I don’t live far from Nana and Granddaddy’s house now, though it is the next town over. It’s the same road, almost, if you stretch that thought a bit. The road just winds and bends to get here. In that sense, my road is connected to all roads and all roads lead here. I travel by going to work, or some where, and pass it on the right there beside the church. The house, which in its long history, had been for a time, the high school, post office, general store, and Odd Fellows Hall still speaks to me, calling me back to where I belong. My great-grandparents lived there too. When my great-grandfather moved in he brought all of his beloved chickens to roost on the stage left by the other odd fellows. The stage had velvet curtains, which I’m sure the chickens appreciated and enjoyed as much as my great grandfather enjoyed the clucking of the hens and the delicious eggs they laid on such rich nesting material.
I lived there, a seemingly singular child, alone with my grandparents, until the third grade. Though there were pictures of my brothers and sister on the wall I wasn’t really conscious of who they were. They were just children sitting in a row, bodies at a right angle to the camera, sitting in-between each other’s legs, four little faces arranged from the smallest to the tallest, and I was one of them. I stared sometimes at the picture as placidly as they did at the camera. I wondered why the me in the picture was so unaware that she was stuck in the middle of a bunch of strangers, innocent and blank. I didn’t wonder why I wasn’t with them and no one ever explained why. I was just living with Nana and Granddaddy surrounded by love. That was enough to know. I could go spin the top now, faster and faster until it made a sound like a train or look at my books so full of beautiful colors and warm stories.
Nana, my nana, so tall and beautiful, was always just so--elegant, her hair, her perfume, her clothes, she was history, church, Mother, Authority and God all in one. Her laughter floated through the whole house filling all the corners with glee; but she could be stern as well. The Northern Baptist Church had taught her well. She kept clear the lines that were not to be crossed just as the Hummel figurines that lived on either side of the white couch were always dust free and in perfect order.
Granddaddy, on the other hand, was earthy and often smelled like machine oil. He went off to work early, his pure white hair brushed back from his forehead, wearing blue work clothes, returning in the evening to chase me through the house telling me he was going to, “Cut off my curls!” and I would run, in terror and love, to hide. Later, I would sit on his lap in the kitchen, in a pool of golden light watching him sprinkle a bit of salt in the foam of his Knickerbocker beer. While waiting for the beer to be ready he would talk to Nana and me about his day. I felt secure and warm on his lap with his deep voice sounding through my body, Nana puttering around, the good smells of dinner enveloping us. He had a quiet, almost silent presence. I’d watch him drink the golden beer waiting for my part--the last sip of the glass--a swallow of bitter saltiness. Then we would have dinner.
While sitting on his lap, or just sitting in the kitchen, alone, waiting for him to come home, I would look into the darkened dining room that led to the living room. I knew the wallpaper in the dining room would be moving now, the Chinese boatmen going home in their maroon junks. Sometimes I would hear voices whisper my name from there. The whispers would be so loud I wondered why Nana never heard them. When I went to bed they would open secret doors for me to go to other places and meet them there.
New Hampshire seemed cleaner then. The air was sweet, fresh, high and scented by the big pines that lived behind the house, across the field, the dark woods, overlooking the river whose steep banks I was never allowed to go near. There were leeches in the water and an old tumbled-down stone bridge that used to connect the church to the graveyard on the island behind. The remains of a house slumbered into a cellar hole. In a dream I met the old man that lived there all by himself.
Nana hung the clothes out on the line, so fresh and clean, and we would walk across to the church basement for suppers and Sunday school. The basement held its history to itself in cool darkness and kept a scent, like water; old, contained, mixed with the flavors of old lady’s perfumes, more composed salads, deviled eggs, Swedish meatballs, and weak coffee, all laid out in vagrant chafing dishes and plates with little bits of tape on them bearing the owner’s name.
My memories of winter are of sickness. I was famous for being sick. I had some grand illness when I was born. “Your toys all turned yellow when you touched them.” Nana said. I thought a great deal about what it meant to have yellow toys. Did anyone play with me? How could my body produce so much yellow? Was it like gold? Could I produce it on demand? Was this why I was with my Nana and not my mother? Snow came and for a brief time I could go outside and play, bundled up in so many layers of clothes that I could barely move, to play in the cold, with the strange whiteness that melted in my mouth.
