White Walls

by Judy Batalion

  But in the end, we didn’t have to call 911. Eli’s gentle voice was magically soothing, turning her wild pupils soft. The two of us managed to convince her to come with us to the emergency psychiatry ward. (Dad hid in the basement.) She hadn’t left her house in years, and yet, she came, dragging her duffel bags like guard dogs. Somewhere inside her, she wants help, I try to convince myself. That’s why she agreed to come.

  “You captured me,” she yells.

  I did. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. Her delusions had become reality. I was now the criminal, the SS trooper, she’d always feared.

  Luckily I am asked to move to another room. Eli goes to make calls and I walk, my legs helping to soothe me, as always. I find myself wandering through the basement of the Jewish General Hospital where I was delivered. (Being born was difficult, I used to joke in my stand-up act. Not only did I go from the warm comfortable womb to the cold dangerous world, but I was naked, wet, and the very same day, I found out I’d have to move in with my parents.) I’d traveled the world, through Egypt, Israel, the DMZ in Korea, and yet here I am again. A boomerang to my birth. Death and birth are all splashed together in these white walls.

  I pass the room where my brother had his bris, thinking of the parts of ourselves we lose before we even know we’re losing them. The hospital’s basement is like a warren, a web of unexpected corridors. They must disorient us on purpose, I decide, hoping in our confusion we’ll consent to undergo things we wouldn’t do even in our own bathrooms.

  They let me see her in a triage room.

  “Get the fuck out!” she yells before I even cross the threshold. “Do you know what you’ve done? I will die here and it’s your fault. You should know that you have ended my life.”

  “I’m just trying to help you,” I say quietly, firmly, to convince myself despite the hard bed and metallic instruments. What am I doing? Am I giving up on her? Have all these years of pleading for someone to help me been a mistake? Maybe Dad was right all along. Perhaps I should not commit so fiercely to committing.

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  It’s her disease speaking, I remind myself. It’s her disease that can’t stand me.

  But I get out.

  A nurse calls me over: “So.” She’s chewing gum. “Like, she told us she’s homeless.” Homeless? “And, like, that she has no family.”

  “She has homes. Several.” I don’t even begin to get into the fact that she hoards houses, that her whole disease plays out in the home, as she fills and barricades it, locks herself in.

  “Oh, also, in her bags we found dozens of keys. And thousands of dollars.”

  I hope this can help convince them to keep her in. “You must listen to my version of the story,” I say. “She’s extremely clever, but not seeing reality.”

  “Super interesting,” the nurse says, lowering her tone, like this is gossip. “Like, make sure to tell the doctors.”

  We are interrupted by an orderly. “She’s resistant. We have to restrain her. We’ll use ties.”

  Ties. My mother. My own limbs go numb. There is life in her, even if it’s buried deep. My mother, who told all the good stories. At Great-aunt Gittel’s house, she’d leave the adult table and sit on the floor with us in the den, my second cousins all entranced by her improvised worlds where good reigned over evil, while I sat next to her, my elbow on her knee. These concrete moments are so far away, covered over, photos at the base of a collage, occluded by more recent images. When was the last time I saw my mother’s knee?

  Dad finally joins us, and Eli sits with him in the relatives’ room. The vending machine offers Kit Kats. They remind me of Bubbie, and suddenly it dawns on me that this is the very same emergency room where Mom used to take Bubbie to be treated for the same mishegas, as Dad called it. But my mother cannot see the parallel.

  What about me? How can I know that I’m not deluded too, that my own reality holds weight? A part of me is constantly on edge, waiting for these damaged genes to express themselves in my own cells, metastasizing through my consciousness. Not that I would even realize.

  I unwrap the top of my Kit Kat and crack the lines, parallel, neat and crisp. I take a bite, ready for a moment of bliss, but instead the taste shocks me: it is bitter. I look at the package and am enraged. Who the hell wants a dark chocolate Kit Kat? If you want dark, buy Valrhona, Jacques Torres, Godiva, even, but Kit Kat? The bitterness burns my insides, and I feel vacant, reminding me that at my center I am a hollow core.

