Matto, Pazzo

by Laurie Lalish

January that year was so cold that Kathleen's favorite radio DJ, Rick Myers, was taking bets on the first day the thermometer would rise to 0 degrees and the Big Freeze of '57 would be over. The contest was already two weeks old. Everyone was complaining of the cold except for Grandma, who would sit for hours each morning in her rocking chair. Mom would feel her arms, as cold as ice, and finally insist on being allowed to help her into a warm sweater. Kathleen had worn long pants under her dress that morning. With legs covered and scarf wrapped around her face, her forehead alone would take the sting and would only stop hurting by 9 o'clock when Religion class was over.

All month Sister Margaret Anne let the girls hang up their wraps in the cloakroom first, without the boys, because there was the problem of the girls hiking up their skirts to get their pants off. Noreen had whispered to her in the cloakroom, "Is your grandmother going to Moose Lake? My mom said your grandmother was crazy and was going to Moose Lake." Kathleen gave Noreen her meanest look, squinting her eyes and tightening her lips. The state mental hospital was named for the town in which it was built, but Kathleen always imagined it as a dark gray building, looming over a small wild pond. The crazy people would be at the barred windows, screaming to the stillness of the water until the moose emerged from the forest to bellow back at them. Of the phrases Kathleen and her friends tossed about in play, "Oh, go jump in the lake," referred to the big one: cold, deep Lake Superior, whose terrifying storms swallowed fishermen and sometimes whole ore boats. It only meant you were being pesty, but the phrase "You belong in Moose Lake" was a remark meant to hurt and could lose you a friend for the better part of a day.

It was Tuesday, the day of the week when an hour of Art would follow Religion. Kathleen smelled the spicy wax of Crayolas and the oil of plasticine warming in coffee cans on the radiators under big windows along one side of the room. The windows were wide and tall. On damp days last fall, when the windows refused to open, Sister Margaret Anne sent Peggy O'Neil down to eighth grade for her brother Joe, who had stayed back two grades and was bigger and stronger than anyone else in the school. The O'Neil's were a big family and poor, but the kids stuck together. Joe worked as part-time janitor at the school to pay their tuition bill.

During Art that morning Kathleen drew a pattern down a long strip of manila paper, separating the paper into two parts with a curve that looked to her like the hook of a question mark, like the curve on the arms of her grandmother's broad rocking chair. She colored one half of the pattern blue and the other half yellow, overlapping the colors in the middle to create an undulating green line. For a moment, she stopped her coloring and stared at a small pile of sweeping compound Jim had left from yesterday's cleaning. Grandma would be awake now, sitting in her rocking chair, her dry hands picking imaginary lint from the skirt of her dress. Maybe Kathleen's mother had convinced her to bathe and wash her hair and change into a clean dress. Maybe not. Like the blue half of Kathleen's pattern, Grandma would be in her morning quietness, would soon begin to speak quietly in a voice so small the words seemed to fall back into her lap. "Such is life, such is life," Grandma would say and find more lint to pick that really wasn't there. When Kathleen had been home sick last week with a cold, she watched her mother move through the house with ferocious speed, opening windows to shake scatter rugs into the freezing air, forgetting to make the special breakfast of cinnamon toast and hot milk she always made whenever Kathleen was sick enough to stay home in bed. It wasn't the house that needed cleaning, Kathleen thought, it was Mom needing to claim part of the day as her own, spinning a cocoon of orderliness around herself before Grandma's sickness stole the rest of the day from her. Later that morning Kathleen offered to dry the bowls and pans from Mom's baking. When Mom poured scalding water from the big aluminum teakettle on the soapy dishes, Kathleen noticed her mother's red eyes and the splotchy marks around them. When she poured too fast, drops of scalding water splashed Kathleen's arms and burned in hot peppery dots.

By afternoon, Grandma would begin to move about the house, winding through the rooms like Kathleen's green line. "They've been here," Grandma would say, "They've taken my pocketbook and my jewelry. They've hidden my pills, I know, I heard them talking. Claire, could you help me find my pills?" "Josephina," Mom would say, "your pocketbook is on your bureau, in your bedroom. Here is your jewelry box. See, nothing is missing. Your pills are right here in the kitchen. You already took the two blue ones this morning." When Kathleen came home from school each day, Grandma was fully into the opposite side of the pattern, the bright yellow of her day. Grandma would wave her arms and shake her fist at the ceiling, throwing out angry remarks to no one in particular, but sometimes at the weatherman after the 6 o'clock news. "Stop it, you stop watching me," Grandma would shout, sitting on the edge of the couch, confronting him face-to-face. "Oh, I know you, you're the dirty dog who's been sneaking around this house." Grandma would rock back and forth and fret for the rest of the evening, afraid to move from her spot on the couch, never believing for a minute that the man on the screen could do her no harm. Finally, no one in the family was allowed to watch TV, so Grandma wouldn't get worse.

Conclusion—»