Momocidal maniacs. Mothers who kill. Mine. Pole-ax the heart. Gut the soul. Cripple the dream. What dream? Mine. Who said you could have one? The woman in the black and white photo is twenty-seven years old with a month old infant in her arms. Seventy-three years ago. The sun shines through the window. She is smiling, no older than my son is now, smiling at the tiny thing in her arms. There is no hint here of anger. Her brothers and sisters said it was always there, even when she was very young, but I don't see it, not in this picture, anyway. She seems serene and happy, not how I remember her. Once I heard her say that she knew she had a temper, but, after five minutes, it's all over, like it never happened. All over for her, yes, but the collateral damage remains. She was under four feet, eleven inches tall and never weighed more than ninety pounds, small, compact, like a hand grenade.
The first time I ran away from home I was four years old. I remember stashing all the things I'd need -- coloring books, crayons, my sipping cup, a picture book of dinosaurs -- all the essentials. I hid them underneath the living room sofa until I could make my getaway. When I made my move my get-away kit was too heavy for me to carry, so I left it there. I managed to get across the street to Aunt Mildred's. The next time I got further. I was eleven. I don't remember the inciting incident -- the usual assault and battery stuff -- but I remember collecting all the loose coins I could find, taking a streetcar downtown to the bus station, buying a ticket, and arriving in New York City with nothing in my pocket but a pocketknife. The goal was to find shelter with my favorite relative, Uncle Milton, who lived there. I walked from Port Authority in the forties to Willoughby's Cameras in the thirties where he worked in the advertising department. Everybody knew me because he'd taken me to work on a former visit. "Hey, what're you doing here?" someone asked."I came to see Uncle Milton," I said, only to find out he'd gone to Baltimore for the week-end, and I was in New York City, eleven years old, all by my lonesome. Jess Wilkes, a friend of my uncle's, put me up for the night and shipped me back to Baltimore the next morning. I walked into the kitchen expecting to be hit with something, but nobody paid any attention to me at all. Nothing out of the ordinary. My father was napping on the sofa in the family room with the funny papers over his face, an Orioles game on the radio. My mother folded laundry. There was a roast beef sandwich on the kitchen table. It was a tactic, a rare moment of family sanity. I don't remember any others. The next time I ran away I found myself at the Marine Corp Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina. It seemed calm by comparison. Here was my Drill Instructor's first speech: "My name is Staff Sergeant Smith, and I am your Drill Instructor. You will address me as sir. I am your mother and your father packed into one big, ugly package. Your soul may belong to Jesus, but your ass belongs to me."
I told you, calm by comparison.
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If Jane Austen will forgive me, it is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a new Marine in possession of a Parris Island education not be fucked with. Having said that, here goes.
Back then there were no SEALS, no Green Berets. There were Marines.
And I was one. I was a slick sleeve private, a lowly grunt, but I was one of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children now, and nothing, not no Hell nor high water, could stop me. It was in this state that I went home to Baltimore for a week's leave, liberty they called it.
I arrive at Penn Station, Baltimore, in uniform, and my father who has come to pick me up walks right by me. "Hey, Dad!" When he turns around and realizes it's his son he actually stifles a cry. The week went, as a gentleman from Minsk might shrug and ask, "How should it go?" Family. Friends. The usual internecine tumult. Laughter. Bickering. Open wounds. Salt to rub in them. Cousins rolling bandages in the kitchen. Tourniquettes handy. Hearing for the umpteenth time how your Uncle Herbie always hit on her, how her boss tried to crawl in bed with her. What was she doing in the bed, anyway, and, more to the point, do I really need to know this? The week went, and everyone was still standing, given the requisite sarcasm and sniping. Today I would call what went on in my house back then asymetrical warfare. Attack, inflict maximum damage, fade back into the woodwork. That was a good day. You just might get hit with a hanger or rapped with a wooden spoon, but that was it. Let me tell you about a bad day. She went after my brother with a baseball bat, swung, missed, and split the top of a vanity. True dat. But that wasn't a really bad day. A really bad day would mean she'd have connected. A really really bad day would be when a seven year old gets his nose bashed in with a heavy, cut glass, crystal ashtray. That seven year old had Tourette's, and he had twitched.
So, it was the night before I would report to Camp Lejeune. She'd been berating my sister over some grave transgression, picked up a stainless steel ladle and went after her. I yelled at her to cut the shit, and she turned and came at me.
Let's pause here a minute.
I know something about violence. It's one of those things like riding a bicycle. Once it's in you, you've got it. You don't even think about it. If the time comes, when it comes, you just do it. For the past few months I'd been in survival mode daily, not one day off ever. Mostly I was learning not to hurt. So when she came at me -- no thought at all -- I stepped to the side and slugged her. A straight left. Suffice it to say, she went down. I never told my body what to do. It knew before I did. Many years later, while going through a divorce, I made the mistake of visiting Baltimore. I had this crazy notion there might be some comfort there. At the time my mother lived in an apartment with a kitchen just large enough to allow a small, round ice cream parlor table and two chairs across from each other. She sat in one chair. I sat in the other. She kept asking me questions about the divorce. "Mom, I don't want to talk about it." This did not stop her. And the more she asked and the more I wouldn't answer the angrier she became. Goddamn woman, she bristled with it! I was watching madness. It was an epiphany. Mom was nuts. "You know what?" I said, truly incredulous, "You're really crazy." She was up out of her seat, fists clenched, ready to rumble. I jump up with my right fist cocked. She slams on the brakes a la Wiley Coyote. "You're gonna hit me just like you did in the Marines," she said. "One more step," I told her, "One more." There was no doubt in either of our minds what would happen if she didn't back off.
She's warehoused now, lying in bed or tied to a chair so she doesn't slip to the floor. She's half way to one hundred and one, and her mind has all but been erased. What's left is her basic meanness. When she's awake she throws cups of coffee at people and calls them names. She was thrown out of two nursing homes before this one -- for violence. Truth. Mostly, though, her head hangs to one side, and she repeats the sound ma ma over and over, mamamamamamama...So many times while growing up we heard, "You're making your bed. You're going to lie in it." It was uttered not in warning but as a curse, an outcome devoutly to be wished, and there she lies. Mamamamamamama...
