SPIDER

trent jonas

Iowa City, Iowa

One summer night when I was ten, I lay down next to Mom in her bed, because her room had a window that caught the breeze better, making it cooler than the stuffy, airless room David and I shared, where, even if you opened the window, nothing came in but the sounds of chirping frogs from the creek running behind the apartment complex, the distant muted roar of big rigs on the interstate, and voices arguing or cooing or laughing in the Villa Brun parking lot. I think that was one of the months when they’d turned off our power because Mom hadn’t paid the bill or taken the bus downtown—we were between phones, so she couldn’t call—to the Iowa Electric offices to work out some kind of an arrangement to get our electricity back. The lack of lights was manageable since it didn’t get dark until nine or ten at night in the middle of summer; it was the lack of air conditioning that was hard to bear.

Sometimes during our breaks from air conditioning, we’d take blankets out to the small courtyard and lay them down on top of the grass. There was a single big tree in the yard, maybe an oak or a cottonwood (it’s gone now), and the three of us would lie on top of the blankets and look up through its branches toward the night sky. Although it was dulled by the town’s amber lights, we could still see stars, which we would wish upon, for electricity, a lottery win, pizza, soda, or a magical check in the mail from Texas.

But that night, Mom and I lay in her bed. David had managed to fall asleep back in the room he and I shared. She wore a nightgown over her big, soft belly; and, always a little incontinent, she smelled vaguely of piss, sweat, and cigarette smoke—a sour-sweet scent that meant “Mom” to my fifth-grade nose. Soft amber light from the courtyard illumined the edges of the curtains and shadowed the corners of the room. As I was slipping into my dreams, Mom started and shifted suddenly.

“Trent,” she said. “There’s a spider on my back!”

Mom had been terrified of spiders ever since she was locked up at Mitchellville—the Iowa State Reform School for Girls—for shooting herself when she was a young teen. There, she told us, spiders crawled all over her fourteen-year-old, goosepimpled skin. Me, I’m not afraid of spiders—but I also don’t seek them out—however, a mother’s fear sometimes becomes her child’s. Like the times Mom swore she was possessed, and the devil was close at hand—living inside her, trying to devour her soul, coming to get us kids. Those were the times she used a Sharpie to draw a cross on her forehead and wouldn’t allow us to open any windows or doors in the tiny, two-bedroom apartment. Once, as a thunderstorm was coming in, the wind whipped open the screen door off the kitchen, and Mom screamed, held up a cross toward the door, and shouted the Lord’s Prayer over and over. That scared the shit out of me. Even though I was a kid, I’d already manifested a pretty secular view of the universe. But what if she was right, and Satan was trying to rip the door off our apartment to consume us in fire and brimstone and eternal damnation? As afraid as I was, I tried to be the voice of reason, assure Mom and David that it was just the wind from the storm, and assure Mom that we were all going to be okay (although she never really was “okay”). Whether demons or spiders, after her divorce from Dad, I realize now that I often assumed the role of the adult in the room. And lying there in the dark, I was pretty sure she was imagining things, again.

“Mom, there’s no spider.” 

“It’s there, it’s there, I can feel it crawling—please check!” The panic was rising in her voice. “Please, Trent!”

It was too dark in the room for me to see, since we had no lights, but even at that age, I knew how Mom could spiral into her own fears, and I could feel myself on the fringe of her vortex. The hairs on my neck pricked up.

“I promise there’s no spider, Mom.”

“Are you sure?” 

I began to relax.

“I’m sure.”

“Just rub your hand along my back to make sure.”

It’s not that I thought there was actually a big hairy spider on Mom’s back any more than I believed Beelzebub knew where our apartment was, but, as with the devil, I feared the possibility that I might be wrong.

“It’s okay, there’s no spider.”

“Just put your hand on my back.”

“I can’t.” The fear in her voice was frightening me, and I didn’t want to know whether there was anything on her back. And I didn’t want to be wrong.

“Why not?” I could feel Mom growing even more agitated, but she’d backed me into a corner: The truth spilled out.

“It might bite me.” 

Mom leapt out of the bed, tearing off her nightgown in the dark, and completely naked, slapped her bare feet into the bathroom, wailing through her teeth. She whipped back the shower curtain, started the water, and got in. The jets doused her back, and she sighed in relief.

∞

It’s really impossible to describe how just much time I spent at hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices as a kid (my brother, too, of course), especially after the divorce when we couldn’t be left home with Dad because, eventually, he moved far away from Iowa City. A September 1, 2000, clinical report from St. Peter Regional Treatment Center in Minnesota describes Mom as having

a long psychiatric and medical history, with 78 chart volumes at the University of Iowa with what are believed to be 70 hospitalizations and between 1500 and 2000 medical encounters. She carries psychiatric diagnoses of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, major depressive disorder with psychotic features, borderline personality disorder, dissociative disorder and somatization disorder. She has been treated with numerous antipsychotics apparently, with little benefit, and tells me that she received thrice weekly ECT for over one year at the University of Iowa.

Taking only the low estimate into consideration, 1,500 “medical encounters” excluding hospitalizations, Mom’s history shows that she visited the University of Iowa hospital, on average, more than once a week for thirty years. This doesn’t account for other hospitals, like Mercy Hospital in Iowa City, another favorite of hers, or St. Mary’s in Rochester, Minnesota; nor does it account for her weekly, and often more frequent, therapy appointments at the Community Mental Health Center.   

Yeah, I spent a lot time at hospitals—mostly in vending or waiting areas, but sometimes actually visiting Mom in her room or, more often, on open psych wards. In 1970s, the psych ward at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics was tucked away in its own low, brick building, across a curve in Newton Road from the emergency entrance, which David and I were also quite familiar with thanks to Mom’s frequent diagnoses of nonexistent maladies—in both herself and in us—confirming imagined symptoms with her well-worn copy of The Merck Manual and using information from The Physicians Desk Reference to discuss her own recommended treatments with doctors. Mostly, David and I were prescribed loop-handled lollipops as tight-faced but polite doctors and nurses did their best to get Mom to leave so they could treat people with real problems. Not surprisingly, Mom was on a first-name basis with the reception staff in the ER. Across the street, in the psych ward, though, Mom’s difficulties did not lay in convincing doctors and nurses of her illness; rather, she spent almost her entire time there trying to convince everyone that she was perfectly fine! and should be allowed to go home.

Inevitably, she would convince them, and she would come right back to our stuffy apartment. The electricity might be back on by then, but the air would still be heavy. And I would still be there, waiting, wondering when the next invisible thing would crawl across her skin and force me to play the adult all over again. The hospital records measure her life in chart volumes and clinical encounters. They do not capture the sheer weight of being a ten-year-old boy lying perfectly still in the dark, terrified of reaching out to comfort his mother, of the demons that haunted her.