With hard words and cold indifference, she can turn away anyone she chooses, but sometimes those weapons have not been sufficiently effective in our turbulent relationship. Even though she doesn’t feel it, she recognizes the existence of a special bond between mother and child, and she knows that sometimes it won’t be broken by any but the cruelest measures.
“You want to pull the trigger for me?” she asked.
As I always do, I looked away. As if I had inhaled the shade of the oaks along with the air, as if my lungs passed it into my blood, I felt a cold shadow arise in the chambers of my heart.
As she always does when I avert my eyes, she said, “Look at me, look at me, or I’ll gut-shoot myself and die slow and screaming right here in front of you.”
Sickened, trembling, I gave her the attention that she wanted.
“You might as well pull the trigger yourself, you little shit. It’s no different than making me pull it.”
I couldn’t count—and didn’t care to remember—how often I had heard this challenge before.
My mother is insane. Psychologists might use an array of more specific and less judgmental terms, but in the Dictionary of Odd, her behavior is the definition of insanity.
I have been told that she wasn’t always like this. As a child, she had been sweet, playful, affectionate.
The terrible change occurred when she was sixteen. She began to experience sudden mood swings. The sweetness was supplanted by an unrelenting, simmering anger that she could best control when she was alone.
Therapy and a series of medications failed to restore her former good nature. When, at eighteen, she rejected further treatment, no one insisted that she continue with psychotherapy or drugs, because at that time she hadn’t been as dysfunctional, as solipsistic, and as threatening as she became by her early twenties.
When my father met her, she was just moody enough and dangerous enough to infatuate him. As she grew worse, he bailed.
She has never been institutionalized because her self-control is excellent when she’s not being challenged to interact with others beyond her capacity. She limits all threats of violence to suicide and occasionally to me, presenting a charming or at least rational face to the world.
Because she has a comfortable income without the need to work and because she prefers life as a recluse, her true condition is not widely recognized in Pico Mundo.
Her exceptional beauty also helps her to keep her secrets. Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.
Her voice grew raw and more confrontational: “I curse the night I let your idiot father squirt you into me.”
This didn’t shock me. I’d heard it before, and worse.
She said, “I should’ve had you scraped out of me and thrown in the garbage. But what would I have gotten from the divorce then? You were the ticket.”
When I look at my mother in this condition, I don’t see hatred in her, but anguish and desperation and even terror. I can’t imagine the pain and the horror of being her.
I take solace only in the knowledge that when she is alone, when she is not challenged to give anything of herself, she is content if not happy. I want her to be at least content.
She said, “Either stop sucking my blood or pull the trigger, you little shit.”
One of my most vivid early memories is of a rainy night in January when I was five years old and suffering with influenza. When not coughing, I cried for attention and relief, and my mother was unable to find a corner of the house in which she could entirely escape the sound of my misery.
She came to my room and stretched out beside me on the bed, as any mother might lie down to comfort a stricken child, but she came with the gun. Her threats to kill herself always earned my silence, my obedience, my grant of absolution from her parental obligations.
That night, I swallowed my misery as best I could and stifled my tears, but I couldn’t wish away my sore and inflamed throat. To her, my coughing was a demand for mothering, and its persistence brought her to an emotional precipice.
When the threat of suicide didn’t silence my cough, she put the muzzle of the gun to my right eye. She encouraged me to try to see the shiny point of the bullet deep in that narrow dark passage.
We were a long time there together, with the rain beating on my bedroom windows. I have known much terror since, but none as pure as what I knew that night.
From the perspective of a twenty-year-old, I don’t believe that she would have killed me then or that she ever will. Were she to harm me—or anyone—she would doom herself to exactly the interaction with other people that she most dreads. She knows that they would want answers and explanations from her. They would want truth and remorse and justice. They would want far too much, and they would never stop wanting.
I didn’t know if here on the porch steps she would turn the gun on me again, and I didn’t know exactly how I would react if she did. I had come seeking a confrontation that would enlighten me, though I didn’t understand what it needed to be or what I could learn from it that would help me to find Robertson’s collaborator.
Then she lowered the gun from her throat to her left breast, as she always does, for the symbolism of a bullet through the brain will not as powerfully affect any mother’s son as will the symbolism of a shot through the heart.
“If you won’t leave me alone, if you won’t stop forever sucking and sucking on me, draining me like a leech, then for God’s sake pull the trigger, give me some peace.”
Into my mind’s eye came the wound in Robertson’s chest, as it had plagued me for nearly twelve hours.
I tried to drown that insistent image in the swamp of memory from which it had risen. It is a deep swamp, filled with much that stubbornly will not remain submerged.
Suddenly I realized that this was why I had come here: to force my mother to enact the hateful ritual of threatened suicide that was at the core of our relationship, to be confronted with the sight of a pistol pressed to her breast, to turn away as I always do, to hear her command my attention ... and then, sickened and trembling, to find the nerve to look.
The previous night, in my bathroom, I hadn’t been strong enough to examine Robertson’s chest wound.
At the time, I’d sensed that something was strange about it, that something might be learned from it. Yet, nauseated, I had averted my eyes and rebuttoned his shirt.
Thrusting the pistol toward me, grip-first, my mother angrily insisted, “Come on, you ungrateful shit, take it, take it, shoot me and get it over with or leave me alone!”
Eleven-thirty-five, according to my wristwatch.
Her voice had grown as vicious and demented as ever it gets: “I dreamed and dreamed that you would be born dead.”
Shakily, I rose to my feet and carefully descended the porch steps.
Behind me, she wielded the knife of alienation as only she can cut with it: “The whole time I carried you, I thought you were dead inside me, dead and rotting.”
The sun, nurturing mother of the earth, poured a scalding milk upon the day, boiling some of the blue from the sky and leaving the heavens faded. Even the oak shadows now throbbed with heat, and as I walked away from my mother, I was so hot with shame that I would not have been surprised if the grass had burst into fire under my feet.
“Dead inside me,” she repeated. “Month after unending month, I felt your rotting fetus festering in my belly, spreading