the backdrop of her breakfast plate, but because of the v-shaped cut-out in the center of each pill, I assumed they were like the vitamins he gave us. I learned years later that the little yellow pills were Diazepam, more commonly known as Valium, a psychotropic substance often prescribed for chronic anxiety disorders. Mamma began taking it right after it came out in the early ‘60s, perhaps as an alternative to barbiturates. It was supposed to be safer and less likely to lead to an overdose, but was later found to be highly addictive. (Evidently Valium has also been used at times by military snipers to relax muscles and slow breathing for increased firing accuracy… It’s probably just as well that Mamma didn’t know this at the time. You know, with the knife and everything…)
Bubba had the idea that the pills were somehow supposed to keep her and Daddy from fighting so much. If so, they didn’t work very well. No matter how much we talked about our lives and how they might change, I could never draw a clear picture in my head of a safe, quiet place that I could see myself going to at the end of the day. I was upset when my parents fought, but to be honest, I was almost as upset when they got along. It was as though when they were in agreement, they were still in opposition to me.
The only thing that helped me get by during those years before I went to school full time was the fact that John (I had come to think of him this way instead of thinking of him as Daddy) worked out of town most of the time. I’m not sure what he did exactly, and I never bothered to ask my mother. In fact, I almost never asked anyone direct questions. I had developed a tendency to limit myself to the information I could take in directly through experience. In a strange way, this put me more in control of my environment. In other ways, it left me vulnerable both mentally and emotionally. I was like a mirror, able to reflect only those events and ideas that passed directly before me. At times this dubious ability protected me, but at times, it made me open to things I wished I had never witnessed.
For example, one night, not long after my sister was born, Bubba and I had to ride with Mamma to the nearby town of Troup to pick John up at the train station. He had been away on a business trip and was returning by train instead of plane because of some bad weather in the area. It was well after our bedtime, so Mamma, having left the baby with my grandparents for the night, put us in our pajamas and packed us in the backseat with pillows and blankets to make the thirty minute trip to the depot.
It was rainy and dark and almost unbearably cold, and the defroster on Mamma’s car wasn’t working right, so she took the cloth “emergency diaper” out of the glove compartment, and every half mile or so, she would make a swipe across the inside of the windshield to clear it of vision-impairing fog. Even though she cautioned us repeatedly to sit back, we couldn’t keep from leaning over the back seat, chins propped on our arms, as though we could somehow help her see where she was going.
Every time she mopped the windshield, we could see the rain-drenched scene before us, but only for a few seconds, then the road would begin to disappear in the inevitable fog. At one point the traffic on the two-lane highway suddenly stacked up. We slowed down almost to the point of not moving, and I could see the cars in front of us, one after another, stopping, starting, then finally stopping for good, as their brake lights flared and faded, flared and faded, and then stayed lit. Down the road a bit, I could see a row of headlights pointed toward us, stretching over the hill into invisibility.
Mamma was preoccupied with keeping the windshield clean and moved her car only in response to the movements of the line of cars in front of us. After fifteen or twenty cars swished past in the oncoming lane, it was our side’s turn to go, so we proceeded forward impatiently as though we had earned the right to do so.
Suddenly Mamma said, “Oh my god!! You kids sit back!” We braced, expecting her to brake abruptly, but when she continued to creep forward, our curiosity made us stretch even taller to see what was going on outside the car. I was in the seat behind her and couldn’t see much, so I turned to the triangular window at my left. It was covered with convex water droplets, pregnant round dots that constantly grew heavier and ran together in small, clear tracks down the pane. Beyond the veil of the speckled glass, I saw lights, red and blue, flashing painfully bright, a warning that something dangerous or criminal had happened nearby.
In that moment, I was convinced that John’s train had crashed, that he had been killed, and that there would never be any more fights or fainting spells at our house. Then I saw the bodies. At least, I assumed they were bodies, various human-shaped forms draped in rain-soaked white sheets, laid out randomly on the side of the highway.
