Beneath my vulnerable, open surface a powerful and highly primitive part of me keeps tabs on what’s acceptable.
“I’m trying to resist. Something has been ruined. Wrecked. I don’t know where this leaves me.”
“Another child left alone who defiles herself or was defiled,” is his answer.
This part of myself resents and fears my dependence on anyone I let in too far. In falling for what he offers, in telling secrets, I’ve violated much of what protected me throughout childhood.
“I’m worried you’re trying to steal me away from the magic.”
“You’ll pay any price to keep that” because, as he observes, “the constant presence is what is good.” In other words, my crazy system is better than being fully alone.
The Queen of the Universe is alive and well—that’s me, or Dr. Kohl’s name for my internal tyrant. She sees things, as Dr. Kohl notes, “So absolutely one way or the other.” This Queen keeps me to the crazy rules: which cigarette to smoke, what’s “okay” to eat, why I can only drink coffee from my special mug, the significance and power of jewelry and hair, which article of clothing confers magic. Keeping hold of the rules is part of what makes it crucial to remain apart—to protect what remains of the real elements of who I am. I glance at my hour and wait to hear and say more. Dishonorable truths fall to the floor, where I hope to leave them.
At the bottom of the chart on day three posthospital he writes, “Therapy is about the give and take of intimacy.” Beneath that he writes in big, bold letters with triple underline: “Boundaries.”
CHAPTER 35
So Many to Choose From
The lengthy posthospital era is best summed up as a colossal bitch of complication; the longing and aloneness are unmanageable. After two months he writes in a note to himself, “Looks distinctly more intact today.” I must have looked pretty bad in the immediate aftermath.
I come as close to dying as I ever have. Trapped, I spin in what the psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg calls “the extreme and repetitive oscillation between contradictory self concepts.” Not only do I not know who I am or what I want; I don’t know what I’m feeling from moment to moment—I have no way of naming what I experience.
So I take to my bed, where I collapse into the pillow while the noisy days get on outside, the sun high. I sleep past the hours warm and soft under a pillow of feathers. No matter how risky it is, I let my dreams think for me. When I wake up the light will have changed, but since time has nothing to slip around while I sleep, I absently wonder what it’s done with itself. Smudged, I miss nothing about the days I lose. Happy to see them go, I fall back into sleep and, with nothing to wake me, I skip morning and go directly to noon.
He’s forcing me to sit in a church basement twice a week. “Hi, my name’s Cree and I’m an addict.” It’s all a big joke to me. I complain bitterly but he doesn’t care if it’s helpful; he’s holding me to the original contract I agreed to when I returned from the hospital. Going to OA was part of that deal. It takes months before he lets me off, granting release from the circle of tragic metal chairs where the bulimics, active and former like me, look on. We can parade our apparent normality before the corporeal freaks surrounding us, but everyone knows how repulsive we are. Lacking the loop of pleasure in becoming ever thinner that feeds the anorexic, our weakness is an indulgence in abandon. Only we hate our bodies—hate ourselves—so fiercely we’ll do anything to erase the effects of too many calories. At least the overeaters seem to keep it honest.
Never a God person and almost equally impatient with the so-called higher power—yes, given the magic 11s the hypocrisy reeks—I can’t bear the leveling maneuver the confessional, handholding format demands. I don’t want to be like them. My problems with food, eating, and my body aren’t going to be subject to the burned-coffee-scented air. I want no share in this lot of humanity; my own is more than enough.
I wander the bike path for miles as it stretches up the northeastern flank of Lake Champlain. I trust the lake’s violent, changing surface to take on the job of displacing the imprint of framed mown grass and trimmed trees. Glacial, the lake’s blue-gray water, flecked with aquamarine and white, cuts any conceit. I’ve long admired this lake’s enviable self-sufficiency; even on the warmest days its surface communicates an inhospitable quality, daring rather than inviting entry.
