Lights On, Rats Out

by Cree LeFavour

  I also told my friend Jess, and Matt. He got concerned and teary while Jess took it pretty well; she claimed she knew all along.

  My father arrived a week later, defenses up. Suspicious. In his hybrid WASP-hippie world, seeing a shrink was a sign of weakness, subject to accusations of quackery. I suspect he associated talk therapy with a pseudoscientific worldview fixated on the sexual drives Freud believed to be “the strongest of all human impulses.” That the modern version of the therapeutic process had evolved considerably since Freud’s brilliant, frequently incorrect, wild theories probably didn’t matter. My father wouldn’t recognize the fact that the graffiti of memory Freud’s theories depend upon, most notably the marks of developmental stress and trauma, anticipated important discoveries about how the brain shapes itself in response to various forms of deprivation. Stress matters. That’s why Dr. Kohl suspected I was sexually abused. But not having responsive, invested caregivers at various developmental stages also leaves its mark—more on some than on others. I’m sure my father would have agreed humans are social beings. The social imprinting that occurs through the process of nurturing is critical to survival—in evolutionary, biological, and social terms. Neuroplasticity is not fiction.

  No matter. My father didn’t see the deprivation, even if he had trusted in any brand of psychoanalytic theory. Why, he might ask, would anyone buy into the limitations of half-assed, pseudomedical self-realization? If Freud’s place in the popular imagination weren’t enough, the rank subjectivity of the whole psychotherapeutic project would be enough for scientifically minded people like my father to dismiss it. Seen through this lens, its claims are no more viable than a belief in the almighty God—and it doesn’t get much worse than that in my atheist family. This is the air I’ve long breathed.

  I wasn’t raised to concede weakness. I knew my father didn’t approve of the indulgence of seeing a therapist. Why can’t I be as self-contained as he is? I’ve nearly exhausted myself trying.

  In the world I know best, deviance is valuable. Why squash it out of existence with a normalizing formula? Out with the old, in with the new. Don’t just question authority. Fuck authority. The names of the rebels I’ve heard praised, the ones I’ve read or listened to, ring through my brain. These figures of the counterculture populated my crowded mind. If the goal of psychotherapy is misconstrued as a normalizing project, then what’s it good for? If becoming ordinary is not the goal of therapy, what is? And why not simply fuck it all up if it’s not working? If you need to know how just ask one of them … Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman, Gloria Steinem, Edward Abbey, Herbert Marcuse, Kurt Vonnegut, Pete Seeger, Martin Luther King, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, Hunter S. Thompson, Patti Smith, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Rachel Carson, Carole King, Thomas Pynchon, John Lennon, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Martha Graham, John Coltrane, Philip Glass, Ken Kesey, Anthony Burgess, Andy Warhol, Joseph Heller, Cormac McCarthy, Betty Freidan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Alan Watts, Angela Davis, Diane Arbus, Janis Joplin, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Aldous Huxley, Tom Hayden, Bob Dylan… I’ve forgotten more than I’ve included, I’m sure. It doesn’t matter. I’ve absorbed the idea that their collective legacies of disruption reflect a refusal of smallness. The very scent of the 1960s and 1970s provided my parents and their friends with what seems like a relatively effortless ride to identity.

  Rejecting limitations as beneath you while living off the money someone else earned may be ungrateful and spoiled but it’s far from unusual. I should know; I was raised on trust fund hedonism. Although we lacked the materialist gusto of good Americans—no expensive cars, jewelry, designer clothing, or immaculate lawns—the fact is that my parents didn’t have to work for a living. Expenditures were made to reinvent the rules 1960s style and expressed through food, wine, grooming, clothes, travel, music, and books.

  Family money on my father’s side meant he grew up wealthy, with trips to Europe, prep school at Andover, and college at Dartmouth—until he decided to drive west to the then sleepy town of Aspen, grow his hair and beard, live in an unheated cabin, and write a novel. He left most of the traditional values of his East Coast upbringing behind—although his patrician manners never rubbed off. Nor did the cash.

