Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
“Never Smile at a Crocodile” from the Disney cartoon “Peter Pan” was one of my favorites. I spent a lot of time in the bedroom alone, plotting plays in which my stuffies starred, and in which they all, from pandas to poodles, struggled to get along.
While I sat in the chair in kindergarten and cried, I kept reliving the moment of separation: me clutching at a fold of my mother’s taupe wool coat, burying my face and sobbing into its downy surface, angry at the affront of being parted. The harder I clung, the more my mother stiffened and withdrew.
“Stop it, you’re making a scene,” she said.
For one sweet moment, when Mrs. Bell was out of earshot, she stroked my head and said, “Oh cookie, shush,” softening her body against me, a small concession to solace. I wanted that moment to go on forever; hearing her call me cookie was the best thing, the only thing in the world that mattered. More cookie, more cookie, more hugging, I thought. But my mother was shamed by the rawness of my desire for her, the voltage of my longing.
My mother’s absence bore a hole through me—there was no me without her—nothing but what was missing. After a few minutes, the pain lessened a bit, but I made a decision to keep crying. To stop was to give in. If I acceded to the separation, my loss would become absolute. The only way I could hang on to any piece of my mother was to not let go, and to not let go was to keep on crying.
So I sat in my chair by the window for the remainder of the day. When the sobbing exhausted me, I kept my spirits up by whimpering, howling, hyperventilating, and making little animal sounds in the back of my throat. Mrs. Bell alternated between glaring at me and pretending I wasn’t there. When the other children looked at me with pity, she instructed them, “Just ignore the little crybaby.” They did not stop looking, but curiosity and compassion devolved into smug superiority.
The last half-hour of the day, Mrs. Bell told a story by moving figures on a felt board. The story lured, promised escape from the unresolvable tension between where I was, and my mother’s car, where I longed to be. Sammy, the seal, became separated from his family in the ocean but he recovered by joining the circus and becoming a star. Sammy balanced a ball on his nose, flapped his flippers on demand, and barked. The trainer rewarded him with sardines. The story held out a promise of independence. I could be like Sammy the seal; I could leave my mother and join the circus and be a star, too. But to commit to Mrs. Bell’s story felt like a form of giving in, so I gave up the story because I could not listen and cry at the same time.
When class was over and I was finally freed to return to the sanctity of our blue Desoto, I stopped crying. On the way to my mother, and then once I had seen her face, I felt relief and the inklings of happiness. Yes, this was what I wanted, this was exactly who I needed. “I cried all day,” I told her. “I couldn’t stop crying for you.” My behavior had shown a certain resolve and tenacity, I figured.
“Oooh,” she said, laughing. “You silly, silly girl. I bet none of the other children cried like that.”
She hugged me, but the fervor of my passion was not met by equal fervor on her part. Shame washed over me. And in the midst of hugging her, I was still longing. Longing as she held me. Longing as I looked beyond her for that other perfect mother, the mother who loved me the way I loved her, the mother she became as soon as we were separated.
After a while my mother stopped walking me all the way into the classroom and said goodbye at the front gate. She kept trying to wean me, coaxing me to say goodbye and let go of her sooner, as if there were some virtue I could not perceive in my needing her less, in increasing the distance between us.
Dusk. I was in the front yard, playing one afternoon after I’d come home from kindergarten, when I nearly tripped over something. At my feet, at the base of one of the tall cypress trees that flanked our house, lay a broken nest.
Bending down to examine it, I saw four baby birds inside. These were not the cute birds of my children’s books, not the fluffy chicks of Easter baskets. These didn’t look like any birds I’d ever seen. Bony bodies naked, their feathers not having come in yet, they trembled, shivering all over. Their dark eyes bulged, and I could see the blood pulsing blue in the vessels of their chests, in their throats, throbbing up in their bald heads. Their mouths were wide open, open so far that looking into them was like looking into the pink-lined flesh of an open cut. Like the cuts on my arm or knee that my father doused with Merthiolate while I sat on the bathroom counter and screamed. “Bactine isn’t strong enough.” Ira explained. “It has to hurt to kill the germs.” My father was hurting me to save me, and if I screamed loud enough I would probably get another stuffed animal later.
Nothing I’d seen had ever looked quite this exposed and been alive. I wanted to throw a blanket over them. If I hadn’t looked down, I might have missed them, might have kicked the nest out of my path or stomped on their heads without even knowing it. These birds were so small I could almost not see them, their cries so weak I could almost not hear them. But once I had heard them, their cries became the worst part—high-pitched, plaintive chirps; signals of distress. As I bent down, I understood exactly what they were pleading for. It was the same way I had cried for my mother the whole first day of kindergarten.
Trying to override my own panic—a mixture of exhilaration, shock, disgust, and compassion—I improvised a plan for their rescue. My mommy will make them a new nest, I thought, a nest of soft cotton. She will protect them, take care of them, keep them warm. She will let me feed them; we will feed them together. We have to feed them right now, I thought. We have to do something to get that chirping to stop, to get those raw, open wounds of their mouths to close. My mommy will be their mommy, I thought; together we will take care of them until their own mother comes back.
I raced into the house so excited I could barely get the words out: “Mommy, mommy, there’s baby birds that fell on the ground,” I said. “And they are crying, and the mother is gone, and they are so hungry.” Her head was in the oven, as she stirred stew in her blue speckled cast iron roasting pan.
“I’m trying to get dinner ready now,” she said, “before your father gets over-hungry.” When my father got “over-hungry” he exploded. The worst fights always happened around the dinner table, where everyone was captive to the appetites that brought them.
“Go and get Daddy,” she said.
I found my father on the bed, dozing in his undershirt with his gray suit pants unbuttoned. He snored and a dark shadow of stubble covered his round face. “There’s baby birds outside,” I said, jostling his fat upper arm. “Get up, come on, come see them.” He finally stirred, looked confused, then took a long minute to raise his mass from the bed. He put his white dress shirt back on over his undershirt and a long black overcoat over that, and his scarf, and his shoes. All the time, I was at his side, trying to hurry him along.
“Is it cold outside? I don’t want to catch a chill,” he said, as I took his hand and pulled him toward the front door. All I could see were those little open mouths crying.
My mother was already standing beside the nest when we arrived at the base of the tree. The birds had not given up, had not altered the alarm-like pitch of their cries. My mother looked at the birds and then at my father. Some understanding passed between them; my mother went back into the house and my father started muttering to himself. He sounded the way he did when he got off the phone after a business call and repeated everything he’d said and everything the other person had said, tilting his head from side to side to indicate the shift in speakers, and even laughing over his own jokes a second time.
Then we began to move quickly, trudging around the side of our house, up the hill toward the garage. He kept tugging at my wrist, until I had to almost run to keep up with him.
“Where are we going, Daddy? What are we doing?”
My father completely intent, eyes cast downward, lost to me. We trudged into the garage, where he reached into the dark corner (where the black widows crawled) and got a shovel. Then we were moving again,