Lithium for Medea

24

I drove north on the Pacific Coast Highway to Sunset Boulevard. It was the longer route. Waves beat their black backs below me, below the gouged rubble of coastal cliffs, those slow-falling terminal victims of windlash and mud slides. The cliffs would feed the sea in time, in time. The night was dark, clear and sharp. I wasn’t in a hurry.

I followed Sunset Boulevard inland where it curved itself between hills and sudden gullies. I felt the sea beating behind me, waves curling on shore and withdrawing, waves clawing at the shore and leaking out spent. Crash and foamy silence. Crash and sudden silence. And if Caroline Murphy was the first and Picasso the second, the old man with the mandolin, wood reddish and fine like a stretched heart, was the third and it was enough. It was over.

I took the cardboard boxes out of my trunk, one by one. Francine took a long time to answer the door. She did a double take.

“It’s after midnight.” She pulled the folds of dark green silk close to her neck. She stared at the cardboard boxes as I dragged them through the living room.

A stiff-looking balding man sat on the tufted tan living room sofa. He was buttoning his shirt as I walked in. He tried not to look at me, tried to somehow disappear, blend in with the oyster grays and eggshell whites. He reached onto the wide cocktail table and picked up a glass. He held it tightly in his hand and stared into it as if trying to connect to something. I walked past him, pulling the boxes with me.

“Make it quick,” Francine whispered. “What’s wrong? Not your father?”

“No.”

“Because I just called the hospital. They’ve taken him off the critical list. It’s going to be like the other time, at Jefferson Hospital. You wouldn’t remember. You were only three.”

“I was six.”

“Not so loud,” Francine said quickly. “Anyway, he got better so fast last time. He used to grab the head nurse. He pinched her ass every time she walked in. They barred him from the hospital. They said no matter what ever happened, he could never be admitted to Jefferson Hospital again.”

We were sitting in my mother’s bedroom. The walls were tan.

The lamplight made everything seem rose-tinged. The door was closed.

“Well?” Francine studied me out of the corner of her eye. She lit a cigarette. She placed her hands on her hips, graceful, formidable.

“I need money.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

Francine seemed relieved. Maybe it was something that could be handled simply, quickly. She had put in a big day. The hospital in the morning. A lunch conference. A budget session. There was the stiff balding man downstairs. And now me, still eight years old and helpless, afraid of everything, the thick slats of palm trees, the huge gouged sun, my afternoons alone.

My mother opened a drawer. She removed an envelope and sifted through a green stack. She extended a fifty-dollar bill in my direction. It was new and crisp. It made a small snapping sound between her fingers.

“I need more.”

“How much more?” Francine looked as if she was starting to sober up.

“What am I worth?” I opened my purse. It appeared that we were going to play seven stud high. I extracted items from my pocketbook. It was my bet. “Here’s the ring, the bracelets and the stock.”

“What stock?”

“The Disney you coughed up when I married Gerald. The ring is five grand. I had it appraised,” I said. I was holding the jewelry and stock certificates out to her. I felt good. A picture card.

“What am I? A bank? A pawnshop?” Francine was getting nervous. You had to bet your hand. I was high. And I had an ace in the hole.

The man coughed somewhere downstairs. A polite cough. Francine glanced at the door. I could sympathize with her. Her parallel worlds were colliding.

“Get rid of him,” I suggested. I was high. Was she going to see me? It was her turn.

“He had a horrible flight from Atlanta. He came back and his house was burglarized. They even took the balls from the tennis court. He just got here. He’s got a heart condition. He’s going to Tokyo tomorrow.” Francine stared at me, trying to read between the lines. Trying to check. Trying to buy time. Bluffing?

Was she going to throw in a chip or not?

“Could we talk then? Tomorrow? You could spend the whole day with me. I’ll take you out for lunch.”

“Put that asshole in a cab, Francine. He only feels comfortable in airports, anyway.” I was still high. It was my bet. I tossed in a chip. “Get rid of that turkey before I give him a stroke.”

Francine studied me in the pink lamplight. She lit another cigarette. Then she picked up the telephone and called a cab. The man left. So she was going to see me after all. She must have something in the hole, too.

