Six
After a few weeks, Face and Mind was almost entirely highlighted in bright yellow. One night, I sat down with the boys on the sofa and told them I had an important announcement. Jacob said, “This can’t be good.” It was good, in a way, I explained. I had a rare neurological disorder. I wanted them to know about it so they wouldn’t be hurt or confused when I had trouble recognizing them. Dave was sitting on a stool in the corner of the living room. He had a beer in one hand. His laptop was on his thigh. I thought he should be listening. I felt I was going about this all wrong.
“You don’t have anything, Heather.” Junior stood up. “But I gotta go, sorry.”
“Wait,” I said. Dave told him to sit back down until I was done.
I explained, in simple terms, what I had learned. I asked the boys to let me know who they were if they were aware that I wasn’t recognizing them. Like if they ran into me downtown or came by my office unexpectedly.
Junior covered his face. “Who am I?” he said in a singsong voice. “You don’t know who I am?” He was half mean, half kidding.
It was just a tiny glitch, I said. I used hair, and context, and voice, but I made lots of mistakes. It wasn’t a mental illness, but it had been very frustrating for me. When I saw them out in public, I said, I might not know who they were. Or I might.
Jacob said he wore a tie-dyed T-shirt all year round, so that would make it easier. “You know me,” he said.
“Except at our school that is basically the uniform, tie-dye,” Junior squawked, his voice cracking. “I gotta go,” he said again, and this time he flew out of the room, slamming the front door.
“Everyone has hair. I don’t see the problem,” Jacob said. He patted my leg. He went to his room.
“They’re fine,” Dave said. “They’re just boys. They’re interested in their Nintendo and when is the pizza going to appear, and that’s about the extent of it.” He was fiddling with his computer.
I sat on the couch and stared at the carpeting for a long, long time. This wasn’t an easy thing in general, but for the boys I suspected it hit too close to home, because of their mother. I said this to Dave. He didn’t think they thought about their mother at all. “They think of her every single day,” I said. “Every single day. She is with them every single day.”
I called my doctor and told him I wanted to be tested for face recognition.
He said, “What?”
“I believe I have face blindness,” I said. I didn’t say prosopagnosia. I didn’t want him to think I thought I was smarter than him, a prima donna, a showy, knowy bitch.
“You’re having vision problems? Confused?” he said. “Headaches?”
“I’m not confused,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m sure I have face blindness. I want to be tested for it.”
“No,” he said. “That’s extremely rare. You don’t have that, Heather. Insomnia, shortness of breath, diarrhea? Heart palpitations? Numbness?” He was one of those doctors who speak in lists.
“I can’t recognize people,” I said assertively.
“I’m terrible with names too. It’s not really a serious problem, Heather.”
I resisted the temptation to launch into a discussion of person identity nodes and name retrieval processes. I said, “There could be a tumor, or something—a stroke, maybe something from the car accident. I don’t know. That’s why I want to see a specialist. I have to pursue this. If I can get it fixed, I want to do so.”
“You’re having headaches?”
I wasn’t, but I said I was. Yes, headaches.
He said he’d write the referral, I could see a neurologist, get an MRI. “But you are fine, Heather.”
Dave thought I was subjecting myself to needless trouble and anxiety and expense, but he said he’d be there whenever I needed him to be. He visited me every couple of days; I visited the boys in the afternoons, bringing them socks, pizza, Gatorade, pencils. On weekends, we ate out, impersonating a family. I bugged the boys about their grades. In my driveway, after the boys got out and jogged up the street to the apartment, Dave bugged me about bugging them. “They’re not used to being talked to like that,” he said. “I don’t want them to have complexes.”
I couldn’t give up on how I wanted the boys to be raised. As long as we were married, I felt entitled to vote. “It’s not going to work unless we unmarry,” I said. I told Dave I was thinking about a do-it-yourself divorce. I had books from the library. There was a book for Michigan. We could be like we were before. “If I’m the girlfriend, I can keep quiet,” I said.
“You know I don’t like to give advice,” Dave said. “But objectively, I think this is a really bad idea, it would be really bad for you. You shouldn’t have married me. And you shouldn’t divorce me.” He’d said this before.
The brain, I had recently learned, has one task: to make sense. It is a visual organism, and for things to make sense, the eyes have to be level. The perceiving system does not function properly if the eyes aren’t level. If a person is walking unevenly, because of back pain or a sore foot, the legs automatically compensate, one limping, dragging, slowing, or kicking out so it takes longer to arrive and complete the step—whatever it takes to keep the eyes at perfect level. The whole body works, in fact, for the eyes. Your knee might be torqued, your femur out of alignment, but the incoming visual information will route correctly. The brain cannot handle tilted.
Dave and I were tilted.
“It would be a trial separation. If we aren’t yoked financially, car insurance, all that stuff, we’ll get along better.”
“So why did we get married?” he said.
Because I wanted to leave home; he knew where I was from. Because he had the map from one place to another. Because I loved him and, despite my parents, he loved me, even us.
