Normal

by Jacqueline Doyle

In the dream, Mom and I are arguing about my aunt Maddy. Again. I’m tense, my chest tight. Which story has my mother just told? The one about Maddy pilfering change from her purse as a teenager? Or some expensive purchase Maddy made? “My little sister just never understood the value of a dollar.” I seem to have entered this scene in the middle and missed the beginning. The scene is familiar enough. We were always arguing about Maddy. 

Mom and I sit at opposite ends of the couch in the living room of her independent living condo in Sylvan Glen, the retirement complex in North Carolina that my parents moved into shortly before my father died. So whenever the dream is taking place, it’s before she moved to assisted living, before she moved to the memory care facility. The condo has a beautiful view of the mountains, mostly obscured by the half-closed blinds.

I can see the Blue Ridge mountains clear as day, but I know I’m not in my mother’s living room at all. I’m lying on the couch in the converted front porch of our small house in the San Francisco Bay Area, looking out at the foothills as the late afternoon sunlight starts to fade. At least I was, until I fell into that half-sleeping, half-waking state where memories and imagination mingle. The conversation with my mother is unfolding with the hallucinatory precision of a flashback, but it seems more like a Technicolor dream than a memory. 

Somewhere, I read about lucid dreaming, a state where you’re dreaming but aware that you’re asleep, and can actually change the outcome of the action that’s taking place in your dream. It sounds like wishful self-help, but is it possible that the two of us could come closer to actual communication than we did when my mother was alive? 

“Maddy and I are neurodivergent,” I tell her, trying out a new word that I never would have used with my mother to describe myself. Or Maddy. Now I’m sure the conversation is imaginary.

I always called Maddy bipolar. By the time my parents moved to their independent living apartment, I’d been diagnosed as bipolar too, though I didn’t tell my university colleagues or students or acquaintances. In the story I tell myself about myself, I prefer the term manic depressive to bipolar. Easier to romanticize. There was that great Jimi Hendrix song, “Manic Depression,” popular when I was in high school. 

“Maddy spent money like there was no tomorrow. Don’t tell me that was neuro-whatever.”

“Extravagance is a symptom of mania,” I try to explain to her. “It’s a mood disorder that affects your behavior.”

My mother’s got a look of smug disbelief, like I’m tired of your big words and intellectual claptrap. 

She’s wearing one of her coordinated outfits, a lime green- and white-checked polyester blouse with buttons up the front and matching lime green polyester pants with an elasticized waist. White loafers. A thick white plastic bangle and thin gold watch. We’re sitting on their bizarre brown couch—part of a set of waterproof outdoor furniture with tubular white metal arms and frames that they had reupholstered in brown wool to use indoors because she and Dad had spent a lot of money on that furniture when they retired to Florida, thank you, and they weren’t just going to waste it when they moved to North Carolina. And besides, Mom claimed, the couch was comfortable, which it wasn’t really, at least not to me. She’s had her hair permed at the hair salon in the retirement complex. The appearance of normality is important to her. 

“I’m the only normal one in the family,” my mother said to Maddy, back when Maddy was diagnosed with bipolar mood disorder. Sympathy was never my mother’s strong suit. Understanding wasn’t either. She’d always envied her much younger sister’s looks and clothes and money. And my relationship with Maddy, the two of us more like sisters than aunt and niece. The diagnosis seemed to give her more ammunition, not less.

Right now what she says is, “You can’t tell me all that spending was normal. I don’t care what some so-called doctor says.”

I remember a recurrent joke of my father’s during my childhood that featured a James Thurber cartoon with a shapeless girl in a nightgown kneeling by her bedside, hands clasped for her nighttime prayer: “And keep me a healthy, normal American girl.” I was very young, maybe nine or ten, yet the cartoon infuriated me, and my father was always taping it over my bed, I was always ripping it down, and he would laugh. Was I already rebelling against the oppressive New Jersey suburbs and plotting my escape? 

Maddy was enraged with my mother’s reaction to her diagnosis. “You’re the only normal one? Well, if you think sleeping for ten years was normal.” My mother did think that sleeping for ten years was normal. She claimed she had a lot of colds. She never acknowledged that she was depressed or that there was even such a thing as depression (a unipolar mood disorder). Willpower, she and my father believed in willpower in the face of low spirits. Antidepressants were happy pills. Psychiatrists were witch doctors. They agreed—my mother was the only normal one in her family.

