Lewis Carroll: Open Your Mouth And Close Your Eyes, or… Nympholepsy considered as one of the Fine Arts
“And if he left off dreaming about you, where do you suppose you’d be?” “Where I am now, of course,” said Alice. “Not you!” Tweedledee retorted contemptuously, “You’d be nowhere! You’re only a sort of thing in his dream!” Through the Looking Glass
Through the lens the child seems double-fronted; Pregnant as a Rorschach blot. Knowledge is possession, says the Bible. Better to be etched forever by silver nitrate eyes Or better to be loved? But To be loved you must hold still Hold still forever. The butterfly stains spread outward: We are safe for not much longer. Faces prop the dying man like theorems Lines extending to infinity Lines that never meet. That’s mathematics, says Tweedledee, the Ultimate logician. “You won’t make yourself a bit realer by crying.”
At first Benny and Lisa thought their daughter Jane had named her doll Violet. She was always talking about Violet. It was Violet, Violet, Violet. For example she would say something like, “Last night I had the most wonderful dream about Granny and Violet.”
“That’s marvelous, Jane.” Trying not to roll the eyes, because Lisa tried to be an encouraging mother. Her model was the late ex-First Lady Mrs. Onassis, who, whatever else you might say about her, had obviously been an exemplary parent because she gave birth to two children who adored her. Jane was a handful. She was a constitutionally slow riser and it was a hell of a project to get her to the sitter by eight.
“Granny was holding Violet in her arms. She kissed her and kissed her.” “Granny was always a very loving person,” said Lisa. “Into your shoes now, come on. You can do it. Left, right.”
Nothing odd about a dream that included both Granny and the doll. After all, it had been her last gift to Jane before the cancer took her. The doll was a “cabbage patch” knockoff – a “preemie”, just as Jane herself had been. She even had little glasses just like Jane’s. On the other hand, her hair was still blond, while Jane’s by this time was decidedly ash, soon to be the rather depressing brown Lisa’s would be if she didn’t take care to color it.
But Jane’s statements about Violet continued on an arc of increasing peculiarity until they were something even a busy parent can’t ignore.
“Violet says she forgives you,” Jane told her mother over lunch. This said in public over salad and juice at The Yogurt Break.
Lisa gasped out loud – anyone listening might think she had really done something really awful, so she tried to make fun of it, saying, “What did I do – leave her face down on the sofa again?” Jane gave her mother a strange look. Such an unlikely expression on a four-year-old face. Lisa felt sure the late Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had to contend with nothing similar from her children. For one thing, it was way too mature – just as if some other spirit looked out of her – a sort of polite cynicism flickering with amused contempt. Lisa was awarded that look as she struggled to recall the names of the children in Jane’s playgroup. Wasn’t Brendan the one who always pushed and Mystique the one who always cried?
“You haven’t left her anywhere,” Jane said. “You can’t touch her. She doesn’t like being touched.” Creepy. She must be talking, obviously, about something different from a doll that spent all its time suspended from its owner like a baby koala. But Lisa refused to think about it. She was not one to indulge in “mind games” as she called them. The employees she supervised were always eager to waste time in long conversations in which motives and memories were examined from every angle and then stood on their head. It wasn’t the same as getting the work done.
“Well,” she said, astutely changing the subject, “We’re here to buy a party dress! Let’s go!” Ben’s brother was finally getting married after many false starts, and Jane, as the only niece, had the exciting role of flower girl. Lisa, by pleading how difficult her daughter was to fit, had managed to acquire the dress purchasing job with the following proviso: long, lace, off- white. A pleasant afternoon of fashion choice meant that it wasn’t till dinner that Lisa finally found out who Violet actually was. Lisa and Ben were on their second glass of Chablis, enjoyably discussing future plans while the somewhat over-steamed shrimp curled in its dish, when Jane said, “Violet doesn’t look anything like Daddy.”
This silenced Ben, whose face showed confusion, so Lisa said, “Don’t talk with your mouth full. It’s revolting.”“I guess I’m flattered that I don’t look like a cabbage patch doll, “ said Ben finally. But he had lost his train of thought. Just when he was agreeing that a Disney cruise for Christmas would be so nice.
“Violet is NOT a doll,” said Jane, loudly as if communicating with deaf people, “Violet is MY FRIEND.
