Her father’s death= formative trauma. Her father was a “saint,” a “hero,” her “only champion.” In short, a sacred cow that the patient is not comfortable analyzing or discussing critically. Even the slightest probing from the therapist was met with disproportionate hostility.
The other loci of trauma at the center of patient’s suicidal ideation seem to be: her failed marriage, her failure as a mother, and perhaps her failure (?) as an artist.
Delusions of grandeur. Believes series of best-selling novels were written about her. [This has been confirmed to be true. Surprisingly, though, she doesn’t consider this a great honor, and rather, finds the role of “muse” oppressive.]
As for her own work, she is dismissive of it. She said that her husband had encouraged her to be dependent on him for artistic validation, which he was “generous with but only because there was no threat in [her] ever overshadowing him, or of being particularly good or bad.” I believe it’s important for a person of her artistic temperament to have a creative outlet for self-expression. We have discussed this, but she remains difficult non-compliant and refuses to participate in arts & crafts activities.
Treatment:
Daily talk therapy. Also, have put her on 5mg BID of haloperidol. When she began treatment, there were several strange incidents that we think were potential side effects. Twice during a therapy session her eyes became glazed and unfocused as though she were in a trance. Her pulse, when measured, was very fast, a heart rate of 120 bpm, and yet she was flat in her affect, pale and withdrawn, with shaking hands. Both times when it happened she fell asleep immediately afterward, as one would following a seizure. When she awoke she was hesitant to discuss what had happened, but she seemed confused and thought she was in New York City. It is possible she was experiencing visual and auditory hallucinations. For this reason we are in the process of adjusting the dosage, and adding 25mg of olanzapine.
Quite an interesting woman case.
MARIANNE MCLEAN’S JOURNAL
[1985]
they make me fill out idiotic worksheets here. i wonder about my head. the feeling of cotton in my head. (I think of daddy, a cotton ball sticking out of his nose, out of his ear. oh! how he was prone to infections).
they say, not to worry! the cotton feeling is because of the coma. to give it a few days & it will dissipate. i think, no, as usual, i have not made myself clear: i want more cotton. i want to be taxidermied. but they don’t do that at this hospital.
the therapist is an idiot. i told him about the tree stump—
about how i took the girls to the woods near where my house used to be (daddy’s art studio flattened under a parking lot for a piggly-fucking-wiggly—there is no dignity, there is no justice…). we were walking even though I had not meant to get out of the car. we were walking & then i was hitting a rotten tree stump with a stick. it would make this thump when i hit it, a dull sound & i don’t know why, but that sound excited me very much. i could feel it in my heart. the girls were like little monkeys. they found their own sticks & they were digging in the ground with them. mae had a wet cough. it gave me the feeling that her insides were the rotten stump & it was her i had been hitting. it’s terrible. it’s terrible to always have to keep track of the edges of things as they slide away from you.
of course, the therapist didn’t know what to make of the story. it’s okay to express anger, he said. hit something! that’s an idea! holding out his palms for me to punch.
the worst part is that dennis is the only one left who has any idea what i’m talking about. how infuriating to have him as a screen always between me & the world. my translator! my apollo!
“what’s it like to be married to a man who understands women so keenly?” people have asked me.
it’s unbearable. unbearable. he is a thief. he steals from me constantly, though what exactly i can’t say. & he’s a liar. & what it is exactly he lies about i can’t say either. but you see, this doesn’t make it any less true.
& that i, at 16, could have foreseen it—i was the one, after all, who chose the name cassandra. apollo spits in my mouth & now nobody believes me. those thick alligator teardrops sliding down his cheeks as he suffocates me. for my own good! as he squeezes me from the bottom up.
literally? that’s what doreen wants to know.
literally, not literally, what’s the difference? his breath is on my face even when he isn’t here.
