Between Here and April

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

MRS. CASSIDY: Yeah, okay. See you next week.

  Amazing, I thought, that postpartum psychosis, or even its more mild manifestation, postpartum depression, were so ill-understood. How little credence was given to the effects of hormonal fluctuations in women back then. I’d been shocked to learn, when I was doing research on the Andrea Yates trial, that the diagnosis of postpartum depression hadn’t even been added to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until 1994. 1994! Just five years before the birth of my own daughter.

  No wonder my mother claimed she didn’t have postpartum depression after Josh was born. It was 1972: the same year Adele Cassidy was being told that her visions of stabbing her daughter were simply the result of having watched too many horror movies. Postpartum depression, back then, simply didn’t exist.

  I turned the page in the folder and read on.

  Patient: Adele Cassidy

  Date: Monday, September 18, 1972

  Note: Patient did not show up for her normally scheduled 11:00 AM appointment this morning. I called her at 11:30. She picked up the phone, but her speech was slurred. Patient apologized for missing the session and said I should not take it personally as she kept forgetting things the whole week: a haircut appointment, lunch with her sister, a carpool home from April’s Brownie meeting. I asked how many pills she was taking a day, and she said eight. I reminded her that the prescription I gave her was only for four pills a day, but she said that she assumed since she was so large, she’d need to take twice as much. I explained that I’d taken her weight into consideration when I wrote the prescription, and that she should cut back to four a day. Patient promised to rectify the dosage and to meet the following Monday. She then asked if she had to pay for the missed session, and when I said she did, she said, “That’s not very nice,” and hung up the phone.

  Patient: Adele Cassidy

  Date: Monday, September 25, 1972

  Note: Patient showed up at her session fifteen minutes late, looking mildly disheveled. She wore a housedress with a pair of rubber flip-flops, her hair appeared greasy and uncombed, her skin was sallow. When she sat down in her chair, she stared past me, at the window behind my head, and remained silent. After several minutes spent this way, I spoke first.

  DR. SHERMAN: How are you feeling today, Adele?

  MRS. CASSIDY: How does it look like I’m feeling?

  DR. SHERMAN: I sense some hostility in that answer. Why?

  MRS. CASSIDY: You’re the doctor. You tell me.

  DR. SHERMAN: I think actually it would be more helpful if you told me what you are feeling, since they are your feelings.

  MRS. CASSIDY: I’m feeling fine today. No problems at all. Can I go now?

  DR. SHERMAN: You’re free to go whenever you please, but we do have quite a few minutes left, if you’d like to fill them.

  MRS. CASSIDY: With what? More stories? What will that accomplish? It’s been a whole month now, and I feel worse than I did when I first began. I can barely get out of bed in the morning. I walk around my house like a zombie. My daughters hate me. My husband won’t touch me. Not that I even want him to touch me, but still. I don’t see how telling stories in here is going to get me any better.

  DR. SHERMAN: Adele, I can understand your trepidation. Starting therapy can be a scary process. But I can promise you, after years of experience, that spending time talking in this room will help you. Provide you with some clarity. Stories are how we make sense of our lives. To tell a story is to own it: to own the narrative thread, to own a piece of our past. And when we own a story, when we put it in a tidy box and store it on a high shelf, it becomes manageable, so that whatever negative effects it’s been having on us are, in theory, lessened.

  MRS. CASSIDY: In theory.

  DR. SHERMAN: Yes, in theory. And in practice, too. I’ve seen patients of mine who’ve been through tremendous traumas, upheavals, tragedies—even war—get on with their lives. People who’ve lived through far worse than you.

  MRS. CASSIDY: Worse than me? You want to play that game? Fine. Here’s one you can write down on that little yellow pad of yours: I found my mother. In a bathtub. Of her own blood. Wrists slit. Happy now?

  DR. SHERMAN: Well, I wouldn’t say that makes me happy. But I do think we’re finally getting somewhere. Was this a recent occurrence or did it happen in the past?

  MRS. CASSIDY: It happened when I was seven. But what do you mean, we’re finally getting somewhere. Where exactly are we getting?

  DR. SHERMAN: To your truth.

  MRS. CASSIDY: My truth? What the hell is truth anyway?

  DR. SHERMAN: Those are two separate questions. The truth we’ll leave to the philosophers. Your truth is whatever is at your core. Your essence. That which makes you you. This is the first I’m hearing of your mother’s . . . was she dead when you found her in the tub?

