Kristin King-Ries                                                                                                      

Liquid Assets

People threaten to die of embarrassment all the time, but they never follow through.  Yet Mom insisted a person could go insane from embarrassment.  Dad had done it.  He went from sane to a straight jacket in the space of fall semester.  The main thing to remember, according to Mom, was the insanity was temporary, and the so-called ‘depression’ wasn’t an illness.  It was more of a lifestyle choice.  Dad had been shamed into a short-term madness.  He was embarrassed like crazy.

I wondered how that worked, exactly.  If extreme embarrassment led to insanity, why weren’t confession booths churning out nut cases?  Why weren’t bankruptcy courts filled with lunatics?

The doctor explained that filing for bankruptcy disturbed the delicate balance of Dad’s brain.  It was a case of cause and effect.  Bad press in the business section effected a generalized anxiety disorder, E-GAD for short.  A change in federal tax policy persuaded his selective seratonin re-uptake receptors to shed their inhibitions, stop being selective about re-uptake, and start taking up with anything that came floating down the blood stream.  According to the doctor, shame turned those receptors into neuro-chemical sluts. 

When Dad was a kid, his Uncle Charles shot himself in the temple.  The gun slipped and the bullet severed the nerve fibers connecting the brain to the frontal lobe: a do-it-yourself lobotomy.  After that, it was smooth sailing for the Great Uncle. 

Was that the kind of thing you could inherit?     

“We’re not talking congenital heart disease here folks,” the doctor told mom, leaning casually against his steel desk.  “It’s not like this stuff runs in families.” 

Dad didn’t need to have his medical history taken.  He didn’t need to talk to a shrink about his childhood.  In the short term, Dad needed pills: stimulants for the depression and tranquilizers for the anxiety. In the long term he needed an infusion of moral fiber. By way of example, the doctor inhaled to draw attention to his own straight spine.

Mom talked about circumstances.  The doctor talked about choices.  Either way it was an isolated event.  Dad would soon return to normal.  Though their theories made little sense to me, I found them appealing.  The idea of mastering your circumstances seemed hopeful.   Having the choice to be sane seemed downright decent.

I.         The Visit

New England in late September during leaf season.  The glorious red, gold and orange trees looked intimidating against a sky of Tiffany’s blue.  Mom and Dad visited for parents’ weekend first semester freshman year. They embarrassed me in front of my seven new best friends, the private school girls from New York who found my crew cut, Veteran’s Village clothes and public school pedigree exotic. 

Dad showed up in the dorm lobby yelling Whoop! and breathing into his cupped hands for warmth.  He turned to mom. 

“Dearheart, you forgot to pack my jacket.”

Pierced by the tone, she paused and then said in her flat Midwestern accent,  “You’re farty-eight years old.  Maybe you should start doing your own packing.” Mom pulled a wad of used tissue out of a purse the size, shape and texture of an elephant’s foot and dabbed her eyes.

I rushed them through the boys hall before they had a chance to comment on the stench of keg beer, sweaty clothes, and bong water.  The smells on the girls’ hall were not as pronounced.  Some patchouli oil, nail polish, with just a hint of stomach acid coming from the bathroom.

My seven new best friends and their parents were mingling in the common room at the end of our hall. Their parents looked more familiar than I expected and my parents looked stranger than I remembered.  I’d never noticed Mom and Dad came with their own sound effects.

“Mom and Dad, this is Andrea.”

“Angina?” Mom squinted hopefully.

“An-Dre-Ah,” I corrected. 

Mom’s hand moved automatically to her ear to adjust the volume. In the damp northern climate, her hearing aides made shrill tea kettle noises.  “Android?”

The seven best friends and their parents were very understanding. I noticed Dad was wearing the pants with the patches of duct tape.

Sunday morning I had an audition for a play called Savage Love. 

“What about mass?” Mom asked.

I shrugged, snug in the new boiled wool jacket they’d bought even after I insisted my Veteran’s Village overcoat was warm enough. Dad cleared his throat with the force of an outboard motor. 

“At least tell us how to get to the goddamned church,” he said.

I couldn’t tell them because I didn’t know. Mom dried her eyes with the tissue she kept digging out of her purse. 

