Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
A stove that looked like the one Miss Frances cooked in on television. I opened the package.
“See,” she said, “buttons,” pointing to green, yellow, and red buttons that pushed in and out without effect. I felt duped. This was so much less than I’d asked for. Another of my mother’s disappointing gifts: scratchy blouses and sweaters in neutral colors, textures utilitarian and serviceable. I preferred the fluffy, shiny dresses with oversized bows that my father gave me. And the bounty of stuffies he brought home on my slightest prompting: poodles, tigers, teddy bears, lions, zebras. He was still trying to make it up to me for Jo Jo, the stuffed monkey that I took with me everywhere until I made the mistake one day of letting him fall from the car seat into the gutter.
“There’s pigeon dreck there,” my father shouted, instructing Ben to remove Jo Jo from my sight as I screamed. He put him in the trunk. Later that night, my mother held him up for a moment so I could say goodbye, and then he disappeared from my life. Afterward, I kept trying to remember his face. I keep trying still.
The other animals were small solace but I loved them nevertheless and never took them out of the house where they might meet Jo Jo’s fate.
My mother’s oven was too small to put real pots and pans in. But in her absence, the toy stove was all I wanted to play with.
I made mud pies—the mud was chocolate; the sprinkle of sand on top was sugar.
“Want a bite?” I said to Paul. He pretended to eat it.
I repeated my mother’s final act before she left us, pulling the oven door open, closing it shut, opening it again. The pie went in; the pie came out. My mother would return.
Ben created his own new ritual. We found his ordinary daily ablutions entertaining enough: he’d come home on the bus from high school in Glendale and go into the bathroom, scrub his face with Phisohex to ward off the acne, then brush his teeth and gargle. Gargle and gargle and gargle.
“As long as he kissed a girl for—that’s how long he has to gargle,” Paul said. “He’s trying to get her germs out of his mouth.”
Now Paul and I watched wide-eyed from the hallway outside the boys’ bedroom as Ben performed this new mysterious act. After he came out of the bathroom, he stood on the threshold of the boys’ bedroom with his hand towel draped over his arm. He muttered to himself and then walked methodically forward a few inches. He lingered there, deliberating, and then flung his towel purposefully onto his bed. Then he went over to the bed, picked up the towel, backed up into the hallway, stood at the same spot outside his bedroom, and threw the towel again.
Paul and I looked at each other, trying to figure out the rules. A certain number of steps from the bathroom to the hallway, from the hallway into the doorway, a position that his feet had to line up in at the threshold of the room, a particular spot on the bedspread the towel had to hit?
“What are you doing, Ben?” Paul asked. Teasing. “We can play too if you tell us the rules.”
“Leave me alone,” he said.
“Debbie and I are just trying to figure out what you’re doing.”
“Mind your own beeswax,” Ben bellowed.
My mother came home two days later with a cowgirl outfit for me. On the skirt, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans stood and smiled as Roy’s horse Trigger reared up powerfully behind them. I put on the skirt, along with the vest with studs and fringes, and the green and brown plaid flannel shirt, and abandoned my pie baking to play cowgirl. My mother removed the cloths from the mirrors. I stood back, aiming my black plastic gun at my own reflection in the mirror. I would be fierce.
In the days that followed I watched for clues. Eva was no longer the mother she’d become the day she received the bad news, but she was not the mother she’d been the day before that either.
Paul tattled on Ben about the towel-throwing ritual. My parents went into the boys’ room and sat down with Ben while Paul and I stood right outside the room. Ben confessed that if the towel had not hit the bed right, my mother’s plane would have crashed.
“How you throw a towel has nothing to do with a plane,” my mother said.
“You’re trying to control things that human beings have no control over,” my father agreed.
It was one of the few times I saw them come together and concur on a matter of child rearing.
“There’s been too much of Rebecca’s superstition in our house,” my mother said. Ben sobbed, no longer enslaved by the compunction to throw the towel.
Over the next week, my mother sat Shiva. We borrowed the metal folding chairs from the Jewish Center and lined them up in our dining room, pushed our dining room table up against the wall. Hives of chattering women invaded our kitchen. The smell of their clashing perfumes made me sneeze.
I worried about who the bad habit might kill next, but that did not stop me from doing it.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Kindergarten Papers
Imade a name for myself in kindergarten by crying the entire first day. While the other children stood up together for the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, I pledged my allegiance to my mother by refusing to let go. When I would not stop crying, the teacher, Mrs. Bell, old and gnarled and severe, her skin and stiff hair both bluish gray, segregated me from the rest of the class in a chair by the window. “If you won’t stop crying, you can just sit here all by yourself,” she said.
In fact, I wasn’t strictly alone. From the chair I could see my mother—or more precisely—my mother’s car. Eva sat out in front of the school in our blue Desoto for the duration of that first day because she had promised to, and feared that otherwise I might go “berserk.”
My mother’s almost-presence, her being so near and yet out of reach, invisibly hidden inside the car, only increased the intensity of my grief. If I cried loud enough, I wondered, would she hear me? Would she know I had refused to let her go? Would she recognize it as proof of my love? I kept up a steady, nearly unbroken stream of my torment, my cries a string connecting us whether my mother could hear me or not.
At first, I was among a small chorus of kindergarten criers. Ultimately, the other children proved pushovers. Tom with the bristle brush haircut held out the longest. Cagey Mrs. Bell knelt down beside Tom and in a sing-songy voice that barely masked her impatience, told him everything his mother would be doing while he was in school.
“She’ll go to the store and buy food for you and Daddy,” she said. “She’ll clean and dust and vacuum the house, and then she will pick her big boy up and will be so proud of him for not crying, and you and Mommy will go home together and wait for Daddy to come home from work. Won’t that be nice?”
Tom whimpered two final, tiny whimpers, wiped his eyes with his fists, and was vanquished.
I couldn’t place myself in Mrs. Bell’s wholesome tableau. If Eva had not been sitting out in the car, she would not have been cheerfully cleaning house or shopping for dinner. She would have been in the office tending to my father. While I cried, I imagined the scene: all three phones ringing at once. Ira half-dressed in suit pants and a white V-necked t-shirt with one suspender falling over a shoulder, paced the office floor. Barefoot, twisting a strand of his curly black hair, he answered one phone and spoke jovially to a customer, while my mother held out the receiver of another. My parents mimed frantically to each other; she passed him a note; he wrote a furious note back.
If I were not being held prisoner in kindergarten, I would have been in the middle of it, “under foot,” as my mother called it, making impromptu beds for my dolls in the drawers of my father’s desk. I lay the doll in gently over a stack of phone books, covered her with a towel-blanket, and shut the drawer. My father, needing the phone book, flung the doll and its blanket across the room. I retrieved her, waited until he had moved on, and restored the doll to her rightful chamber.
“Debbie,