I followed Francine into her den. She poured herself a shot of Scotch. I poured myself a glass of Scotch. We sat on low round cream-colored chairs facing one another. Were we going to put our cards on the table?

“What do you need money for?”

“I’m pregnant,” I said and regretted it. A bad lie. The first thing that came to mind. But it didn’t matter. I had a pair of aces underneath. Twin aces.

“Abortion?” Francine tilted her head. She looked as if she was sniffing the air. “That’s a cheap item. Go to the Free Clinic. Tell them you’re a hippie. Get the state to pick up the tab.”

I said no.

“You’re not pregnant,” Francine said suddenly, accurately deciphering the air between us. She looked from my face to the cardboard boxes in the living room. “You’re running,” Francine realized. She seemed to relax. She was getting a lay of the land, all right. She was beginning to feel better about her hand. She might even toss in another chip. See me and raise.

“I’m running,” I admitted. I had the ring, the stock, the cardboard boxes. I threw in another imaginary chip.

“You can’t. What about your father? He needs you. He’s dying.”

“He’s not dying,” I yelled. I stood up. The round glass and chrome table was between us. “Look at me, Mother. Concentrate. Pretend I have a cock, Mother. Pretend what I say is important. I’m telling you, he’s not dying.”

“I talked to the doctors, to specialists. You don’t understand. The prognosis is—”

“Fuck the prognosis. What do they know?” I lit a cigarette. Why did Francine think she had a high hand? Was she raising on the prognosis?

“O.K.,” Francine said. “O.K. But we need you. I’m lonely, don’t you realize that? I’m terrified. And Father needs you. You owe him,” she said, tossing in a big chip. A big black five-hundred-dollar number.

“No I don’t,” I said evenly, seeing her and throwing in another chip. A black one. “Daddy and I are even.”

Francine scrambled. “We need some time to think. You want money and arrangements can be—”

“Don’t jerk me off,” I shouted. “I’m desperate.” I was still standing up. I sat down.

Francine was staring at me through wide yellowish eyes. Her lower lip trembled. “I’m the desperate one,” she said. “The old man is dying. I’ll be all alone. You can’t abandon me. You are the child of my longing, my hopes, my passion. I have no grandchildren. I’ll have nothing,” she said. Somewhere she tossed in another chip.

The pot was getting bigger. I began to wonder what we were really playing for.

“I’ll be alone,” Francine gasped. “I’ll die,” she assured me. “It’s like when I was an orphan. It’s like the time the mice fell on my head. Did you know they sicked a dog on me? A German shepherd? They were Irish, I remember. It was summer. The dog took a chunk out of my leg. I was only five when it happened. I needed nineteen stitches. Look.” Francine pulled her silk bathrobe apart. There was a faint white circle engraved into her thigh. “I’ll be alone.” My mother began to cry.

“But you’re not alone. You have your sister,” I said, seeing her. My mother made an ugly face, as if she had just eaten something foul. Human flesh, perhaps. Was I still high? I took a deep breath.

“You have your own mother,” I said carefully. It was my ace in the hole. I had the stuff. I knew I was going to win.

Francine jumped out of her chair. She seemed to leap up effortlessly. Could she defy gravity? “My mother?” she repeated. “You call that creature who abandoned me a mother?”

“But she’s still alive!” What the hell was wrong? Didn’t Francine see the ace, the pair of aces? “You knew her in childhood. She’s still there in the same apartment. She refuses to move. She wants to stay there so you’ll always know where she is if you need her. She has presents for you, Mommy.”

I looked straight at my mother. I had a pair of aces. I searched her face. Francine didn’t even blink.

“You knew,” I realized slowly. “And your half-sisters and brothers all over the fucking country?”

Francine didn’t say anything. The silence seemed to last a long time.

“Of course, you must have known. Always,” I said.

Silence. So she had two aces underneath, too. I glanced at my mother. She was staring out the plate-glass window at the brick terrace jammed against the mountain, at a pine tree perched on the hill and sending spokes of black shadow into the darkness. Somewhere I threw in an imaginary chip. I had to call, even though I knew she had me beat.