EDITH (1997)
The apartment feels like an insect husk. Empty and strange. Charlie left to go borrow a car. Dennis and Mae are still at the party. Everyone was busy holding hands and singing when I finally emerged from the coatroom, the thick wad of cash in the waistband of my pants. I extracted the keys from Dennis’s pocket when he was mid-toast, pantomimed a headache, pointed to the door. I whispered in Mae’s ear that I was leaving for good and she didn’t even try to mask the joy. Something oily was sliding around behind those eyes, giving them a greasy sparkle.
I dig my duffel bag out of the closet and begin filling it with clothes from the dresser. Fine, Mae. You have your wish. You’ve always been slippery and now you’re free of me. But be careful. Freedom isn’t good for people like you. Who’ll keep you tethered while I’m gone? Don’t you get scared that you’ll float off? Dennis has no idea what to do with you. Mom said he liked his birds with their wings broken, but she was wrong. It’s his wings that are broken. I can see that now because the rage has scrubbed me clean. It passed through me and got everything out and now I see things for what they are. The woman in the coatroom, my fairy godmother, she was right. I’m not helpless.
I’ve packed all my clothes except the sweater. It’s soft and green, made of cashmere, a present from Aunt Rose on one of her early visits. I won’t need it. I’ll leave it for Mae.
Her sheets are rumpled, the blanket balled up. A peach pit in a glass, wedged between the mattress and the wall. Black specks, flies, hover by the rim. There’s a faint sweet smell that makes my skin crawl. A sex smell. But when I sniff again, it’s gone. Maybe I imagined it. I lay the sweater out on her bed like it’s a person.
A knock on the window. I jump. The glowing tip of Charlie’s cigarette. He’s ready. I gesture “one minute” at my own reflection in the glass. I throw my shoes in the bag and start to zip it. Do I have everything? I go into the living room and check under the couch, then into the kitchen and look under the table. I go into Dennis’s room, though what could I have forgotten here?
There’s his typewriter. Should I leave him a note? I unlatch the cover, slip in a blank page.
Dear Dennis,
I begin, the keys clanging like motherfuckers.
This is my first letter to you, at least the first one you’ll get to see, and I’m writing to tell you that I’m going home.
I pull the lever and it slides back to the left side with a ding.
I’m sure it’s no surprise, since I’ve been talking about leaving since I got here. I know, I know, “Mom isn’t well.” Your refrain. And all I can say to that is: Duh. Of course she isn’t. That’s why I need to go home and take care of her.
All these years, whenever I’ve thought about Dennis, I pictured him all-powerful and heartless, but now I see that there’s no wizard behind the curtain, there probably isn’t even a curtain. I have an impulse to say something kind, so I type:
Anyway, I know you’ve tried to make up for the lost time, and though of course, you failed, still it was better than nothing, DAD. There, I said it. That’s the most you’ll get out of me.
Please take care of Mae.
And then on a lighter note, a quick sign off.
What is it you guys loved to sign your letters with? Keep On Keepin’ On? God Bless? Mahalo? Ta-Ta? Peace, Peace and Chicken Grease?
Over and Out?
I type out my name quickly, before they come back home and find me here.
Edith.
I open the window and pass Charlie my duffel bag, catch Cronus before he attempts a great escape, nu
zzle him briefly.
“Bye, cat,” I say and shut the window.
Charlie drops his cigarette and the embers spark out on the asphalt seven stories below. Through the slats of the fire escape, I see the idling pickup truck.
Our feet thump on the metal stairs. We pass the drawn curtains and blinds of the other neighbors, 5C, 4C, 3C, 2C. The night air, the night city air. Thank you, Ms. Ann Carter. From the alley below, Dennis’s windows look very small.
Charlie tosses my bags into the bed of the truck.
“G-g-g-good to go?” he asks. I nod.
Inside the cab, it smells like a campfire. He swings an arm over the seat and throws the truck in reverse. It stalls. He starts it again, and we lurch out into the street.
CHARLIE
My substitute-teaching job ended and the film student lost interest in our project. I’d been spending a lot of time alone in the apartment, so I was glad when Edie appeared at my window. She told me she wanted to use my woodshop. I showed her a few things—how to use the table saw and the sander. She came by a couple days in a row. I started looking forward to it. The day of the party we smoked a joint on the fire escape and I felt happy for the first time in a while.
