Keeping the Feast Read Online Free Page B

down-at-the-heel wooden houses in Dallas itself, was painful but right. My six-year-old marriage had long been dying, and a judge was about to grant the divorce my first husband had sought. The house that I spent the next three years restoring was my psychologist. I hammered, sanded, patched, painted, laid floors and sub-floors, ordered wallpaper, planted iris, staked tomatoes, picked green beans, and tended herbs in a heat so intense that my basil plants grew waist high. I could rock to and fro in one of my old front-veranda swings and smell the basil baking in the sunshine or the figs drying on the branches of the old tree that kept the sun at bay.
    It didn’t bother me that I no longer had a bed, and was sleeping on foam camping mats on the restored parquet flooring of my new bedroom. With a window seat as my headboard, I lay happily under twelve-foot ceilings and a glittering crystal chandelier that had been so obscured by sixty-five years of grime and dust that I initially thought it was made of black plastic. My mother came to visit shortly after I moved in, to make sure I was surviving the divorce proceedings, the first in our family. It was a singular moment, with a certain fragility hanging in the air, not only because neither of us dared bicker with the other for the few days we were together. I was twenty-eight, she sixty-one, and over a long pot of tea and slices of apple cake at an old-style café not far from downtown, she told me a story I had never heard, a story that, in a heartbeat, seemed to explain the central puzzle of my childhood. Her story, though I didn’t know it at the time, would also prepare me in some ways for what was to come later in my life with John.
    Squeezing lemon into her tea, she spoke in a confessional tone I had never before heard her use. She told me she had developed the baby blues after my birth. Not the normal come-and-go baby blues but the kind that come and stay. This being the 1950s, and my mother never given to revelations, she kept her illness secret, except for the family. Her older sister, Marie, would call her daily to try to get her to stop sobbing. Auntie would talk and talk, telling her to put on her coat and hat, dress me warmly, pop me into my carriage, and get out into the fresh air. My mother usually managed to follow her sister’s advice, day after day pushing the carriage across the Ash Creek bridge into Black Rock, tears rolling down her cheeks, her favorite epithet, “sonofabitch,” escaping softly, in whispers, into the air.
    The only professional advice she remembered receiving came from the doctor who delivered me. “He clapped me on the shoulder,” she said, her voice still shaking with rage and emotion nearly three decades later. “He clapped me on my shoulder and told me to buck up,” she said. “ ‘You’ve got a nice baby there to take care of. Get on with it.’ ” She tried, heroically, it seems to me now. And with my father pitching in when he got home from work, and my mother’s parents pitching in while he was at the office, and my aunt playing psychologist by phone and in person, time went by. Still terribly ill by the time I turned two, she underwent electroshock therapy, done as an outpatient procedure in those days, and soon she came around.
    She told me that a miscarriage a couple of years later sent her back for more shock treatments, after six months of depression. A second miscarriage provoked the same response, the same treatment. My brother’s birth, seven years after mine, provoked a yearlong collapse, she said, but a last round of shock treatments brought her out of it again.
    I sat across from her, our cake plates empty, our teacups drained. I had no memories of anything she had related. Nonetheless, the puzzle pieces of my childhood suddenly seemed to find their place. Much as she loved me, she found me a source of both joy and pain. My birth had made her a mother; my birth had made her insane. Her story explained her