But it was a crisp, sunny November afternoon, and I had been riding for over six months, and I’d heard from several people that six months was a long time to ride without cantering, and now, in the middle of an old indoor arena at the edge of a farm, on a bay horse named Rascal, under the tutelage of a warm and somewhat cherubic-looking instructor named Patricia, I was going to canter.
Patricia had me start by sitting in the saddle a few beats of the trot. “Just to get your seat used to staying in the saddle,” she explained.
I did as she instructed and was reminded of how much I still had to learn: after finally becoming adept at posting the trot, I had reverted to getting jostled around in the saddle as I had when I first learned to ride Shaddad. “Ouch,” I said after a few strides, rising up to free my crotch and post again.
“It takes time,” she said. “Go ahead and ask him to walk, and this time when you ask him to trot, try to relax your seat a little. Let it be elastic, so it can move with Rascal and absorb the impact of each stride.”
So I willed my backside to be like rubber, and for maybe thirty seconds or so I was able to stay reasonably quiet in the saddle while Rascal trotted.
“Good job!” Patricia cheered. “Now go ahead and slide your outside leg back, give him a tap, and canter!”
“Wait? What? Now?” I could feel the adrenaline shooting through my veins. “Canter now?”
“Canter! Now!”
I took a breath and slid my leg back and gave Rascal the gentlest tap. And he rose up then and leapt forward, and there was this tremendous power suddenly beneath me. His back was like a swing, was like a wave, was like flying, was like all the air and all the dreams and all the sounds of all the horses that had galloped across the flatlands of my mind, the ghost-years of my life expanding, like a soft, beautiful explosion.
TWENTY-FOUR
Not far from where we lived was a house with a sign in front: CLAY CLASSES. The sign stood perched on the road’s edge, sometimes glossed with rain, sometimes splattered with mud, sometimes windblown on its back. But it was always there. It seems life is always presenting us with signs. Some of us don’t notice them at all. Some of us see them and keep driving. And some of us finally stop in the rain to write down the phone number, thereby getting splashed in the face through the open car window by a passing truck.
When I arrived at my first clay class—where a group of three older women and their teacher, a tall white-haired goddess, sat quietly doting on their bowls-in-progress at a small table crammed in the middle of a small room, which was once a small garage—my first instinct was to turn around.
“Welcome,” said the white-haired goddess. Her name was Phyllis, and before I could say, “Oops, sorry, wrong clay class,” she’d wedged me in at the table, introduced me to the ladies, presented me with a slab of clay, and asked me what I wanted to make. Despite the ladies’ warm nods and easy smiles, I still had the urge to hightail it out of that tiny crowded space. But part of the reason I was there that day was that I was looking to feel less alone. So I pulled my chair forward and looked around at the others. “A bowl maybe?”
Apparently, the way a novice potter learns to make a bowl is by placing her wet clay inside another bowl, then gently peeling it out. I learned this in twenty-minute installments punctuated by dashes from the table, when, on the verge of panic, I fled to my car and breathed and willed myself to go back inside.
At the table with the ladies I couldn’t resist pressing my clay-covered fingers to the side of my neck to check my pulse. I tried to be surreptitious about it, which isn’t easy when you’re crammed into a tiny space. The women, though, were nothing but smiles and words of encouragement, as if everyone gets up from the table three times an hour. “Your bowl is really coming along,” they’d say, as I sponged it with water the way Phyllis showed me, to keep it from drying out. And despite my anxiety, I liked the clay, its flesh-like yield to my fingers. And I liked the women, their oversize sweaters, their collective calm and quiet industriousness. Any one of them, I thought, could be a mother.
Back in Dr. E’s office, things pretty much stayed the same: I left traumatized every time. We never graduated to the stairs because my panic was intense enough from simply running in place. I’d run until the alarms started resounding in my head, then sit on her couch and catch my breath while being interrogated about the severity of my tunnel vision.
“I think I’m getting worse,” I told her.
“It can take time,” she said, blinking her nearly invisible eyelashes.
“But I still have that tightness in my throat, like I’m about to cry.”
“And have you cried?”
“Yes,” I said. “But it doesn’t help.”
Dr. E ran her finger back and forth across her pen and gazed at me. I was waiting for her to say something, but she was intently examining my face, the way therapists sometimes do.
“I had a cooking lesson, though,” I told her, “and I went to a clay class. Maybe that’s helping a little.”
“That’s wonderful,” she said. “Keep doing those things. Now let’s get back to running.”
I decided to call the UU church. I needed to talk to someone, and I thought maybe a minister who quotes Vonnegut and speaks about love might have some interesting advice for me. But the minister who showed up at my door the next afternoon wasn’t the minister I was expecting. It turns out there were two ministers at the church, and this one was a blue-eyed, quick-witted woman named Erin. “Nice place you got here,” she said. “I’m pretty sure your garage is bigger than my house.”
“Come in,” I said, smiling, liking her immediately. “Can I offer you some banana cream pie? It’s homemade.”
“Can a seal clap?”
I cut an extra large piece for Erin, and we sat in the living room with our plates in our laps.
