Mending What’s Broken by David Sapp

I. Constitution

When I was ten, when we were happy, still a family all together on Glenn Road, I began a plastic model of the USS Constitution on my little desk. The hull rose from the keel; masts were erected; the longboat was placed on the deck, at hand for boarding enemies; and cannon were positioned, readied for powder and shot. I never quite got to the rigging and sails.

The Constitution is a three-masted, wooden-hulled, fifty-cannon frigate of the United States Navy. Commissioned by President George Washington, she was constructed in Boston and launched in 1797. She fought the French in the Quasi-War, the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean, and the British in the War of 1812. The Constitution was perfectly suited for battle – built to annihilate her nation’s enemies. After her victory over HMS Guerriere, she was named “Old Ironsides.” 

When I was fifteen, when we lost the house and dry cleaning business to bankruptcy and moved into town, to the rental on Hamtramck Street, the Constitution sat unfinished, drydocked beside the twelve-cylinder 1932 Duesenberg, the Panther and Tiger tanks that fought the Russians at Kursk, and Doolittle’s B-25 Mitchell that bombed Tokyo soon after Pearl Harbor. Only a year later, Dad, my little sister and I moved out – to a tiny upstairs apartment with rickety stairs across town. In the house we left, Mom remained alone with her paranoia and rage. I marooned the Constitution on that distant, inhospitable continent. The rest of us, refugees in our spare rooms, patched together the resemblance of a family again.

You could say it was a bad day. Horrific. And the skirmish remains vivid nearly fifty years later. It was winter. Bitter cold. Six inches of snow during the night made the streets treacherous. No one was going anywhere, but by noon the day was also beautiful. The sun appeared in a brilliant clear sky, and with the new snow, the town was bright, immaculate but incongruous with the events of my obligation. Mom called. Car wouldn’t start. Demanded a jump. I agreed (the good son still deferential to the parent). Drove there. Big four-door Ford. Unwieldy former family car. Eased into a drifted driveway. Knocked at the door. For the key to her car. Did not intend to go in. She insisted upon the removal of my remaining possessions and there was the Constitution, awkwardly aground upon clothes I’d outgrown. Wanted none of it. Told her so. I turned to go.

(We stood just inside the door. Warily, my hand gripped the knob, and I wouldn’t let her get between me and my retreat. This was the very spot where, a few months before, I knocked her down as she refused to allow me to pass with the laundry – mine, hers, my sister’s. Apparently, she was a “Mother-on-Strike,” but I didn’t know what that meant or how to navigate the rules or her logic. I intended to take it all to the laundromat as it hadn’t been done for weeks and I, a self-conscious teenager, wanted to go to school in clean clothes. This seemed reasonable.)

I turned to go. She followed me onto the icy porch. Screamed at me. Cursed me. Kicked at me. Viciously. She missed. She slipped. (I’ll admit, there was a comical aspect to the scenario. The scene turned black and white – Laurel and Hardy. If it weren’t for the intended violence, we might have laughed.) I paused. Was she all right? My mistake. Stumbled to the car. Tires spun and spun. Escape doubtful. Enraged, she opened the car’s rear door. I got out. Pushed my mother (carefully, strategically) into the snow. Returned. Locked the doors. She retrieved the Constitution. Placed it behind a tire. Just stood there. Wild-eyed. Triumphant. She showed me, didn’t she? (Did she comprehend the “making of a memory?”) A wheel found the depth of the snow, caught a bit of gravel, and the hull of Old Ironsides was crushed. I drove off. With the Constitution scuttled, there would be no more battles. My childhood was over. Forty years later, my mother would die alone.

II. I Should Have Been in Love

When we were five and six, we played with Barbie’s dolls on her bed all day on rainy days. Though I don’t recall the scripts or scenarios, we explored the roles of adults by assigning our perfect, sexless little people with voices and dramas. Her bed seemed to be the safest place on earth, warm, heavy with her sleep. The stairs, front door, porch, and her mother Margie in the kitchen, a sentinel, a fierce lioness, were between us and our looming ogres. We were still too innocent to comprehend our terror, the intentions of our separate and secretive predators.

When our three families camped along the banks of the Mohican River, when the boys, Tim, Boomer, Doug, and I, disappeared hiking or tubing on our own, Barbie, the only girl, remained behind near the fire. One Halloween the oldest boy, Tim Wheeler, was caught at the throat by a clothesline while running through an old neighbor’s backyard. Decades later I remembered the event and imagined, decades before, Barbie surreptitiously smiling at this news – but also wondering why his head couldn’t be conveniently and fittingly snapped off like a French aristocrat.