Since Mamma had just said we were still several miles from the station, I couldn’t figure how they had gotten off the train. I imagined a fiery explosion and screaming people being thrown through the air, flying like aliens. Then the traffic stopped again. I saw more police cars with their strobing lights. And then I saw another car, a mud-streaked white one, upside down in the ditch and caved in on the top. On the back corner, one yellow-orange light flickered off and on in an unpredictable rhythm.
Bubba touched Mamma softly on the shoulder and asked, “What happened?”
“It’s a car wreck,” she answered, and this time when she told us to sit back, we did. That’s when it hit me. John wasn’t dead. And our lives weren’t about to change.
On the way home from the train station, I heard Mamma telling him about the wreck. She pointed out the section of the road where the bodies had been temporarily laid to rest. He thought for a moment… and said matter-of-factly, “The curve is too flat. It should’ve had more bank to it.”
Mamma was silent. From her seat on the passenger’s side, she leaned toward the left and wiped the fog from the window.
“Were the kids upset?” he asked.
Mamma peered over her shoulder to the back seat where my brother slept and I pretended to… “I don’t think so,” she answered quietly.
Later that night in my street-lit white room, I pulled the sheet over my head and lay very still. I wondered what it was like to die. I wondered if people would line up and look at me some day, a faceless mound held down by a clinging sheet. I tried to imagine the faces of the people who had died that night, but I could only imagine their tiredness… their sudden willingness to sleep…
I wanted so much to be able to sleep. At an early age, I had developed an ongoing relationship with insomnia. I came into the world afraid there was a monster under my bed and a bear in my closet, and more often than not, I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming for someone to come save me. My mother had been worried for a while that I wasn’t getting enough rest. As I got older the problem would become exacerbated to the point that I would eventually go to a sleep specialist. A few electrodes later it was revealed that I was a “hyper” sleeper, cycling through R.E.M. sleep in half the time of the average specimen. Studies have shown that it is during these periods of relatively light sleep that memories are formed. It has also been hypothesized that disruption of R.E.M. sleep can improve depression. I guess on some level, even at an early age, I was attempting to control what my brain took in, how I stored it, and how I would deal with it later.
The day after the trip to the train station, when it came time for our naps, Bubba and I were worn out from the night before, and we didn’t argue. But we didn’t put our heads in the headboard either, opting instead to lie like mirror images, facing each other with only inches separating our faces. With Mantovani playing softly in the background, I told him how I had imagined the train wreck, and I admitted without shame, my disappointment when I had realized the truth. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes agreed. We never talked about it again.
As we grew older, there were lots of things we stopped talking about. Some things it just doesn’t do any good to hash out. They’re beyond our control, and for that matter, were never a matter of choice to begin with. Like being born. Some of us try repeatedly to wish life away. Most times I try not to think about things like that… or about the other brother I never knew, the one who lived only a few days… or about the fact that I was born less than a year after he died. Or about the stories I’ve heard about the purple shadows my father’s fingers left on my mother’s fair skin, and how she went into premature labor on that wet day in late October…
My other brother lived no stories and he had no name, so sometimes I write about him. I write about wanting to feel close to him, like the space of one minute on the face of a clock must, out of inescapable necessity, be close to all of the others, no matter how minute the connection at the center of the circle remains. Sometimes I pretend, that since I came after him, I was his replacement. I pretend that I burst out of a wasted womb and onto the scene like an enthusiastic stand-in. And I make up stories. Enough for two people.
I never did find out for sure what it was that made Mamma faint. Maybe it was the Valium, or the natural aftermath of the violent episodes, first with my father… and then my stepfather. Either way, I guess there were times she just couldn’t go on in an upright position. Maybe it was the promising coolness of the hard floor that pulled her down, the flat, grid-like tiles so different from her warm, round, vulnerable body.
Is this the first time you fainted?
I think Mamma wanted to escape to a place where the boundaries were clearly defined, and that she saw the squares on the floor not as limits or fences, but more like a map, a guide, presented in predictable, manageable pieces.
And I think there must have been times she just needed to lay there for a while… and rest.