Every morning I would trundle down the tall staircase outside my room, down the steep stairs, the stairs that threatened a fall at each step as I slipped down in my pajamas with feet. I would have breakfast at the green enamel table with folding sides, looking up at the cat clock that slowly moved its tail and eyes back and forth. Because of my famous illness I had to drink a glass of prune juice everyday and eat medicine mashed in green bananas. Then I would be set down on the toilet and there I would be for a very long time looking at the small window of the bathroom and the wallpaper with various kinds of fish that swam up to the mirrors flanked by two white florescent lights with shiny metal switches at the bottom of each. The fish swam in their sea of multicolored weeds stuck between pink and gray lines. They had happy faces, and I liked them quite a lot so I didn’t mind sitting there waiting for my nonexistent poo. Smelling the sweet urinal perfume mixed with Cashmere Bouquet and Ivory soap I waited for my reprieve. Even though I was full of love for my grandparents and wanted to be good I probably would have sat there all day waiting for the prune juice to work. I never understood what was the big deal with my evacuations anyway.
When Nana gave up she’d come and call me to the living room to brush my hair. On a little stool I’d sit, nestled in front of her and her wing-backed chair, and we would watch “As the World Turns” while she brushed in the ritual ringlets of my hair. First, dipping the brush into a little glass of water, then gently taking a small division of my hair in her hand she would brush, brush, brush and then begin to wind the segment around her finger, brushing at each turn to convince my wayward hair of the direction it was supposed to take. If there was something dreadful happening on her show she might gasp a little in astonishment that anyone could be so cruel or unfortunate. My hair might be forgotten in wonder--that someone could be pregnant--organ music rising--my Nana’s hand frozen in the air, tied to my head by a wet curl. Then the rhythm would begin again, one small curl worked slowly off her finger and another section of hair chosen, brush, brush, brush, until it was wet enough to wind around the finger.
You could watch a lot of soap opera that way.
“Tsk, tsk....” Nana said and I fell into a dream, a trance of warm sun, worlds turning in disgrace and the slow, wet, steady pace of my hair being combed and brushed. The lady who sat on top of the television holding up the lampshade and vines watched me drift away.
Where did I go? Somewhere calm, peaceful, and blank where I would rest until something would shake me out of my reverie and I would realize--with a jolt of solitude--that Nana was gone.
Where could she be? I always felt a deep shock at her disappearance. How could she leave me there all alone? Why didn’t I know she left? Did she sneak away? I wasn’t asleep, was I? How could I sleep sitting up on that little stool? After a moment or two of disorientation and panic I would hear her somewhere in the house singing and cleaning, and I would feel safe again.
Safe enough to start my own prowling around the house and I had plenty of territory to cover in that huge old place which was full of forbidden rooms and corners that I just had to see.
The most prohibited spot, and therefore the most attractive, was behind the door at the top of the stairs. A door to the right led to my bedroom which you had to pass through to reach either of my grandparents’ bedrooms. Each of those rooms had secret charms but what lay behind the door directly in front of me held the most promise of riches and forbidden pleasures. This is where my Great Grandfather once kept his chickens, and was strictly off limits. No evidence of chickens remained but a multitude of magic drew me in, like sin. Quietly opening the door, I would start across the floorboards that had drawn apart from each other over time. As I walked, one foot silently placed in front of the other, I would look down into the barn and catch the dark, dangerous smell of oily machinery. I would be especially thrilled to be sneaking across those boards if my grandparents happened to be down there for some reason. Granddaddy broiled fish there and Nana would call out to him to see how things were going. They didn’t know where I was in my secret place, watching them. All around me were objects that seemed to have been especially placed like things in some old painting. Mandolins, maracas, old toys, clothes, boxes, books, and a Phonoharp No. 21 from Boston, Massachusetts that made the most wonderful ancient sounds when I plucked the hard metal strings. Who had owned this instrument? Did my great grandfather play it? It sounded like it came from far away and long ago, nostalgic and faint.
As I made my way through this collection of wonders I would finally make it to the stage, or what was left of it after the chickens had had their way. A couple of steps up and there I would be, on stage. Pinned on the walls, up near the ceiling, were pictures of half-naked women, posed this way or that. They gazed out at me as though they were going to tell me all about it. One was a lady, she was my favorite, leaning over her washboard and tub, looking back at me with a surprised look, naked, except for her see-through gown saying, “Oops! I forgot my nightie!” As though there was something more to reveal, as though I didn’t get the joke.
