PART III
It might be desirable to die; but this privilege was evidently to be denied her. Deep in her soul—deeper than any appetite for renunciation—was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come.
—Henry James,
The Portrait of a Lady
If you were coming in the fall,
I’d brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.
If I could see you in a year,
I’d wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.
—Emily Dickinson,
“If You Were Coming in the Fall”
Everyone I like stays the hell away from me.
—Archie Bunker in All in the Family
CHAPTER 33
Safe in My Bed
The November flight to Burlington belongs to one more leg of a pilgrimage crowded with impending casualties. I can’t muster the enthusiasm to qualify this as a homecoming. It’s the familiar prescription for any illness minus the bed: “Bed rest, no excitement.” Guiding my key into the lock for the first time after two months in a psychiatric hospital doesn’t distinguish itself from the mix of disappointment and excitement I’ve felt many times before when, sporting a tan after a beach vacation, I’ve turned the key at once wishing for and dreading the sight of what I left there. Objects I never thought of or missed remain precisely where I left them: the single glass I washed before resting it on the drain towel next to the sink; the labels from the cashmere sweaters, ripped cardboard cartons emptied of Camel Lights, dried tea bags with the shape and feel of dead cockroaches litter the trash. It’s all here. The familiar heavy quiet I’ve missed roosts easily on my shoulder—it’s just me.
I can walk out the door and move freely down the street to the co-op, where I’ll find a local Bartlett pear, biting into it to find its perfumed flesh unlike anything I’ve tasted in two months; I can order a strong coffee and my favorite sandwich, an untoasted sesame bagel with butter, Muenster cheese, sprouts, and tomato, and eat it over the same day’s New York Times; I can light a cigarette at my kitchen table no matter what time of day it happens to be—and no one will be watching.
Putting the kettle on for tea and a smoke, I try not to pick a new spot. Once a spot is chosen, denial is nearly impossible to come by. Distraction. I wad up whatever thoughts I can to blinker my brain, filling space with words and books and lists and colors in an effort to displace the temptation to get at my own flesh. I don’t want to go back—imagine failing within a day?
The temptation to clear the mind with a strong dose of cruel feeling and its wake of ablution suspends itself from the ceiling of every room. I miss the Band-Aids, nonstick pads, creamy white ointment, and most of all those frail filaments that once woven together form sturdy gauze. Rolled into a spool, this almost-fabric let out in one long ribbon might wind the circumference of my arm—or leg, or foot? But I can’t have it.
I’m past hunger, my nerves setting my stomach into free fall. Chain-smoking with my tea at hand, I turn these matters over in my mind. No music allowed: the silence keeps the mental chaos in check. No Leonard Cohen or McGarrigle Sisters telling me it’s time. As I stare at the loaded ashtray, my mind forms a daisy chain out of spent filters—pick the burned tobacco out and thread the white spongy remains on dental floss long enough to slip gracefully around my neck.
Listening to the jets pass, I wait for the clock to take the sun away. The digits are having their usual fun with me, winking 5:11 P.M. when I’ve avoided looking at them all day. I seek my bed. The numbers will wait for sleep to pull me to them and through to the other side. I listen for their symmetry, dreading the feel of them descending from the ceiling like so many spiders making their play for me. I won’t feel them when they land but they will be there. Resting. Gaining strength. On me. Slowly spinning a net.
I catch myself, pressing my cigarette into the crystal rectangle that was my paternal grandfather’s favorite ashtray. So I’m told. It’s tomorrow soon and I can go to him: 11/11/91 is just hours away.
