The Comedown Read online

  After that, Melinda’s mother began to concede territory in their dark house to Melinda. She didn’t knock on her bedroom door now at all—not to tell her about dinner, not to say good night—and never again turned on the TV in the family room while Melinda was reading. She hugged Melinda, but only if Melinda initiated the hug, and she stopped kissing Melinda on the cheek. For her part, Melinda ate less of her mother’s fatty meals, stayed out on school nights with her boyfriend (to hold hands and smoke his father’s cigarettes), and echoed her father’s comments about her mother’s weight. As her mother vacuumed the rug in the foyer, bent forward so her massive buttocks were vulnerable to Melinda’s inspection, Melinda wondered if she shouldn’t give second thought to that diet her father had mentioned. When her mother took a peppermint from the candy dish, Melinda asked her if she should be eating that. Melinda’s grandmother had always said that a good child was seen and not heard. But now Melinda thought it was better to be heard and not seen: a beautiful, airy specter coaching her mother out of her sad life. A potential agent of change.

  Once Melinda woke and caught her mother eating in the middle of the night. She’d baked a pie that afternoon and only Tommy had eaten a piece, complimenting her on its sweetness. Melinda had declined her mother’s offer: she had an audition for the school play the next day, and she didn’t want to ruin her complexion with sugar. Preaudition jitters had roused her from sleep, and she had gone downstairs for a glass of water.

  And there was her mother in the dark, wearing her sack of a nightgown, licking the cherries from the fingers of her left hand as she scooped the pie crust with a fork in her right. Melinda flipped on the light.

  Her mother looked at Melinda as though she’d just awakened from a dream. “What time is it?”

  “Twelve oh seven,” Melinda said.

  “Hm,” she said, and returned her focus to her plate. Melinda watched in revulsion as her mother raised the gooey contents of her fork to her lips, watched her swallow and sigh with pleasure. She went to the table and grabbed the fork from her mother’s hand.

  “Stop,” Melinda said. “You weigh more than Dad.”

  Melinda had never seen this face on her mother before—wide eyes, a hurt and trembling lower lip—and wondered why she’d taken so long to show it to Melinda. She chewed the remaining pie in her mouth, made her face apelike by running her tongue over her top row of teeth. Then she scooped the rest of the pie with her hand and took another bite. Melinda grabbed the plate and pitched the remains into the garbage.

  “Stop it,” Melinda said.

  Melinda’s mother looked at her, chewing still. Her mother had cried at Rock Hudson movies, cried when Tommy “graduated” from nursery school, cried when her father hit a squirrel with the car—it would make plenty of sense for her mother to cry now. But she just kept chewing. She swallowed and crossed her plush wrists in front of her.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “It’ll be hell for you someday, too.”

  Melinda ran from the room as though hexed. She hid under her sheets, hugging her knees. Her insides hummed with newly hatched bugs.

  During her junior year of high school, Melinda underwent a growth spurt that made long, fat flippers of her feet and left a rash of pimples on her back. Her stomach swelled with fluid several days in advance of her period, with the result that she spent two weeks out of every month rotating among three cable-knit pullovers. She broke up with her boyfriend in the summer, and in the fall she took first place in the science fair for a project on laboratory behavior in dogs. Her father observed that she had a “brain for data” and asked her if she had considered becoming a secretary in an engineering firm. Tommy developed the obnoxious habit of reaching under her pullovers to tickle her stomach and telling her she needed to “reduce.” When she asked him if it had anything to do with their mother, he shook his head and said he was just worried about her health. She applied to colleges, and Kent State offered her an academic scholarship. Her father drove her to campus on move-in day, singlehandedly carrying her heavy leather trunk up three flights of stairs to her dorm room.

  At Kent State, Melinda monitored her body carefully. She ate only salads in the dining hall, drinking water whenever she felt hungry for something other than leafy greens. She had never been skinny, exactly, but she had never been fat, either: if she was careful, she could remain well proportioned, with hips and breasts that were frequently the envy of her suitemates. Eager to escape the suburban bread box of her childhood, she fell in with the hippie crowd, drinking dandelion wine and cheap beer, smoking grass in dorm basements, complaining about Nixon and Vietnam and “containing communism”—the pigs in the White House thought anything that wasn’t capitalism could be sealed away like soggy leftovers. She kissed Jamie, who was leaving to join the Black Panthers. She participated in two hunger strikes to protest US imperialism. She met Leland.

