Love Is Both Wave and Particle

by Paul Cody

IEPs were mandated by the state. What it meant was that if a kid was having trouble in school—couldn’t keep up with schoolwork, was disruptive, couldn’t sit still, was withdrawn, overly aggressive, anything that consistently stood out—the teacher would talk to the school social worker, the parent or parents would be brought in, and an assessment would be done. A special-ed person, a social worker, a teacher, and often an administrator would go over the kid’s records at length, talk to the child’s present and former teachers, and decide if this kid needed to be deemed a student with special needs. If the child was so deemed, then an IEP was drawn up by a team consisting of a psychologist, social worker, special-ed expert, and the child’s teacher. It required that the child consult a doctor or psychiatrist. Meds were often dispensed.

  The child might get counseling, a one-on-one aide in the classroom, hours out of the classroom being tutored, particular protocols of therapy, and physical or psychological or anger management therapy.

  Essentially, our wealthy school system brought its considerable resources to help the child.

  Basically, after four years of teaching English at Boynton, of watching IEP plans try to make up for messed-up homes and the quirks of biology and bad or overwhelmed parents, I was offered a job at the high school as a social worker. I thought, Now I can do some real work. Get in there with the kids and their families, and really get my hands bloody with dirt and grime and broken calluses. Plus no more papers to grade.

  But boy, it was a ride. Five years in the dark heart of really broken families, of seriously damaged kids. One-parent families, or no-parent families, or parents addicted or alcoholic or in jail or on parole or under the supervision of the court. Sometimes the saddest cases were the kids living out in the trailer parks, a few living in the woods in abandoned buses, the incest, the sisters or half brothers or “aunts” or “cousins” trying to raise a whole brood of kids.

  So many of them were listless; they had no light in their eyes. You could just look at them, and they were unwashed, and badly fed, and unloved. Many of them had parents who worked at Walmart or Burger King, or cleaned houses or hotel rooms, and still had to get food stamps.

  The worst was when fourteen- or fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girls came in and told you they were pregnant and wanted so much to keep the baby. They were so happy. They would finally have something all their own.

  This was by no means the majority of the students. Many of the I-High kids were worrying about getting into Princeton or Williams, or whether they should take a gap year. They had, as we say, first world problems.

  But after five years, I started to feel bleak. I’d come home after work with this feeling of heaviness, with something like despair.

  Then I started hearing about the Clock School. Special needs, but kids who were generally quite good students, but wanted really small classes and lots of attention. A charter school for grades seven to twelve. State, city, and federal funds, plus grant money. They were talking about roughly 150 students, twenty-five per grade. A staff-to-student ratio of one to five, which was outrageous, and few of those staff would be administrators.

  It took over two years to get it off the ground, to get it funded, to get the Calendar Clock Building renovated, to hire staff, but, man, boy oh boy, I wanted it. One of the big arguments for it was that some gifted kids were so bored in regular classes, even in Advanced Placement classes, that they just checked out. They basically said, Fuck this. They became disruptive, depressed, disengaged.

  So I applied for and got the job at the Clock School. And the kids there were amazing.

  I remember first reading Levon’s file and seeing that in the fourth grade he was tested in reading, and he was at the level of someone in the third month of the twelfth grade. It was so at odds with his class performance that they retested him, and he tested at the sixth month of the twelfth grade. In science he tested below grade level, despite the fact that his mother taught neurobiology at Cornell. WTF? his teachers seemed to think, but didn’t the fact that there was no father on the scene, ever, have something to do with it?

  Or that Sam, whose file is thick as a Dickens novel, consistently tested in the mid- to high 130s in both Stanford-Binet and Wechsler intelligence tests, and always underperformed in school. Because of something in the DSM? Because she took more than a dozen different meds between the ages of seven and sixteen? Because she cut? Didn’t get out of bed for days? Had nearly a dozen rounds of electroconvulsive therapy at age sixteen?