  For a second, that image calms me.

  Which is good, because the psychiatrist calls us in. We shuffle into her tiny office. I motion for Dad and Eli to sit on the metal chairs. I stand, face her. It’s my turn to talk, to present the case of my lifetime, the real performance that I’ve been rehearsing for all these years. It suddenly dawns on me that I’ve never told anyone except Jon the whole story. No other friend, no lover. Even the social workers have gotten only half versions. I have honored my mom’s wishes, kept her secrets. Perhaps it’s because I’m afraid they will consider me crazy by association. I should have done more, and sooner. Now I must convey it all, convince this woman to keep my mom here. To save her.

  But before I even open my mouth, the doctor speaks: “Paranoid delusions. Severe depression. Acute intelligence, but no emotional insight. A bad case. I do not know how you’ve managed.” She looks up at me now from her file, speaks gently. “I do not know how you’ve managed for all these years.”

  There! There it is! The sentence I’ve been waiting for for a third of a century. Warm tears marathon down my cheeks, hot, soft, so heavy I could hear each drop.

  We are in the open, skeletons out of the closet, along with keys and cash. The truth is out there, scientific.

  Someone else will take care of Mom.

  “Go home,” the doctor orders me. “We are treating your mother now. I’m going to keep her here for eight weeks. Go home.”

  Eight weeks!

  I leave the hospital, thinking of Jon’s hands, my white apartment, my calm, clean adult life, my gridded streets.

  I leave, thinking: For the first time, I am free.

  • • •

  OVER THE NEXT few weeks I wafted around, sated with the notion that I’d realized a lifelong dream. I could hardly believe it: someone was taking care of Mom.

  I’d stayed in Montreal for a few days after the emergency episode, keeping Dad company and visiting Mom twice, averting my eyes from the dirty conditions of the locked psychiatric ward—the gray marks on the walls, the unkempt beds, the toilets strewn with wet paper. My mother didn’t even notice. She wanted me to bring her books, pencils, sweaters, socks. Now. Then she threw me out.

  Facing her anger, her shrill demands, my own cascading guilt, I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t have to. I’d given her care over to a specialized authority who knew so much more than me. I breathed, and walked away.

  Relieved that Mom was being watched, excited for the potential results of her therapies, even letting myself fantasize, in tiny glimpses, the happy version of her that might emerge, I began work on my own home. Jon and I had recently achieved another lifelong dream and purchased our first apartment—a completely open loft space with large windows. I now went about decorating as if under a spell, enthralled by the prospect of designing a permanent place—all white. Tiles, carpets, walls, blinds, linens—even sofas. I ripped out intricately ruffled moldings and put in open shelving, graphic white built-ins. It was my childhood dream suburban mini-mansion, but better because it was a loft smack in the middle of New York. I wanted to buy the smallest number of furniture pieces possible (An ottoman? Really?) and keep our shelves half-empty. Or completely empty! “Militant minimalism,” I joked. Clean lines, clean boundaries.

  Jon, however, picked out red and orange tiles for the kitchen.

  I freaked out w
hen I opened the box. “We. Said. Only. White.”

  “Don’t have a backlash with your backsplash,” he said. “Calm down.”

  I realized I was going too far, to the opposite extreme of my childhood home, being selfish about our shared sphere. “We can add some hue,” I reluctantly conceded.

  The backsplash stayed white, but we got bright orange British-designed light fixtures.

  Jon and I developed a domestic system of stuff. We only purchased major items that we both loved, creating an aesthetic from the overlaps in our tastes. I did not go through or criticize his drawers but placed any floor-standing junk into his “man cave” closet, for which he called me “the hoarding police.” Introducing new things into our household meant old ones were jettisoned, including plastic bags. The curtains on our large living room windows always remained undrawn—we had nothing to hide.