I conjure a childhood spell of snowy Castle Peak in the distance and the movement of white-barked aspen trees clustered in their neat groves like gentle herd animals. It takes but won’t hold. The freedom of living alone is a luxury I’ve sacrificed a great deal to guard and yet I’m never done thinking of intruders. My friend Poppy, my mother’s girlfriend’s daughter, was with me in ninth grade the day we hitchhiked home together after school, taking a ride in a pickup with a guy we quickly identified as creepy. He insisted on driving us to the door of the tract house in Elkhorn. We weren’t that naive. I declined to show him where I lived, and he let us off at the intersection; he was more interested than we realized. Getting ready for bed that night—Poppy brushing her teeth across the hall—I stood at the uncurtained open window in the warm air. Never far from thinking about what might get me, I checked directly beneath me before looking up at the spangled cosmos. I didn’t exactly choose to see if someone was hiding there—it was the only way to quiet persistent fear, even if some part of me knew how irrational practicing these precautions was. The conviction that I might be right was so outsize it took courage to look—but I couldn’t possibly not look. I’d been through endless rituals: checking under beds, in closets, behind shower curtains and doors. Never had I found a thing, but I kept doing it. That night, rather than the usual nothing, I saw the curve of a crouching back hiding, head down, so close I could have touched the plaid shirt. I was in my underwear, no top. I’d like to think that, backing away from the window like an automaton, I made a chilling noise worthy of a great actress in a horror film. If nothing more, it was loud.
This man embodied my fear, the big one that trumps almost every other natural, material fear. A man. After me. It’s in my nightmares and in my mind almost every time I’m alone in the dark. I don’t have a chance.
The man outside the window had seen my breasts; watching through the window, he waited silently. He was there while I painted my nails. Or was he? He wondered at me as I giggled at Yossarian’s perversity in signing “Washington Irving” and then “Irving Washington” just to fuck with the authorities in Catch-22. He’d come for me—at the very least to see me undress, at worst to rip whatever remains of my comfort away along with my pink undies.
In my dreams, fears, and darker fantasies I’m tied up and gagged with my own ripped garments so he can stick himself in me and move with the violence of an animal until my guts bruise and the taste of puke and salt fills my mouth. But my body and mind would soon be gone. Putting my body away as I do when I burn my skin or when I can’t think the same thoughts anymore just takes undressing all the way as I did in the hospital more than once.
But that time, just an overgrown kid, I was the victim of nothing more than my own imagination, the object of a prospective threat. The result of the Peeping Tom—how innocent that sounds—did nothing more than confirm what I believed to be true: that men were dangerous because they wanted something and would take it if they could. Desperate to escape the fishbowl of the house, we made a break for a neighbor’s house to call the police. By the time they shed their small-town flashlights on the house and took their perfunctory report, the Peeper, whoever he was and whatever his intentions, was gone. My sister, Poppy, and I slept that night in a seedy motel on Highway 21 on the outskirts of Ketchum.
When we returned to the house in the safety of daylight to grab toothbrushes, our homework, and a change of clothes we discovered the creepy pattern of footsteps around the house. The sight of the boot prints sunk deep in the wet ground fossilized in my memory. They were the boots of a big man. Without turf or landscaping to hide his trail, we could see he circled the house repeatedly, like a predator circling prey. But then, maybe he was just trying to get a better view.
After two nights in the motel—Poppy was whisked away after just one night—t
here was nothing to do but go back to the empty house now crowded with fear. My mother, whom we called to tell of the unexpectedly dangerous house, thought we were being silly and didn’t want to continue paying for a motel room when we had a perfectly good house to live in. Wherever she was—at the café, in Picabo, on vacation with Pat helping her spend all that Pacific Palisades green she’d inherited from her father—it was easy for her to say, “Get over it.” Maybe she saw it from her own perspective, a loaded pistol under her pillow; likely as not she’d have shot the fucker in the face.