  Although most people in his circle were anarchists, he was the closest thing they had to a leader: a philosophy major and self-proclaimed “thinker.” He always had drugs; people bought grass and magic mushrooms off him all the time. He walked around shirtless and barefoot, skipped half his classes but aced his finals. He was never not high, preferred turning on to going to protests, but he always managed to show up in time for the most exciting part of anything. Melinda thought his tastes ran more toward the tiny types on campus, but she’d thought wrong. He was obsessed with the way she danced, which she herself had always found awkward and kidlike. He called her “Sandra Dee from outer space.” They dropped acid and she gave it up to him then, in his dorm bed, beams of light shooting out the soles of her feet. They started dating officially after that. She sent a photo of the two of them to her parents and mentioned that Leland had German heritage—which her father would approve of—but didn’t mention that he was a Jew. Her mother wrote back: You two make such a handsome couple. Melinda nodded proudly at the compliment, ignoring the hot hint of guilt at the back of her neck. Her mother was right. They made a very handsome couple.

  Spring 2009

  Chicago

  Nearly a hundred pounds heavier than her mother had been at her heaviest, Melinda watched as Leland Jr. slept in an industrial twin bed at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, where he’d been hospitalized for three weeks following what doctors were saying had been a psychotic break. From what Melinda understood, he’d been touring a pharmaceutical factory, Cisco Drugs, someplace he had to be for work, and right in the middle of the tour he’d started hallucinating. He’d attacked the CEO (who had promised not to press charges) and slapped—or maybe punched, she didn’t want to think about it too much—his own wife in the face. And, several minutes ago, he’d fallen asleep midconversation from some tranquilizers he’d been administered before Melinda started talking with him. Why they gave him the tranquilizers in the middle of the day—especially when she’d read on the Internet that tranquilizers could trigger catatonia, for which schizophrenics were apparently at risk—remained a mystery to her, and she didn’t bother asking the nurses and doctors who spoke to her loudly if they deigned to speak to her at all, treating her as if she knew less about her son than they did. “Ma’am, your son is receiving the best care we can give him,” one nurse told her, “and it makes it harder to provide him with that care when family members take their frustration out on us.” They had taken a different approach with Melinda’s daughter-in-law, Jocelyn. Patient, poreless, thin, doctors at least “understood her concern,” and referred her to some hotline she could call for 24/7 support.

  Her son had used his brief window of lucidity to discuss practical matters with her: whether people at work knew where he was, whether his front yard had been watered, whether Melinda wanted to leave the hotel and stay at their house. Melinda told him that was generous, but what she really wanted was to be closer to him, and going all the way out to River Forest and back every day without a car was a hike—It’s just the train to the green line to a bus, Mom. In reality, she’d wanted to avo
id the anxiety going on at her son’s house: she’d spent an afternoon there when she’d first arrived in Chicago, Jocelyn rushing over to help Melinda every time she wanted to stand up or sit down, declining Melinda’s offer to cook and instead ordering two sixty-five-dollar prepared vegan meals, spending two hours speaking with her lawyer on the phone. The hospital bill would be massive, she had said between calls, and they’d found some foreign substance in Leland Jr.’s bloodstream.

  “It could be that the little brother and his friend poisoned him, and that triggered something.” Jocelyn’s young mind was already furred over with theories, Melinda could tell. “They’ve just been expelled for possession.”

  “Are you sure that’s what it was?” Melinda asked, not particularly wanting to think about the little brother. The little half brother. “Have you talked to the doctors about how this kind of thing starts?”

  But Jocelyn was now looking at the keypad of the only noncellular phone in the house, whispering to herself as though she were alone. “I shouldn’t have pressured him like that. There was too much bad blood in the family. I should’ve seen this coming.”

