I was so distracted that I took the wrong tram. I tried to stay calm; I had hours to find my gate. I had just oriented myself in the right direction, down the correct corridor, when who should come lumbering up, out of breath, looking frantic and pissed-off, but Keith Landreu.
“Frick,” Keith said, reading something on the bank of the monitors. I stood there, unable to speak or scoot away. “Fucking A.” He looked right at me, for help, for someone to blame.
He wasn’t Keith. He didn’t have Keith’s voice.
This happened, I knew, to everyone. When we were upset, we saw the people on our mind in everyone else. I knew it was common, like déjà vu, but still, whenever it happened—whenever I mistook someone for someone else—it made me feel haunted, lunatic. I often said hi to people, just in case I knew them. “Do you know him?” a friend would say, and I never knew how to respond. Maybe?
Faux Keith lumbered on his way. And I stood there, breathing as though I’d been chased, in the middle of a busy corridor of the Orlando International Airport.
On the plane, I pressed my face hard to the glass. I said a prayer for my dad as we bellied over his house. I could see his car. With one arm, one leg, and a rusty red knob bolted to the steering wheel, gin between his legs, he was still a better driver than I was. He never got lost. He never got caught. He knew all the shortcuts and two-tracks.
I watched Orlando turn into a tiny toy town, and then Florida became a patch of squares of sodden green and tan, pocked with blue lakes and gray rivers. Then we were above the clouds, which looked like a silver-white floor that would hold us if we fell, and I slept.
2
One
In my new third grade, no one looked familiar, not even the teacher. I wasn’t sure I was even in the right classroom. Already, I had attended six different schools. I was the perpetual new girl, trying to figure out who everyone was. I was shy and unresponsive. When I was called up to write cursive letters on the board, I wanted to, desperately. I loved letters. But I could not make myself get out of my seat.
My mother wanted me to work on the expression on my face. I always looked so sad when she picked me up. The word she would use, she said, was bereft. She wanted me to try at least to look happy. She was worried the school would call and report her for mistreatment of a child. “Maybe you can offer to help the teacher. A teacher can be a friend. The best way to find a friend is to be a friend,” she said in a singsong voice that didn’t sound like her at all.
My third-grade teacher, Miss Tolbert, was not a friend kind of teacher. She wore tiny suits, smoked Virginia Slims at recess, and snacked on Butterfingers in the afternoon. She despised me because I couldn’t talk in class. When I was called on, I knew what to say but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth.
During recess, I hung around Miss Tolbert while everyone else ran around screaming their heads off. I communicated with Miss Tolbert telepathically. How old are you? Do you have a boyfriend? I know you have Butterfingers in your desk drawer but I won’t tell! She never answered. She wasn’t even trying to receive my subliminal communications.
I wasn’t worried about not fitting in with the other kids. I was worried about how I didn’t fit in my family. When I watched other kids playing, I wasn’t wishing for friends. I was wondering which ones had mothers who would adopt an extra girl.
The summer after third grade, my father seemed to be around a lot more. He was no longer away on business for months at a time. On weekends he grilled shrimp and steaks on the back patio, tossing me little bits of raw meat, for which I begged. My mother laughed and sang bouncy songs from the 1930s, from her childhood, and made gleeful faces and little waving motions with her hands, like rainbows. We went to Missouri, all of us, and my father drove us all to Nashville to an accountants’ convention, where activities were organized for families. My mother began to talk about wanting another baby. At this, my father’s face would turn dark, and dinners would end abruptly. Still, we were back to being a family. It seemed as though we’d been through something unpleasant and mysterious and now we were back on track.
And there was hope for me being a normal girl. Mysie Fenton, who lived down the street, invited me on an overnight trip to her grandparents’ beach condo in Smyrna. And I was allowed to go. Mysie’s parents were Christian Scientists and she couldn’t have any medicine of any kind, ever. My mother respected them for marching to their own drummer. We did not take medicine, but we were not part of a religious movement. We were allowed to have half a baby aspirin in an emergency.
