The Alchemy of Nineteen

“Your mother was nineteen, you know,” Aunt Melissa says, “when we started noticing.” Her declaration pulls me out of myself. Its not the first time she’s said this, and it won’t be the last. Today its particularly annoying, because its Thanksgiving, and I’m doing that thing where I imagine how life might have been different. You know. If my mom hadn’t gone crazy.

I do this a lot, living a parallel life in my head. For example, instead of my father and Wren sitting on Melissa’s couch, staring blankly at the television and their phones, we’d be home. We’d be circled around the antique dining room table, laughing and sharing stories. Wren would be excited that I was home from college, and I’d be looking forward to my friends popping by for a reunion. Dad would carve the turkey and Mom would whip up all my favorites, do my laundry, and hug me more times than necessary.

Instead, we’re sitting in Melissa’s glorified double-wide which reeks of overcooked food due to the lack of proper ventilation. Her own kids aren’t even there, because they have to split Thanksgiving between her and her ex-husband. Her new husband, Paul, is asleep—no, passed out—in the recliner. I’m not even sure why she married him, there is nothing redeeming about him. I’m helping Melissa with the dishes in hopes that we can speed this obligatory pretend-we-like-each-other holiday up. Wren catches my eye; she would be helping too but there’s no room in this shoebox of a kitchen.

I’d been tuning out Melissa with the fantasy in my head, the one where my mother doesn’t go crazy, and our lives followed the proper path instead of splitting off into this dysfunctional version. Unfortunately, Melissa has one of those grating voices that makes it impossible to zone out, even for someone like me who has perfected the art of daydreaming.

“It was just a bit of weirdness at first, you know,” Melissa says, shaking her head and clucking her tongue like this isn’t the five millionth time she’s gone over this with me.

I know the story like the back of my hand, and I hate it. Its part of the reason its easier to imagine the parallel life, the way things could have been. My mother had me during her senior year in high school, and Melissa tells me that she and my father were in love, although my father says my mother trapped him. Sometimes I think he’s made up his own reality, because its easier to hate my mother than it is to hate his life. I like the version where they’re in love and decide to beat the odds by getting married and starting the family young, so that’s the one I use.

In my head, they have me, they graduate high school, they get married, and they have Wren soon after (that part’s true.) In my version, though, they stay in love. In my version, we have traditions like chopping down a Christmas tree together and putting milk and cookies out for Santa. Wren and I have a chore list and once a month we have family movie night. We hire a photographer to take family photos of us walking down a wooded path during the golden hour, holding hands. My mother does things like braiding our hair and my father, who used to be an artist, brings home pastels and good paper for us to be creative on. We have a dog.

This is preferable to the reality, which Melissa is hellbent on reminding me of today.

“You were barely one, you know. When she started talking about voices. Not all the time yet, that came later. I mean, my sister was always a kook, but it was off the wall even for her.” Melissa neatly stacks the green melamine plates with cartoon turkeys on them, her version of holiday dishes. She leans her overweight body against the kitchen counter and lights a cigarette. I nearly choke as it mixes with the invisible haze of burnt yams and turkey grease.

“Then came Wren. And it just kept getting worse.” Melissa shakes her head gravely, and I want to punch her. I hate this trailer where I’m forced to spend every holiday because there is no other alternative, no kindly grandparents, no father who steps up. I hate the smoking and the stuffy air and drunk Uncle Paul. My cousins aren’t even here anymore.

Melissa goes on and on, and I pull one of Uncle Paul’s Miller High Lifes out of the fridge. Melissa doesn’t even notice, even though I’m only eighteen.

I also hate her uneducated, ignorant version. Your mother went crazy. I mean, when explaining to a stranger, that description is justified. But between us, her family, can’t we just call it what it is? She’s a paranoid schizophrenic. She became symptomatic when she was nineteen years old, shortly after the birth of her first child, and shortly before the birth of her second. Her disease progressed quickly, and by the time I was five she had her first stint at a mental hospital. She had been on various types of medications. By the time I was six my father had kicked her out, having no use for this life she tricked him into, he said.

From the time I was six until I was twelve, she lived with Melissa and her ex-husband. To hear my father tell it, she ruined that marriage too. She lived in this stupid trailer, sleeping on the pullout couch, with Melissa, my ex-uncle, and my two cousins who were babies. Meanwhile, just a mile away, my father lived in a house with Wren and I. A house with enough bedrooms for all, but not enough space for my mother's sickness.