∗ ∗ ∗
I try to convince myself I’m safe in my bed in my apartment at 77½ Intervale Avenue despite how quiet it is and how unfamiliar the sheets feel after my two months away. I’m used to the imperfect sanctuary of a bed. Waking, I’m sickened by a presence on me like a mean hangover. It wasn’t just the Dr. Kohl or hospital era that’s been full of these nightmares. Bad dreams have intruded on the false security of sleep with regularity since I can remember. From the age of three until I was nine, the appearance of my sister’s long white flannel nightgown floating like an illuminated ghost toward me though the dark meant I was safe—or safer. When I frequently woke myself—and my sister—with an unthrottled operatic scream Nicole escorted me to my parents’ California king. There I’d lie between them, a hangover of fear wet on me, terrified to move lest I be booted back to my own, now scary bed.
I remember that the oppressive warmth and heavy smell of my parents’ adult bodies disturbed me, but the idle house surrounding me was the greatest presence just as the silence is now. Staring up through the skylight centered over my parents’ bed, I’d fall into a depth of stars laid like a fine gauze of patterned lace across infinity. With no light for miles around to obstruct their intricate collusion, I took in the beauty and the awful depth those pricks of light suggested while the house exhaled around me. Then as now, marveling and listening were the best I could do. There’s no chance for sleep.
CHAPTER 34
The Queen of the Universe
Henry’s. I’ve arrived. I crunch spiced sugar on warm bread, anxiety mixing with smoke and sour coffee. The waitresses in matching maroon take a few orders, mostly at the counter, talking among themselves. It’s early and the day is long. They don’t seem to register they haven’t seen me in two months despite the sign on my forehead: FREAK. Or does the sign read PSYCHO? PSYCHO-FREAK? Or maybe it just says LOSER and I’m flattering myself. There’s no chance of reading the newspaper; it’s just for cover. I stare at bitten cuticles, scars, and the gold rings I’m again wearing. They’re welcome links to places and people. I smoke another, knowing there’s a cigarette machine in the corner, right over there. Freedom.
I feel people looking at me. I’m now one of those people who frequent public places everywhere—buses, bars, park benches—who make other people nervous. My force field of isolation keeps me safe. You’d never casually ask one of these people over the back of the booth for the ketchup or offer to buy a drink in a bar or sit next to one on a bus unless the one seat adjacent to them was the last one open. I’d long suspected many of these people weren’t as scary as they appeared and now that I’ve entered their ranks I know it’s true. My natural, fluid movement between inside and outside remains stiff. I can’t locate my public face as easily as I once could. Or maybe I don’t care enough to make the effort.
Do I feel ashamed? Yes, though I’ll pretend not to be when I see my friend Jess and ex-boyfriend Matt. The worst will be well-meaning acquaintances busy talking around knowing where I went when we both know they know. I’m almost sympathetic. What can they say? How was it? Happy to be back? You look great. I can smile and pretend it was nothing, move the topic along, turn it around with “I’m fine, how are you?” Mercifully it has to be gotten through but once. Pretending I never went anywhere is the easy way out—for them and for me.
The shortest waitress tips the brown-and-gold urn to fill my too-small cup. She’s making her rounds. I sit as long as I can at my table, forcing one more cigarette down. When I go I want Dr. Kohl to be there before me, waiting. The locked exterior door to the building reminds me that his room is a place of business where we engage in a professional transaction. I want to open the door to see him bending over the receptionist’s desk looking at some paper, that luxurious, thoroughly reliable warmth ready and waiting for me. I long for his encompassing smile, the one he never fails to offer, the one that comes freely, flooding me with his sympathy, admiration, affection, and interest. The contents of my stomach jump and squirm, the movement coming right up to my throat. I’m choking on the anticipation of seeing him again.
I slide out of the booth, money on the table, ashtray full, coffee gone, granules of sugar and crumbs all that remain of my toast. I’m not sure whether I’m walking or floating over the blocks to 112 Church Street. Door unlocked, inside in his presence, his eyes on me, I feel the sickness fall away as he unfolds himself, predictable and lusher than I remember. That smile and the eyes hold me. Once we are secure behind his closed door it’s us. Bodies, but mostly words. I could swallow them but they keep longer this way, out there in the air between us. This is what I waited for. This is what I mean.
