A chilling incident reconjures a seminal scene from the Billy Wilder classic
I could see her out of the corner of my eye, lying still in her white bedroom - dreaming? In silent agony, perhaps? ...Lifeless?
I couldn't tell. Not even the low-voiced mutterings of my stepfather, which in that surreal moment, my head spinning, I was barely paying attention to anyway, were letting me know exactly what was going on. Something, I seem to recall, about liquor and drugs...or was it just drugs?
I knew she had been depressed, certainly; I was all of 13 but I knew that, that something very major, and very adult, had been grinding away inside of her for some time now.
There was that sunny summer afternoon, for instance, when I emerged from an energetic dip into our apartment complex's swimming pool to find that while she was sitting there sunning herself, she was crying. Tears were streaming down her face that were wetter and fatter than the drops that were falling off of my skinny frame.
"Mom...what's wrong?"
She sputtered, her face reddened...then she finally came out with something.
"Your uncle Mackie." Her younger brother. The hippie. "He's dead."
I told her that I understood, then escaped as quickly as possible into the pool, back into the wild, noisy and overcrowded world of kids, grateful that the screams and splashes of the younger half of the neighborhood were willing conspirators in my effort to obscure a more complicated universe.
A few short years later, when we all bumped into a happy, healthy Mackie at a family reunion, I lovingly said nothing...but my mind immediately flashed back to that silent and surreal afternoon when I returned home from school to find her near comatose on the bed, my stepfather - had he been called home from work? - trying to explain to me, I think I heard, that an ambulance was on its way.
In that moment, I wanted to play Jack Lemmon, the heroic schmuck from that old black and white movie I had sneakily caught on television one late night, The Apartment, and to do my best to revive her.
But for whom?
Years later, I would discover love letters, written to my father from whom she had been divorced less than a year at the time of the incident. The state of being torn between two men - husbands old and new - was tearing her apart, she wrote, perhaps even... killing her.
I can't remember how the climax of this inner torment of hers was dealt with. My guess is that an ambulance came, and that my mother was brought to hospital.
All I can tell you is that a few days later, life was, unbelievably, back to its old, normal self: Mom was making breakfasts, going to work, dealing with her husband.
Her thoughts, though, I knew, must have constantly been entertaining an alternative - life in a renewed relationship with my father - the same way that mine, whenever I again caught her in moments of private, silent sadness or of Uncle Mackie-calibre lies, kept entertaining the image of sweet, despondent Shirley MacLaine, being walked around Jack Lemmon's apartment.
