Dis Story

Seth Harwood

A Long Way from Disney

When I was eight, my mother went to a weekend EST conference in Worcester and was never the same.  Werner Ehrhardt pumped her full of ideas, broke her down and then built her from a new mold, one with new thoughts and fresh agendas.  She began to believe she was a woman going places.

“I feel like a whole new being,” she said, that Sunday night over dinner.  “I feel like I can change mountains, dig out all of our molehills.  This isn’t going to stop with one weekend.”

My father smiled and nodded.  We were having steak for dinner and he was busy cutting my piece into eight-year-old mouthfuls.  I sat quiet, looking at my mother’s eyes.  They were wild in their sockets, full of energy and ideas, white all around the iris so that I wondered if somehow they’d raised her eyelids where she’d been.  She said, “This is so amazing Adam.  This is so incredibly unbelievable!  I’ve learned that I should no longer stand in front of the bus.  That’s my life; I mean this is: a bus.  I know now that I’m steps away from driving it, but I have to now at least get on it and stop resisting.  Here I am and I’m here so I should welcome that.”

At first it was just the weekend seminars, and she did wonderfully: she scaled the ranks of the EST system, elevating with each successive weekend, climbing through the hierarchy of the training: the diagnosing, treating and discussing of her own and others’ problems.  She was figuring herself into the person that she was capable of being, as Werner Ehrhardt saw it.  Then there was a week-long seminar in Rochester she went away for.  This left us alone in the house, my sister, my father, and me.  Suddenly the rooms seemed bigger, immense even.  The second floor seemed so far away from the first, and the third floor was somewhere that I didn’t want to venture. 

At night my father made our dinners and then, after I had watched my hour limit of TV, he tucked me in and read to me.  We were making our way through The Hound of The Baskervilles, and Holmes was just discovering the hound.  I liked the feeling of laying in bed with my arms pinned down by the covers and watching my dad sit close by, holding the book in his lap.  There were pictures on some of the pages, and when they came to one, he held it up for me to see.  That was my favorite.

I slept with a flashlight under my pillow for protection in those days.  I’d try everything I could to keep my father reading, then talking, wanting him to stay, but finally he did leave, always, and he would shut the light off, and then I was alone.  I’d turn on my flashlight and patrol around the walls and corners of the room with its beam, warding off monsters and hounds, whatever other demons might be lurking, fearful from Saturday afternoons watching Creature Double Feature on TV and disturbed by the horror movies they started showing once they ran out of the Godzilla movies and then Wolfman-Frankenstein-Dracula.  One movie that got to me had little men coming out of the chimney and killing people in a big house.  That was the one I thought of.  After my flashlight patrol, I would stare directly into the light, looking at the worlds contained inside it.  All it was was a bulb and a shiny cone surface around it, but looking at it from so close, I thought I could see things moving around, distinct happenings, far off places that I would someday go visit.

For my dad, Lawrence Berkman, his marriage had had its problems since well before my mom first went to EST.  His hope had been that perhaps she was going through a phase, something to ignore, but when Ellen came home from work, it was as if something in the whole house had instantly changed.  Most times my dad was busy at the stove making dinner—his professor’s schedule left more time for cooking than her social worker’s—and he waited in the kitchen to greet her.  He always heard her in the hall: she would start talking to me, asking if I’d had a fabulous day, asking what I did for recess, asking what was dinner.  Then she’d come into the kitchen, take Rachel out of her high chair and goo goo at her for a minute.

Other times when she came home she was tired from work and she’d just sit in the living room, drinking wine and waiting for dinner.  These nights she might cry at the table.  My father worried that this would scare me and he tried to comfort my mom, but usually the best he could do was to take her upstairs and get her to lie down.

At my mother’s suggestion they started seeing the counselor.  They met with her on Thursday nights at the building next door to where my mom worked, while a babysitter watched Rachel and me.  It was at one of the early sessions that my dad first heard of my mom’s family history of depression.  He’d thought her family was just naturally odd, what every son-in-law had to expect from his new wife’s mother and her siblings, but now it was all coming out in the terms that she usually saved for her clients.  She told the counselor that her mother was manic, that her brother had been depressed on and off since college, and that her sister was already taking medication for her own manic symptoms. 