I arrived at the gallery early but I didn’t want to appear too eager, so I went for a walk around the neighborhood to kill time. When I finally got up the nerve to go inside, I was almost too late. I caught Edie as she was leaving for Port Authority. I remember being seized with that feeling you get right before you jump and I offered to drive her all the way to Louisiana. Why not? I needed to get out of the city. I loved New York, but I needed a break from it. I borrowed a truck from a friend. He was backpacking through Europe so he wouldn’t even know it was gone.
Something about Edie put me at ease. My speech impediment can make me shy. People look away from me like I’m an invalid, but not Edie. She looked at my face openly the way children do. I don’t mean to say she seemed like a child. I didn’t at any point think: I am pouring my heart out to a child. As we drove, I told her everything. I told her about how when I crawled through abandoned subway tunnels or climbed up the beams of the Williamsburg Bridge, I would see the city as a big pulsing thing that was mine and that I could love, even if the people in it had found a way of disappointing me. As I was jumping from roof to roof in Chinatown, I wasn’t thinking about my dying grandmother, or my emotionally distant brother. I’d sit at the top of the scaffolding on St. John the Divine and look at the lights in people’s apartments go on and off to a rhythm that the people themselves weren’t even aware of. They were all simply cells in this big, beautiful organism, and they had no idea. The city had loved me and always been kind to me even when the individual pieces had not.
“I’ll be kind to you,” Edie had said then. She had her knees up, her cheek resting on them, looking at me. It took a lot not to just drive off the road. It was like in Yesterday’s Bonfires, when Cassandra and Gregor are in the tent together in her father’s backyard, connecting without touching. I kept driving and driving, trying to cover the sound of my pounding heart.
MAE
We stayed at the party until it was just me, Dad, and the gallery assistant closing the place out. Dad was, in retrospect, pretty drunk, though I didn’t pick up on this at the time. I was 14 and not very worldly. The gallery assistant put on a Sam Cooke record and danced for him, but when Dad saw me leaning against the gallery wall, watching, he gestured for me to join in. “Bring It on Home to Me” was playing and Dad and I danced, a swaying, clutching sort of thing. The song was already dripping with nostalgia, but more so under the watchful eyes of those beautiful mugshots. He was singing, so I sang too. I have an excellent singing voice and this surprised him because he had never heard me sing before.
The gallery girl tried to join us several times, but Dad ignored her, and for a while she danced next to us alone, until finally she got the hint. Then she turned on all the lights and started sweeping, and when that side of the record was over she switched it off and swept us out the door.
On the cab ride back it was only the two of us, no more Edie, no more Amanda. We didn’t talk. Dad sat there like a sad bear, humming and looking out the window. Whatever had been set in motion was beginning to feel real. I held his hand. I knew that Edie would not be there when we came home, but I said nothing.
When we got to the apartment and Dad found her gone he was devastated. It’s dumb, I know, but I’d expected him to be as pleased as I was. He picked up the phone and hung it up several times, not knowing who to call. He asked me for the name of the boy she was always talking to. Markus, I told him. Last name? Conti. Dad called information, had them repeat the number three times, squinting with one eye at what he’d written down.
“Shit. Shit. Shit. I’m drunk,” he said after he hung up. He wiped his mouth on his shoulder, stood up, and went to the kitchen sink to put his head under the tap. He came back with water streaming down his face and beard, onto his shirt. It was very late, and of course when he called Markus’s family, he woke them all up. Dad got a little tangled in his words, but managed finally to ask them to call if they heard anything.
He paced for a while, then stopped and looked at me with his wet face.
“Did you know about this?” he asked.
I said that I didn’t, but he could tell I was lying.
“Would she have taken the bus?” he asked.
I nodded, averting my eyes.
“Go to bed,” he said and left to go look for her at Port Authority. I spent the night worrying that he would find her and bring her back and was relieved when the next morning, I found him alone, awake and bleary eyed, sitting at the kitchen table.
