That night, my mother and I stopped at Taco Bell and both ordered steak chalupas, which she claimed reminded her of the fry bread from home. When Ron didn’t come home, we sat in her living room, and she sipped can after can of beer, and she talked to me the way we talked on the phone: her talking, me listening.
After a few beers, she pulled out her wallet and flipped to the back. She had a picture of my sister and me, taken years ago. Then she pointed to a picture of a baby and said, “That’s your sister.”
“Alexandra,” I said, in confirmation.
But she shook her head. This was a different sister. “I named her Janelle,” she said, watching me through half-lidded eyes. “She was adopted by another family.”
That’s my name, I thought reflexively. They sounded too much alike. I stared at the photo and wondered, When? and How? and Another one? and Why? but said nothing aloud.
“Don’t tell your sister,” my mother said. “Eileen would just get mad.”
I told her I wouldn’t. In this I believed my mother was right: Eileen would just get mad, and no one could predict the things she would do. I would keep my mother’s secret about our youngest sister until after our mother died.
The next night, my mother asked me to drive her to Sneakers, her favorite dive bar. I followed her inside to meet her friends. She bragged about how I was in college, and we played a round of bingo over a basket of fries. When I left, my mother asked if I could pick her up in a few hours, and I agreed. I went back to her house and fell asleep watching television on the living room floor. She stayed almost till closing, calling me to pick her up sometime after one.
She spent the next night at Sneakers. And the next.
In the mornings, while she was at work, I went on long drives. One morning, I drove to the coast and walked into the ocean, over the worn, round rocks that rattled soothingly in rhythm with the waves.
Another morning, Ron snuck me onto a private beach in Fort Lauderdale where he performed maintenance for a condo association. The sand was white and perfectly smooth.
Another morning, she and Ron took me with them to the casino on the Seminole reservation. She gave me twenty dollars and left me near the nickel slots. “Ron’s taking me to the blackjack table,” she said.
I exchanged my twenty-dollar bill for little tokens I fed into the machine. The rows of slot machines were ghostly empty, and I hopped one machine down the row each time I lost. When I ran out of money, I wandered through the casino to the gift shop, full of indigenous crafts: beadwork and buckskin and clay pottery. When my mother and Ron ran out of money, she called me and told me to meet them in the parking lot, and she laughed about “next times.”
Years later, I would discover that gambling was more than a passing recreation for Ron—that gambling was an addiction that pulled him under.
The morning I drove back to Pennsylvania, I woke to find my mother already gone. Neither one of us was any good at goodbyes.
On the drive home, I stopped at South of the Border, a tourist trap on I-95 filled with statues of dinosaurs in sombreros, where we always stopped when I was a kid. I bought a bumper sticker and a pair of lawn flamingos, and then I set out on the road again.
I reached Virginia at the peak of morning rush-hour traffic heading into D.C. Grandma and Don would have left the highway before we reached the city—they preferred slower but more scenic byways to traffic-clogged interstates—but I didn’t think to ask my grandmother for directions before I left. I spent an hour stuck in an endless chain of pulsing brake lights, and then I pulled into a rest stop, locked my doors, and set my alarm for an hour. As I fell asleep, I found myself dreaming of a sister I could bring on a road trip like this; who could take the wheel while I napped a few hours in the passenger seat; who could pick up old license plate games and sing familiar songs with me. I dreamed of a sister who understood our mother the way I did, the good and the bad; who could laugh with me after the trip we’d had.
*1 In my mother’s photographs, I find pictures of my mother and Dale, smiling on my uncle’s couch. In the corner of the photo, on a coffee table: a carton of cigarettes and four cans of beer.
*2 March 11, 1997. “Tony went to jail for Domestic Violence.”
*3 March 12, 1997. “Lenore wanted me to leave him in there. I can’t do that because I’m not that kind of bitch.”
*4 June 3, 1997. “Nobody is ever going to tell me what I suppose to do. Not ever again and not even Lenore.”
[Apocalypse]
EVERY NIGHT WHEN I close my eyes, the world ends. In my dreams, the sun is dying—a cube of fading orange light. I walk into a house, where my mother lies in a canopy bed and wastes away in a white dressing gown. She hands me a clown doll with a porcelain face and tells me to take care of my sisters. I can’t make myself tell her it’s too late for that.
In another dream, the earth is a seed that cracks open and sprouts a world tree. The tree grows quickly and its thick canopy shrouds the world in dark. Druids tell us we must climb its branches to ascend to the next plane of existence, but the limbs are so thick that I can’t even wrap my arms around them. I stand at the bottom of the tree and watch the distant flickers of light, but I cannot fathom reaching the top.
In another, I drive down a familiar road, past a church where my grandmother lives. Out the driver’s-side window, I notice a black hole opening on the horizon. It pulls the world into nothing. I become aware that I am floating in a room shaped like a beehive. A single neon word in a box flashes in front of my eyes, but before I can read the word, two words branch away from it, and then four more, like the family tree my mother drew on a piece of a notepad paper. A web of lines and symbols fills my vision, and I fall through.