  Living large as my parents did required a robust faith in the rewards of going too far paired with a deep cynicism about living a purposeful life, one that went beyond cultivating pleasure. Unfortunately amid all this robust pleasure in living I haven’t swallowed much optimism—I’ve swallowed only determination. My future feels formless and uncertain. I have nowhere spectacularly new to go—nothing grand to rebel against or reject. There are worse things than drowning in an aimless routine of work, reading, eating, and sleep. The superabundance of my life feels cheap and not entirely worthwhile. I’ve spent the past year examining who and what I am with Dr. Kohl through the lens of my words, behavior, failures, and shortcomings. Surely I’ve failed, but not in a way my father likely anticipated. Whatever my flaws, I’m certainly guilty of lacking the resilience to gracefully get on with it, whatever the world around me looks and feels like. It’s the least I could do given all I have.

  When they met, Dr. Kohl observed that my father is “Bewildered by parenting.” This shouldn’t be surprising considering his mother died when he was nine years old. Despite the steady presence of a kind father, he was essentially raised by nannies and boarding school. Fortunately, even if he never quite knew how to parent me, I adore him.

  When he arrived to talk about the mess I was in we went out to dinner and talked books over chicken tikka, garlic naan, saag paneer, and saffron rice, all washed down with Kingfisher beer. The next morning we met for breakfast at the faux-French restaurant Leunig’s, where we tore at croissants, smeared apricot jam, and nursed café au lait while trading sections of the New York Times. What could he say? He’s never so much as pretended to know what’s best for me except when he told me he didn’t think it was a good idea for me to move to California to live with him while I was in high school. It’s hard to forget that moment.

  He also may not have wanted to delve deeper into my psyche—he and his second wife enjoy a rich, presumably fulfilling life together. At twenty-five, you might argue, I’m old enough not to be his problem. We have a warm, easy relationship but we’re more like friends than father and daughter. We never fight or even disagree. I’d chosen to dig and question where he’d always chosen, as far as I could tell, to cover and duck. After all, “We LeFavours never complain.” Why should we? Forward march. Open another bottle of wine. Salt and temper the meat. Warm the plates. Is the cheese out? Watch the reduction! Who wants to switch to the Romanée-Conti? Well, maybe just a sip.

  So my father came and went and I had it my way. A session with Dr. Kohl and me—the three of us together. Dr. Kohl probes my father, wondering if there might have been any evidence of sexual abuse when I was a child. My father tries but comes up with nothing more than the grubby family at the end of Little Woody Creek Road and their teenage boys. But it’s a dead end. That’s all there is. So it’s more therapy for me. Dad continues to pay what the insurance doesn’t cover. He can afford it. Maybe there’s something disrespectful about squandering someone else’s hard-earned money even once removed. My father raised me to help him piss away the inherited money that arrived in his bank account quarterly. Compound interest? Yield on investment? Corporate dividend? Advertising revenue? Drinks all around!

  CHAPTER 15

  Said Spontaneously

  The month dragged on—all I had to look forward to was figuring out how to sustain a life I didn’t want.

  “I feel like I’m going to die if I don’t burn myself. The healthy shit,” I told Dr. Kohl, “isn’t going to work.”

  In my chart he unconsciously (or consciously) echoed Daffy Duck as he wrote to himself, “So it’s war.”

  “What are you like when you get really angry?” he asked.

  “I don’t get angry. It infuriates my sister.”

  “Makes life easy for me.” He�
��s trying to get me to fight with him rather than self-destructing all alone. “You’re charming, bright, funny, witty. I sit back and enjoy it.” Of course he didn’t, because he knew too much. Pills in pocket, cigarette to skin. I needed relief. As Churchill observed of the dangers of standing too close to a speeding train, in a second a single “action would end everything.” All it takes are “a few drops of desperation.”

  I’m not big on razors, but since I couldn’t burn myself I gave one a spin, carving a bloody triangle “straight around old burn on palm.” When I confessed, I told him it was minor.

  “I don’t care how small it is, you’re stretching our contract,” he said, having a look for himself. I should have gone deeper …

  “I felt terrible.”

  “I believe that,” he said.