Mysie and I swam all day, and in the afternoon her mother made us lie down and rest but we could talk. As we lay on the shag carpet, propped up on our elbows, touching, we examined her copies of Teen Beat. She wanted to talk about which Cassidy was our favorite, about the Osmonds, and about Leif Garrett and how he liked pink, and might wear lipstick—just for photographs. What did I think? Did he? Was I really looking? Was I getting bored? Mysie already had boobs. She wore a mesh bra-vest, like a little half tank top. It did not obscure the boobs. In fact, it made me look at them more.
I didn’t have a favorite singer. What was the point of choosing one? They were all exactly the same: blond shaggy boys in white shirts open way low. I wanted to go outside and body-surf and count bird flocks; I had a theory I liked to test, that they were always an odd number. But to be polite, I told her I just could not decide which boy I liked. I liked them all the same, I said. Her mother said it was good I wasn’t so boy-crazy; Mysie should try to be more like me. I loved Mrs. Fenton. I thought she was brilliant and kind and wise.
But I am boy-crazy, I wanted to say. I’m completely boy-crazy. I just can’t tell any of those star boys apart. I didn’t want to like odd boys; it was just that they were the ones I could tell apart from the others. I kept quiet, though. I wanted to keep my membership as a near-Fenton. But the more time we spent looking at those magazines, the more I hated the Cassidy boys, and Leif, and their ridiculous pouts and bubbles of thought and blow-dried hair. Mysie kissed the pages. I restrained myself from eating them.
Miraculously, I was asked back. Mysie’s mother called and asked me to put my mother on. My mother, in a fake-friendly voice, made all the arrangements with Mrs. Fenton, but when she hung up she was livid. “What have I said over and over and over again about not answering the phone? We never know who it is going to be. And the phones aren’t safe. We have to keep that kind of communication to a minimum.” I was to walk down to the Fentons’ and politely tell Mysie that we had chores to catch up on and I wouldn’t be able to go after all. I was hysterical, but finally I went. Mysie and her mother came to the door in matching aqua shifts. I told them my family was going camping, but thank you for the invitation and feel free to invite me again.
“Oh, so special and adventurous. Camping where?” Mrs. Fenton said. I panicked. Where did anyone camp? Why couldn’t I think? Camping, camping, camping. I had no idea. I ground my teeth, turned, and ran home, windmilling my arms, pretending that I wasn’t really a lunatic and a terrible liar.
That same summer, when things came so close to normal, my entire family went to a pool party at the Ahearns’. My father knew them from work, a very nice, conscientious, Catholic family with good values, my mother said. She put on a blue knit pantsuit and a watch. She packed towels and made a cake, as though we visited people all the time.
It was exotic and wonderful to be all in the same car together. As we sped across Orlando, my mother gripped the handle on the glove box with one hand and the armrest inside her door with the other and closed her eyes. Let me walk, she begged. Just let me out of this death trap. My father told her to shut up. My brother and I hunkered down in the way back. My mother cautioned me to work on my expression. I had the pout again. The despairing pout.
The three Ahearn girls were lined up on the stoop in front of their house. My father and Mr. Ahearn went out back with beers. I followed my mother inside. Mrs. Ahearn and my mother sat in the kitchen, wallpapered with black kettl
es and cooking pots, and they talked and talked. My mother was not herself, but in a good way. She talked fast, with exclamation points. Mrs. Ahearn told me to go play with the other kids. I slunk down onto the floor, behind my mother’s chair. My mother said that the Ahearns had the nicest noses. Perfect aquiline noses. The Ahearn girls were going to grow up to be beautiful women.
“How can you tell?” I said. I was hanging in the doorway now, leaning into the kitchen from the foyer. “How can you tell they will be beautiful women?”
“How could you not tell?” the new version of my mother said. She looked at Mrs. Ahearn with pity, as though she were sorry I’d said such a rude blind thing. The bone structure, my mother said. She couldn’t explain it. They just had the right kind of bones, and perfect noses. I asked my mother what kind of nose I had.