  I knew that her father, Nathan, had worked seventy hours a week as a vice president at Fidelity in Boston, as the top IT specialist in computer security, which is to say that he was chief guard for nearly one or two trillion dollars in investments, virtually all of which traveled by computer, but he gave that up for the less stressful position of guarding Harvard’s thirty billion dollars in investments, and now guards Cornell’s modest six-billion-dollar portfolio.

  And that her mother, Vera, a trained economist, according to the file, seems never to have worked since her only child was born, but has poured her considerable intelligence and energy into anxiously hovering over her daughter, making sure she was all right, then just ignoring her. Which is to say, according to one postdoc at McLean, the famous psychiatric hospital associated with Harvard Medical School, making sure she was sick. After last fall at McLean, Nathan and Vera left Chestnut Hill and Boston, came to Ithaca, and Sam spent the spring semester, as it were, at Austen Riggs, a topflight treatment center for the very rich in the Berkshires, which is closer to Ithaca.

  She graduated, as though from school, in May.

  Meanwhile, I do not have a partner, since Rob and I split two years ago.

  I am forty-three years old, and I have a wonderful chocolate Lab named Buster. We walk in the woods on the Finger Lakes Trails. In the fall, when it’s cool in the shade of the woods, and Buster has raced ahead of me, I’ll rest, my back against a tree, in an open spot, my face to the warm sun. I’ll close my eyes, and hear Buster’s feet pounding toward me. He’ll lick my face, scratch my shoulder with his paw as if to say, C’mon. Let’s go. Stop sitting.

  I’ll think, This is good.

  I forget for the moment that most kids in the world, that many in this affluent, sweet city, have very little of what is good in life. That even the kids who seem to have everything are often as broken and lonely as dolls, naked, missing limbs and eyes, discarded in woods, next to rest stops, just off the tens of thousands of miles of interstates of our country.

  Four

  Chloe

  There were no single rooms at McLean, not in the adolescent units anyway, and that was because they didn’t want any of us to “isolate,” to be cut off from the world and other people. It was part of the “therapeutic” and “socialization” process. That’s what they called it anyway.

  So it was me and Sam, pretty much the whole time I was there, which was from September, last year, to December. Then I was an outpatient, going to appointments three times a week, and then by this summer they got my meds settled, which is to say, they got me settled. And so it’s back to Miss Porter’s School in another week for me, just about. So no more cutting, no more bingeing and purging, no more crazy shit. No more McLean.

  Just a nice pretty rich girl going to a rich girl’s school, then maybe a pretty good college, if I can get into one. The McLean stay kind of put a wrinkle in the works. I took my junior year off to be crazy. Do I write that in my application to Smith or Wellesley or Bard? Probably, most likely, I’ll spend an extra year at Miss Porter’s.

  I got there about a week after Sam did. I think the first week of September. Instead of boarding school, our family SUV pulled up at the reception area at McLean in the morning, and they unloaded me and my baggage (hahahaha), and there’s a lot of baggage in every way. At that point, to be honest, I didn’t give a shit. I was so fucking tired. I so didn’t care about anything anymore. They could have dumped my useless carcass in a field somewhere, or on the bank of some weedy river
or marsh, and I would have curled up and stayed there forever.

  After about five interviews and three days in the medical unit, they brought me to the room I was gonna share with Sam, and she wasn’t there. The only thing I noticed was how neat everything was. Clothes hung in her closet, a few pair of shoes, some Birks and Docs, a bunch of books lined up on the shelves over her desk, and her bed really neatly and tightly made.

  I thought, How does anybody have the energy to be neat and organized? How can anyone care that much about shit like that?

  And it was funny because at that moment she was having the first of her ECT treatments, which I found out about later, when they wheeled her down the hallway in a wheelchair, and she was not with it. She was under it. From the sedatives and the volts of electricity to her brain, from being so depressed she could hardly move her hands even.

  When she came to the room a few hours later, the two nurses, or aides, got her out of the chair and into the bed, and she was wearing yoga pants and a loose top, and a nice black V-neck sweater. Her left wrist had a big white bandage around it. They got the pillows under her head, the covers over her, then they took the hairnet off, and she had great hair. Brownish-blond, and a little frizzy, like one of those Botticellis in art history class. It looked soft and beautiful, and you wanted to stroke it to see if it was as soft as it looked.

