Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl

ISBN-13: 9781567927757

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher

Publication Date: 06-20-2023

Pages: 272

Product Dimensions: 5.25(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.75(d)

Alison Rose was born in Palo Alto, California. Her stories and “Talk of the Town” pieces began appearing in The New Yorker in 1987; she has also been a regular contributor to Vogue. Porochista Khakpour is the award-winning author of Sick: A Memoir and, most recently, Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity.

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Better Than Sane

Random House

Chapter One

THE ORIGINAL MARRIED MAN

I'll never be anywhere I like better than the veranda off my childhood bedroom in Palo Alto, California. My room was upstairs, fairly large, with a few French windows overlooking the garden. The bedspreads on my twin beds were quilted in cream-colored chintz wing a small chandelier with grapes on it, a friendly presence at night. But the thing that mattered most was the veranda. All the wisteria and magenta bougainvillea grew up onto the veranda, and when I lay there under the green awning on my collapsible chaise with green cushions, anything bad or ugly was automatically blacked out: gone.

The house in Palo Alto was made out of sandy-colored stucco, with cream-colored wood trim. Mother's mother and stepfather had built it in 1928. It had a pitched roof with a dark-green front door and a wrought-iron grille over a small window, and all the shutters were painted British racing green. I don't think of the house without seeing fairly bright, undepreth little claret-red rosebuds all over, the same as the curtains on the windows. From the ceiling hussing small green leaves all over it, but it didn't look as cheerful in winter, when the leaves fell off. Facing the street was an enormous blue spruce and two deodar cedars, the kind whose tops tip over. There was another hovering blue spruce (looking old, like the other, because the needles were silver), and a little boxwood hedge going all the way around the house. From the front door to the sidewalk was a winding brick path with violas (blue, lavender, white) on either side and, along the front sidewalk in the spring, purple iris, which looked too thin and unprotected against the street. They died fast.

Out in the back of the house, in a corner, stood a huge evergreen tree that could have been in Yosemite. A white owl used to sit in it. Across from a brick terrace, sort of in a row, stood some fruit trees: nectarine, apricot, peach, a flowering Japanese plum. Down in the garden were lilacs, daphnes, dahlias, and sweet peas, and cannas: big white flowers with orange centers. A stone wall went around the back of the garden and along one side of it. The grass out back was scalloped with tuberous begonias (the small ones) in a border. Outside the breakfast room were an orange tree and a grapefruit tree, but the fruit didn't grow very well: undersized, not so sweet, too pale. Not enough sun.



I never did think of myself as a person who would get married and live in a house. My mother and father seemed like two separate entities in our house, so to me marriage was a state and a house was a place where people who are wittily mean to each other live in an isolated way.

At the dinner table, my sister-she's six years older-and I would sit at our places in our school uniforms, navy pleated skirts and white middy blouses. A little crystal bell sat on the table by my mother's place, to call Nita, the maid. ("Don't forget the finger bowls and the butter balls," my sister told me on the telephone the other day.)

My father sat at the head of the table, in a chair with arms. The rest of us sat in chairs with no arms, but all of them, like his, were upholstered in dark yellow-gold damask. Oddly, there was a portrait of me in a white dress on the dining-room wall behind him. Daddy nearly always looked as if he were on the verge of losing control in one violent way or another, as if he were going to laugh at us or swat us away in a fit of bad temper. He had green eyes, a good color, but they often took on a sneering and impatient cast. His hair was very dark and straight, with some hair tonic in it. He usually wore a dark suit and a white shirt. In between courses, my father would rant about his patients (he was a psychiatrist) or his hatred of Communism, and my sister would be mute when he asked her questions about current world crises. Any answer she came up with to any question he asked was invariably wrong. My sister might start to cry, Mother saying, "Milton! You don't hear yourself," as he hollered some more. Other times my sister or I, or even my mother, would get up and run.

