A memory.
I am fourteen. Mum is soggy-sick with Depression, an episode that manifested itself long before my summer holidays began and which continues to saturate our home, seeping into all our moods and drowning out the fun and games, submerging the laughter under a deluge of wet misery so that you don't hear it as much and even when you do it bubbles up hesitantly, as if from a long, long way down.
I have a friend over for the day. She is the daughter of a neighbor. A neighbor whose hair is always perfectly coiffed, unlike my mum's whose dark tresses are standing up in crazy indignation around her crown. Because she tosses and turns all night and teases it into a pillow-mad knot. Because she can't be bothered to brush it. Wash it. Because she's sick. A neighbor whose sofa is scattered precisely with cushions that stand against its back in a regimented line of perfectly ordered shape and color. (Unlike the one in our own home where order rushed out the door the moment Depression stepped over the threshold so the sofa is littered with sheets of last week's newspaper and crumbs and lost teaspoons). A neighbor whose housekeeping bears witness to the fact she wouldn't dream of yielding to the same hopelessness and apathy that seized mum weeks ago. A neighbor who thinks that Depression can be fixed by bending down and pulling up your socks.
My friend tiptoes warily past my mother, I can see from the fear and the suspicion in her eyes as she nervously glances in Mum's direction that she has overheard the conversations I know have taken place in her home: about the nutter who lives up the road. I wonder if she's afraid she might catch my mother's madness if she stands too close. It's tempting to exploit her anxiety: ‘Come and give my mum a kiss hello then', I'd like to say.
Instead I ask Mum, ‘'Can we have a drink?" (I don't mean a Coke Cola, lemonade, iced tea). Mum says nothing. I persist, ‘A Martini?', I am a child of late seventies commercial breaks: Martinis were anytime, anyplace, anyhow. So why not then, mid afternoon, when you are late summer holiday home-bored and your mum is sick? Anytime. Anyplace.
‘Whatever', says Mum.
I take that as a yes.
I pour myself and my now wide eyed friend a stiff measure, splash some soda into both glasses and add handfuls of ice cubes and sliced banana. Anyhow. I wished I had maraschino cherries too, and little paper umbrellas. The bananas begin to brown and soften quickly. Cherries would have been more appetizing, I think.
‘'Chin, chin'', I say as I raise my glass and urge her, my reluctant drinking accomplice, to do likewise.
Why did I do that, I puzzled years later; it certainly wasn't about scoring a real drink? Was it some unkind, confusedly adolescent way to test my poor sick Mum? To prod some sense of propriety into her? To nudge her into grappling back some control? Or to mischievously and bloody-mindedly feed the rumors and the speculation that circulate when somebody slips into Depression's quick-sand grip?
I imagined, as I slid into bed that night, my friend's return to her ordered home the same afternoon, her cheeks flushed with the thrill of a tale to tell (and her first taste of alcohol, of course). And I imagined her mother's shocked reaction: her little darling drawn into the den of iniquity and inebriation and insanity up the hill.
The mental image of her outrage made me want to laugh.
Instead I cried myself to sleep.
