16

To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power.

—MAYA ANGELOU

My children call their grandmother “Gaga.” They love her. She has been seventy-nine years old for several years, and she gets away with saying so. She is radiant, bigger than life.

When she comes to our house, she flings open the front door, and in a husky voice she cries, “Helloooo! Helloooo!”

I remind her that we do not live in a group home for the deaf.

She places her leather-gloved hand on her breast. “Why don’t you love your mother?” Then comes the kiss that leaves a perfectly shaped, bright red imprint of her lips on my cheek. This is how my mother brands her cattle.

Hours later the cheerful Pakistani man behind the register at Cumberland Farms will hand me a wet wipe and point to the place on my cheek where it looks like Bette Davis assaulted me. I chuckle and wipe it off. “My mom did that,” I explain, putting down a five-dollar bill for a quart of milk.

He winks. “If you say so,” he says, handing me my change.

Twenty-five years after my father’s death, my mother has become someone I wouldn’t have recognized as a boy. She shows up wearing sneakers with multicolored spangles on them and beautiful clothes that don’t always coordinate—all this from a woman who at one time wouldn’t be caught dead without high heels, even at the beach.

My mother hugs longer. She laughs louder. She’s graduated her ghosts.

Our parents are mysteries to us. No matter how close we think we are to them, we cannot know the content of their hearts. We don’t know the disappointments, or the scars and regrets that wake them in the night, or the moments for which they wish they could get a do-over. I’m not persuaded we should know them better than that. In our therapeutic age, it’s commonly said that we’re only as sick as our secrets. But there are secrets that we should keep only between God and ourselves. I don’t trust people who tell you everything. They’re usually hiding something.

There’s plenty I don’t know about my mother. She is rock and flower, steel and clouds. She wasn’t a perfect parent, nor would she claim she was. There were times, however, when she was brilliant beyond words.

“Darling, wake up.”

I sailed slowly upward as if in a hot-air balloon, pushing away the gossamer that formed the ceiling of sleep. I opened my eyes and saw my mother’s face only a few inches from mine. She was leaning over me, her hands on her knees, smiling. I was nine years old.

“Put some clothes on,” she whispered.

“What time is it?” I asked, looking around and scratching my head. My room was dark except for the light that came through the crack of the door of my closet.

“Nine o’clock,” she said, pulling a pair of blue jeans and a shirt out of my dresser and placing them on the end of my bed.

“What are we doing?” I said, swinging my legs out from under the covers so I could sit on the edge of my bed and stretch my arms.

“You’ll see,” she said, turning and leaving.

As I put on my clothes, I heard my mother talking to my sister in the bedroom next door, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. My sister’s tone of voice told me that she was as confused as I was.

My mother had checked my father into a hospital. Between his depression and his drinking, he’d been unable to get out of bed for a month, and my mother didn’t know what else to do. It was a Friday night; my older brothers were probably out with friends. So it was only my sister, Nanny, and me my mother ushered into the car.

“Where are we going?” my sister asked, closing her car door.

“On an adventure,” my mother said. My sister and I smiled at each other. Nanny smiled as well.

As we pulled out of our driveway and drove down our street, I grabbed my mother’s headrest and pulled myself toward the front seat. We didn’t wear seat belts in those days. Parents smoked with the car windows closed too. Humans should be extinct.

“Will it take long to get there?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes,” my mother replied. I fell back into the seat and heaved a sigh of protest. This was intolerably long.

But I was struck dumb with astonishment when we pulled into the entrance of Rye Playland. Opened in 1928, Playland was proof positive that Eden might have been a real place. To a nine-year-old, it was 313 acres of paradise. The park sat on the bank of Long Island Sound, and it was so chock-full of rides and games that you couldn’t do everything you wanted in any single visit. It had a carousel with hand-carved horses sporting blankets for saddles, armor, and pink tongues lolling out of their mouths. It had another carousel called the Derby Racer that circled at twenty-five miles per hour. Its horses went up and down and side to side, simulating the experience of galloping on a real steed. It sounds harmless, but going in circles for five minutes at twenty-five miles an hour would’ve made the famed astronaut Neil Armstrong feel queasy. You didn’t want to ride the Derby Racer behind the kid who had just eaten cotton candy and the popcorn drenched in artificial butter.