I was beginning to think of prosopagnosia as a key part of who I was, and to consider how it might have protected me or steered me through my childhood. The condition demanded a relationship with ambivalence, an acute ability to not-know, a comfort with postponing certainty, a familiarity with chaos and doubt. What was negative capability if not a kind of prosopagnosia? I considered everything from a place of profound uncertainty, and considering my mother in this manner must have helped me cope. Not knowing her was possibly the only way to have loved her the way I did. I was used to being blind-sided: Oh, you aren’t who I thought you were at all.
Generally, Dave encouraged me not to talk to my mother when I was tired, alone, hungry, or upset about something else. He vetted her letters for me, promising to let me know if there was anything important in them. He strongly believed schizophrenia wound down in the elderly—they just didn’t have the energy to make everything topsy-turvy anymore.
“I’ll try every hour on the hour,” my mother would say on the answering machine, and she did, leaving the same message each time. Then weeks would pass when she wouldn’t call or answer her phone. Sometimes her neighbor, Pilar, left a message: “We are a little worried about your mom. She doesn’t appear to have gone to the grocery store. She won’t eat anything we take over. She says she has trouble with her legs.”
When we did speak, I never mentioned anything about my research, my theories. Sometimes she went on about how she and my father had raised me to be an intelligent, special person. “I just can’t believe you work for so little money. You should be making decent money. With all that education? All those years of school? It’s ridiculous. It’s a crime.” I kept my mouth shut. I pretended to go along. I was accustomed to pretending; it was only weird now to recognize it as that, pretending.
In the same conversation she could plummet. “I was a terrible, terrible mother,” she would say in drastic tones, weeping. “I don’t know how you can forgive me.” I stayed away from the past; any question about my childhood and she would clam up, hang up, not call back for days. She changed the subject if I mentioned Dave, the boys, house-hunting, my marriage.
I was proud of how I handled her now. I pretended
my mother was a near-extinct, exotic bird. You had to be very subtle and cagey in your approach. You had to hold out your hand and pretend you wanted anything other than for her to land there. I loved the feel of her feathers, the glance of them on my palm, the whisper, and I worked for it.
Whatever secrets my mother harbored, I’d always thought I had to find them out, or that someday she really was going to tell me. I always felt I had to know—the answer, the story. I’d organized myself around the feeling that I was wrong for not knowing. Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that I had known all along, that I was the one responsible for articulating this knowing, and for telling what I knew.
I re-saw everything; I remembered things I’d never before considered. The mother who made perfect Chex Mix. The mother who was passionate about The Sound of Music. The mother who adored my father. The mother who, when she drove across the Intracoastal Waterway, said she felt that this time the truck was going over, we would die, and it would be for the best. I held all of these contradictory memories together and realized I knew now how to remember her: I understood how it all fit together. I started to write down the story as best I could.
My mother used to say that the best years of her life were when she was little, following her father around the golf course, where he was greenskeeper. Shagging balls in a plaid jacket that was a micro version of his Pendleton gear, with her own miniature set of wood-handled clubs—this was when the world was open and beautiful for her, when time swept out from the golf course, never-ending. She’d said her father was the only person who ever understood her, and when he died on Christmas Eve when she fourteen years old, it was the end of her real life; she was never the same again. The packages for him sat under the tree for weeks.
Something else had marked her that year; she’d hinted at it, shrouded it in mystery. I thought rape was a legitimate explanation, the source of all her checking, the fire drills, the drills where we had to pretend we were being kidnapped and escape. But the details kept changing. Two things had happened to her, maybe three. Someone she knew had disappeared. Nothing had happened to her when she was fourteen; she’d never said her whole world changed. “Stop pressuring me. I will never tell you if you keep on like this, Heather.”
Maybe grief had tipped the balance, but illness had been running the show ever since. Illness was life itself. Illness was truth and safety and manners and being aware of everything but the illness as a thing itself.
In 1955, my parents cut short their honeymoon to Niagara Falls. (“She kept hitting me and, yeah, I hit her back,” my father told me, and he sounded, fifty years later, still reluctant, surprised, and not sorry. Was this the deep, dark secret that he’d have to kill me if he told me? No, he said. He would never tell me that secret. Never ask him again.) Then a trip to Europe was scuttled, over passport photos and fingerprinting. My mother tried teaching. She hid, she told me, in the classroom closet “to see how the children would behave when they didn’t know I was watching.” She tried substitute teaching. It took them nine years to get pregnant. Sometimes she said they were desperate for a child. Other times she said they were happy just being the two of them. Still other versions had them on the brink of divorce.
In a perfect and elegant counterpoint, as I began to recall the past, my mother started to lose her memory. She didn’t seem to be remembering our conversations, and this new forgetting had a different flavor from her usual lack of apprehension. She’d call me twice, three times in a day, each time saying: “Hi, honey! Is this a good time to get caught up?” Each memory I picked up seemed to correspond to a memory she had dropped, for good.
I called her more now, unsure how much time she had left as her. Tell me anything, I said. Tell me any story about your life. Any illnesses? Tell me any little thing.
“I’ll think. I’ll get back to you. Someday I am going to write it all down. I’ve always wanted to write.”
My mother didn’t even like writing checks: her signature could be copied, the routing numbers stolen. The conversation was over. I told her I loved her and we said good-bye.