“It was a million-to-one shot,” Francine began. “A man comes up to me at the Regency. I’m eating breakfast. It’s a business trip. I’m in a hurry. He says I look exactly like a woman he knows. Do I have a sister? And I realize he’s not trying to hustle me. His wife is standing next to him. And I say I have a twin in Maine. And the man says no. The woman he’s talking about lives in Seattle. I gave him a business card and the woman calls me. We started talking and bingo.” Francine looked at me, looked into me. “Should I have told you?”

I thought about it. “No. It’s O.K. You win. I give up.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I already have. Just cash me in,” I screamed.

Suddenly Francine sprung awake. She was on her feet. She was moving. “There’s so much you don’t know,” she yelled. She grabbed the cut-crystal vase from the round table and threw it into the plate-glass window. The window seemed to shatter in slow motion, the glass soft and feathered, a flock of yellow birds. I noticed a long splinter of glass had fallen near my ankle. It stuck up from the carpet like a dagger.

“Do you think this crap means anything to me?” Francine demanded. She brought her face very close to mine. Her eyes were enormous, stormy, dangerous. “It’s illusionary. Don’t you think I know that?”

“Stop it,” I yelled. I stood up. I didn’t know what to do.

Francine was hurling whiskey bottles from the bar with the imported black marble surface against her tan and cream walls. The bottles broke and left ugly stains, like urine on alley walls. That’s when I noticed the blood. Her foot was cut. She began hopping through the den, screaming, “It’s nothing,” her bleeding foot curled in the air.

I reached out for her but she hopped past me, hopped to the cardboard boxes I had brought with me. She grabbed a glass-framed poster from a painting exhibit in Rome and hurled it against the wall. It shattered.

“You wouldn’t go into the world,” Francine cried. “So I tried to bring the world to you.”

A hand-painted vase from Barcelona broke. A delicate statue of a little girl combing her hair hit the wall. Decapitated.

Then as suddenly as it began, it stopped. Francine fell to the floor. She put her head into the crook of her left arm, the arm that can still bend, and wept, sobbed, her shoulders shaking. I wrapped a towel around the gash in her foot. I patted her head gently. “It’s O.K., baby,” I said over and over. “It’s going to be O.K., baby.” Her hair looked red in the lamplight. After a long time she lifted her head.

“I’ve made mistakes,” Francine began. “Monumental mistakes. I was just reading the Harlow experiments. The deprived monkeys. They gave them surrogate wire mothers. Just like foster parents. And when the monkeys reached maturity they couldn’t function.” Francine looked at me with wide orbs of yellow eyes. “Do you think the Harlow experiments would have a wide popular appeal?”

I thought about it. I said no.

I helped my mother weave a path through the glass splinters back to the den. She finished her Scotch and poured another. I finished mine and poured another. I looked at the cut on her foot. I put a piece of gauze and adhesive tape around it.

“I broke my arm when I was six. It was the year after the dog bit off a mouthful of my thigh. I slipped on ice and they wouldn’t take me to get it set. My arm doesn’t bend. That’s why I’m such a shitty tennis player,” Francine said.

My mother finished her drink. I finished mine. I poured us both another.

“Remember when we snuck down the stairs in Philadelphia and I showed you the first snow of the year, before it got damaged?”

“I remember. It was beautiful. We drank hot chocolate.”

“Chivas is better.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never spent the night here before,” Francine said. She seemed to search the air for something. “Are you really leaving Jason?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Are you going to see your father first? Make sure the throat job works?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I know it will work.”

“You think I’m looking for a man?” Francine suddenly asked. She seemed to be evaluating a pinkish slice of shadow near the light creamy wall. “I’m not. I know everything about men. I’ve known since I was eleven.” Francine took a sip of Scotch. “I’m not looking for a man. I just try to keep busy. I keep punching. The bell rings and I get back in the ring swinging. I’m punchdrunk. But I’m not expecting anything from a man.” Francine smiled. Her eyes looked lit from the inside the way they had when she told me she knew all along that the mice were in her room, in the sewing machine and ceiling. “Men always break in the end,” Francine said. She was staring at me. “May I comb your hair? Like when you were a little girl and we used to play together all day?”

