“Imagine trying to communicate with this person,” the book stated. I was imagining that, and it seemed nice, like a nice thing to do. Who wouldn’t want more allegro in the treatment? I wanted more allegro in everything. Could I imagine trying to communicate with this person? Yes! Communicating with an allegro-wanter felt like my life’s work, the goal of poetry, of writing. What I couldn’t imagine was happily communicating with a judgmental bystander.
My mother, however, would never approve of “a little more allegro” in anything.
The next key characteristic of schizophrenia was the tendency toward “word salad.” There was an example, a rambling block quotation that strung together a grandmother’s death, sunlight, dinner, and cats that didn’t exist, interspersed with inappropriate laughter. Again not my mother. Again more like me. “Word salad” was the exact name of a writing exercise I gave my students at the beginning of the year. In a piece of writing, those moves from death to dinner could be crucial, heartbreaking.
I opened a fat gray volume titled Schizophrenia. I found a chart that listed the warning signs of the disease: birth complications, separation from parents, withdrawn behavior, emotional unpredictability, poor peer relations, solo play. One could also consider this the recipe for becoming an artist, a writer.
I was just about to call it a day—all this was doing was calling my own identity into question—when a quote by John Ashbery caught my eye. “The lure of the work is strong,” he wrote about art by mental patients, “but so is the terror of the unanswerable riddle it proposes.” I wrote that down in my journal. I read it over. The lure of the work is strong, but so is the terror of the unanswerable riddle it proposes. It didn’t seem to be saying very much. Art by madmen was spooky? Still, I found the poet’s interest cool and reassuring. I turned the page and there were samples of schizophrenic artwork, two drawings and a painting.
I’d forgotten all about the collection of drawings I’d discovered in my mother’s closet when I was about nine, the paper yellow and brittle, cracking. They looked exactly like these. The drawings were of skulls. The skulls seemed on the verge of falling apart, as if whatever was inside was in the process of bursting out; craniums crackled with electricity and breakage. The irises were laced with elaborate jagged lines, crazed. Eyeballs sprang out of their sockets. Most of the skulls were mounted on spinal columns, the vertebrae singed, twisted, tilted, the bones way too far apart. The lines were thick and soft and crude, but there was an enormous amount of detail. I brought them to my mother and she said, “Put those back where you found them and do not root around in my things.” But I wouldn’t let it go. Finally, we went through them all together. My mother explained they were done by her sister, Katy, who’d been a talented artist, who should have gone to college but instead, right after high school, had married her sweetheart, also uneducated. Willard, my uncle. The high school janitor. My mother shook her head. Katy had made a huge mistake, not nurturing her talent. “You have her fingers,” my mother said. “You have the hands of an artist as well.” Don’t make her mistake, my mother said. Get your education. Don’t get pregnant, don’t get pregnant, don’t get pregnant.
I loved those drawings. I wanted us to have them on our walls. My mother forbade us to look at them. Whenever I was home alone, I would get them out and puzzle over what it was those skull heads knew that I did not know; they had such an air of secret insight, a glee in their own great otherness, such certainty. They could see without a doubt that I was a fool and due for a fall. And they seemed to say, You know it, don’t you.
But I’d never known my aunt. Katy hadn’t been able to leave her house, then her bedroom, in years. She’d died of emphysema, but no one had ever said that she was also mentally ill. My mother hadn’t gone to her funeral. She hadn’t gone to their mother’s funeral, either. I’d never spoken to any of the relatives on that side of the family, at my mother’s insistence. When I’d asked for their addresses to send them graduation announcements she’d said no, we can’t do that. They’ll think we are just asking for money. Yes, that was the point, I thought. But I followed her wishes. I didn’t want her angry at me. I didn’t want her to cut me off as she had them.