  • • •

  OR DID I?

  Two weeks after the commitment, Eli called. “She’s out.”

  I sat on my new windowsill and stared at the daytime traffic that built up with each red light and then let go. Muffled swooshes of movement. I tried to breathe along.

  From confinement, Mom had asked for a copy of the Quebec Civil Code, read it, and learned that you can contest being held against your will. She went to the hospital’s legal department, officially requested a trial knowing it was her right, was taken by taxi to the court, fought her case, and won.

  “Dad was there. He says it was a beautiful defense,” Eli said. “She charmed the wigs off them.”

  “She turned off the crazy for them,” I said, shaking my head.

  All my efforts—poof—vanished.

  My eyes welled. I stomped my foot. I felt so helpless, fighting this lost cause. Somewhere in Mom, she must have known better, known she needed help; she just refused to get it. But she was sick, I reminded myself. She was traumatized.

  Could the ill mind ever be culpable? What about when it affected us all?

  Was I allowed to be angry or not?

  “So she’s back home now,” I said, to believe it. “How’s Dad?”

  “Fine.” Eli sighed. “Actually, I think he supported her release.”

  “What?” I actually pulled my hair from its roots. Why was he foiling our plan?

  “He said she was driving him crazy, calling him at all hours from the ward.”

  Then again, what could I do? I didn’t live there, he did. He’d never run away. He had chosen to keep caring for her. My freedom was, to a large degree, at his expense. I’d always felt like the mother of my family, but really, I’d shirked the daily duties and passed them to him. My father, I surmised, preferred not to be alone. He liked being needed. He missed her—insanity and all. I always felt he saw her as the twenty-four-year-old she was when they first met, beautiful and odd, filled with peccadilloes, as he put it, but not yet so twisted.

  “Did they give her antipsychotic medication? Is she taking it?”

  “They did. Who knows?”

  Who knows? swirled through my mind. My whole life I’d assumed this was the solution. The system. Medical help. The hospital. The court. I’d assumed that at some point, someone would step in and take care of it, take care of us. But there was no grand caretaker.

  No answer. Not even a clear equation.

  My mother was big, too big, bigger than me, uncontainable. How could I fight a force that was so smart, so passionate, so determined, so desperately against helping itself?

  I could never save my mother.

  “What do we do?” I asked, just to say something. I had the horrible thought that if this was cancer, I’d be telling everyone. I’d get sympathy. And Mom would want help, maybe even appreciate it.

  Maybe I just had to let her be, in her house, with her files, just as she wanted. Maybe that was the best way to love her. I do not know how to love her, I realized, wondering if it was this confusion that had guided my whole life. Did I see her as a person? An illness? A victim or a perpetrator? I did not know what I owed her.

  I hung up and stayed on the white windowsill, my body stretching out as if becoming part of the wall itself. Then I called Melissa. “Remember when I canceled lunch and headed to Montreal? It’s time I finally told you what’s really going on.”

  • • •

  LATER THAT SAME week, I found myself sitting across from my gynecologist in a cramped office space, his various diplomas hung like a Victorian gallery, stacked on top of one another along the entire wall. “You’re thirty-three,” he began. “Your blood work is, well, off.”

  “Oh,” I stammered, surprised. I’d recently been having unusual cycles, and with a family history of early-onset menopause, I’d decided to have my hormone levels checked. But I hadn’t actually anticipated a problem.

  “It’s possible that long-term use of the pill is causing some of this,” he said. “But considering your genetics, and your history of abdominal surgeries, which generally result in a fifty percent infertility rate, I really would look into this now.”

  Infertility. It was a word I’d heard, of course, but never imagined in relation to myself. Then again, neither was the word “fertility.” Children? Lord. I’d barely dealt with my parents. I still wanted time for me. I still wanted to be a child. Could I stand to get lost in another person’s emotional landscape yet again? The idea of not having kids seemed sad, but in an abstract way.