Granddaddy’s naked pictures were something to think about but there was one more thing that was the real goal of this excursion into the forbidden zone. It sat on a table in the middle of the stage. A little town filled with houses and trees and little people, bridges, mountains: a whole universe in miniature and right through the middle of this was a train track that wended its way through the countryside with a complete train that said “Lionel” on the side of the cars. I don’t ever remember seeing it run and I couldn’t ask because that would give away the pathway of my covert meandering. It was enough to creep in and look at it and wonder who it was that had played with it once upon a time. Then, satisfied that I had seen, once more, the forbidden lands, I would slide back out again into my room to ride the Wonder horse and think about what I had seen.
Sometimes, though, these excursions upstairs excited me so much that I would, suddenly, have to go to the bathroom--the kind my Nana had waited so long for that very morning---the proof of the prune juice. What to do? The only bathroom was way downstairs, there wasn’t time to make it there. I had another plan and it was a good one because it too required stealth.
Nana’s room was sweetly scented, drawing its air through open windows--always open--through the white net curtains, frilled at top and bottom that billowed gently into the room with each breath of wind. Roses on the walls in neat little patterns, buds and full, walked down to the braided rug on the floor. Three mirrors turned in to gaze at themselves on the small table by her bed. A pair of graceful porcelain hands held a collection of rings. I’d stand and consider these elements for a long time with a strong, urgent sense of secrecy, breathing in the sweet perfume of Nana and all her love.
When I was sure that I was quite alone I would enter this sacred space and take a little piece of tissue paper from the basket by the dressing table. Then, I would neatly and politely poo into the tissue. I always inspected the present carefully, never touching the round, neat, earthy-sweet brownness. Did this come from me? After considering the mystery of this coveted item, so highly sought after by my elders, I would gently and tenderly wrap it up, and nestle it in the wastebasket. Proof, if ever there were, of my undying love for Nana.
Nana never mentioned my little gifts and I often wondered why. She was such an immaculately clean person, surely she must have found my little packages so lovingly arranged?
We went for walks, Nana and me, into the woods in back of the house or other places in the neighborhood. The pines were tall and whispering and I could feel all kinds of ghosts out there but I still didn’t want to go back in, so I’d hide. The pines grew taller and taller as Nana disappeared around the corner and then the trees turned into giant dinosaurs that were going to eat me up! Panic filled me as I ran and ran to catch up, never daring to look back. Other times we would cross the street to the village store but never much further, until one day we went further, past the store to a little road that led to a stone gateway with a metal arch over it. We walked up the old dirt road, along the worn parts, through dappled light, silently; I had a strong sense of big adventure. When we came to an opening in the trees that lined the road Nana stopped, took my hand, and gazed down at me.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked.
I just looked back up at her mute.
“This is where your great-grandparents are buried.”
I looked at the ground, wondering what that meant. All I could see was the ground, the trees, pine needles and tall white objects that leaned this way and that over rounded mounds of earth.
“Someday, I will be buried here too.”
She gazed down at me in a strange proud way as I struggled to understand why she was telling me this weird news. What did she mean be buried? Then something began to work its way up inside of me, dark, knowing, and old, that I had always understood, always known and had just been waiting to be told again. I looked at the full, leafy trees sighing softly, at the strange stone things standing around, then back at the ground for a long time, and said nothing, feeling like something precious had just passed out of my life, but I didn’t know what it was. Another strange, empty thing moved in to take up the space left by my Nana’s words.
We stood a while longer, in silence, then she took me by the hand, and we walked home.
I had a dream not long after which I remember to this day. Nana and I were at a gas station and I wandered away from the car for a moment. When I came back to find her I went up to her to take her hand and found she had turned into a cardboard cutout. I woke up screaming.
Nana said I walked in my sleep through that big dark house.
I lie in my bed, in my own house, the house not so far from my first remembered home listening to the cars driving by at night. I see them first by the trail of light that shadows the crosspieces of the windows on the ceiling of my room. Starting small, looming large, then fading away, just as they did in my bedroom when I was a child, and just as mysterious. Wavy patterns from the texture of old glass, the sense of age and endurance expressed in that waviness, somehow causes a combined feeling of security, loneliness, and transience in me. I drift away, both calmed and worried.