A decade later, when we were fifteen and sixteen, the dolls set aside, Barbie showed me her pet mice. Unlike most girls, she was unafraid of creatures that slithered and scurried. Presiding over their small world, she tended her tiny white and pink wards judiciously and tenderly. She wore baggy jeans, frayed at the hems, and unflattering men’s plaid flannel shirts, a costume meant as camouflage to boys’ attentions. We rarely saw one-another in the hallways, but she found time to patiently and expertly explain the high school social landscape of jocks, nerds, freaks, geeks, and loners as if hypersensitive to who might be a potential ally or threat. An accomplished loner, I struggled to comprehend the hierarchy or qualifications of my role.

At twenty-five and twenty-six, we said hello too awkwardly in the drugstore downtown where I was ashamed to be found stocking shelves, cosmetics, shampoo, paper products, and pain killers, after dropping out of art school. Her eyes were still soft, kind, and dark; her hair shimmered under florescent lights. Now Barb, not Barbie, she was beautiful and I should have been in love with her all along. A fleeting, electric moment, a wisdom, passed between us. We could have been co-conspirators in and swapped harrowing tales and strategies of survival.

And four decades later, our lives played out upon separate paths, in a chance phone call, the easy familiarity of those rainy days in our voices, I heard her declare the fact aloud. I learned that she was Tim Wheeler’s victim. Somehow, unlike Barbie and the other boys, I was not. My monster came for me from an entirely different tangent. I think I said, “I never would have guessed.”

III. Crazy Car Ride

There was this crazy car ride before Mom was carted off: commitment, state hospital, Thorazine, electroshock, in those early days when there was still hope – when we all assumed that the marriage was salvageable like a small screwdriver adjustment to a carburetor. In 1974, when I was fourteen, a novice obsessive-compulsive, just beginning to fathom what disillusionment meant, Watergate somehow intermingled with, responsible for, the erosion of trust, we motored between Hamtramck Street and Moundbuilders Guidance Center on Coshocton Avenue.

(Why “Moundbuilders?” Is it a place of burial? That’s grim. We dig a hole before building a mound where the archaeology of emotion is essential. A place of ritual, the Hopewell were known to expand their edifice for fifty minutes each week – payment on a sliding scale expected at the time of the appointment. And when the center got a new building a few years later, it was located on Blackjack Road implying that a good bludgeoning over the head to alter the phrenological landscape just might do the trick.) 

This was a time when community mental health centers began popping up across rural America like monasteries, islands of civilization, across medieval chaos. This was the usual route to Big Bear Supermarket, Woolworths, and the burgeoning fast-food stops. We passed the little shop where we bought our parakeets. With the current errand at hand, this familiarity was turned on end. I was mistaken in thinking we would stop for ice cream after the session. 

It was Mom, both grandmothers and I ensconced within the maroon 1970 Ford Galaxy 500. (Where was Dad? My little sister?) Why we all rode together I could never comprehend. Madness, the error evident when the car was put in gear. To this day I do not know who drove, as if the car moved on its own accord, a sign of the precarious nature of the journey. My memory remains troubled over the gap, rehearsing the logistics again and again. In this closed, black-vinyled space, Mom attempted the word “bastard” in a tangential experiment. Grandma Sapp replied sharply, “We won’t have any of that!” Grandma Dearman looked out the window. The idealism of childhood fell away, irrevocably misplaced that day.

These three women became three facets, a trinity, of my personality. Mom was darkly, absurdly hilarious, manic, and dangerously paranoid. She was unquestionably crazy and not in a quaint way. Dorothy Snow, Mom’s mom, was irretrievably lost, house-bound, probably abused by her husband – at the very least, emotionally neglected. Each day was a weighty, cumulative burden. She was a silent, invisible tragedy who rarely smiled or knew what love was. 

Helen Louise, Dad’s mother, was who I worshipped (more than the Eucharist at Sunday mass – happily risking Catholic blasphemy). A practical, forthright matriarch who ruled her husband, the farm, and any kitchen she entered – who sought out and discovered a bit of humor in any situation – except maybe this one, she cried “bullshit” and laughed with equal enthusiasm. And she considered counseling a useless extravagance. (We won’t mention her little green nerve pills – likely Valium – stowed in her kitchen cupboard.)

I don’t recall my conversation with the therapist or the return trip. The disaster irreparable by then, I don’t recall feeling any different or any better. There was a vague futility, though, as if the more pertinent questions were never broached. This therapist was later pressed by lawyers and judges to testify. All three women are long gone now – maybe the therapist as well. I’d like to think I’m the only one driving.

IV. Mouse and Knee Therapy

Those years when in my mind I was yet a little boy bruised from no one touching me, the contusions garish purples and sickly greens, I could not ask her knee for comfort. Occasionally, when the desperation was overwhelming, I would plead, “Could you hold my hand for just a little while?” She saved me, eventually, this woman, my therapist, wearing her role confidently like a uniform – but hers was unpretentious, unstarched, lacking epaulettes, a little frayed at the collar and sleeves. She had this scar on her knee from a surgery, a high school track injury she said. (I inquired, ineptly though innocently.) I imagined her, a grade or two ahead retrieving books from her locker, on crutches chatting with girlfriends in the hall before English. Or sitting across the table at supper – punching my arm on long car trips.