“What does this mean for Adam?” my dad asked.  “Does this mean our son and daughter…”

“Relax Mr. Berkman.”  The counselor reached out with both hands and waved her fingers at him as if she were fanning a small fire.  “This isn’t for you to get upset about now.  Ellen has just made an important discovery.”

“Do you mean that my family’s manic depression might be an explanation for the way I’ve been feeling?  For the problems we’ve been going through?”

My father looked at the two of them as they went on discussing the merits of this realization.  “Is it possible that this kind of depression could have anything to do with someone’s ability to listen?” he asked.

“Of course,” the counselor said, nodding.  “This has everything to do with attention when the patient is up, or on the highs as we usually say, both in terms of needing it and being able to give it out to others.”

“And the lows?”

“It’s similar, Mr. Berkman” she said, “But not exactly the same.  When the patient is on their lows, often what we’ll observe is a similar inability to listen, but a great need for attention.  It will sometimes feel like they’re not hearing things you tell them, but you have to continue to tell them that things are all right.”

My mom was nodding, but my father hoped things weren’t this clear or determined.  He wanted to still be in the normal marriage he’d thought he was getting into: the one without problems or with problems that he and his wife could work out on a day to day basis—problems without clinical names.  “Is this really serious?” he asked.  “Do you mean this is decided then, or are there some tests that still need to be run?”

He listened to the counselor explain about manic depression for the rest of the hour and then he listened to his wife say many of the same things in the car as they drove home.  He wondered how he’d gotten himself into this, but he couldn’t really be mad: this was Ellen, after all, the woman he loved, and he wasn’t going to abandon her just because they’d been having a hard time communicating, or because her family had a history of depression.  “We can beat this right, hon?” he said, taking her hand out of her lap and holding it in his own.

“Sure we can,” she told him.  “I think.”

It was after the weeklong EST seminar in Rochester that things really started to change for my mom.  When she got back, the house and the things in it seemed smaller.  My father was still a good husband, but now he seemed merely dependable and consistent, rather than exciting and engaging, like a man she’d love.  She began to find problems in almost everything he did: the way he read his book at night in bed, holding his glasses; the way he offered the same options every day for breakfast—“hot cereal, cold cereal, eggs, toast…”— the way he drove when he picked her up for work: meticulously and carefully, with great care, listening to classical music on an AM station. 

She wondered if she could have done better.  Not just in terms of a better man, but she wanted to know if she belonged in a better life.  Whether her life’s path was or was not supposed to contain my father became almost a constant obsession.  She began to look for signs of whether they were intended for each other.  Werner Ehrhardt had told her that she was destined for incredible heights if she could only listen to her destiny and follow it.  At work she closed her eyes at her desk and tried to listen for her life’s intention.  She doubted if it was supposed to involve working at a desk, but when she saw clients she knew she was on the right track: there was something definitely right about her ability to talk to people.  She knew she was intended to help them.

My mother tried to listen to the little things that came into her life.  Depending on whether she got quarters or combinations of coins when she bought things—her breakfast or lunch, a magazine, clothes at Filene’s Basement—she judged whether she was on the right track.  If she got quarters only, she could put those into the front-pocket of her wallet.  That was where she kept quarters for her vending machines at work, or the money that she would consider acceptable to give a cashier—her mother had taught her that paying for something with nickels and pennies only took up too much of someone else’s time.  Occasionally she would put dimes into the pocket of her purse along with the quarters, but only when she got dimes and quarters as change, or dimes alone.  Any combination that featured pennies or nickels she removed any quarters from and dumped the rest into her purse.  Every other week or so, when she had some time and she remembered, she would remove the intended objects of her purse—her business card holder, lipsticks, make-up, tissues, her wallet—and she would dump out the rest of the change into a drawer in her desk.  After picking out the garbage items, the stray gum wrappers and unwanted receipts, she left the coins in the drawer, her inappropriate coin collection.

Part of her believed every penny in the drawer held some indication that her life with my dad wasn’t fated.  This seemed only partly rational, and somewhat unrealistic, but still in some way she believed it.  She asked herself if she really believed any of this sometimes, knew one couldn’t go around deciding her life based on coin-collecting, but—and there was always this contradiction in her mind—she felt she needed to listen very hard to the world and all of the things around her, that there would be messages that came into her life from outside her, from her surroundings. 