The trance of my childhood, my life with Nana and Granddaddy, was brief in the overarching span that I have lived so far. I cherish the memory of that oasis of caring and love that has sustained me through thornier times. I’ve often wondered what her motives were for taking me on a walk that day. Perhaps she had had some intimation of the end of her days. Possibly my mother and stepfather had already called to ask to take me back with them on their next trip out. Maybe, she intuitively knew how difficult the path would be for me. I left little gifts in her wastebasket, round symbols of life’s circle back to decay. She brought me the awareness of the transience of all things, even the beloved.
Comments
Robins Song
The Hell
Water...!
Water...!
We have not water.
Bread...!
Bread...!
We have not bread.
Egg
egg
The egg is cracked
Fire!
Hell!
~Seval Vincevic
The flooded remains--the water from the wetlands recedes--I’m checking the grounds for survival. The wind is picking up and the trees sound relieved. There’s always too much of a good thing and water is one of them. I’m checking the robin’s nest made in the low boughs of one of the hemlock tree. I planted the them six years ago and now they are over my head; but those branches are still too low for a young family of robins. I can’t help it, even though I hear the robin singing nearby, I have to see if those eggs, those beautiful blue of sky eggs, are cold. They are and I hear a poignance in two notes of the watching bird that tells me something may have happened to Mrs. Robin during the storm. Maybe they both just gave up--waiting for a sunny day to start again.
The song of a robin is varied. Often it is as cheerful as their red breasts popping over the hills in formation on the earliest days of Spring, days that seemed too early for such birds to find juicy worms and bugs to survive on. I wonder how they make it each year and are such comrades during these treks across the lawn; like men in formation intent on something good.
There was a time the sound of their song made me panic. Early mornings when I could never sleep. when I lay there counting hour after hour hoping that somehow this night I would break the spell and fall into deepest, darkest, restful ignorance--and sleep.
Ten o’clock was bedtime and when eleven rolled around there was still hope. Perhaps fifteen minutes and then it was twelve--where did I go then? Did I sleep? Not likely. One o’clock and panic would set in--two o’clock the tears. On and on, night after night. Five o’clock that neighbor in the house set so close next door in these Cambridge row houses that the light snapping on was like it was right over head, that drove me really nuts. Then I knew it was impossible another night without sleep.
Then I’d hear it--a two-note medley every morning. I hated that bird.
I walked for hours until the blood ran in my toes. I walked into the darkness of the fancy house area one block over--nearing Harvard Square. Julia Child's house with the beautiful apple trees and me--the sorrowful insomniac mourning by. One time, I lay down on the ground hoping that sleep would catch me on some side street. A cop pulled up and asked if I was okay.
And then the robin. Two notes. Over and over.
I had such panic. I rode my bike all over town. Something must make me tired and I was tired all the time. Something to eat, I was always hungry. Two bites of toast stuck in my throat like glue.
What brought me to this pass? I had always been able to handle it all. Even in the worst moments, even when I heard the news that my sister was dead I was finally able to sleep. I was able to catch the plane and lie down across two seats and cry. Why now? Why five years later?
I fixated on the last failed romance but I knew it wasn’t him.
I was under an avalanche of grief.
I rode my bike to work, down Magnolia Avenue, through Inman Square, down past the Science Museum and over to Beacon Hill.
I worked helping old people. One of my clients was an old lady. A rich old lady with a staff of five, who wandered around the house, her half full glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, always with a sediment of curdled cream rimming the edge. Old and mad she was with her silk dresses and cane as we walked down the hill from Louisberg Square. She smiled and nodded to everyone with her pith helmet on. Duck boats on tour would stop to take pictures. Make way for Mad Ducklings. We’d wander over to the Ritz where she used to live until she took off all her clothes to greet the guests next door when she was 75.
I loved her madness.
I loved imagining the rich patrons of the Ritz Carleton opening their door to a rich, drunk old lady screaming at them to get out of her room.