  Again, I was toeing the line while trying to do what I could to keep my brain from detonating. He writes in my chart that I’m “like a 3-year-old preoccupied by the rules.”

  He asked, “Have you already decided to die?”

  “I don’t think so …” It was the best I could do. The cut was a warm-up, the preparatory mark of a death I hadn’t committed to.

  On September 4 I struck a deal with myself. It was the spawn of aberrant logic made comely by a feeling of inevitability. If I burned myself one more time, I could stop. I needed this last one to get through the night. I figured out a way to give the act legitimacy because, I told myself, this one time was different. Just one more. Again. My darling, back. The pleasure waited for me, however impatient.

  But it was our deal, so ink-and-paper solid, that promiscuously spilled out into the expectant quiet of the next day’s session. The 11s had taunted me—turning up to strut about in denominations ordering time, space, money, communication, mass, weight, and volume. I had no choice.

  “I burned myself one time.”

  “Something about first degree, slight burn,” he wrote to himself.

  “Defiant is better than disengaged,” I said.

  “You’re punishing me.”

  “I don’t mean to.”

  “It’s not me, it’s your life.”

  “Couldn’t believe I did that much. Took a shower and did it again. 11 minute thing going on again.”

  “You’ve pushed me too far,” he said.

  “I know the contract and I know I broke it. It seems like it just happened.”

  “That makes it worse.”

  I was angling to get off, but seeing that the degree of the burn and the supposed spontaneity of the action weren’t getting me anywhere I tried honesty.

  “I realize it’s a game to argue that I didn’t burn as deeply.”

  “Did you feel it?”

  “It felt great and I wished I could have done more.”

  Long silence.

  I’d gone too far, even wearing myself out. I wasn’t sure I could keep going much longer and I certainly couldn’t do it without him. Rather than leaving literally or figuratively—rather than being ingloriously thrown out—I said, “I want you to say ‘Yes’ to my going into an institution if you’ll be willing to see me when I get out. If that’s the only way, then I’ll go in.”

  In his notes he wrote, “SAID SPONTANEOUSLY.” I’d made him an offer.

  “Long silence with her,” he wrote. Then he said, “I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with your being unable to be responsible for your life.”

  “Continue contract discussions Monday,” he noted at the bottom of the page. He didn’t agree that day to my proposal to go to the hospital, but he did call me over the weekend to see how I was doing. (Wow! He’d never done that before.) Nonetheless, I felt the increasingly tenuous filaments holding my life in place breaking. There was no good solution. I didn’t know what would happen once the impossibly slow hours of the weekend passed by.

  On Monday, September 9, 1991, a month and a day after I signed the contract, I told him I wanted to die if he wouldn’t see me again.

  “I feel up in the air. I tried to fill the time between Thursday and now. I get angry, I have suicidal thoughts when I thought you wouldn’t see me again. I did burn myself more this weekend. Saturday, late A.M.”

  “That brings us right back to Thursday,” he said, observing in his notes my spontaneous offer to be hospitalized.

  “Burning is getting close to self in a negative way. Only way to connect is through horrible feelings,” he said.

  Of course, having blown the contract the previous week justifying that “one time” as the last time, I burned again over the weekend. One last time is always a lie and I knew that even when I made the bargain, even if I pretended it could be different, that maybe for once when I promised the last it would take.

  That Monday he noted in the chart, “Three 2nd degree burns on her right arm.” He then told me if I agreed to go to the hospital he’d see me when and if I was released, but not “Against Doctor’s Orders.”

  I had no choice but to agree.

  He wrote at the bottom of the page, “I’m willing to argue with her about anything but she can’t put her life on the line.” He called my father during the session to tell him I was going into the hospital. Listening to the call, I cringed and blushed. My share of shame leaned in, bloated and oppressive. My father was, once again, on his way.

  Dr. Kohl called the insurance company and wrote, “Rx $2,000,000.” (The Rx stands for treatment. I have $2 million to spend at the psych ward. That must be good news …) He called around to various psychiatric hospitals. On a separate note he wrote:

  Sheppard Pratt

  Availability [circled “Yes” next to it]

  Cost $19,000 per month

  Proof of insurance (to call me tomorrow)

  Book a flight. Board the plane. All of it was much too soon. My fate unfolded as inevitably as the bill the receptionist tallied as I walked out the door.