During our sessions I was mesmerized by her scar emerging just below the hem of her print dresses. As I was too ashamed of my pain, its grip on every thought, the depth of its roots in my consciousness, I could not meet her eyes. I could not bear to see my despair reflected there. Instead, I talked to her knee, the scar a friendly crooked smile persuading me to let it all out, to sob and rage as much as I might require. And I did so in a keening as sharp and resolute as the surgeon’s scalpel.  When I was especially low and alone, I would think about how her scar was an imperfection like me. Yes, the cathexis was potent; however, brilliantly, she casually dismissed its intensity. And you must know her scar was never the object of fantasy – hers was a big sister’s knee. I recited my woeful narrative, unsteadily navigating dim, desolate corridors. I chronicled my tragedies as a cathartic accountant tallying debits and credits, the cost of melancholy. Her knee heard my suffering, nodding in apprehension. The lips of her scar alternately pursed, parted, and grimaced in thoughtful regard.

One evening, the waiting area quiet, most all the staff gone for the day, a mouse skittered along the wall of her office and broke the fixation. For a moment, all pathos fell away. Here was a welcome and perfect reprieve from my routine horror. Halfway through its intercession, it paused, studied us, assessing its effectiveness. (The tiny gray Freud may have stroked its goatee and jotted down pertinent analysis.) I was suddenly fearless or rather, very generally, boys are curious about and unphased by things that crawl, slither, and scurry while girls are repelled by the same creatures. Reflexively she pulled her legs up to her chin, her knee close to her face, her scar and mouth equivalents in surprise. I now knew that scar and expression would match in empathy. Together we watched, delighted and relieved, as the mouse escaped under the door and down the hall, seeking another poor soul in need of therapy.

V. Broken

When I was young, pliable, yet resilient in my innocence, I rarely regarded what’s broken – or without a history I could not comprehend the years of grief to come. (I admit, this is another list. At my age a tally, a testament, is my nature and unavoidable.) Christo, my paragon, died this year – the artist who wrapped Biscayne Bay islands in pink, the Australian coastline in white, and a Paris bridge, the Pont Neuf, in gold – died soon after his wife Jeanne Claude. Sure, he was old. However, I am thinking that, more so, he was simply heart-broken.

Last I heard, Dave of Neiding-A-Tractor Repair, disconcertingly not much older than I, who fixed anything and everything with an engine, is “in bad shape.” Within a few weeks, the parts sold off, the shop closed, who will tune up my chain saw? Anything and everything must go, go, go. And Terry, also my age, the lonely bachelor with the bad knees and other assorted aches and complaints, who gets his mower blades sharpened at Dave’s, who has no one but his dog Zeke, talks of stepping in front of the freight train that passes by his home, tempting him too much each morning.

Too suddenly, too rudely cancer, and three dear women: Elaine, who navigated the world with an aesthetic compass as I did, isn’t there anymore. There was an understanding, a pact, that somehow we would know the other was somewhere near or not. It isn’t fair that Lynn, my long-ago therapist, saved me from certain destruction, but I am helpless to return the compliment when she got sick. And Gayle lost both breasts. I took her to the prom with matching corsage and boutonniere in Dad’s 1978 Ford LTD but couldn’t do much about anything else.

When Barbie was a little girl, no one seemed to know she was broken, her innocence shattered by six by an older messed up boy we both knew. At sixty-something, haunted as in every year in all her years, she survives and survives and survives, her journey consumed with this singular task. Tom is a little crazy after working in the Insight Meditation Center office, filing and answering phones for twenty years, his obsessions and compulsions heightened rather than quieted with age. Despite free retreats and medical and dental, enlightenment and retirement remain out of the question.

John and his wife Marty, an oh-so-very-nice-couple, watched their son Duncan crushed beneath the stone of heroin. They watched him steal from their neighbors and his brother. They witnessed his sentencing in the courtroom – watched the bailiff lead him away from them. They visited Duncan in prison and took in his girlfriend and her baby-by-another-man when she had nowhere else to turn. After he was released and over-dosed – after flatlining and three rounds of Narcan – Duncan chose hospice and oblivion rather than lifelong dialysis and losing his legs.

Too much like our mother, my sister’s psychosis rules her life, a cruel despot demanding an absolute and perverse obedience. Her delusions follow her, flushing her from town to town, job to job, home to home, and even now a refugee, hunt her in the vast anonymity of the city. Cousins and cops, psych wards and social workers, her meds and I cannot seem to curtail the pursuit – cannot seem to mend what is broken.

David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.

7 April 2023