The woman lying next to me was a large woman. I will always remember her that way. Only five feet seven, she seemed taller. Her forearms were like blades, broad and flat, and packed with rippling tendons from endlessly carrying around children and groceries and whatnot. She was strong and had fast hands, gunfighter fast. When she struck you, her right arm sprang toward you . . . snap! . . . like Navratilova’s backhand.
Even in sleep, she seemed frightened or wracked, her face slightly contorted, sweat beading around her neck. Her dyed hair, thin and damaged, was matted around her forehead and temples, a brownish tint on a cotton candy fineness of texture. If I turned slightly in any direction, the arm whipped. “Lie still,” she ordered, as if she was at sleep’s portal until my slightest movement had intervened. I froze. What was I there for? Was it to ease her mind? Was it to protect me from whatever danger she envisioned I’d face if I went out and joined the other children I could hear playing outside in the afternoon? Was I there to keep her company?
The room was as still as the moon. On a bureau against one wall was a television. Along another wall was another bureau, on top of which sat cheap plastic baskets of clothing, some tangled, some already folded. The arrangement of these baskets tumbled down onto the floor, where baskets were piled on top of baskets. One might think that the residents of this house were operating a laundry business. There was laundry, in baskets, everywhere: clothes from previous seasons; clothes passed along from friends as hand-me-downs; clothes purchased, still tagged and new, that were lost under the mountain and never worn. All of it was piled in a multicolored tangle of cotton and synthetics. Years later, it might have been a hit at some contemporary art gallery. Then, it was just a mess.
The furniture in this room was chipped and marred. There were dark rings from wet glasses here, a handle or knob missing there. Go into another room, and it was more of the same. Threadbare chairs, some covered with bedsheets to hide escaping tufts of stuffing, sat in a living room no one used. A dining room held a table requisitioned for folding even more laundry. There was a den, with a TV, that was the center of the home, for all practical purposes. A small kitchen resembled a New York City subway car in the mid-1970s, in terms of traffic, wear and tear.
Doors came off hinges, and windowpanes were cracked or broken. You might wait a year for them to be fixed. Appliances were often in need of repair. Nearly everything in the house was a donation from a relative or friend. Thus our gratitude flowed while they simply expunged their old stuff: sofas and chairs, beds and bedding, inexpensive dishes and mismatched collections of forks and knives. One exception was a beautifully carved bookcase with beveled glass doors, bequeathed by my grandparents, that sat incongruously in the living room, the books inside worth more, perhaps, than the other contents of the house combined.
The woman, half asleep, now breathed heavily, in and out. On the bedside table was a small wicker basket nearly overflowing with a haphazard pile of prescription vials: sleeping pills, blood pressure pills, antianxiety pills, perhaps eight or ten small bottles. Even at my young age, I wondered if the active ingredients of these drugs were constantly rolling around inside her head. She stirred and reached over to sip from a raspberry-colored metallic tumbler, filled with Tab, which sat on the night table near Pill Hill. Beads of sweat ran down its side, making new rings on what was left of the table’s finish. The woman, believing that it held magical weight-loss potential, drank rivers of Tab. If slimming was her goal, it was to no effect. Each successive choice to have six kids in eleven years left her body wracked. From the bottom of her rib cage to the top of her pelvis, any muscular fiber was gone. When she coughed or laughed, her stomach, beneath her sheer bedclothes, seemed to ripple like water. I lay there and looked toward the window and wondered if the kids’ shouts and whoops accompanied throwing snowballs at cars.
Why did she never want to go outside? Why didn’t she want to take a walk or get some fresh air or get out of this room? Slightly stoned and immobile, she might end up like some suburban version of the Collyer brothers, buried by an avalanche of unfolded laundry, I feared. What could I do to help her? “This is my mother,” I thought. “Whatever that means.”
In the earliest days, she tried. She was alone in her tiny house with six kids and no help. (Sometimes, I repeat that to myself, over and over: “Six kids and no help, six kids and no help.”) So she baked, constantly: cookies, brownies, cakes. Popcorn and Kool-Aid were served on a picnic table in summertime. Back then, you controlled your kids, perhaps told them you loved them, by serving them their favorite sweets. Today, love means withholding much of that.
Our previous house, where I had lived until I was nine, was a small ranch that had only two bedrooms. My sister Beth shared a bedroom with two of my brothers and me. The room had had two bunk beds. My younger sister slept in the living room in a playpen-like enclosure. My brother Stephen, then a baby, slept in a crib in my parents’ room. At the old house, a clothesline ran across much of the yard, packed tight with children’s clothes, sheets, and towels. In a two-bedroom, one-bathroom house with six young children, the absence of a working washing machine or dryer was enough to wear my mother’s patience raw. By 1967, my parents realized that these conditions were ridiculous and moved to a nearby dilapidated house with four bedrooms.
Lying next to my mother, I forged a lifetime of conversation with myself. Other children talk to themselves, whispering intently to someone who isn’t there. However, I went all out here: not merely repeating lines from films, TV shows, and commercials, but attempting dialects and ethnicities and singing songs. While my mother was next to me “napping,” I was channeling Steve Allen, Frank Gorshin, and the Beatles, Allan Sherman, Dick Shawn, and Paul Lynde. All of them might appear in a single afternoon, all in that bed.
Eventually, my mother would stir. Her fitful nap ended, she headed to the kitchen to grapple with what to make for dinner. She would tell me we needed milk or bread or butter. She would tell me to hike up to the local delicatessen, perhaps a mile away, to get the supplies. I’d be more than willing to go. “I’m out!” I’d think. I was nine years old and addicted to solitude.