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Twig Doll
Phoenix is hot this time of year. Phoenix is always hot, period. Mom and Dad will have the swamp cooler going. They have always refused to buy an air conditioner, saying it cost too much to run. Instead, they sit around breathing damp air, their clothing draped over them like wet paper.
They say you can never go home again. Though I’ve only been gone a little over two years, I never planned on going back. Of course, the only person important enough to draw me away from my so-called life in LA would be Anna.
I remember waiting for Anna; a cobwebbed memory of my mother’s swollen belly, round and plump, like an over-ripe melon whose skin was ready to split. In the beginning, waiting was easy because it was for tangible things. Waiting for Anna to walk, waiting for Anna to talk. Infinitesimally slow increments of time, installments to be paid for the right of having a sibling, a friend, a sister.
But two people were never more dissimilar than we were. In fact, everything about Anna was different, unique in a sort of indescribable way. Unfortunately, as Anna grew, so did her problems, which became almost like a third child, overshadowing our life; as if there were more of Anna than of me somehow.
When Anna was very young, Mom took her to the pediatrician because she said she was worried, but she wouldn’t say what exactly, was troubling her. The doctor ran tests and then only smiled, telling the family that Anna’s IQ was much higher than normal. She was probably “hyper-sensitive” and just required a little extra TLC; she would be fine.
Anna was always the wild one; vexing our parents, exhaling discontent. Mom would swoop through the house carried by gusts of spurious agitation as Dad mumbled through thin, pursed lips. Anna would roll her eyes, suppressing an ocean of sarcastic sighs while Mom struggled to extinguish the despair that swirled above our heads.
Life became a series of incongruent assurances. The promised puppy never materialized because of worries that Anna’s temperament wasn’t “suitable” for pets. Never having friends over because of Anna’s anti-social behavior. Missing my best friend Kimberly’s thirteenth birthday party because Anna had thrown a fit and had broken nearly every dish in the house and Mom needed my help cleaning up. As I grew older, the promises from Mom to make up for missed events and special occasions became so thin that it seemed to me even Mom didn’t believe what she told me most of the time. I learned early how not to cry. Tears were anger, and letting go of either one meant that I might not have anything left to hold onto when it was all over.
All this history wearies me as I reach across the car seat for my Marlboro’s. I light one, letting the smoke scuttle out the window, like broken dreams.
As Anna grew, Mom and Dad tried to accept her eccentricities, but everything about Anna had an oceanic quality. At the beginning of her seventh grade Valentine’s Day dance, Anna pranced onto the dance floor, alone. She danced every single dance, moving at a feverish pitch, even after the music stopped. When the lights went on and everybody left, the vice-principal had to escort Anna from the school gym. Her hair was soaked with sweat and she cried because she had to leave. Life was a heaving, throbbing verb. She gulped knowledge, consumed experiences, and devoured feelings, as if she knew there wasn’t much time.
As I speed down the Papago freeway, through downtown Phoenix, my tires eating asphalt, I feel swallowed by bitterness over my sister Anna. Though Anna had always been “challenging” as Mom put it, there had never been too much out of the ordinary until Anna turned fourteen. How could I ever forget that day?
I had a part-time job at Smitty’s grocery after school and had gone in for a short four-hour shift. That night was the prom, and it seemed the one thing that Anna could not take away from me. I was just clocking out when I received a hysterical call from my mom.
“Anna’s gone crazy! She’s talking nonsense. One minute she’s silent as a post, the next she’s babbling incoherently. I opened the door to her room; she was marking the walls with her own feces,” her voice stopped suddenly, as if she couldn’t believe what she had just said.
As my classmates slow-danced to Celine Dion amidst dizzying clouds of perfume and after shave, my family was in the emergency room trying to calm Anna’s fears of being pursued by spies. Hemmed in by suspicious stares and quiet, cruel remarks. A handsome young man about Anna’s age looked at us as though we were oozing molecules of the Ebola virus. Anna would have liked him, I thought. But she couldn’t see through her beveled consciousness, as she waded through endogenous thoughts. The young man moved away, drawing his windbreaker close to his body.
Physicians turned into family counselors, who turned into psychologists and psychiatrists, who eventually turned into Dr. Van Buren. He was a portly man with graying sideburns who diagnosed Anna as having hebephrenic schizophrenia, with some delusional paranoia. Dr. Van Buren smiled confidently as he spoke of medications, assuring my parents that he would find a drug to help Anna.
I pull into my parent’s gravel driveway, dread coiled tightly around the isthmus of nerves between my brain and my heart. How I wish I were back in my own apartment, among my own things: my large amethyst paperweight, my tall blue water glasses, my endless rows of books balanced on wooden boards supported by cinderblocks.
I pull down on my cinnabar-colored tank top and quickly check my make-up in the rear-view mirror. As I ring the doorbell, I push away the nagging memory that no one ever said a word about my senior prom.