The big textbook fell open to another page, and there she was. A photograph was captioned The schizophrenic look: piles of formal but frenzied curls, low over the forehead. A pretty face, but a face covered with urgency, sheeted, closed, absolutely not okay. It looked exactly like my mother. I pored over the photograph. My mother had “the look.” I sat there, knowing this and not knowing it, both at the same time. As I always had.
I scanned through the index, looking for references to “children of schizophrenics.” I found a reference with “children” and “schizophrenia” that turned out to be a discussion of the diagnosis of schizophrenia in childhood; it was becoming more common, though still controversial. The next two references were equally unhelpful: long discussions of the controversy surrounding the “icebox mother,” a long-standing theory that cold mothers created schizophrenic children, currently disputed in the medical community. Was my mother an icebox mother? This was the problem with all this stuff. Everything seemed like it could fit, and nothing did. She wasn’t icy, really. She was more like all the kitchen appliances going at once.
Flipping through pages, I landed on a section about schizophrenics and faces. Schizophrenics made strange faces, faces that didn’t fit the situation.
This was my mother, no question about it. She made all kinds of faces; it was part of the way she communicated, punctuating her sentences with moues and quick grins and exaggerated expressions of surprise, Aha! If you walked by her eating at the table alone, her face looked like it was controlled by a radio dial twisted by an invisible hand, passing through expressions like radio frequencies, holding each for a second or two. She looked as if she were having an ongoing conversation with herself.
In childhood, I’d rankled whenever my father or any of his relatives said my gestures and expressions reminded them of my mother. I looked like the Sellers side, they all said, but I seemed like my mother. No, I said vigorously, I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see that I was like her at all. She was fair, blue-eyed. I was dark, auburn-haired. She’d visited me in college several times. “Your movements are just like hers!” friends had said. “No, no, no,” I’d said. “No.”
The passage explained that schizophrenics had trouble reading emotions. They couldn’t tell what someone was thinking by their facial expression. They couldn’t utilize social cues. Irony was not available to them. I skimmed along until two words brought me to a complete standstill: face recognition.
I put my finger on the words and closed the book over my hand. I closed my eyes. The book was talking about emotions on faces, but the phrase itself, face recognition, made it easy to conflate the two concepts: reading emotion and identifying faces. It was as if I’d shaken a kaleidoscope. It was all the same pieces, but suddenly a long sequence of misunderstandings, from when I was very young to just the night before, sprang into light, lined up, crystallized.
It was as though all along I had been someone else, and now I had a glimpse of who was who.
That night was to be my last with Dave and the boys for a long time. I had to return to upstate New York, where a stint as a visiting professor would run through to spring. I told Dave the whole story twice, in his arms. He smelled like popcorn and fresh laundry. He listened to all the details and then said yes, maybe there was a face thing. It explained a lot, he said.
Across the room, in his dresser, Dave had his list of goals for the year. I knew the list by heart: (1) Be kinder. (2) Run faster. (3) Be more loving. (4) Pray more. (5) Volunteer. (6) Find a great house for me, Heather, the boys and . . . ? (7) Buy a great van. I hadn’t known him even a year, but I told Dave, in that moment, that I wanted to marry him. He never yelled at his kids. He was patient and gentle and thoughtful. He never criticized me. He had only kind words for my parents. He held me and heard me. He loved me, an
d for the first time in my life, I was sleeping through the night. The guns, Libertarian websites, the stockpile of silver, the generator—these were differences of style, not deal-breakers.
“I want us to get married,” I said again in the morning.
He wanted me to think about it. He wanted me to be sure. I told him I wouldn’t ever be sure but we could at least try it. “We can always get a divorce,” I said, laughing. I was kidding. But I could see I hurt his feelings.
“I’m going to miss you guys,” I said. “A lot.” I leaned into the boys’ bedroom. They were playing a video game and didn’t move. They didn’t look at me or say anything. Their thumbs rolled over the little plastic buttons. I walked over, knelt down on the nest of comforters, among pizza boxes, empty Coke bottles, a bag of Doritos. I rubbed Jacob’s head. “You’re coming to see me soon. There’s Nintendo. In the house.” They didn’t take their eyes off the screen.