Sometimes, in-between clients, she would sift through the coin drawer and examine the pennies it held.  She looked for the older ones, or the new ones, trying to see if she could find any information in the pennies that had come into her life.  If she found a nice one, she asked herself what had she done in that year?  Was this before or after her relationship with my father had started, and how productive had that year been?  She considered all of this as information directed toward her, intended for her consideration.

When the treasury started minting the new John F. Kennedy fifty-cent pieces, my mother knew she was really onto something.  These were bright new coins that she could pay with.  They were shiny and large and they paid tribute to a great man in America.  There was nothing inappropriate in using them, she was certain, and she even found pride in paying for her coffee in the morning without any bills.  The fact that this new coin came about at the time she was most interested in change seemed altogether meaningful.  It seemed irrefutable evidence and confirmation that her listening to the world around her was going well, that she was definitely onto something.  EST, the way she was thinking about my father, what she and Werner knew were the right directions for her life, all of these had to be leading her along some kind of path.  She wouldn’t go on looking at coins for the rest of her life, she realized, but she knew to keep listening, that something was going to happen soon, or was happening already for a reason.

About this time, Werner Ehrhardt announced that another week-long seminar would be taking place that summer, in Rochester, and this time participants’ families were not only invited, but were strongly encouraged to come along.

On the way to Rochester for the EST conference, we stopped off in the Berkshires to stay with some friends of my parents, the Mirkins.  Their house was a big one on a big lake, and the Mirkins had planned a barbecue for our arrival.  They had two daughters, one a few years older and one a few years younger than me.  They made me nervous: the way they talked in whispers, or scrutinized me like they would paint me all over, as if they needed to decide on a particular color for each part of my body.  And they loved and adored Rachel.  As soon as we arrived, they took her away and started dressing her in their old clothes.

In the car my parents had been quiet.  Coming through Worcester my mother had said something that had made my father stop talking, then for the rest of the way they hadn’t spoken.  My mother made periodic stabs at the car radio buttons and these were the only movement in the front.  Once, when they got off the turnpike, my dad pointed to the directions on her side of the car.  She had raised her palms as if to show him and said, “You know this is what I’ve been thinking.  You know these are questions I want to deal with.”  But he had merely raised his hand to the side of his face as if it were a blinder, and continued driving.  “The directions, Ellen,” he said.  “Please.  Just the directions.”

So it was a choice of one discomfort over another that led me into the lake with the Mirkin sisters instead of staying close to my parents that afternoon.  I followed the girls down the hill to the shoreline after we’d eaten, nervous about being alone with them, but eager to swim in the clear water.  The younger one, Stephanie, dropped her clothes to reveal a pink one-piece with frills around her shoulders.  Her stomach protruded beyond all her other parts, a rounded pink globe.  Rachel had on her yellow bathing suit.  She waddled into the water with Stephanie, the two of them moving together, Rachel with her orange water wings holding Stephanie’s hand.

I watched Jane.  The first thing she did was unfasten her shorts.  When she did, I thought I could see her belly button and when they fell to the ground I saw the bottom of a black two-piece bathing suit.  Then she raised her T-shirt over her head, and I saw the bikini completely.  It was the first time I’d seen one up close, or really been around a girl’s body like that; I could see her flat, tanned belly, her legs, and the fact that she had a reason to be wearing the top. 

“Aren’t you going to take your shirt off?” Stephanie said, splashing water at me from the edge of the lake.  Jane laughed.  She dropped her shirt onto the sand and ran into the water.  Turning, I saw her back, most of it, her black hair hanging down just past her shoulders, and her shoulder blades raise as she lifted her arms to dive into the water.  She began a perfect crawl away from me, out into the water toward the float. 

I lifted my shirt over my head and held in my stomach.  Somehow I’d put on weight in the last school year.  While I’d been thin a year ago, a new candy store had opened on my way from school to the bus in the afternoon.  My school had stopped the funding for a school bus and now we had to take the T.  The temptation of a drawerful of quarters for the bus and the candy store on my route proved too much.  And these daily indulgences had added something to my body.  I looked down at myself and pulled my stomach in, then started into the water, where I thought I could hide.  I plodded into the cold until it reached my knees and then I dove in.  When I came up I heard a noise that I thought at first might be my own screaming, that I might actually be yelling about the cold.  But then I saw Stephanie and Jane’s faces.  The noise hadn’t come from me; they were looking up the hill toward the house.

