“He talked to me about nothing,” she said, turning her attention back to the TV. The news came on again, its ominous music echoing into the room.
I tried another tack. “Did your husband keep any records or notes of his sessions with Adele Cassidy?”
Mrs. Sherman took a sharp, shallow breath and snapped off the TV with the remote.
“You remember her?”
She pursed her lips together. “I saw her,” she said.
“Who, Adele?”
“Of course Adele. Who else would I be talking about?” Now she laid her skeletal hands on mine and used them to pull herself up to a near-sitting position. “That poor woman. She was always crying, even before she went in. Saul met with his patients here, in an office we built onto the garage—Olivia lives there now—and I used to go in there to dust after breakfast, right around the time of her appointment. She wouldn’t read the magazines like everyone else. She’d just sit there, crying. A lot of them cried afterwards—that was normal, that you could understand—but it was the before part that worried me. I said to Saul, ‘Be careful with this one. Don’t give her those pills, it’ll make her worse.’ ‘Who’s the doctor, here?’ he’d say. ‘You think you’re the doctor?’ I tried those pills. I knew what they did.”
“Pills? What pills?”
“How do I know what pills? The ones they gave us back then. Little yellow ones. I forget what they’re called.”
“Valium?”
“Yes. That’s right. Valium. To treat hysteria, they called it. Idiots. Treating depression with a barbiturate.”
Mick Jagger began to croon in my head—They just helped you on your way through your busy dying day . . .—followed by the image of April’s mother, lumbering into our classroom with her disheveled hair and eyes half closed.
“It’s those pills that killed her,” said Mrs. Sherman, as if reading my thoughts. “I’d bet my life on it.” She looked down at her spotted hands, with their gnarled joints and raised veins and yellowed hue, and examined them like an archeologist studying a found object, something odd and incomprehensible apart from herself. “Oy gevalt. Could you help me with that, please?” she asked, pointing to the foot of the bed, and as I was leaning over reconnecting her catheter tube, feeling my esophagus starting to convulse from the fetid stench of fresh urine, she whispered, “They’re in the garage.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I don’t know how big the files are, but they’re in there,” she said. “Notes. Transcripts of his sessions. Everything. My husband, the anal-compulsive. Taped all of his sessions, just like Nixon. Take the file, what do I care? I was going to throw them all out when Saul died, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. People’s lives are in there. Not mine, of course. I was never allowed to see a shrink. Saul didn’t believe in them, he said.”
“But he was a shrink.”
“What’s that?” She cupped her left ear with her hand.
“But he was a shrink!” I shouted.
“Life’s full of irony, bubelah. Haven’t you learned that by now?” She reached for her book and opened it up to a ribbon-marked page. “Now go. And tell Olivia I’m still waiting for my teeth.” She shook a bony finger at me. “A woman can’t think without her teeth.”
CHAPTER 12
THE WESTERN SKY was turning a deep purple by the time I tossed Adele Cassidy’s file into the backseat of the Taurus. I’d wanted to sit down and read through it right there where I’d found it, in a dusty corner of the Shermans’ garage, but I had one more stop I needed to make, one more place I wanted to see.
I plugged the intersection of Route 28 and Route 107 into the rental car’s GPS system. The strip malls and domino-clustered houses of Potomac gave way to the dull thrum of outbound traffic on I-270, hypnotic and dense. I imagined myself a headlit cell, floating out from the aorta toward what? a foot? until an exit became a two-lane highway, clogged with Lexus sedans and Chevy Caravans, and a computer-generated voice announced, “You have arrived.”
I pulled the car over to the shoulder and stepped out into the frigid air. To my right and to my left stood newly constructed McMansions, each one boxy, gargantuan, like weight lifters pumped up on steroids. I took out my video camera and, after a pan across the landscape, trained it on the windows of the house nearest me. I zoomed in on the bedroom, where a teenage girl communed with her computer, staring blankly ahead and IMing; now a swish pan to the kitchen, where, seemingly miles away from her daughter, a woman stirred a pot, expressionless; meanwhile, in the double-height plateglass window of the living room, crisscrossed by fake mullions, a boy squatted alone on the floor clutching a joystick. A joystick? Refugee camps I’d visited in Somalia had more joy in them than that house, yet there it was (I zoomed out until the whole house was in the frame): The American Dream.
