Mothers of Sparta

by Dawn Davies

  I loved feeling high. It was such a relief to not worry about ridiculous things that might not happen, or to not have an anxiety attack while sitting alone on the back porch with a magazine. I didn’t overthink. I printed out the application and made a hand-scrawled, wasted checklist of things I needed to do to apply. Then, for the rest of the week, in fifteen-minute increments while my family was sleeping, I popped pills and worked on my application until it was done. I was unapologetically, heavily shit-canned during the whole process, including writing the sample of my work, but my nerves were Rico Suave, sitting at a bar wearing a Panama hat and a vest with a pocket watch, drinking Southern Comfort Manhattans. I mailed the application without fear, and then I waited. I don’t remember if we had a good Christmas.

  Over the next few months, I started to scare myself when I realized that I was looking forward to each dose of Percocet, and I loved the fifteen-minute high the Ambien gave me right before I fell asleep. I thought I might be in trouble when, after a hard day, I took an extra pill to feel better emotionally, and it worked. Then I did it again the next day just to see if I was right. Then I started taking two per dose and then I started taking a second Ambien in the middle of the night after the first wore off. To steal a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut that I have seen tattooed on no fewer than forty-seven hipsters: Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. There was no pain and there was no anxiety. Parenting was a delight, because I simply didn’t care about much, and because the drugs also made me a little stupid. I said yes a lot and the children loved me for it.

  We all know how pill-heads ruin their lives. We have all heard the stories of normal people: schoolteachers, or bank managers, or housewives, et cetera, who get in a car accident and start taking Percocet and muscle relaxants, and end up crushing and snorting black market oxys on the back of strangers’ toilets, or giving sexual favors in exchange for pills, losing their jobs and their families in the process of the decline. Talk to any police officer and he will tell you that pill-heads are dangerously numb—empty zombies who operate with the singular goal of obtaining more pills. And don’t let them lie to you, the sleeping medication Ambien is addictive. When taken together, Ambien and Percocet make even a common, garden-variety housewife panic when she thinks the prescriptions might be getting low, or worse, that there are no refills left, and worse yet, leads her to ruminating on some experimental ideas, such as how far one could go to get more of these drugs when the prescription runs out. Sell the wedding ring? Dip into savings? Leave the children home alone to go meet some guy named “Toothless Tim” in an IHOP parking lot?

  At this point, I didn’t technically need the drugs anymore, but I wanted them very much. I liked how I felt just a little numb, numb enough to not feel the worry that had dominated my personality for most of my life. I knew I was treading in dangerous water, the kind of water with a big undertow that was waiting for me to go to the doctor and fib about my pain levels, or find an ER resident I could lie to about back pain, an undertow that was waiting for me to hide a bottle of pills from my husband, or hide an addiction from myself. One Friday after the kids were asleep, I grabbed my pills and took them to my husband, who was reading in bed. I handed him the bottles.

  “I need to stage my own intervention. I’m getting too dependent on these.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly.

  “You know I have an addictive personality.”

  “You do.”

  “I need to stop these now,” I said. I was embarrassed to admit this kind of weakness, especially to a man who, besides a small, nagging issue with Monster energy drinks, doesn’t even have a vice.

  And here is part of the beauty of my husband. He got out of bed, grabbed the bottles of pills, took me by the elbow, and led me to the bathroom. He handed me a bottle.

  “Open it,” he said. I did. “Now flush it.” I did. He handed me the other one, and I dumped it and flushed, watching my pills swirl down the drain to drug fish and other wildlife all over Southeast Florida.

  “Are there refills on these?” he asked.

  “One on each.”

  “Give me the bottles,” he said. I handed them to him and he put them in his pocket so I wouldn’t be able to use the prescription number to call in a refill.

  “Thank you for telling me,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and this is another beautiful thing about my husband: his ability to allow me to feel generous and beneficent as a result of things he does.

