Simple Sips

Have you ever tasted insanity? Have you ever worried that you might have had your first sip? Madness is the strongest earthquake and the hottest wildfire, at the same time. You don’t just lose your grip on reality, you lose yourself to an angry roaring machine that you don’t know how to unplug. Sonya had become comfortable around madness. Her mother always said, “Anyone can go mad. Do you want to?" She'd throw head back in laughter. "I have the recipe. Two-parts emotional trauma, one-part disastrous relationship, a generous scoop of hate and resentment. Mix together until you can’t anymore. Add a dash of self-loathing and pinch of hostility. Let simmer and stew in your brain until you have a breakdown, repeat endlessly.”

Sonya’s mother was a jaded woman. Her name was Victoria. She was turning thirty-six in a few days. Victoria had gotten pregnant too young. She was infatuated with the neighbor boy. He had turned her down more than once. But on a night loneliness and desperation, he called her on the phone and invited her over. Victoria had the choice to end the pregnancy. She knew within a few weeks that she had missed her period. She went to the drug store to buy an at home pregnancy test. Well, she bought six, a bulk box of lollipops, three tubes of lipstick from different brands, though all the same shade. All six came back positive. She didn’t want to believe it, so she went back to the same drug store and bought six more, and another shade of lipstick, this time, many shades darker.

Her parents were open minded people. There was no way that they would pressure her to carry her pregnancy to full term. Her mother was feminist and an activist. She rallied for women to have the right to choose, yet Victoria felt dwarfed in her presence when the time came that she needed her mother’s open heart. Victoria was the most troublesome teenage to roll through her small town in Maryland. The teachers didn’t like her because she refused to be quiet, and she didn’t like the teachers because they tried to dismiss her. She was always late to class and always bringing in weird things with her. One day she brought fourteen jars of snakes she caught along the creek. They were learning about cold-blooded creatures in biology, and how they reproduced. Victoria thought that the class would be grateful for the chance to see the snakes in person. They weren’t. She was suspended for a few weeks because of it. It was over that period where her obsession with the neighbor boy blossomed, and Sonya was pulled into the world.

She hid her pregnancy for weeks. It was easy because Victoria had always preferred to wear oversized clothing. When her parents did finally realize something was awry, Victoria was already into her second trimester. She spent her pregnancy scrawling handwritten love letters in her journal. She folded them into complicated origami and left them around the neighbor’s lawn. At first, they thought a child was playing a prank on them. It took Dave a few weeks to catch on to who was sending the anonymous love letters. He went to a private school on the other side of town. Dave was never around to see Victoria, so he didn’t notice when her belly started to grow and the love letters started showing up. Over Christmas break, he knocked on their door. He wanted to ask Victoria to stop leaving the letters because it was starting to worry his mother. She thought that neighbor girl was stalking them, which she was, but she would never admit to it. Dave had planned it out in his head. He would be kind; he would be direct. When Victoria opened the door, Dave saw right through her sweater. Nothing could hide the swollen stomach of a woman who weighed ninety pounds in her third trimester. Victoria didn’t have to say anything. He knew that baby was his by the way she looked at him, and by the timeline. There wasn’t a line of boys knocking on the crazy girl’s door either.

Sonya remembers a lot of extraordinary memories from her childhood. One of her favorite on was on New Years Day when she was five. As soon as the clock struck midnight, her mother had some kind of emotional shift. She nearly tore the house apart trying to clean. She kept saying “I want to start over, I want everything to be perfect.” She pulled the carpet from the floorboards and scrubbed the cracks of the tiles with a toothbrush. Sonya liked to help her mother with housework, so she was thrilled to help her clean. They organized the closets and dressers first by season, then color. Warm colors on the left, cool on the right. Red first, finish with purple. The Darker shades go first. White before the reds and the blacks by the purples. Dave worked third shift, and he had taken a shift on New Years for the holiday pay. He got home at 10AM to find his five-year-old sleeping in the front lawn with a pair of scissors in her hand. When Dave demanded to know why she was wearing her Halloween costume, and why it was covered in green stains from the grass, Victoria simply said, “She was cutting the grass.” That was the first time Sonya’s mother went away, but it wasn’t the last. Over the past thirteen years, Victoria had “gone on vacation” at least a dozen times. It always got bad in the winter, especially around the holidays.

Today Victoria was sent off when Dave served the divorce papers to her. Sonya had been accepted into college out of state. She was turning eighteen the day after her mother turned 36. Dave said that he did his part, that another moment with Victoria was another step towards the grave. When Dave said that, Victoria chased him around the lawn for a while with a butcher's knife, but Sonya eventually calmed her down.