I turned off the camera, stamped my feet, and blew into my gloved palms to stay warm. Somehow, the fact that the forest into which Adele Cassidy had driven her children on the last night of their lives had been razed and replaced by these giant, cheerless mushrooms of atomization seemed oddly appropriate, as if the soil upon which they—the trees, the girls—had been felled had become tainted by the woodcutter’s axe for all eternity. On the other hand, I had no hope of seeing the forest for the trees if the trees had all been chopped down.
The sky had now blackened completely. I stepped back into the car, squinted my eyes, and tried to imagine a dark wood, the path leading into it, tree trunks and branches, moss and autumn leaves illuminated by the conical beams of Adele’s headlights. I knew I wouldn’t find the “clearing of dense underbrush” mentioned in the Post—thirty-five years of photosynthesis would have rendered it impenetrable—but I hadn’t counted on the impenetrability of its absence.
I flipped the radio on to hear the top of the news—“A van loaded with explosives drove into a crowded schoolyard in Baghdad today, killing thirty . . .”—and snapped it off.
The previous weekend, Mark and I had taken the girls to an antiwar demonstration in Union Square. As we pushed our way through the crowds, Tess had suddenly said, from her perch atop my shoulders, “Mommy, who invented wars?”
“Well . . .” I’d shot Mark a help-me glance, which he answered with a smile and a feeble you’re-on-your-own shrug of his shoulders. “That’s a complicated question, sweetheart.” I ran through some possible answers in my head: It’s part of our nature, this hatred for the other; No one really invented it, it just happens; Have I ever told you about testosterone? Then I hit on the perfect answer for her six-year-old psyche: I’d remind her what we learned about mice when she had a brief flirtation with a cageful. She’d already picked out her favorite Beatles names, but then the mouse expert at Petco told her that male mice don’t usually make the best pets. For one, their urine has a pungent odor. For another, they tend to be very aggressive and will often bite their young owners. But it was the third reason that had Tess running back to the gerbil display: if two male mice, raised separately, are placed together in the same cage, they will tear each other to shreds until one of them is dead. “You see . . .” I said, getting ready to launch into my lecture on mice and men.
But Tess had already grown impatient. “Well, whoever it is,” she said, dismissively, her mittened hands gripping the side of my head, “I’m going to kill him.”
The memory of this exchange suddenly made me laugh, sitting there in that rental car, on the shoulder of the last road down which Adele Cassidy had ever driven. With all of its invisible frustrations and sacrifices, motherhood was also a remarkable mosaic-in-progress, with such moments, like handmade tiles, painstakingly inlaid: up close, just a jumble of colors, haphazardly placed in no particular order; from ten feet back, so beautiful you could cry.
Maybe Adele had just forgotten to step back. Or maybe she simply couldn’t.
I remembered her file in the backseat. I checked my watch. 6:07 PM. Three more hours until the last shuttle back to New York. If I left now, the girls would already be asleep by
the time I got back anyway.
I drove to the nearest Starbucks, ordered a coffee, and plunked myself down in an empty chair. I held the file in my hands for a minute or so, half kid with a candy bar, trying to prolong the ecstasy, half cuckold with an envelope of photos, trying to prolong the moment of truth. Then I opened it. The pages, dated only from September 1972 until mid-October of that same year, were typewritten and yellowed around the edges. Had paper printed when I was a child had time to yellow? Somehow this fact seemed shocking.
I began to read.
Patient: Adele Cassidy, 39
Date of first treatment: Tuesday, September 5, 1972
Referring physician: Dr. Leonard Barlow
Date of birth: 2/14/33
Marital status: married, with two young daughters
Previous psychiatric treatment: none
General health: Obese, mild hypertension
Note: Patient called on 8/30/72, citing desire for treatment, which she expressed thus: “Dr. Barlow thinks I’m depressed. He thinks I need to speak to you.” We agreed to meet the following week, after her kids were back in school, as well as to record sessions for research purposes, when I explained I was writing a paper on midlife-onset female depression. Patient showed up on time.
I flipped past the opening nervous exchanges concerning the weather and the origins of a paperweight on Dr. Sherman’s desk until the real discussion began.
DR. SHERMAN: So, Mrs. Cassidy. Why don’t you tell me why you are here.
MRS. CASSIDY: Dr. Barlow told me to come. He thinks I’m depressed.
DR. SHERMAN: What about you? Do you think you’re depressed?