The door opens and there they are suddenly, like some poorly directed movie. Dad stands too close, his face, large and sagging, like a caricature of himself. He’s peering, moving fast, wresting the suitcase from my hand. Mom’s cool, clammy hands upon my cheeks, as if I were made of some special dough. Both of them examine me. Mom smells like she always did; of penicillin and oranges.
“Reve, honey, it’s good to see you. Have you gained a little weight?”
She pulls me in to the old, gilt and brown living room and I have to look away from her pale, washed-out eyes. Her hair has gone completely gray. She is forty-six years old. I feel my cheeks flush hotly and swallow hard to smother the burning that expands in my abdomen.
“I can’t stay,” I blurt out, and then regret it.
Mom and Dad look at my suitcase and then at me.
“Surely you could spend the night and leave first thing in the morning?”
“Not safe for a woman driving at night,” Dad says, scratching a large, hairy ear.
“Besides,” Mom says, mopping her eyes with an already wet tissue, “I was hoping you could help me with Anna’s room.”
I am so angry with Anna, with all of them, and I can’t even begin to explain why. I sink into an over-stuffed chair with worn spots on the armrests and let out a ragged breath.
Mom stands up.
“Let me get you some iced tea, dear.”
She returns with a murky jelly glass filled with instant tea that seems lukewarm even though there are ice cubes bobbing at the surface.
“How’s Wal-Mart?” Mom asks.
“I work at the bookstore now,” I say.
Mom waves her wet tissue in front of her. “Of course, the bookstore. How are things?”
I know she asks out of politeness. Her eyes and body are so drained from sorrow, I wonder how she keeps from collapsing.
I suppose I could tell her what it’s really like. Stocking the new titles, arranging the remainders tables, the careful whittling away of each hour, as if each fallen minute must drift away in a particular pattern. I work the late shift, closing the doors each night at midnight. The owner thinks that by staying open late, he will make money. But nobody buys books at midnight. Mostly, there are men, wandering in and looking around. They come in for small things, a newspaper or maybe a birthday card they will never send. As if my youth contains a scent they feel compelled to seek out, the way a dog rolls in wild smells in the grass.
“Things are just fine,” I say. And already we’ve run out of things to talk about.
An elongated moment of time fills the room like an expanding balloon. I realize that my jaw is clenched so tight that it hurts.
“So, what exactly happened?” I say, knowing I have no right to ask. I gave up long ago trying to care or to help, even before I left. Because of this I feel terribly guilty. I rage over everything and nothing, feeling a little like Saturn eating his own children.
“It was her condition,” Mom says.
“But she was in the hospital, wasn’t she? I mean, you can’t die from schizophrenia,” I say, my voice serrated with impatience.
Dad looks deeply into the lap of his trousers.
Mom plants her palms at the tops of her knees, sighs, and then stands up.
“We’ll need to leave soon.”
I had left home before they sent Anna to Hale House, a private sanitarium. I had been very much in a hurry to go and had missed the worst of Anna’s rapid, inglorious descent.
A month after my missed prom I had come home from work to find her wandering the street in front of the house. She was wearing a down jacket in the sweltering August heat, layers of crinkled tin foil protruding from her tightly drawn hood.
“Anna, come inside,” I urged. I pulled at the arm of her jacket, wiping the sweat from her forehead with my other hand.
Anna’s shocked eyes darted to me, then quickly back to various points in the sky.
“They’re trying to x-ray me again. Do you feel it? I feel it. My skin is stinging. Every time they try to x-ray me, my skin starts stinging.”
I pulled her into the living room and looked for Mom. Inside, the house was a shambles. Couches and chairs had been tipped over barricade-style. The small foyer was littered with a river of silver. Forks, spoons, kitchen knives, plated-silver picture frames, the silver floor lamp, a desk fan, screwdrivers and the toaster, all lay strewn about the floor. Mom sat at the kitchen table, huddled behind a cold cup of coffee, her eyes dark pools of tears. She spoke in a coarse whisper.
“We were eating breakfast. Suddenly, she began screaming, clawing at herself. Something about a laser beam trying to get her. She said the silver things would bounce the beam back at the ‘matchstick people’.”
I followed my mother’s eyes and found that Anna had wandered into the kitchen, taking a chair opposite Mom. She smiled sheepishly, then held a hand to her mouth, stifling a giggle.
“Anna, is everything alright?” I asked.
She looked at me and smiled warmly.
“I’m so unbearably sad. Really, really sad. Have you ever been so sad that you just wanted to die?” she asked. And then she began laughing hysterically.
