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Overview
Psychoanalysis was her family’s religion—instead of wafers and wine, there were Seconals, Nembutals, and gin. Baptized into the faith at fourteen, Melissa Knox endured her analyst’s praise of her childlike, victimized mother—who leaned too close, ate off Melissa’s plate, and thought “pedophile” meant “silly person.” Gaslighted with the notions that she’d seduced her father, failed to masturbate, and betrayed her mother, Melissa shouldered the blame. Her story of a family pulled into and torn apart by psychoanalysis exposes the abuse inherent in its authoritarianism as Melissa learns, with a startling sense of humor and admirable chagrin, that divorcing Mom is sometimes the least crazy thing to do.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781947976054 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holly Monteith Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/09/2018 |
| Pages: | 228 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.56(d) |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Spider and the fly
"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the Spider to the Fly, 'Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy; The way into my parlor is up a winding stair, And I've a many curious things to show when you are there."
"Oh no, no," said the little Fly, "to ask me is in vain, For who goes up your winding stair — can ne'er come down again."
MARY HOWITT, "The Spider and the Fly"
My mamma used to read me this."
A smile ghosted Dad's lips, his southern lilt deepening. A dreamy look gleamed in his eyes, the humid summer evening settling, a sleeping animal before a storm.
Dad sat in the kitchen where we could look out at the Hudson River, the sun sinking below the trees in Riverside Park. A lone fly circled the lightbulb. The air, New York August, stayed hot and steamy even though both kitchen windows remained wide open. Dad hummed, nodded — the lack of a breeze relaxing the hand around his drink, his glass beaded with condensation.
Across the river on the New Jersey side, neon lights started glittering — Palisades Amusement Park lit up. Wild greens, deep pinks, flickering blues, whirled on strange machines and were reflected in the waters of the Hudson.
Dad smelled of Vitalis and gin; he had lots of hair on his chest and legs. We were alone. At last. I climbed into his lap, looked at the pictures in his book. In my favorite illustration, a dapper fly in a monocle, tremulous as Little Red Riding Hood, tips his hat to a hairy, potbellied spider sporting an axe like a codpiece. Eyes trained on the fly, the spider smiles: Such an easy mark!
Dad grinned as he read, his head wagging to the rhythm. I didn't want to look up when I heard Mom's bare feet striding across the floor, the ice in her orange juice clinking.
"Must you?" Mom glared, arching her eyebrows. Her face pale with fatigue, she let him know she found the spider's wheedling, flattering, lying, and trickery, verse after verse after verse, "Disgusting!"
"Read, Daddy, read!"
What if the two of them fought? He'd shove me off his lap.
I gripped his wrists.
Mom wanted that fly rescued, but immediately!
Giggling, Dad shifted the chair around so we were facing away from her, held our book up to the light, declaimed,
"I'm sure you must be weary, dear, with soaring up so high. Will you rest upon my little bed?" said the Spider to the Fly —
I didn't know why he was laughing, but I liked his laugh and the way he was caught up in the story.
"Harry, you'll give her nightmares!" Mom said.
"Daddy!" I yelled. "Read!"
"Harry!"
Ignoring Mom, Dad read on:
"There are pretty curtains drawn around; the sheets are fine and thin,
And if you like to rest a while, I'll snugly tuck you in!"
By this time, Dad was snorting, wiping his nose with the back of his hand, whipping out a cotton handkerchief to mop his hand and face.
"It's brutal! Deceitful!" Mom yelled.
Dad turned our chair back toward her.
"My mamma read me this, Celine, and we didn't have nightmares!" He looked, for a moment, like a boy pleading with his mother. Mom's face hardened. Dad's expression slid from puzzlement to exasperation. He shook his head, mouth set, and sloshed another jigger into his drink.
I watched Mom walk into the living room, stand by the window facing the George Washington Bridge, and sigh, her eyes cast upward, as if praying. Or crying. Maybe she could find out how sweet his sadness was. Maybe she would come back, sit down beside him. Maybe she would smile. At Daddy.
