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I assumed she was annoyed about how she and Dad couldn’t agree upon that new arrangement of beds and dressers and chairs. I couldn’t hold back anymore and I burst into tears and cried, “I’ve lost Kathy and I’ll never meet anyone like her again.” Instead of hugging me, which I sort of expected, Mom pulled back and in a callous and distant tone she said, “Oh, that’s what you said about the last one.” This completely threw me. What “last one,” I wondered. Then I turned away from Mom and asked Dad for the car keys again. To my amazement he let me have them.
    Driving into Providence was like riding on a washboard. The whole road was like a liquid river in my eyes and every so often I would have to stop the car and open the door and throw up.
    It was a miracle that I made it to the theater and that I was ableto focus on the play. For the first act the whole stage was moving as if it was being performed aboard a ship in high seas. By the second act I had sobered up enough to get into it and that’s when I began to think that maybe I would like to be an actor. It was not then a need for artistic expression as much as a discovery of a safe place to hide out in a state of controlled drama, knowing what the drama was going to be before stepping into it. The stage that night looked like a very safe place, and the actors seemed protected by the gaze of the audience.
    It took me three days to recuperate from that hangover, and while I was recuperating I began to realize that Mom and Dad had been rearranging the guest bedroom so that Mom could use it. The time for their big move was getting closer and closer, and Mom needed that guest room as a place to collect her thoughts and prepare for the move. She used it as sort of a retreat.
    Gram North said that she used to come over for dinner on Sundays and was surprised to find that Mom wasn’t there. She thought that was odd but she really didn’t want to pry, so she didn’t say anything about it, if you can imagine that. She didn’t even ask Dad where Mom was.
    Then at last, Gram said, she figured out that Mom was not away but upstairs. I don’t think anyone had any idea what Mom was doing up there at first. They only knew that she needed her privacy and she wanted to be left alone. She was tearing her hair out and talking to herself. She was picking at the inside of her ears until they bled.
    Dad was very upset by all this, because they had just sold the house on the bay and were about to move. How could he move when Mom was so crazy? But he did; he did the whole move himself while she was away at a sanitarium, where he finally had to have her committed.
    That was a wild day, which I thank God I wasn’t there for. It took two doctors to legally commit her; two doctors to agree on the fact that she was crazy. She didn’t want to go and the more they tried to make her go, the crazier she got. In the end she was pulling her skirt up over her head and beating off the doctors with her Bible and
Science and Health
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    T HIS AND ONE OTHER event that happened two summers earlier began to make me wonder if Christian Science might not be the right religion for some people. That was the summer that Mom had gone away for two weeks to take a Christian Science intensive class that was supposed to prepare her to become a practitioner. Mom thought she would be able to be a real healer through Christ. It was while Mom was away that Mrs. Bowdin came to visit. Sally Bowdin was Mom’s Christian Science friend who lived nearby. We used to pick Sally up at her house on the way to church on Sundays. Sometimes she’d bring her two little boys with her and take them to Sunday school. Sally Bowdin always seemed normal to us. She was tall, thin, and graceful and really quite beautiful. In fact, I remember Sally Bowdin looking a little like Katharine Hepburn. But over the years Sally got, as they say in the Christian Science church, “a little troubled.” We could tell she was getting