Yahtzee and Suicide by Zach Ellis
“I couldn’t tell her how much I hated God for keeping her alive”
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The first time my mother tried to leave us was the Summer I learned how to play Yahtzee and spell suicide. My father took us to visit her at the Psychiatric Institute, a building as bland as it’s name. My mother was napping. That’s what my father said. She was tired and had taken too much medicine to help her try and nap. I hated napping and couldn't understand why anyone would actually want to. She’d be home when she was a little more awake. My sister told me this was all bullshit because she’d heard the nurse talking to our dad and using the words “suicide” and “kill” in the same breath. “She never said anything about naps.” My sister did her best to protect me from any hint of fiction. I already knew Santa and the Easter Bunny were figments of other people’s imaginations. I’d never heard the word suicide before. To me it sounded like the name of a bad queen in a Disney cartoon or a sharp object that should be locked away from children.
We were told to wait in the Rec Room.
My mother entered the room looking very un-napped. Her long brown hair was a ratted mess. She wore a beige gown with the letters “P.I.” stencilled in black on the sleeve and yellow slippers that sported smiley faces on the toes. When I went to hug her, she didn’t hug back. Her arms hung loosely at her sides. My sister pulled me to her and held my hand tightly. We all sat around a card table that had an abandoned jigsaw puzzle atop it. It looked like a beach scene. As my mother fingered the loose puzzle pieces, my father scolded her for making him a temporary single parent. Because he didn’t know our routines. Because he didn’t know how to talk to kids. He promised that his mother would be coming to help out. My mother looked through us while she continued to finger the puzzle pieces.
A tall woman with an enormous Afro sat down at the table next to us and plunked a Yahtzee game down, much to the annoyance of my father. He stood up and grabbed my mother's arm to pull her aside. My mother didn't put up a fight, but went with him. A limp sleepwalker.
While my sister had focused her attention on the jigsaw puzzle, I focused on the woman next to us. I noticed she had on the same beige gown and yellow socks as my mother. The stenciled letters on her gown were faded. I stared at her slippers to see if hers also had the smiley faces on the toes. She caught me looking and introduced herself as Debbie and asked if I’d ever played Yahtzee before. I hadn’t. She tapped the chair next to her and I changed seats. The dice shaking in the small plastic cup jarred me. She taught me the difference between a Yahtzee and Full House. Small straight and large straight. I said I thought Full House was my favorite roll because I liked the way it sounded and it seemed harder than any of the other rolls. She told me to keep practicing and I’d get a Yahtzee one of these days. When I asked her why everyone was wearing the same slippers, she said, “Because the doctors want us to see that there’s always something to smile about. Even in a place like this.” My sister chimed in and said, “What’s there to smile about?”
The next week, my grandmother came to stay with us. She spoke very little English and could not answer my persistent questions about when my mother would be done napping and what exactly suicide was, but instead filled the house with her Lebanese cooking and swallowed my little body into her full arms every night. Rocking me back and forth while stroking my hair, calling me her little olive tree in Lebanese.
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The Summer I was nine, my mother tried to leave us again. We were moving across the country, my mom, my sister and I. She told us she had to get as far away from my father as possible. He didn’t understand her, she said. My sister told me this was all bullshit and that the real reason we were driving across the country to Oregon was because my father was sick of my mother’s drinking.
“That’s why she got locked up, you know.”
“She wasn’t locked up. She was napping. And besides, she’s doing AA now. She doesn’t drink anymore.”
My sister rolled her eleven-year-old eyes at me and reminded me of what a baby I was. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”
When we finally arrived in Oregon, ten days later, the moving truck was not there to meet us. The house my mother had her heart set on fell through. She muttered words under her breath as we drove to her sister’s house. She warned us to stay away from her brother-in-law Ted because he smoked and had a tendency to put his cigarettes out on people when he was in a mood. We didn’t have to call him Uncle if we didn’t want to, she said.
We stayed in the basement of our Aunt’s house, a dark place with one finished room. The two twin beds separated by a small cedar chest full of Barbie clothes my Aunt had carefully made for her daughters. My mother ventured out during the day to find a job, while we stayed in the basement playing with Barbies and being fascinated with the radio stations that stayed on all night.