* * *
—
MY COLLEGE ROOMMATE and I walked back to our dorm one day after class, sometime during the late fall of my junior year.
A gust of wind rolled a pile of leaves toward us like a wave breaking on the shore. I thought immediately, The world is ending again.
I ducked behind the closest tree and curled my arms over my head. My roommate kneeled beside me and tried to coax me to my feet, but I couldn’t move. I bawled.
Finally, the wind quieted. The leaves settled. She convinced me to follow her back to our room. I bundled myself in my blankets and turned my face toward the cinder block wall.
I skipped meals. I stopped being able to sleep. I fought to keep my eyes open, terrified of what waited behind my eyelids in the dark. Exhaustion nuzzled at my neck, but every time I felt myself slipping, I jolted awake.
Marie convinced me to see a counselor on campus. I hadn’t been to therapy since high school, but after a few weeks of sleeplessness, I agreed to go.
I met with both a counselor and a psychiatrist, who asked me about my family’s history of mental illness and substance abuse. They asked me about my childhood. They asked me about home. They diagnosed me again with depression and anxiety. The psychiatrist suggested I might also be bipolar, but I rejected that diagnosis because I didn’t recognize the symptoms in my behavior; she prescribed me a different class of antidepressants from those I had taken before.
The first week I was on Effexor, I was jubilant. I skipped to class. I laughed again. But when my dose doubled the second week, the walls came tumbling down.
I was at a conference with my world literature class. Our professor, Rich, organized the trip and drove us to the hosting university, two hours north. But when I presented my paper, my voice was too loud and too fast. My hands trembled, and I couldn’t sit still, and I realized something was wrong. I left the seminar room and paced back and forth in the hall until the other sessions let out.
Rich must have noticed something was wrong. He followed me into the hall to ask how I was doing. I tried to tell him that I was fine, but on the drive home, he told me to sit up front with him. My leg hopped incessa
ntly. I clenched and unclenched my hands and willed myself not to cry. I could sense Rich watching me out of the corner of his eye.
When we got back to campus, he asked me if I would be okay.
I nodded and said, “I just need sleep.”
I went back to my room and fell into bed, but when I woke up again, I was worse. I played the fastest, loudest music I could find and screamed the lyrics as tears poured down my face. I ran in tight circles across my room and, on each pass, touched the four posts of my bed.
My mother called. I answered, but I couldn’t talk: My tongue jerked and stumbled in my mouth.
Alarmed, my mother called Grandma, who called me to ask what was going on.
I sobbed, “Nothing,” and hung up the phone.
I called Marie, who picked me up at the dorms and drove me to the emergency room. She waited with me there for hours, and by the time I was seen, my manic episode had already worn off. The doctor prescribed me Valium to help me sleep and told me not to take my antidepressants again until I could see my psychiatrist the following week.
The next morning, my friends drove to Maryland for a birthday party, but I stayed home to sleep. After they left, I found myself sitting in my bed with a pill in my hand. The doctor told me not to take it. I knew I shouldn’t take it. I clenched the pill in my hand. Someone told me to take it. Take it, take it, take it. So I did.
I called Nathan, my ex-boyfriend, who drove me back to the emergency room. He waited with me in the lobby. We watched people with bee stings and broken arms and stomach pains filter through the doors, and after they moved me to a small room with a bed, we waited some more. We were in the final weeks of the semester, and I told him he could leave; I knew he had work to finish. But he told me he would be happy to wait.
When the doctor finally saw me, she threw my pills away. She recommended I commit myself to the psychiatric ward until the medication was out of my system—a few days, possibly a week.
“I have three huge papers due,” I said, glancing at Nathan.
He—the person I felt had dismissed my depression and anxiety when we dated; the person I expected to convince me that nothing was wrong—scratched his beard and glanced between me and the doctor. “I think you should stay.”
* * *
—
SOMETIMES, WHEN I am at my lowest, I still pine for the week I spent in the psychiatric ward. The nurses gave us sedatives every night to help us sleep. I slept exactly eight hours every night and woke up each morning perfectly rested. The nurses oversaw a strict schedule packed with light exercise, arts and crafts, and mandatory sessions with the staff psychiatrist and counselor to manage our medications and our moods. They gave us balanced meals on neatly partitioned trays that arrived at the same time every day. They cared for us in a way I have never been able to care for myself.
My stutter lingered, but I assigned myself to the phone in the hallway anyway. Each time it rang, I ran out to answer it, and then fetched whichever resident they were calling for.
On the second day, my grandmother called me and told me not to be upset, which was how she introduced every piece of bad news.
“Why not?” I asked, my tongue stumbling into the wh and n sounds.
“Your dad’s in the psych ward in Elizabethtown,” she said. “He ran out on Deb and got drunk, and they sent him there instead of jail. They thought it might help.”
I thanked my grandmother and hung up the phone. I tried not to let her words shake me. The uncomfortable parallels. But I couldn’t help but feel that I would never escape my father—that a piece of him was lodged somewhere inside me, and I would never dig it out.