There was an ice rink, lake boats, putt-putt golf, restaurants, and game booths like the one where you could shoot BBs at painted tin deer that jerkily traveled around on a track. There was a small roller coaster called the Crazy Mouse, the 1928 Kiddie Coaster, bumper cars, the Ferris wheel, the Magic Carpet Fun House, and the Whip, a ride that in 1928 lived up to its name, catapulting some poor man to his death, a fact we discussed every time we got on it.

I had never been to Playland after dark, so I had never seen the thousands of lights of every conceivable color that made the park glow so bright that you couldn’t see the stars through the ambient light. Some lights were blinking; others stayed on permanently; others were burned out, leaving gaps in the chains of lights that seemed to border everything.

Any confusion about why we had been awakened in the middle of the night to go to Rye Playland evaporated in our excitement about being there at all. The Dalai Lama couldn’t have been more in the moment than we were that night.

“Follow me,” my mother said, which seemed funny since she had already grabbed our hands, leaving us little choice.

“Mom, slow down,” Caroline said.

My mother was walking quickly and deliberately. She was on a mission. After stopping at the ticket booth, she walked us toward the line for the Dragon Coaster. No one can understand how exciting this is unless they lived near Rye Playland and knew the mythology behind this ride. The Dragon Coaster was a celebrated wooden roller coaster built in 1929 as part of the original park. It is 3,400 feet long and at its peak is 85 feet high. Does it compare to Kingda Ka at Six Flags in New Jersey with its 418-foot drop? Is it as fast as the Top Thrill Dragster roller coaster at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, that travels at 120 miles per hour? Is it as long as the Steel Dragon 2000 at Nagazhima Spa Land in Japan—8,133 feet long? No. But among true roller coaster connoisseurs, it is a beauty, a classic that must be ridden before one dies. A few years back, it was designated a Landmark Coaster by the American Coaster Enthusiasts.

Kingda Ka will have to wait in a long line for that honor, thank you very much.

Until that night, I had never been allowed to ride on the Dragon Coaster, probably because I was too young or didn’t meet the height requirement or both. On the rare occasions when we went to Rye Playland, the rest of my family would get to ride it while I stood with Nanny at the bottom, pouting and watching. Nanny was glad for the excuse of needing to stay behind with me. She would no more have gone on the Dragon Coaster than put on a leather helmet and goggles and gone wing riding on a biplane. Tonight, however, I was growing up.

When we got to the front of the line, my mother pushed me into the car before the guy operating the brake lever could stop us and make me stand next to the height board that daily dashed the hopes of small children. The man began to object until my mother gave him a look that would have spooked Stalin.

He shrugged. “He’s your kid,” he muttered.

The Dragon Coaster at that time was still outfitted with the original 1928 wooden benches that had flimsy seat belts and no lap bars. It did have metal rods that splayed out from the tops of the wooden sides of the cars. They were psychologically comforting, but they wouldn’t help you if you had a seat belt malfunction on one of the drops.

Like I said, humans should be extinct.

“Ready?” my mother asked. She was sitting between my sister and me. I was holding the back of the bench in front of me for dear life. I could feel my pulse racing in my temples. I was finally riding the Dragon Coaster. When the brakeman pushed the lever forward, the string of cars lurched forward, eliciting the first round of screams, outing the more anxious riders. Wooden roller coasters are loud creatures. They are mechanical, not pneumatic. They creak and groan. They rattle and grind. They are barbaric in their simplicity.