I said yes. My mother found a hairbrush. She hopped over to me. She knelt on the floor and began brushing my long tangled hair.

“I used to brush your hair when you were little,” my mother told me. She brought her face very close to mine. “I put ribbons in your hair. I had a drawer of different-colored ribbons. I liked to make your ribbons and socks match.”

I thanked my mother for combing my hair then, when I was an infant and when I was a girl, and now. Terminal now. Outside the night was deep, a solid black without a trace of dawn in it.

“You don’t leave a mother in the middle of the night,” Francine said. “That’s how I left the foster homes. Just disappeared. But you don’t leave a real mother that way. Not a mother who put the right-colored ribbons in your hair. You don’t leave a real mother in the middle of the night, do you?”

I said no. I finished my Scotch. Francine poured me another. The gash on her foot had stopped bleeding. “I can’t go on,” I said finally.

“I know. I’m exactly the same as you. There are no boundaries between us. It’s just that I’ve gone through it more often.” She was looking at the arc of pink light pushing into the night.

“Inside I’m unchanged. Your father loved me once. You loved me once. But despite it all, the core of who and what I am remains unchanged. The only time I was allowed in a kitchen was to clean it. If I wanted a glass of water I had to go to the bathroom and I was afraid of the men, the fathers, the uncles sleeping over drunk.” Francine looked at me. What was she looking for? She refilled our glasses.

“Every time I went to a new foster home I changed my identity. You never knew when they were coming for you. A social worker would just appear and you’d pack your suitcase and be driven to a new foster home, a new school. I would pretend I had just arrived from Wyoming. Can you imagine? Wyoming?” Francine laughed. She touched my arm with her hand.

“Your father said I was too damaged to have a child. He was wrong, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, Mommy.” I held her hand. “He was wrong. Remember the robin building his nest in the rain?”

“Are you really going?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe we can be adult about this,” Francine began. “Don’t you think leaving like this is merely a regression? A flight into fantasy? The romanticized childhood and idealized past?”

“Hardly.”

Francine started to stand up. She remembered the cut on her foot. “It’s been done, kid,” she said. “The Woodstock trip is passé. The journey to the east, to the south. It’s a standard convention, a cliché.”

“That’s irrelevant,” I said.

“It’s wall-to-wall redneck out there. The bathrooms are unclean. You won’t like it,” Francine assured me.

“I’m going beyond that,” I told my mother, “into something greater. I am going to go the distance.”

There was a long silence between us. A lonely wet robin built a nest in a low branch. We watched him struggle. Snow fell in an arc of lamplight, perfect, unmarked. A pansy was pressed between the pages of a book. A purplish imprint across the title page. A moment severed out of time and preserved.

“Go the distance?” Francine said finally. “I like that. I’ve been waiting for you to wake up. Connect. Open your eyes. Reach out your arms for something that matters. Only a fool stays at the same losing table. Get a new deck, a new game. Just go. Go while you’ve got momentum. There were doors I stood at,” my mother whispered. “Train terminals. Corners. A few steps in either direction and your whole life is different. I could have been someone.”

“You are someone.”

Francine laughed. “I mean someone good.”

“You are good, Mother.”

“I fucked up bad.”

“So did I.”

“But you can do it over. You still have a chance,” my mother said, her eyes large and glowing, pulsing with something. “I know.”

After a while Francine said, “Tell me about my mother.”

I told her. The night grayed. Spokes of dawn shoved through and night was a pair of charcoal wings parting. My mother and I sat together on her brick terrace and waited for the sun. The air began to sting.

“You better go,” my mother said. Her voice was small, the voice of a little girl.

“I’m afraid,” I said.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of. There’s nothing but mediocrity out there. It’s a six-thousand-dollar claimer. Our father taught us that.”

We were standing near her front door. The splinters of glass glistened in the early morning sunlight. Birds chirped. My mother tried to smile. Her lips twitched. It looked as if pieces of her skin were crumbling, falling off in big white blocks.

“Go now while you’ve got momentum,” Francine said. “Go out and box smart, slug hard. Go out and do it better than I did. Do it cleaner. Do it without lies. Do it strong.” Francine opened the front door.