I turned to see my mother standing next to the others with her arms raised over her head.  She was yelling.  I was too far away to hear what she said, but she was yelling and pointing at my father.  The way my father kept his head down, as if he were just looking at his hands, rubbing them together, and the way the Mirkins tried to pacify my mother—first his, then her hand reaching out for her shoulder—and then pulled back, nodded to each other and went into the house, I could see it all.  My mother gestured wildly, waving her hands and saying something that looked as if she repeated it again and again.  Finally, my father looked up and spoke, but my mom didn’t stop to listen.

“What’s going on?” Stephanie asked, standing next to me.

“They’re fighting,” Jane told her.

My father had known that my mom was headed for a breakdown when they’d been in the car, that it was only a matter of when.  Now, in front of their friends, but luckily away from the children, Ellen had gone into this: her belief that she needed to be out of this marriage, that somehow he and the kids were holding her back. Whether this was her own manic high-side or something Werner Ehrhardt had pumped into her, he had no idea. She said she was meant to accomplish much more than she could within what they were and she needed to get out of their marriage altogether.

“OK,” he said, “I’m not going to fight you anymore.  I’m not going to fight your decisions for your life.”

“But you know that this is right for me!  You know it!”

My dad looked down at his hands.  It seemed they should be scarred from the fights he had had with her over all of this, but they weren’t.  They were just simple hands, the hands of a man who had lived with the Wanji in Tanzania for two years and once dug ditches with them to set traps to catch the birds they would eat, pink hands that could hold his daughter, but could only pull on the things around him—his wife and his marriage—so hard, hands that had to sometimes let go.

“I’m telling you I don’t want to fight you about this anymore,” he told my mother.  “I’m saying that you can have what you want.  You have to do what you need with your life.”

From the water, I saw my father get up from sitting on the picnic table and walk across the lawn, then open the back door and disappear into the house.  My mother sat down on the bench of the table, next to where he had been, and put her face in her hands.  Although I couldn’t see her face, I noticed the movement of her shoulders, the way they jiggled up and down. 

“Don’t you want to go out and see if your parents are all right?” Jane asked.

“No.”  I looked down at my hands: they had become pruney from the water, but I didn’t care.  My stomach was out, above the water.   

“Let’s swim,” Stephanie said, and then she took off with Rachel flapping and kicking in tow.  Jane headed out toward the raft, swimming her beautiful crawl.

I stayed where I was.  I could feel the dirt and leaves under my feet and the funny way my fingers felt when I rubbed them against my thumbs, the wrinkles bumping against each other, fitting together and then not fitting at all.

My father watched us carefully as we stayed on at the Mirkins’ without my mom.  She had gone on to Rochester, on the bus, and he’d arranged to pick her up at the end of the conference, when she was ready to drive back to Boston.  She’d said she would call, that driving back to Boston might not necessarily be what she’d want.

I noticed that my father stayed quiet a lot now, and took swims in the lake by himself.  When he spoke to me, he seemed happy, like he was trying to keep everything fun, but I could see in the corners of his eyes that things were different.  I couldn’t place exactly what was different until one night when my father was tucking me in.  When he gave me a hug, I felt the scratch of his unshaven face against my own, and saw that my father had started squinting.  A tired look had come into his eyes, not in the wrinkles that were starting to form around the edges, or in the eyes themselves, but in the way he held them open.  I hugged him around the neck and tried to hold on, to keep him sitting on the edge of the bed.

“Don’t go downstairs now, Dad.  Stay up here for a while, OK?”

My father took my arms in his hands and freed his head from my grasp.  He nodded and put his hand onto my chest.  “How would you like to go for a trip this week?” he asked.  “We’ll go somewhere and have fun.”

“Where will we go?”

My dad shook his head and patted my chest.  “I guess I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“But don’t go yet.  OK, Dad?  Stay here for a little while and help me sleep.”  Whatever light had come into my father left again.  “How about we could drive to Disney World, Dad.  That would be fun.”

He laughed.  “Disney’s a long way.  I’ll think of something, though.  In the morning we’ll figure it out.”  He stood up.  “I’ll leave on the hall light for you.”