The ride began with a short curve into an immediate ascent. I looked down and saw Nanny wringing her hands and peering in the wrong direction to catch sight of us as we waved and called out to her. For one second at the top of the hill, I had a glimpse of the whole of the world, as I knew it then, before we took a quick dip that gave the string of cars a burst of momentum. I knew from having heard people talk about the ride what was coming next, the eighty-five-foot drop.

“Hold on!” my mother yelled. This was an unnecessary instruction.

At the bottom of the drop, you were thrown skyward and then down in a double-dip drop that sent you careening toward the pinnacle of the ride. One might think the high point of the Dragon Coaster was the eighty-five-foot drop that we’d just completed, but that wasn’t the climax at all. The double dip gave you the speed to enter a tunnel through the mouth of the dragon. As you approached it, the dragon’s eyes lit up, and a fog machine shot smoke out of his nostrils. The condensation from the fog machine produced water that dripped on your head like dragon drool.

It was all too much. Passing through the inside of the dragon tunnel was terrifying. It was pitch-black, and there was an earsplitting recording of a roaring creature that about made you wet your pants. You had no idea what would happen next. Would there be another stomach-dropping plummet? A sudden turn that defied the laws of physics? When we finally came out the tail of the dragon, I knew what Jonah must have felt like when the whale spit him out on the beach. I couldn’t recall everything that happened after we came out of the dragon’s tail—only that I was glad to see the boarding station where you got off.

“Don’t take off your seat belt,” my mother said.

My eyes furrowed. “Why not?”

My mother laughed. “Because we’re going again,” she said.

“Seriously?” my sister said.

“Absolutely,” my mother replied.

This was not welcome news. I was glad to have survived the Dragon Coaster once, but my stomach was knotted, and I wanted nothing to do with a second pass. When we pulled back into the loading station, my mother handed the brakeman three more tickets.

“Mom, I don’t want to do this,” I said.

My mother looked at me and smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s not as scary the second time.”

I had been taken hostage by Willy Wonka.

My mother was right; the ride wasn’t as frightening the second time around. Now I knew where most of the curves and dips were, and the eighty-five-foot plunge didn’t give me that pukey feeling I’d had before. But there was still one section that scared the pants off of me: passing through the tunnel of the dragon. I am right-brain dominant. This is the highly imaginative and creative side of our minds. If you were to perform an MRI on my head, you would discover that the left side of my brain, the part responsible for analytical thinking, reason, and logic, is woefully smaller than its counterpart. As we approached the dragon’s mouth, with his huge green blinking eyes, my little left brain tried to convince my overactive right brain that killing visitors was probably not good advertising for an amusement park and therefore not something the management would set out to do, but there wasn’t time to call a jury to settle the argument. I closed my eyes and quietly invoked the name of the Holy Family as we blew into the dragon’s mouth and whipped around in the darkness. It was just as bad as the first time.

When we pulled into the loading station, my mother handed the brakeman three more tickets. My sister and I leaned forward and looked at each other, our eyes wide with confusion. Maybe Mom had finally gone over the edge. Maybe she was possessed and we needed Father Durcan to perform an exorcism on her.

“Are you sure, lady?” the brakeman asked.

“Quite,” my mother said.

“It’s gotta be your last time,” he said, pointing backward with his thumb. “I got a line.”

“Mom, are you crazy?” I asked.

She put her arm around my scrawny shoulders, and my sister’s on the other side, and snuggled us into her. “A little,” she said.

As the train lurched forward, beginning our third excursion, I thought about having to pass through the dragon tunnel again and shuddered. I asked Jesus to miraculously make it disappear and replace it with something more like the It’s a Small World ride they have at Disney World, where all those happy automated creatures sing while you sail safely and slowly down a calm river. My left brain told me this wasn’t going to happen.

Every other part of the ride was fun now. I knew what to expect and laughed my way through it all. As we went into the double dip that came just before the dragon’s mouth, my mother let go of me and my sister, and I just about cried.

“Throw your hands in the air and scream!” she yelled.