There were three of them, three sisters. Mom was the oldest, Helen a couple of years younger, Maddy more than ten years younger. What was not normal about Helen? Probably my mother meant Helen’s narcolepsy, which caused her to nod off and fall asleep, sometimes when she was driving. She crashed a lot of Cadillacs but came out unscathed. Helen was unmarried, a hearty phys ed teacher, probably a lesbian. At least, she bought a house on the New Jersey shore once with another woman, always had female companions, never male. Was my mother referring to that? As far as I know, my mother never came close to acknowledging Helen’s sexual identity, so probably not. I don’t think it occurred to me until I was in college, and when I asked my mother whether Helen was gay, she said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” More big ideas. If it had been up to her, I wouldn’t have gone to that fancy college. I certainly wouldn’t have gone to graduate school. I stayed in college far too long, in her opinion. What did it get me anyway?

I’m still not sure when this conversation is taking place. We seem to be alone, but I only made one visit to their retirement complex without the reassuring buffer of my husband. My husband’s not in the living room and I don’t sense him nearby.

I vividly remember a moment from that solo visit to her after Dad’s death. I was sleeping on the living room floor, that is, I’d been tossing and turning in the dark, blankets twisted around me, jet-lagged, eyes burning, desperately hoping for sleep. Every time I started to drift off, she called from the bedroom, her voice querulous. Wanting me to get her water. Wanting me to help her get to the bathroom. Asking me about tomorrow’s plans and did I know about the new restaurant downtown.

“I need to sleep,” I answered. 

After several more interruptions, “I’m bipolar. I need to sleep.” Louder, increasingly frantic. 

She didn’t get that sleeplessness can trigger a manic episode. My psychiatrist was always warning me about jet lag and sleep patterns. He advised against international and cross-country travel. I thought I’d probably be okay, but I was anxious.

“Keep your voice down,” she said in a piercing whisper.

Was it because she didn’t want the neighbors to hear that her daughter was bipolar? Not normal? Or because she didn’t want them to know that her daughter was a shrieking harpy? It never took more than a day with her before I succumbed to hysteria.

I’m hoping we’re not headed into another hysterical fight right now in this conversation about Maddy. My mother is quivering with indignation. “Don’t tell me that spending money like that’s normal,” she repeats. “Don’t tell me that treating Patrick like that was normal either. The man was a saint.” Maddy’s boyfriend was not a saint. I’m tensing up, waiting for her to mention Maddy’s suicide and the great funeral he threw for her. All the normal people in town were there.

Normality was deathly important in the New Jersey suburb where I grew up. It was a middle-class small town when my mother and Maddy grew up there, but by the time I was born in the 1950s, it had become an affluent, all-white, bedroom community where husbands in suits and ties commuted by train into Manhattan and wives stayed at home, carpooling their kids to school, trading recipes for casseroles, cutting out supermarket coupons, and shopping for clothes and jewelry and home furnishings to showcase their wealth. It was an era when articles with titles like “Is Your Child Normal?” proliferated. Socialization and fitting in were important enough to note on children’s report cards. Am I exaggerating when I remember popularity being more important than good grades? 

My mother wasn’t exactly in the PTA. She claimed that her allergies and chronic colds prevented her from cooking or doing housework. When she wasn’t chain-smoking in front of the soaps on TV, she was napping with all the curtains in the house closed. On Sundays she dressed and put on makeup and her prized mink stole to go to church, as if nothing at home was out of the ordinary, everything normal. 

Normal in Wildwood Lakes, New Jersey, was gold bangle bracelets and expensive clothing brands like Villager for teenaged girls, membership in the dinky country club with a pool and tennis courts at the other end of the lake from our house (we didn’t belong), membership in one of the Protestant churches (we were Irish Catholic). Looking back, I’m astonished at the push toward upward mobility and pretensions of upper class gentility in my childhood. Piano lessons and dutiful recitals on the rare occasions when my parents had visitors. Saturday afternoon dancing school where girls donned white gloves and chiffon party dresses (mine from the charity shop) and dutifully fox-trotted and cha-chaed around the dance floor with sweaty boys in sport coats and ties. The garden club, of all things, where I learned to arrange flowers. It’s hard to say exactly what kind of normal life this was supposed to be preparing me for (British aristocracy, maybe?), but it wasn’t the one I ended up with as an English professor at a public university in California. 

My mother never asked me about my job. I was surprised at my father’s funeral when not a single person from the retirement complex knew what I did for a living. 