Dave never took the time to understand Victoria. He loved his daughter; he loved her more than anything else in the world, but Victoria was more than a handful, and he resented her for taking his youth from him. Dave wanted to go to college to be an engineer. Instead, he took a job at a mechanics shop out of town. No one made him marry her, but he thought it was the right thing to do. He didn’t want to abandon her with his child, and he didn’t want to leave Sonya with Victoria when she was unwell.

Victoria had good days. She had days where you would not be able to tell that there was an internal war raging on. She took Sonya to the woods to pick wildflowers. She would rent out beach houses for the day so they could sit and paint the ocean together and reconnect. Victoria had never missed a school play, a parent teachers conference, or a ballet recital. She always had a hug, a kiss, and a pat on the back for her. But she didn’t have stability. She had high days. So high her feet didn’t touch the ground. She would forget to eat for three or four days, and sometimes she'd forget that Sonya had to eat as well. Victoria would stay up for days, obsessively scribbling in books, journals, and on her computer. She ripped pages from magazines and books she had checked out from the library. She pinned them on the wall and made collages for inspiration for her art, she said. Sometimes Victoria would go missing for a day or a weekend. At first, it frightened Sonya, but after the third time, she only missed her.

Dave was afraid of Victoria when she was like this. He never said it, but he never had to. Dave avoided her. He filled his days with work and exercise, and he found his comfort at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon. Some days Sonya would wake up for school, and she would find an empty bottle next to the shell of a man passed out on the floor. If things were really bad, he’d get a second job for a while or pick up a new hobby that required him to be outside the house. The problem with hobbies was that Victoria was a hobby sponge. She needed constant entertainment and activity to fuel her moods. The only place Victoria wouldn’t’ show up was to a stable job. She always said that her illness kept her too busy and that she would never be able to hold down a job. Sonya always wondered how much of that was true and how much of it was Victoria’s naturally wild and free spirit that was unwilling to be tied down.

After her highs, she hit bottom, and she hit it hard. Victoria would be a heap of blankets, pillows, and take away boxes for months. The house would start to smell. It wasn't of dirt or mold; it was the stench of her illness. Dave could pretend nothing was wrong, but Sonya was always at home with her mother. She wanted her to take her prescribed medication, but Victoria refused because she said it clouded her mind and ruined her artwork. She wasn’t wrong. The work Victoria did on her ups was usually breathtaking, and the lows packed and incredible punch. Sonya tried to convince her mother that her health was more important than her art. That sent Victoria into a nasty rage filled haze for days.

Today, though, today was something new. Dave moved out two weeks ago. He delivered the divorce papers every day, and every day Victoria would burn them in the bathtub. Victoria’s highs were usually filled with art and passion and creativity, but sometimes they would take a sinister turn. Victoria would scream for hours, days, if you upset her. She’d smash the china and threaten to run Dave’s computer over with her car. She did once. Dave had threatened to take a restraining order out against her. He didn’t want to. Dave knew the last thing Victoria needed was law enforcement to get involved. But she was out of control. She called him twenty times a day and poured hate filled rants into his inbox.

“You’re a piece of garbage! You are worth less than my own shit! I hope a car falls on you at work and crushes you! Fuck you! How could you leave us!” Victoria hit end and redialed. No answer. She waited to leave a voice mail but instead slammed the phone on the table. She picked it back up and slammed it down a few more time until the screen cracked and the screen went black. “What kind of son of a bitch doesn’t clean out their inbox!”

Dave called Sonya that night and told Sonya what she already knew. Mom was out of control again, and she needed help. Sonya hated telling her mother that she thought she needed to be admitted. She always agreed to go, because Sonya only said it in dire situations. Victoria hadn’t eaten in three days and hadn’t slept through the night in four. She spent the night pacing the kitchen like a caged animal, and she went on running sessions for hours in the day. When she sat her mother down at the kitchen table that night, Victoria’s heart began to ache. Sonya spent the day cooking a lavish meal for them to share together. They sat down and ate, and Sonya waited until she cleared the table to bring up the dreaded conversation. Victoria wept and so did Sonya. They held each other in their arms and Victoria agreed to go in the morning. Sonya was relieved and saddened that her mother would spend the next month away from her. She was going to school soon. She wanted to spend her time off with her mother, not alone, and not in her father's cramped apartment. Sonya was grateful though that her mother was willing to go. She knew that many patients at the care facility Victoria went to who were forced to be there. Victoria would tell her horror stories of the other patients, and Sonya would always be reminded to be grateful for her mother's health.

Sonya went to stay with her father in his new apartment. Victoria would be in the facility for a month.
As the days crept on, Sonya recognized a familiar darkness creeping into her life. It was the same darkness that trailed along behind her mother everywhere she went. Sonya had felt sad before, heartbroken, but this kind of sadness was different. It was deeper, darker, and a scarier place to be. The entire time Victoria spent in the hospital getting well, Sonya felt worse by the day. She couldn’t help be ask herself, “Did I just have my first sip of insanity?”