In Another Country
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Sara Boyd has been shaped by crises, by illnesses and deaths that wrench her from familiar domestic landscapes into "another country." In these six interlocking stories, Sara recalls the devastating death of her father when she was 12; her mother's frightening recurrent bouts with madness; and the protracted illness that now threatens to take her husband.
In the third chapter, "Facing Front," an old reel of film leads Sara into a series of recollections about her difficult relationship with her mother and her struggle to understand and accept the vagaries of her character as her mother's behavior increasingly reflects the uncontrollable cycles of depression and mania. Below is an excerpt from this chapter.
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(Excerpt from In Another Country, Chapter 3, pp. 51-59)
FACING FRONT
The last time my brother visited us he left a reel of film for me, the 16 mm kind with no sound. "Something I found when I was cleaning out the attic at Mom's. I had a copy made for you. " I just shrugged and put it on top of the refrigerator and left it for a while. It lay there, a big dark celluloid cookie, until I finally got around to borrowing a projector from the college and running it. We waited for the kids to go to sleep, and then I set the projector on the coffee table while Phil unrolled the screen. I could tell the film wasn't very long, and it seemed like lot of trouble to go to for six or seven minutes of somebody's old home movie, but I thought it might be amusing, even if it were only me waddling around in diapers squeezing mud worms through my fingers.
The big white square danced, glared, then was suddenly overtaken by the faded sepia interior of a room. The sunlight spiking through the windowpanes barely outlined the windows and woodwork, the folds of drapes like bleached carved stone, and I could just make out in the shadows on either side of the window two tall trumpet shaped urns full of gladiolas. A wake? A christening? The only movement was the lurching and wheeling provided by the hand-held movie camera. The room bounced for a few seconds, then the image blurred into lateral streaks and we were transported outside and temporarily overpowered by the bright sunlight. "Take your finger off the button, dummy, " I muttered, while Phil sat back with arms folded, repeating gleefully "It's a classic , a real film classic."
Then suddenly, with no transition, there they were, and I knew we were watching my parents' wedding reception at my grandmother's house in Skaneateles, New York, July 31, 1938. They just burst onto the screen, my mother and father, swaying in front of the latticed area underneath my grandmother's wraparound porch, arm in arm, with big grins on their faces, my mother all dark lines and angles, black hair and eyebrows and vivid dark lips and eyes, my father blond and slim, shiny-faced and curly-haired, both proud and confident, innocent of any suspicions about their future. The breeze blew my mother's veil across her face and my father said something out of the corner of his mouth, and my mother smiled even harder, put up her hand to hold down her veil, then looked up at my father and excitedly jiggled his arm with her other hand, which he pressed closer to his side. My mother hung on his arm and beamed, too large dimples shadowing her smile. The person with the camera must have said something about kiss the bride, because my father appeared startled and shook his head, and my mother lowered her eyelids and looked demure, and then they bent toward each other and briefly touched lips. Then they came to attention, eyes front, like two mechanical soldier dolls, and my father snapped a mock salute. They laughed and sidled away through the shrubbery, and the camera panned around to the guests; all my aunts and uncles, my father's father the minister, his wife, my chubby grandmother with the plain frontier schoolmarm's face, wire rimmed glasses and all, and my other grandmother, my mother's mother, stout, elegant, faded, with white hair and pale thin mouth, looking exhausted but relieved.
The whole scene had that jerky, slightly jived-up tempo of old movies, but there was something else wrong. Nobody looked quite the way I remembered them; nothing matched the pictures I had filed away in my memory. Even my grandmother's house with the high, latticed porch was oddly unfamiliar.
"There's something wrong," I said. "Something's not right about the faces."
"I don't see anything wrong," Phil said. "I'd know your mother anywhere; she looked as crazy as a coot even then. It's that wild, glassed-in look in her eyes."
"It all looks strange. Not the way I remember it."
"Maybe you don't remember it right because you weren't born yet."
"I don't think that's it. But never mind. Let's just watch."
We watched for a few more minutes while the camera nosed around the grounds of my grandmother's house, trying to keep up with my parents as they mingled with the guests. Then the film hiccuped and my parents came out of the front door dressed in street clothes and started down the steps, while the guests awkwardly hurled rice at them and they bobbed and ducked, laughing. My father got a handful in the eye at close range from my mother's sister Rosie and stopped to wipe the rice away like so many hard little tears. They hurried over to a car parked in the street alongside the house, got in, and drove away. The film ran on rather aimlessly, forlornly, back over the wedding guests, the house, the goldfish pond, until the last frame jerked away and the film slapped around the take-up reel.
"Why did your father have an English car?" Phil asked.
"Huh?"
"The car. The steering wheel was on the right-hand side."
The white screen flooded our eyes and I flicked off the projector lights, letting the machine cool down. I thought about the steering wheel. Then I stopped the take-up reel. But this time I turned the film over, reversed it, because I thought I knew what had happened. Who ever had copied the film had rewound it inside out. My brother hadn't noticed anything wrong because he didn't know the faces of most of the people or remember my grandmother's house. It gave me a chill to think that of all the people who might ever see this movie, only I would see that all the faces in it were oddly reversed, mirror images of what they ought to be. The car alone wasn't a certain tip-off; my father might have driven a British car. Even the people in it wouldn't know, if they were still alive, which most of them weren't, because they would be used to seeing themselves that way, the way they looked in the mirror. It wouldn't occur to them that they were supposed to be seeing themselves as others saw them, and they would never miss the mild shock of nonrecognition that comes from seeing all your moles and droops and quirky asymmetries in their proper places. I felt oddly excited as I waited for the film to rewind. When I started the projector again, I could see from the very beginning that everything was all right. The sepia sun streaked room decked out with gladiolas was my grandmother's parlor where the wedding ceremony had taken place, and the slope on which the house was built ran downhill the way it always head. The faces were familiar. I sighed and settled back to watch the film again, no longer puzzled by the strangeness of it all.