  No surprise. Here I am, waiting. If I pack maybe I’ll believe I’m going into a psychiatric unit. Gathering everything I think I’ll need for a place I can’t believe in, I pack as a naive honeymooner—the surprise destination to be sprung by my eager fiancé on arrival. Skiing in Zermatt? The white sands and azure water of Bali? A culinary tour of Rome? It doesn’t really matter, does it? Honeymoons are for fucking.

  CHAPTER 16

  A Well-Conducted Hotel

  Shopping and packing for a few days, ten at the most? Maybe no time at all. Maybe I won’t go or maybe they won’t have me, turning me away at the door with a breezy, “You’re fine. Go home.” Maybe I won’t sign the legal document to commit myself, the one I haven’t read. Most likely I will put my name to it blindly, as if I’m applying for a Visa card and all I want to know is where to put the pen down because I can’t be bothered to decipher the irksome block of letters blossoming above it when I badly want all that free money.

  When my father opens my American Express bill with the U.S. Postal Service’s official yellow “Forward To” sticker plastered on its face he’ll scan sheets enumerating clots of dollars spent. Delighted he will be to sign the check and send it on its way to the American Express Billing Center in Duluth, ND. How could he not be happy to pay another bill, this time one I’ve run up properly in my version of a hangman’s meal?

  Why not buy whatever I want? I’m post-consequence now. Credit card in hand, over the past twenty-four hours I’ve fulfilled needs that belong to another girl: Swiss-made cotton underpants, fine-grained Italian leather pumps with slippery soles, watery Japanese silk cut into strappy camisoles, Scottish cashmere cardigans in ghastly aquamarine, pearl pink, and babyish ice blue fit for a blond. Over the counter I slid the magical mint-green card with the embossed black letters: 3732-10459-2002 Exp 09/92 Cree LeFavour. “Sign here.”

  I’ve hoarded Camel Lights. What do I know about what I’ll need once I get there? Do they sell cigarettes off a cart making regular passes through the hall, lobotomized candy-striper pedaling dated mysteries, cum-stained romances, Hershey bars and Marlboros, conc
ealed by a uniform of insipid cheer and red-and-white-striped ruffles? Is there a squalid mini-mart where the most functional depressive on the hall sells butts, condoms, girlie mags, and candy? What about a vending machine, commissary, boutique, or emporium?

  Can I expect these or any other amenities or should I dream bigger—a convenience store for depressives, schizophrenics, anorexics, bulimics, and the generally indeterminate psychotics. Pajamas de rigueur. This store, instead of offering the standard array of Slurpees, burned coffee, Twinkies, and potato chips, would sell only cigarettes, nylon ropes, matches, straight razors, and strong sedatives in jumbo bottles. Checkout time is 11.

  Gigantic, the vaguely menacing black duffel bulges, sated with new clothes, old clothes, shoes, cigarettes, toiletries, pens, pencils, and books. It’s all inside, packed taut as a 22°F-below down sleeping bag in a compression sack, expedition-ready. I set aside my favorite pink Converse high-tops, black pants, and a trusty white T-shirt to wear the next day.

  One black dress—“Women’s 10, J. Crew, 100 percent Silk, Made in China, $139.50, On Sale $99,” with tax and shipping $115.47—has been spared. It hangs crisp, unworn, tag on, safely falling from the metal hanger like a mourning flag in the absence of so much as a puff of wind, black leather pumps set parallel beneath, sheer black stockings a step away snaking their randy passage through my drawer amid a tight tangle of solo socks and colored tights. There will be no passing off an appropriately expensive ’88 Michel Redde et Fils Pouilly-Fumé to sip as an aperitif along with a long gabardine coat and cashmere scarf still warm with animal scent. No fumbling to secure kid gloves in the sleeve. No hostess waiting to make another coat disappear. Social lubrication followed by a tasteful if not tasty dinner at eight is not on the agenda. That much I do know. The dress stays.