Ben’s forehead creased. “Is she the one who’s always crying?” “Violet is my PRIVATE friend. “
“I fail to see why your friends should look like Daddy.” Lisa served everyone more salad just to keep busy, even though they hadn’t yet cleaned their plates.
“Violet’s my sister,” explained Jane. “She has red hair just like you, but her eyes are green.” Lisa rose abruptly from the table and turned away. She began dishing out dessert too forcefully. The flan would collapse if forced to just sit here, but the hell with appearances. Jane had no sister. No brother. She was an only child. Lisa had had an abortion at fifteen, which was something she never thought about, and she had gotten the idea at the time – either from something someone told her or just out of her head – that the child had been a girl. That was why when Jane was a girl she had been so relieved. If Jane had been a boy she would have felt the need to go on questing for that lost little girl. But now her family was complete, because now everything was all right again. This was not something Jane — or anybody — had any reason to know.
Lisa’s hair had never been red, that was just the most flattering shade agreed on by customer and colorist. On the other hand that boy – Lord she could not even recall his name, she must be blocking it – had fiery red hair. And very freckled skin. Even though they were still in the middle of dinner she began unloading the dishwasher, because physical activity always made her feel better.
“Sounds like Violet is one of those imaginary friends,” she said, amazing herself with the calmness and placidity of her own voice. “Lots of children have them. It shows…” she couldn’t think of anything. Her brain was parched. A desert. “Imagination.” “I had one,” said Ben.
Amazing! The things you find out about a person you’ve been married to for fifteen years! At first she was beyond grateful to him just for participating; then she wondered if he was lying to make everyone feel normal. That would be a very Ben thing to do. But it helped Lisa for one to feel calm enough to sit back down and give the others a big smile. Inside she was thinking, “God I’m a lousy mother. I probably talk in my sleep. And Jane can see totally through me and knows just how to push my buttons at only four years old.”
Unfortunately Ben felt a need to build on his success. Since there were only three of them at a table with four chairs, he joked, “Why don’t you set a place for Violet? I always did with mine. It used to drive my mother crazy!” He laughed. “I hope she likes shrimp.” “She isn’t allowed to have shellfish,” said Jane. “She’s allergic. She’s allergic to a lot of things.”
Poor Lisa’s face collapsed like the flan. She thought she was going to burst into tears. Calloway — that was the boy’s goddam name, Crispin Calloway III. How could she ever have forgotten it? He came from a very snooty family. And he was allergic to everything. His parents were allergic to becoming grandparents, that was for sure. But at fifteen years old, what choice does anybody have?
When husband and wife were finally alone upstairs, Ben sat on the bed watching Lisa do sit-ups. She had a theory that if you exercised right after a meal the fat wouldn’t “take”. It was uncomfortable and unpleasant, but that was true of virtually everything worthwhile in life.
Ben cleared his throat loudly. He must know from experience that she wouldn’t stop just to talk to him, but he went right ahead anyway, asking,
“What happened to you at dinner? I have never seen you so thrown.” She did stop. She stopped in mid sit-up, her gut aching, and leaned against the bed, thinking, I am never going to do another sit-up again. What is the point? What is the point of anything?
How could she tell him after all these years? It was an ugly, stupid story she had done her best to forget – had forgotten until this bizarre concatenation of circumstances had somehow brought it back into the present, a situation as unlikely and yet possibly as inevitable as a group of chimps typing in a room until they produced a scene from Shakespeare. What was the point of bringing it up now? Eons of time had passed, everyone and everything was different. Yet Ben was so sweet, so sympathetic, looking at her so lovingly. He would never hold it against her. Yet if she told him, it would be like giving birth to the thing she and her mother had stopped. It would be out there in the world.
Lisa, who never cried, who hadn’t cried even when her beloved father died, amazed herself and Ben by bursting into tears. Ben slid to the ground to hold her tightly against his suit, and she choked out, “I’m such a CRAPPY MOTHER!” Because that’s what she was always feeling. Jane knew she was faking it. That’s why she was torturing her. That was the accusation in Jane’s eyes. Ben was still talking, on and on, while he rocked her. He said things like, “How can you say that? You’re the best mother I know. You’re with Jane a lot more than I am…and she’s a smart kid…she’s like a little crystal radio set…she tunes into your anxieties, all of them, even the ones that aren’t about her and she picks at them like scabs. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Imaginary friends are perfectly OK. She’s learning to “self-soothe”. That’s what we want, isn’t it? To set her free from us emotionally. It’s probably harder on us than it is on her. We can’t just invent people to make ourselves feel better.
