Mother Love and the Minotaur

I have to begin with a Spoiler Alert to write this. I have never dealt well with suspense or rising tension. With most mysteries or novels, I read the first chapter and then the last, unable to tolerate any wrenching plot twists unless there is assurance of a decent resolution at the end. In the days of movie theaters, I had to cover my eyes or leave to wait out the most suspenseful parts in the ladies room or by the popcorn machine. I love streaming movies at home since when something ratchets up my anxiety on the screen, I can just go to the kitchen and clean until Ken calls me back with promises the worst is over.

And with my mother’s story there is plenty of rising tension. Imagine: if you start out with a purple birthmark, incest, rape, and an unwanted mixed-race pregnancy, where does it go next? How bad can it get? It does get worse; that’s why I need a Spoiler Alert to remind myself that it eventually ends in an approximation of serenity.

Following that first Thanksgiving Deenie and Richard dated for a year while Mama remained at home with Gma and me. It was a time of raging arguments. Deenie loved her new life: restaurants, theater, lively discussions about events and ideas. Gma saw only a dirty old man preying on her daughter. Once Gma found a pornographic novel in Deenie’s room and, in an act of amazingly poor  judgment, read a paragraph to me. It was something about grape juice dribbling between breasts, as I recall. Between that paragraph and seeing Richard in Gaslight, I was firmly on my Gma’s side. Finally, Deenie  moved out to live with Richard.

One day the teacher told me to go see Pastor Wangerin after school. Remember him? He’s the one who ruined the Christmas carnival with warnings about the Second Coming. This time it was about the apocalyptic coming of my mother. He began by having me recite the fourth commandment and its explanation from Luther’s Catechism. 

“Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother, that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. What does this mean? We should fear and love God that we may not despise our parents and masters, nor provoke them to anger, but give them honor, serve and obey them, and hold them in love and esteem.”

I was bewildered about why I was being examined on this; Giesela Marie took care never to provoke the authorities to anger and was pretty good at the “honor, serve, and obey them” stuff. Pastor followed this up with a reminder that I owed respect and obedience to my mother.  Deenie was outside with all my things–clothes, clock radio, Nelly Doll–piled in the back of a car. I was to dutifully go with her, without even a word of explanation or goodbye to my Gma.

Deenie took me to a place she had rented on the hill near the state capitol building. The building was dark brick with three floors of furnished apartments above a drug store on the street level. If you watch a noir movie from the ‘40s or ‘50s, you have the setting. There was a kitchenette, although I don’t remember eating anything, a living room where my mother talked to Richard or others late at night, and the bedroom I shared with her. 

I only remember the bedroom. I’d finish homework and then sit on the bed and work on embroidery, using supplies kept in a shoebox I had covered with material when I did my needlework badge for Girl Scouts. I’d sit on the bed, listening to Deenie talk in the next room or looking out the window at the unfamiliar street, knowing I couldn’t find my way to Gma’s from there.These were not residential streets, empty at night. It was a relief to have lights and some traffic to watch even after midnight when I woke up.  My insomnia was severe. 

Deenie would talk late into the night, usually with Richard, but sometimes with another voice. When I peeked out once I saw an African-American minister, or so I assumed from his clerical collar. From what I could overhear she was having the kind of miserable discussions about eternity that rattled around Giesela Marie’s head. How strange! There was no heater with flames like at home, but people could still contemplate hellfire.  

Sometimes when I woke up Deenie wasn’t in the apartment; restless, she wandered the building’s corridors. The hallways were as dark as my Great Grandma Mable’s house, lit by a few low-watt bulbs. I hated those hallways, the ugly odors of past meals embedded in the brown and maroon rugs. I was frightened every time I started up the stairs, not ever sure which floor or what apartment was ours, terrified I’d meet some stranger. In later years when I read the myth about the minotaur of Crete, those hallways were what I envisioned. I pictured my mother wandering around looking to confront some monster.

One morning I was in the drugstore, by a rack of greeting cards, when I overheard some men talking. “She wanders the hall in her nightdress.” “She had a Black man visiting at all hours.” They were talking about my mother. “That’s her minister!” I objected, popping out from behind the rack. They gave me their crooked smiles and moved off.

The nightmare only lasted a week or so. Suddenly Nellie Trythall and Gma picked me up and took me home. Everything was back to what it had been. Normal, except that Mama was in the hospital. Gma gave a complicated explanation. There had been a discoloring on Mama’s face that the doctors feared was lupus. So they had given her medicine that made her crazy. She was in the hospital and would be better once all that bad medicine was out of her.

At some point in Deenie’s treatment the doctors decided it would help her recovery to see me, so Gma took me up to the state hospital. Was it the doctors’ idea that it just be me for the visit, that Gma might trigger her? Or was Gma just too frightened to see her daughter in that condition?

I sat alone on a wooden bench in a bare room until Deenie came to join me. She told me that it wasn’t too bad there, she was feeling better, and that she had made me some paper dolls. She held out her gift. If this were a movie, at this moment there would be a sudden shriek of staccato violins, the sort Alfred Hitchcock used. I was pierced, terrified. My mother had always done realistic fashion drawings to go with my Katie Keene comics. This time she handed me instead a crude drawing done with crayons on brown paper torn from a bag, something a young child would do. The most horrible feature were the eyes, wild spirals above a red mouth.

[and at this point I had to stop writing.]

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