  The nurse said that this was Sam, my roommate, and that she’d need to sleep awhile, and I said that was good with me.

  I didn’t know at the time she’d just been shocked, but she looked pretty messed up and vulnerable, like a sleeping, damaged princess, and I felt something new and funny. I felt kind of sorry for her. And somehow, that didn’t feel right. It felt like it did matter.

  She started to stir around eleven, to move her arms and head, and then a nurse came in with a tray of crackers and juice. I had been quietly unpacking my junk, clothes and shoes, a few books, stuff for the bathroom, and I was sitting up on my bed, looking through the folders they gave you when they released you to the less restrictive wards. Rules and Regulations, Your Safety, Treatment Modalities, and a social worker had come in somewhere along there to say hello. She was Kim, and she looked too young and too cute to be a social worker, and she said lunch would be at twelve thirty, and an aide would come by to show me where to go, and she asked me if I was getting settled okay, and I said, Sure.

  Lemme know if you need anything? She patted my shoulder and I thought, I need a new life, a new attitude, a new everything, but I didn’t say any of that at the time. I’d promised my mom that I’d do my best, that I’d at least try to get with the program, whatever the program was.

  The nurse put the tray down next to Sam’s bed, and shook her arm a little, and Sam made noises, and the nurse said, Sam, time to get up. The sun’s out.

  And I noticed it was. It was streaming through the big windows, it was shining in the leaves of the trees outside.

  Sam opened her eyes, and they were brown, and set far apart, and she blinked, and tried to sit up but couldn’t at first. But the nurse got her sitting up in the bed, put a few pillows behind her back, poured some juice for her, opened a small package of crackers, and Sam sat there with her head on her chest.

  Okay, Sam, the nurse said, we’ve gotta get some food in you.

  Sam blinked some more, and she turned and looked at me, and she said, almost in a whisper, Hey, you’re Chloe, then she closed her eyes again.

  That’s Chloe, the nurse said, your roommate, and I said, Hey.

  And it was funny, but I was moved that she knew my name, and that the first thing she said after coming out of the fog was to acknowledge my existence.

  I watched her sip orange juice and bite the corner of a cracker.

  Good, the nurse said.

  Yummy, Sam said, and the nurse laughed.

  The nurse took her blood pressure and checked her pulse, and again said, Good. Then she said she was going to check on someone down the hall, and asked me if I could keep an eye on Sam.

  Just don’t have her up walking around yet, the nurse said.

  I said, Sure.

  Then we were alone, and Sam said, ECT. Electroconvulsive therapy. Shock therapy.

  I nodded, but I was kind of shocked.

  How was that? I asked after a while.

  Kind of fuzzy, she said. They drug the shit out of you first, so I don’t remember much. But I don’t know if it’s the drugs or the ECT. The tee hee hee.

  So that was how I first met Sam, and until she left, the week before Christmas, we were together pretty much all the time. I mean, not all the time. But a ton.

  The first three weeks, she was getting ECT twice a week, and I don’t know what she was like before, but she was definitely not paralyzed with depression after that. She was fuzzy and funny and pretty forgetful, but she was up and moving slowly around. I pictured bolts of lightning in the dark sky of her brain.

  We walked around outside with an aide, and she spent a fair bit of time reading. In the lounge, which had big couches and chairs, and in quiet rooms, where you could read or use your computer or write in a journal or write letters.

  It was kind of like Miss Porter’s, in some ways. Rich girls, only here, oddly, ironically, they were better behaved. Maybe because of the drugs, or the fact that there were way fewer of us. On our unit, there were just twelve of us, and my God, there was enough staff for fifty. Doctors and interns, nurses, aides, social workers, recreational and physical therapists, psychologists, grad students in biology, neurology, psychology, social work, public health. I don’t know what else.