I looked across the room at her and thanked her for coming.
“Anytime you make a pie like this,” Erin said, “I’ll be over.”
When I was nineteen and recovering from a nasty cocaine addiction, a Baptist minister came to my apartment. I wanted him to pray for me because I didn’t want to die. I wanted to believe that somehow I could be forgiven—mostly for the damage I had done to my body, but also for pushing a girl in the mud when I was a kid—because if I could be forgiven, maybe I could heal. The minister told me that first I would have to rid myself of all traces of Satan. “Do you have any Dungeons and Dragons games?” he’d asked me. “Because they’re the devil’s games.” I explained that I was sick, that I was sorry, that I’d never played a game of Dungeons and Dragons in my life. “What about yoga?” he’d asked, accusingly. The minister and I were having two different conversations, which as it turned out, was actually a blessing. Because it was then that I realized his forgiveness would do me no good unless I learned to forgive myself.
Erin was different from the Baptist minister, mostly because we were having the same conversation, and we were both listening. And because we took turns naming our favorite Mary Oliver poems. And because I could tell Erin about my heart and about the terrifying inner sanctum of my shower and the nightmarish portal of the grocery store checkout line and the disabling oppression of the highway, while she gave me the full sphere of her gaze, along with just the right amount of commiseration—“Of course you feel that way on the highway. It’s Boston! Who doesn’t feel that way?”—and just the right amount of advice: “I’m thinking it would probably be a good idea for you to talk to a therapist who doesn’t make you do calisthenics during the session.”
Three things happened that afternoon that I will always remember. The first is that for the entire hour I sat with Erin, I didn’t check my pulse once. But this victory probably had something to do with the second thing that happened: by the hour’s end, I was in the throes of a burgeoning crush. It might have been simply because I laughed more that day than I had in a long calend
ar of days, but I could feel the stem of something new winding up the lattice of my fluttery little
heart.
“Thanks again!” I called, waving wildly after Erin as she walked to her car. “I’ll see you in church!”
It must have been the endorphins that enabled me to leave the house that day without the usual rampant monologue in my head—some version of how the world was big and scary and was, in one way or another, going to kill me. So I drove. I passed the farm across the street and the cows. I drove past the lake and watched the trees’ reflections sketched onto its surface. It was November, the sky muted, the light as palpable as pages in a book. Small bodies of wind stopped short, resurrected pockets of leaves, twirled them up.
But when I crossed over into the next town, I started to panic. I was suddenly too far from my house, too far from the nearest hospital, too alone. At once my heart skipped a beat and the world grew loud. My ears were ringing with the volume. And the light, even on that cloud-heavy day, grew instantly sharp. All I could see were the hardest things—the speeding cars, the asphalt, the metal guardrail, the unforgiving mass of it all. Everything was coming at me too fast, and I wanted to close my eyes and make it all disappear. I pulled over on the shoulder and tried to focus on one single tree. I thought I should call Larry or 911 or maybe just put my window down and randomly scream for help, but I didn’t take my eyes off the ribbed bark. And the panic passed.
I turned around and started heading back. By then the schoolkids were on their way home. A yellow bus stopped in front of me, and I watched a young girl step down and hitch up the backpack that was slipping from her shoulder. She was probably seven. And she was braver than I, this child who took the bus to school each day and had adventures and came home to descend the big black steps with such certainty, as if the world were there to hold her.
The girl crossed the street, where her mother was waiting to hug her. As I watched them—a mother leaning down to pull her daughter’s coat closed, a daughter reaching up to take her mother’s hand—a part of me turned so quiet that I thought maybe it had died. And then I realized that was the sound of emptiness.
That was the third thing that happened that afternoon.
Back at home, I eased my panic button over my head and collapsed onto the couch. I had a panic attack, filled out my panic and anxiety records, and panicked some more. It seemed the more I focused on my scary thoughts, the more scary thoughts I had, until I had no choice but to anesthetize myself with sitcoms again while lying very, very still. Larry came home late each night, and I gave him the stethoscope, and he listened to my heartbeat, and I could see in his face that he was lost, that we were lost in different places. “I miss you,” I said.
“I’m right here.” He held my hand, and I leaned my head against his shoulder.
“What’s my heart doing?”
“Beating.”
“I know that. But I mean, how does it sound?”
Larry pressed the stethoscope to the center of my chest and closed his eyes. “Strong.”
“Then why do I feel so weak?”
I had to face it: I was the 5 percent. I was failing CBT.
I decided to take Erin’s advice and find another therapist, which meant scrolling through therapists’ pictures online until I settled on a silver-haired motherly type. By the time I got an appointment, it had been days since I’d left the house. I’d missed a clay class and never made it to church. But as I stood outside my front door, terrified to leave my front step, I was faced with a decision: turn back and sign my life over to panic, or go get myself some help.
So I drove and panicked and pulled over suddenly several times to the chagrin of horn-happy drivers gesticulating past, but I made it there, and the silver-haired lady, in her worn shoes and silk blouse buttoned at the neck, appeared right on time. She led me through her house to a small parlor lined with psychology books, and we sat facing each other in two upholstered flowered chairs. “Tell me,” she said, gently removing her bifocals, “what brings you here today?”