She didn't. Daddy reached for his drink, let me grab it with both hands, allowing me a sip. The melted ice and gin-flavored tonic slipped down, slightly bubbly, slightly sweet, making me dizzy.
He kept reading as I kept hanging on.
I could see the dark outline of Mommy in the living room. She glanced over her shoulder, as if wondering what Daddy would do if she were to decide to return to the kitchen. I could tell by the way she was standing how much she wanted him to notice she was angry.
When Dad read the part where the spider drags the fly up his winding stair, Mom cringed. When the fly met its fate in the comfort of the spider's master bedroom, Mom stage-whispered, "Oh, Harry."
Dad reached for his other book, the one with the torn red cover, pages brown, crumbling a bit at the edges, and opened it. While I gazed at a picture of an upside-down bird, claws extended, an arrow securely anchored in its breast, Dad sang a happy dirge: "Whooo killed Cock Robin? Whoo-ooo-ooo killed Cock Robin?"
My mother put her hands over her ears. Dad's eyes glinted. I bounced, waiting for the next line, which emerged as a gut-wrenching sigh, though I supposed he was one second from collapsing into giggles.
"I, said the Sparr-ah! With mah teensy bow 'n' arrah!"
The more Dad drank, the thicker his accent, the more lugubrious his delivery. The question arose: who caught Cock Robin's blood? With a heartrending shudder, Dad gave the answer:
I, said the Fish With my little dish,
I caught his blood.
Dad drew out the last word to three syllables, "bluh — uh — ud," snickering as if only the two of us understood.
CHAPTER 2Through the wardrobe
He had a strange, but pleasant little face ... and out of the hair there stuck two horns, one on each side of his forehead.
C. S. LEWIS, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I am a tomboy," I announced. I was wearing black high-tops, like my younger brother, and Oshkosh overalls.
Mom was holding the drawings of big-boobed girls that I'd done with my friend Leslie. Leslie's mom said the drawings were disgusting.
Mom's face shrieked the same message, even though she was an artist and had told me that what Leslie and I were doing was called "life drawing." I'd never shown Mom my drawings. She must have gone into my room.
"These proportions are all wrong. The arms are too long for the body, the head too large ..."
I squirmed. The drawings were girlie-girlie, but I'd liked them until Mom saw them. I grabbed them and ripped them up.
"I'd rather be a boy."
"Do you have a boy's name?" Mom was wearing a baggy shirt, jeans, and a newsboy's cap.
"It might be Bucky. Maybe Honey, but maybe Bucky."
Lately, getting hit in the chest hurt. I tried hitting myself in the chest, and that hurt, too. Before, it hadn't. If I slammed my fists against my nipples, maybe I wouldn't get breasts. Mom's face — was she going to cry?
While I decided on Honey or Bucky, my mother called Dr. Berkeley.
Mom and I were sitting in the kitchen of a rented house on India Street in Nantucket. I was enjoying the sunset sliding across the widow's walks across the street, drifting off into daydreams of the beach, looking forward to biking to Cisco Beach or Madaket, wondering whether I'd see bayberry bushes along the way, anticipating going to Arno's on Main Street for blueberry pancakes, and hoping that the lady with my favorite chocolate fudge still had her shop.
As I was finishing dinner, Mom explained that Aunt Berkeley had asked her to ask me something. "Do you want to have your vagina cut out and a penis sewn in?" The question shot from my mother's mouth. Her eyes widened in shock, as if someone had just cursed or farted, or both.
"No, Mom," I said, in a please-pass-the-butter voice. I didn't want to imagine someone hacking off a penis and cutting me where it really hurts to attach the thing, but I couldn't get the image out of my head.
My fascination with Dracula and vampires had been growing before she popped her question, and I was a longtime fan of Barnabas Collins, the sensitive vampire in Dark Shadows, but Mom's question mobilized my interest.
Early that summer, she mentioned how much she'd enjoyed a girl's camp in Vermont.
"When I was your age, I went swimming, I went canoeing, we sang songs —"
"How long does camp last?" I asked. But she was lost in happy reminiscence.