The holidays arrive and my father and sister want to see me. Strained is a generous description of Thanksgiving with my dad, his wife, Faith, and my sister in Saint Helena, California. Dr. Kohl demands I go to OA even there. I go once, utterly humiliated to admit to my family where I’m going. We cook the big bird and eat. The wine bottles gather by the recycle bin, the cluster expanding as the afternoon meal wears on into evening. It would make quite a contest to determine who’s most grateful when the dishes are given over to the quiet hum of the dishwasher, when the leavings of the greasy turkey have been scrubbed out of the butcher-block counter, when the final late-night turkey sandwich has been consumed and the mayonnaise put away. We don’t fight or raise our voices—ever. That kind of bad behavior is reserved for the catharsis of juicy, healthy, barebones fights with my sister, mostly contests over how we treat one another. She accuses me of dismissing her or not taking her seriously; I accuse her of being overly emotional, which edges a little too close to calling her irrational. Neither one of us much appreciates being called crazy. It’s all painful but not fighting with everyone else is so much worse.
I return to my 77½ Intervale Avenue apartment and, after a restless night, I’m greeted by Dr. Kohl at the following morning’s session with the demand I leave the nest of my apartment to move in with roommates. Impossible. But he ties the whole animal to the stake—me, the hospital, him. We fight. He wins.
My aloneness, how expertly I avoid spending time with people, has occupied the content of many hours between us. I make excuses, delaying the move as long as I can.
I arrive at a session that winter “feeling better, resigned, not in a rage.” I tell him, “I’m just going through the motions of my existence. Why not kill myself, end this completely? But even that’s pointless.”
He suggests I’m giving up on ever being loved. He frames it unoriginally through a metaphor of the child—the part of me that refuses limits, rebels, destroys myself. It’s her, my domineering three-year-old self, the one that learned to survive alone by being tough and never needing anything unless I could give it to myself. She’s having a temper tantrum because I’ve opened up all these extremely painful needs by experiencing real connection with Dr. Kohl. Therapy has shown me what it feels like not to be so alone. Now I can’t let go of how good that feels. My intimacy with objects and numbers pales in comparison with the way he makes me feel. Of the little I’ve allowed myself, Dr. Kohl says, echoing Miller, “the gifted child left alone to parent self is brutal.” It’s sad and difficult and perhaps impossible to say good-bye to the power of self-sufficiency. All the need leaves me feeling exposed. The process of putting this tyrannical, cruel part of myself away, even taming her, is risky because, as Dr. Kohl writes in my file, “She might kill you” first.
I find the temptations of suicide pulsing as naturally through my mind as the temptation to eat. Denied, each can be forced back, diverted, or otherwise foiled, for as Mann writes, “Reason is only virtue, while death is release, immensity, abandon, desire.” Sticky, the thought returns, resilient as a cockroach. There again, the uninvited guest.
I indulge in fantasies, but I know it would be cold to slip away without telling anyone. I imagine it that way. I think I could do it. Banish their faces—my sister, father, mother—so I don’t have to think about them when they find me gone. But I’ve never settled on just one plan, as all mental health professionals say when they ask, again and again, if you have “a plan.” Only one? But there are so many to choose from.
I dream of dying but I want to live. I’m either all good or all bad. Dr. Kohl is the same. I hate him because he doesn’t care about me
or I love him more than anyone else I’ve ever loved because he’s perfect. “Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together,” Hans Castorp reflects in his dream.
Dr. Kohl notes in my file that he’s “using the demands” to have roommates, go to OA, and do no harm to myself “to ‘delete’ the transference.” He’s forcing me to confront his imperfections, provoking my rage without doing anything unreasonable.
“I see you as a deity and everyone else as detractors,” I say.
“Very destructive,” he replies. “I can accept your dependency now, but it’s not an acceptable outcome.”
He can’t stop me from believing he’s the only person in the world who will ever understand me, the only person who can ever love me and know me fully. Despite this or perhaps because of it, I’m as angry as I’ve ever been about anything. I blame myself for wanting too much, for asking for what I know I can’t have.
CHAPTER 36
Want to Fuck?
