All American Horror of the 21st Century

Still Crazy After all these Years. Judi Rohrig-2

“Lou was here this morning. He wants you get better, that’s why he’s stayed away. But your sister wrote him a letter telling him how much you’ve improved.”

“No, I haven’t.”

Now, he who had survived horrible, unspeakable torture was touching the arm of my chair. “Yes, you have.”

“I’m sick.”

“No, Kassie. You face your demons now, remember? Nobody hates you.”

Then he let the silence hang in the room. Dangle and spin. Round and round like the spoon Aunt Lily swirled in the glass jar just before she drizzled the honey over her steamy pancakes. And we’d eat the pancakes. Me and Delia and Lou. Lou, the neighbor boy. Skinny, like me. People would point at us and say we were sticks. Bones. “Turn sideways and we can’t see ya’.” But Lou would stand defiant, flicking them his wet tongue or flipping them his longest finger.

I knocked him down a hill once, in the snow, and the next summer I hit him with my bicycle when I turned my head to gawk at a boy with muscles. His nose bled both of those times. And I was sorry I’d hurt him. But it was an accident. I didn’t mean to.

I didn’t mean to.

I remember jamming the soiled rags along the bottom of the garage door before I nestled myself behind the wheel of the Mercury. Fingers that weren’t really mine turned the key, and the radio came on, blaring.

Lou had stopped loving me. He was tired of my insecurities. Exhausted with having to bolster my ego. “You’re a woman, Kass,” he’d said, yelled, swore. “For chrissakes, act like it. Olivia needs a mother.”

The engine hummed as Paul Simon whammed the nail on the head and sang of still being “crazy after all these years.” But he didn’t really know.

I don’t remember anything past that line as the vapor surrounded me. I just knew I was killing Lou. I was steaming him from the fibers of my soul. If he didn’t love me, and I was just some burden, what was there?

As much as I looked at the butts of bus boys, I never wanted them. I never wanted to touch the hairy legs of the stranger who sat beside me while naked men and women did things I’d only done in private. Nazis must have made those filthy films.

“I didn’t think the fumes would get into the house.”

What did you think would happen?

“I thought Lou would find me and wrap me in his arms when he saw how much he meant to me.”

Bullshit.

“I thought the pain would end.”

What pain?

“The pain of just being alive and not being able to really live.”

Go away, you’re just pretending. You have a layer you haven’t peeled away.

I looked at Dr. Jack. He still hadn’t said anything. But he smiled. It was odd. He’d never smiled at me before, but he was doing it now. And he had teeth. White, straight teeth that no crazy Nazi terror tool had touched.

“I loved my father,” I said.

But it was a lie.

* * *

Olivia’s baby curls were gone. Her hair was darker and clipped short. She’d called me Mommy and was all hugs. Like Delia. Free hugs and warm smiles. Nothing held back.

Lou looked older, heavier. He’d tried to kiss my mouth, but I turned away. We were outside, for Pete’s sake. What would Delia’s neighbors say? What had they said already?

At first, the visit was stiff, very stiff.

I felt as if I were some kind of bomb all loaded—c****d, engaged—ready to blow. One false move and they knew I would mushroom everybody to kingdom come.

Then for one brief moment, one odd burst of sunlight second, we all became children again, playing pretend games, and it was almost fun. Seated around the carefully decorated table, we were family—the Brady Bunch maybe or the Waltons.

We did this a long time ago, pretending we were the people we saw on TV or at the movies: Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, Double-oh-seven and p***y Galore. I’m Scarlett O’Hara and fiddle-dee-dee.

That’s when the fracture closed. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Lou had never said those exact words, but they radiated off him like heat off desert sand.

Now he was pretending he did give a damn, and somehow he’d sucked Delia—my sweet little sister—into the game. Just like old times.

Just like the time we dug a hole in the side of the hill near the creek under the shady cover of towering birch trees and sweet gums. We were going to dig clear to China and trade the prickly gum balls for fire crackers that we could light on the Fourth of July. We were Little Marco Polos balancing the nation’s world trade deficit.

