A portrait of an American family in the 1970s
Dick is a patient on the seventh floor of a private psychiatric hospital on Chicago’s Near North side. For the first two weeks we aren’t allowed to visit him at all. I bake cookies and send them in a tin. The tin comes back the following week with a note, the handwriting shaky, but the sense of humor is distinctly my brother’s: “Thanks for the kookies, you kook.”
I endure the next five weeks as an only child in a house where the adults who come and go are far too distracted to notice me, but I find opportunity in the vacuum. That’s when I first begin to practise the art of leaving by the window.
I wait until my mother switches off the hall light and goes to bed. Then I wait another 15 or 20 minutes until I can hear my dad’s deep breathing, his almost-snores echoing up the hall. In the pitch dark, I part my lace curtains, quietly lift the sash and peel back the screen from its frame. My second-floor room is on the inside of an L-shaped corner of the apartment building. Every third brick juts out from the façade just enough to get a toehold. Below me is a small flat roof above the doorway. I let myself down onto the black tar and scramble the last eight or nine feet down a decorative wrought-iron lattice that frames the entry. My bare feet touch grass and I walk away from the apartment over lawns, avoiding streetlights, feeling the bracing cool of dew-wet grass between my toes. I have pinpricks on my arms and legs, and I tremble with anticipation. At the end of the block, I put on my shoes, which are in the donkey bag slung over my shoulder. The long park that borders Lake Michigan is only five blocks away. In a few minutes, I’ll join the other night marauders, the older kids who stay out to smoke pot and watch the shooting stars.
*
One Friday evening after dinner, my mother goes out for a walk and doesn’t come back. I’m in my room listening to music on the FM transistor, and I don’t pay much attention. I fall asleep with the earphones on, the radio under my pillow. When I wake early the next morning, there’s this song from The Band going round and round my head, “take the load off Fanny, take the load for free ...”
My dad is sitting at the table with a cold cup of coffee in front of him. He looks awful, unshaven and unslept. “Do you know where your mother’s gone?” he asks me. Is it a question, I wonder, or is he about to tell me? The world slows down, my dad and I alone in a dense fog. “It’s summer,” he says, talking to himself. “It wouldn’t have been very cold last night.” We debate calling the police, but in the end we don’t. My dad drives around in the car to look for her, and I take the dog and walk down to the lake. Suddenly I need my mother terribly. I am crying as I walk past all the big houses along the lakefront. How could someone simply disappear? For a fleeting moment, I understand that I depend upon my mother the way breathing depends on air.
“Do you know where your mother’s gone?” he asks me. Is it a question, I wonder, or is he about to tell me?
My mother comes home in the late afternoon. I’m afraid to say anything, but I’m angry too. I stuff it all behind a cool veneer. My dad seems even more anxious than before. “Ivanie,” he says, “where have you been?” His voice is husky, like he’s choking something back.
“Sitting on a bench. In the park, up near the university.”
“What were you doing?” my father asks.
“I was sitting there. Thinking, I guess.”
That’s all. We eat a meal together in complete silence, just the three of us, that song still stuck in my head. Dick has been away at the hospital for several weeks, but tomorrow they’re going to let me see him. If he’s having a good day, I can take him out, maybe for a walk around the block. After all, I’m 13.
*
A few weeks after my brother went to the hospital, my mother suggested maybe I should see someone too. She’d had a letter from the principal, mailed home with my midterm report card. It seemed they didn’t trust me to deliver it myself. My grades and the teacher’s comments indicated several cracks in my reliable, steady demeanour. The letter alerted my parents to my “excessive absences”. We had a series of heart-to-heart talks, my mother and I, but for once I wasn’t forthcoming. I was curled tight as a pill bug, drawn into myself. “Now you’re acting like a teenager,” my mother snapped. “Grunts and one-word answers.” My cheeks were red hot, but I wasn’t giving in.
“I phoned the school,” she said. “The guidance counsellor suggested I make an appointment for you at County Mental Health. This Wednesday afternoon at 4, okay? I’ve arranged with the office to get out early—just this once. You’ll have to go on your own after that.”