Down in the driveway, I loaded my stuff and the dog into my car. Dave sat in the passenger seat to say good-bye. “Don’t think about your mother too much,” he cautioned. “Think about some other things, too, okay?”
“Why did I take a job in another state again?” I said.
“You like to move,” he said. “You love being new. I want to be with you, honey. Don’t worry. We have plenty of time.”
I pulled out in my little car, watching him wave, and I wondered: If he walked down the street tomorrow in my little town in upstate New York, would I know it was he? Would I recognize this man? The man waving at me now, in my rearview mirror, was Dave. I knew this: I had just been standing there, next to him, in his embrace. But when I looked at him, I realized I had to say to myself: It’s him.
My new existence, twelve hours east of Dave and the boys, was like hiding from my life and coming into my life at the same time. Already, I was struggling to identify my new friends. In the classroom, students sat in the same seats and in small sections—twelve in a course—and the key to recognizing them was to memorize the pattern. But the women in my running group were difficult to tell apart. I couldn’t distinguish Bonnie from Betsey from Linda: it was always cold when we ran, and all that was exposed was our faces. Once, I commented on how hard it was to tell which was which, and Bonnie said, “Yeah, we get that a lot.” As in Michigan, I tended to avoid situations where I would run into people I was supposed to know. I shopped late at night. I skipped nearly every campus event. I made plans to attend readings or concerts or meetings, but when the hour drew near, I couldn’t overcome the urge to get into my big bed with a book.
My house was on campus, and the master bedroom was large, with a complicated roofline. My bed was like the bed in a fairy tale, high off the floor and tucked under the eaves. Tucked into this cozy nest, I called Dave on the telephone every night. I needed to talk about Sarah, my mother, and face recognition, over and over and over. What was paranoid schizophrenia, exactly? How did it get diagnosed? I was trying to get an outline, a shape for it.
Dave spoke the way a sofa would speak: slow, wide, comfortable, each word cushioned with space around it, upholstered. “Well, sweetheart, I’m not a psychiatrist,” he’d say carefully. Had they used the word schizophrenic around Sarah? I wondered. Dave said no. The diagnosis was so final, conclusive: it meant the end of hope for normal life. “You’re always going to find people will be slow to say that word or phrase out loud or in print. Sarah had been in the hospital when she was a teenage girl, but people probably wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt: this was a young girl who was upset, who had emotional issues. No one repeated the diagnosis aloud. They found ways to not buy into it. Not to be difficult, but for the sake of their daughter, out of hope. If you hadn’t known about it before, seen it before in someone else, you’d have said she was going through a rough patch, maybe going through it a little rougher than most people, but give her a couple of months to herself, let her have some therapy and rest, and it will all be fine.”
Most people thought Sarah was difficult, peculiar. “My mother,” Dave said, “thought Sarah was a pain.”
That word again. Peculiar. A code word we use when we don’t even know we’re using code.
Did he know before he married her? Had anyone ever said anything to him? Dave paused for a long time and then he said, “Rumors swirled around.” But people didn’t talk about mental breakdown. They worried. They worried they had caused it, contributed to it, or failed to prevent it. And their worry was diluted by the long stretches of fairly normal-looking life, ordered by all the desires humans have—for children, for dresses, for shrubs to plant along the back of the property line. There was always so much else to talk about.
In any case, Dave believed this avoidance of diagnosis was as it should be. Why would you go around telling everyone, Look out! Don’t let her have kids! She’s going to snap! Sarah’s parents loved their daughter and wanted her to have a normal life. Illness was a theory, something separate from the girl herself, a story made of her life. “Arguably, in a freedom-loving society, you are going to default to letting someone go off on their own.”
So her parents didn’t tell Dave about her hospitalizations. I knew my mother had dropped out of college for mysterious reasons. If it had been for a breakdown, it was understandable that she would have wanted to keep that information from my father. From me. From everyone.