A couple weeks after I brought up the idea of do-it-yourself divorce, Dave came down to my house, late. He got under my covers. He said I was making a terrible mistake. “You’re divorcing the wrong person,” he said. “You’re letting this marriage get caught up in what you really do have to leave behind. I’m tired of being collateral damage in your life. Please don’t leave me and the boys, Heather. It’s wrong. You’ll regret it. It doesn’t make any sense.”
But I had already filled out the forms. I told him I didn’t think I could figure out how to make it work. We cried in each other’s arms. He left.
Yes, I had used him. I felt like a creature, a parasite, a crab. I had lived in Dave, used him as my shell, and now I was going out of him and leaving him empty.
I told him I loved him.
I didn’t tell him that I loved him and I couldn’t be with him. There aren’t words for that.
Seven
The neurologist’s receptionist said she was sure I was fine. “Everyone gets confused. I do all the time.” She dragged out the word “all,” making it into a blanket.
In the waiting room, fluorescent lights hummed. A woman had her lumpen legs propped up on the coffee table, making a bridge to a pile of Better Homes and Michigan Living magazines. Two very old women in wheelchairs who seemed to be twins stared at the walls, looking mad, bored. I sat as far from them as I could. I pretended to read about midwestern destination vacations. Leaves were the big draw.
“Heather Sellers?”
Startled, I leaped up, dove through the doorway, and followed the nurse down a thin corridor.
“You think you’re confused?” the nurse said as we walked, reading the form on her clipboard. Her name tag said Bettina.
“No,” I said. “I’m not confused. I can’t reliably recognize people.”
Bettina sped up. I scooted along behind her down the narrow corridors, clutching my paperwork. The office was much bigger than it looked from outside. I’d never find my way out alone.
In the examining room, she weighed me. “We all get that sometimes,” she said. “I bet you are Just Fine.” She patted my shoulder and I got off the scale and said, “No. This is a real problem.” But I forced myself not to tell her what I had learned. That we must have recognition to survive. The infant has to be able to lock on to the mother’s face, her gaze, her identity, in order for cuteness and likability and pity to occur. So the organism will be likely to be fed, carried along with, and touched. To survive, we have to be seen.
Bettina strapped the cuff on my arm, took my blood pressure. Why did they do this in every office, for everything? We watched the needle pause at its favorite numbers. “Oneoh-nine over eighty. You’re perfect,” she said. “See?” She left.
I waited and waited and waited in the windowless room. I sat and waited. I walked around and waited. I went through the cupboards. Paper cups, boxes of gloves that looked like condoms with fingers, tongue depressors. There was nothing in this room for a brain. On the back of the door was a poster with a giant ear; I was studying the peachy coils when the doctor walked in, knocking. I jumped back, busted.
He had Yntema stitched in blue across his white coat. The way he rocked back on his heels, reading a page in my folder, I sensed he liked wearing the white coat too much.
I grabbed my articles from my satchel and didn’t sit down. I’d brought three: “Right Lateral Fusiform Gyrus Dysfunction During Facial Information Processing in Schizophrenia,” “A Network of Occipito-Temporal Face-Sensitive Areas Besides the Right Middle Fusiform Gyrus Is Necessary for Normal Face Processing,” and my favorite, carefully highlighted: “Where Am I? The Neurological Correlates of Self and Other.”
Dr. Yntema had thinning white hair, a wiry little body, small feet. He motioned me to sit down. “Dr. Mathur indicates confusion at work, forgetting names?”
He had a way of sending his words over to me that said,
I have yelled at people who love me. I couldn’t sit. I made a little barking sound. My palms instantly glazed with sweat. I wiped my hands on my dress. I moved closer to him and leaned on the counter.
“No,” I said. “You’re confused.” I smiled to show I was clever but kind. “I’m a professor and a writer,” I said. “I’m not forgetting names. I’m great with names.”
He frowned. “What do you teach?”
“English,” I said. “I’m not confused.” I smiled at his chin. “I can’t recognize people. I first noticed it in college, but I have probably had it my whole life. I am sure I have prosopagnosia.” I handed my articles over. He would not take them.
He asked me the date. The president. My address. What day of the week it was. I told him: October twenty-third, Bush, Twenty-fourth Street, Thursday. “Those are all things crazy and confused people do know,” I said. “This isn’t about confusion.”
He said, “I know you know this, but can you tell me where we are today?”
“Down the wrong path,” I said.
“Married?” he said.
I sat down in the chair. “Yes.”
“Why the hesitation? You aren’t sure if you are married? Not that married?”
“No hesitation,” I said.
He said, “Marital stress? Job stress? Abuse? Alcohol?”
I smiled and said no, no, no, I was doing really well. I was happy.
“You do not have prosopagnosia,” Yntema said. “I have never even seen a case. Remember four words: house, car, tree, window. You will be asked the words later.”
“Someone has to have it,” I said. My articles sat there between us. I stood and gave him my hands, as he requested. I gave over my arms, and he pressed and I resisted. I gave him my knees and he banged on them. They responded appropriately, with kicking.
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