You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

by Heather Sellers

  I glanced over the application form she’d handed me. It was one page, two sides. At the top, with boxes next to them, were all the colleges in the state system. Florida State University. The University of Central Florida. The University of Florida.

  “Thanks,” I said. I wasn’t sure what box to check. I wasn’t sure what address to put, my mother’s or my father’s. I’d have to take my time with this form.

  “No,” she said. “No, no, no.” She finished typing and whooshed the letter out of her machine. “Check a box.”

  My hands were sweating. She handed me a pen and I wiped my hands on my pants and took it. In fourth grade, we had moved up to Tallahassee for part of a year, all four of us. It wasn’t clear why. We lived in a little apartment. Tallahassee had all four seasons, and hills, very “up North” and college-y. The kids all had gorgeous Georgia accents. My mother said I had to stop talking like those Georgia kids. I couldn’t stop. I contracted some bizarre illness and couldn’t go to school. I had a fever, hallucinations, rashes. My mother left me home during the day. I do not know where she went. One day I was better. She let me go back to school. Then my mother moved us back to Orlando and Fred stayed behind in Tallahassee.

  Florida State University was in Tallahassee. I checked it. Because I’d lived there. Because it wasn’t where everyone else was going. Because it was where Sara Simko was going. I had the strong feeling I had just changed the course of my life forever, and at the same time an equally strong feeling that nothing would change, ever.

  Our time was up. “Good luck, Heather,” the counselor said. She put her hand on my shoulder. In my heels, I was taller than her by more than a head. “Be smart, girl,” she said. “Be smart.”

  I stepped out into the hot general school office. A line of kids I didn’t know waited on the bench for their turns—we all had to have our relentless futures approved. I hid the packet of forms in my notebook. Most of my classmates already had their acceptances.

  Instead of going back to class, I walked down to the lake and lay on the grass and fell asleep wondering. I tried to remember what the sky had looked like up in Tallahassee. It seemed like it had been a different kind of sky, higher and smaller than our Orlando sky. But I had been just a little kid then. I lay there wondering, pretending hard not to hope. I could be a stewardess. If worse came to worst, I could completely lower myself and abandon all hope. There was a lot of that in Orlando.

  I thought about the neurologist visit a lot that spring. I waited and waited for Fred to say something about the results of the tests. I waited for the neurologist to call. I was sure he needed to send me to a specialist. In May, a few frayed-at-the-edges kids were still waiting for their college acceptance letters. I was waiting to see what was wrong with me.

  Then everyone was waiting for final report cards. I didn’t care at all about my grades: I was making either an A or an F in each class; I knew that there was nothing in between.

  I quit asking Fred if he’d heard word. He seemed to not remember that we’d gone to the neurologist, and sometimes I wondered if I had just dreamed it. But I remembered the little wheel on my knee, the little rubber mallet, the questions about the day, the president, where we were. I went through Fred’s mail. I thought about calling the office myself, but I couldn’t remember the man’s name. For the life of me, I could not remember. I looked under Neurology in the phone book, but no name looked familiar.

  Three

  In my second and third sessions, Peter Helder, Jr., wanted to know if I had discussed divorce with Dave. Had I approached the subject, since we were separated?

  “We’re not separated,” I said. “Not really.”

  “You don’t live together,” he said. “You are separated. You are estranged from Dave. Essentially, the marriage is non-relational.”

  Yes, yes, yes. I had talked around the subject of divorce with Dave. I had asked him if he thought we were separated. I had asked him what he thought about divorce. I had even asked him if he thought it was possible to get a divorce without hiring lawyers. Amicable? I said. The only time people ever used the word amicable was with divorce. I had said amicable a dozen times. Whenever I got near the subject, he looked haunted, or terrified, or furious. He would get a stony look on his face and then he would say he loved me, he didn’t want trouble, and he believed we had it real good.