“I think the best thing to do is to ignore it. That’s what my parents did. There will come a time when Jane and her “sister” part company. Trust me. All little kids long for a brother or a sister….till they have them. You know what the books say about single children. They’re more verbal, they have more resources, they’re happier and more successful when they grow up…”
Thank God for Ben! He was so wonderful! What slam-dunk it was the day she married him! He never really knew what the issues were but he dove in bravely anyway, smoothing the roiled waters with his charm. Or trying.
She gasped, “You don’t think… we have to find a child psychologist… bend the insurance…”
He said, “No. I’m sure of it. Jane is fine and so are we.” And she felt so much better. Much, much better.
The morning they went to the airport to catch the plane to Ben’s brother’s wedding was one of those family nightmares that becomes the stuff of legend. It was a perfect storm of unreeling disaster. First there was oversleeping; everybody overslept. The there was quarrelsomeness; everybody was quarrelsome.
Ben ate the last of the raisin bran in the middle of the night – the last of it – knowing full well it was the only thing Lisa could tolerate for breakfast. She tried to eat oatmeal with the others but it was just the most disgusting stuff. Ben forgot the tickets and they had to go back, because they weren’t e tickets, which they should have been. Jane kept asking if she could wear the gloves that came with the dress and it made Lisa’s head ache to even think of trying to clear this past a bridezilla obsessed with trying to match the flower girl exactly to the ring- bearer. It was always dangerous to lie to Jane but “we’ll see when we get there” wasn’t cutting it.
Jane, although strictly forbidden to do so, had been trying the dress on and parading around in it so much she had managed to tear one of the ruffles at the bottom. Already. Lisa would have to mend it on the flight if it wasn’t bumpy – she was scared enough of flying as it was – or maybe in the hotel room later while the rest of the world partied. Ben was warned against bringing his coffee into the car, did so anyway, and then spilled it on himself. He was so angry he threw the mug out the window, right in front of an inquisitive four year old who had been told to grow out of tantrums.
Thank God the plane was late. It gave them a moment to regroup, to calm down, to walk more slowly, to speak to each other without biting and snapping. But when it was finally time to proceed to the tarmac, Jane began suddenly convulsing, her body jackknifing like an epileptic’s, bringing the flight attendants running – in short, it was awful.
“We can’t go!” shrieked Jane. “We can’t go without Violet and Violet’s not coming! She just stands there waving goodbye!”
They had not seen anything like this since the terrible two’s.
“Stop it!” said Ben sternly. “We are getting on that plane. Violet will join us later. You’ll see.” “If not, good riddance,” said Lisa. “Everyone has to grow up sometime.”
The tiny blue-eyed flight attendant twisted her face up with concern. She was thinking what an awful mother Lisa was, Lisa could just tell. Everyone must be thinking it.
“The airline sponsors a Fear of Flying group,” she said. “But with a child this young maybe a doctor can prescribe something.“
See? They were all telling her she’d ruined her kid and it was time for medical intervention.
“She’s getting ON THE PLANE,” said Lisa, trying to pick up a forty-eight pound thrashing weight, but it was like battling a beached marlin in full public view.
“I’m sorry,” said the flight attendant firmly, “She can’t get on while she’s shrieking like that. It would disturb the other passengers. If you have medication—“
Ben had Prozac if Lisa could just remember which bag it was in. She was demoralized enough to say to the flight attendant, “Any idea what dose…?”
The woman pulled back as if they were all crazy.
“But under the circumstances, you’ll have to take a later flight. I’m sure she’ll have calmed down by then.”
Lisa wanted to burst into tears herself. Jacqueline Onassis’ children never did anything like this. They did cute things on the tarmac, like saluting and shaking hands. Ben, who had been standing there helplessly, finally spoke up.
“I’ve got to go!” he cried, the vein in his forehead pumping like a water-hose. “I’m the best man! They’re relying on me!”
“There’s two more planes today,” the flight attendant soothed.
Jane broke away and ran wildly back to the terminal, shouting, “Violet! Violet!”