There was a knock on the door and he shot up, probably hoping it was Edie, but instead it was the little old woman from the party and her large middle-aged daughter. The daughter was tall and swollen-looking. Something about her didn’t seem quite right.
Dad hugged them both, offered them some coffee, apologized for his state. He explained that Edie was missing.
“I know,” the old woman said, taking a sip of her coffee. “I’m the one who gave her money for the ticket.”
Dad was furious. They argued. Her daughter stood up and shuffled over to wait by the door.
“Ma, we gotta go,” the daughter said, jiggling the handle, but the old woman acted like she hadn’t heard her.
“Really, Dennis,” the old woman said. “I’m sure you were going all over the country when you were her age, and don’t give me that garbage about how much safer it was. You know that’s not true. Marianne was only a year older than Edith when she married you.”
“I mean it, Ma. I can’t take one more second,” the daughter said, barring her little, yellow teeth.
The woman got up. “Frances, calm down. Take a breath. We’re leaving,” she said and hugged Dad’s waist.
He was furious. After they left, unkind words sputtered out of him all afternoon: “…Ann Carter handing out parenting advice, that’s rich… Poor Franny, covered in track marks and looking like an overfed tick… Who knows what could have been prevented…”
Despite his anger, I could tell his resolve to bring Edie back was crumbling. He was accepting that she was gone and that he had no right to care now when he had been absent all those years.
That night I lay awake, listening to Dad in the other room, getting drunker, knocking over glasses. Eventually, I drifted off and woke up a while later to him standing over me in the dark. Because I slept on the top bunk, his face was not much higher than mine. I could feel his breath. It was warm and smelled like alcohol, almost citrusy. He stroked my face and my hair. I pretended to be asleep because I didn’t want him to stop. He must have remembered that at least he had me.
FRED
My friendship with Dennis came apart gradually.
It started with his relationship with Marianne. There’s a long, rich historical tradition of men marrying younger women: fine. And, it was the era of free love: fine. But if J
ackson McLean had lived, no way would Marianne and Dennis have gotten together! Marianne was a kid. Dennis made a show of nurturing her but really he plundered her for his own work. The same way he had used me and the Civil Rights struggle, and I don’t think his work was good enough to justify this exploitation of pain.
It was after Marianne came to New York that Dennis began writing in earnest. The more he wrote the more dazed and uncertain she seemed. He was an emotional vampire. He needed her to be in a certain state to be his muse.
I’d given up the idea of a literary career quickly. I’m a much better critic, and that’s where my interest lies. It wasn’t jealousy that drove a wedge between us. It was Yesterday’s Bonfires.
He brought over the stack of pages, straight from the typewriter. He and Marianne waited for me in the living room while I sat at the kitchen table, reading. Somewhere in the middle of the book, it got dark outside and Diane came in and turned the light on. I think it was Diane. It could have been Marianne. I’d barely noticed that I’d been trying to read in the dark, nose pressed to the page, hands shaking. The panic I was feeling was giving me tunnel vision. All I could do was keep reading.
There, in the manuscript, was a thinly veiled and very unflattering portrait of me: Robert. So this is how he sees me! I thought. A naïve buffoon, his entrée into the world he wanted to write about. Things, private things, I had told him in confidence, were laid out bare, typed neatly paragraph after paragraph. It was incredibly hurtful. He wrote about my affair with Diane’s friend, an organizer in Tennessee, something Diane hadn’t known about. He quoted me saying unflattering things about our friends and colleagues in the heat of the moment, questioning certain people’s commitment to the cause unfairly. But there were also things that wouldn’t even seem like secrets to most people that felt like as much of a violation—like when he described me tasting a plum for the very first time. I was a freshman in college and Dennis had given me my first plum and it had brought me joy. That he would include this simple moment, distort it to fit his narrative—the plum an obvious symbol for my sexual awakening—oh, I know it sounds silly, but it still makes me furious! Yes, when I got to the last page of the manuscript I was just in shock.
The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish Page 10