  “We just got married,” I said to Helder. “It’s been such a short time. I have to try. Most of the problems are on my end: I brought so much baggage to this!” I’d be turning forty soon. There wasn’t time to find a whole other husband, start completely over. “We’re not officially separated,” I said. I proposed bringing Dave into therapy. I wanted to work on the problems. I wanted to read a helpful book on marriage and do sex homework and learn communication skills. Like normal unhappy couples.

  Helder said we weren’t in a homework situation. We didn’t even live together. “I think you’re hiding behind Dave. Dave is your defense.”

  I didn’t understand. Helder talked about codependence. A term I’d heard for years and thought I’d understood and wisely dismissed. I’d suspected there was something silly about codependence: Wasn’t there a book on this topic that was generally mocked? But as Helder talked, I realized I didn’t understand codependence at all, I never had. I needed Dave to be weak so I could be weak? I needed Dave to be weak so I could be strong? I tried to take notes as Helder talked on and on, but I couldn’t complete sentences. The page in my notebook from that third session read:The most important thing . . .

  Ambivalence doesn’t have . . .

  Neutral ambivalence

  Until you . . .

  When I looked back at my notes in order to see what it was I was learning, and I found these fragments, I was surprised and stymied. Why didn’t I write down the important things? What were the missing parts of the sentences? Why couldn’t I remember?

  Helder said I needed to speak from a clear position, take a stand. He said I could tell Dave that I was through trying to change him. “I am pursuing divorce to protect me from my desire to change you.” He said I needed to say aloud to Dave: “You have abdicated your responsibility as an adult.”

  I could never say these things to Dave, hurt him this way. Helder said this was a feeling state, a child part of self, a girl who felt she wanted someone to fix things, wanted someone to know her and understand. “This is a feeling,” he said. “Not a position.” He said Dave was a really good man who had a lot of trouble committing to people, life, himself, relationships. We weren’t a good match. He understood my family and that made him super-compelling, super-comfortable. For me to be in a relationship that did fit would be very uncomfortable.

  Helder wanted me to divide myself into one hundred parts. Like a senate. And then take a poll. How many senators thought the Dave relationship was going somewhere? How many saw a future?

  I froze. I saw my senators; that part was easy. But they all looked very serious and stern and foreboding. I was scared to ask them for their opinions. “Vote?” I said to Helder.

  “If my wife told me she was thinking about divorce, I would be galvanized into action,” Helder said. “If my wife said, ‘Pete, I have some serious issues and I am thinking about leaving this marriage,’ I would be on the move,” Helder said. “That would get my attention. Dave seems to be shut down. Not really engaged in this relationship.”

  But he was so kind. So patient. He’d helped me so much.

  “And you can honor that,” Helder said. I was crying by then. He called that grief. But I said no. No, it was hope, it was hope and I wanted to try. I would bring Dave to counseling.

  Libertarians, Helder said, didn’t come to therapy, and when they did, they didn’t do well. They had a very structured world-view, one that wasn’t up for discussion. On that note, we have to end.

  I leaned forward but didn’t stand up. “I came to therapy to talk about my mother,” I said. “Not really my marriage.”

  He stood up and brushed h
is sweater. He said I was learning to talk about my life more objectively so that it felt like a part of my life and not a part of myself.

  “Wait.” I got my notebook back out of my purse. I didn’t care I was making him late for the next session. I wrote down the sentence I am trying to learn to talk about all this more objectively so that it feels like a part of my life and not a part of myself.

  Then, with my hand on the doorknob, I told him Dave had bought a project at Goodwill, a Viking ship made by a kid, a giant and flimsy thing, thinking Jacob could use it at some point at school, to turn in. It was an abdication, wasn’t it? “Jacob might not even have a Viking unit! But he should do the work himself.”

  “This is a doorknob moment,” Helder said, “like when the patient says, leaving the office, ‘I slept with him.’ Then they walk out!”

  “That too,” I said.

