2.09 Toy Soldiers

1954-56 • San Jose ~ Mom was seldom around, and when she was, she wasn’t really “there.” She escaped into sleep, her black eye mask blocking out the world, her small feather pillow hiding her head, and her rounded body buried beneath her blanket. The pills she took didn’t help her either, lined up on her deco four-drawer dresser like an army of toy soldiers wearing neat white caps: tranquilizers, diet pills, pain pills, and sleeping pills, all standing at attention. My mother took pills for her head, for her heart, for her stomach, her surgeries, her depression, her nerves, and whatever else ailed her. I’d sit and watch her from the edge of the room, waiting for her to rise from the void.

When she wasn’t sleeping, she stayed in bed and escaped into books. We carried home stacks of them from the library. I loved reading too, disappearing into mysteries or dissolving into Hansel & Gretel and Through the Looking Glass. Reading saved us. It gave us other people’s lives to live.

Mom read hardcover historical fiction or pulp paperbacks by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour. She read True Crime and Detective Story. While she turned the pages, I sometimes put my head on her soft stomach and listened to the sounds, the gurgling and churning and popping noises in her belly, the passage of her breath and the cadence of her heart. I loved nothing more than to feel the rise and fall of her, to close my eyes and feel her warm heat. She didn’t seem to mind. I loved the smell of her too, she smelled like Pond’s with a dusting of Lily of the Valley.

Cathy 1955, 1st grade

When we moved, or I started a new school or returned from seeing Dad, I had vomiting spells, getting so sick I had to be hospitalized because I became dehydrated. At times I was so sick Betty thought I was going to die; at times I wanted to. Everyone was worried and no one knew what was wrong. After the fifth or sixth time, the medical insurance ran out. With no money for the hospital, a kind doctor made house visits and worked out a way to feed me intravenously at home, rigging an IV bottle to a coat hanger over the bed.

I grew some in height over those years when we lived in San Jose, but I was thin, and when I got sick, I got bone thin, like a slice of light toast. My back, arms, and legs were covered with fine blonde hair; my fair skin was speckled with freckles, moles, and needle marks. I spent much of those years on my knees, my head hanging over a bucket or in prayer, praying for a different mother. The one I had wasn’t working out so well.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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