The Medicine Burns Read online

  She was setting the table for a game of mahjong. Her friends would be arriving in a couple of hours. She was filling ceramic bowls with candy and nuts. When I arrived home, she looked up as though she was startled. Perhaps she was; I’m sure she could not help but to have seen me differently.

  But I saw something had changed in her, too. It was a look of shame that had irrepressibly risen to her surface. It was the shame she had denied by her storytelling.

  “Do you want to tell me something?” she asked finally.

  She came around the table and squeezed my arm. “You don’t need to tell me. I’m already well aware,” she said, and pulled the letter from an apron pocket.

  I could easily re-create the argument that ensued, with both of us playing defensively, because arguments around the issue of privacy have never ceased for me, nor have the strategies changed. What I found most compelling was my mother’s insistence that one must “fit in,” that if I chose the life of a homosexual, I would be ostracized, singled out, kept apart.

  And I imagined myself sitting alone on a beach somewhere, sharing my mother’s unvoiced humiliation while a muscle-bound cartoon kicked sand in my face. I said to her, “Perhaps I will have to learn about devils disguised as angels.”

  Curfews were instituted in the belief that homosexuality existed only when practiced. These were desperate measures that I couldn’t be bound by, and I remember pulling up in a car full of friends as the sun rose. My mother would be preparing my breakfast and about to wake me when I would come in the front door, just ready to fall asleep. There were the tedious arguments that never broadened our understanding of each other. And then grudging silences.

  You may wonder what my father’s reaction was to all this. His was an imposing presence wearing massive suits from Big and Tall shops, but beneath the mafia looks and dark glasses, he was really terrified by conflict. He wept when my mother showed him the letter, but refused her suggestion that he have a little talk with me. He was a traveling salesman and I never saw much of him but one day the phone rang. “How are you, Dad?” I asked. His voice was shaky and finally broke on the other end. He asked to speak to my mother. I remember sitting in the kitchen while she spoke to him on the phone.

  “You did what?” I heard her asking. “What are we going to do now?” And finally I heard her say, “Then make an appointment with a psychiatrist and explain to your boss that you can still work while you see him.”

  “Your father’s had a nervous breakdown,” she said. “He walked out of a store with the equipment he’d just sold them. They found him placing the cameras in his trunk.”

  His boss had already suspended him from further work until he was fully evaluated by a psychiatrist. I think we all sensed that there was no specific amount of time implied by this. My father never did resume work for that company.

  Not that he didn’t conform to the wishes of his boss—he did seek out the counsel of a psychiatrist, and after each session defended himself against my mother’s ire. For her, the whole thing was an embarrassment; I believe she felt that there was an analogy between a twisted mind and a twisted limb, and that a therapy should be first and foremost corrective.

  “And what did you discover today?” she would ask him. “How much longer?”

  And despite the fact that my father grew sullen and timid in response to these questions, his withdrawal and vagueness only assured her that his sessions were not working. It was only a month before she demanded his return to work. I heard them talking about it late one night after I had arrived home, silently unlocking the door, taking off my shoes, and drifting past their bedroom. I heard him sobbing, and stopped to listen.

  “What can I say to Epstein?” I heard him ask. “I have nothing conclusive to bring him.”

  “Use that,” she said. “Tell him the therapy isn’t working. Explain to him what was on your mind when you did it, not in detail, but tell him that your son is having problems and that you collapsed under the stress.”

  Their voices lowered and I could no longer hear them, even with my ear pressed to the door, but my mind was full of talk, and I urged myself to believe that I wasn’t at the root of my father’s collapse. For the first time I began to pity my father, fearing that he would lose the one opportunity he had to understand the real source of his anxiety. But I could not trust my pity, fearing that my mother may have clarified his problem in the defining terms that are characteristic of her stories.

  I slept fretfully and was up when they awoke the next morning. My mother laid out the clothes my father was to wear to his interview. He smiled at me pitifully from their bedroom doorway, then closed the door before he began putting on the prescribed suit. My mother was busy cutting grapefruits in the kitchen, and sprinkling sugar on each half.

  I sat with them at the breakfast table. My mother tucked a bib over my father’s shirt and tie. She complimented his barber who had trimmed his hair just a few days before. After he had eaten his grapefruit and stood away from the table, she came up close to him and straightened his tie and held out the jacket for him to slip on. I hadn’t seen that doting tenderness in years, and I felt strangely moved and terrified at the same time.

  She came back to the table to clear away our dishes and her mood had already darkened. I waited to see if she would mention the interview, but she did not. Instead, she began talking about the neighbors whose homes she’d watch through the mirrored window in the living room. I already recognized that her stories about the neighbors were her roundabout way of confronting me. She asked me about the good-for-nothing son of Airs. Rosen-bloom, who was growing pot plants along the side of their house. She’d watch his comings and goings with keen interest.

  Finally she said, “The days of entertaining our neighbors are long gone. Every time Ruth speaks to me she wants to know about your father and you; she acts as though we’re some kind of TV show—there for her entertainment.”