At last my parents stood poised at the top of the stairs once more; then they were at the bottom, arm in arm. After one last laughing look, they turned away from the camera and walked across the lawn toward the car. I watched their young, jaunty, straight shouldered backs as they walked away; suddenly they seemed so vulnerable, their happiness so fleeting, and I felt like a mother watching her two children walk away, hand-in-hand, into the woods alone. Then I saw that the back of my mother's dress was undone at the top, so that a small patch of white skin showed. No one else seemed to notice; nobody rushed over to do it up. My father helped her into the car and then walked around and got in himself. The two of them smiled and waved, my father leaning across my mother, and then they drove away.
Twenty years later my mother ran down the same steps, leaving behind three bewildered, underage children and the contents of every drawer, cupboard, closet, and rubbish can, cereal box, flour bin, and paint tin dumped out and mixed together on the floor. She had gone for three days without sleep, chattering to herself nonstop, playing jazz records at top volume on the stereo. I was 17, my sister 11, and my brother not even 10 yet. Worried and then frightened, on the third day I finally called the family doctor and then the police. My mother saw the police car pull up alongside the house near the back; she ran out the front door, down the steps, across the lawn, and into the fields behind a neighbor's house without looking back. The police caught her about a mile away and brought her back to the house to say goodbye to us before they took her to the state hospital. She looked at me, still all dark lines and angles, and her eyes glittered like a lathered race horse's; she looked very happy, even triumphant. Her cheeks were flushed and her breathing shallow. She reared her head back and stared at me with her proud, satisfied, crazy eyes, and said, panting, "Did you call the police?" I nodded. "I could kill you for that," she said. The tall policeman holding her arm blinked, stared at her, at me. "But I won't. Maybe now I can get little help around here. Get the picture?" And she turned away. The second policeman grabbed hold of her other arm, and the three of them marched out of the house and down the steps to a waiting police car. She was 44, and my father had been dead almost exactly five years.
II.
My mother always claimed the beads were solid gold, that Uncle George, my father's uncle, had bought them in France for her, and they were very valuable. The jeweler who restrung them for me said they were gold filled and very nice, but not of any great value. My mother wanted me to have them and pass them on to Linnie, she said, as she handed them over to me two summers ago at the bottom of the stairs in the house in Skaneateles. She had gained weight in the last 10 years, less running around, she thought, or possibly it was the lithium that made her so logy, but anyway the choker had gotten too small for her neck, and she wanted me to have it. I put the beads around my neck, reached back, and fastened the clasp. It was a choker, all right. I gagged, not liking the feel of cold metal so close around my throat. I pulled on it slightly and the chain gave, scattering the beads on the floor. My mother and I went down on our hands and knees.
"Oh, dear," my mother said. "I wish you hadn't done that. But never mind. We'll find them. They needed restringing anyway."
We groped around in the dust at the bottom of the stairs, found the beads in cracks, next to the wall, under the rug, and collected them. I put them in a plastic bag, took them home to Vermont with me, and had them restrung. There must have been one or two beads missing, because when I picked them up and tried them on, they were even tighter than before.
The next time I talked to my mother on the phone I told her. "Oh, never mind," she said. "Just have the jeweler put a chain guard at the back, and you can wear them undone."
"But it will look funny," I said.
"But it's the back of your neck. Nobody ever looks at the back of your neck. It'll be all right; you'll see."
As I put the beads away in my jewel box I thought about what my mother had said, and about all the years I'd lived with her, the hours I'd spent, the letters I'd written, the phone calls I'd made, trying to make some connection, trying to get her to face up to herself and her life as it really was. My father had been dead since 1953; more than 25 years later she still mourned him, bitterly resented the thought that he had carelessly abandoned her to this life alone. She wouldn't give him up, and though his image wavered and changed from hero to villain and back again, it remained always at the back of a mind; he was her final audience. Of course she couldn't turn around and look behind her, because that meant facing up to what she had lost.
So often while growing up I would see her walk out of the house with her hair flattened and matted at the back, her dress unzipped at the top, the hem falling down or her slip showing, her stocking seams as crooked as a hurrying snake. She would turn and smile at me, implying the question How do I look?, and I never told her she wasn't finished behind, not after the first time, when she gave me a look of haughty disbelief, fluffed her dress in front, and stormed out of the house, insulted. The facade of her life must have seemed plausible enough to her as she skimmed past it, resisting my attempts to make her look around and see its incompleteness: the flat walls propped up with angle irons and toothpicks, sandbagged into place, the doors leading into rooms that did not exist, and stairs dropping off into empty space. And there we were, my sister and brother and I, trying to pick our way through the debris.
The other day I made my daughter a grilled cheese sandwich and charred it on one side because I was paying attention to something else. Without thinking I flipped the sandwich over burned side down and served it to Linnie, who took one bite and looked at me with an expression of outraged betrayal, then disgustedly spat the soggy mess onto her plate. As I threw the sandwich in the garbage I recalled all the grilled cheese sandwiches and slices of toast and pancakes my mother had served me in my life, burned side down. What an injustice it is to be served a sandwich burned side down, and not to realize it until you've already bitten in. There you sit, small and humiliated, knowing that sooner or later you'll either have to choke it down or spit it out.