I pulled up to the modest ranch style house in Pearl’s very middle-class, mountain-west neighborhood. I suspect it was full of empty nesters because I didn’t see any basketball hoops, balls in front yards, or other playthings common in households with littles or teens.
Her house was a neutral color, heavy on the bisque with light cream undertones. Window frames were all painted white. A white PT Cruiser was backed into the driveway, which was on the right side of the home when facing it from the street. If ever there was a car made for my mother and all of her idiosyncratic ways and peculiarities, it was the PT Cruiser. It’s vibe matched hers. The car was unique on the road, an eye sore actually. It felt temporally mismatched, totally misplaced at the time when compared to other cars. It looked like a Disney movie from the 50s collided with bad automobile engineering and design of 2010. My mom always named her cars, and I wondered if I’d ever find out the moniker for this one or if she’d taken it with her to the grave.
The house was modest and completely understated. Completely aligned with Pearl’s sense of style; never gaudy or attention-grabbing.
I was immediately shocked when I saw the front yard. No grass whatsoever. Was this really Pearl’s house? The landscaping was all rocks, different shapes and sizes, colors and tones.
Despite the fact it was winter, I missed seeing Pearl’s hanging ferns, spider plants, and marigolds. She loved marigolds. There were no window boxes for flowers when the season warmed up, either. I suppose, having never seen her house before, I had imagined a small but meticulous landscape that was fastidiously kept. Clean-edged grass with few, rare-looking shrubs. Pearl had a green thumb like nobody I have ever met. Working with her hands, in the kitchen, yard, or crafting, silenced her mind.
Then it hit me. She was xeriscaping, a water-conscious way to still have a pretty yard while conserving water. That was next-level Pearl, the one I never got to know because of our 22 year estrangement. It fell right in line with her beliefs in our obligations to God’s earth, not polluting it, caring for it and all the animals, too. She was a big proponent of conservation and organic living, long before it was on trend. Once I made the connection to what initially seemed a total contradiction to Pearl’s tree-loving spirit, I took a moment to really admire the nuances of her handiwork before going into her home.
Or, maybe I was just avoiding the task at hand.
Her ⅓ of an acre front yard looked like a work of art. Cactus of various types and sizes nicely complimented the terra firma. Most impressively, the patterns and design were spectacular. A place for each rock and a rock for each place. The hardened minerals danced along the ground in a way that contoured the yard, making it less cookie-cutter.
Little pebbles with silver and grey undertones eventually bled into bigger rocks that had the same monochromatic look, but incorporated hints of creme and brown. Those tri-colored stones mused larger pieces of pumice-looking mortar; it was miraculous in texture with holes, bumps, and divots…and sharp as hell. They were formed of various shapes and deeper in hue, the color of a golden retriever. Larger boulders were sporadic, yet perfectly placed to draw the eye. The cacti and stoned earth dovetailed, moving in waves, almost like the clouds in a Native American version of Van Gough’s Starry Night. It was 100% my mom. Creative, intricate, spectacular. In keeping with Pearl, there were bird and squirrel feeders, stuffed to the brim with nuts and seeds, and a warming shelter for stray cats on the porch. Lots of work for petite hands, no noise in the head.
I grabbed the keys to the house and opened the door. I was instantly transported to another place. Literally, the world behind me was in stark contrast to that which I could see ahead. Harry Potter fans are well-aware of how the seemingly boring tents at the Quidditch World Cup are anything but. Small, canvas tents, tattered and torn, appear along abandoned moors as temporary housing. Upon entering each tent, spectators are ensconced by plush furnishings, elaborate kitchens and living room suites, and grand chandeliers that look to be the property of King Charles himself. In a singular moment, visitors depart one reality and enter another.
The contrast between the interior and exterior of Pearl’s home was as stark as Rowlings’, only it wasn’t mystical and whimsical. Maybe this was a movie set for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and I was in the wrong place? It felt foreboding, despondent, and lifeless.
I left the real world and entered a structure that actualized the inner workings of Pearl’s broken and distorted brain. Dark caverns, long hallways, and locked doors felt like manifestations of her prefrontal cortex and limbic system. The abstract nuances of her mind instantly became quite real in the form of drywall, furnishings, and methodical clutter. This organization would only make sense to Pearl. It was somewhat familiar to me, but the last time I was amongst Pearl’s keepings was decades prior.
This was the beginning of my adult tour into the depths of her intangible and befuddling mental illness. With every step forward I departed further from reality.
Problematically, I cannot find a word to describe what this experience did to me or how it felt. Eerie. Otherworldly. Ethereal. Distorted. Circus fun house. I could continue regurgitating the thesaurus in my head but nothing quite captures the sentiment, which is odd for me. It is absolute euphoria for me when I find a word that encapsulates a complex idea. Alas, I was finally ineffable.
Without so much as opening a cabinet door or rifling through a filing cabinet, I lost hours of time. Literally. I sat there, purse on my left forearm, keys in my right hand, and dejected shoulders. Coffee sitting on the floor to my right. I leaned against a wall on the tile floor in the foyer and wept, and I cannot articulate why. Maybe it’s because I was faced with her inner demons, in a way I had never seen, and they were unavoidable. I had years under my belt, I was also a mother, and some of her illness seeped into me. Compared to my Wonder Bread world, her home revealed a significant worsening of her condition. I had left the degenerative nature of her illness behind years ago, stuffed it far and deep in my psyche, and had forgotten how it felt to be encapsulated by it all. I mistakenly placed her illness in stasis; never worsening or improving.
I think this might have signified my first real relationship with the convent of, “the end.” Or, perhaps, there was 22 years of a woman that was missing from my life that I’d be learning about in retrospect, a semi-stranger who I knew to the core and better than anyone else on the planet. She no longer had temporal relevance to me.
