A DIRE SITUATION (Chapter 4 of a Novel by Louise Scott)

 

Chapter 4

With Melanie's phone insistently ringing inside the house, I skipped over a stack of mixing bowls, bounded out of the garage, up the steps and across the porch, managing not to trip on Melanie’s Persian cat.  I dashed through the living room and caught the phone on the sixth or seventh ring.

"Mama, it’s Sally."

"Well, Hi, Honeybunch,” I wheezed, slithering onto Melanie’s brand new leather couch--keeping my feet well off the edge of the white upholstery--catching my breath and settling in for an uncomfortable chat.

It was such a tangled skein of love with Sally, my oldest child.  I was always afraid a mundane conversation could veer off into a confrontational path that would make matters worse.  Talking with her usually felt like wading into icy water that was over my head, where each step could bring a downfall. With her schizophrenia it’s been catastrophe after catastrophe through many years, though she had been an exemplary child—always a straight A student, creative, alert, lots of friends.  My feelings for her stack up from the adorable dimpled infant on my breast, to a Brownie Scout selling cookies, a young bride and mother, to her more recent times as a hustler—as a coke whore.

A Bedlamite.  She’s not psychotic, at least I don’t think so.  But it was Looney Toons to deal with her.   I understood schizophrenics may not be able to differentiate between the external world’s circumstances and what their minds perceive in the everyday reality most of us live within--though that reality, too, maybe illusory. Other than consensus for mundane things, like whether it’s night or day, black or white, we each perceive differently.  Consider animals’ perceptions:  A dog smells a cat several blocks away; insects manage to find each other though separated for miles. If we could hear everything making noise in our radius, we’d go deaf.

However.

I took a long deep breath. “I’m so glad you phoned. I've been trying for several days to get in touch.  I want to see you and the boys, today if possible.  Kee-rist!  It’s cold enough to freeze the devil’s gonads, but I’ll be ready to truck on down the road just as soon as the fury of this forecasted storm passes.  I’m packing now, how are you?”

"Not so good," she said in a voice that sounded like the ghost in Hamlet. I heard the note of hysteria behind it.  "They just phoned me from the school.  Justin threw another tantrum and neither of the teachers could control him.”

“What?  What did he do? What happened?” 

“They have the police there.”

"What?  Police? At the school? What the. . .What happened?"

“I don’t know what started it,” she sobbed.  “He raised quite a ruckus, throwing papers all over the place; he spit at one teacher, they said, then bit and kicked the assistant in the shins.”

“Oh shit! That’s awful!  And how did cops get involved?”

“The teachers called the police. The cops put him in handcuffs."

"Cops! Handcuffs! What the fuck! The police put Justin in handcuffs? You mean he’s shackled? Manacled! Holy Mackerel! Is this what happened?"

"Yes. They just phoned me."

"Oh! My God!  That really sucks! Why aren't you at the school right now?  Why haven’t you gone to get him?"

"They told me to wait.  There's nothing I can do right now.”

"Well then, I’ll go get him,” I said as I struggled up from the couch heading for my purse and car keys, trailing the phone’s long cord behind me.  “I can't believe the teachers didn't just twist his arm behind his back.  Really stupid of them to call the cops!  What bloody idiots."

"Well,” Sally said in an abrupt tone, “the teachers aren't allowed to hit the children."

"Crap, Sally.  I'm not talking about hitting our incipient Mike Tyson, only restraining him--just grabbing an arm behind him or grabbing a tight hold of one ear.  How can it be possible that two fully-grown teachers can't control a seven-year-old boy, no matter how obstreperous he might be?  And calling in the police!  Holy cow!  Handcuffing a child!  Justin must be terrified.

“I’ll go calm him down.  But we don’t need to waste time talking.  I'll go get the problem child right now."

"No, Mama, they won't release him to you.  They won't even let you see him; not even me, his mother.  They told me to wait until they phone.  Anyway, if the teachers and police can't control him, there's no way you’d be able to do so."