"We made campfires, we climbed mountains, we —"
"How many weeks?"
"— roasted marshmallows, we learned archery, we even put on, let me see, which Gilbert and Sullivan? I know I sang —"
"MOM! How long can I go for?"
"— the piney air was ... what?"
"I want to go! How long does the camp last?"
"Oh, well, it's a whole eight weeks, but if you don't want to go that long —"
"I want to go!"
When my summer camp uniform arrived, I opened my closet, pushed my way behind the racks of dresses, the school uniforms, and the coats to the very back, where I tapped the cedar wall and pretended, one last time, that it was melting away, such that I found myself crunching across a winter-white landscape on my way to the faun's house in frosted-covered Narnia. I'd practically memorized the chapters in which the White Witch tempts Edmund with magically enhanced Turkish delight, whips out her wand to turn Santa into stone, and finally gets her hash settled by the now-rehabilitated Edmund. I'd tie her to the stone table myself and send an army of ten-foot-tall ogres and rheumy-eyed hags with knives and pitchforks after her. Some of the meaner giants would sharpen the stone knife for me.
My mother sewed in my name tags and then drifted into painting little green trees up the legs and basin of the kitchen sink. She concocted inedible dishes she called "Chinese food" out of several breakfasts' worth of leftover scrambled eggs and a few anemic scallions from the back of the crisper. She needed to talk to my father — right now — as the ice clinked in his fourth gin and tonic.
I started packing, even though camp wouldn't start for another four weeks. At night, I tried on the uniform and was delighted to find I'd need a belt to hold up the shorts, that the green knee socks could be pulled over my knees, that the hiking boots (L.L. Bean "Ruff-Outs") required Kleenex in the toe for me to be able to walk in them without my feet slipping around until I tripped, and that I'd have to roll the sleeves of my black watch plaid camp shirt up so they didn't flop over my wrists.
These clothes had to fit me for a long time. I was planning to wear them for maybe a year, if I couldn't afford to buy clothes on my own once I made my getaway. I could maybe escape during summer camp or right before my mother picked me up. I'd need a winter coat, but somewhere down the line I'd find one in some Salvation Army thrift shop. Maybe I could get into an orphanage. I was sure they'd take fifth graders. Or I'd stow away on the Nantucket steamship, pretend to be an orphan, and get adopted by a family on the island.
Or maybe I'd decide to stay. Anything could happen during those eight weeks. By the end of summer camp, some mysterious transformation, fueled entirely by my wishes, might occur. When my parents and brother came to pick me up, they'd look like extras from the set of Leave It to Beaver. Or at least they'd resemble The Addams Family. I wouldn't even recognize them. My mother would call my father "honey," a word she had never uttered, and even though her voice would be pleasantly low, unlike anything I'd heard at home, I'd know her immediately. My father would smile and bow like Lurch and, also like Lurch, wouldn't speak. My brother, inconspicuous as Wednesday Addams perching demurely in a corner, would sit inertly in the car the whole time my trunk was being loaded and speak a single sotto voce "hello" when I climbed in for the ride home.
Even if none of these things happened, maybe I'd befriend some other camper whose parents had always wanted another daughter, or maybe a sister for their little Clara, yes, a companion for their lonely, sickly child who had a cleft palate. I'd play Heidi and get her up to speed by helping her learn to speak — and to climb every mountain, too. Then they'd have a good excuse to lavish upon me their considerable wealth and lasting affection, and I'd fit right in to their family. It'd be easy. They'd be so grateful to me for saving the child they had almost given up for lost. A whole eight weeks! Yes, anything could happen.
Near the end of our drive to camp, Mom and I stopped at a roadside restaurant for dinner, and I dove into my chicken with gravy and wild rice, eating so quickly I could hardly taste it. Suddenly I — who am so allergic to nuts that in my thirties, a boyfriend's kiss would turn my lips into a red welt after he eats a hazelnut — felt my throat start to swell. I waved at Mom, sitting opposite me, because I could barely speak. The skin on my hands, my arms, got bright red and itchy. Quarter-sized hives were popping out all over. I was scratching like an ape.