I loved my mother and wanted her to have a normal life; I wanted people to think the best of her. I wanted them to think the best of me. I wanted my love for her to be right, not wrong. I obsessively thought about my mother. How could I diagnose her using a checklist in a book? How, when she fit the criteria perfectly, could I not? Most of all, I worried about my own ability to see things and know things: if she were a paranoid schizophrenic, how could I have fooled myself? Could I ever know for sure?
I called Dave and called him and called him and called him. I called him in the middle of the day, at work. He was unfailingly patient and kind. He seemed smarter than any doctor, any therapist. I worried about relying on him too much, but he said we were good. We were figuring it out.
One night, after tossing and turning at three a.m., I pulled on my running pants, found a scarf, hat, and gloves, and put on my coat over my pajamas. In the hall mirror, I looked like a mental patient. The dogs barked with joy.
I got the leashes but didn’t hook them up, and we walked around the block, loose. The streets of tiny Canton, New York, were deserted. My face was hard and my toes were numb. Streetlights flickered and buzzed, straining, it seemed, in the cold.
My neighbor Mrs. Knapp was watching television on her stiff velvet sofa, her chimney emitting a perfect constant S of smoke, as in a painting. A cheesy painting. It was like she was having ideas in there and they were coming out. Across the street I could see the backs of the heads of my colleagues Bob and Sarah, watching a black-and-white movie. I couldn’t believe so many people were up at three a.m. I couldn’t imagine myself in such a window, such a life, sitting so still, dishes done and put away, just the right amount of light to see by, to feel cozy by. I willed myself not to cry: the tears would freeze my eyelids shut.
At the bottom of Jay Street, I walked down the hill and cut over to the golf course, covered in a foot of crisp snow. Every once in a while the snow crust would break and the dogs would fall into a little crevasse of their own making, then clamber out and trot along sturdily, as though they’d never break through again.
I imagined my mom down in her house, in Florida, in her too-large flannel nightgown, the windows nailed shut, the air dusty and close. She wasn’t that bad. She was never as bad as Sarah. I couldn’t imagine telling anyone my mother was a paranoid schizophrenic. She bought groceries, baked cookies, kept up her yard, planted shrubs and small trees. Lately, she’d been going to an exercise class at the YMCA.
It would devastate her if I said these words out loud. She would never speak to me again. I tried saying it to myself: “My mother is mentally ill.” It was like walking out on ice in
the dark. I could only go a little ways, and then I skittered back to land. No, no, no, no. It was crazy! It was so melodramatic. She was my little mother, papery and difficult, like good stationery. I didn’t see how to be who I’d been all this time and also believe in those two words. Paranoid schizophrenic. It felt like saying “My mother is a hairy spider, and I am her spawn.” Freakish, larger than life, monstrous.
I could see it. My mother is paranoid schizophrenic. I could see the surface and the shape of it. But I couldn’t be in it. My mother was my mother. I walked and walked and walked and tried to get the two things to line up: my mother was really, really crazy, and I hadn’t known it. I herded the dogs back to my house on the hill. I looked up at the light coming from my capacious bedroom upstairs under the eaves, the windows revealing only part of what was inside. I remembered how when you are a little kid and you look at your house, you can’t figure out which window corresponds to what room. I couldn’t match up my experience of life with my mother with what it looked like from the outside.
For Christmas I went back to Michigan and played Nintendo and drank wine and snuggled into life with Dave and the boys. We house-hunted halfheartedly, talking in greater detail about construction techniques and roofing applications than about our relationship or the future. We barely talked about my mother. But back in Canton for the winter term, I resumed calling Dave every night, like a hotline. I asked him about different things my mother had done: not letting food touch other food; not letting me go to school activities, join a sport, march in band; not leaving the house after dark; not going to malls; not answering the phone. Were these examples?
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Page 9