“You surprise me,” I began.

“You surprise easy, kid.”

I started walking to my car. I knew I had to walk quickly, right then, or the waves would rise inside again, the sudden black riptide, the impossible current, the whirling and spinning in black concentric circles, useless, useless.

“Wait,” Francine yelled behind me.

I turned around. Francine hopped into the street. She still had the big white gauze around her foot. She was carrying something. “For your trip,” she said. She handed me a brown shopping bag. She leaned close to me. “You will come back?”

“Yes.”

“Do you promise?”

I started driving. At the first traffic light I looked into the brown shopping bag. One small can of tuna fish, an onion, a box of crackers, a flashlight, a large can of lima beans, a butter knife, a fifty-dollar bill, some paper napkins and a gold American Express credit card. Jesus, Francine, what a crazy picnic. And then I started laughing.

I could still feel the laughter inside me as I walked down the hospital corridor, walked through the dim folds of shadow curled across tiles the color of enamel mud. My father was sitting up in his bed. He was watching the morning news. When he saw me he turned off the television. His movements were abrupt, sharp. His eyes commanded attention. Something had happened.

GOOD NEWS. SAW DR. ATE.

“You ate already?”

VANILLA CUSTARD.

“And it worked? You swallowed it?”

My father nodded his head. There was something different about him. The color of his skin, perhaps?

BOURBON?

“Maybe tomorrow.” My father’s blinds were wide open. Outside, the sky was a pale and dreamy blue. The sun seemed uniform, creamy and warm and possible, possible.

My father stood up by himself. He reached for his bathrobe. I helped him drape it across his shoulders. He motioned for me to go with him. We walked into the corridor. My father produced a pad and a pen from his bathrobe pocket.

1 STEP AT TIME. DO WHOLE LENGTH TODAY. AM OLD WAR HORSE. GOOD CAMPAIGNER. WILL COME BACK.

We walked the length of three hospital rooms. He motioned for me to stop. He leaned against the corridor wall. He took a deep breath. A nurse appeared. She asked if my father needed anything. My father took out his pad and pen.

DOES SHE HAVE A BOYFRIEND?

We started walking again. We reached the midpoint of the corridor, halfway to the elevators. My father stopped dead in his tracks. I thought he was going to collapse. He extended his arms. He rolled his hands into fists. What was happening? Should I get a wheelchair, a doctor? Then he started punching at the air. His feet were moving in a very slow shuffle and he was jabbing and dodging, finding combinations, turning his bandaged neck and hooking, swinging. And behind us in the nurses’ station they all stopped what they were doing. They let the phones ring, let their clipboards lie in their hands and watched my father shadowbox. Then they clapped. I helped my father back to his bed.

After a while I said I was going.

U JUST GOT HERE.

“I mean out of the city. Away. I’ve got to try for it.” My father looked down at the floor. One tear formed in the center of his eye. He blinked his eyes and the tear disappeared.

LIFES GONE SO BAD.

“I know. I know.” I was pacing. The hills outside were fine and firm, young bodies. I could almost smell them. I looked at my father. “It’s not the world you planned on, right?”

My father nodded his head.

“I understand, Daddy. The changes, the disruptions, the disintegration of the nuclear family, the failure of marriage and religious institutions. The loss of human values. The collapse of tradition.” I took a deep breath. I noticed that my father was studying me carefully. His expression seemed intense and puzzled.

“I can understand. I can imagine. Once the gray-haired man was sage. A dispenser of wisdom, revered. Once the cities were different. They were holy places, enclaves of knowledge. That was before the mutations and the long process of severing man from the ground and his animal heritage. That was before industrialization, decay, rot, drugs, free sex.”

I WAS BORN 30 YRS TOO SOON. I WOULD HAVE BEEN A HIPPIE.

I stared at my father. He stared back at me. Then he pointed to his wrist. I went into the corridor and looked for a clock. “It’s eleven-thirty.”

My father put on his eyeglasses. He opened the TV Guide.

GOLF AT 1:00.

I was still on my feet, pacing and looking at the mountains through the wide-open Venetian blinds. It occurred to me that the mountains were a kind of spine. I sat down on my father’s bed. I held his hand.