The smells of the hospital were still lingering in my nostrils because I wore the same clothes from the prior day. Looking back, it is rather gross. I had spent hours physically interacting with my dead mother, brushing her hair and giving her a departing mani-pedi, and here I was wearing the very same cloth that touched her cold and bluish skin. The only other affront to my olfactory system was the stench of stale cigarette smoke. Years of smoking in a house that was practically hermetically sealed. My God I hate that smell. I can taste it just thinking of it wafting past my nostrils.
Black plastic covered every window visible from my vantage point. Multiple layers. It was meticulously cut, leveled, and hung. Black tape. Smallest pieces cut to fit the glass only, followed by larger ones to cover the entire window and frame. Pulled taught; no ripples or dimples. Even though I would later find a note that explained the rationale behind the shrouded panes of glass, I knew exactly why she did this…instantly. She was keeping the demons out. Rolls of thick black plastic, industrial of some kind, leaned against a corner. A shower caddy stuffed with electrical adhesives, a level, scissors, and measuring tape sat neatly next to the dozen or so rolls of black plastic. Pearl was exacting in her attempt at keeping the demons out, just like everything else in her life when she was in a sound mind.
Her house faced westward, with windows on all four sides, and it was blindingly sunny with blue skies outside. The front and the back of the home had particularly large plate glass windows, enough to let in the warmth of sunshine. Yet, inside was pitch black, except for a slice of bright light that was illuminating the edges of a door about 15 feet away. It was closed and I’ll admit my interest was piqued at the contents behind it. Such a stark contrast; pitch black and a slice of blinding brightness.
As I sat there, I looked at her entry room. Soaking up every detail. It was a wide-open space, roughly 20’ by 20’. Cream colored carpet covered the floors and the furniture was scant but well placed and welcoming. Two armchairs and a small sofa. Ellipsis coffee table in a light oak. No dust. I was rather shocked at the fabric pattern on the furniture. A deep burgundy with some horrific floral and paisley mashup with greens and shades of gold. It was atrocious. This style was not the Pearl I remembered from so long ago. The furniture itself was very much her. Few pieces, high quality. Less is always more.
Small end tables with reading lamps and each had a clean ashtray; I smiled when I saw them. It made this foreign place feel like my Wonder Bread home. Little pieces of the Pearl I knew from decades prior were here. There were a few framed pictures of her and her deceased husband. My heart admittedly sank when I realized there were no pictures of me…until I remembered she didn’t have any. Guilt.
The room, despite being sparsely decorated, was cluttered with boxes of new things. Deliveries from Amazon, purchases from JCPenney. I wouldn’t call it hoarding because the sundries were well organized and almost in an order indicating a walk-through project list. She had made a ton of recent purchases. New deadbolt locks for each door, vases of every size and shape, seeds for planting, bird feeders, and brand new pots and pans. There were brand new curtain rods and light cream curtains. It occurred to me that she likely was going to hang the curtains over the black window coverings to make it feel less gloomy inside. Despite her broken brain, she still liked pretty things. And she was also consumed by shame. Hide reality at all costs.
My body felt so heavy. I thought the day before was hard, seeing Pearl lying dead in a hospital bed, but this seemed harder. It’s like I was left with a gigantic puzzle to put together and was trying to find some semblance of normalcy in her life. To understand the now-Pearl but post hoc. Every box was a riddle to be solved. Why this? Why that? Why, why, why? Dr. Mandolin hates it when I ask why, and I understand her thought process, clinically speaking, because this is a healing journey. But this entire delve into Pearl’s world was full of the ubiquitous question.
I looked at my watch and realized I had been sitting there for 4 hours. Made no progress. I felt defeated, like a failure. Why is this so hard? I realized it’s because I was alone, literally and figuratively. I had nobody to help me, to lean on, to ask for help. My husband, though he thought himself supportive, was always at a distance. His choice, not mine. I could never be myself with him, his and his family’s actions had made that abundantly clear; when things got too “real” he pulled away. Crappy communication growing up, so he’s not entirely to blame. Talking to him always ended up with him being distracted or bored, so I gave up. There were my closest friends in my new home, but they didn’t know the real me, the baggaged before-Stuart. And I sure as shit wasn’t going to ask Mick for help. To invite him into her home, which he asked for numerous times during this shitshow, felt like sacrilege. No way in hell I would disrespect her in that way.
In later years it occurred to me that being in her home was a collision of all the what-ifs. The edifice represented all I knew about Pearl and so many things I didn’t. She was a stranger but not. What if she hadn’t been sick? What if our last conversation hadn’t ended in the way it did? How would her life have looked if Mick had manned up and been a real husband? If she had real support for her mental health struggles?
After so much time had passed, that was utterly wasted, the only thing I craved was my son. To feel his squishy face and slobbery kisses. He was my home, my lifeline, my purpose for living. After 30 minutes of realizing and then admitting complete defeat to the foyer in my mom’s house, it occurred to me that I wasn’t alone. I had my baby. He knew me, and I him. Our connection was otherworldly, eternal, life giving. He had no words in his vocabulary, and those that he did made not a lick of sense, but I got in my rental car and raced to my son. I wanted to hear him babble about everything and nothing.
That night in our hotel, we watched cartoons, played peek-a-boo, ate finger foods, and snuggled. He fed me Goldfish crackers until it felt I had grown gills. He was my safe and my brave, regardless of our location. I was making my own home with my son. The realization that it would end with me, the generational trauma, torture, torment and fear, was the single most powerful moment in my life. My brave…in the form of a giggly little angel sent directly to me by God himself.
We shared a sippy cup of water, at his insistence, and dozed off around 10pm. Tomorrow morning I would make it past the foyer. I made that promise to myself.
And I did.