I used to drive my International Truck to her house, the big green monster of a truck called, Nishkinnon, from the company that used to own it. Nishkinnon, Lake of Clouds it means in some New England native people’s tongue. I’d park it on the edge of the special park that sits in the middle of Louisberg Square, the one that only the residents may enter. It’s a lonely place with over grown shrubs. The ghosts of Brahmins and Louisa May Alcott flit around. The nunnery’s bell still tolled.
My truck. It drove the lady with pretensions down stairs crazy that I parked that garden hose of a truck there; but my friend the drunk dowager had decided it was her truck and no one could bother it. In good weather, though I’d ride my bike to work.
She was dying. The Dowager with the Japanese screen that had been given to her father by the Emperor of Japan. We kept telling the doctors she was ill. She held her hand at her neck all the time. Sometimes she’d talk about how awful it was that the servants in her father’s house had to sleep way upstairs and get up at five o’clock in the morning to make her breakfast. I told her we didn’t mind so much anymore.
My old lady was dying, my boyfriend had left me and I couldn’t sleep or eat. I rode my bike, I walked--I dreaded nightfall but even more I dreaded dawn and the robin singing.
I rode my bike over Storrow Drive. I thought if I rode enough I would be tired at night and sleep again. I rode my bike across the footbridge and stopped each day in the middle to watch the cars drive underneath me. One day, on the last day, I stopped again. It had been a long time since I had slept. My life was a long round of waking and not eating. I was so skinny none of my clothes fit. I rode my bike across the footbridge. Life had become so sad and hard and there was no end to it. I was tired of crying everyday. I wanted to shut it off and sleep. Why couldn’t I sleep? Why couldn’t I snap out of this round of sorrow?
I stopped my bike on the bridge and leaned over the side. I started counting the seconds before a car would pass beneath the bridge. One, two three.....and then another car would come. They were moving fast those cars. Why can’t I sleep? I’m so tired and this sadness never ends. One....two.....some cars are faster than others. Why didn’t he love me? I watched the cars and realized there was nothing between me and jumping down there. I counted correctly I could jump right in front....
This reverie went on for quite sometime before I realized what I was doing. With the last bit of strength that was in me I pulled back in shock. If I stood there much longer I was going to jump in front of some poor unsuspecting car passing by on Storrow Drive. I got on my bike, totally exhausted and started to ride. I could barely push one pedal down. I pushed and rode but I was moving so slowly that people stopped to stare at me as I moved by. It was as though I were moving in slow motion. One more push and I would be by the river on the path toward home. One more push and over the bridge. My mind is numb with sorrow. I can’t move more. I’m moving past the Science museum. I need to go home, at least here it’s flat and there’s less traffic. I’m moving now and sometimes I can glide because there is no strength left in all my body. I can see a bubble around me and outside of that bubble it’s getting darker and darker. I have to get home. I have to keep riding. I have to stop this. I have to live. I cannot die like this. I’m going to die. I’m going to die like this. I am so sad. I can not live like this. I must make it home.
At home I lie on the bed. This can’t go on. How long have I been like this? If I go on like this I will die. I won’t stop myself the next time. I won’t even know what I’m doing. My roommate, my dear friend, Sarah, comes home. She walks me over to the hospital. We sit together for a long time. She keeps asking me if this is what I need to do.
Yes.
The intern is terrified because I tell her I’m suicidal and keeps jabbing me over and over with the needle looking for a vein for blood. I watch her jabbing me and it strikes me funny that she’s so scared I’ll kill myself that she’s jabbing me with a needle and I’m so removed I can’t feel a thing. There’s no room for me in the hospital they say. I’ll have to go to Belmont to the institution.
Oh boy, I think. I’m putting myself into a mental institution. Okay, I say. No room at the inn. To the Insane Asylum I go. We wait for the men and the van to come. I’m riding in an ambulance. Suddenly it all seems a little silly. Maybe if I go home now...can’t I sleep? Can’t I eat? I can’t. I could just go home. I can’t. I say goodbye to Sarah and climb into the back.
I’m riding backwards through the Cambridge Streets, the ones I’ve so often wandered. I’m looking out the back windows of the ambulance that’s taking me there. The streets are empty and slightly wet. I watch the streetlights glowing orange. I want to cry and cry and yet I feel hopeful--they won’t let me kill myself. The drivers let me sit up since I didn’t seem violent. What have I done? The ambulance whooshes down under a bridge. I’m all set now.