Lisa felt she had never been so humiliated in her life. Everyone’s attention was focused on her. She was the one preventing this plane from leaving the runway and making all of their connections. daughter.
Lisa kissed Ben hastily, and rushed after her.
She found Jane curled up on one of the hard molded plastic seats; sobbing so hard she had difficulty speaking. She hadn’t cried this way since infancy.
“I can’t find Violet, Mom,” she gasped. “She’s gone! She said if we left we’d never come back. Well here we are but where is she? Where did she go?”
Lisa sat beside her daughter wondering if there was enough Prozac in the world for the two of them. Did she really even want to go to Ben’s stupid brother’s stupid wedding? It had been so long since she had done anything because she wanted to do it that she hardly knew what it was to want any more.
“Don’t worry, Jane. It’s like we’re having a bad dream while we’re awake. It will all be over soon. If we take a later flight, maybe Violet will meet us there.” “She said not to go,” Jane sobbed. “I tried to do what she said. We’ve got to go look for her!” Lisa took her hand. “All right,” she said, “Let’s go find Violet.”
She steered her daughter towards the airline desk where they could change their tickets, thinking, Taking care of children is like living in an asylum. You try humoring the inmates, then you realize you are an inmate. In that moment she surrendered the late Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, her own imaginary friend, thinking, We’re all crazy here.
On the escalator she looked out through the wall of glass, glancing mechanically in the same direction as everyone else, craning her neck to see the source of the sirens, or at least, their objective. When the escalator arrived at the top she lost Jane’s hand, tripped over the people ahead of her, unable to walk any more under her own steam, borne aloft by the panicking mob. Violet had certainly been right about it. One of them at least would not be coming back.
SET: A low bed with scrim behind it, a table, a sewing machine, surrounded by a garden. Old couple in the bed. CHORUS member (white-clothed) brings out SUN.
Couple yawn, stretch, wake up, perform yoga sun salutations in perfect harmony together, smiling frequently at each other.
They dance a warm, familiar dance – then he goes to the garden, she goes to the sewing machine. She is making a quilt, holding up different-colored patches, trying different arrangements. In the background we see him gathering flowers, trying different arrangements. White-clothed Chorus removes sun. Black-clothed chorus brings out MOON.
Husband puts flowers and vegetables in wheelbarrow and brings them to wife – she displays her quilt, he shows off his produce, they dance joyously, make flower crowns for each other, sit down to eat. They then perform yoga moon salutations in perfect harmony, then get in bed under the new quilt. We see something that might be sex, might only be hugging and stroking. Sleep.
Chorus removed MOON brings in SUN. WOMAN rises, pushes man. Nothing. She gets out of bed, begins disturbed sun salutations, but interrupting constantly to touch him, push him. Finally realizes he is dead; his arm & head fall out of the bed in a too-obviously dead way. Distress. She seeks in the garden for others – calling. The white-clothed CHORUS appears, comforting her, checking the body, dancing sorrowfully with her, trying to keep her from the body, trying to get her to eat, to dance. She resists; angry; sad. SUN trades with MOON.
CHORUS lifts the body to take away, she insists on covering it with quilt. Chorus helps her into bed, she kicks off her covers; lies like stone. Finally closes her eyes. Might be asleep. HUSBAND appears behind scrim, trying to reach through scrim to her. Finally she wakes up, touches him through scrim, without seeming to be able not to see, only feel, him. She rises up, presses her body against his through the scrim. They dance around the stage, always with the scrim between them but their bodies locked close. Still, they are not able to get through the all-encompassing scrim.
Finally the black clothed CHORUS appears, pulls him away from her through the audience – he is reaching toward her, unwilling to go. She reaches toward him, but he is gone. Wife sits dejected. Finally she takes down the scrim, sniffing it like an animal, dances reminiscently with it, shakes it out. Of course it’s not alive. She folds it up, regards it thoughtfully. Takes it to her sewing machine where she turns it into a fantastic see-through dress, like a wedding dress with a deep skirt, flounces, full sleeves. Puts it on, dances joyously for the first time since the death. Pulls the MOON into her dance. SUN appears, she pulls him too, the three dance wildly together. At the back of the stage another scrim, previously invisible, is lit. Behind it we see the HUSBAND yearning to join their dance. Then he, too begins to dance, with increasing joy until they all are dancing. Dancing.