Staging Sam Shepard’s love poems as a play seemed pretentious even by my own clove cigarette smoking, black turtleneck wearing, surrealist film watching standards.   But I welcomed the excuse to escape from my parents. The minute I entered the theater and breathed in the smell of sawdust and acrylic paint I wanted to stay. The elfin director was charming; the sight of him dancing around the stage with his clipboard made me giddy.  One of the guys auditioning had beautiful eyes.  When he smiled there was a sizable gap between his front teeth.  I was not having sex with anyone, but wanted to be having sex with him.  I made it my goal for the semester.

While I was auditioning, one of my seven new best friends waltzed into my room without knocking, to show Mom and Dad how close we were, and found them on the bottom bunk making out.   

“So sweet,” she told me later.

Sunday afternoon I drove Mom and Dad in their beige rental car to the Burlington International Airport (two gates long) and sat around until their flight left.  Mom and I papered over our differences.  Dad told me to get my priorities straight.  We all exchanged air kisses.

Then they walked across the tarmac to the plane.  I stood watch in the terminal window and lit up a cigarette before Mom and Dad made it up the portable staircase and into the cabin.  I waved good-bye, trailing smoke from one hand.  Dad smoked in college too.  He’d suffered three collapsed lungs and Mom blamed it on cigarettes.  It drove her crazy to see me smoke.

          II. The Idyll
          Late October.  My roommate left a message on the dry erase board, ‘Your mom called—wants to know how to set timer on microwave.’  The cute guy and I both made the cut for Savage Love.  We exchanged nervous looks when the directortold us he was devoted to black box theater.  No costumes, no props, and no on a picnic. They waited in a corner of the room and tried to be quiet while the cast finished up.  Their hair, covered with soft white flakes from the first snow, twinkled under the lights.  Baguettes poked through the zippers of their backpacks and when they moved glass bottles chimed prettily. Out in the chilly air they burst into full volume. We chatted our way across a field of hay stubble under a white afternoon sky, the cold freezing the muddy furrows beneath our boots, the snow falling in rafts and cosseting the land around us.  Our breath came out in puffs.
          One of them said, “Do you realize there are going to be people surrounding you on all sides!”

I did realize.                

The friends said “I would be freaking out!”

They said “Where are all the, like, couches and stuff?”

We climbed under a section of barbed wire fence, snagging mittens and coats temporarily on the tiny metal spikes as we made our way into a neighboring farm.  One of the girls was majoring in Psych.  She’d introduced us to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (the DSM III) and it was a big hit.  We had been after her to diagnose us.

“Okay,” she pointed to the thinnest girl. “Yours was easy.  Shredded cuticles, irrational fear of obesity: Anorexia.”

We murmured in agreement.  The anorexic blushed shyly under the downy hair covering her cheeks the way a girl might blush at being voted best looking.  Our resident analyst pointed to another girl.

“I had a hard time deciding between Histrionic and Exhibitionist.”

“Hee!  Did you know my breasts are uneven!” She reached for the hem of her peacoat and we shouted over each other, “Stop!” “We’ve seen them!” and “It’s fucking cold out you spaz!”

One by one the analyst handed out diagnoses, until I was the only one left. 

“What about me?”  I’d secretly had my heart set on malingering. I liked the way the word sounded, like a cross between menacing and lazy.

“I couldn’t find anything. It was weird.”

I burrowed into my boiled wool jacket.  The seven best friends reassured me.  It was not my fault that I grew up in the Midwest.  It was not my fault that Catholics had regular bowel movements without the help of coffee or cigarettes.  I thought of Uncle Charles and his botched suicide.  I pictured the way he was after do-it-yourself lobotomy, so slow and happy, and wondered why being neurotic appealed to me anyway.

Aside from my lack of diagnosis, it had been a perfect day.  We cleared the cottony snow off the picnic table at the Morgan Horse farm and while we ate, we watched the horses prance in their paddocks to keep warm.  We shared crisp apples and soft cheeses and paper cups of red wine. The snow stopped and the sky cleared in time for a red orange sunset.  We took the road home in the dusk, stumbling and laughing, falling down and getting snowier, navigating by the lights of the college on the distant hill. By the time we reached the dorm, the snow on our clothes had melted and we smelled like soggy sheep. 

III. The Phone Call

          Mom called on the hall phone in early November.  One of my seven new best friends found a group of us lounging on pillows beneath a cheap tapestry to tell me I had a phone call.  ‘Sounds like a rental unit,’ she warned as she slid onto the pillows to take my place.  I went to the booth and picked up.  Mom sighed.  Her voice went in and out of range because she was clutching the receiver between her ear and shoulder while she ironed and folded laundry and changed diapers and handed out allowance.  Mom made dire predictions about the future prospects of the four younger brothers at home.  She asked again how to operate the microwave.