My father turned the light off next to my bed and walked to the door.  When he opened it, I said, “Dad?”  The hall seemed very bright.  He turned back into the room, closed the door all but six inches. 

He tried to sound strong, to keep his voice happy and pleasant and adult for me—they’d decided it was best not to tell us all of the details just yet—but he didn’t: something got caught in his throat and he had to cough before he could say, “Adam?”

“Nothing, Dad.  It’s OK, now.  It’s nothing.”

He opened the door again.  From the light in the hall he could see my head on the pillow, my eyes squinted tight-shut against the oncoming tears.  My father returned to the bedside and put his hand on my arm.  When I sat up, crying, and buried my head in his chest, he held me. 

“It’ll be all right,” he said.  “One day soon.  It’ll be all right.”

“What happened with you and Mom, Dad?  Why didn’t we go with her?”

“Your mother feels like she might need some changes right now, and if we’re going to help her at all we’ve got to let her see them.  She needs to do some things on her own.”

“Is she coming back?”

“She is,” my dad said.  “I think.”

In the morning he told me he was leaving to go on to Rochester.  I looked up from my cereal.  “You’re going to find Mom?”

“I don’t know.  I just mean I’m going to Rochester.”  He stood up, nodded at me, and left the kitchen.  I ran to the window to watch him.  Rachel stayed in her high chair, Jane and Stephanie feeding her toast.  Finally my dad came outside.  He walked down to the lake, stood next to the water.  I watched him pick up a rock and skip it across the lake.  Then he did it again.  I rushed through the rest of my cereal and ran down to the shore to skip rocks with him. 

“What’s happening, Dad?”

“I don’t know if your mother is going to want to come home with us,” he said.

I looked at him, and he looked away, out at the water.  “Are you getting divorced?”  He looked at how the trees met the sky far ahead of him: thin clouds stretched over them in horizontal lines that gave a sense of the sky’s enormity.

“We have to talk more.  That’s what we need.  I’m going to see what I can say.” 

“But I thought we were going to Disney.”

“Disney’s a long way, Adam.  A long way away from Rochester.”

When he had packed all of his things into the car, my father headed west for Rochester.  He drove out of Massachusetts and into New York State, listening to whatever classical music he could find on the radio.  He tried to hum whatever music he needed in his own head.  It was a clear summer day and tall, green trees bound the highway on both sides.  On the other side of a median, he could see the traffic headed back east, toward Boston, but sometimes he drove through tall trees on both sides of the highway and felt as if he was passing through a huge woods, driving by himself in the wilderness, with only the one direction available.  Occasionally he passed parts of blasted-away hillsides, or slight mountains that appeared as flat cliffs, ridged with the drilled holes that road-makers had packed dynamite into to explode away the earth. 

In Rochester, the most he could get my mother to consent to was talking over dinner.  That was the longest she would leave her conference.  Before they were to meet, he put a tie on, though the restaurant wasn’t fancy, and went downstairs to the lobby to wait.  In the elevator down, he straightened his tie in his reflection on the polished brass doors.  He hoped that Rachel and I would do all right at the Mirkins’, knew it may not have been right to leave us, but that it didn’t make sense for us to be around whatever he and my mother had to say, or whatever she would do, and so leaving us had been the only option.

The lobby of the Sheraton was a big one, perhaps the biggest and fanciest that Rochester had to offer.  My dad walked around in it, feeling it out, but he didn’t see my mom.  He took a large chair on the side of the room where he could see the door to the main hall, where he supposed the late-afternoon EST session would be happening.  He could hear clapping from inside, and then more, and he hoped things would be wrapping up soon. 

Their therapist had said that patience and understanding were the best things he could give his wife, that he needed to listen and offer her everything he could.  A waitress came over to ask if he’d like a cocktail, and he declined.  When she’d gone, he wondered if that’d been the right thing, if he could’ve had something to warm up to this conversation, or if being loose was even a good idea at all.  He decided he really didn’t know. 