  It took me weeks to get back to a normal sleeping pattern without the drugs, and within a few days of quitting, the anxiety started creeping back up past Defcon 4, to Defcon 3, and finally, Defcon 2, where I could hear my own heart beating in my ears as a matter of course and push myself into an anxiety spiral simply by poking my imagination, and I realized, clearly, cleanly, in an unimpaired way, that I had applied to graduate school while I was on drugs.

  Around the end of March, a few weeks after flushing my drugs, I began to feel queasy in the hours before the mailman delivered the mail each day, or when I opened my e-mail in the morning. I began to check the school Web site several times per day, the mailbox on my porch several times per day, and my e-mail several times per day. When I thought about the MFA program, I would sometimes get a nervous colon, which led me to fool myself into believing I didn’t want to get in after all, that graduate degrees did not matter. The market was flooded with baristas and middle school tutors with MFAs behind their names, and besides, I had important things going on at home. There were some soffits that needed scraping and repainting. I was thinking about starting to sew the kids’ clothes again, because they were in high school and the fashions were more challenging, and I was sure they would love looking different from all their friends, and think of all the money we would save. I had also watched an Internet video on how to paint a faux mahogany look on a garage door and I had a mind to do it. Maybe I would even start a home business painting faux wood garage doors for people in wealthier neighborhoods. I told myself I put the program out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I wanted it too much.

  The thing that drug abuse and anxiety and pain flirt with, bat back and forth like a badminton birdie, a crocheted hacky sack, a psychological hot potato, is loss of control. Nobody wants to lose control. Before I had my first child, the thing I was afraid of more than the pain of natural childbirth was accidentally having a bowel movement in front of the midwife while I was pushing. And now, years later, when I think of the pain I can’t remember its particulars, but I do recall shitting myself while pushing, and the midwife wiping my bottom with a Chux, saying, “Oopsie, a little poopsie!”

  So we develop anxiety to brace ourselves for adjustments we are afraid to make due to things we don’t want to happen. We develop hypochondriasis in anticipation of the ultimate loss of control—death. We drink at parties so we can try and control how we are viewed, so we can be seen by others as interesting and entertaining. We avoid pain because we fear it becoming worse, unbearable even, to where we want to jump off a bridge or shoot ourselves in the heads to make it stop. We take drugs to protectively numb ourselves from an accumulation of lifelong pain of all sorts—physical, psychological, and psychic. These things, especially when they work in concert, weave in and out of each other. We take drugs to avoid pain, we avoid pain because we are afraid of losing control, and we lose control trying to not feel pain. The pain eats the drugs, the drugs eat the anxiety, the anxiety eats the pain, and we are left with a roil of snakes shaped like a Celtic knot, each with another’s tail in its dirty little mouth. Everything has a price.

  Sometimes, perhaps even for one day, during that fresh, drug-free, postsurgical state, when my pain was improved, and my shoulder injury was healing, I felt a tiny bit of control that came on me of its own volition. It wasn’t drug induced. It felt hopeful—there wasn’t an anticipation of pain in my immediate future, save the possible rejection from the MFA program, and honestly, fuck them, right? Who were they to tell me I would or wou
ldn’t “be” a writer? I was feeling a little giddy, a little silly in the way that someone who just cheated death feels, so the kids and I planned an April Fool’s Day prank on my husband. My kids loved April Fool’s Day and often concocted elaborate ruses to fool other family members. We once called my ex-husband and told him that our fifteen-year-old had gotten pregnant and he believed it for almost a minute. We were pros.

  I curled up on my bed. The kids ran out to get my husband, who was outside doing something manly that would have been inconvenient to stop, like digging a fence-post hole. They said, “Something’s wrong with Mommy. You have to come inside.” I waited, snickering inside my armpit. When I heard his footsteps on the bedroom floor, I groaned.

  “I think I have a kidney stone,” I said.

  “You’re kidding me.”

  I got up and paced across the room bent over, yet on tiptoes, the way I walk when I have a kidney stone. I groaned again like a goat, my kidney pain sound.