I was secretly pleased. I’d been crawling in my skin, and home was just an empty place I came back to every evening, for the ritual of family dinner and the nightly news. I’d broken up with Eli because I didn’t want to have sex again. He was already going out with someone else, not a freak at all, just a nice Jewish girl. She didn’t even get high. I suppose I should’ve been despondent, but I didn’t really care. I didn’t feel much of anything. I’d taken to stealing again, this time from home: condoms from my dad’s sock drawer, money from my mother’s purse. I took a twenty-dollar bill and bought an ounce of good pot, rolling joints for all my friends, leaving little treats in their lockers or slipped into their shoes during PE.
On the day of the appointment, my mother read out the counsellor’s name from the information sheet they’d mailed to us: Sister Felipé.
“Holy shit, is she a nun?”
“Language, Abby.”
“I’m serious, Mom. I can’t talk to a nun.”
“She’s not just a nun, she’s a professional. She talks to kids all the time.”
“I’m not a kid.”
“Teenager.” My mother’s voice was strained.
I didn’t think how hard it must have been for her to get away from the office more than an hour early, let alone bear the burden of another child on the edge. I wondered if I was cracking up.
My mother announced my arrival to a woman behind a glass screen, and we sat on orange plastic chairs in the waiting room. Across from me, a boy with a round face and broken glasses held together with masking tape had picked up two plastic trucks from the toy corner. He was bashing them together over and over; they were already mangled beyond repair. His mother, a bigger, rounder version of the boy, with stringy hair and bright pink lipstick, swatted the air beside him with a rolled-up magazine. “Cut it out, Henry,” she pleaded. “Act your age!”
My name was called, and the woman behind the screen pointed to a room at the end of the corridor. My mother waved to me from her seat and went back to the papers she’d brought from work. The room I entered was small and square. Two chairs set on the diagonal facing each other, a narrow window with half-closed Venetian blinds. Late afternoon sun streamed in unpleasantly. The nun got up from a small desk in the corner, turned and gestured at one of the chairs. She was very little, smaller than me, with a leathery brown face. She wore a white jumper, white stockings, and sported an enormous wooden cross around her neck. Her hair was pulled back in a trim bun. On the wall behind her was that pathetic poster of a kitten dangling from a bar, frantically holding on with its claws. Hang in there, baby.
“Sit down, Abby,” Sister Felipé said with a quick, tight smile. “Let’s get started.”
*
I went to Sister Felipé exactly three times. After the third session, the Sister called my mother and told her she thought I was having sex. I didn’t know how she’d deduced that, but I was furious. She’d never asked me; I would’ve told her if she had. Besides, I wasn’t having sex. I’d had it once and didn’t like it. It wasn’t at all like the warm, oceanic encounter I’d dreamed about. It was awkward, boring and messy.
Sister had missed the point entirely. All she’d succeeded in doing was startling my mother and bringing on a few weeks of misplaced scrutiny. I didn’t cancel the next appointment. I just never went back.
*
Everything is the wrong way around. When I enter the hospital, the doors are unlocked from the outside. It’s easy to breeze right in. But once inside, I quickly discover that the way back out is locked. My mother is waiting in the car; I’m supposed to run back out and tell her when to pick me up. After I check with the nurses on Dick’s floor, I have to ask the orderly behind the desk to let me out again. I tell my mother we’ve got a pass and we’re going out for a walk. “Come back in an hour and a half,” I say.
“Are you sure you’ll be okay, Abby?”
“Yeah, yeah, mom. Fine.”
Dick and I take the stairs back down to the lobby. He doesn’t want to get in the elevator. The orderly behind the desk looks me up and down. He asks my name and scrutinises Dick’s pass. “Only good for an hour,” says the orderly. “You have to have him back here by 10 past three.” Like he’s a sack of laundry or something. I nod my assent and the orderly presses a button underneath the desk. There’s a loud click as the lock on the thick glass door releases. Dick shies like a spooked horse.