  Her son wasn’t sleeping, exactly—he was unrestfully unconscious. His jaw grinding was audible and his eyelids fluttered every few seconds in a way that made him look possessed. She flipped her phone open and saw that she had no new texts from Alvin—although that made sense, since he had a meeting with the school board. She closed her phone. Leland Jr. probably wanted her visiting hours to be over anyway. She mentally prepared herself for the walk from the hospital to the hotel, the sports bar where the college kids had accosted her earlier that day, already drunk at noon, pelting her with wadded-up napkins and asking if she knew what BBW stood for. She would call Alvin when she got to the hotel and give him the update he’d requested. She’d leave a long voice mail.

  Leland Jr. grunted. She looked over at him and his eyes were open. He mewled like a child.

  “Sweetie,” she said. He didn’t respond, which sent a horrible shock of adrenaline through her body. “Sweetie,” she said again. “Leland.”

  He began to tremble.

  “Leland.”

  He looked at her. “Mom.”

  “What is it?”

  “Mom?”

  She held his hand. He blinked a tear down his cheek. His voice was not his own.

  “Mom, I’m a bad man.”

  “No! No, no. Oh, sweetie, no. Mr. Campbell said he forgives you.”

  “It’s worse than that.”

  “And so does Jocelyn. They know you weren’t in your right mind.”

  “It’s even worse than that.”

  “What could be worse than that?”

  “Something could.”

  Melinda blinked, watching him. He was the little boy with the gap between his teeth whom she’d failed to protect from his father. He was waking up in the middle of the night calling out to her, begging her to play “Desperado.” He was always so nervous—he hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep since 1979. That was probably why he’d gotten sick.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shuddering with the realization that everything had been her fault.

  He shook his head. “Mom, this isn’t about that.”

  “About what?”

  “It’s about the briefcase.”

  “What briefcase?”

  “Mom,” he whined, “stop pretending.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He grunted, rolled his eyes. “I took it from Lee and Diedre. It was locked and I never opened it. There might be money in there.”

  “I didn’t know you even,” she tried, but stopped herself. “Honey, you’re imagining things. Please don’t worry about it.”

  Then his face transformed: his eyes got huge, the tendons on his neck tight and large. His lower jaw out and rigid, he growled, “Believe me when I say what I did, Mom! For fuck’s sake it was wrong what I did! Give it back!”

  Then he held his head and screamed. She wanted to press herself comfortingly against him, but the scream was so horrible and not-his that she stumbled backward and nearly tripped. “Give it back to them! GIVE IT BACK!” he screamed. Melinda tried to tell him not to worry, that everything had been taken care of, but her voice sounded soft and pathetic in comparison to his. Two nurses pressed into the room behind her, one saying: “It would be best if you left.”

  So she left. She checked out at the front desk to the sound of her son screaming in protest against the nurse’s harshly whispered assurances. As she signed her name on the visitors’ sheet, the lower-right edge of which was dirty and curling, she remembered things she knew thousands of mothers before her must have thought about, standing in this very spot and signing their midwestern names—she read the three entries above her own: Pamela Joffrey, Louise Sheppard, Breanna Mullmann—as they applied cheap lip balm and thanked the bored secretary for the staff’s (nonexistent) patience or sympathy or tolerance. She remembered how her child looked as he’d been happy (Christmas 1976: unwrapping a toy fire truck big enough to ride in), as he’d been sad (August 1983: after a fight with his father), and as she’d failed him (September 1978: in the car, silent, when she’d picked him up from school after he’d been sent home early for throwing a book). She scanned her memory for early warning signs of his illness. Had anyone even been thinking about mental illness in 1978? Kids played outside until they were tired, they came back in and did their homework and watched TV, you fed them, they went to sleep, and either slept through the night or awoke and required reassurance about the existence of ghosts or monsters. She had parented Leland Jr. on her own, protected his life, defended his passions. Had there been some new scientific discovery proving this wasn’t enough? Would she herself have been better off being born later, giving birth to her son in the age of baby monitors and plastic-free cribs and organic teething rings?

  But she was kidding herself. She wasn’t some superparent who’d done the best she could with what she had. She’d smoked pot while she was pregnant. A lot of it. All the doctors in all the magazines said that was bad for any child. It was her fault he was the way he was. She’d known as far back as 1978 that she’d been at fault. She’d known on that day she picked him up from school after he threw the encyclopedia. Her worst fears had been confirmed on that day: he was his father’s son.

