Lithium for Medea

15

I woke before dawn. I had slept a drugged sleep, dozing and tossing. It was like drifting on a too calm silvery sea. I kept glimpsing slivers of stars.

I sat on my front porch. The gray haze covered me, a kind of wave.

Dear Rachel,

You sound so well and so quickly. And so many questions like a flock of singing seabirds. I think of a certain bloated white bird circling the harbor at Ensenada, swooping down for the tossed heads of cut bonita, screeching at the rusty burned-out boats. Birds fatter than longed-for children. You see, I have a certain distrust for the sudden. It’s not easy to erase what was. And the genuinely new emerges slowly, one pale part of an inch at a time.

You want to know more about the family? Our family grief is flat and wide as those dark barren lands that strained us through cursed generations. Our history unwinds in slow pieces like a bolt of wine-red velvet then in fashion at the Czar’s court.

They were peasants, Rachel. They were the poorest kind of farmers. They were rootless and ignorant, arrogant and despised. They knew better than bowing down to the North Star to ensure the fertility of their goats and cows — but barely. Their religion had become portable and abstract. They were confused by and simultaneously proud of their sheer alienness, their undecipherable manuscripts and haircuts. They burrowed, isolated and dark as the poor shubbery, the monstrous skies pouring always too much or not enough.

The original landscape did something to our eyes. I believe people grow the organs they need. Our eyes are enormous, eyes stained by Polish skies, eyes of the ghetto and suspicion. We have the mutant eyes able to see the periphery, to detect disasters waiting in shadows — Cossacks, droughts, pogroms, floods, and the idiosyncrasies of kings.

Has your mother told you nothing?

They came in slow pieces. First Rose’s father, Joseph. He called himself a tailor, had tuberculosis and went blind hemming and saving pennies to bring the others across the Atlantic in steerage, almost like pieces of freight. In the end there were sixteen blood relatives in a three-room East Side tenement.

Rose’s mother, Katrina, died almost immediately. She was an exceptional woman. They said she read books in Hebrew and Polish, an amazing feat for a woman of that stifling and rigid culture. She died the first winter.

At thirteen Rose was the oldest child. She went to work in the sweatshops. She had never ridden on trolley cars or even been to a real city.

The private detective located her brothers and sisters for me. Our great-aunts and uncles. The people who do not recognize our mothers as kin. I walked into their houses and it was like being in a time warp, a new dimension. One hasn’t simply crossed a room but opened a portal and bounded centuries. A kind of black hole in the fabric.

I asked these great-aunts and uncles about Rose. And across the decades her younger brothers and sisters spit the evil eye in protection. I stood in front of them already tried and infinitely guilty and I felt the dark strangling strangeness of ten thousand claustrophobic Sabbaths.

A horse kicked her head back on the farm, they warned me. She isn’t stable mentally, they said. The head wound. They turned silent. I was amused by their image of a mythical horse. The sheer simplicity of the explanation, its inadequacy and childlike quality of assigning a tangible physical cause to the unique and inexplicable, filled me with something that might have been a combination of laughter and rage. It was neither.

Later I asked our grandmother if a horse kicked her head. She smiled. They’re full of shit, she said.

Rachel, I tell you this about the horse as a bare beginning, an arbitrary symbol. Our line was poisoned with this misshapen intensity some called mental illness before our grandmother. What of her mutant mother, Katrina, who read poetry, read in an age when women were mere extensions of the kitchen, important as a metal soup pot, a necessity, not requiring serious thought? Why, women grew arms only for sweeping and stirring and rocking children. God must have glued them on last, an afterthought.

Why do I tell you this? It’s part of our family history. You’ll see in time.

The telephone rang. This is it, I thought, running back into my house. He’s dead. The final white apology.

I grabbed the telephone and glanced at Jason. He looked white and small in my bed. A pale beached sea mammal, some kind of seal.

“They just wheeled him in for the graft,” Francine said. “I have a real bad feeling about it.”

“Tell me.”

“He’s been in pain since last night. Bad pain.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“Mumbo jumbo.” Francine paused. “I’m scared.”

