The Chronoliths

She sounded that way now. Her eyes were too round and her mouth was clamped into a narrow line, and I suspected that if I got close to her I would smell the same repulsive salty stench, like a beach at low tide.

She went on cleaning, and I crept into the living room and turned on the TV and stared at a syndicated rerun of Seinfeld until I got to thinking about the remark she’d made about Chuffy.

My mother had never liked Chuffy. She tolerated him, but he was my father’s dog and mine, not hers. If Chuffy had peed on the kitchen floor, say, might that not explain her reaction? And where was Chuffy, anyway? Usually, this time of day, he was up on the sofa wanting his ears scratched. I called his name.

“That animal is filthy,” my mother said from the kitchen. “Leave that animal alone.”

I found Chuffy upstairs, locked in the half-bath that adjoined my parents’ bedroom. His hindquarters and his legs had been scrubbed raw, probably with one of the steel Brillo pads we kept for greasy cookware. His skin where the fur had come away was bleeding in a dozen different places, and when I tried to comfort him he sank his teeth into my forearm.

The years hadn’t been kind to the Maryland suburb where my father lived. The once semi-rural neighborhood had become a nest of strip malls, erotica retailers, and high-rise worker housing. The gated community still existed, but its gatehouse was untended and covered with Arabic graffiti. The house on Provender Lane, the house where I had grown up, was almost unrecognizable behind lumpy hedges of snow. One of the eavestroughs had worked loose from the roof, and the shingles behind it sagged alarmingly. It was not the house as I remembered it, but it seemed very much the kind of house my father would (or maybe ought to) inhabit — unkempt, inhospitable.

I parked, turned off the engine, sat in the car.

Of course it was stupid to have come here. It was one of those reckless impulses, all drama and no content. I had decided I ought to see my father before I left the country (implicitly, before he died) — but what did that mean exactly? What did I have to say to him, and what could he possibly say to me?

I was reaching for the ignition key when he came out onto the creaking wooden porch to pick up his evening paper. The porch light, in a blue dusk, turned his skin jaundiced yellow. He looked at the car, bent to pick up the paper, then looked again. Finally he walked out to the curb wearing his house slippers and a white strap undershirt. The unaccustomed exercise left him panting.

I rolled down the window.

He said, “I thought it was you.”

The sound of his voice set loose a regiment of unpleasant memories. I said nothing at all.

“So come on in,” he said. “Cold out here.”

I locked the car behind me and set the security protocols. Down the street, three blank-faced Asiatic youths watched me follow my dying father to the door.

Chuffy recovered from his injuries, though he never went near my mother again. It was my mother whose injuries were permanent and disabling. I was told, at some point during her decline, that she was the victim of a neurological disease called adult-onset schizophrenia; that it was a medical condition, a failure somewhere in the mysterious but natural processes of the brain. I didn’t believe it, because I knew by direct experience that the problem was both simpler and more frightening: A good mother and a bad mother had begun to cohabit the same body. And because I loved the good mother it became possible, even necessary, to hate the bad one.

Alas, they bled into each other. The good mother might kiss me goodbye in the morning, but when I came home (late, reluctantly) from school, the crazed usurper would have taken control. I had no close friends beyond the age of ten, because when you have friends you have to let them into your house; and the last time I had tried that, when I brought home a timid red-haired boy named Richard who had befriended me in geography class, she lectured him for twenty minutes on the danger posed by video monitors to his future fertility. The language she actually used was considerably more graphic. The next day Richard was aloof and unresponsive, as if I done something unspeakable. It wasn’t my fault, I wanted to tell him, and it wasn’t even my mother’s. We were the victims of a haunting.

Because she disbelieved in her own illness she saw this as my weakness, not hers, and I ca

None of this brought my father and me closer together. The opposite. He resisted the diagnosis almost as fiercely as my mother did, but his form of denial was more direct. I think he always felt that he had married beneath him, that he had done a favor to my mother’s family in Nashua, New Hampshire, by taking this moody and reclusive daughter off their hands. Maybe he had imagined that marriage would improve her. It hadn’t. She had disappointed him, and perhaps vice-versa. But he continued to hold her to a high standard. He blamed her for every one of her irrational acts just as if she were capable of moral and ethical judgment — which she was, but only sporadically. Thus the good mother suffered for the sins of the bad mother. The bad mother might be bitter and obscene, but the good mother could be cowed and bullied. The good mother could be reduced to a state of craven apology, and he performed this alchemy on her on a regular basis. He shouted at her, occasionally struck her, regularly humiliated her, while I hid in my room trying to imagine a world in which the good mother and I could abandon both him and the invading pseudo-mom. We would live contentedly, I told myself, in the kind of loving home she had once at least attempted to create, while my father continued battling his irrational faux wife in some distant, isolated place — a jail cell, say; a madhouse.

Later, after I had turned sixteen and learned to drive, but before she was committed to the residential home in Co

I have only two vivid memories of the weekend in New York City.

We visited the Statue of Liberty on Saturday, and in my mind’s eye I can practically count the burnished stairs we climbed on the way to the top. I remember the simultaneous sense of smallness and largeness when we arrived there, the smell of perspiration and hot copper on the windless July air. My mother shrank away from the view of Manhattan, keening quietly to herself, while I watched with rapt attention the seagulls diving toward the sea. I brought home from that journey a hollow brass model of Liberty as tall as my hand.

And I remember Sunday morning the same weekend, when my mother wandered out of the hotel room while my father was showering and I was down the hallway pumping quarters into a soft-drink machine. When I came back and found the room empty I panicked, but I couldn’t bring myself to interrupt my father’s bath, probably because he would have blamed me (or I imagined he would have) for misplacing her. Instead I walked the red-carpeted hallway up and down, past room-service trays and carts of snowy linen, and then rode the elevator to the lobby. I saw my mother’s dark hair disappearing through the rotunda, out the revolving doors. I did not call her name, because that would alarm strangers and provoke a public embarrassment, but I ran after her, almost tripping over the newspaper rack outside the gift shop. But by the time I pushed through the glass door onto the sidewalk she was invisible. The red-suited doorman was blowing his whistle, I didn’t know why, and then I saw my mother lying sprawled across the curb and moaning to herself, while the driver of the floral delivery van that had just broken her legs jumped out of his truck and stood trembling above her, his eyes wide as two full moons. And all I felt was brutally, icily cold.