My friends visited me at the hospital. They brought me assignments from my classes and wireless notebooks to write in, but I didn’t get much work done. Instead, I spent most of my hours visiting other residents on the ward. One of the men in my group counseling sessions was near retirement, but that year, he had experienced his first crippling depression after a surgery that left him unexpectedly weak and, from his perspective, useless. He only left his room when the nurses made him, so I visited him there to just sit quietly and talk. After a few days, he started joining me in the evenings in the common room, where I pieced together jigsaw puzzles and told stories that made the other residents laugh.
In my sessions with the counselor, I talked about the other residents more than I did myself. “You’re not here to help them get better,” my counselor finally said. “You’re here to get well.”
My father was released from Elizabethtown before I was, so he and my grandmother both visited me while I was still in the hospital. I told them the psychiatrist confirmed I had bipolar disorder, but he was curious about my father’s diagnosis. My father shrugged uncomfortably. “Delusional psychosis,” he said, then laughed. “But I made them think that. These doctors are so easy to trick. You just tell them what they want to hear.”
My grandmother told me he was prescribed a short-term antipsychotic. The medication was meant to relieve his symptoms of psychosis, but they were not a long-term cure.
On one of my final nights in the ward, the man I had befriended noticed my stutter was fading. We were both surprised. I wasn’t aware the other patients thought my stutter was a permanent fixture, or how well I could mask my own fragile state of mind.
* * *
—
I DON’T REMEMBER much of the year that followed. My doctor prescribed me lithium to treat my bipolar disorder and a benzodiazepine to treat my anxiety, but both my mood swings and my anxiety were worse than they had ever been.
That summer, I fell in love with a man I met online and drove four hours to meet him in a hotel room in the middle of New York State. A few weeks later, after the semester ended, I moved into his apartment. I was convinced I was going to marry him, but I struggled to find a job in New York. I spent all day playing videogames and then, in the middle of the night, driving back and forth between New York and Pennsylvania, alternating the time I spent with my boyfriend and my college friends. I stopped at the same Sunoco to refuel each night and fantasized about fucking the gas station attendant, Bob, in the bathroom around back.
That same summer, I fell in love with another man that I met playing videogames. He lived in Alaska but was turning thirty and talked about how he had always planned to leave his home state before then. I convinced him to move to Pennsylvania, and I helped him find an apartment near my college so we could see each other during the school year. He sold everything he couldn’t pack into his little car, then started the weeklong drive across Canada. I stopped loving him before he was halfway across the country. I offered him a single hug in the grocery store parking lot the night he arrived; he smelled harsh, like Irish Spring. I introduced him to my friends only once. They all thought I was crazy. Boy crazy, just like your mother, Grandma would have said.
I fell in love with one of my best friends and then, just as quickly, fell in love with another. When I realized Marie was torn between our friends and me, I gave her an out. “They need you more than I do,” I said.
I believed I could handle everything myself.
I limped through my last year of college. I stopped taking both the lithium and my antianxiety medication cold turkey, which made me sick and irritable. For over a week, I couldn’t get off the couch. “You’re withdrawing,” one of my friends told me when I couldn’t bridge the connection myself.
I started cycling through mania and depression again.
Manic, I got into my car and drove long, inexplicable distances. To Ohio, in the snow, to visit another man I met online. To my sister’s new apartment, even though I knew she wasn’t home.
My sister had started stripping as soon as she turned eighteen. Her new profession turned our grandmother’s face red, but Eileen made more money than any of us, and she moved into a series of her own apartments in York, then in Littlestown
. She briefly tried selling Kirby vacuum cleaners with one of her boyfriends, but nothing compared to the fast and easy money she could make dancing.
I drove an hour to my sister’s apartment and picked up a rock in the parking lot. I imagined smashing the glass pane of her front door and breaking in. I imagined rooting through her fridge; sitting down on her couch; watching daytime TV. Everything I did or planned to do made so little sense. I threw the rock over a fence and drove home.
To drown my mania, I bought bottles of cheap vodka and cranberry juice and started drinking until I passed out.
* * *
—
DESPITE EVERYTHING, I graduated on time. My mother planned to stay two weeks in Pennsylvania with my sister and me.* When I called Eileen to tell her how long our mother would be staying, we both had to laugh. “What do you do with a mother?” we asked.
Our mother arrived a week before my commencement ceremony, while I was still finishing final exams. My grandmother didn’t understand how busy I would be. Instead of visiting me at college, my mother spent most of her first week at my grandmother’s, eating meals and watching TV with my grandmother and my father, who was sleeping on her couch again.
Between classes and exams, I drove home—an hour and a half each way—to see them. One night at dinner, I watched my parents lovingly tease each other over a dish of instant potatoes. I remember thinking, They could have been good parents. There could have been so much love.
After dinner, our mother gave my sister and me gifts she had promised. I received one of our grandmother’s blankets, a Pendleton blanket dyed orange, yellow, and forest green. Eileen received a polyester shawl, fringed and periwinkle blue. I could tell, and my mother could tell, that Eileen was disappointed.
“I was a Yei’ Bi’ Chei dancer,” our mother said. The shawl was one she wore to dance in a healing ceremony.
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