I saw my mother sporadically during those years, at Melissa’s for holidays mostly. She wasn’t a mom to come to soccer games or school functions. She was either zonked out on meds or not medicated enough and talking to people who no one else could see. Watching for the spies, always. Even then, I knew Melissa was a shitty caregiver. It would have been hard for anyone, but she can’t even follow instructions for how to make candied yams. I’m not sure regulating a schizophrenic’s medication was ever in her skill set.

For holidays, my father would send us there. I’m not sure why he comes now…it certainly isn’t for Melissa’s cooking or some warm and fuzzy family moments. Maybe he has some shred of guilt for being so distant during our childhood; for sending our mother away instead of loving her. In those years, I would spend whole Christmas days in my mind, in the parallel world. It was as if, in the presence of my mother, some visceral feeling came alive and I could see her as she might have been, instead of a woman with a wild look on her face, eyeing us suspiciously, questioning if anyone had followed us there.

Instead, I would picture us at our house. My mother would have slaved over the meal, and my father would do the dad things, taking out the trash, entertaining the guests, wrestling with the kids. Wren and I would help set the table and draw name cards for everyone—the grownups in the dining room and the kids around the card table which would be set up in the den. We would be excited about our cousins coming, because they were just toddlers and we loved to carry them around and pretend they were ours. The adults would sip wine after dinner, becoming jubilantly buzzed (not flat out drunk like Uncle Paul.) But Uncle Paul wouldn’t even be there because Melissa’s ex-husband would still be around.

My dad is right—Melissa’s ex probably left because of my mom. Even in my parallel world I couldn’t escape this truth. There was a lot of fighting towards the end of Melissa’s marriage and my mother’s long stay on the couch bed. Fighting between Melissa and her husband, who argued that if my mother wasn’t fit to be around Wren and I, she shouldn’t be around any kids. Fighting between Melissa and my father about having her committed and each one’s level of responsibility. Fighting between my father and Wren and I. He snapped at us constantly, always citing my mother as the root of his stress.

When I was twelve, she went away for good. There were a handful of holidays when Melissa brought her out for a visit—pending her status—but they were few and far in between. Easter when I was fourteen. Wren’s birthday when she turned sixteen. Melissa’s justice of peace ceremony to Uncle Paul just last spring. My graduation. I’ve envisioned all these days differently…making ham with pineapple slices under my mother’s guidance, having a sweet sixteen party for Wren, attending an anniversary party instead of a second marriage for Melissa. It just sits better. Sometimes I think Melissa’s life stagnated when her sister went crazy.

Melissa is still talking. I want to go to the living room, to sigh loudly and make comments to Wren like, what time are we meeting everyone to speed up the departure. But something in me will not let me just walk away. Melissa is still going through the history, and now we’re up to last year, when I graduated high school, and she brought my mom home for the family celebration.

“That was a good day for her, don’t you think? She was better,” Melissa nods to herself, as if she needs to convince herself of a truth that isn’t real—her own alternate reality, I guess. One in which my mother becomes well again, as if that’s even a possibility. At least my mind follows things that could have been true.

On my graduation day, she didn’t talk about spies and she wasn’t catatonic. But she was cool, distant. She hugged me as if I were a second cousin, once removed, and she was only there out of obligation. In my mind however, the embrace was from who she was meant to be, my mother. She was teary with pride, nostalgic about this bookending of my childhood. She hosted a graduation party, a backyard picnic, a DJ for my friends and I to dance to.

Instead, we’d all gathered at Melissa’s afterwards. Just how I wanted to spend my graduation day—eating potato salad from the grocery store and listening to my new Uncle Paul tell my father how the gun raffle at his hunting club was rigged. My mother sat in a kitchen chair, quiet and demure. Wren rolled her eyes every time we looked at one another. Melissa fluttered about, never straying too far from her sister.

But now Melissa is still talking. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Wren stand and stretch, look at her wrist even though she doesn’t wear a watch.

“You’re nineteen next week,” Melissa says, her voice full of warning. “You know, that’s when your mom—”

“Yes, I know,” I snap, holding her gaze, knowing she’ll break it first. She does, and I put my half empty beer in the sink. “I’m good, Aunt Melissa. Thanks for dinner.”

“Honey if you ever feel…you know…well, I’m just saying. Nana had it too. The craziness.”

“Schizophrenia,” I supply. “It’s called schizophrenia.”

I walk outside to the car, not bothering to say good-bye to Uncle Paul, no longer caring about pleasantries. I feel bile rising, anger at Melissa, who couldn’t just wash the freaking dishes in peace with me. I know, also, that I am angry because she’s tapped into my fears. She’s hit the sore point, the exposed nerve. In my parallel world, I am just like my mom…we look alike, we have the same sense of humor, of kindness. We both love cooking and we both have a flair for all things bohemian. These things, I know, were once true about my mother. And they are true about me now.

