Is there a word for what gets said without language, for the look, the way the body is held, the silent ways we communicate what we care about and what we cannot endure? Even now, I am fighting for words to tell this story. Words that will convey the power of my father’s love, the implicit nature of his psychosis and how children who believe their parents are at risk find separation harder…
When we got to their dirty, smoke-filled Staten Island home, Barbara was sitting in the dark, an overfull ashtray next to her seat. She sat smoking and talking as if her baby Jackie were in the room. “You’re going to be all right my little angel. God is watching over you, and everything is going to be fine. Isn’t that right, Frankie?” she pleaded, looking to my father for reassurance…
(Coming soon)
The kitchen was thick with cigarette smoke and A Love Supreme, his favorite Coltrane. I danced with scarves wrapped around my undersized torso, one tied gypsy-like around my head. Dime-store clip earrings dangled at my neck. I twirled to his lap, where he slumped over his coffee cup at the dining room table, and pulled on his hand to join me. Anchored to his chair by something weightier than our life could contain, he chuckled, looking into his cup, waiting for the “holy” calling only he could hear…
I thought of my father when the New York Mental hygiene law was recently enacted in New York City. The bill that allows the police to commit people for emergency assessment if they appear mentally ill, or display an inability to meet basic living needs, or are thought to be a harm to themselves, or others. I pictured Dad when he was on a mission from God. His long wool coat open, flapping like a cape, as he marched down 6th Avenue to see the children in the playground. Sitting on a bench with fall leaves spiraling to the ground, listening to the children play. “It’s as close as you can get to God,” he would tell the officer before being asked to leave; a vagrant who made mothers uncomfortable…
“Mama don’t do it,” she pleaded with me. She ground her feet and put her arms out to try and block my path to the layered bands of rock undergirding millions of years of life on earth. No amount of rationalizing would get her closer to the edge. She intuitively imagined the dangers at the borders and openings of our world. But for all her fears she was the first to call out a need for courageous advocacy when friends or groups needed to do better.
“Get me my cigarettes, would you Baby?” he asked, sitting dressed now, diffusing my anger with his dependence. Acting like every moment offered a cycle of restoration, like we have and will always take care of each other despite his transgressions. I handed him cigarettes and signaled through the window for the girls to come in.
“Would you like to place your food order?” the waitress asked. And in the blink of an eye Barbara was defending herself from some disembodied assault, transfigured back to the fixed trauma of her schizophrenia. “Just because you think you’re better than me, doesn’t mean you have to call me a whore!” Barbara blurted, raising her eyes to the waitresses like an assailant…
I was one of those babies who probably wasn’t held enough and so, was happy in anyone’s arms—but I felt more like a guest with the families that fostered me in the urban landscape of my youth than part of the fabric of the community. Then I met Ken. On our first date, he caught me in the turnstiles of the train and made me promise to see him again. His certainty that we belonged together was an eddy that drew me in.