  I’m from Philadelphia, Mount Airy, much of which is pretty ritzy. And Sam is from Chestnut Hill, which is just outside of Boston, like McLean, and very ritzy. We didn’t talk a lot during those first three or four weeks, when she was getting zapped. There were two other ECT girls on our unit—Melanie, who was pretty overweight, and way depressed, and Lila, who was small and had long black hair that usually covered her face. Lila was always cold, so she wore a ski sweater and one of those Peruvian hats with the earflaps and the strings hanging down from the earflaps.

  Maybe they were getting more voltage than Sam, or more sessions a week, but they seemed way more out of it. Not that Sam wasn’t fuzzy and foggy and forgetful, but she was up and around and doing things. She told me a little about herself. That she had no sisters or brothers, that her dad used to work for Fidelity, and now worked for Harvard in finance and IT security, and that they were probably moving to Ithaca in New York so he could work for Cornell. He was tired of working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks. Her mom used to be a banker in New York City before Sam was born, but after Sam was born, Sam was her full-time job.

  I was one of seven kids. Catholics, I told her. The middle of seven, and I was the designated fuck-up. Both my parents were attorneys, were partners in law firms in Philly. We probably had opposite problems. I got no attention; she got way too much.

  But there was something about Sam. She was just so gracious and thoughtful and kind. I felt like such a piece of shit, and she treated me like I was someone special, like I was someone with dignity, and deserved respect, and it started to kind of rub off on me. That if someone like this could think so well of me, and treat me so well and thoughtfully, then maybe I could treat myself that way too. Like just being with Sam made me respect myself more.

  Even though she was one of the ECT girls and wasn’t required to do much, like go to group, gym, or any of the therapy stuff except individual, she was usually in one of the quiet rooms, the lounges, in a big chair, under a blanket, reading. And she didn’t read crap. She was reading Lord Jim and Henry James and Willa Cather, and the thing that impressed the hell out of me, she was reading James Joyce. When I said something about that, she said, Oh, it’s only A Portrait. That’s like climbing Mount Washington. Ulysses is K2. Then she started to tell me about this German book, The Magic Mountain, where all these people are stuck for years in a TB sanitarium in the Alps.

  Kind of like
here, I said, and she laughed.

  Except a bunch of them die, and it ends in World War I, and that sucks.

  By the end of September, I think, her ECT sessions were done. They’d switched up meds on both of us, and neither of us could sleep. We’d lie in the dark and talk, and it was almost like we were little kids. I told her about going in our giant Suburban to our lake house in the Poconos, and how at night we built campfires and toasted marshmallows, and tried to tell ghost stories, but they only scared my youngest brother, Tad. And how going to bed really late on the sleeping porch there was a wonderful smell of wood smoke and lake and pine trees and wet towels and bathing suits. There was the sound of crickets, and moonlight, and it was delicious to lie there, so, so tired, but not wanting to sleep yet.

  Sam was quiet for a while.

  That sounds gorgeous, she finally said.

  You know what I could go for right now? I said.

  Yeah?

  A cigarette.

  You think we could bum one from Juanita? Sam asked, which surprised me.

  Juanita was a grad student who sometimes worked the night shift. We knew she smoked because we’d hear her prop the door open onto the patio, and we could smell the smoke.

  Sam called her Wan. She said, Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Why so pale and wan? It was from some old poem.

  We went out to the lounge, and the office next to the lounge.

  Wan was staring at her computer.

  Wan, I said, we can’t sleep, and we were wondering, I began.

  We’re dying for a smoke, Sam said.

  Wan said, You girls.

  You could tell Wan really liked and trusted Sam.

  Just one, Sam said.

  Wan smiled. Don’t breathe a word. And stay on the patio.

  She took a pack of Newport 100s from her bag, gave us each one, and said, Use the doorstop to prop the door open.

  We were leaving the office, and she said, Girls.

  We turned, and she was holding up a yellow lighter.

  Outside was beautiful, and though the moon wasn’t full, it was pretty close. One of those big October moons.