I could barely hear her over the soundtrack of the roaring dragon. “What?” I cried back.

“Throw your arms up in the air and scream!” she yelled again, throwing her arms into the air.

I wasn’t keen on taking advice from a woman who had taken us on a roller-coaster ride three times without stopping, but what choice did I have? Just as we passed into the dragon’s mouth, I threw my hands in the air and I screamed. Halfway through the tunnel it happened. The scream turned into a howl of glee.

I was laughing in the dark.

We pulled into the unloading station and undid our lap belts.

“Thank you,” my mother said to the brakeman.

He shook his head. “Don’t mention it,” he said.

“What’s next?” my sister said.

“Time to go home,” my mother said.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“No games?” my sister asked.

“We’re not going on the Whip?” I asked.

“No, just the Dragon Coaster tonight,” my mother said, waving to Nanny to join us.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, I looked back through the rear window to see the fireworks display that Playland put on every weekend night in the summer to signal that the park would soon close. The Dragon Coaster dominated the skyline of the park, and I saw the colored lights following the outline of every turn. And I saw the dragon himself, his incandescent green eyes looking at me.

By the time we arrived back home, I was asleep in the back of the car. My mother woke me and told me I was too heavy to carry in and that I had to get up and walk inside. When we came into the house, it was quiet, and the air, moth gray with sadness, still filled every corner. Nothing had changed—except us.

I have a photo of my mother with my children on the beach near a house we once owned in Watch Hill, Rhode Island. She’s in her midseventies, wearing her oversized Jackie O glasses and a scarf on her head, the back of it fluttering in the breeze. She’s wearing casual pants and a silk blouse to protect her fair Irish skin and is on her knees, digging a sand castle with her grand-kids. Pearls and gold necklaces dangle from her neck. My daughter Maddie appears to be dancing, while Aidan and Cailey are considering what needs to be done next. I remember my mother was telling them about the days when we lived in England and describing Windsor Castle. This was what they were building, she said.

There are no salmon-orange-stained lifeboats on this beach, and I know who’s taking this picture. It’s me.

My kids are never happier than when they are with my mother. We used to leave them with her when Anne and I would go on vacation. One time we called from Bermuda to ask how things were going. Aidan answered the phone, and when we asked what they were up to, he said, “Gaga is teaching us how to play poker and smoke cigarettes.”

In the background I heard my daughter Cailey call out, “That’s not true. Gaga told him to say that.”

“We are playing poker, though!” Maddie chimed in.

No one ever wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I want to marry an alcoholic who will make the next thirty-three years of my life hell on earth.” You marry someone because you are twenty-two, are in love, and think you can make a life together. But love-struck twenty-two-year-olds don’t always have eyes that see and ears that hear.

The insanity of living with an addict rolls into your life like fog as you stand on the shore of your hopes about the future. Then the tide begins, imperceptibly at first, to rise. Over the years, the water gets higher and higher, the fog continues to thicken, and one day you realize you’re lost, over your head, and even the calling of gulls has stopped.

Do I wish my mother had left my father? Yes. Did I find it hard to understand and forgive that she didn’t? Yes. One day Dan said to me, “Forget your mother. Can you forgive your children’s grandmother?” When the front door is locked and you have no key, check the slider on the porch. It’s open.

When their grandmother makes her grand entrance, my kids run to the door to be branded and fight over who sits next to her on the couch. They wait for her to screw up movie titles.

“I saw the movie Drastic Park last night,” she tells them.

“Gaga, it’s Jurassic Park,” they howl.

She rolls her eyes. “Close enough,” she says, then explains that her error is called a malapropism, a word they should know.

I can see the couch from the kitchen. I stop cutting parsley and remember that she taught me how to ride the Dragon Coaster and what to do when you’re flung into the mouth of whatever it is you think will kill you. Throw up your arms and laugh until you come out the other side. That lesson has saved my life once or twice.

My children call their grandmother “Gaga.” They love her.

They should.