"Come on, Sally! That’s humbug.  I certainly can.  I’m on my way.  Right now! At least I can be there to give him some sort of moral support.  Holy Moly! Handcuffs!  That’s terrible.”

"NO!”  She screamed so loud it hurt my ear, “You can’t go.”

“I’m on my way. . . ”

“NO!  It's gone past that point.  I think they may take him to Children's Psychiatric Hospital.  Chances are they've even left the school by now."  I was so shocked I couldn’t think of a word to say. After her initial outburst she was quiet, but I kept the phone’s receiver away from my ear just the same.  

When she again spoke her lowered tone betrayed no emotion; it sounded as if she simply stated a fact, such as what day of the week it was.  I suddenly realized that she’d known even before she called me that the child was going to be sent to the psychiatric hospital again.

"Heaven forbid!” I exploded.  “Putting him in that hospital is sure to make things worse! No way! Absolutely not! We've absolutely got to prevent it! What can we do? What can we do?"

Sally was quiet for a minute, then gave a long sigh.  "Well, Mama, no matter what you or I think about it, they will do what they think best.  Laws are laws; rules are rules.”

"And shit is shit! Sally, for Christ's sake!  Laws are rules that sometimes must be broken. They don’t know anything about Justin’s problems, his fears.  Don’t take a defeatist attitude.”

Her voice changed to somber--like an old style preacher orating from the pulpit the way Dylan Thomas sounded reading his poetry. “My attitude isn’t defeatist.  I’m very much a realist and it’s me in touch with the school and the cops.” 

The silence was deafening.  Then in a more pleasant voice she spoke. "Look, Mama.  There's a whole lot I haven't told you.  It isn’t just that Justin made a scene at school.  You have absolutely no idea at all about what’s been happening.  But I can’t get into it with you now.  I'll call you back when I hear what they're going to do," she said with finality.

There was a click.

Sally had hung up.  I stood there dumbfounded, holding the dead line, raking my brains trying to think of something to do, some way to make things better.  For years I had kept hoping a day would come when all the dots would be connected and a clean picture would appear so I would know what to do about the dire situation.  What to do about Sally.

And now what is it I don’t know?

***

This was Act II for Justin to be in the psychiatric hospital.  A year earlier my other daughters and I had tried our best to prevent his being sent there. That was after he had attacked Sally, but that’s all we knew.  We didn’t know whether it had been Sally that called the authorities or if the call was made by one of Mrs. Lujan’s nurses-- from the house where Sally both worked and lived.  She had a roomy wing at Mrs. Lujan’s luxurious house where she stayed with Justin and Brandon, his older brother.

We had pleaded that Justin could stay with his aunt Stacey instead of the hospital, but she wouldn’t talk to us at all.  She kept telling us to “Bugger off!”  In desperation Marta got us together in some government office with authorities that dealt with child custody or abuse.  Marta, Stacey and I sat around a conference room table twiddling our thumbs until Sally came in with her long legged loping gait closely followed by two male and two female bureaucrats. She seemed to be part of the chummy group.

It is Sally, not Justin, who is crazy we told the people.  We emphasized how Sally had serious drug addictions, how she had been several times in psychiatric wards, but always denied she had any problems.  I quoted when she had told me: “I’m not crazy.  I only go to the psychiatric wards knowing there I could get drugs.”  As if this represented sanity. 

Stacey pleaded that Justin could live with her instead of being sent to the psychiatric hospital. 

The younger women responded that Sally claimed that although she had allowed Stacey to babysit on occasion, now Stacey wanted to take Justin with her on her up-coming move to Florida.  That she was trying to steal the boy.

‘Yes,” Stacey said. “I would like to take Justin with me when I move. But not steal him.  Right here and now I want to take care of the boy instead of his being hospitalized.  He has often stayed with me when Sally was drunk or otherwise out of commission.  Always he’s been well behaved and seems to feel privileged to be the big kid with my two daughters.  He’s an imaginative leader; the neighborhood children follow him in the games he comes up with.”