It was hard leaving Brenda. Morton Pinkney Fitzgibbons III looked out the airplane window at his own reflection in the blue lights. His parents didn’t like Brenda. They hadn’t even allowed her to come to the airport. They were always saying disapprovingly how he hadn’t been the same since he’d met her. They didn’t bother concealing their relief that his college was so far away, or smirking that Brenda’s family finances didn’t run to bicoastal airfares. This way she couldn’t “pester” him, they said. Morty had spent the past four years giving it everything he had to get into a prestigious college, but he wondered if he didn’t hate himself a little bit for giving in so easily, for not standing up to them. But heck, just a few months ago he’d been a little kid.
They were absolutely right when they said he wasn’t the same, and about time too. He’d hardly dated any girls in prep school – date-nights at his all-male school were so formalized he’d pretty much backed off and let his mother do the heavy lifting. None of the girls she picked were easy. She must give them a questionnaire, or a job interview, or something to determine their absolute hopelessness as potential girlfriends. Right from the first Brenda was different. Not just a girl to “begin”, to “experiment” on, as he had imagined in his lonely self- projections. She was the girl. In restaurants people already turned to stare at her and she was only seventeen. It actually was kind of insulting the way his parents attributed his new maturity completely to Brenda. Showed what a spineless jellyfish they’d always considered him.
That jellyfish, swimming down the darkly stained oak halls of his worthless school, that wasn’t his real self at all. Anyone who knew anything knew that. Look at his reports: “Morton seems to have deep reserves he has yet to draw on” and “excellent work but hardly to capacity.” The school psychologist said, “Doesn’t let anyone get close” and “polite but uncooperative.” Like you could study The Prince in class all day and then make a “buddy” out of the school shrink! What kind of retard did they take him for?
That creature walking through the halls of Asbury Prep had been more like an animated corpse, or an “astral double”. The real Morty was sleeping, was gathering power. Gathering strength. The real Morty wouldn’t waste his time with their version of “leadership” – because their version of leadership was servanthood. The real Morty was a Champion.
Pretending to empower you, the school actually harnessed you. Drained you. They demanded lying, insisted on evasion, mandated phoniness and reveled in fakery – they didn’t care who the hell you really were at all. And it wasn’t just Morty who noticed it. Not a kid on his floor dared reveal his true self. Every authentic interaction sapped you – because it turned you into a sap — better hold your fire. Save enough force so you could become who you needed to be, who you were meant to be, later on.
The plane was taxiing to its runway. Morty kept his face averted, absorbing the blue light, so his father wouldn’t attempt conversation. He felt a strange prickling inside his forehead, but it wasn’t pain. When he met Brenda he was taking pills for ulcers, pills for attention, for sleeplessness, for cluster headaches. Turned out all he needed was sex. That as the big secret they had been keeping all those years! He guessed it was like being in the army – they kept you deprived to keep you passive. Once you discovered that, you mastered confidence. Each time he locked loins with Brenda freed him a little more. The soggy curtain that had separated him from the universe since childhood fell away. He didn’t need the pills anymore. It made better financial sense to sell them. When he felt this tingling in his forehead he imagined himself head-butting the universe — breaking the glass that separated him from the world.
Morty picked at the weird fabric of the airplane’s window curtain with his thumbnail. What was this stuff? It was some kind of man-made junk, not plastic, not cloth, more like Fiberglas. That was the trouble with the world these days. Nothing was real. People had been pushing fakes so long they forgot what reality was. Sex was real.
Connecticut dropped away below him until there was nothing left to see. But still he kept his face averted, hoping his father wouldn’t pull the trigger on another awkward, pathetic conversation. He liked his father – would have said he loved him if love wasn’t a feeling now reserved for Brenda alone. But his father was a decoy, some kind of “staked goat” offered to lure him into letting down his guard.
His father used to write music – had a band even back when they lived in Stoneyport – but one of the incontestable facts about Stoneyport was that if you lived there year round, you were nobody. So it was just their summer place now and his father was too busy tending other people’s money to waste any more time on progressive jazz. “Progressive jazz” wasn’t even a “thing” anymore, even, nobody did it, nobody had even heard of it. His father’s time was up. The old man tried not-so- subtly to blame the kids – they all did that — that was the way grown-ups operated – you were the reason for everything! They did it for you! Guilt, the gift that keeps on giving. At school they were always after you to “assume responsibility”. The school’s motto was “No excuses.” If the dog really ate your homework you needed punishment for having such a freakin’ unruly dog. Morty had been trained to recognize buck-passing by the best-in- show. He knew exactly whose fault everything was. Take his mom for instance. She was a screamer.