  MRS. CASSIDY: No. She was still alive.

  DR. SHERMAN: So it was a suicide attempt?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Yes.

  DR. SHERMAN: Okay, so, as I was saying, this is the first I’m hearing of your mother’s attempted suicide, but I’m going to bet it has formed you in profound ways. Let’s talk about it, shall we?

  MRS. CASSIDY: No. I don’t feel like it right now.

  DR. SHERMAN: Okay, fine, but I must tell you Mrs. Cassidy, it’s in your interest to cooperate with me in here. This should not be a combative relationship. If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine, but for me to do my job I need to know as much about you as possible. And the fact that your mother tried to commit suicide, and that you happened to mention it today, is relevant to your mental health.

  MRS. CASSIDY: What’s there to say? I walked into the apartment, she was sitting in a pool of blood, her wrists were slit, she survived. End of story. But like you said, it’s not a war. So no big deal.

  DR. SHERMAN: And you were seven when this happened?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Yes. Or, wait. No, actually I was eight. Almost nine. Anyway, it was sometime after Pearl Harbor. I remember that, because somehow the two got connected in my head. It felt like one day we were sitting around the radio, listening to reports of the attack, the next day my mother tried to kill herself. Late December of ’41. I must have been in third grade. My mother had been corresponding with her cousin Leah. Leah—she and my mother had grown up practically as sisters when they were little—Leah was trying to get out of Warsaw, to come live with us. She needed Mom to sign some papers. They’d been writing letters back and forth for a couple of years by then, trying to figure out a way to get Leah to come live with us, and that day, the day I found my mother in the tub, she’d just received a stack of letters she’d sent to Leah, returned and unopened.

  DR. SHERMAN: And so Leah was . . . ?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Yes. Or at least that’s what we assumed, since we never heard from her again.

  DR. SHERMAN: And your mother made her suicide attempt that same day?

  MRS. CASSIDY: I think so.

  DR. SHERMAN: And do you think the two were related?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Sort of. It was kind of more complicated than that. She never liked Leah. She always said Leah drove her crazy when they were growing up. That even Leah’s father had said she was ugly and stupid, that no man would ever marry her. And I think she was really unhappy with the idea of her cousin coming to live with us. She kept saying to my father, “What are we going to do with her when she gets here, huh? Put her in the kitchen? Or should we make Adele move her bed into the living room?” And my father would say, “How should I know? She’s your cousin. You figure it out.” I think it was more the story she told whenever people asked about the scars on her wrists. People would ask her about them—you know, they were quite large, and kind of dramatic-looking—and she’d say something like, “What? These? Oh, yes, well, it was terrible. It was the day I found out my dear cousin Leah had been sent to Auschwitz . . .”

  DR. SHERMAN: So Leah was sent to Auschwitz?

  MRS. CASSIDY: I don’t know. We nev
er found out. We just know Leah never wrote again.

  DR. SHERMAN: So why did your mother say that her cousin had been sent to Auschwitz?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Well . . . It . . . People could relate to Auschwitz. It was a word that meant something to them. If she told them what really happened, that she’d been stalling with her cousin’s paperwork because she didn’t like her and then one day a stack of unopened letters came back, and then Leah never wrote again, and she didn’t know what happened to her, it’s, well, it’s a different kind of story.

  DR. SHERMAN: I see. Would you say that your mother suffered from depression before the letters from her cousin came back unopened?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Depression? I guess. I know she was never very happy. She always had a little scowl on her face, these little lines at the corners of her mouth that turned down. But I guess I never figured she was so depressed she’d try to, you know . . .

  DR. SHERMAN: How could you? You were a child.

  MRS. CASSIDY: I suppose.

  DR. SHERMAN: And how did you feel when you found her in the bathroom?

  MRS. CASSIDY: I don’t know. I was eight. It was a long time ago.

  DR. SHERMAN: Give it a go. Put yourself back in your eight-year-old mind. How did you feel when you walked into that room?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Scared, I guess. Because of all of the blood.

  DR. SHERMAN: And?

  MRS. CASSIDY: I’m sorry?

  DR. SHERMAN: Were you feeling any other feelings when you saw her in that tub?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Yes, but a stupid one.

  DR. SHERMAN: No feelings are stupid.

  MRS. CASSIDY: Okay. Well. I was . . . worried.