Because I never said a word at the table, he would sometimes turn his attention to me and say in a very loud voice, "How are you, Personality Minus?"-he had a way with language-or he yelled and threatened to send me to Agnew State mental hospital, near San Jose, where he frequently went on his after-dinner rounds. At other times, as if there were only the two options, he might say to me, "You're going to be a femme fatale, Babs." My mother and my sister and I were Babs I, Babs II, and Babs III to him, though none of our names resembled the name Barbara.

Nita, meanwhile, just kept coming in and out of the swinging door to the kitchen, punctuating my father's monologues with interludes of clattering dishes. Nita-her real name was Juanita Johnson-was a dark-chocolate black woman in a starched white uniform who had turned up in our kitchen in Palo Alto, thick glasses shielding a crossed eye, pomade stuff combed into her hair. We'd always had Japanese maids before. (There was an upstairs maid and a downstairs maid. "That's how people lived then, honey," Mother says now.) Nita said "uh-huh" continually, as if agreeing with what she'd just said. Even my father became subdued as she passed the food around in all those silver things.

The first night Nita served dinner at our house, my blond friend Squirrel was there-we were about twelve-and we giggled at Nita, because she didn't know about serving: she didn't know how to set a dinner table, didn't know where the dishes went, or how to clear the dinner plates: she stacked them one on top of the other, right at the table, food still on them.

My father, who was very tall and handsome, sometimes told witty, mean stories about his patients: a middle-aged woman, for instance, was frightened to put on a dress, a sweater, anything, over her head, "for fear she'd be stuck in the dark," he said, smirking. He wouldn't tell us a single thing about Doris Day, however, though she had been a patient of his. One youngish man was upset because his father owned a funeral parlor on the wrong side of town. There was the man who had to do everything twice: wash his face twice, brush his teeth twice, comb his hair twice, put on his clothes twice. The human race was really hopeless, according to Daddy. He got depressed by the patients-he said so. One time, he said all the homosexuals should be thrown in the Pacific Ocean. Too often he told scary, world-coming-to-an-end stories about his friend Robert Oppenheimer and his recent invention the atomic bomb.

Perhaps to cheer himself up, at breakfast he sang songs to himself like "I don't want her, you can have her, she's too fat for me" while Nita served him a soft-boiled egg and her shoulders shook with laughter. In his droll mode, he used to sing around the house, "It's great to get up in the morning, it's great to get up in the morning, it's great to get up in the morning, but it's nicer to stay in bed." But he was in another mood altogether when he banged on my bedroom door. He would bang with both fists so hard it sounded as if the door would fall down, but it didn't. He would yell, each word dragged out unnaturally-he sounded literally brutal-"Get...up...Babs!" Then I would get up, put on my school uniform, and go downstairs to the breakfast room, where my father would say, from inside his perfect white shirt and his dark suit, "Good morning, Babs!"-loud. I never said "Good morning" back to him, and in fact I have never been able to say "Good morning" to anyone since. The worst banging on my door was during my sacred weekly ritual of watching Gardner McKay in Adventures in Paradise, one night a week. I counted on Gardner McKay to save me and he did. No matter how hard my father banged on the door, I knew Gardner McKay understood everything. The close-to-unnatural beauty of Gardner McKay's whole self, combined with a mixed-up-and-lost thing on his face, made me certain of that. No matter what, he was my weekly savior, complete with a vase of hand-picked flowers on top of the TV set, my bedroom door locked.



Most of my mother's friends (except the one who had been married to Otto Rank) had little crushes on my father. For Christmas, he got dozens of presents from those people whom Mother called "grateful patients."

Mother didn't know what to do with all the dinnertime violence. She seemed removed somehow from the chaos around her, an outsider, and would sometimes say, "I'm the only sane one around here!," as if she were defining a malady that separated her from the rest of us. Mother wore Chinese silk pajamas with a matching silk coat nearly every night. When she was twenty-one, Mother had been the only girl in a class at Yale Graduate School studying Chinese history. She told me this, or something like this, twenty million times, holding forth less on the history of peasant uprisings in twelfth-century China, or whatever, than on her professor-who had studied under So-and-So, and who often invited her to his house for a glass of sherry. Her mother had been brought up by Chinese servants, who gave her wedding presents-that's what servants did then-so those gifts were around the house, too: Chinese porcelain vases, bronze things.