"Oh, my goodness, you look tired. We should get you to bed."
"My wild rice gravy has nuts in it."
"Really? Oh, dearie, dearie me. Your throat does sound a bit scratchy. Would you like a little dessert? Or maybe some juice?"
"Mom, I need a doctor."
"A doctor?" she sounded fuzzy, like someone who was just waking up but would rather put her head back down on the pillow.
"I really need one now."
"Oh," she fumed. "Let me see. OK. Wonder if I have enough gas." We got in the car, and she began driving. The car edged forward reluctantly.
"Oh, Melissa, look at the deer!" Mom yelped. "It's so pretty!" She slowed to a crawl and pointed. "Oh, I'd love to paint that! We could stop for a minute."
"Mom, I need a hospital. Please. Right away. Take me to a hospital."
"A hospital? Oh, OK. If you really think so." She shook her head. If I could only calm down and notice the countryside, I wouldn't have these problems. She pointed out another deer frolicking through the birch trees.
I saw a state trooper's car on the side of the road and told her to stop and ask him.
"We don't want to bother him, do we? After all —"
"Pull the car over!"
My mother rolled down her window and told the state trooper it was so good of him to chat with us. She hoped it was no bother. Was there a doctor around here or a hospital?
From the back seat, I rapped on my window, said, "Help!"
He turned and saw my face. Urgently, he told Mom to follow his car.
By the time we got to the small local hospital, I could no longer see or walk. I lost consciousness. I woke on a gurney, in my hand an envelope of pink capsules that reminded me of candy. My mother informed me that I had been given a large shot of adrenaline. I had been unconscious for some time, hours, apparently, and she had on her face the look of a child whose parents have arrived two hours late to pick her up. Mom took me to the bed-and-breakfast near the camp, where I spent three days in bed. She read to me and provided stale sandwiches.
Meanwhile I imagined the plates of homemade blancmange decorated with fresh mint leaves I'd have served up (the way Jo waits on Laurie in Little Women) if Clara of the ruined soft palate had been lying where I was, and if I had been a rosy-cheeked Heidi, feeling considerably perkier than I did right then. I relished the ability to breathe but felt shaky whenever I got out of bed. I looked at Mom humming a little tune under her breath and murmuring about what a lovely lake we were on and wouldn't I like to go swimming?
I realized I'd need to check all restaurant food myself carefully from now on. Not to mention learning to cook, something I would do by watching my father, whose love of southern-fried anything dominated our cuisine at home.
A few pounds thinner, I joined my tentmates three days after camp had started. I enjoyed the piney aromas and the quiet.
The counselor introduced the girls, suggesting we all tell what our daddies do.
"My daddy's a bobbin manufacturer," said a pretty redhead with widely spaced eyes. "My daddy says we'll have a fine old time," said the other girl, shy and genteel. "He's a professor."
My father concealed his mini-bottle of Gordon's London Dry Gin in his shirt pocket when our family ate at the Moon Palace restaurant, where we always ordered the same dish, chicken with snow peas. Dad poured the gin into his water glass. When the waiter's back was turned, Dad pocketed a few pieces of cutlery.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Divorcing Mom"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Melissa Knox.
Excerpted by permission of Cynren Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson xi
Prologue 1
1 The Spider and the Fly 4
2 Through the Wardrobe 8
3 Gods, Gods! 18
4 The Intervention 26
5 In the Beginning 32
6 Two to Tango 43
7 The Group 56
8 Food Fights 63
9 Diagnosis 73
10 Aborted 83
11 Oversexed 90
12 Closer to Mom 99
13 By the Sea 107
14 Independence Day 117
15 Basement Missives 126
16 The Real Thing 132
17 School Days 139
18 Marriage-Material 145
19 At First Sight 153
20 A Whale of a Gift 158
21 Burning Up 170
22 The Exhibitionist 180
23 Divorcing Mom 190
Epilogue 197
Acknowledgments 207
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