          Then the conversation took an unexpected turn.  Mom introduced a series of new, incomprehensible words.  I snapped to attention, and still had trouble following.  I was in the process of acquiring a smaller, stunted vocabulary, the kind in circulation at institutions of higher learning.  I vaguely remembered a time when I had a wide array of words at my disposal.  Now I had ‘lame’ and ‘bummer’ and ‘harsh.’ ‘Totally lame.’  ‘Total bummer.’  ‘Totally harsh.’  When Mom decried tax reform, when she lamented the passing of urban renewal and Section 8 housing, I was lost.  I figured these words somehow implicated Dad, but I didn’t understand how.  I opened my mouth to offer consolation and heard myself say, “Wow, that’s harsh.”

          I spotted one of my seven new best friends walking down the hall so I held the phone away from my ear and made Yak yak yak signs.  She responded by gripping her throat with both hands and pretending to strangle herself.  Parents.  Then something Mom said caught my attention.  She said, ‘I’m worried about your dad.  He’s not sleeping, he’s not eating.’  Mom added, ‘bankruptcy,’ and ‘Chapter 13.’  She added ‘liquidation,’ and ‘reorganization.’  

          I closed the door to the phone booth.  Obviously I had not heard right.  Too much ambient noise, too much Bob Marley and the Wailers, too much Friday night, too many lighters flicking, too much bong water gurgling.  Mom catalogued Dad’s woes.  ‘Wait,’ I said.  ‘What do you mean, bankruptcy?’  The only thing I had in my 18 year-old bag of tricks that was even remotely relevant was Dickens and debtor’s prison.  Oliver Twist and ‘Please, sir, may I have some more?’ 

I raised my voice to talk over Mom’s stream of words.  ‘ Wait.  What’s going to happen?’  I worried about my brothers.  I worried about Mom.  I begrudgingly worried about Dad.  Not once did I worry about what might be floating down my own bloodstream.

Mom talked about shame and circumstance, circumstances and choice.  I wanted to believe her version of events.  I needed it to be true.  For one thing, it allowed me to feel angry instead of scared.  Dad was making poor choices, getting into bad circumstances.  For another, if it was just an advanced case of insolvency, I could take precautions to avoid catching it; I could inoculate myself against risk.

Mom didn’t answer my question about the future.  She didn’t acknowledge the question.  Maybe she didn’t hear it.  I pictured Mom on the upstairs phone at home, the red one with the volume dial on the grip of the receiver turned up to 10.  ‘I have to go, Mom.’  ‘What sweetie?’  ‘I said, I’LL CALL YOU SUNDAY.’ 

          I hung up and sat behind the booth’s glass pane watching girls walk up and down the hall until the last of the partyers stumbled out into the night and the last of the homebodies went to bed.  The hall emptied.   Then I rushed to the bathroom to throw up.  When you got right down to it, the only private place in the dorm was a locked bathroom stall. 

          I spent a bad night tossing in bed, making frequent trips to the bathroom.  I memorized the different floor coverings with my feet.  Warm, scratchy rug beside the bed, chilly strip of linoleum between rug and door, soft rubbery blip of threshold, and flat-out cold tile in the bathroom.  Back and forth.  I appreciated that my nice roommate went to after-hours at Delta Upsilon (DUH for short), came home wasted, and commenced to snore.  The Roommate feared nothing: she hung Kitty and Puppy posters on her side of the room.  She was openly cheerful.  She wore a wide range of colors, none of them black.  Sometimes I wished I had the Roommate’s courage.

          One of my seven new best friends shuffled into the room without knocking, wrapped in her puff with the Pierre Deux cover, and crawled into bed with me. 

          “You didn’t go to dinner,” she said.  “And then you weren’t at Mr. Ups.  No one knew where you were.”

          I sighed.  “My mom.”

          “Is this more about church?”

          “Sort of.”   Without advance planning, I decided not to talk about home.  The seven new best friends might think insolvency was communicable; I didn’t want it to spread.  

          “Catholics are such a bummer!” the friend sputterd.  “I mean, give it a rest, people.  You’re coming to my house for Thanksgiving.  We’re totally agnostic.”

          I tried not to get my hopes up.  “Don’t you need to ask first?”