My father believed that chemicals were the only way to make a mentally disturbed person reasonably sane. Like many people who believe things ahead of their time, he had a contract to write a book about it all but never finished it. My mother said that he hadn't wanted to have children, because he believed mental illness was hereditary and he didn't want them to suffer what he had suffered. She thought he tried out on himself the pills that he believed were going to work, to see what the effect was. This may have accounted for some of his more spectacular moods.

My friend Squirrel spent the night in my room often, her blond hair on the pillow on the other twin bed. This was the first time I had seen blond hair that early in the morning, and it seemed optimistic. Squirrel played Chopin on the big piano downstairs, and Schubert. I would make her play a Liszt rhapsody as loud and as fast as she could, faster and faster, and it was a kind of ecstasy to sit next to her on the black piano bench when she played.

Before Squirrel's arrival, I had three mops as best friends. This went on for two years when I was about ten and eleven. Most days after school, I'd take my mops dancing in the dahlia garden, where I had them all to myself. These were mops the maids used to clean the kitchen floor with. I would find them drying by the back door, between the garbage cans and the wooden milk box for the milkman. My mops were blond, like the blond girls at school who were older and taller than I was. I loved the mops' hair, soft yellowy-white rope, shoulder-length, which looked good wet, too-so thick!-and I loved the way it fell across their faces. Each mop's expression depended on how the soft rope had been horizontally stitched across her face. Their eyes seemed downcast. Since the stitching wasn't exactly the same, I could tell one face from the other, and one's hair was slightly shorter, or was parted in the middle, as opposed to a side part, or was lighter. I've always thought blond hair gives a color to the world that other hair doesn't. Blond hair gave a girl at school a different personality, different thoughts in her head, a fair entitlement. The bright-yellow tall, narrow bodies of my mops intensified their blondness. The way their hair smelled when it was semi-wet, maybe with a touch of kitchen bleach-that was nice, too. The mops were good dancers on the lawn, their rope-hair swaying this way and that, the way the grownup girls' did in my sister's fashion magazines.

My first love, though, had been my pencil collection. A few school years before, I'd had twenty-five pencils, mostly regular yellow ones: black lettering, black numbers, bands of black-and-gold metal at the end, worn-down pink erasers. There was one black pencil, with an odd square eraser-she was probably Jewish. They were a whole school of private friends, all girls, just the way it was at my real school. Their faces were that pencil-pale wood and smooth lead; I had to be careful with their faces. Each pencil had a first name, and most of them had last names, too, and every single one of them had a particular face. The shape of the face depended on how the pencil had been sharpened, how much lead there was above the wood, how rounded off the point of the lead was. Some of the pencils didn't get along with the others, but all of them were reliably faithful to and quiet with me.

One afternoon, my mother sharpened my pencils. Their faces were obliterated and unrecognizable. Some of them were a lot shorter, too. It was as if everyone I knew had a different head and face on a now stunted body. I couldn't look at them anymore, all distorted like that, so I abandoned them. In the years that followed, I would see one of the pencils around the house, by a telephone, vaguely recognizable, but dead.

There was a total education right there in our house, if anybody wanted it. Largely, this education consisted of men-older ones and, later, young ones-and books. Sometimes the men and the books collided. At first, caught up, as I was, in my pencils and mops, I didn't know I wanted this education. Daddy had said it didn't matter if I ever went to college. He said, "It doesn't matter if you ever do anything, Babs." An early boyfriend of my sister's pointed out Kafka, which was exceedingly helpful. There was the story about the man who lived by himself and thought about getting a dog because he was lonesome, but first he figured out the many reasons not to get a dog. Then some bouncing balls appeared in his apartment, following him around and bouncing underneath his bed all night, keeping him awake, until he thought of some scheme to control the bouncing. In the morning, the balls started bouncing again. Kafka made the floor feel like something to stand on, not slanted.

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