Dr. Van Buren changed Anna’s medication frequently. Over the next two years she bumped along on a furious river of drugs: Thorazine, Clozapine, Haldol, Clozaril; always with the same disastrous results. Shaking hands, uncontrolled facial movements, agitated spasms of her body; like a bird trying to break out of a rubber shell. Every so often, Mom couldn’t take it anymore, seeing her beautiful baby girl reduced to a pile of twitches and jerks and facial tics. She would withhold the medication, only to be rewarded with more bizarre behavior.
The last time I saw Anna, she was in her room, sitting on her chair, her journal on the table in front of her, her knees drawn up under her chin. She rocked absently back and forth, as if suspended in an invisible calm.
“Anna, I have to leave,” I said.
Her rocking became more passionate.
“You can’t get away, did you know that? You can’t. I used to try to get away, but now I know the Truth.”
“I’ll call as soon as I get settled. Maybe you could come out and visit,” I said, knowing with certainty that this would never happen.
She looked at me with wounded eyes.
“My liver hurts. My liver and my kidneys hurt. But my liver really hurts.”
I was seventeen when I left. I got a job as a stock clerk at the Wal-Mart on the lower east side of Los Angeles and lived out of my car for six months until I could afford a small cockroach-infested apartment for five hundred dollars a month. I regretted leaving so suddenly, so decisively. I volleyed between guilt and relief as I replayed the confrontations and disappointments from my childhood. I wondered about college. But mostly I drank vodka tonics, trying to numb the roiling discontent that hovered just below the surface. The mess that our life had become wasn’t Anna’s fault. I knew that. She was as caught up in her own private struggle as I was with mine; both of us as distant as planets. Somehow though, I still felt cheated.
Mom had called two months ago to let me know they were thinking of putting Anna into a mental hospital. She was only seventeen. And there had been an incident.
Mom and Dad had awakened to find Anna standing over their bed with a butcher knife, mumbling something about wanting to make sure they were okay, leering and smiling as she played with the knife. Mom had called the doctor the next day. When Dr. Van Buren heard the knife story, he sighed. He told Mom that there was one other treatment option they could try. ECT, or electroconvulsive therapy. He said it was used extensively until the mid 1950’s, until the development of anti-psychotic medications. He said Anna might respond favorably since the drugs weren’t working. He told Mom that ECT would produce a generalized seizure with minimal side effects. Anna might have some memory loss, or disorientation, and suggested a series of treatments, three the first week. There seemed to be nothing else to do. Mom told Dr. Van Buren that she wanted to be with Anna during her treatments, but the good doctor wouldn’t hear of it. He said the experience would be too traumatic.
We all meet in the hallway at the top of the stairs; a confluence of disjointed lives. Mom is wearing a black knit dress, much too hot for summer. Dad has on his old serge suit. I brought a charcoal gray dress that seemed appropriate at the time, but which Mom frowns at slightly.
We get into Dad’s lemon-crème Lincoln and he cranks up the air conditioner as we drive to the church.
Mom picks at the collar of her dress, then pulls down the sun visor and begins poking at her hair as she stares blankly at the vanity mirror.
“They said we’d be able to see Anna about an hour after the treatment.”
Dad shakes his head. He’s driving down Washington Street, thirty-five miles an hour, ten miles below the speed limit.
“I was so nervous,” Mom says. “Dad kept clearing his throat.” She looks at Dad now. “You kept clearing your throat, remember?”
She folds up the sun visor, then dabs at the corners of her mouth with her thumb and forefinger. The car is flooded with the heavy sweetness of her White Shoulders perfume. She turns so that she is looking just above Dad’s head.
“Dad said we should go out to Red Lobster afterwards. Can you imagine? I told him not to make any plans. It would be nice just to spend a quiet evening at home without toasters and screwdrivers all over the floor.” She looks out her car door window.
Dad switches on his right turn indicator. It makes a muffled, comforting pling-plong sound as he rounds the Lincoln up Thirty-second Street.
Mom looks at Dad again.
“You just stood up, remember?” Then to me, “He stood up and walked to the end of the hall and stared out of the bar-covered window.”
Mom folds her hands and places them in her lap.
“After two hours, Dr. Van Buren finally came out.”
“I thought he looked old that day,” Dad says.
“I remember,” Mom began, “right before he gave us the bad news how I suddenly realized that his chin looked like the heel of a foot. The whole time he’s telling us about the accident, about Anna’s aneurysm, about the blood vessel bursting, drowning her brain, and all I could think of was how his chin looked just like the heel of a foot.” She pauses. “Isn’t that funny?” she says to the air.
Dad parks in the lot of St. Thomas of Aquinas. We sit in the left front pew. There are not many of us. A few friends of Mom’s and Dad’s that I vaguely remember. Dr. Van Buren is not here. The funeral is swift and proper, the priest says all the right sorts of things. Just what Anna would have laughed after before she got so sick, saying something like Father Timothy was so cosmopolitan and droll. Dad sits stoically, his face as hard as scrimshaw. Mom bows her head, letting her lap catch her silent tears. I cannot cry. My tears and anger have congealed and at times I think are the only things holding me up. All I can think about is getting into my car and driving back to LA.
