The Dark Side of Alice

          It’s almost as if, as my mother shrinks – she’s down to eighty-four pounds – the essence of her becomes more concentrated, like aged whiskey.

          Today John said, “Alice was always so sweet and now she’s always angry.”

          I replied that I remember an angry Alice, when I was growing up. A fussy Alice.  An intolerant, judgmental Alice.  I remember how everything had to be “just so.”  But to the world – friends, neighbors, business associates, checkers at the market, perhaps even doctors – she presents a cheery bright persona.  Those sparkling blue eyes and large healthy teeth give the impression that this woman is always in a good mood, always willing to listen, to laugh, to notice pretty flowers growing along a fence.

          It’s not that she isn’t these things, she is. She looks for goodness and beauty in the world, but underneath, has always lurked a darkness, a deep sadness, a seething anger.

          Not long ago she told me that as a little girl she used to weep in bed at night.  She doesn’t remember why she wept, just that she was overcome with sadness.

          I remember the story of her being locked in a rumble seat, pounding until her knuckles bled. This, the story goes, was the beginning of her claustrophia.

          I remember the story of her being locked in a library after hours. Had she fallen asleep? The terror she felt thinking no one would rescue her.

          I remember the nightmares she had of her children being snatched by wild animals coming down from the canyon. I remember the veins popping out of her neck when she and I fought about having to visit my grandma, her mother.

          Before my father died, she complained about him. I remember a visit, where, early in the morning, she came into the kitchen where I had just sliced a sweet juicy orange. She was wearing a tattered over-sized tee-shirt, the only thing she ever slept in – no nighties or pajamas for her! She sat on the hard little stool under the phone and sobbed, “He’s driving me crazy!”

          I put my arms around my tiny mama. She was maybe ninety-nine pounds back then.  I experienced the familiar mix of emotions that churned in me like foods that shouldn’t be eaten together.  I felt sympathy for her, having to kow tow to Peter, who always had to get his way.  But I also felt a familiar disgust, that she had let it go on this long, over sixty years of feeling mistreated.

          Most of my generation had a different idea about relationships. Perhaps a different idea about love. We did not have the sense of devotion and obedience that our parents’ generation had. So when Roger sat on the loveseat his mother had give us and told me I could come to Israel with him, if I would convert, there was no question in my mind that I would refuse. Yes, I loved him. Yes, I wanted to “save” him from the demons that plagued him since being abandoned as a child. But I must have loved, or respected myself more. For I knew I could not become someone else, for someone else.

          In saying no to Roger I gave up the promise of children, which I only now vaguely regret, when I see my friends becoming grandparents.

But my sense of self-preservation was stronger that my sense of commitment to him.

          I used to hope that when my father died my mother would emerge from his shadow and do all the things she didn’t get to do when he was alive. But instead, his absence seems to have opened the gate to the demons that always lurked in her mind, ready to pounce. Now when she wakes from her nightmares his warm body is not there to give her solace, to anchor her, to reassure her that it’s only a dream.

          I feel sad about my mother. She tells me, “I really don’t want to be an angry person,” yet anger is the strongest emotion crackling between the synapses in her brain.  The rehab hospital where’s she’s been for the last two weeks is dirty, they don’t bring her a napkin with her meals, the sun is too bright, the food is terrible, her caregivers talk too much or not enough, the therapists are sadistic. . .

          I listen to my mother. I say, “oh” and “hmm.”  After thirty-five minutes of listening to her rant, she tells me she wants to end our conversation on a high note: she had a marvelous time playing Black Jack with a woman whose name she can not remember, another patient, who she hopes she’ll see tonight, if “what-her-name” takes her to the game room.