  For as long as I could remember, Ruth Rosenbloom had been the bane of my mother’s existence. She’d once told me about the horrible affront Ruth had committed on the day of my bris. At the time, my parents had been friendly with the neighbors. They had just moved into their home. There are photographs of my parents entertaining the neighbors on the lawn, all of them with drinks in their hands and a grill smoking in the background. The neighbors had returned these gestures by helping with house repairs, and throughout my mother’s pregnancy, they had urged her to take a less active role in the construction of a fence around their property. It was only in the middle of her eighth month that my mother could be convinced to put down her hammer and take on the role of supervisor. She remains proud of the fact that she saw the fence completed in her first two hours of labor pains; it was only then that she allowed my father to rush her to the hospital, with the neighbors in a caravan behind.

  She claims that I was born without hesitancy, which surprises me even to this day. But then, my birth has been so mythologized by her, it seems more likely that this “anxiousness to enter the world” was merely a response to my early complaints at having been born at all. She has admitted, however, that I was an ugly baby, and that it was with horror that she recognized my turned feet.

  The neighbors gathered outside the glass window to watch me, while my mother wept to my father that she was responsible for my deformity.

  She remained inconsolable until my father sought a doctor’s intervention. He assured her of the commonness of my condition, and that modern medicine had led us away from the primitive measures she had endured as a child, and though he doubted I would dance, he consoled her that my childhood would be normal and happy. His authority soothed her, and she was soon able to accept the congratulations from the neighbors who filed in around her bedside.

  So by the time of my circumcision, my neighbors were all fully aware of the fact that I was a child awaiting two surgeries, my penis and later my foot, and certainly they knew that I would wear a cast on my foot long before I wore a pair of baby shoes.
>
  Did this gift signify her hope for the future when my feet would no longer turn away from each other? My mother chose not to believe so, and from that point forward, she kept a firm distance from Ruth, and almost all the neighbors, as though they each possessed the same potential for ignorant or intentional malice, which she equated.

  Her isolationism might have worked while I was younger, but while my father was unemployed and I was climbing out of my window in the middle of the night, my mother was certain the neighbors were collecting the information, waiting to humiliate her yet again. She suddenly had both of us to attend to, which took some of her attention off me and enabled me to resume a private life which had been prematurely and far too brightly illuminated. After all, I was no more rebellious than my peers, just more committed.

  I discovered a drag club on Miami Beach which flaunted its tacky exoticism. The performers were either overweight or anorexic and desperately untalented. But I could watch them for hours, one after the other making a show of their failures, their alcoholism, and their bad attitudes. One could expect the bouncers to have to remove Lola from the stage; her numbers had the tendency to become an assault on the audience, baiting them to get up on stage and do a better job than she if they thought they could. And she would only leave the stage when the bartender or someone in the audience promised to buy her a drink.

  I marveled at how they lived. As much as I doubted my parents’ values, I assumed that at some point I would be forced to share them. It was these amateur drag shows that made me realize just how vast the world was. The drag queens challenged everything. Not simply gender, but propriety as well. If they sensed they were being laughed at, they laughed along before the joke got too old.

  I planned a party for a weekend when my parents were leaving town. It was my mother’s prescription of a “rest cure” for my father. Though many of the guests had attended my birthday party at the cottage, the spirit of this party was radically different. I chose my parents’ bedroom to act as an orgy room, replacing their reading lights with red bulbs. I moved the stereo from my bedroom into the living room and cleared the shelves of my mother’s kewpie collection and my father’s Norman Rockwell ingots. I invited the guests to come in drag, to bring drugs and alcohol, and to bring pajamas if they wanted to sleep over.

  I remember being tentative about the music and the noise, but my friends’ assurances overrode my concerns, at least temporarily. A once smoke-free environment had my eyes watering in just a few hours. Before I knew it, friends had invaded my parents’ bar and medicine cabinet, traipsing around drunk and on Valiums, dressing each other up and undressing each other in every corner of every room. I wandered around like a good hostess in one of my mother’s aprons, offering cocktails to the guests and urging couples in various states of undress to use my parents’ bedroom for the unholy acts.

  Things died down by the early morning. Many of the guests had gone home, but some were sleeping on the couches and floor. I found myself cleaning up bottles and overturned ashtrays, stray articles of clothing, and even some of my mother’s makeup that someone had drawn from her bag in the bathroom. I was suddenly engulfed with anxiety, with fantasies of them arriving home early, and with the facts of the bottles missing from their bar, their bedding wet with semen and spilled champagne, and the smoke which seemed to linger even with the windows and doors open.

  A friend of mine, Armando, held the trash bag open as we moved among the bodies. For each of my worries he offered tender assurances, and when the last bottle had been picked up, he led me toward my bedroom and urged me to sleep with him. When we turned on the bedroom light, some moans issued up from beneath the blankets.

  “Let’s try your parents’ bed,” he suggested. He took off his clothes and crawled over the filthy sheets. I joined him, naked, on their bed. There was a tremendous erotic charge in my final act of defilement. Our mouths and our chests came together, and I felt my feet digging into the velour spread piled at the foot of their bed. I looked into the eyes of the framed photograph of my mother. At the bottom of it she inscribed her dedication to my father and I whispered it in Armando’s ear, “‘All my love to you, Baby.’”