If only my skin were as tan and smooth as the milk-chocolate-brown string bikini I wore when I walked the seven miles that posthospital January day from the Anglin Fishing Pier along Galt Ocean Drive in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to the breakwater leading into Lake Mabel. The bikini just encased my breasts, covered my ass, and shielded my pubic area. The standard loathing for the appearance of my thighs aside, a glance at my image in my grandmother’s full-length mirror told me I almost looked good.
Walking the distance barefoot across the predominantly bubbly sand beach tested my endurance as with each step my feet sank into the coarse, dirty-blond sand. Before turning back, resting on the giant boulders that hold the beach intact, I absorb the ocean surface, alive as if sprinkled with crude glitter. I still possess the capacity for happiness.
I’d decided to spend Christmas alone in Fort Lauderdale at my grandmother’s condo. I’d spent Christmas there alone once before, during my senior year at Middlebury. It’s not a bad deal—right on the beach, view of the ocean, almost warm-enough pool, and a daily average high of 85°F. Now as then, the appeal of sun beating down on bared winter skin and all that lovely melanin it kicks up in response convinces me to avoid passing the time caged in my apartment while Dr. Kohl takes a holiday week off.
The walk fills me up, gives me a reserve of strength I can draw on before I set off on the seven-mile return. But suddenly a man my father’s age is talking to me. It takes me a minute, as it always does, to realize he’s not just sharing the view. I half listen as he tries to tangle me in lies about the ways I’m beautiful. He asks me up to his condo, pointing to the high-rise beyond the shallow dunes, “Just for a drink.”
Walking away from his insistent, increasingly angry invitation in mid-speech, I feel spooked. The surprise of finding a quiet space only to be hustled out of it shouldn’t bother me. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been snapped into a defensive posture when I least expected to be. I can’t get used to men so casually targeting me physically as if I’m emitting the signal I desire them. I fear that the signal I most frequently had on display back then was lit up in neon. It read: “Vulnerable.”
I’m not special—being a target has nothing to do with what I look like, my string bikini or whether I weight 155 or 185 pounds. The overbearing male desire commonly directed at adolescent girls and women scares me. Others may be annoyed by it, while confident, happily lusty women may welcome it as an opportunity to play out their own desire. I love that my strong, athletic body—especially my unattractive but powerful legs—can carry me these fourteen miles under the hot sun and countless other places when strength and endurance are required. Because I’m not sexually game, trapped in rather than empowered by being perceived as desirable, I blame my physical self for turning me into an object. This alienates me, distancing me from my own flesh and ultimately prompting me to forsake my body.
Dr. Kohl believes my loose, frequently unsupervised childhood was sexualized, with weak lines between private and public, affection and sensuality.
“Children who have parents preoccupied with sexuality themselves become preoccupied with sexuality,” he says.
The pervasive nudity of friends, family, and strangers in the saunas, pond, and pools in Aspen and at Robinson Bar was not terrible. It was the 1960s and early 1970s. The iconic Hunter S. Thompson’s distinctive presence in my childhood tells more than I can of that hedonistic environment. As he put it, “With the truth so dull and depressing the only working alternative is wild bursts of insanity and filigree.” Later, life at Robinson Bar was lusty and loose in a way distinctive to the 1970s, with crass jokes about oral sex, bestiality, and Beatles-style doing “it in the road,” along with Penthouse and Playboy magazines practically on display. Sex was simply a pervasive feature of these easy-going environments in which drugs, alcohol, and desire mixed naturally with regular nudity. “People were not so afraid as they are now,” as Hunter said. “You could run around naked without getting shot.”
That I was exposed to this sensual environment without feeling protected from it—or from much of anything else—is the source of the problem Dr. Kohl identifies. There was plenty of sleeping around in the big, wide-open bunkhouse where the crew lived, as there was in the lodge where my sister and I switched rooms and beds as often as we liked. I even slept in our ranch foreman Hester’s “loft” above the wood shop—innocently—or as innocently as an 11-year-old can sleep with a man of twenty-five.