So, it would seem, logically, that me inheriting her mind would also be a truth that pushes through the muddle of what my life was supposed to be, and this oppressive path it chose instead. I wonder if it’s why my father has been calling me more often, as of late. Is he, too, wondering if I’ll go crazy like her? He knows the story of Nana, my great-grandmother, as well as I do. Of course, in her day, there really wasn’t a name for “going crazy” and she was eventually committed to a sanatorium for the clinically insane. Like my mother, she abandoned two small children in the wake of her madness.

Wren comes out, and I imagine the moment differently: that we are excited to go home so we can call our friends and go hang out in someone’s basement or garage. We will, in fact, do this, but everything is shrouded in this melancholy gloom that seems to hover over our lives. She smiles sadly at me. My little sister knows no alternative; she cannot remember my mother before. But I can.

They’re flashes, I guess, not true memories. I can recall the scent of garlic simmering, the smell of the laundry detergent she used. I know what her hands felt like when she tucked a blanket around me, and I remember her cranking up music in the kitchen and dancing while she cooked. She was always cooking, always baking, always mixing herbs grown on our little back porch, always cutting up fresh fruit for Wren and I to snack on. I remember my father coming home, and how they would dance for a second or two in the kitchen. She, stirring the soup, and he, behind her with his chin nestled in that spot where her neck met her collarbone. I know I didn’t make that up. That’s not part of the parallel world in my mind. That really happened.

Wren doesn’t remember any of it. Wren has no idea, no clue what our lives could have been like, if we didn’t have this wretched family curse of schizophrenia. She never saw my mother when she was whole, only as a suspicious woman who lived with Aunt Melissa, some of the time. She never saw my father when he still let love seep out.

He appears now, striding towards the car with his familiar gait, the one that exemplifies his woe-is-me status, his overburdened life. I usually have little sympathy for my father, but the remembrance just now of the kitchen moments, fragrant with love and sweetness, make me feel a hint of softness. He unlocks the car.

“Let’s go,” he sighs.

On the way home, we don’t speak. I think about my mother at eighteen, nearly nineteen. I think of her as me, but with a baby and a boyfriend and the whole world ahead of her. She had no idea. She still thought her mind was her own. She still thought our lives were marching forward on track. She had no clue that it would only exist in my mind. I think about Nana, who died in her forties, locked away. I wonder who she was.

I think about my own grandmother, who escaped the curse, and of Melissa. They must certainly thank their lucky stars that it wasn’t them. Is this what it will be like for me? For Wren? In my peripheral vision I see her shifting in the backseat, see her face lit up from the light of her phone. What if its her? What if she’s the one who, at nineteen, will lose her mind?

Melissa’s words shake me, because they are thoughts I usually don’t allow myself to have. The alchemy of nineteen, the age I may or may not morph into someone else. The thought that it might be Wren, instead of me, hits differently. I’ve never considered this possibility, before tonight. For all the ways I feel bound to our mother, Wren feels just as disconnected. She doesn’t look like her, she doesn’t act like her, she doesn’t remember her. But I do.

Its too much on this night, with my father driving silently, his lips in a thin, miserable line. I can’t stand the silence any more than I could stand Melissa’s incessant talking, and so I do what I always do. I stare out the window at the night sky, and I change it all in my head. I transform it into something better.

Our parents sit up front, talking and laughing and gossiping about Thanksgiving at Melissa’s. They make comments about Uncle Paul’s drinking, or not, because maybe he doesn’t exist in this world. They agree that the pie my mom made was the best part of the meal. In the back, Wren and I make our plans, text our friends, and we give our parents a version of where we’re going and who we’re hanging out with. In this world, we are normal college and high-school aged sisters. Our parents are normal parents who will probably go home, pour another glass of wine, and fall asleep in front of the television.

In this world, I won’t be sliding into nineteen with trepidation. There will be no alchemy of my life once I cross the magic number. There will be no upcoming year of worrying about my little sister. There will be no Nana, long dead in the asylum and our mother will not be spending Thanksgiving with the other residents in the facility where she lives, warding off spies and undercover agents.

Instead, she will be right in front of us, turning to smile. Her face will have that same contentedness that it held when I was four, standing in the kitchen and watching her dance while she cooked. Instead, it’s a world full of everything I’ve missed…mostly, my mother.