When we get to the hospital it’s like something out of an old movie. Long wings of brick and glass, white columns on a porch, like this is a grand place, an ante-bellum palace. An air of neglect and something out of place is stamped all over the grounds. The garden grounds--large trees--a restful setting. They walk me through the metal doors and trade me off to other hands. I hear metal doors bang shut behind me and I think I’ve never heard a sound so loudly final in my life.
I’m an inmate of a mental institution. Not just any asylum, nope. This one is on it’s last legs, about to close, it’s puke green peeling walls and brick front, the manicured lawns, classic insane asylum. I couldn’t ask for better.
Three days of crying. Three nights of lying awake.
Three oranges left on the windowsill.
The mad poetess, my roommate
takes them and leaves me a collection of worn out bras.
Three days of weeping. The green grilled windows
the night time windows
a raccoon on the lawn eating apples
Three weeks
Cots.
Friends arrive after I’m allowed my phone calls to tell them where I am. Friends, who, as though I were suddenly their father confessor, weep and tell me what’s wrong in their lives.
and I think, wait, it’s me in the insane asylum.
The guarded showers, shampoo handed me, in case I drink it, trying to die. People try to kill themselves with shampoo? I laugh about that one. Amateurs.
Chairs lined up like we’re at an airport. We’re watching a movie. The Elephant Man.
You can’t make this shit up, I think.
The girl who wants to live on air, certain she can do it. The one with all the marks on her arms. The poetess who never speaks. The man locked in his room screaming for days and days finally comes out of his room to kneel by my chair and masturbate.
My visiting friend says, “Don’t look over there.” as they drag him away, screaming again.
“You’re the belle of the ward.” she laughs.
One friend I call asks me if it’s a performance piece I’m doing.
I guess I’m really a performance artist now.
I realize as the medicines start to work that I’ve been running for a long time. Always afraid that if I fall, I won’t get back up, there was no place to fall. The years of wandering from place to place, a full tow of goods, trying to recreate home. Moving sometimes five or six times a year. The bad choices, the emotionally abusive relationships, the self-inflicted shame, the hatred, I can’t fall down, if I do, I’ll never get up.
The guilt of my sister’s suicide.
Three weeks later, when I can finally sleep I sit before a board of doctors convincing them I know why I wanted to die. I just couldn’t sleep. I needed to stop and grieve. For me. I needed to grieve for me. When they are sure I’m not going to do myself in, I head home.
Outside the saturation of color all around me, everything is glowing, fall colors, how did they get so full? I’ve never seen color so rich. I’m going to live.
Water...!
Water...!
We have not water.
Bread...!
Bread...!
We have not bread.
Egg
egg
The egg is cracked
Fire!
Hell!
~Seval Vincevic
The flooded remains--the water from the wetlands recedes--I’m checking the grounds for survival. The wind is picking up and the trees sound relieved. There’s always too much of a good thing and water is one of them. I’m checking the robin’s nest made in the low boughs of one of the hemlock tree. I planted the them six years ago and now they are over my head; but those branches are still too low for a young family of robins. I can’t help it, even though I hear the robin singing nearby, I have to see if those eggs, those beautiful blue of sky eggs, are cold. They are and I hear a poignance in two notes of the watching bird that tells me something may have happened to Mrs. Robin during the storm. Maybe they both just gave up--waiting for a sunny day to start again.
The song of a robin is varied. Often it is as cheerful as their red breasts popping over the hills in formation on the earliest days of Spring, days that seemed too early for such birds to find juicy worms and bugs to survive on. I wonder how they make it each year and are such comrades during these treks across the lawn; like men in formation intent on something good.
There was a time the sound of their song made me panic. Early mornings when I could never sleep. when I lay there counting hour after hour hoping that somehow this night I would break the spell and fall into deepest, darkest, restful ignorance--and sleep.
Ten o’clock was bedtime and when eleven rolled around there was still hope. Perhaps fifteen minutes and then it was twelve--where did I go then? Did I sleep? Not likely. One o’clock and panic would set in--two o’clock the tears. On and on, night after night. Five o’clock that neighbor in the house set so close next door in these Cambridge row houses that the light snapping on was like it was right over head, that drove me really nuts. Then I knew it was impossible another night without sleep.
Then I’d hear it--a two-note medley every morning. I hated that bird.