Though we never made it all the way, our steady afternoons finally netted us a great place to play. It was really cool there and dark and safe.

Or so we thought.

A gully-washer of a rainstorm collapsed the whole side of the hill and our playhouse was reclaimed by the black earth. Delia had never liked it anyway, but Lou had convinced her. He was persuasive like that. That was his game: pretending and convincing people. He was a writer, for Pete’s sake. That’s what they do: suck you in.

What he was still doing.

Delia and I never saw the real China, but Lou had. He and Olivia had together. He’d been doing some freelance stuff for several magazines, and he told me some of the places they’d been. Olivia chimed in with anecdotes almost as good as the color reporting of Harry Caray with the Cubs. Ten years old and she could not only maintain a decent conversation but generate one.

She said the Japanese people were too polite. After two weeks there, she found herself appreciating the indifferent customs agents in New York. “Daddy thought they were rude, but I liked them. They didn’t make my face hurt.”

“Make your face hurt?” I asked.

“I didn’t have to smile all the time and keep bowing,” she explained.

Lou said she was a lot like me, but then he said it one time too many, and I realized he was just blowing smoke up my ass. Olivia was the spitting image of her father. Same long nose, same shape of face. She had my hair, poor baby, and the cleft of my chin. I hoped that was all I had given her, but there was a glint in the corners of her eyes I wanted to read as Blarney.

After dinner, Lou sat down by me twice on the couch, but I moved. Then once, in the kitchen, he’d put his hand on mine, but I slid it away.

I told myself if I didn’t blow up the balloon then I wouldn’t have to feel the loss of it when the string slipped from my fingers; when it touched the flame and burst; when it sagged all wrinkled in a corner, looking like a spent rubber.

Sure. Sure. Nothing ventured; nothing gained.

Nothing lost either.

As I stretched out beside my little girl as she lay in the sleeping bag Delia had set up in the sewing room, I remembered how scared I was the night she was born. While I fingered back a stray hair—hair the color of mine when I was this age—I remembered feeling so unreal as this living creature was pulled free from my body. Everybody smiled at me that night.

Lou cried. Big tears. He talked to her, calling her the special name he’d made up before we knew she was a she. And Olivia had stopped crying when she heard it. “Wiggles.” That’s what it was. She wiggled a lot in the “pokey.”

Now Olivia slept like some angel. Little bubbles at her mouth. Her tiny fingers laced together. Dainty, like Delia, not me. I was the gangly pony. All bony limbs. Limp hair. A face only a mother could love. Only she loved Delia’s face more.

I kissed my sweet baby just where her forehead met her hair so I could smell her girl-nectar at the same time. What rich honey Uncle Dill’s bees could have retched up if they’d tapped her sweetness.

Then I opened the window wide and shut the door.

The house was dark and quiet. Delia was in the master suite, and Lou was resting in the bedroom where I’d spent so many nights after Dr. Jack said I could. I wondered if Delia had let him use the yellow sheets. They were softer than the blue flowered ones. Better thread count, I think. I couldn’t really see in the shadows as I eased up his window. Or even when I draped the wedding ring quilt over him.

But it didn’t matter.

The light went on when I opened the door to Delia’s Toyota. Her car always smelled like pine. Hey, I used to buy those little scented trees at Kmart and hang them from the rearview mirror. Nothing. Oh, a quick burst at first. Then second day, nothing. When I turned on the radio, some very busy violin screeching filled the car. It sounded like an invasion of killer bees. Squeak. Squawk. Buzzzzzz. There was no rock and roll to be found pushing her magic buttons. No country. Just talk. And finally, the Blues.

The guitar edged its sharp blade into my soul. Back. Way back. Way in, and it felt so right there. Like digging the hole to China. Dark and safe. Sweet and thick. Honey.

I turned the key and started the motor while I listened to the paradiddling in the background. Sticks on skins. Heartbeats while the blues band crooned their soft lullaby.

The engine purred like a hedging cat, mindful it could s***h its claws and bring me my peace. So I rested my head back and closed my eyes. No one would have to pretend anymore. Or try. Or worry. Or hope.

“Mommy.”