“It’s okay,” I say, and give him a big, sure smile. “It’s a nice day out there.” Dick looks as if he’s going to cry, or bolt, so I take him by the hand and lead him towards the door. This time it swings open easily when I lean on the bar.
We step down onto the sidewalk and turn towards the busy intersection. Dick’s shaking hard enough to send little tremors up my wrist. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s the medication.” I don’t let go of his hand.
There’s a crosswalk at the corner, and I plan to take Dick across and into the park. “Come on.” I’m making my voice sound as cheerful as possible, but my heart is racing. I look around at the cars that have stopped at the light, and a mixture of pride and embarrassment floods through me. I’m old enough to take my big brother out for a walk, my crazy big brother who hasn’t left the hospital for weeks. I wonder what people see when they look at me. Do they know how responsible I am?
Dick’s hands are starting to sweat. I suddenly realise that if he panics or tries to run, I won’t be able to stop him. We haven’t gone 10 feet from the hospital door; we aren’t even at the corner, when Dick says he wants to go back inside. Something stubborn in me kicks in. “Not yet,” I say. “Please—just try to make it to the corner.” Dick starts to move again, and a flood of relief surges through me. Maybe I can handle this.
He’d crushed a vertebra when he jumped and had to wear a stiff brace on his back
At the corner, the lights change against us and we have to wait while cars and taxis whiz past. A black limousine rushes by and Dick goes suddenly rigid. “Now! We have to go back now!”
“But Dick,” I tell him. “You can see the lake from the park, just over there.” He laughs a nervous little laugh, and says, “Yeah, and the elephants too.” But he won’t move when the light turns green. I take him back inside.
We sit for a while in the day room, where lots of patients are smoking, but my brother won’t let me light up. “What elephants?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer. After a while, he says he wants to go to his room, so I lean over and hug him briefly and leave him sitting there. I’ve failed. I take the elevator back to the lobby, where I thumb through wilted issues of Time magazine, waiting for my mother to pick me up.
*
My brother was home by Thanksgiving, but he wasn’t back in school. He’d crushed a vertebra when he jumped and had to wear a stiff brace on his back. It was itchy and uncomfortable, but he couldn’t stand without it. He had some kind of home study course he would work on in the evenings with my parents’ help, and two young men came by a few afternoons a week. One was a divinity school student, the other studied business administration at Northwestern. They were supposed to be helping my brother cope, but between the back brace and all the medication, Dick mostly slept. I took it on as my project to cheer him up.
On the days when I wasn’t over at the Andersens', or off at the park scoring dope and getting high, I would come home and knock on Dick’s door. If he was awake, I’d go in and perch on the end of his bed and read his poems and listen to music. I went Christmas shopping for him, getting gag gifts for mom and dad, a rawhide chew toy shaped like a small Christmas stocking for the dog, and a red catnip mouse for the cat. I offered to get my brother stoned, but he just shook his head and said, “No way.”
I persuaded my father to let us make the annual photo album by ourselves. In the past, my father always posed us in front of the fireplace or by the Christmas tree. We’d add the new photo and wrap it up and gave it to my mother under the tree. Every year, she’d act surprised. Then we’d all sit next to her, as she looked through the album, page by page, until she came to the new photo and exclaimed in delight. The album was a tidy record of holiday outfits and the passing of our childhoods.
Our first decision was that we should each get a page of our own, to do with as we pleased. When we were done, the staid old Christmas album exploded with psychedelic intensity, our pages thickly decorated with cut-up photos, layers of pictures and headlines from Rolling Stone and Mad magazine. Dick’s featured a pen-and-ink portrait of Bob Dylan and the words “roughing it”. Mine had a photo of me in an old Army jacket, taken from behind. I’m swivelled around to face the camera, my lips in a puffy grimace, my pupils dilated. The photo was adorned at the top by a tiny clipping from the New Yorker that said, “Last chance to set a young person straight.”
An extract from the recently published down they forgot: a memoir by Abby Letteri (Lilith House Press, $22), available from bookstores nationwide.