          “They totally love you.  They can’t believe someone from East Jesus reads Virginia Woolfe.”

          I didn’t mind being a roadside attraction.  I liked the idea of running away from home and joining the circus. 

The next day, I left one of the seven new best friend still fast asleep under her puff and went to rehearsal.  Rehearsals for Savage Love were going okay.  The director still insisted on putting the actors on a naked stage to face their audience without masks.  Yikes.  I said I thought the whole point of theater was make-believe.  

“There’s that piece in the final scene about ties that bind.  You could do the scene lying on the floor, rolling around in a make believe straight jacket.”

          “I’m not much of a mime,” I explained.  Please, like I knew anything about straight jackets.

          “Fake it,” he winked. 

          I noticed everyone in the cast was five and a half feet or under.  Maybe the elf didn’t want to be dwarfed.  The actor was the tallest one at five foot five.  He and I generated a lot of electricity; I got a charge from standing close to him.  But I hadn’t gotten him into bed.  The closest I’d come was too many drinks post-rehearsal and an abbreviated face-sucking session on a dark and snowy walk home from the bar.  With my tongue I felt the space in his mouth where his two front teeth should have been (lacrosse accident) before he told me he had a girlfriend.

          “We’re sort of breaking up?” he said.  “You know?”

          I did not know.  In my experience break-ups were quick and dirty. 

          “We totally grew up together.  Like, we were at St. Paul’s together, so?”

          So what.  “What’s her name?”

          “Plummy?”

          “Plummy?” 

          “Plummy Tucker?” 

          No joke.

          I experienced the female equivalent of blue balls.  All worked up and nowhere to get off. 

          “Call me when you’re finished,” I said, stalking off into the moonscape.  I left the Actor standing, mouth open, the space between front teeth a small black hole. 

I knew I would see him again soon.  The next morning.  But I liked being the righteous and indignant one.  And I was young enough to think that the oversized emotions I felt toward that stranger were really all about him.  That stuff going on at home didn’t enter my mind.  I wrapped my boiled wool sweater around me, hugged myself tight, and sank my hands into the sleeves to stay warm.  Silently I dared the muggers and rapists of the world to try to practice their professions on me.  I felt like I could’ve chewed through steel.   

IV.   The Letters

          My first semester of college wound down.  The snow was old and lacy with black soot, tossed aside in steep piles that lined the roads and walkways.  Snow collected on rooftops in icy continents.  The plates slid and then held on the frozen slate and hovered above unsuspecting passers-by.  My used overcoat and new boiled wool sweater combined weren’t enough to keep out the chill. 

My acting debut in Savage Love approached.  I warned the seven new best friends, “This is going to be the biggest piece of caca you’ve ever seen.”  I added,  “Curtain’s at eight.” 

I had yet to bag my man.  The Actor was still breaking up with his girlfriend, so. 

He had been breaking up with her for two months, and I was losing patience.  He tried to tell me they had grown apart.  He tried to tell me she wouldn’t care.  He tried to tell me he’d cut the cord, but the school was too small to get away with lying.  I waited.

Mom called with more bad news.  It was official.  Dad’s company was no longer solid.  The lawyers had been forced to liquidate assets.  Dad failed to bounce back, failed to come up with the necessary moral fiber.  He failed to buck up.  And from the sound of her voice, Mom failed to see a solution.  She said the words ‘commitment’ and ‘psych ward.’  I dreaded going home for Christmas, but couldn’t see a way out of it.  Besides, I worried about my brothers.  I needed to see for myself that they were getting enough to eat, that they had a place to stay.  Subsequent conversations with Mom yielded no new information.  Subsequent conversations with Mom were a total bummer.

The first letter arrived unexpected.  It was addressed in Dad’s handwriting.  I didn’t open it in the mailroom the way I did letters from friends.  I slipped it between the pages of my Existentialism notebook and found an out-of-the-way bathroom stall in the overheated bowels of the student center.

In the ward they lock the doors to the outside.  They line us up twice a day and wait for us to swallow our pills.  Today I figured out how to hide them under my tongue so later I can spit them into the toilet.  They’re not going to turn me into a zombie.

Dad was a long-time fan of Ken Kesey.  I thought, Holy Cuckoos Nest, Dad.  Grow up. 

