Wichita Falls

“Do you remember when Nanu came to visit me in Wichita Falls?”

The question carried across the unlit living room from the recliner end of a forest green sectional.  The venetian blinds behind her concealed the sunset over the lake.  She was indifferent to sunsets. 

The blinds were opaque and tobacco-stained and probably hadn’t been opened in months.  Whatever shafts of light penetrated the gaps and drawstring holes filtered through a phantasmal murk of cigarette smoke and quickly dissipated into the darkness.  Wichita Falls was an intrafamilial euphemism for the North Texas State Psychiatric Hospital.

“No, not really,” I replied from a few sections away on the same couch, “I was seven.”

“She stole twenty dollars from my purse to buy a carton of cigarettes.” 

Nanu was my maternal grandmother, and never stole so much as a dime in her life, least of all from her own daughter. 

“I really don’t think she would do that.”

“You don’t think that really happened?”  After a few moments of silence, she added, “Well, maybe you’re right.”

No one spoke for a couple of minutes.  I watched her breathing, laid out flat in her recliner.  Her body resembled a bell curve, weight gain being one of several side effects of her medication.

 “Do you remember when I was away at Wichita Falls?  One of the other patients told me your daddy was having an affair… Do you think that really happened?”

“Mom, no, I don’t think that happened.”

Another extended lull followed, during which she sat up and lit a cigarette.  She smoked with her eyes closed.  I let her get a couple of puffs in before protesting.

“You’re going to give me an asthma attack.”  She snuffed it out and returned to a reclined position.

She was unable to hold a job or maintain friendships, so she spent all day alone in a house on a beautiful lake that brought her no pleasure.  I tried to visit often.  We’d spend most of our time sitting on the couch, sifting through memories like used records in old milk crates. 

She was just sound enough to mistrust her own memories.  She knew there were parts of her brain hellbent on deceiving her and throwing her life back into chaos, so she sought verification for each tattered album sleeve she withdrew from the crate–did this really happen?

 At length, she spoke again. “When we were in high school, your Aunt Kathy wore my favorite blouse without asking me one night. It was a red halter top. I was so mad at her, I punched her in the mouth when she got home.”

“Jesus.”

“I’m still mad about that.  She should have asked me first.”

“Would you have let her wear it if she’d asked?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s been thirty years.  Maybe it’s time to let that go.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

Lying there in the recliner, I could see her corneas moving feverishly behind her eyelids, set upon by phantom assailants. I wondered if I would always remember her this way—in a dark room, shrouded by smoke.

“My cousin Sue Lynn came to visit me last month.  You ever meet Sue Lynn?”  She asked without opening her eyes.

“Yeah, I met her once, I think, a long time ago.”

“She tried to tell me that my Grandaddy molested us when we were little.”

I had never heard this one before.

She continued, “I told her she was wrong ‘cause he’d never do that.  I loved my Grandaddy.  He was a good man…do you think that really happened?”

“Well…I don’t know.  Do you think it happened?”

“No, I think she’s lost her mind.”

“What else did she say?”

“Nothing.  I told her she was the crazy one and needed help.  So she got upset and left.”

We sat in silence for a few more minutes.

“Nanu let your Aunt Kathy stay home from school for a couple of days because her lip was so swollen.”  She had toggled back as if these two topics were of equal weight, lost again in some shadowy möbius strip.

I didn’t respond.  I watched her breathing for a bit longer until it appeared she had fallen asleep, an indication that the cocktail of antipsychotics had kicked in.

I rose from the couch, covered my mom with an afghan throw, and walked to the bathroom to fill the tub.  As the water was running, I returned to the living room and began removing the venetian blinds.  The sun was no longer visible, but its light angled up over the cliffs on the opposite side of the lake reflecting like a mesquite brushfire on the thin layer of clouds drifting over the water.  I could hear my mom lightly snoring.

I carried the stack of blinds to the tub, tossed them in, and began wiping them clean.  The tobacco residue turned the water red, like the iron-rich rivers of North Texas.  No matter how vigorously I scrubbed, I couldn’t get the blinds clean and when I thought they were ready, the tobacco resettled before I could rinse them off.  To my surprise, I began to cry.  I had never cried as an adult.  I scrubbed harder.  Clouds of rusty tobacco billowed around my hands as they moved in the water.  I saw my mother’s hands; her wrists, long scarred over, reopened and bursting with red clouds in the warm bath water.  I scrubbed like mad.

I wondered if there was any truth in Sue Lynn’s accusation.  It was fully plausible my mother had blocked this from memory.  Maybe this is the reason for everything—her troubled youth, the depression and mania, the suicide attempts, the physical and mental transience that marred our childhood.  Maybe this is the tragic explanation we’ve been waiting for. 

But then, maybe it never really happened.