He was my first big crush—tall and blond and skinny with his handlebar mustache, worn Levi’s, cowboy hat, and boots. How could I not fall for him? We worked on the horses together. For a break we’d ride in the beat-up, faded blue Ford truck to the Sunbeam general store and campground. He’d buy himself Budweiser, Marlboros, and a Hostess Suzie-Q chocolate cake with cream oozing out of the rectangular edges, memorably coating the clear wrapping from the inside. He’d buy me Orange Crush and yellow Zingers. I’d peel the all-sugar frosting top off to eat first, then lick the exposed filling from the holes on the bottom, where I imagined a hydraulic arm and a piston-driven piping tip puncturing and filling each cavity with precision-measured “cream.”
There were few if any limits set on what might be appropriate in this relationship and others. That my parents often didn’t know where I slept between the ages of nine and eighteen doesn’t mean anything bad happened. I fell in love with Hester first, then my Nordic ski coach, Kevin, who doted on me as his star athlete. Then, of course, Dr. Kohl. These adult men focused on me, expended time and energy to sustain a level of attention I craved.
The warm affection I experienced with these three men stands in bleak contrast to those who made their sexual attraction explicit. When I was a teenager living with my sister and no parents, boys tried seduction: the popular “back rub” that led to the unclipping of the bra hooks and rapidly progressed to the removal of the shirt. I didn’t trust these high school charmers much more than I trust the man I just walked rapidly down the beach to escape. Later, I encountered an even more unprotected environment in Europe when I traveled there for my high school senior project.
My two-month Euro-Rail pass tucked next to my passport in the outer pocket of my backpack, I landed at Heathrow at age seventeen in the spring of 1983. The “project” I was required to do had no real requirements. It was more or less two months off with a research paper due at the end.
I met my father and his girlfriend, “C” Rose, in London. After sharing a train ride to Paris with them, I headed south solo seeking warmth—Cap d’Antibes, Saint Raphaël, Toulon, Cassis. Eventually I made my way through Lyon, Chamonix, Lausanne, Munich, Paris, and back to London. At our parting in Paris I’d arranged to rejoin my father and his girlfriend in a week or two—after they’d had some time together and I traveled alone for a bit, as planned. Sadly, I was hopelessly fixated on meeting up with them before I finished my good-bye.
Asphyxiated by men from the moment I boarded the train for Nice right on through to London, I defended myself but got no
thrill from doing so.
“Want to fuck?”
“Bonjour, mademoiselle. Vous-êtes seule?”
“Get in the car.”
“Can I join you?”
“Vous-êtes libre?”
“Please sit down.”
“Si jolie …”
“Come with me.”
“Vous-êtes mariée?”
“Are you alone?”
I avoided restaurants at night, kept in sight of crowds on quiet streets, remained shut in my hotel room after dark. Shirt buttoned high, head down, I felt under siege. The sanitation problem in nineteenth-century New York prompted reformers and historians to ask, “When did free-roaming pigs begin to be considered a public nuisance?” I can’t help comparing the pigs to aggressive men given their equally “unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public”—in this case my right to walk the streets, sit in cafés, or read at the beach unmolested. Under pursuit I was reduced to sexual currency, a kind of medium of exchange with my body as coin. I was not the banker. Absent a sense of my own sexual agency given my age and character, I tried to stay out of circulation. As I wrote in my journal, “I feel like a whore.”
I traveled that month without purpose, my teenage self abstractly pressured to have a good time. I wasn’t certain what that meant to me. Capable but too alone, I began looking for my father’s reappearance before it was possible he could arrive. Traveling with him, I could be a girl again. At hotel after hotel I waited, moving from one grubby room to the next, each time leaving careful instructions with Madame to direct any calls to me while religiously leaving the number of a succession of hotels with a friend in London we’d designated as our contact. I filled my days reading by the phone in a series of one-star hotels, envisioning the glad reunion between chapters while refusing to recognize the brain-numbing speechlessness I practiced to perfection as weeks passed without conversation.
Lights On, Rats Out Page 18