I hadn’t heard the car door open and close or seen the overhead light blink on and off, but Olivia was suddenly beside me in the front seat.

“Take me with you, Mommy.” Her eyes were saucers of affection and supplication. And the fumes from the exhaust were now mixed with Olivia nectar. “Pretty please with sugar on it?”

When I looked into her face I didn’t see the innocence a ten-year-old should have. I also didn’t see the feigned caring of Lou or the desperate worry of Delia.

I saw him. Daddy.

“Do you love your father?”

I pressed the button on the black box that hung securely on the visor overhead, and the garage door rumbled open. Rich, clean air rushed into the windows as I backed out, thumping over the speedbump of rags.

“Where are we going, Mommy?”

I drove down MacDonald Street past my old school. “Hey, sticks!” I heard Ten Ton Tim yell from long ago. He was still as round as the hippo at the zoo, even had his picture taken with the damned thing when he ran for mayor last year. How could he just laugh it all off?

The car rounded Liberty Park where Delia and I flew our kites. I’d stepped on a bee there, and Daddy had carried me all the way back home.

“Let’s be bees,” I said to Olivia. “Let’s look for flowers and collect their nectar.”

I turned off the radio and listened to her honeyed voice tell me about her best friend, Gretel, and a boy name Dan. I could tell she liked Dan.

“Dan gave me a red ball the other day that could bounce really high,” she told me. The blue glow from the dashboard lights couldn’t disguise the pleasure of acceptance in her face. “But I lost it.”

“I’m sorry, baby.” I would crawl under a car or dig another hole—this time all the way to China—to find her treasure.

But she patted my hand. Like Delia. Like Lou tried. “It’s okay. He’ll give me another one.”

“He will?”

“Yes, Mommy. Dan’s like that.”

“Like what?”

My little girl stared down at her shoes for a moment, though they were nearly invisible in the dim light; then her eyes glinted. “Like Daddy.”

Daddy. My own father was a tall man, thin like me. My mom used to call him “the rail.” I remember I fell off my bicycle once, and he carried me, a crying me, back to our house. The same house where he locked himself in the basement and French-kissed a gun barrel.

“You have your father’s eyes,” my Mom once told me, and now I was looking at the next generation.

“Are we going to make honey, Mommy? You know, after we collect the flowers?”

“Yes, baby. Honey.”

“Can we eat it then, Mommy?”

I looked at my baby. The child who grew inside me. The child who giggled and had only begun seeing the whole world with eyes that could damn her to hell. Lou was right; she was just like me. And just like him: my Daddy.

He left such a big hole—a hole deeper than could reach to China. I loved him so much, his crooked smile and wavy hair. The way he sucked on a cigarette and held it in his hand as though he could hide the burning end because he was afraid I would accidentally get burned.

“Do you love your father?”

“I don’t understand why he left me.”

“Is that what he did?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s why you want to run away from Olivia?”

I looked at her. This time her lips were blue, but she wasn’t dying.

“Look again. Look at her eyes.”

That glimmer. It was death’s gleam. The same siren that beckoned my daddy away from me. Cajoling. The end of pain. The end of my pain.

The beginning of hers.

Why had it taken so long to learn the lesson of the hole we dug to China? It didn’t go there. And it wasn’t safe.

No place would ever be safe.

It only took a few minutes to get back to Delia’s.

I laughed as I looked at Olivia, giving her my best Irish twinkle. Playful beam. I gave it to her. Fully. Forever. Just as my father had given me mine.

We snuggled together in the front seat and pushed the buttons on the radio, but we couldn’t find Paul Simon. We couldn’t find the blues. There were only people talking, sounding like bees searching for nectar. Buzzing a benediction.

And the sound of the car’s engine ...

* * *

No one denies the towering contributions to American music of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and John Mellencamp, but a strong case can be made for Paul Simon’s providing the relevant soundtrack for the end of the 20th Century and the start of the 21st. You hear his guitar and poetic lyrics—and not only of his “Crazy” song—in Judi Rohrig’s story of not-so-everydaybut- ohso-real madness, and you know Paul Simon understands. And, of course, so does Judi Rohrig.