  “Jeezy Petes,” he said. “Looks like we’re going to the ER,” and this is where we burst out laughing, shouting, “April Fools! Ha ha! We fooled you, didn’t we?” The kids jumped up and down, delighted with their win. My husband, who doesn’t appreciate pranks, wasn’t amused.

  The next morning, in the ultimate payback, I woke up with a real kidney stone. I kid you not. We drove to the ER, where I vomited on the floor and passed out, while the tiny stone slammed against my ureter, trying to escape. They admitted me. I had surgery. They gave me another stent. When I woke up pissing iron filings and razor blades, filling the toilet with blood, they mercifully whacked me out of my skull with a morphine drip. My husband had brought my laptop, and I was able to fool around on it between the hallucinations I had of Chinese men with Fu Manchu moustaches floating down from the ceiling, lips a’pucker, to kiss me about the face and neck. I checked my e-mail and found one from the director of the MFA program telling me I was accepted for the following fall with full funding. In fact, thanks to the morphine and another prescription bottle of hydrocodone, I don’t remember my hospital stay, I don’t remember the nurses, and I usually make friends with the nurses. I don’t remember my doctor, and I don’t remember opening that e-mail and getting one of the best pieces of news of my life. My husband had to tell me I read it.

  But when faced with a new thing, we always get a choice. We can turn back to what we know is safe, or we can take a chance and do the thing, even if it scares us. I got out of the hospital, had my stent removed, and this time, when I stopped needing the drugs for pain control, I stopped taking them. Instead of looking forward to an imagined, always apocalyptic personal future, I looked forward to something real that was actually going to happen. I kicked the knot of snakes into the dirt and moved on.

  TWO VIEWS OF A SECRET

  Some people believe there are two kinds of people: those who believe in God and those who don’t, those who eat animal flesh and those who don’t, those who burn the midnight oil and those who get up with the sun, those who fantasize about space and time travel and those who don’t read sci-fi, those who pick their scabs and those who don’t. Or as Tom Robbins said, “Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.” I’m not smart enough to know better, because I believe there truly are two kinds of jazz music lovers: those who think that Jaco Pastorius was the best bass player who ever lived, and those who are misinformed.

  Because I live with a scattered mind, and because my prefrontal cortex could probably use a hoarder intervention, it helps me to think this way. I envy clean thinkers who can follow a logical map in their mind to a thought they have stored there, who can make sense of the volumes of information that are thrown at them every day, those who are not daunted by caretaking their memories and knowledge. But that’s not how I roll.

  Classifying things into sets of two is not sophisticated. My life is structured around things of two: two piles on my desk—things to do right away so I don’t lose my job or house, and things that can wait. Two orders of kids—the ones on autopilot who have left home, and the ones I still have to remember to feed. My old marriage and my current one. The sheets that are on the bed, and the set that is hanging on the line out back. I am willing to consider that my simplistic view might be a sign of inferior processing, as I recognize that I am unable to categorize things logically without blending in unscientific pieces of information, such as feelings and memories, and for me, even colors.

  * * *

  I am a lifelong music lover. One of my earliest memories is of lying in my crib with my favorite stuffed elephant, who had a windup music box where his heart should have been. At night, when I couldn’t sleep and the darkness lay ahead of me like a long road, I would wind the key in the elephant’s back and listen to “Brahms’ Lullaby,” manipulating the sound by pushing it into my ear, or pressing it against the mattress to make the notes bounce off the springs and create an echo that felt like an empty room. Sometimes I would hold the key to slow the song down, or speed it up. When I did these things, the sound manifested as colors in the dark, either behind my eyelids, or in the space before me when my eyes were open. I could see the music. And for many years, I assumed this was what all people experienced.