“Don’t be scared,” I said, my heart racing, blood pumping, everything cooking, grinding, shooting off sparks, going berserk, a body filled with sudden raging storm clouds.

“I feel that I’m being punished,” Francine said.

“That’s a common reaction.” I was trying to be precise with my mother. I was trying to be quiet and calm and take deep soothing breaths like the ones the Red Cross recommends for snakebite victims. I had to be very slow and careful or I would start screaming. And I was afraid that once I started screaming that way I would never stop.

“Listen, kid. We are, all of us, many ages at once,” Francine began. “My ordinary boundaries were malformed. I have arrested development. I am both your mother and your daughter. You are the only thing I’ve ever really loved.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything simple to say.

“Do you love me?” Francine began crying.

“Yes.”

“But you hate me, too?”

“Yes.”

“You are cruel. You are one callous daughter, may it haunt you. Not that I want to curse you, but—”

“Don’t curse me, Francine,” I said, hard.

“You’re mean to me. You know how lonely I am. Unspeakably lonely. You never visit me. And you know it’s never going to work with Fred. He took the midnight plane back to Miami. He—”

I took a deep breath. “I have to hang up now.”

“Why? What’s the matter?” Francine demanded, all at once wounded and offended, terrified and hurt.

“I feel like I’m dying,” I said.

Outside, the front yard seemed strangely wrong. The gladioli were too bright and sharp. Their fist-sized petals opened like screaming mouths. Their stiff pinkish undersides looked like the organza party dresses I never wanted, the ones Francine pushed me into in the long girlhood I never wanted, never understood.

The mums along the side gate were better. The yellow of bleached linoleum kitchen floors, the sort Francine always wanted for me. The mums were the yellow of a child’s playroom. A room I would never have. The yellow mums were sturdy and undemanding. A practical flower perfect for bedside or table setting. Could I take them to the hospital? The cemetery? Would they stop the slide into day, that yawning crevice, that gaping hot yellow bull’s-eye? “What are you doing?” Jason asked.

He drank orange juice from the bottle. He left the refrigerator door open.

“I’m writing a letter.”

Obviously, you bastard. Are you blind? And I’m waiting for Francine to call. They’re doing the skin graft today. He’s in surgery. The half-ass sadists in their starched white suits are taking neat little squares of skin off his back and thighs and sewing them to his throat. He’s been in pain all night. Even the butchers are worried.

“Come back to bed when you’re done,” Jason said.

He walked back to the bedroom. I heard the television go on. The announcer seemed to be discussing the Harbor Commission.

I looked into my front room. A row of cardboard cartons lined the far wall, so many small caskets with my past buried in them. A preparation for another burial, something enormous? And I remembered that I was waiting for Francine to call me from the hospital. I remembered I was writing a letter to my cousin Rachel.

Somewhere my cousin wondered if she should take the thing they called lithium. Somewhere they were cutting up my father. Somewhere a man was talking about taxation of pleasure yachts. It had become clear to me that I was no longer playing with a full deck. Did anyone notice?

History. Yes. It was during the Great Depression. Our grandmother Rose got off a bus at a wrong stop. A simple mistake. Imagine the immensity of New York City for her. The sheer urban web, the unmeasurable dull winding rot of boulevards for a girl who had lived on a farm, pulled water from a well, fed chickens. New York opened its deranged mouth. Our grandmother had never even been to Warsaw.

She was fourteen years old, with our red hair and dark amber eyes. She literally walked right into him. An accident on a wrong street corner. How dashing and American he must have seemed to her with his stiff black suit and private car. Remember our grandmother had a sense of other things. Didn’t they say she brooded through too dark eyes? Didn’t she sit at her sewing machine and dream pink taffeta?

The sin occurred in his car. He took her driving to the country on a secret Sunday picnic. He dropped her off back at the street corner near her tenement and never saw her again. Our grandmother’s mother, Katrina, was dead by then. Imagine Rose with her belly swollen at her sewing machine hardly knowing what had happened until the monstrous thing became visible. Even then she needed an explanation.