  He smiled and handed me my receipt. “See you next week,” he said. He was friendly and closed for business.

  In the parking lot, in my car, I read over my notes. I tried to remember what words might go in the blanks. Internal world re-created in external world, I remembered from another session. My pages of fragments: this notebook was me. Some beginnings. Some attempts. Gathering glimpses at all the little pieces. No complete thoughts, no wholes.

  I started my car and eased out of the lot. I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn’t even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of the sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them.

  From therapy, I drove directly to my classroom on campus. I went from a room where I knew nothing, not even myself, where I wept and didn’t understand why, into a room where I was supposed to know many things for certain, where I could never break down. I was supposed to know titles and themes and how to use words like heuristic and hegemony. I was supposed to teach fiction and explain “hidden meanings” and point out the significance of the epiphany.

  With my students, I used stories about Dave and the boys like giant cardboard cutouts that I dragged in and set up and pointed to. Sons! Husband! My life! My life with them was proof that I was normal, certification that I was allowed to talk about the muscles and heartbeats in Hemingway’s sentences at swanky little Hope College. When I made this little show, I couldn’t imagine my life without Dave and the boys. My family! They were my way into living in the normal world. My only way in. I loved them. I loved talking to my students as this woman, this normal woman, who could amuse and delight and surprise.

  Helder said the goal of therapy was to make a container to hold all the disparate selves.

  I was going to need a big container. One that could hold hordes.

  “A very strange, upset, concerned person called you,” the department secretary informed me. “I didn’t get her name. I really couldn’t understand a word she was saying. This might be her number.” She handed me a slip of paper with the scrawled digits.

  It was Bernie, calling about my mother. A month had passed, and they were still in Wisconsin, still well within range of a visit. My mother had planned to spend a week or so with me and then ride out hurricane season, the rest of the fall, in Wisconsin, with Bernie. But all week my mother, it seemed, was complaining of debilitating leg pain. She couldn’t walk. Couldn’t eat any of Bernie’s food.

  “I’m concerned but I feel completely helpless, with no solution,” Bernie told me. “She’s really angry at me that I am calling you, she’s very perturbed. She told me she is a very private person and if I told you anything, she’d never confide in me again. So we need to be discreet, Heather. I think I have to take her to the emergency room. This will be against her will.”

  “Is it really her leg?” I asked Bernie. It was for “leg pain” she’d gone to the hospital for extended stays after I was born, after my brother was born.

  “I was going to the Sunrise Service at six-thirty this morning. She left me a note in the bathroom that said she would not be able to go to church with me, that the pain had gone to her knee. I went back for the eight a.m. service, and then when I returned from that she was up and about and she did seem better. She wants to go home. I’m worried about her traveling. I think her doctor should give the okay. She said she has several doctors. I think the new one is named Pistachio. Does that sound familiar?”

  “She doesn’t go to doctors,” I said. I wondered if Dr. Pistachio was as invented as it sounded. I asked Bernie: could it be an emotional problem? Did my mom seem more anxious, more nervous than usual? Had she said why she wasn’t eating?

  “She’s always nervous, I guess, isn’t she?” Bernie feared an embolism like the one that had killed my mother’s father. My mother seemed forgetful. Had I noticed that? “I don’t know why she is such a private person,” Bernie said. “It’s so difficult to deal with! I’m so open—you can read me like a book. I share all my frustrations and joys and feelings with friends. All I can tell you, Heather, is to pray. I’m going to try to get her to a doctor. I’ll keep you posted.”

  That evening I called Bernie again. I asked if I could talk to my mom.

  “I am enjoying myself so much! The pace is so relaxed and pleasant,” my mother said in grand and formal tones. “We have daily walks and Bernie has an outstanding minister. Love going to the little Lutheran church where she is a member.”