At least Dad was somewhere safe and Mom could focus on taking care of the real children at home.  Assuming home still existed.  I did some research on bankruptcy.  Apparently, filing could be a long, drawn out process.  I had reason to hope that the repo men hadn’t arrived, at least not yet.  The sick feeling in my stomach had to be dorm food.

The second letter arrived a few days later.  I went back to the out-of-the-way bathroom stall in the bowels of the student center, holding the envelope by the corner as though it might contain anthrax.  The old marble was cracked but beautiful.  They didn’t make stalls like that anymore.  I rested my cheek against the cool marble and waited for our temperatures to reach stasis.

Locked ward!  Ha!  Guess where I am?  At the office.  I followed a nurse and caught the door before it clicked shut.  I walked the half-mile in my hospital P.J.s and no one noticed!  I’m going to go hide under my the desk with the lights off.  No one will think to look for me here.

Son of a bitch.  Selfish, crazy stupid motherfucking son of a bitch, you are making bad choices.  How long could his Chapter 13 take?  I hoped he would to move on to Chapter 14 soon.

I marched to a pay phone and fished for nickels, dimes and quarters in my many pockets to cover the cost.  No sense calling collect.  I crossed my fingers with one hand as I dialed with the other.  Please let one of the boys pick up.

My oldest little brother answered the phone.  “Mom’s in bed,” he told me.  It was lunch time.  “When are you coming home?”  It hurt to hear him.

“Listen, have they found dad yet?”

“Uh-huh.  They took him back.”

My stomach lurched.  A surprised part of me was sad he’d been caught.  I tried not to picture the disappointment on his face.

The third letter arrived the next week.  I figured I’d seen the worst Dad could dish out.  I opened the letter in broad daylight, in the middle of the snowy, muddy mailroom, surrounded by ski jackets and scarves and knit hats with little yarn pompoms on top.

Today I worked in the leather shop.  I tooled a belt for you; it’s got your name in raised letters.

I got an image of Dad shuffling along a gray corridor in one of those stingy hospital gowns that hang open at the back.  He was worse off than I’d realized.  He’s gone from a solid to a liquid in under three months.  How long before he evaporated?

That night was the opening of Savage Love.  I decided to get lucky.  I asked my Roommate to spend the night at her boyfriend’s. 

“Awesome,” the Roommate said.  She dated a football player who came looking for her in the wee hours, yelling like Stanley Kowalski.  ‘Sah-rah, Sah-rah!’  The Roommate was worried about me.  She liked the Actor.  She like my new pro-active approach, it had the feel of improvement. 

In the dressing room, used only for make-up since there were no costumes, I told the Actor, “I don’t care if you’re broken up or what anymore.  I want you to spend the night after the show,” and was treated to a glimpse of the space between his teeth.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted the faces of my seven new best friends sitting in the audience.  I wished I hadn’t told them the date of the play.  I regretted the overwrought performances, the midget cast.  The friends were never going to let me live it down.  I spotted a girl in the audience who could have been a Plummy.  I’d heard people describe her as pale, blonde and pretty, which did not exactly narrow things down. 

During the first act, my mind flitted between the stage and my room.  I was exchanging lines with the Actor, and I was in bed with him.  I was probing the painful limits of love, and I was peeling off his clothes. 

In the last scene the spotlight came up on me, lying alone on the stage floor.  A snarl of dust and hair lay on the floor nearby and I breathed in softly to avoid inhaling it.  The theater was dark except for the one beam, the black box full of dim figures in folding chairs.  The chairs had been placed in a square around the empty space of the stage.   As I rolled around and recited my lines in my imaginary straight jacket I became disoriented.  It felt nothing like rehearsal where the director represented the audience and when I spoke my lines, I directed them toward him.  There were people surrounding me on all sides.  There was no upstage or down stage, no stage right or stage left; what was behind was also in front, depending on the perspective of the viewer.  I lost my bearings.

I lay on the floor in my make-believe straight jacket and planned to feel like an idiot.  I cradled myself as instructed.  I wasn’t much of an actress it turned out.  Too self-conscious, too unforgiving.  But during that final scene I forgot about everything—the Actor in my bed, my brothers at home, my seven new best friends witnessing my humiliation, the possible Plummy, frantic Mom, faltering Dad.  I concentrated on the poetry and blocked out everything else until I was quiet in my mind.  The straight jacket no longer seemed like a restraining device; it was a welcome boundary, an old familiar.  In that quiet place I could almost hear my blood echoing down corridors of vein.