“I know how it must seem. You feel deserted, abandoned, cast off. The world churns. You’re sixty-five. You remember another kind of world, another kind of summer. You knew the Bronx as farmland, forests with trees and streams. And here you are, one of the last of your kind. It’s like being the last of a tribe. All the skills have become scrambled, decayed. How to build canoes and trap fish.”

TRAP FISH??

“Not fish. Forget the fish. I just mean the old days. You can remember when any six-footer could play basketball. You watched baseball evolve. You saw them all. The entire Hall of Fame. The Yankee dynasty of the twenties. The house that Ruth built. The immortal infield. Gehrig at first. Lazzeri at second. Mark Koenig at short. You saw the first All-Star game. You knew the world before instant replay. It’s like you’re one of the last of a vanishing species.”

My father was staring at me. He shook his head slowly from side to side.

“I know you envisioned a different sort of future for me. For us. Me married with children. Grandchildren for you to take to games. To teach them how to be shortstops. To initiate them into the culturally determined forms of manhood.”

KIDS BIG NUISANCE AT GAMES.

“Look, Daddy. I failed you in a lot of ways. Things happen. Think about Native Diver struck down without warning at seven. Things just happen. The world must seem so alien to you. The role reversals. The emergence of women. The fall of America. The rising of the Third World. You even hated expansion baseball.”

PROVED GOOD 4 THE GAME.

“Daddy, I’m not talking about baseball,” I said.

My father shook his head from side to side. Suddenly I realized what was different about my father. The red plastic feeding tube was gone from his nose. My father was staring at me. He picked up his pad and pen.

U R NUTS.

I laughed. The feeding tube was gone. I felt pure. I felt clear, blessed. A nurse brought my father a dish of green Jell-O. He ate it slowly. He stared at me between spoonfuls. His face was registering some form of disbelief.

NUTS.

“Then you forgive me for failing you? I’m going to do better. You’ll be surprised.”

U R A LUNATIC. WE R SQUARE. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

WHERE IS THE OTHER NUT? 46 YR OLD TENNIS STAR?

“She hurt her foot. She’ll be here later, Daddy.” I looked at my father. “Will you take care of Francine?”

HAVE PUT UP W/HER ABOMINABLE SHIT SINCE SHE WAS

16.

“You’re a good man, Daddy.”

U KNOW WHAT HAPPENS 2 GOOD MEN?

“Durocher was wrong. You’re finishing up like a champ.”

WISH I COULD B SENT 2 STUD DUTY.

“I can’t help you with that. Can I get you something? There’s a gift shop downstairs.”

My father seemed to consider his possibilities. He nodded his head.

GO DOWN & BRING UP A NEW FAMILY.

My father was somewhere smiling. I kissed his lips. He was pointing to something. He was pointing to the door. He made a kind of ripping motion with his fingers.

“You want me to tear off the door?”

My father shook his head violently from side to side. He looked at me as if I were the strangest sort of anomaly. He took a deep breath and pointed to the door again.

I studied the door. He didn’t want me to break off the door. No, of course not. I didn’t even have any tools with me. Just a door. A door with a piece of paper that said no visitors. Yes, of course. He wanted me to remove the sign.

My father motioned for me to come back. I stood near his bed. Then he reached out and grabbed my hand and kissed my palm. I closed my fingers tight into a fist.

I was walking down the corridor past the green cubicles, the death chambers, the humming, the human aquariums. My fist was clenched around my father’s kiss. When I was a child and frightened, my father would kiss my hand. He said if I closed my fingers fast enough, the kiss would be caught inside. My father told me the kiss would stay with me all night. I could put it carefully under my pillow. I could slide it into my pocket. And I would have a piece of him with me always. And the kiss in my hand would warm me. He said it was a magic fire.

I was halfway to the elevator. I knew I could make it. I had a can of tuna fish, a box of crackers, a flashlight, a jumbo can of lima beans, a gold American Express credit card, napkins, an onion and my father’s kiss stored in my change purse, instant fire. It was early afternoon. I got in my car. What more could a woman ask for?