In three breaths I’d managed to tell her about the panic, about my heart, about my marriage, my loneliness. I told her about the tightness in my throat that wouldn’t go away. “It feels like that feeling right before you cry, only I don’t cry. But even crying doesn’t help it.”
She smiled knowingly. “You know what’s often behind panic, don’t you?”
I shook my head no.
“Sadness.”
Yes, I wanted to say. Sadness. Let me be sad, right here, in your parlor, with the rain just starting to tap against the windows. Let me tell you about the girl who got off the bus, about her mother, about how sometimes our mothers hate us. “I don’t want to be scared,” I finally said.
“Of course you don’t,” she said. “That’s why you’re here. Now tell me, have you done anything to treat your panic disorder so far?”
“I’ve been doing some CBT work with a doctor at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, but I think it’s making things worse somehow. I think what I need is just to be able to talk to someone.”
She leaned forward and looked at me quizzically. “So you already have a psychiatrist?”
“No, no, she’s not my psychiatrist. We’re focusing on a particular program that will only last a few more weeks. But part of that program is that we don’t actually talk much. So I thought this would be a good addition to what I’m already doing.” I smiled, ready to talk sadness.
The silver-haired lady put her glasses back on and scratched some notes on a pad. “Let me explain my policy to you. I would need to talk with your psychiatrist before you and I could start any kind of therapy.”
“I just explained to you, she’s not my psychiatrist. I’m seeing her for one specific thing, but I don’t have a psychiatrist per se.”
“Still,” she said, “I would need to talk with her first so that we could work as a team. I would need to know what she’s doing in her therapy with you.”
“Why couldn’t I tell you that?”
“It’s just my policy.”
“Okay, here’s the thing.” My voice started to waver. “I don’t need a team. I’m fully capable of making my own decisions about what type of therapy I want.”
“That’s your opinion.” Again with the glasses. On the table, off the table.
I couldn’t believe what was happening. How did my sweet silver-haired motherapist end up being this rigid, controlling woman? “No,” I said, “it’s the truth.”
She finally retired her glasses to the table, alongside her pad. “I don’t think this is going to work for us.”
The nerve! She was dismissing me. “You can say that again,” I said, pulling out my checkbook. My hands shook noticeably as I wrote the check, and against all that is holy and good about anger, my eyes started to fill.
On my way back to my car, I cursed her. “Fuck you,” I said, backing out of her driveway, wiping the tears off my cheeks. “Fucking waste of my time. Fucking idiot.” Down the road I went, incanting my new favorite word. “You don’t know what the fuck I need! I know what I need!”
I once read that if you put a variety of foods in front of a baby, she will instinctively eat the things her body most needs. I don’t know if that’s true, but I suspect that we all have that power to unequivocally determine what we need, and to declare it so. “I don’t need you, stupid lady, or your fucking OCD glasses habit!” I shouted. Sometimes, in interpreting what we need, it’s helpful to start with what we don’t.
“I don’t need to be talked to as if I’m powerless! I don’t need Dr. E and her stopwatch! I don’t need this tightness in my throat! And I don’t need a mother!”
What a revelation it was, after thirty-six years, to suddenly understand this fundamental difference between the past and present tense. I once needed a mother, that was true. I had needed her for years, needed her with the grist
of my being, with the stake of my feet on the earth. I had needed her to put Band-Aids on my scrapes, to ask me questions about my days, to pull my coat closed when the cold air got in. But she didn’t. And I grew up.
TWENTY-FIVE
The security guards take me to a building called Putts, which, translated phonetically in Yiddish, means idiot. “Welcome to Montrose,” they say and laugh, locking the door behind them. Inside there are about twenty girls in a large room with old fluorescent lights that drown out the daylight, as if the sun stops just outside the bars on the windows. A few girls look up at me from their Spades games. Other girls shuffle ruggedly across the room, on their way to nowhere. Nobody speaks to me. I sit on an empty bench in the corner and watch until it’s time for lunch.
Some of these girls have really stabbed people, have dropped their babies into Dumpsters. I can hear them talking about each other. One of them is talking about how she woke up in the infirmary to the sound of a girl crying. “It was weird,” she says, “but her cries seemed to be coming from all directions at once.” It was a ghost, someone at the infirmary had told her—the ghost of a girl who’d hanged herself there years before.
We walk single file in silence to the dining hall, manned by security guards and their buzzing walkie-talkies. The stone buildings are the color of thunderheads. Lunch is a plate of noodles under a sloppy brown sauce. We eat with plastic spoons so that we don’t stab each other, and we have fifteen minutes to do it. Before our meal we have to say a prayer: Our father, God, gives us this food. We bow our heads in gratitude. And from our thankful hearts we pray that we will do God’s will today.
My cell has a window with bars on it, an army-green metal cot, and a matching metal cabinet to keep exactly two changes of clothes, one pair of pajamas, a few basic toiletries, and writing paper. Each night, we have to put our day’s clothes out in the hall to be laundered and returned the next morning. “To keep away the crabs,” I hear one girl say.
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