I walked for hours until the blood ran in my toes. I walked into the darkness of the fancy house area one block over--nearing Harvard Square. Julia Child's house with the beautiful apple trees and me--the sorrowful insomniac mourning by. One time, I lay down on the ground hoping that sleep would catch me on some side street. A cop pulled up and asked if I was okay.
And then the robin. Two notes. Over and over.
I had such panic. I rode my bike all over town. Something must make me tired and I was tired all the time. Something to eat, I was always hungry. Two bites of toast stuck in my throat like glue.
What brought me to this pass? I had always been able to handle it all. Even in the worst moments, even when I heard the news that my sister was dead I was finally able to sleep. I was able to catch the plane and lie down across two seats and cry. Why now? Why five years later?
I fixated on the last failed romance but I knew it wasn’t him.
I was under an avalanche of grief.
I rode my bike to work, down Magnolia Avenue, through Inman Square, down past the Science Museum and over to Beacon Hill.
I worked helping old people. One of my clients was an old lady. A rich old lady with a staff of five, who wandered around the house, her half full glass of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, always with a sediment of curdled cream rimming the edge. Old and mad she was with her silk dresses and cane as we walked down the hill from Louisberg Square. She smiled and nodded to everyone with her pith helmet on. Duck boats on tour would stop to take pictures. Make way for Mad Ducklings. We’d wander over to the Ritz where she used to live until she took off all her clothes to greet the guests next door when she was 75.
I loved her madness.
I loved imagining the rich patrons of the Ritz Carleton opening their door to a rich, drunk old lady screaming at them to get out of her room.
I used to drive my International Truck to her house, the big green monster of a truck called, Nishkinnon, from the company that used to own it. Nishkinnon, Lake of Clouds it means in some New England native people’s tongue. I’d park it on the edge of the special park that sits in the middle of Louisberg Square, the one that only the residents may enter. It’s a lonely place with over grown shrubs. The ghosts of Brahmins and Louisa May Alcott flit around. The nunnery’s bell still tolled.
My truck. It drove the lady with pretensions down stairs crazy that I parked that garden hose of a truck there; but my friend the drunk dowager had decided it was her truck and no one could bother it. In good weather, though I’d ride my bike to work.
She was dying. The Dowager with the Japanese screen that had been given to her father by the Emperor of Japan. We kept telling the doctors she was ill. She held her hand at her neck all the time. Sometimes she’d talk about how awful it was that the servants in her father’s house had to sleep way upstairs and get up at five o’clock in the morning to make her breakfast. I told her we didn’t mind so much anymore.
My old lady was dying, my boyfriend had left me and I couldn’t sleep or eat. I rode my bike, I walked--I dreaded nightfall but even more I dreaded dawn and the robin singing.
I rode my bike over Storrow Drive. I thought if I rode enough I would be tired at night and sleep again. I rode my bike across the footbridge and stopped each day in the middle to watch the cars drive underneath me. One day, on the last day, I stopped again. It had been a long time since I had slept. My life was a long round of waking and not eating. I was so skinny none of my clothes fit. I rode my bike across the footbridge. Life had become so sad and hard and there was no end to it. I was tired of crying everyday. I wanted to shut it off and sleep. Why couldn’t I sleep? Why couldn’t I snap out of this round of sorrow?
I stopped my bike on the bridge and leaned over the side. I started counting the seconds before a car would pass beneath the bridge. One, two three.....and then another car would come. They were moving fast those cars. Why can’t I sleep? I’m so tired and this sadness never ends. One....two.....some cars are faster than others. Why didn’t he love me? I watched the cars and realized there was nothing between me and jumping down there. I counted correctly I could jump right in front....
This reverie went on for quite sometime before I realized what I was doing. With the last bit of strength that was in me I pulled back in shock. If I stood there much longer I was going to jump in front of some poor unsuspecting car passing by on Storrow Drive. I got on my bike, totally exhausted and started to ride. I could barely push one pedal down. I pushed and rode but I was moving so slowly that people stopped to stare at me as I moved by. It was as though I were moving in slow motion. One more push and I would be by the river on the path toward home. One more push and over the bridge. My mind is numb with sorrow. I can’t move more. I’m moving past the Science museum. I need to go home, at least here it’s flat and there’s less traffic. I’m moving now and sometimes I can glide because there is no strength left in all my body. I can see a bubble around me and outside of that bubble it’s getting darker and darker. I have to get home. I have to keep riding. I have to stop this. I have to live. I cannot die like this. I’m going to die. I’m going to die like this. I am so sad. I can not live like this. I must make it home.