“I’ve got all this paperwork to do,” my mother says, changing the subject before it turns to Maddy’s suicide. “She brought it on herself” is what she usually says when we talk about Maddy’s death, my cue to leave the room, slamming the door. She’s always been uninterested in statistics about bipolar mood disorder and suicide, which she views as a moral failing.

We’ve averted that blowup. Instead, we’re surveying the familiar chaos of my mother’s living room together, the stacks of what she calls the “paperwork” that’s been accumulating since my father’s death—bills and receipts and unopened financial statements and weekly menus and schedules of activities and notices from the bridge club and TV guides and penciled notes to herself. 

“Don’t move that,” she barks when I pick something up to look at it. What will happen if she doesn’t pay her bills? “I just got that organized. I have an appointment with the accountant next week.”

I’m pretty sure that’s not true. At least, the appointment’s not on the calendar on the refrigerator. The subject of Maddy and our shared mental illness seems to have been shelved, though, along with other things my mother would prefer not to talk about, including her memory problems. “Thank God we never had any of that in our family,” she always says about Alzheimer’s, though her father had some sort of dementia before he died. She laughs whenever I suggest that. “Oh, he was a little eccentric,” she says. 

Neither of us knows yet that she’ll end up in the memory facility at the retirement complex, where she’ll die of Lewy Body dementia—the second most common form of dementia, after Alzheimer’s, characterized by hallucinations as well as memory loss. My mother will tell me that her room is a lake of fire. She’ll tell me that a hooded figure follows her in the hallways. She’ll claim that she’s married her caregiver’s son. 

Right now I’m still wondering whether my mother and I might finally have a conversation where we face facts, come to some sort of understanding, but it’s not feeling that way. She was never one to face facts. Our dream conversation is turning out to be just like our real conversations, which never arrived anywhere. 

I need to read up on how lucid dreaming works. It doesn’t seem to be working for me. There’s so much I want to say to my mother about Maddy—how joyous she was in life, how profoundly I grieve her death, how I can’t help but blame the death grip of the “normal” for what happened. How I blame myself for escaping to a life I love in California and leaving her behind, even though that doesn’t make sense. Maddy didn’t want to leave. She was one of them, with her expensive clothes and cars, her tennis, her golf, her memberships in two country clubs. Despite her bipolar diagnosis, despite the status and income she lost after her divorce, she belonged. Outraged by my mother’s suggestion that she no longer qualified as “normal,” did she begin to doubt her place in the world? Was she feeling ostracized in Wildwood Lakes? Is that why she took her life?

Mom’s still sifting through stacks of papers, arranging them on the makeshift card table in front of the couch. She stops to read a menu out loud. “Chicken with gravy and biscuits again. You’ve got to meet the new chef. Such a good-looking man.” All men are good looking to my mother, at least all men under sixty. Now she peers over her glasses. “Never mind. These are last week’s meals.” She doesn’t throw the old menu away.

Is “I’m the only normal one in the family” one of those lines that’s destined to play on eternal repeat in my dreams? At least we haven’t had a fight this time. Maybe the dream is a demonstration of conflict avoidance. There’s worse to come in the years ahead, when she will repudiate me in favor of the caregiver who swindles her, repeatedly threaten to change her will, blame me for the loss of her possessions in her move to assisted living. But there was a kind of sweetness and intimacy in my last visit before she died, something beyond words as we sat on the quiet, sunlit patio in the memory care facility.

My mother’s form fades and the living room in North Carolina disappears along with her. Maddy’s face glimmers before me for just an instant as I wake up. I wish Maddy would visit my dreams instead of my mother. I’m back on the worn beige couch in the front room in our house in California, wrapped in a blue afghan. There’s a pile of books and unread New Yorkers on the floor next to me. The room is lined with windows on three sides and I watch two squirrels chasing each other up a tree trunk, chittering. The faraway hills are bathed in a rosy glow. Just outside the front window, a hummingbird zips by and then reverses course, ascending out of sight. Maddy?

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Jacqueline Doyle is the author of the award-winning flash chapbook The Missing Girl (Black Lawrence Press) and the forthcoming essay collection The Lunatics’ Ball (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press). She has published creative nonfiction in The Gettysburg Review, Passages North, Fourth Genre, The Pinch, and EPOCH. Her work has been featured in Creative Nonfiction’s “Sunday Short Reads” and has earned nine Notable Essay citations in Best American Essays. She is currently the associate editor for nonfiction flash at the online literary journal CRAFT. Find her at www.jacquelinedoyle.com.