The gray-haired woman at the end of the conference table kept pursing her lips in a tight straight line, pushing her eyebrows together and scowling. She commented that Sally didn’t appear to be drugged or drunk.  “Quite the contrary,” she said. In her voice I felt accusation, as if I were a bad mother and now was talking bad about my dear daughter.

Lady, you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground.

These yahoos were impressed by Sally’s well-mannered presence and proper appearance, the same qualities I’ve always been so proud of with her.  She presented herself as a paragon of virtue with such decorum though her demeanor was subtly coquettish when she flashed her dimples and flounced her abundant black curls.  She’s an excellent actress; we had nicknamed her Tallulah when she was little.

 She kept her beautiful baby blue eyes focused right on the middle-aged pot-bellied man, undoubtedly the head honcho, whose hair combed to one side still didn’t cover his baldness nor his fat hairy ear lobes. He burped and I wondered if he’d had a gastric bypass.

He was so smitten with her that the officious nit-wit simply dismissed our concerns—he and his cronies wouldn’t even listen to us.

Sally was out of the room before any of us could push our chairs out from the table.  Stacey, Marta and I left, exceedingly despondent.  We were stuck with a big sack of excrement.

With Sally adamantly opposed and supported by the law, in the face of her perversity there was nothing we could do then. There was probably nothing we could do now.  She held the poker hand.

She had the say-so with the boys unless we could take her to court to prove her an unfit mother, and what an ugly business that would be, besides requiring plenty of time and money for lawyers. These days family matters are resolved through highly paid surrogates-- the attorneys and establishment bureaucrats we’d tried to deal with.  We were severely hindered by those fuckers.

Sally’s sons were in jeopardy and it wasn't just that Sally couldn't see the solutions; she couldn't see the problems.  She couldn’t tell shit from Shinola.

And now what is it I don’t know?

***

It had been terrible for Justin when the little tyke was locked up at the hospital before.  He came out heavily armored with hard sharp edges, dosed on Ritalin or some other prescription drug.  We couldn't let him spend another two months with screwed up kids in that cold impersonal institution with his only guidance and comfort coming from probably well-meaning, but certainly underpaid, strangers trying to somehow manage to get their rent together on their five-day-per-week shifts. 

I'd gone to visit when he was there before and I saw what a Bedlam it was.  Just to tell you, I was smack dab in front of the nurses' station waiting for Justin, standing right there in the waiting area where there were nurses all about wearing their sweet little white starched uniforms, a couple of them within three feet of me, gossiping about some doctor, when a boy, eleven or twelve years old, walked up to me and with no further to-do aggressively thrust his fist right in my face—almost hit my nose--with his middle finger pointing skyward.  The little dork flipped me the finger, spat out "Fuck you, Lady," and nobody but me seemed to notice or care.

Meanwhile, huddled by himself in a corner by the barred windows, trembling like a little animal with fear of the vet, a small boy was staring at the parking lot outside.  He was perhaps eight or nine years old, scrawny and pale as a seedling thrust early from its seed in darkness.  The lad was still quivering there, staring out at nothing, alone and ignored, when I left several hours later.

"A lot of the kids here are strange," Justin had volunteered.

***

Feeling overwhelmed, I made another cup of coffee, my third or fourth of the morning, and carried it upstairs to Melanie’s guestroom that she euphemistically called the Old Broad’s Home. I sat on the sunny southeastern facing balcony warming my hands on the cup as I sipped and vacantly watched the early morning sun erase shadows as it bounced color off the corrugated wisps of shape-shifting clouds looming in the distance.  

It looked improbable that I would be on my way there in the next few days, now that this horror was back in my face again.

Lately I hadn’t often been thinking of Sally and her sons, but ignoring the problem rather like ignoring it as if there were a hurtful pebble in my shoe. I had been thinking more of how best to recreate order in my own discombobulated life.

What about Justin?  What is it I don’t know?

Please, help to support me in publishing this work. 

Click here to make a donation.