“Honey,” she said. “Please. You have a fine nose. Weren’t you asked to go play, nicely?”
What kind, though? I needled. I knew she would have to be nice in front of Mrs. Ahearn. How come I hadn’t known noses came in styles?
“I think someone is fishing for compliments,” my mother said.
I got tears in my eyes. I wasn’t fishing. I just wanted to know if I had the right kind of nose to become a beautiful woman. It was looking like no.
My mother got up from her chair and said please excuse her. She grabbed my shoulder hard and steered me to the front door. “We are guests in this house,” she hissed. “Go play with the children.”
I didn’t want to go play with those kids. I was sobbing, shaking. I could see myself in the hallway mirror. My mother was standing across from me, leaning over, hands on her hips. “Please just tell me what nose,” I said. “What kind?”
“Button,” she said. “I’d say closest to button.”
“A cute little button nose?” I said. I stepped toward her and put my arms around her waist. She pulled back.
“Well,” my mother said, appraising me, hard. “Your nose isn’t your strongest feature, honey, I’m sorry to say.”
What was my strongest feature?
I had nice hair, she said. She was kneeling down before me. She had given in to niceness. “Now, honey, please. Please do as you have been asked! I’m begging you,” she pressed. “I’ll be right there, Margot,” she called to the kitchen, in a fake, I’m so embarrassed way.
I spent most of the party in the backseat of the car. At some point my mother joined me, slumped against the door of the passenger seat. Other neighbors had arrived, and they weren’t quality people.
“You can’t stand people having fun,” my father said when he finally came out to the car. He was wearing a towel around his shoulders, no shirt. It wasn’t our towel. He drove home with a beer in one hand, steering with the other. My mother said he shouldn’t drive with a beer, it wasn’t safe. He yelled at her. “Why are you so goddamned averse to having a good time, to happiness?” He sounded perplexed and furious, like stripes.
I hung over the edge of the seat, begging them to stop fighting. “You are as bad as she is,” he said. Then he took the beer and poured what was left into my mother’s lap. He held the can way up high, and the stream of beer looked like pee. My mother didn’t move until he was done. Then she snapped out of it. “Thanks,” she said. “Thank you for cooling me off.” She made sweet faces. “I was really hot and now, thanks to you, I am all refreshed. You are a wonderful, thoughtful person.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “You are a swell guy, real swell guy.” The car smelled like beer, like pee, like sour bread. Soon enough, my brother and my father started fighting, and my father pulled over, and my mother screamed, and I screamed for it all to stop, and that was the unequivocal end to our stint as a happy normal family.
Two
“You’re going to cry,” Molly said. I was in my early thirties, and Molly was an ex-boyfriend’s sister with whom I’d kept in touch, off and on, for years. We sat on the green carpet in her living room. Recently she had put all her Super 8 movies onto videotape, and she said there were great ones of me, playing with her babies. I didn’t think I would cry. I thought it would be fun. Politely, I watched as unfamiliar babies played to the sounds of Windham Hill. I spotted younger versions of my boyfriend, always smoking a cigarette, his long yellow hair pasted to the sides of his head, his yellow long board under his arm, wearing the red flowered bathing suit I had mended more than once. I remembered that bathing suit of his, how it had felt in my fingers, stiff and sexy on him. I figured one woman for a younger Molly, the others her friends. Strangers frolicked on the beach, kids played in a baby pool. People held up giant submarine sandwiches to the camera, grinning. I didn’t cry. I didn’t feel anything. I waited. Maybe the part with me was coming up later.
I looked at Molly. She was sniffling on the sofa. When the tape ended she said, “You looked so cute with short hair. Do you think about cutting it again like that? And God, that body of yours.”
After that, I avoided situations where people might ask me to watch family videotapes or look through photographs. I was unable to shake the idea that something was radically wrong, but I tried not to think about it. I hoped it wouldn’t happen again.