She had a super-simple business model: just yell and scream till you get what you want. Amazing how effective it was. Nobody would pay to get that in the real world – not since the concentration camps closed – but in interpersonal relationships “Making a Scene” was the strategy to beat. No one was willing to go up against her. Nobody could outlast her. The thing that really got his goat was she pretended, in the midst of epic rages, to be a competent, polished adult. Oh, yeah, she set herself up as judge as well as executioner! A day didn’t pass without a tweet, email or sticky note about how he had failed her perfect standards. He was sick of it, really. The degrading scenes, the room searches, the “white glove” inspections. He had long since learned to leave nothing personal, nothing of any importance in his room.
He could imagine her prowling around when he wasn’t there – feeling up his underwear and sneaking looks beneath his mattress, hoping to find the weed, the smokes, the girly mags she could get her wail on about. Nothing there; but there were always Brenda’s phone calls and text messages good for a public session of electro-shock; a thong trophy lifted from her son’s blazer pocket or the wet scrap of bikini discarded on the cabana floor. Scream-a-thon if Morty was using condoms; Shriek-
a-thon if he wasn’t; take your pick. Good thing she couldn’t get a hold of Brenda’s mom – there was no dad – or she would have made her life a living hell. But Brenda’s mom was one of those unlucky females forced to actually contribute to society instead of just yelling at people – she lived at work – and hospital dispatch don’t take personal calls.
Morty’s mom was fat. That was her real trouble. Morbid obesity. Her body was so swollen that from a distance she looked like a tiny block placed atop a big one. If anyone ever said anything about dieting – even diets in general – Elsa the She-Wolf went right upstairs and cried. Then she came downstairs and screamed harder. She actually forced her kids to eat ice cream. Bizarre. Morty could burn it off and his father preferred alcohol but it wasn’t doing his little sister any favors. His mom’s fashion solution was to wrap herself in shawls. Not working. Who asked for a Hungarian peasant woman for a mother? Frankly, it was embarrassing. There was his tall, distinguished, tired father partnering Hulda the Witch to school events. Bad.
She was sitting behind him now, talking to Gracie in a baby voice, trying to “persuade” her not to kick her father’s seat back. Gracie was ignoring her — poor Gracie wasn’t able to stand up for herself yet, so passive aggression was all she had going. What hope could there possibly be for her with an example like that? She was finished before she started. Morty knew – he had been forced to listen – that she wasn’t in the “popular” group at her school and surprise! Screaming and threats failed to fix the situation. Face it: his mom made everything worse. Your misery was her modus operandi in life.
Morty hated leaving Brenda. Everybody said college was so great, but what if college turned out to be another Asbury Prep in disguise? A place where “Gentlemen’s Agreement” meant upperclassmen torturing underclassmen for three long years? Could he stand it? It would be a relief getting away from his parents. His Mom was getting harder to fool – and his dad was sinking so fast it was politer to avert your gaze.
Mom had allowed Morty to invite Brenda to his pool party. It was all a trick of course. She was trying to find out if they’d been “seeing each other behind her back”. Belligerent as a tank in her red-skirted suit she’d gathered steam watching Brenda lounging in her invisible bikini, belly jewels and hummingbird tats. Swim-suited Morty tried to convince his Mom that his circular red weals were “wrestling burns”; that was a hard enough sell, but when Morty’s father rubbed sunscreen along Brenda’s shoulders Hulda blew like Vesuvius. Only coming down at midnight to make herself spaghetti.
On the way to the airport the screaming was particularly intense. She lashed them, beat them, drubbed them all with waves of sound; then, the minute they hit the ticket counter she snapped out of it like the psycho from Three Faces of Eve. Sybil from the suburbs.
Now Mom was taking Gracie to the bathroom. Didn’t trust an eleven year old to go alone. Morty closed his eyes but he could imagine the horrible scene in the aisle, his mother’s huge hips bumping into everything, her tight black dress riding up in little ridges around knees and waist. He vividly imagined her falling into the laps of a pair of horrified strangers, struggling with flight-attendants, burping and farting and shrieking while the pilot appeared personally to help place her in restraints. If only.