It was the Depression. Times were changing, all right. The patriarchy felt besieged. Her father, Joseph, abandoned her. He scorned her during her pregnancy and literally threw her out into those savage poor streets alone. She could barely speak English. And when she bore twins, particularly twin girls, they took it as an evil omen, proof absolute of the horrible contamination in those alien gentile genes. Besides, who needed more daughters? As if the world wasn’t hard enough.

Our mothers were born that January night in a charity hospital. Rose took the subway there herself. The city was sheeted by blizzard. Her father, Joseph, got as far as the head nurse. When he heard of the dual birth he spit the evil eye on the hospital corridor floor. Perhaps he shuddered with visions of unspeakable sin.

It’s not uncommon for primitive people to react to the birth of twins with fear or revulsion. Perhaps our great-grandfather saw in the identical red-haired girls the twin horns of some satanic force, some new world demon, stone gray, hard and towering. He refused to see his daughter or the twins again. I think that was the definitive moment, the incident that pushed her into the strange exile she has lived this half century. But then, they say she was never well, not even on the farm in Poland.

Of course, she couldn’t work and take care of the infants by herself. But she tried. She was fifteen years old. She went to the factory each morning and left the infants swaddled old-world style. She kept them nearly two years that way. A welfare worker stumbled on them. They brought Rose documents to sign. She was illiterate. Your mother had temporary blindness from untreated measles. My mother had whooping cough. They were removed by ambulance to the state orphanage.

Our grandmother didn’t realize she had signed away her right of custody. She thought she could get her daughters back. But she never made enough money.

Rose began working as a waitress in the Catskill Mountains. Perhaps she was calmed by some green vision there she never gave a name, not even in Yiddish. Perhaps she was able to walk barefoot on the grass in the late afternoons on her one day off, days she wasn’t carrying the trays of rich soups, steaming meats and potatoes, the trays of chocolate and fat cream pastries.

Rose returned to New York in the off seasons. Our mothers would come from the orphanages on subways on Saturdays. They would sit in her tiny kitchen in the apartment where Rose lived, where Rose still lives.

She had a fascination for geography. Our mothers stole books for her, atlases from libraries. They would sit together in the late afternoons with the maps spread open while Rose traced with her fingertip the exact route she had taken from Krakow to New York, and cursed half the world.

They call themselves orphans. Lies. Our mothers simply choose not to remember those Saturday afternoons when they were six and seven. Years when they stood in the tile courtyard below her brick apartment building and Rose called to them from her sixth-story window and dropped pennies wrapped in pieces of old newspaper down to their outstretched hands.

The chain is long like a string of black pearls. Expensive. Magnificent. But one mustn’t wear it too tight around the throat. One mustn’t choke. We must take it bead by bead, one at a time, and savor the black depths, the gouged black eyes and the shine the color of dried blood.

Rose never took a lover. There was a chef four or five summers in a row who wanted her. But he could not accept her twins and in return she refused him. She was still a teen-ager then, thin and dreamlike. Men must have wanted her. But she felt stained, guilty beyond redemption. There must have been certain temptations during the years of her twenties and thirties as she carried the heavy trays, the meats, the creamy pastries in a sea of starched white linen. Prosperous city merchants with fat bellies must have propositioned her in the carpeted hotel hallways and on the grass near the bungalow where the help slept. But Rose resisted them.

And perhaps her madness was a factor even for men on a holiday. They must have sensed her blackness burning like an open wound and shining in the center of her dark ambery eyes. A certain intensity men find impossible to deal with.

At eight our mothers were sent to foster homes. They did not see Rose again. Our mothers both married during the war. Shortly after that our grandmother woke one day with her legs almost paralyzed. Since that day she has needed a cane to walk and she rarely leaves her apartment and then only under duress.

Is it odd that she should stop walking the year our mothers married? The year our mothers sent her terse announcements of the fact, after the fact? Perhaps on some level she realized fully for the first time that she would never get her daughters back. Perhaps there was no longer a reason to keep walking.

