Instead, he winced. He said, “Honey, it’s private. And very sad. And this is your big day.”
I know you don’t show just anyone your madman, like sex, but even people who talk all the time about something that’s supposedly private are covering for something else. The more I was part of the whole adult world, the more turned out as one secret after another. My madman was still just a cloak and a stick, and oh yeah, we call him Armand. But there was my dad, who I’d supposedly known all my life, and what was he?
If the world looked different so far, the difference was it didn’t look so symbolic. That is not what a girl wants when she comes of age.
At the house, my mother’s car was in the driveway with its daytime running lights still on and both doors flopped open. Eyes rolled back, limbs splayed.
“Take Armand to his shed,” said my father.
He was terrified.
—
Back in the gallery of madmen, when my mother was yelling because of what I wanted, I looked at her eyes and tried to see them objectively. Their blueness, whiteness, redness. I tried to look at her eyeballs themselves — not the lids or brow or her crow’s feet or the other muscles in her face. I wanted to know how emotion could come shooting from her eyes the way it did. Maybe I couldn’t block out the rest of her face, maybe that was impossible, like pretending I wasn’t her kid would be impossible. Maybe the feelings came from the situation and not her body. Maybe the situation and her body were the same thing or I will never understand because I don’t have enough empathy.
She said I was romanticizing. She said I’d like anyone if I knew the whole story. She said being free is not being free if you are in pain. She said madness is pain.
I said, “I have pain.”
She said, “It’s different for them because it’s more.”
What do you want to be wearing when your father comes back from checking on your mother and you learn that this time your mother has actually killed herself? This is what I wondered, sitting in the cab of the truck in the driveway, looking at the familiar world, which had become so still. Sweatpants, I thought, because you can sleep in them and be in public in them. Cross-trainers because they have good grip and breathe. Layers on top: a long-sleeved shirt under a short-sleeved shirt because it’s flexible and I’ve seen pictures of her wearing that when I was a baby, also a fleece vest because I might have to sleep in the hospital with air conditioning, or, I kept thinking, you might have to be outside at night. I kept picturing that. Looking for her in the woods behind the house. Which one time I did do. My father was out of town and she had been crying for so many hours, I’d tried being nice, I’d tried leaving her alone, and I threatened to call Dad and she said “Go ahead” in a way I took to mean if I called him, she’d finish herself off for sure. I even put my face up to hers and then screamed in a sudden burst like saying “boo!” but as loud and angry as possible and not funny. It freaked me out about myself when I screamed like that. Eventually it was like two in the morning and I was in my bed holding the phone, trying to decide what would be the moment I would call a hospital, trying to decide what the sign would be, and I heard the front door, and looked out the window, and saw her take off running into the woods. One time our cat had gone missing and years later I found her collar and her bones in the woods while I was walking, and then that night we all went into the woods to bury her, with candles, stones we’d chosen, and a baby tree, and it was beautiful. When my mother took off into the woods, I hesitated to follow her. I had this image of a beautiful candlelight thing and then just, I don’t know, peace, being on my own.
But I did follow her into the woods. It was so dark but I found her curled up on the trail by a fallen mossy log. She was covered in dirt and not crying anymore. She came with me, which I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t, but for some reason I didn’t even have to touch her, she just came with me. At the house she said, “Thank you for saving my life,” and I let her take a bath, even though I was scared of what might happen in there, but I told myself to stop being dramatic, she was my mother and she could take a bath. Maybe I believed that I had saved her life, and that’s what let me go to sleep and next day tell my father a version of it when he came home that was true but unemotional in a way that let him not make a big deal out of it and let me think it wasn’t a big deal after all. But even then I knew it wasn’t me that saved her life. It wasn’t about me. I was just there while she was maybe going to die and maybe not, and then she just didn’t.
I got out of the truck and stood in the driveway, unhooking Armand’s harness. He scrambled to his feet under his cloak and used his staff of madness to steady himself on the ridged bed. I reached out my hand — the idea was he could take it and walk along to the tailgate — and there was a moment when he seemed to be deciding between dropping his stick to take my hand or not. It was impossible to know for sure with the cloak, but I had the distinct impression that he might have only one arm.
The sun was starting to set. The house was behind us. He didn’t take my hand, just made his way to the end of the truck, and I lowered the tailgate, and then he sat on it. His legs dangled. I glanced to see if I could see his feet, if they would be in boots, or shoes, or sandals, or rags, or nothing. If he would have feet. But his cloak floated below them, and only the staff poked out. I hopped up onto the tailgate with him, careful not to touch him, and the truck rocked like a boat, and so, like a lookout at the prow of a ship of fools, I put my hand to my forehead and squinted toward the sun into the distance. I could spy with my little eye the roof of the shed, partway down the hill, and sparks like tiny fires in the low water in the creek, and the woods like a curtain with everything beyond darker than ever, sucking up the light. Soon the sun was setting enough that it was past the time when the pieces of the world are sharp and distinct from each other and on to when everything becomes one fuzzy mass. Our eyes saw and then didn’t see the forms we knew were in there, and then saw again for a second, and then were just making it up. Okay, that’s what my eyes were doing, anyhow. At some point I was going to have to say something to him, and if he had a voice he was probably going to say something back. Maybe something would change then. The sun was so close to set, but it hadn’t set all the way. Instead of saying something, I thought about the weathervane, spinning, because I wanted the moment to last forever.
THE ARMS AND LEGS OF THE LAKE by Mary Gaitskill
Jim Smith was riding the train to Syracuse, New York, to see his foster mother for Mother’s Day. He felt good and he did not feel good. Near Penn Station, he’d gone to a bar with a green shamrock on it for good luck. Inside, it was dark and smelled like beer and rotten meat in a freezer — nasty but also good because of the closed-door feeling; Jim liked the closed-door feeling. A big white bartender slapped the bar with a rag and talked to a blobby-looking white customer with a wide red mouth. A television showed girl after girl. When Jim said he’d just gotten back from Iraq, the bartender poured him a free whiskey. “For your service,” he’d said.
Jim looked out the train window at the water going by and thought about his white foster father, the good one. “You never hurt a little animal,” his good foster had said. “That is the lowest, most chicken thing anybody can do, to hurt a little animal who can’t fight back. If you do that, if you hurt a little animal, no one will ever respect you or even like you.” There had been green grass all around, and a big tree with a striped cat in it. Down the street, ducks had walked through the wet grass. He’d thrown some rocks at them, and his foster father had gotten mad.