MRS. CASSIDY: I don’t know.
DR. SHERMAN: Well let’s talk about what you’re feeling, and then we can decide whether it’s depression or not. Does that sound okay?
MRS. CASSIDY: Okay.
DR. SHERMAN: So how have you been feeling lately? Try to describe it in words.
MRS. CASSIDY: It’s kind of hard to describe in words.
DR. SHERMAN: Just do your best. This isn’t a test. It’s just a conversation.
MRS. CASSIDY: Okay, but, it’s just . . . Something’s not right. Something’s off. I look around me, and I see everyone else living their lives—you know, going to work, putting gas in their cars, shopping for food, the normal stuff—and most of them seem happy. Well, not all happy, but you know, fine. Coping. I look at me, or rather inside me, and all I see is this . . . dark space. Blackness, I guess you could call it.
DR. SHERMAN: Can you describe what this blackness is like?
MRS. CASSIDY: What it’s like?
DR. SHERMAN: Yes, describe it. For example, does it have weight, texture—
MRS. CASSIDY: I don’t know. I guess you could say it’s . . . sticky? Like tar. And other times it’s just, well, nothing. Emptiness. It can be sunny and seventy-five degrees outside, and the girls can be giggling in the backyard, and all I can think is when is this all going to be over? These endless days. The sunny ones, especially. I mean, I know I should be happy. But . . . [Long pause.]
DR. SHERMAN: But?
MRS. CASSIDY: [Patient does not answer.]
DR. SHERMAN: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your family, Mrs. Cassidy. You’re married?
MRS. CASSIDY: Yes.
DR. SHERMAN: To whom?
MRS. CASSIDY: My husband’s name?
DR. SHERMAN: Yes, let’s start with that. What’s his name?
MRS. CASSIDY: Shep. Short for Shepherd.
DR. SHERMAN: And when did you meet?
MRS. CASSIDY: Oh, god, let’s see. Twelve years ago? A little over twelve, actually. He was my patient. I’m . . . I mean I was a nurse, at Holy Cross. Shep came in for a hernia repair, and, well, my family always jokes that he walked in with a hernia and out with a bride. After the wedding, they joked that. None of them would come to the wedding, actually, either Shep’s family or mine, because, you know, the whole religion thing. He’s Catholic. I’m a Jew. Neither of us was really religious, but still, it mattered. To them, at least. So we eloped. Well not exactly eloped. My sister, Trudy, came to City Hall with us and stood up as a witness, and Shep’s friend Marty came, and I wore a white dress, which wasn’t really a wedding dress, but it was white, you know, like a wedding dress, with little white gloves, and we all went out to this bar on M Street afterwards to go dancing. Shep got so drunk, we had to wait until the next night to, you know. Be husband and wife. We must have gotten pregnant that same night. I had a miscarriage, though, right at the end of the first trimester, which, you know, I was a nurse, I knew it was no big deal, but Shep took it hard. Like he’d failed. He started going to church again, every Sunday. I kept telling him these things just happened, and there’s no explanation, just nature’s way of getting rid of babies that shouldn’t be born, but he wouldn’t listen. At one point he even talked about becoming a priest. But he didn’t. Thank God. [Patient sighs.] So anyway I was a little down because of the miscarriage, but you know, pretty much fine after a month or two and actually kind of relieved to have a little more time before we . . . [Patient stops talking. Several seconds elapse.] I’m sorry. I got lost. What were we talking about?
DR. SHERMAN: We were talking about how you met your husband. Then the miscarriage. And before that the reasons you came here. The “blackness,” as you called it.
MRS. CASSIDY: Right. The blackness. I guess it started when . . . actually I have to go back again. Okay, so, a few years after the miscarriage I got pregnant again. With Lily. She’s eight now. April, my other one, she’ll be six in October. And after Lily was born, and she was healthy and perfect and you know, just this perfect little baby—slept through the night at five weeks, hardly spit up at all, very easy to soothe and, well, just a perfect little baby—after she was born, I found it hard to get out of bed. Hard like there’s lead on top of you. Like you’re living on one of those planets, you know the small ones near the sun, where gravity pushes you down. Sometimes Lily would be crying in her bassinet, and I could hear her? I could hear her, and in my mind I knew I was supposed to go get her, but for some reason I couldn’t. I’d just lie there in bed on my heavy planet, listening to her crying, wondering when her mother was going to come get her. And I guess, somewhere in the back of my mind, I couldn’t believe I’d signed up for this. That I would be responsible for this little baby’s life forever. Supposedly, when they brought Lily to me that first night in the hospital, when they woke me up to feed her, and I guess I’d been sleeping pretty deeply, probably in the middle of a dream or something, supposedly I turned to the nurse and said, “Oh, no, I’m sorry. You must be mistaken. She’s not my baby,” and went right back to sleep. Am I doing this right?