  When I was six or seven, my parents bought me a portable white plastic record player. My father taped a nickel onto the arm to keep it from skipping, and sometimes, on Friday nights after payday, he would bring home a 45 record of whatever caught his fancy. I spent hours playing records alone in my room, memorizing the songs of Steve Miller, the Beatles, Elton John, and Kiki Dee, and a discarded fifties doo-wop collection that must have belonged to my parents. When I visited my grandparents, I tagged along to their weekly choir practice. I leaned against my grandfather while he sang, so I could feel his baritone vibrations moving through my body while I followed along to his part in the hymnbook with my finger. The sanctuary would become a dance hall, where visual echoes of the pipe organ and the Latin praise songs ricocheted into the high-arched space and showed me their colors.

  When I was nine, my grandfather bought me a tabletop organ. It spanned two octaves, and had a red plastic covering and bright white buttons that played real chords. He built me a little table and bench and my parents put it in the upstairs dormer room. I sat on my little bench in front of that organ for many hours, teaching myself how to read music by trial and error using a booklet that had come with the organ. The organ sounded terrible and I made it sound worse, which I think is why my parents set it up so far away from the rest of the house. No one could bear it. When I was eleven, my parents rented me a clarinet, a real instrument, and I thought I was on my way to becoming a real musician. I loved that clarinet so much I rubbed it with special wood oil, and each time I took it apart, I placed its sections gently in the case as if they were parts of a rare, fragile artifact. At night, I slept with the case on a pillow beside my head, like a favorite pet.

  My first sound was an open G, which on the clarinet was a no-fingered note that came out wobbly and wretched and leaky and squirting with spit. Not joyful. A day later I tried an F, then an F sharp, each of which used one different finger to produce, but which somehow made perfect sense, like identifying each sibling in a set of fraternal twins. As I gathered speed and built up an embouchure, I learned more notes, then slowly began to put them together as scales that made clear visual, as well as auditory, sense. The notes had their own positions, their own identities, their own colors.

  In beginning orchestra, we began with simple compositions in C major—sixteen-bar pieces composed of whole notes and half notes that no one, not even the kids who didn’t practice, could screw up. C notes and C-major chords are thick, sunny yellow lines, with the color variations a satin ribbon might have. They felt good and were easy to understand. By middle school, we played classical music by real composers, which produced explosions of color that were hard to describe or recollect, yet were consistent each time I heard them. When I then learned to
play the saxophone and moved into complex jazz compositions, the vague collection of colors and images that I had always associated with music became a lexicon, or better stated, persona for me. It became a filter through which I saw the world—all parts of it: the kindness of my friend Jim, an alto saxophone player, who died of leukemia in college, is a sandpaper-colored B-flat note he sustained during a solo, the breath he took before he played. The feeling that I had always had—the choking, black, anty scramble in my throat when I listened to a distorted electric guitar sound, or Mozart’s Concerto 34 in D Minor—was the same feeling I had when I felt anxiety about something, which was quite often. The pinching in the bone and muscle behind my ears leading down my neck is the orange anger that rushed my field of vision when cymbals crashed, and became what I heard or felt when I got in an argument with someone. The slow swing of a Glenn Miller song was soft, pastel ribbon candy folding over on itself, and also the love my grandmother and grandfather shared with each other. Music, which had always been a palette of feelings and images, took on an arrangement of order that made sense, though I still stand by my classification of two when I say that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who can see what music sounds like, and those who cannot.

  * * *

  I’ve never denied being obsessive. In fact, I’m annoying enough about it that people either humor me, like they would a mentally ill relative, or they end up angry at my fundamental makeup and stop spending time with me. I don’t keep a lot of friends, and my husband’s application is currently being reviewed by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, but my mind is a playground, or perhaps a laboratory, and I have grown used to managing it. By the time I was in high school, I practiced both instruments many hours per week, ignoring the Florida life outside of my bedroom windows, children shouting and riding by on bicycles, the sprinkler system turning on and off, cicadas in the bushes, and the breeze parting the tree branches and making the leaves hum. My stunted social life revolved around music, and all my school activities were band related. I entered state competitions and competed in solo and ensemble performances. For a while, even as a freshman, I was one of the best.