My cousin’s bedrooms had no doorknobs. "Ted told us that girls don’t need locks on the doors,” the youngest said, “He’s fixing these.”
We stayed for two weeks before our mother told us it was time to go. That she’d found us a better place to stay. Our aunt slipped my sister a bag of Barbie clothes.
We journeyed thirty minutes to Lake Oswego, a town my mother said we'd always be too poor to live in. An AA family had temporarily adopted us. We never asked why we had to leave our Aunt’s house or how long we’d be staying with this new family. We'd learned not to ask too many questions.
The Rey family lived in a huge home. Each of the five children had their own bedroom. My sister and I shared a space in the basement. It wasn’t as dark as our Aunt’s house, but just as foreign. My mother continued to look for a job and house and go to AA meetings. We were an afterthought most days. The Rey sons learned to terrorize my sister with their bodies, voices and mental prowess. They called it wrestling. She started to have the same sleepwalker gaze my mother had.
My mother left us again.
The youngest of the Rey sons woke my sister up with a poke to the side of the head. "Your mom’s gone. My dad says she took our best kitchen knife too. He’s pretty pissed about that. You’re going to have to buy us a new one, you know."
There was no note. No goodbye. She left us again and we didn't see her for two weeks. Mr. and Mrs. Rey assured us that everything would be alright and quoted various pages of the Alcoholics Anonymous book about letting go and trusting God.
My mother had driven out to a logging road near the Oregon Coast. Took that knife and butchered her arms, front and back. While she bled, she got out of the car and put her lips to the exhaust pipe. Insurance, in case the first attempt failed.
She survived.
My aunt and Ted came to get us and soon we were back in the house with no doorknobs.
She was locked up again. Another hospital, but this time I knew better. I knew it wasn’t a lack of naps to blame. My father didn’t come to take care of us or send his mother. We never asked where he was and no one asked what we needed. I learned that there was no place like home. My sister and I would sit silently and sort the Barbie doll clothes: day dresses, school outfits, and fancy dresses. She never told me that she was as sad as I was. We learned the language of silence together. I learned how to live not in the moment, but in the next moment. Always preparing for evacuation and escape.
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My mother was taken to numerous AA meetings, spoke mostly of God and declared her life valuable. She told us there must have been a reason she didn’t die on that logging road. She told us life was good, that if we just trusted God we would be okay. I couldn’t tell her how much I hated God for keeping her alive. I couldn’t tell her that every time she walked out the door, I wasn’t sure if she would come back. I couldn’t tell her that I wished she’d succeeded. I couldn’t tell her how much I envied children whose parents had successfully suicided. How lucky they seemed to be to have a sense of finality.
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You’ve never left me.
I know you’re coming home, but I just can't be sure. What if you drive off a cliff? What if you choke on your Diet Dr. Pepper at the traffic light? Suppose you get carjacked in downtown Sellwood, although I have my doubts about anyone ever being carjacked in Sellwood. You might be only five minutes late, but five minutes is enough time for me to imagine your untimely death, how I will deliver the awful news to your family, how I will plan your funeral and what I will say in the eloquent obituary I will write.
You think I worry too much. I don’t want you to be dead. Not at all. How can I explain that I don’t really believe that my heart, my head, and this pain will ever agree? How can I tell you that no matter how many times I chant mantras that my therapists and I have come up with, that sometimes the words don’t reach far enough? How can I show you scars that are invisible?
Sometimes the gap between past and present is not as wide as I’d like. I know that I matter to you. I know that if you say you are sad or depressed that it’s not 40 years ago and you are not her. I know that I might leave forehead marks on the window sometimes, wondering where you are. But I know you will always text or call me if I can’t find you, because you’ve heard me silently chanting those mantras, because somehow you can see those scars that no one else could. I know that you will always come home to me. Right?
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Header image courtesy of Matthieu Bourel. To see his artist feature, go here.
Zach Ellis writes creative nonfiction and is the author of the memoir Being, published by Instant Future. He has been published in The Nervous Breakdown, Rad Dad, NAILED, and The Gravity of the Thing. He lives in Portland.