I tell him about how I mostly wanted to leave the hospital and how afraid I was of catching the dreaded defeat that had drowned so many of the patients there. I tell him I felt guarded with Dr. Weiss, careful of what I said. I liked a few of the night staff—the ones who saw me in the dark hall, who knew I hardly slept during their shift. I tell him I’m afraid of getting sent back if I lose it. And then there’s silence because I’m not telling him anything—I’ve been talking fast but not saying much. Silence.
“Are you waiting for me to start talking?” he says, because “I’m over here trying to figure out where you are.” That’s when I know I’m home.
The fantasy of reunion runs its strange, unexpected course—I was detached but hadn’t realized it until he asked me where I was. The pleasure of him knowing me is deep and terrifying. Now I’m here again, about to become his in a way I can’t begin to imagine.
There’s business to do. Unavoidable. He’s taking my treatment in hand, setting limits, and insisting on accountability. He writes “Reentry” at the bottom of the chart, as if I’m returning to earth’s atmosphere from space.
Contract
1. No self-destructive behavior.
2. An understanding that I can’t do anything to hurt myself: burn, cut, alcohol, laxatives, vomit. Want some help understanding that?
3. Overeaters Anonymous (OA) 2 x week.
He writes, “Nails grown in; arm’s healed.”
If I fail to meet any of these three conditions—if I harm myself in any way—he will not see me. I will then have a choice: leave treatment with him and find another psychiatrist, or go back to the hospital. Although I’m not surprised, I’m cornered by the appalling alternatives.
Going to therapy four times a week, doing nothing to self-destruct, and attending OA meetings are my jobs. I’m not working. I’m living in my cozy apartment with my cat, Billbob; painting; walking; writing; and thinking about applying to grad school.
All of life outside his office is filler. When I’m with him I’m right back where I was before, clinging to the smallest nuance, rehearsing every word I can remember as I parse and peel his meaning, looking for what I don’t know, what might save me. The magic signs.
The first week I confess that the desire “to burn is out of control.” For now, I’m putting on paper whatever anxiety or rage or unidentified feeling is driving me toward the impulse. We review the steps that lead to a burn. It’s not complicated: 1. Thinking about burning myself, often for days before it happens. 2. Choosing the spot. The two steps are entirely artificial since choosing the exact spot is when I get wound up and attached to the idea of carrying it out. I’m supposed to call him if I get close. I hope I can do it in time.
Day three. I fear I’m filling with a nearly palpable blasphemy.
&n
bsp; “I’m really angry.”
“It shows,” he assures me.
I’ve been “feeling a sense of death close at my bedside at night—twice in the last week. It’s a sense of death as a finality. A choice.”
Rather than exploring this fear with me he says simply, “It’s a choice for everyone. I’ve said it before, I do not take you being alive for granted.”
I consider my options. I could leave, climbing inside an airplane to the smell of oxygen and steamed food, and buckle in for a nineteen-hour flight. My standard phrase, pre-hospital and now, is “India calls.” It means I’m fantasizing about slipping into the soft, colorful folds of a sequined sari to evaporate in the foothills of the Himalayas: fine rhetoric to cover the chill reality of going for good.
I don’t want “the burden of having to make things better. It’s scary,” I say.
He suggests that “what’s scary is feeling connected” to him.
Whatever I had of an identity has been flooded as thoroughly as before I was hospitalized. I’m entirely overwhelmed by my desire to meld with him, become him, have him in every way. This internalization reflects how porous I am. Psychiatrists call this quality self-transcendence. I empathize with characters in films and novels to the point of failing to maintain my own identity—it returns, of course, but not before the other is consciously shaken off. This identity confusion is part of the transference; the separation between self and nonself. In my relationship with Dr. Kohl this line has become dangerously fuzzy. The name for this excessive attachment and rage is “transference psychosis.”
Lights On, Rats Out Page 17