DR. SHERMAN: Why are you asking?
MRS. CASSIDY: Well, I just, I mean, I’m just sitting here talking, and you’re just sitting there listening, and I don’t know, I thought you were supposed to be helping me or something. Telling me what’s wrong with me.
DR. SHERMAN: What do you think is wrong with you?
MRS. CASSIDY: Well, that’s what I came here to find out. I just sit here and talk? What does that accomplish?
DR. SHERMAN: You’ll see. Much can be learned from the way we tell our stories. Later on we might talk about your dreams, have you free associate, things like that. But right now let’s just concentrate on your story. From your own mouth. Not Dr. Barlow’s or your husband’s—whom, by the way, I spoke to last night when he called, and I told him under no circumstances would I be reporting to him anything that might get discussed in here, so you should feel absolutely free to talk honestly. About him. About your feelings. About anything. So. You were talking about Lily. The night she was born. When the nurses brought her to you in the middle of the night.
MRS. CASSIDY: Right. Lily. Do you have children, Dr. Sherman?
DR. SHERMAN: Mrs. Cassidy, usually it’s best if the patient knows as little as possible about the personal life of her psychiatrist. Trust me, it’s better
this way. What is relevant, however, is why did you want to know if I have children of my own?
MRS. CASSIDY: So you could understand me.
DR. SHERMAN: And you think if I don’t have children of my own, I won’t be able to relate to your story?
MRS. CASSIDY: Well, yes. I’m even a little bit worried that even if you do have children, the fact that you’re not a woman will make it hard for you to understand.
DR. SHERMAN: I see. Well, Mrs. Cassidy, I think you can rest assured that I will relate to your story both regardless of my gender and regardless of whether or not I am a parent myself. So. You were talking about Lily.
MRS. CASSIDY: Well, we brought her home from the hospital, and I, well, I wasn’t very good at it. I mean, my job was to take care of people, and here I was, unable to take care of my own child. I actually thought about going back to work, so I wouldn’t feel like such a failure. Because work had never been a problem, right? And I had people there I could talk to. The only person I ended up talking to after Lily was born was my neighbor. Mavis. She had kids around the same time I did. But that’s pretty much all we had in common. Her house always smelled like either nail polish or nail polish remover, and she was always sitting there with those pieces of cotton between her toes, putting polish on, taking polish off, putting it on, taking it off. Anyway, Shep kept asking me why I couldn’t be more like Mavis. Why I couldn’t just be content with taking care of Lily and making dinner and running errands. When I asked if I could go back to work, he said what would people think, a mother leaving her child in the hands of a stranger? It wasn’t right. And then April was born. [Patient pauses to choke back tears. Doesn’t speak for a full four minutes.]
DR. SHERMAN: And?
MRS. CASSIDY: And, I don’t know. Things got worse. I got heavy. Fat, I mean, not heavy the way kids say it these days. I just, I couldn’t help myself. From eating. All the time. I knew I shouldn’t, I mean, I still know I shouldn’t, but it’s like this other person takes over. This really hungry person. Sometimes, when I’d take the girls to the Giant, and it was stressful when they were really little, you know? April was just a baby, flopping over in the kiddie seat, Lily would sprint off down the aisle if I so much as blinked, and I know—I know—people have four, five, six children, and they manage to get through the grocery store every week without a hitch, but I hated those trips to the grocery store. Hated them with a passion. So, kind of like a gift to myself, for getting through another week without losing my mind, I’d buy these big bags of Ruffles and Cheetos, and a gallon of mint chocolate chip and a couple of Baby Ruths and some Oreos and a box of Hostess cupcakes. These were not for the kids, mind you, but for me. To eat on the way home. And at first when I was eating I felt great. More than great. Like I was drunk or something. And at the same time, while I was feeling so great, I hated myself. I hated myself for eating all that food. It was a vicious cycle. Vicious circle?
Between Here and April Page 9