  I’d never walked in on my parents having sex, nor had I heard them. Sometimes I would find them in the morning asleep with the television still on and a pizza box with some leftover slices between them. My father expressed his affection through telling dirty jokes which my mother would respond to with feigned shock even though she would often have to remind him of the punch line. Having sex in their bed was not exciting because of any of their activity. If anything, I felt I was originating the primal scene, and my excitement was generated by the idea of them walking in on me.

  It is assuredly this erotic fixation with being discovered that prevented my housecleaning of the following day from perfectly masking the events of the night before. Certainly, I’d come close. I mopped and dusted, put everything back where it belonged, washed sheets and towels, and even went so far as to replace some of the bottles of alcohol in the bar. The rest, I had hoped, would go unnoticed.

  What I’d neglected, of course, was the makeup. Nothing was mentioned, however, until my father returned from his interview with Epstein, visibly distraught as though he himself had been caught in some perverse act. He stood for a moment unsure in the doorway. If my mother hadn’t been so quick to greet him, I suspect he would have quietly turned and fled.

  “How did it go?” she demanded, her hands on her waist, as though she was defending something behind her.

  “They’ve asked me not to come back,” he said quietly. Then, in a moment I wish I hadn’t observed, he looked at her tearfully and asked her, “Do you want me to leave?”

  Even my mother looked awkward, her mouth searching out an expression comforting but firm.

  “Come in,” she said.

  I snuck back into my bedroom while they talked in the kitchen. Though I didn’t want to hear them, I couldn’t bring myself to drown them out completely with my records. I cannot claim surprise at hearing my name spoken in the exasperated and angry tone that by now seemed inherent in the name itself. It had been two weeks since the party and I had, to some extent, been waiting to be invoked. The fact that it was an unrelated matter, my father’s unaccountable theft and its repercussions, did not surprise me either. By that time, it was impossible to localize a problem or blame. Nothing any of us did was discrete anymore.

  I went to the record player and shut it off. I’d come to the last disc of Berg’s Lulu and worried that its cacophonous climax might fuel their accusations of me. My mother had come a long way in her assessment of my antisocial behavior: where I’d once been the flawed product of their conscientious upbringing, I now had taken on the dramatic proportions of a stranger, a boarder at whose mercy they found themselves.

  I overheard her assurances to my father that he was not to blame, he was not mad. I needed help. If they continued to allow me to go on the way that I was going, the family (and this she pronounced like a curse) would rot from within. Perhaps my new position as a sort of stranger within the family made my parents naturally superstitious of me. It was this superstition that had suddenly driven my mother to believe in something she had never had faith in before: psychiatry.

  True, she had gone along with my father’s recommended therapy but the fact that it had failed to produce results for him supports my opinion that it was a leap of faith, the calling in of the witch doctor or exorcist, that my mother resorted to while scheduling an appointment for me. I was summoned to the kitchen where she offered me the time and date from a Post-It stuck to the tip of her finger. In another clinical gesture, she dangled her makeup bag before me and asked, “Do you want to tell me about this?”

  “No,” I answered, as there really was nothing to tell. Had she taken the jockstraps from my drawer, I might have blushed. She had, in this case, allowed her imagination to fill in the gaps. The missing makeup and apparent return of some gouged and mutilated lipsticks
and eyeshadows were the basis for her assumption that I had gone on to the next step of homosexual development: the inevitable renunciation of my gender. This theory went along with another of her theories, that using her makeup was an attempt on my part to mimic a heterosexual lifestyle. I’m still unsure as to whether she considered that hopeful.

  As ludicrous as the accusations were, any attempt at refuting them on my part were viewed as understandable lies in the face of such shameful behavior. And so I tempered my responses, which were initially quite negative, and consented to their suggestion that I see the psychiatrist. After all, what could it hurt? I reminded myself that it was my mother, and not I, who had such doubts about them.

  One thing I was certain of was that my mother and I had gone as far as we could talking with each other. Everything we said seemed to have some other meaning beneath it, and in the same way that my mother walks with that stiffness from so many years in casts, I seem to maintain an inhibition in my language, finding in it an inherent, or possibly inherited, quality of concealment.

  I didn’t believe that it was communication we were both attempting. It has taken this much time to recognize that we did not so much want to discover each other’s secrets, but to find a way to reveal ourselves. I am sure now that we were both trapped in one of the great and painful deceits of language: the promise of its transparency. It was this dream of nakedness that drove my mother to the most drastic, literal acts.

  I began seeing the psychiatrist, a middle-aged Jewish woman with whom I felt immediately at home. And it was in her office, with its dark wood and draperies, its shelf of leather-bound books including the complete standard edition of Freud’s works, that I began to understand the significance of our club feet.

  I was withdrawn from therapy at the crucial junction when the conflict with my mother seemed best handled with her at one of the sessions. The therapist had asked both my parents to come to the session so as not to put my mother on the defensive. But from the moment I broached the news to them that Miriam and I felt we could accomplish a great deal if they would join me for just one session, my mother began to fear a setup.