Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
hard with our effort, until we were back in the front yard again.
My father held me back while he crudely scooped the shovel’s blade under the nest. Then we were in motion again, the birds’ nest precariously balanced at the edge of the shovel’s blade, bouncing as we went, birds still chirping. I worried that the nest would fall, but I could not get around to the other side to protect the birds, my father held me so tightly in his grip.
“Where are we taking the baby birds, Daddy?” I asked. “Where are we going?” I had seen Mr. Wizard on TV feed a bird with an eyedropper. But we were not going toward the house, toward safety and warmth and my mother, toward the soft cotton lining, toward mushy bread and warm water put into an eyedropper. We were ascending the rocky hill at the edge of our property, behind the garage.
Up here, there was no grass, only dirt, rocks, and weeds, rusty tin cans, an ant hill that swarmed with red ants, and a rusted, off-kilter clothesline. At the very edge of our property, marked by a barbed wire fence, stood our cement incinerator. Up here, it always smelled of burning garbage.
Before what was happening could register, my father had let go of my hand and was holding open the door of the incinerator. He propped the shovel blade in the open door and pushed hard until the nest with the baby birds inside it slid down the chute. The birds, mouths still open, fell down into the incinerator, where the hot coals burned.
The birds slipped the same way I slipped down the slide at kindergarten, no stopping once I had started—easy and smooth and quick. Gone. Forever.
Had I really seen what I thought I’d seen? I tried not to picture those birds’ open mouths filling with red heat but I inched forward instinctively, and my father put his hand across my chest to stop me.
It was the same reflexive gesture he’d used the day of our car accident. My father had been driving the way he always drove, alternately distracted and vigilant, prone to what my mother called “sudden stops.” Gas pedal to the floor as if he were going to accelerate forever, and then, amazed that a red light or another car had appeared in his path, he would push the brake to the floor. No sooner would he brake than he would be accelerating recklessly again.
His hand that day had not stopped my forward momentum. We were late to make the post office’s last pickup, speeding through a narrow alley when we sideswiped a car coming in the other direction. I had been sitting on my knees on the front bench seat and flew forward. As my front teeth hit the unforgiving cold metal dashboard, a hard shock of pain vibrated up into my teeth and then through all the soft places in my mouth.
My father jumped out, incensed to confront the other driver. “Can’t you see I have a child in the car?” he said as he slammed the door. I sat frozen in my seat crying hysterically, as blood, saliva, and tears mingled in a pink stream from my mouth and nose onto the dashboard, onto my hand, onto the brand new baseball jacket with a tiger embroidered on it that he had just bought me. The same day he’d taken me to the barbershop with him and impulsively gotten me a boy’s haircut. I’d been stroking the short hairs at the back of my neck at the moment of collision.
My father banged the incinerator door shut and dropped the shovel. “Did you know your cousin Stewart got a high fever just from touching a sick bird? Birds carry terrible diseases,” my father said. His own words ignited a spark in his brain. “You didn’t touch them, did you?” He shook me hard by the wrist. The spark from his brain jumped to mine. Did I? I could imagine touching them; I could imagine exactly what they would have felt like.
“How close did you get to them? Tell me!” He was trying to shake the answer out of me. “Oy Gevalt, did you put your face down next to them?” The pictures flashed in my brain: my hands patting their heads, my mouth breathing their air. What happened to them might be contagious; I already felt sort of sick, sort of bad; was I sad or was I sick? Could I even tell the difference? Something sank hard in my stomach and then fluttered up again.
“I don’t think I touched them,” I said, and my father didn’t wait for any more of an answer. He dragged me toward the back door of our house, screaming Eva’s name until she came out the back door and stood on the stoop.
“Shhh,” she said, “Gotteniu, the neighbors are going to hear you and call the police.”
“Wash her hands,” he said. “She got close to those filthy birds.”
When we reached the door, my mother asked him a question with her eyes, and he shrugged his shoulders and said one word in Yiddish, “Fertig [It is finished].” My mother did not ask me how the birds were. She was not waiting with soft cotton to make them a nest. Instead she took me into the laundry room and stood behind me, in front of the oversized stained-gray laundry room sink. I rest ed my head against her white apron, against her soft, full, warm body.
“Wash them thoroughly,” my father said, standing behind us, supervising.
My mother worked her fingers between each of my fingers, glided her thumb over my palms, and into the tender pads on the inside surface of each hand. She maneuvered our hands so she could pick up the soap again, resting it in my hands that were resting in her hands. Then as she moved her hands over mine to make the suds, I gave up all volition, let her move my hands as she would, allowed my body to sink into her body, allowed myself to sink into her.
“You know, the mother would never come back for them. Once they fell out of the tree and became contaminated by the smell of human beings, she would never take them back. And they were too little for us to take care of them.”
The birds’ mother abandoned them because of something they’d had no control over. I wondered if it had been my smell that condemned them.
We went into the dining room, where my father and brothers were waiting at the dinner table, forks in hand.
“You look like a bunch of lions at the zoo waiting for the zookeeper to throw a slab of meat into the cage,” Eva said.
I had seen protection and destruction in my father mixed in a combination I could not reconcile. It should have made me wary, I should have begun to wonder more about the contradiction between his recklessness and his obsession with outside contamination. But I was only five; I could not afford to question. Whatever my father did, he did to keep me safe, I told myself.
Still, that night, for perhaps the first time, I could not bear to look at him.
Present, Kitchen, 9:00 a.m.
I’m sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee, watching the birds at my backyard feeder, when anxiety rushes over me. Is it the product of too much caffeine too rapidly ingested, or of too much rumination? I can never tell what’s physiological and what’s induced by what I’m thinking. For me the feedback loops are endless.
I attempt mindfulness meditation; focus on the breath coming in, the breath going out, stare at one neutral spot on the wall, slow down my breathing, follow my breath. As I do so, everything calms down, and I find stillness. Then my anxiety is replaced by a wave of sorrow. Longing, longing for all that is lost, longing for what I never got, retrograde longing. I call my brother Paul.
“I had a dream I was back in the house again,” I say.
“Whenever I dream about Ira, he’s tormenting me,” Paul says.
“Whenever I dream about Eva, she’s starving me.”
The old alliances remain entrenched. To Paul my father was a villain, a maniac, a sadist, my mother a hapless martyr. To me, it remains much more complicated. Despite everything, I still love my father. But I do not miss him the way I miss my mother. Every day, the longing. My unabated mother-hunger remains insatiable.
Paul and I reminisce.