  “Are you doing okay? Do you feel okay?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she said grandly. “Just spoiled!” She tittered. “That Bernie has prepared some great meals and has really spoiled me! It’s almost too much! I can’t eat this much food! Oh my goodness. Haven’t even washed a dish! We think of you often!” Then she said she knew how busy I was at work, a lot of pressure, a lot of deadlines, how sorry she was that I had to work so much. Would I, she wondered, ever get a break? I knew she was waiting for me to say it was okay to come visit.

  I didn’t say anything. This cheery, formal version of my mother was just one version cycling through. Don’t get sucked in, Dave was always saying to me. Kind of like Helder’s container idea: Notice everything, but don’t buy into it. Hold it. “Heather, you understand everything. You really do. I don’t have to spell it out. I’m not sure Bernie picks up on my cues sometimes and I can’t be rude, I couldn’t hurt her feelings for the world! But it’s so nice of you—you really do read between the lines. I’m a very laid-back person! You understand!”

  I waited.

  “I have to get back home,” she whispered. “Right away.”

  My students complained, as did the boys, that I read into everything. But for so long, I hadn’t read into things nearly enough. My mother and I had operated on a normal surface, conspiring to keep the disturbance beneath a secret. Now I read clearly: My mother had leg pain and wanted to go home. But I was also pretty sure I could read something else: My mother was having a psychotic break and needed the safety of home. She knew I knew the code.

  For the first time in my life, I felt I could see all the versions of my mother at once. For the first time, I recognized my mother and saw chaos for what it was: chaos. It was something I knew, but not something I was in. I felt clear and strong and calm. I didn’t need her to see me or know me; she wasn’t going to be able to do that. And I could see what needed to happen next. I could hear Helder whispering in my ear: Sure, help her, do the good-daughter thing—but do it for yourself and with no attachment to any outcome. Nothing you do will hold. Nothing will change. You can live with a lack of clarity.

  My mother returned to Orlando. She didn’t visit and she didn’t refer to it in any way, ever. When I spoke with her, she hardly seemed to remember the summer, my marriage problems, her trip to Bernie’s, her vow to stop speaking to me—any of it.

  “Love the class,” a student said to me after class. “You’re, like, so positive. Even with the people who suck so bad, you find something nice to say, and it’s true! I wish there were more professors like you.” She slung her backpack onto my table. “Are you always like this
? Are you like this with your stepsons? Are you exhausted when you get done?”

  And then she burst into tears. She blew her nose in napkins from her backpack, apologizing. “I’m not usually like this! I am so sorry!” I wished I knew who she was. Had she been coming regularly? She said she didn’t think she could stay in the class, even though it was her favorite. She knew what she was supposed to be writing about, but she couldn’t bear to do it. She didn’t know what to do. She leaned over her knees, hugging herself.

  “You don’t have to write about anything upsetting. There’s not a topic you should write about. I say go with the easiest thing, always.” This was the opposite of what I’d said in class.

  She leaned back down onto her knees and it all came out in one giant paragraph. Her roommate was date-raped at a frat party and wouldn’t go to counseling; the guy asked out their suitemate, who agreed to go. “I’m totally overwhelmed,” the girl said. “I’m freaking out.” This was why she couldn’t write. She couldn’t think of anything else. Then she laughed and wiped her face on her bare arms. “I can’t believe I’m like this,” she said. “I’m, like, psychotic.”

  No, I told her, with great confidence. She wasn’t psychotic. I wrote down the name of the counselor I liked best at the college and I told her if her roommate wouldn’t go, it would be good if she did.

  “You think I need a shrink,” she said. “I can see why.” She laughed some more and put her hands over her face. “Oh man!”

  “Your homework tonight is to not do the writing homework. I want you to not do the reading, either. Your homework is to make an appointment with Jeanne. In class, write about tiny things. Nothing upsetting. Go slowly. The feelings are overwhelming, but they’re not you. They’re the feelings. You are separate, and you are strong and amazing and good.” This was direct quoting from Dr. Peter Helder, Jr., Vulture 101. I had added strong, amazing, good.