I thought: So many people look the same, everyone dresses the same. I thought: I am not paying enough attention. I thought: I’m fucked up, an introvert, a narcissist. I’m dumb, socially awkward, a misfit, self-defeating, self-absorbed. In the years after college, it had gotten harder and harder to make friends. I was mostly alone. In my heart of hearts, I knew what the problem was. I was mentally ill.
On the flight back to Michigan, I went over and over all that had happened in Florida, feeling increasingly foolish. My mother hadn’t ever been diagnosed, as far as I knew. I never saw her take a pill—she refused to take so much as an aspirin. When she broke her arm, she wouldn’t go to the hospital—she lay in the garage for two days, she told me months later, rather than face a doctor. True, she’d been in the hospital at least once in the past that I knew of, and for mysterious reasons: “her legs.” Still, the mentally ill whom I was aware of cycled between group homes, the streets, and hospitals. A mother couldn’t be crazy and her daughter not know. I’d confronted my mother and upset my father because of a high school boyfriend’s offhand remark, his cruel theory. None of it made sense. But it also did.
When I landed in Michigan, I drove straight from the airport to the nearest bookstore. I settled down on the floor in the psychology section and read.
One in a hundred people developed schizophrenia, and this was true across cultures, all over the world. The disease ran in families. A parent afflicted with schizophrenia produced children with drastically greater odds of developing the disease: one out of ten children of schizophrenics had the illness. It always got worse, never better; it was difficult to treat, and incurable.
Schizophrenia wasn’t one thing, though. Schizophrenia was a group of things, a cluster of disorders affecting thinking, emotion, perception, and action. There were a lot of kinds, sizes, and shapes; sufferers tended to have wardrobes of schizophrenic disorders. The illness cycled, symptoms going into remission, then coming back, often worse than before. When some symptoms receded, others came to the fore. Some schizophrenics did quite well for long periods of time.
My mother had cycles. I’d never really thought of her habits in that way. Some of the time she was like any mother, baking four-layer cakes, taking trips to Jetty Park, buying me sandals, putting up the Christmas tree. Then suddenly she would pack us up: we had to move, we had to get out. In the middle of the night. What about school? Not to worry. She was a teacher. She would teach us. We could live in the back of Suzy for a bit.
Until she found some work. Sometimes she took off for days and days on her own. I was scared and proud to be in the house by myself. When she was gone, I felt like a character in a book. When she was gone, time slowed down into a force that felt endlessly absorptive, like a vacuum.
Most of the time, her reasons made sense—as much sense as adult re
asons ever make to a child. I had to wear strange used clothes because we were not rich. Trends were for sheep, fools. We had to move because she was dead set against the divorce, the bank was foreclosing. The wrong food contained toxins that killed people; people had died from eating food they thought was perfectly safe. I couldn’t argue. Her bizarre habits were swirled into the days with no obvious pattern; she happened like life, in hours, in years.
Maybe it wasn’t just that I had gone back and forth, between her house and my father’s house. Maybe she, too, had gone back and forth: okay, not okay.
I set the book down, embarrassed. Wasn’t I just being melodramatic? This was what people always did. They read about disorders, and suddenly everything applied to everyone. I was keeping a score sheet in my head, two columns. She has it. She doesn’t. She has it. She doesn’t.
I opened up an introductory psychology textbook to the section on schizophrenia. It opened dramatically: “Schizophrenia is without a doubt the most dreaded psychological disorder. If depression is the common cold of psychological disorders, schizophrenia is the cancer.” The cancer. I thought of my mother: a thin, terrorized specter in the hallway.
What exactly made schizophrenia schizophrenia, and not something else? The book said that what separated schizophrenia from the other disorders was strange thinking. This made me angry and, like Dave, distrustful of diagnosis. I loved strange thinking. My work as a teacher of creative writing was to lead students to strange their thinking. The example of strange thinking in the book was disturbing to me: “One man begged for ‘a little more allegro in the treatment.’ ”
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