That was years ago. Ever since, she has lived self-contained and crippled, a small bent woman in a miniature invented world in a corner of the city called Washington Heights, with its brick and darkness, the streets and buildings and people. There is a certain smell to rooms inhabited for so many years. You may discover that.

Our mothers have erased her apartment from their memory as simply as an advancing army removes a village, severs it from history by mortar and fire. So in their own way did they bury hers.

Rose lives on a narrow street, one jagged fork from a poor gray boulevard that seems to lead nowhere, seems to be a piece of something immense but now forgotten. One can’t even reconstruct the meaning it might have once contained.

I came by cab. I clutched the address the detective had given me. The little piece of paper was sweat-stained. My hands trembled. Young Puerto Rican and black men leaned against double-parked cars shouting and laughing, tossing coins against brick walls laughing. The air was alive. It was early in the fall. Children played in the apartment courtyard, a square expanse of chipped orangy tiles. As I crossed the courtyard my feet seemed to dig into the tile. They echoed. Voices echoed sharply, flying pointed arrows.

I walked past a sagging wrought-iron gate. I felt as if I was walking into something breathing, not an apartment building but a body still warm. Everything had the quality of echoing. The sunlight fell in bouncing splinters. Radio music filled the gray tile corridors. Bass drums echoed and rumbled and curled on the tiled stairs.

It was six flights up to her apartment. Sixty-seven steps, I counted. Imagine her stumbling up one steep cement plateau to another with her cane and pieces of kosher chicken wings, with her disability checks and crippled legs and her hair dyed red. Yes, she still dyes her hair. She is so crippled she can barely bend her neck forward over her old chipped sink. Still she keeps that one small vestige of vanity, of her girlhood, of some intrinsic and overwhelming necessity. And it occurs to me that when I saw her, she was still only in her early fifties!

The walls lining the corridors leading to her apartment were covered with spray-painted red obscenities in Spanish and English. Even through the thick walls smells drifted, sounds drifted. Dogs barked. Infants squalled. A smell of onions and old meat was draped like a sheet across the building. It was chilly in the corridors, a chill that seemed to cut. I found it hard to breathe.

I knocked on her door breathless, a knapsack on my back. I had taken the Greyhound from Berkeley. I moved randomly, a wind creature not in a hurry. This was seven years ago. The world was different then. Doors had opened then that are closed now, probably forever.

Still I had certain expectations. I wanted a grandmother with a pale blue gingham apron. I wanted still warm from the oven butter cookies in round embossed tins. I wanted my history neat and complete, down to dates and localities, velocities and body counts. I was not prepared for the old woman behind the heavy metal door chain, red-haired and stooped.

The phone rang. My arm leaped out for it, made contact and felt shocked.

“He’s out of the recovery room,” Francine said.

“And?”

“And he’s sleeping. They cut him and he’s sleeping.” Francine paused. “They’re going to take him for tests when he wakes up. If he wakes up.”

“What kind of tests?”

“Liver. Kidney. I think this is it. Wait by the phone.”

“What about you?”

Francine laughed a harsh wisp. “Me? I was at the hospital at five this morning. I’m working like every other day. Why don’t you go back to doing what you do best? Nothing.” Francine hung up.

Rose studied me as the light faded, as day shredded and fell down beyond the brick. I’ve been waiting for you, my grandmother said. She laughed and the sound was like wind tearing through something dark and wiry, wind ripping scrub brush.

I will tell you more about Rose later. You say you are walking along the ocean. I also live near the sea but this sea is different, shuttered and untouchable. The sea is important, of course, the patterns and salt.

Is lithium a kind of salt? A white powder? Does it open new channels in the sea’s face? Does it help you ride above whitecaps on a gull’s wing? Does it let you sing?

I folded the letter into an envelope. I crossed the bridge over Eastern Canal and mailed it. Somewhere my mother’s twin sister’s daughter was considering the myriad possibilities in a thing called lithium. Somewhere a young girl was learning her personal history. Somewhere my father was sleeping after being skinned and patched.

It was noon. Jason was lying in my bed waiting. I let him wait.