At home I lie on the bed. This can’t go on. How long have I been like this? If I go on like this I will die. I won’t stop myself the next time. I won’t even know what I’m doing. My roommate, my dear friend, Sarah, comes home. She walks me over to the hospital. We sit together for a long time. She keeps asking me if this is what I need to do.
Yes.
The intern is terrified because I tell her I’m suicidal and keeps jabbing me over and over with the needle looking for a vein for blood. I watch her jabbing me and it strikes me funny that she’s so scared I’ll kill myself that she’s jabbing me with a needle and I’m so removed I can’t feel a thing. There’s no room for me in the hospital they say. I’ll have to go to Belmont to the institution.
Oh boy, I think. I’m putting myself into a mental institution. Okay, I say. No room at the inn. To the Insane Asylum I go. We wait for the men and the van to come. I’m riding in an ambulance. Suddenly it all seems a little silly. Maybe if I go home now...can’t I sleep? Can’t I eat? I can’t. I could just go home. I can’t. I say goodbye to Sarah and climb into the back.
I’m riding backwards through the Cambridge Streets, the ones I’ve so often wandered. I’m looking out the back windows of the ambulance that’s taking me there. The streets are empty and slightly wet. I watch the streetlights glowing orange. I want to cry and cry and yet I feel hopeful--they won’t let me kill myself. The drivers let me sit up since I didn’t seem violent. What have I done? The ambulance whooshes down under a bridge. I’m all set now.
When we get to the hospital it’s like something out of an old movie. Long wings of brick and glass, white columns on a porch, like this is a grand place, an ante-bellum palace. An air of neglect and something out of place is stamped all over the grounds. The garden grounds--large trees--a restful setting. They walk me through the metal doors and trade me off to other hands. I hear metal doors bang shut behind me and I think I’ve never heard a sound so loudly final in my life.
I’m an inmate of a mental institution. Not just any asylum, nope. This one is on it’s last legs, about to close, it’s puke green peeling walls and brick front, the manicured lawns, classic insane asylum. I couldn’t ask for better.
Three days of crying. Three nights of lying awake.
Three oranges left on the windowsill.
The mad poetess, my roommate
takes them and leaves me a collection of worn out bras.
Three days of weeping. The green grilled windows
the night time windows
a raccoon on the lawn eating apples
Three weeks
Cots.
Friends arrive after I’m allowed my phone calls to tell them where I am. Friends, who, as though I were suddenly their father confessor, weep and tell me what’s wrong in their lives.
and I think, wait, it’s me in the insane asylum.
The guarded showers, shampoo handed me, in case I drink it, trying to die. People try to kill themselves with shampoo? I laugh about that one. Amateurs.
Chairs lined up like we’re at an airport. We’re watching a movie. The Elephant Man.
You can’t make this shit up, I think.
The girl who wants to live on air, certain she can do it. The one with all the marks on her arms. The poetess who never speaks. The man locked in his room screaming for days and days finally comes out of his room to kneel by my chair and masturbate.
My visiting friend says, “Don’t look over there.” as they drag him away, screaming again.
“You’re the belle of the ward.” she laughs.
One friend I call asks me if it’s a performance piece I’m doing.
I guess I’m really a performance artist now.
I realize as the medicines start to work that I’ve been running for a long time. Always afraid that if I fall, I won’t get back up, there was no place to fall. The years of wandering from place to place, a full tow of goods, trying to recreate home. Moving sometimes five or six times a year. The bad choices, the emotionally abusive relationships, the self-inflicted shame, the hatred, I can’t fall down, if I do, I’ll never get up.
The guilt of my sister’s suicide.
Three weeks later, when I can finally sleep I sit before a board of doctors convincing them I know why I wanted to die. I just couldn’t sleep. I needed to stop and grieve. For me. I needed to grieve for me. When they are sure I’m not going to do myself in, I head home.
Outside the saturation of color all around me, everything is glowing, fall colors, how did they get so full? I’ve never seen color so rich. I’m going to live.
—
Cathy Nolan Vincevic