  On the other hand, I did not like the idea that my hormones were out of whack, which I knew could cause other medical problems, and the idea of menopause troubled me with images of facial hair and sweaty temper tantrums.

  “Realistically, for someone with your history, I estimate it will take two years to become pregnant.”

  No problem; I needed two years just to think about that word. This was good news to me. There was medical intervention. There was time to get pregnant. That is, if I even wanted to.

  “I recommend you go off the pill now,” Doc continued. “If you don’t get your period within four weeks, go straight to the fertility clinic.”

  I sighed. Another medical project.

  That night I told Jon the news. “Two years?” He held back from saying anything more. He was about to turn forty, and I knew he didn’t want to pressure me. But “Dad or Grandad?” was the game he’d been playing lately as we walked through town and saw a man with a stroller. We both knew he’d be a terrific father, dedicated, involved, loving.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll go off the pill and we’ll start the process.” But I was relieved, really, by my time buffer.

  I went off the pill. I didn’t get my period. I called the fertility clinic. I made an appointment. They told me to repeat my blood work. And so, one morning, I went to see my enthusiastic Israeli GP.

  • • •

  THE TWO PARALLEL LINES.

  • NINETEEN •

  38 WEEKS: SURVIVAL OF THE WITTIEST

  New York City, 2011

  “I need to ask you a favor,” Mom said faintly over the phone. “Please.”

  I sighed. “What is it?” I sat down on my white sofa, wondering for how long it would remain crisp, colorless. And for how long I’d fit on it. I was nine months pregnant, and so many organs sat on my sciatic nerve that for three weeks I’d barely been able to walk without shards of pain running down my leg. The third trimester had been a downer, the hormones less buzzy, the appearance less glowish, the sense of passing time, limited possibilities, and loss of common ground with childless friends heightened. I’d had enough of people accidentally telling me stories of how they went into labor during rush hour, enough internal kicking (or what I was now calling domestic abuse), enough browsing stores that sold only cashmere onesies, enough answering why I wasn’t having a baby shower (baby shower? I’m too scared to even take a regular shower), enough of the insomnia, sciatica, and panicka. I was eyeing knives
in the desire to self-C-section. Despite my cascade of anxieties, even I was bloody ready for this thing to come out.

  “I need Dad and Eli to stay here. At least one of them.”

  I locked my lips. Hard.

  All three of them were supposed to come to New York two days before my elaborately scheduled C-section (to take place on a Tuesday at four p.m.—the only time of the entire week when both colorectal and obstetric surgeons were available) and to stay for a couple more. Mom, however, had called me the week earlier, profusely apologetic, certainly upset, saying that she just didn’t see how she’d be able to leave the house. I wasn’t surprised, but still, disappointed. Considering that she was more excited about this than about, well, anything, part of me had expected her to rally, as she did for my wedding, sliding in at the last minute like a ballplayer capturing home plate. My immediate ping of anger—it was so unfair not to have a mother when I had a mother—dissipated quickly into guilt that I wasn’t birthing closer to Montreal for her sake, and finally to calm reason. Our umbilical cord was the telephone line, and that’s how she would experience this event too. Besides, I told myself, what I wanted at my side was the image of her—smiling, nurturing—not the anxious reality, making me scared and late.

  But at least Dad and Eli were still supposed to come.

  “I can’t be alone in this house. I know you want them to support Jon, but really, Judy, I need more support than he does.”

  I removed the phone from my ear, leaving it hanging limply in the air a few inches from my brain. Since when was this about Jon? Sure, we both needed them to help out while I’d be in the hospital, which I knew would be at least five days. But mostly, I just wanted them to be here. For me. Not for Jon.

  I put the phone back to my head. “Please, Judy,” she was begging. I closed my eyes, my lids heavy like the rest of me. “Please.” Of course, she was right. She did need help, she needed support, more than Jon, more than me, even if I was about to have major surgery to give birth.