As we leave the church, I push away refractory thoughts. They are cold, I know. I do not wish to be cold. I don’t mean to be callused or hard. For so many years I have defined myself only in terms relating to Anna’s illness. Living on my own, sometimes I have tried conjuring the blurred vision of me alone, but it rises like bile, sour in my throat. The past then settles like heavy ashes and I find myself desperate for a vodka tonic oblivion.
After the burial, we walk slowly to the Lincoln. Mom links her arm in mine. Her anguish is cement-heavy. I want to say something that will help, but there is nothing to say.
Back home, Mom busies herself in the kitchen with a neighbor who has brought over a lasagna and green bean casserole. Dad sits in his usual chair, his fist round a glass of brandy, listening to the stream of conversation from the kitchen. Someone else shows up with a meatloaf.
I walk upstairs and stare at the door to Anna’s old room. Opening the door, I am almost overwhelmed. It smells of Ten-O-Six Lotion and Bonne Bell Strawberry lip-gloss. A poster of Bon Jovi hangs on the wall next to the bed. A pale ivory dust ruffle peeks out from beneath a salmon-colored comforter. I remember that Anna always hated that comforter. “How could they make me sleep underneath something that is named for a fish!”, she had said.
There isn’t much. Most things were taken to the hospital when Anna left. Inside the closet hangs just a few clothes. A plaid flannel shirt sent by a distant aunt from Minnesota that Anna never had occasion to wear, a couple of pairs of shorts and a tank top that I don’t recognize. I fold these things and then turn my attention to the dresser. On top of the dresser are a few knick-knacks. There’s a picture of the four of us taken a decade ago, against a backdrop of the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon, like so much else in life, just didn’t seem real. A vase in the shape of a cow I remember Anna buying at a garage sale, stands empty. Next to the vase is a small glass jar of multi-colored marbles with a cork lid. I look closer and notice tiny bits of foil dot the surface of the dresser, like scales on a fish. The drawers too, are mostly empty. I gather everything and put it next to the small stack of clothing that sits waiting to be boxed up on the bed. Of course, I have saved the desk by the window for last.
The first thing I saw when I walked into the room was Anna’s journal sitting on the desk. After taking down the poster, I look around. The only thing left is the journal. Anna always stressed the importance of everyone calling it her journal and not her diary. Diaries, she said, were for silly girls who liked Barbie. Mom has said that everything will be boxed up and given to Goodwill or maybe The Salvation Army. But somehow it doesn’t seem right to do that with her journal.
The late afternoon sun casts uncertain rays of light across the table. I walk to the desk and pick up the journal. It is leather-bound, heavy and solid in my hands. I put the journal to my face and inhale and surprisingly, it doesn’t smell of leather at all, but only of Anna.
I open the journal and thumb through the pages, glancing at the writing. In the beginning, the writing looks normal. Anna’s generous, loopy cursive sprawls across the page. I catch odd blurbs: …my philosophy is receding, I reached out to grab it as if it were a brass ring, …templates, what a lovely word, it sounds like some sort of expensive jewelry, …dancing must be to the woman, what sex is to the man.
Closer toward the end of the entries, the writing takes on a more sinister look. Anna has begun to print some passages. Many sentences end with numerous exclamation marks that look as if they’ve been engraved with a dagger instead of a pen. I turn the pages more quickly, afraid to read anything, yet my eyes catch words anyway: “pierce”, and “sting”, “ripping”, and “bleed”. I close the book momentarily, then take a deep breath and open to the last entry. It is dated March 10, 1995, the day I left for LA.
Reve’s fear makes her run away. But the more she runs, the less she sees.
She always said I was the strong one, but I am not. I feel as fragile as a twig doll, trying my best not to snap into a thousand tiny pieces.
From my darkness I’ve seen dimly and someday she will know: the past and future are one; a shadow lit only by the fire of the present. I hope someday she dances in the flame.
The rest of the pages are blank. I close the book as my eyes well with tears. I try swallowing the lump that has formed squarely at the base of my throat, but it stays, rooted. I am surprised by the warmth of my tears and find myself wondering if they are so warm because they are so old.
Through the window, I notice a large prickly pear cactus growing in the front yard. A late, bright yellow and white flower has bloomed on the cactus. By this time of year, most of the blooms on all the cacti are gone. But this one, lone flower sits, thrusting itself towards the sun. As I weep, a hummingbird, a bright flash of cobalt green, flickers on top of the flower, then darts away, as quickly as it came.
Note: This short story won the 2000 Lite Circle Literary Contest for fiction. It was published in the December 2000 issue of
Lite: Baltimore's Literary Newspaper