  She huffed a thick sigh in the mirrored elevator that brought her up to her hotel room. It was useless trotting out the woulda coulda shouldas, she’d always stressed that to Leland Jr. It was better to just understand everything in terms of good and bad luck. No real purpose to it all, just waves you either crested or were crushed by. Ever the pessimist, her son once asked her what you did when you got crushed by so many waves you couldn’t even stand up to crest the good ones. “You pretend you can stand up,” Melinda told him. “And then eventually you’ll actually be standing.” Then he’d asked, what if some deadly seaweed had just wrapped around your legs so tight and you just really couldn’t stand up at all?

  Bad luck was thick as thieves with their little family, of this much she was sure. Melinda could pinpoint the exact beginning of the end: late April 1970. She had been finishing up her communications degree at Kent State. Leland had graduated early and was working at Dog ’n’ Suds. They were at a belated twentieth birthday party for Jeffrey Miller, whom they knew because he frequently bought grass from Leland. Crepe paper was taped to the walls and people roved around the room in cardboard party hats, eating cake off plates with Howdy Doody’s face. Jeff was standing in the middle of it all dressed in an ascot and an old smoking jacket. “Welcome to your future, lovebirds,” he said, offering them both flutes of champagne. “It’s some snot-nosed kid’s birthday party, and you’re the chaperones.” Melinda drank the champagne in one gulp and started seeing tessellating shapes that fit together to make a pocket watch, a complicated-looking thing that when viewed from far away was not a pocket watch at all but a globe, and then upon closer examination not a globe but the big, unblinking eye on
the Masonic pyramid. A beautiful girl sat down next to her.

  “Are you okay?” she asked Melinda.

  Melinda nodded and pointed to where she thought Leland was standing. “My future,” she said.

  The girl smiled. “I’m Allison.”

  “My future husband,” Melinda said.

  Allison looked behind her and then back at Melinda. “Yeah, I think I know him.” Her face soured. “Don’t worry about him for now, okay?”

  Melinda nodded. Don’t worry about him. Light was coming off Allison’s hair. Her hair was dark and thick, had those scented oils in it, went down past her shoulders. No makeup. She was beautiful and she didn’t need makeup. Melinda tried saying that, but what came out of her mouth instead was the sound of wind in a tunnel.

  “You’re feeling it, right?” Allison nodded expectantly, her eyes wide.

  Melinda nodded back.

  “Is this your first time?”

  Melinda was pretty sure it wasn’t.

  “It’s fine,” Allison said. “I’ll stay with you. I’m going to ask you a question, okay? Have you ever thought about how each person in this country is like a gear in a grandfather clock?”

  “Yes,” Melinda said.

  “Then it’s like—I know you get me—then it’s like a tyranny, right? Isn’t that what’s going on here?”

  “Yes.”

  “With, I mean, I bet Nixon’s going to threaten to invade Cambodia. And at this point who even agrees with him? Rogers? Kissinger? Even they know better. He’s like one gear in the clock trying to take the whole thing over. And everybody’s probably thinking: If he’s the only one working and the rest of the clock is busted, then maybe it’s the other way around, maybe the clock’s working and he’s busted. He’s insane, and he’s gonna make the whole machine fall apart, you know? Another example—”

  Melinda tried to arrange the parts of her face so her expression suggested Please, go on.

  “—another example is fucking J. Edgar Hoover. What do you accomplish by killing Malcolm X? Whom I liked better than King, by the way, he got straight to the point and King moseyed a little. But then what do I know, you know, since I’m white? Anyway, what do you accomplish by killing them other than proving you’re some insane fascist sitting high up in his icy tower, trying to take over the world even as your little cabal’s dwindling? It’s like you’re gonna end up alone, you asshole, you’re all gonna end up alone. And what’s worse is if we don’t figure out something to do about it, then we’re the broken gears, then the fascists still win, we all get pitched out in the same busted grandfather clock together. Emphasis on grandfather, you know?”