Is that you, Mrs. Havisham?
While I was out playing in the sprinklers during the summer of 1993, my grandmother was spending her days hanging around the house in a full-length mink coat, wearing every piece of jewelry she owned, and a nightgown. She'd lay on a tufted silk chaise lounge, dingy from the decades of sticky little kid hands, reading from The Great Gatsby.
It wasn't her first nervous breakdown, I was told. But it was her most glamourous.
I wasn't aware that she had nervous breakdowns, which gives you a good idea of just how naive I was as a child. I just thought she was "being fancy" and recall thinking that I'd like to be a lot like her when I grew up. I didn't want to be trapped in a 55 year loveless marriage or anything like that, but I did aspire to wear 10 carat cocktail rings to the grocery store.
My grandmother was, and is, still nuts, but she always had a sense of style about her that almost made you want to be on a cocktail of potent prescription medications. She'd spread out her medications like candy on her bone china, delicately slicing through them with Art-Deco era silverware, eating them with the highest manners while going through a free-association monologue worthy of James Joyce, if he were vaguely racist (debatable), suffered from Tourette's Syndrome, and lived to create longstanding grudges between his children.
A few weeks ago, my grandmother stayed with us for an extended period of time, due to a suspicious accident that we only have a foggy notion of. My mom had picked her up for a hair appointment, only to find her with a two-inch cut in her head and bruising all over her face. MumMum said she slipped on ice while waving to her great-grandson (if she were telling this to you, she'd add in "illegitimate"). She ended up needing a whole bunch of stitches, and we thought it was best if she wasn't alone.
What concerned us was not her injuries, but her state of being. Gone were the 60 year old satin nightgown, the fake eyelashes (it was her who taught me how to put on a pair when I was five, much to the horror of my very feminist mother), the marabou high heeled slippers. She wore no make up, and was clad in a sensible outfit. Her lack of crazy-lady attire made us fear the worse: that she really lost her mind.
MumMum always took a certain pride in her appearance, leftover from her days as a runner-up in the Miss New Jersey pageant (she lost to "a bottle blonde with visible roots and a flat butt"). Her special talent was fencing, a sport she actively pursued up until she had kids.
Given that set of data, you'd think that it was having kids that pushed her over the edge. But I think it was more of the loss of a dream that did it. This was a woman who probably never wanted to be a suburban wife with three kids. Her story is like those E! True Hollywood stories, only without any sort of climactic success: The oldest daughter of two New York-by-way-of-Italy vaudeville actors, who leaves her to raise her brother and sister when they mysteriously disappear to Cuba, never to be heard from again. She takes a day job as a typist, does the odd modeling job on weekends and sings caberet at night. This being the 30's and 40's, she marries her next door neighbor in order to get by. She watches her siblings grow up to marry powerful people, while her husband ends up becoming an alcoholic sign painter. Her siblings, now in powerful circles, are ashamed of her and never really talk to her again. Things begin to look up during the Miss New Jersey pageant, but then she gets pregnant and has to give that life up.
It was a life that would drive any person to insanity.
So while her family might resent her, as they had to grow up the daughters of a crazy lady who never wanted to be a mom, I'm far removed enough to feel sorry for her.
Still, it was weird having this living form of a cautionary tale around for two weeks straight. I became more work-oriented, only to become increasingly neurotic everytime a query letter went unanswered, a phone call unreturned. My mother still hasn't gotten over the stress of having her own mother around, and she lays in her room very unglamorously, watching british comedies all day in her sweatpants, asking me every five minutes if she looks fat. My dad can't take the stress of that scenerio, so he plays video games all the time, taking a break from time to time to give me 10:30 curfews ("I'll consider you a grown up when you can handle being a grown-up, which isn't going to happen anytime soon so don't bother waiting for that to happen"), and changing my homepage from The New York Times to MSN.
My grandmother, meanwhile, is back to wearing her mink, the scars now a faint line under her makeup. I'd like to think that we'll all be back to our normal crazy selves someday.
It wasn't her first nervous breakdown, I was told. But it was her most glamourous.
I wasn't aware that she had nervous breakdowns, which gives you a good idea of just how naive I was as a child. I just thought she was "being fancy" and recall thinking that I'd like to be a lot like her when I grew up. I didn't want to be trapped in a 55 year loveless marriage or anything like that, but I did aspire to wear 10 carat cocktail rings to the grocery store.
My grandmother was, and is, still nuts, but she always had a sense of style about her that almost made you want to be on a cocktail of potent prescription medications. She'd spread out her medications like candy on her bone china, delicately slicing through them with Art-Deco era silverware, eating them with the highest manners while going through a free-association monologue worthy of James Joyce, if he were vaguely racist (debatable), suffered from Tourette's Syndrome, and lived to create longstanding grudges between his children.
A few weeks ago, my grandmother stayed with us for an extended period of time, due to a suspicious accident that we only have a foggy notion of. My mom had picked her up for a hair appointment, only to find her with a two-inch cut in her head and bruising all over her face. MumMum said she slipped on ice while waving to her great-grandson (if she were telling this to you, she'd add in "illegitimate"). She ended up needing a whole bunch of stitches, and we thought it was best if she wasn't alone.
What concerned us was not her injuries, but her state of being. Gone were the 60 year old satin nightgown, the fake eyelashes (it was her who taught me how to put on a pair when I was five, much to the horror of my very feminist mother), the marabou high heeled slippers. She wore no make up, and was clad in a sensible outfit. Her lack of crazy-lady attire made us fear the worse: that she really lost her mind.
MumMum always took a certain pride in her appearance, leftover from her days as a runner-up in the Miss New Jersey pageant (she lost to "a bottle blonde with visible roots and a flat butt"). Her special talent was fencing, a sport she actively pursued up until she had kids.
Given that set of data, you'd think that it was having kids that pushed her over the edge. But I think it was more of the loss of a dream that did it. This was a woman who probably never wanted to be a suburban wife with three kids. Her story is like those E! True Hollywood stories, only without any sort of climactic success: The oldest daughter of two New York-by-way-of-Italy vaudeville actors, who leaves her to raise her brother and sister when they mysteriously disappear to Cuba, never to be heard from again. She takes a day job as a typist, does the odd modeling job on weekends and sings caberet at night. This being the 30's and 40's, she marries her next door neighbor in order to get by. She watches her siblings grow up to marry powerful people, while her husband ends up becoming an alcoholic sign painter. Her siblings, now in powerful circles, are ashamed of her and never really talk to her again. Things begin to look up during the Miss New Jersey pageant, but then she gets pregnant and has to give that life up.
It was a life that would drive any person to insanity.
So while her family might resent her, as they had to grow up the daughters of a crazy lady who never wanted to be a mom, I'm far removed enough to feel sorry for her.
Still, it was weird having this living form of a cautionary tale around for two weeks straight. I became more work-oriented, only to become increasingly neurotic everytime a query letter went unanswered, a phone call unreturned. My mother still hasn't gotten over the stress of having her own mother around, and she lays in her room very unglamorously, watching british comedies all day in her sweatpants, asking me every five minutes if she looks fat. My dad can't take the stress of that scenerio, so he plays video games all the time, taking a break from time to time to give me 10:30 curfews ("I'll consider you a grown up when you can handle being a grown-up, which isn't going to happen anytime soon so don't bother waiting for that to happen"), and changing my homepage from The New York Times to MSN.
My grandmother, meanwhile, is back to wearing her mink, the scars now a faint line under her makeup. I'd like to think that we'll all be back to our normal crazy selves someday.