There must be something pleasurable he could do with his imagination; playing Vice Cop3 or texting Brenda a note to send when cellphones were allowed. But completely unbidden a new thought popped into his head. What if they were dead? All of them.
Now a new vision; himself walking down an antiseptic corridor, a doctor shaking his head like a metronome. Repeating, “I’m so sorry, sorry, sorry…” Then Morty could call Brenda, even in the middle of the night, never mind about her beauty sleep, telling her, “We’re rich.”
Because he would be, wouldn’t he? Even though his parents moaned and groaned about the expense of two homes and their crushing load of debt, there were retirement funds and college accounts and a pile of insurance because Hulda wasn’t getting left penniless like her own mother had been.
Morty and Brenda would go to Europe — she had never seen it — he could show her all the places he knew and all the places he didn’t know. Wasn’t making love to Brenda under all the bridges of Paris the only education really worth having?
He reached in his pocket and felt the satiny scrap Brenda had left for him, and it was so reminiscent of her all the blood left his tingling forehead and tumesced between his legs. Morty pulled down his tray table to conceal his excitement.
But how could he do it? He summoned up the whole of his first class education: the difference between a wish and a goal was a plan. Three people were a lot to ask for. How about a car crash? That would be a start. Get him out of college and visiting a hospital, then he would see what he could do. His parents were renting a car to drive back home so they could see Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon and all the other boring obligatory stuff. His father always drove because of his mother’s bad back, and he always carried coffee in case he felt sleepy. Morty still had plenty of sleeping pills; easy enough to give his father a doctored thermos as a thoughtful, parting gift. His mother never drank coffee, she insisted on Earl Grey and if you couldn’t provide that, God help you. It was a plan. A shy, modest beginning of a little plan, but unmistakably, a plan. He drummed his fingers ecstatically on his plastic tray table.
His father had obviously been awaiting just such a conversational opportunity. “Hungry for airplane food?” he teased. Morty said, “Hungry for everything.”
Right after we were married, my husband and his mother went into the business of renovating aging Philadelphia buildings into modern apartments. Toss sank all his money into this endeavor. As the partnership progressed, a lot of problems with my mother-in-law surfaced. She was personally combative and talked continually about her own unhappy marriage and angry divorce, as if they had just happened or were still happening. Her constant hostility destroyed any chance of a good personal relationship between us. She ignored the contract that she had signed with my husband, she used construction money to purchase a property for herself, and she stopped paying the lenders. I had been forced to sign onto every loan, so, when we were inevitably sued by the bank, I was also sent constant legal demands that I come in and give depositions. Toss and I sold our house to pay back the bank, but when we moved into one of the apartments, my mother-in-law sued us. I was studying psychology at the time and could see that she had deeper problems than just an abrasive business approach.
Throughout this horrible state of affairs my husband kept hoping his mother would come to her senses. He was extremely upset by her behavior and even became suicidal at times. I had two small children and couldn’t figure out the best thing to do. I consulted a divorce attorney but realized that I didn’t want a different husband, I wanted a different life.
At this time my own family sold our summer place in Maine and I gained a sudden influx of cash. I decided to use it to get my husband away from his mother and into a new life. There was certainly the possibility that he would feel obligated to choose her, or his “financial best interests” or just feel emotionally unable to leave his situation.
Through the nine years of our marriage and the seven years of my husband’s partnership we had found joy and release visiting his family summer place, Ravine Falls Farm, in the Berkshires, and it seemed to make sense to choose somewhere near there. Hartford was the nearest big city and Connecticut appeared halcyon and clean; almost a paradise in comparison to Philadelphia. The children were six and two at the time; as soon as I received my psychology degree from All Saints the three of us took off to explore the Hartford suburbs. Manchester, “Silk City”; “The City Of Village Charm” seemed just perfect. I bought a cute little new townhouse and enrolled the kids in school. It took Toss only a few months to decide to join me. He hired a lawyer to extract him from his partnership and he found a wonderful job at the Connecticut Law Tribune which combined his writing skills and legal knowledge and stayed employed there twenty-three years! We were a happy family again. My bravery paid off.
Alysse Aallyn 