A mother walked into the lobby leading a small boy by the hand.  She walked him to the reception desk, where she spoke to the concierge.  The boy dug with both hands in his pockets.  He brought out something that he at first picked at, then began to put into his mouth.  His mother slapped it out of his hand just as it reached his lips, and whatever it was dropped on the floor.  She held his hand in hers and slapped it.  “Justin!” she said.  “Don’t eat that!”  She went back to talking with the concierge as the boy stooped to pick up what he’d dropped and then put it back into his pocket.  My dad wondered again about his kids.  What was the best way to take care of us?  What kind of upbringing?  It made the most sense for us to have two parents, for both of them to love each other, for them to live together and take care of us.  That much seemed clear.

The big doors of the meeting hall remained closed. 

My father stood up and looked around the lobby.  It seemed that no one had noticed him.  There was a man and a woman, sitting on a couch, drinking from martini glasses and reading the newspaper.  A young couple walked in and waited at the desk behind the mother and her child.  My father approached the porter, a young man dressed in a red uniform standing by the doors. 

“Do you know when the conference in the main hall will finish?”

“No, sir.”  The porter shook his head.  “In a few minutes perhaps.”

My dad nodded.  “Thank you.”  He walked to the side, toward the doors of the hall, regarding them.  He thought he could still hear clapping from within, and behind that a strong male voice.  It seemed as if a great meeting was happening within the conference center, that something was occurring which he should be a part of, but wasn’t.  He could hear the applause inside, loud and clear, obviously encouraging whatever great insight had been spoken.  He moved closer, so that he was standing next to the crack between two of the doors, and leaned against them to listen.

“Your life,” the male voice said, “is nothing if not a series of decisions, ones you can make every day.  Ones you have to.  From there whatever you decide, it becomes you.”  There was an interruption of applause.  “It’s up to you, then, working with us, to fulfill what you want of that life!  To get the most out of every day possible.  For you!  This isn’t about all the others, the ones who are there.  This is about us here, in this room.  How can we get—” 

My father leaned away.  The applause began again.  He watched the porter walk outside.  The newspaper readers had not looked up.  My father felt as if no one in the world might know he existed.  He thought he could slip inside the doors and join the meeting.  He could go along with them and find out what he had coming, find how he could go get it, whatever it was as far as he was concerned, that he needed to make himself whole.

But when he opened the door he heard the waves of applause begin again as if anew, and looking inside he saw the audience standing.  He saw them all rise and the single man above them on the stage hold his arms in the air and smile into the applause, nodding.  He slipped into the room along the wall.  A woman a few rows away from him turned and noticed him despite her fervent clapping.  She stopped and regarded him seriously.  She wore a name badge and the woman next to her and the man in front of her did also.  The woman turned back to the stage and resumed her clapping. 

My father turned to look at the stage again, saw Werner Ehrhardt, the man whose face he’d seen on the backs of my mother’s books, smiling broadly, nodding.  “My friends,” he said, quieting them with a downward gesture of his hands.  “We thank you all for coming.  And I ask you, Are you ready to seize what you have belonging to you?  What rights and opportunities are yours?  Because what we’ve done today, this weekend, is help to make you realize that, I hope.  No.  I am sure.  I—”

That was when my father saw my mother in the crowd.  He saw her face reverently pointed up toward the stage, her eyes full of understanding and peaceful quiet. She was nodding, and she had her hands clasped in front of her chest, poised and ready to begin clapping all over again. And he knew that she would continue with this track in her life, that she believed this man and would follow him for as long and to wherever it took for her to get what she wanted, what she thought she had coming and deserved in this life, whatever that might be.

And he wondered if he should stay, listen and consider what he might become with the help of these systems, or if there was something he was meant to achieve, something he was meant to be.  At the same time he knew that he did exist already: to some people, the ones who were important to him, and if not at all times, then at least every day.  Every day he was a part of his son’s and his daughter’s lives, a father to two children.  If that wasn’t a meaning, then he didn’t know what was.

He looked around one final time and made his way out of the hall and away from it, across the lobby toward the revolving glass doors of the hotel.  He passed through them and walked outside.  He went past the young couple that was now helping the porter unload their car, and he didn’t stop; he walked into the streets of Rochester, into the cold night.  He would simply go on walking, he decided, and when he came back he would go upstairs, pack his things, and return to the Berkshires to be with his son and daughter.  He would make sure then that my sister and I were all right.

This story originally appeared in Pisgah Review, v.1, issue 2, winter 2006.

Copyright©2007 Seth Harwood