  DR. SHERMAN: Worried about what?

  MRS. CASSIDY: About who was going to put my hair in a ponytail. I used to wear it that way every day. To keep it out of my eyes.

  DR. SHERMAN: That’s a perfectly and developmentally normal reaction of an eight-year-old. At that age range, you would be worried about such things. You were too young to care for yourself.

  MRS. CASSIDY: No. It runs deeper than that. Deeper than, you know, ponytails.

  DR. SHERMAN: Go on.

  MRS. CASSIDY: Okay. Well, when my mother brushed my hair?

  DR. SHERMAN: Yes.

  MRS. CASSIDY: When she sat on the floor of my bedroom in front of the mirror and brushed the hair up from my neck and back from my forehead so I could finally see? Even though she sometimes did it too hard, I didn’t mind, because it was the only time when we were alone together. And quiet. Just the two of us.

  DR. SHERMAN: And how did that make you feel?

  MRS. CASSIDY: It made me feel . . . loved.

  DR. SHERMAN: Didn’t you feel loved at other times in the day? What about bedtime?

  MRS. CASSIDY: She never put me to bed. I always put myself to bed.

  DR. SHERMAN: After school?

  MRS. CASSIDY: She didn’t usually talk to me after school. She had headaches. Migraines. She’d leave me a snack on the kitchen table so she could stay in bed listening to the radio. You know, with her migraines.

  DR. SHERMAN: And so when you found her in the tub . . .

  MRS. CASSIDY: When I found her in the tub . . . When I found her in the tub, I felt angry.

  DR. SHERMAN: Angry at whom, Adele?

  MRS. CASSIDY: [Patient pauses.] At my mother. For doing that.

  DR. SHERMAN: For doing what?

  MRS. CASSIDY: [Patient starts to cry.] For not loving me enough to want to stay.

  DR. SHERMAN: Good. That’s good, Adele. Now I want you to hold that thought until next week, because we’re out of time for today. I’d like to see you next week, at our normally scheduled hour, with your daughters. Can you take them out of school early?

  MRS. CASSIDY: Sure, but—

  DR. SHERMAN: Excellent. And please try to be on time this time next week. I’d like to use the entire hour we—

  MRS. CASSIDY: Can’t you just push back the next patient? I fell asleep. Those pills you gave me, they make me so tired. That’s why I was late. It wasn’t my fault.

  DR. SHERMAN: No, Mrs. Cassidy, I can’t push back my next patient. It wouldn’t be fair.

  MRS. CASSIDY: So, what, so I just pour out my heart to you, tell you about my most private and horrible moments, and you say, “We’re out of time”!

  DR. SHERMAN: I’m afraid that’s how things work sometimes, yes. But give me a call at the beginning of next week, and we can talk about the dosage on your—

  MRS. CASSIDY: Fine. [Patient slams the door to the office behind her.]

  A dramatic exit. One with which I found myself empathizing. Of course I had the advantage of hindsight, of knowing what lay in store for Adele Cassidy one month later, but even so, I couldn’t help thinking that if she were my patient, I might have made my next patient wait. Even if only for five minutes. Enough time to allow the epiphany to sink in. Enough time for Adele to “own” her story and put it in a tidy box and store it on a high shelf, as Dr. Sherman himself had suggested, where it would remain, part of her conquered narrative forever.

  “My truth?” she’d said to him. “What the hell is truth anyway?”

  Two separate questions, yes, but not wholly unrelated. For truth, no matter the modifier, is always intrinsically modified.

  Adele’s sister had said Adele was five years old and worried about braids when she found her mother in the bathtub and that she killed herself because of the patriarchy. Mavis Traub said Adele was having an affair with Lenny Morton, a gay man, and that she was depressed because she was fat. Mrs. Sherman said her husband, the psychiatrist, didn’t believe in psychiatry. My mother said it was Mavis Traub having the affair and that Adele Cassidy was murdered by her husband. If she even existed at all. Dr. Sherman said hormonal fluctuations in women would not account for abnormal behavior. Miss Martin said April and Lily would not be coming back to school, ever. The kids on the bus said that April had been devoured by the Loch Ness monster or drowned in the JCC pool or fed gas.

  How was I to ever know whether Adele was a cold-blooded, calculating murderer, a housewife at the end of her rope, or some other creature altogether? Even with the transcripts, the interviews I’d shot and planned still to shoot, how was I ever going to find out what happened in that station wagon, three decades earlier, somewhere near the very spot I was now sitting, drinking a small coffee everyone in the world seemed content to call tall? Because that’s what I needed to know: what happened in that car.

  Amazing, I thought, how the lie of omission told to a little girl—April and her sister, Lily, will not be coming back to school . . . but we’ll always hold them in our hearts—could be held responsible for the obsessions of a grown woman. Was that my truth? Or simply a truth?

  At least in a war, I thought, truth is, more often than not, verifiable. Person X was shot on Date Y in the Town of Z. A deadly battle was fought on Bridge A, near City B. The morgue of City Q became inundated today with R number of corpses, of which S number were children. Leader G proclaimed that Leader H was a scoundrel and a menace; Leader H called for the execution of Leader G.

  The danger in covering a war was not in losing one’s head getting the story wrong; it was in keeping your head down low enough and long enough to get it right.

  My cell phone rang, blinking, “HOME.”

  “Mommy?” said Daisy, a strange muffled whimper hovering in the background. When had she learned my cell phone number by heart? I pictured Irma lying prostrate on the ground, felled by a container of LEGOs.

  “Yes, sweetheart. What’s going on? Is Irma okay? I hear someone crying.”

  “That’s Tess. Irma’s fine.”

  “Why is your sister crying?”

  “Uh, well, don’t get mad. She didn’t want me to call you, because she thought you’d get mad.”

  “I won’t get mad. Just tell me why’s she crying.”

  “She’s crying . . .”—I heard her whisper to Tess, It’s okay, she won’t get mad! I pictured poster paint
spilled onto the girls’ carpet, a gerbil set loose into the apartment—“about the cupcakes.”

  I gasped. The cupcakes. Shit. The girls’ school had recently switched birthday protocol from cupcakes on the actual birthday itself to cupcakes on the second Friday of the month of the child’s birth, or maybe it was the third, I could never keep it straight, which meant the teachers didn’t have to deal with sugar-fueled children thirty days out of the year—granted, an intelligent plan—but also one that meant that only the most vigilant parents could ever remember when to bake. “Oh, Daisy, where’s your sister right now? Can I talk to her?”

  “She’s here on your bed. Waiting for you to come home. But she says it’s almost bedtime, and it’s too late to bake, and now she won’t have any treats to bring in for her birthday. Irma told her she could do it, but she screamed no.” It’s okay, I heard her reassure Tess once again. She’s not mad.

  “Oh, Daise. I’m such an idiot. Sweetie, please, put Tess on the phone.” I threw the rest of the transcripts into my bag and my plans to sit and read quietly away. I was already halfway out the door by the time Tess got on the phone.

  “Mommy? Is that you?” Tess was sniffling, her voice cracking on the last word.

  “Yes, pumpkin, it’s me.”

  “Mommy, you forgot—”

  “No, Tessie, I didn’t forget. I’m coming home right now to bake those cupcakes, and then I’ll wake you up early in the morning and we can frost them together before school, okay?” I threw the car in reverse, nearly hitting a pedestrian. “Sorry,” I mouthed, holding my hand to my chest. The woman flipped me the bird.

  “Okay. Did you get the sprinkles?”

  “Sprinkles?”

  The driver in front of me slowed down to wait for another car to exit a parking space, and I nearly slammed into him, too. Keep calm, I thought to myself. No point in committing manslaughter over baked goods.

  “Remember? I said I wanted to make them with purple sprinkles? And you said you’d buy them at the store?”

  I had no memory of this exchange. Lately this had been happening to me more and more. The girls would be talking to me while I was doing some other activity, and I’d be standing there say, soaping a dish, staring straight back at them, nodding my head as if in rapt attention, but the noise of the water running and the sound of the phone ringing and the din of NPR would blend in with their words, and my mind would wander off to the medical forms I was supposed to have dropped off at the pediatrician’s office; to my email inbox crammed full of messages—from other mothers seeking playdates, from a friend of a friend from college hoping to “pick my brain” about a career in TV journalism, from my production assistant from That’s Hot! who needed to be called back that night before our piece on cellulite reduction creams aired—and before I knew it I was agreeing to honor some promise I’d never even mentally deciphered. Purple sprinkles? I’d never even seen such a thing. Red, blue, yellow, and green, sure. But purple?