Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  The rat’s renewed vigor does not reflect an increase in his well-being—although it will look (and perhaps temporarily feel to him) that way. The rat’s vigor comes from surges of a neurochemical called dopamine, which floods the reward circuitry of his primitive brain so that he gets the job done.

  That seven-years-ago seven-year itch. The first bland stretch in my marriage. The itch that was not an itch, or even an ache; just numbness. Staring at my husband and seeing him as stone, or salt, the flattening out severe. Words dwindled down between us, and when I touched him, his skin felt less like flesh than wax.

  We made it through that winter of winds and endless snow. Eventually spring came, an anemic tentative thing, the first crocuses a yellow so pale they seemed somehow vitamin deficient, but over time, the warm air found its way through. And then came a balmy night in late May, the sort of night when the windows are open and fresh air pours in by the jugful, and you would be happy if you weren’t so sad, because June, the month of roses, is right around the corner. I was in the kitchen washing a pot, moving the sponge round and round the pot’s curved contours, watching the bubbles froth up and wash away with the water running over my hands, mesmerized by the sight of these bubbles bubbling and then dissolving, over and over again, until, all of a sudden, in a second that changed my life forever, I heard a scream the likes of which I had never, ever heard before.

  This was before we had children, so I knew the scream, clearly coming from the basement of the house, where my husband had his study, belonged to him. The scream was strangled in its sound but also blood curdling and continuous, the scream of a man in the grip of total terror, the scream making the man at once larger than life while stripping him to his primitive once-was essence, the scream for the mother even as it was the mother of all screams. I put down the pot and took the steps down to the cellar three at a time, but even so, I was going so slowly I could not get to the bottom fast enough, there were so many steps, not ten, like I’d thought, there were suddenly thousands upon thousands of steps unfolding accordion-like in front of me. The scream continued, as did the steps, on and on, for seconds, moments, months, years, yes, years went by before I finally hit the concrete ground and began making my way across the ocean of floor, towards the scream, towards the story behind the scream, another endless trip, crossing that expanse of dusty floor, like traveling to China on the slowest of slow boats, as the blood-curdling screams (for they were plural now, not a single desperate sound but a series of separate sounds, each one more terrible than the next) continued on for all those years and universes.

  And then I reached my husband’s study door and flung it open. I had already decided in my mind what I would find, and this fixed decision only increased my shock at finding something so different than my vision. Prior to opening the study door, I’d assumed my husband was being murdered, for what else could cause such sounds of total terror? I’d assumed a murderer had snuck in through the basement window and was slowly, very slowly, slitting my husband’s throat so he died in terrible torture. I expected to find the murderer there and the wet red of blood, but as is often the case, my mind did not meet the moment at any point. I saw my husband standing there, screaming, a smashed test tube on the floor. The smoke was as creamy as it was noxious, but who cared? His entire body was on fire. Have you ever seen a person burn? A log burns from its inner heart, but a person burns from his outer edges. My husband was rimmed by flames dancing down his periphery, outlining him in leaping light, from head to toe, except his hair, which was engulfed, like he was wearing a top hat of swarming fire, a semitransparent Cat-in-the-Hat hat that showed his singular strands of hair as they were being incinerated. He had long hair at that time, long, fine, beautiful strawberry-blond locks that usually fell straight as rain to his shoulders but that were now all standing up like porcupine quills, offering themselves erect to the moving mouth of the fire.

  What happened next is unclear. My husband says I tried to run away, but I know this is untrue. I know for sure there was this nanosecond moment of extreme existential distress when I was thinking a thought as long and complex as the Torah but that I could start and finish in a sliver of a second, and the thought went something like this: Less than a moment ago I was a woman washing a pot, but now I am a woman watching her lover burn to death in a fire, and forever after this I will always be a woman who watched her lover burn to death in a fire. Of all the possible life narratives I could have, this, it turns out, will be mine, forever and ever, because the present, even as I am thinking this, is cementing into the past, and how odd, I never expected such a story to be mine, that I am a woman who once watched her husband burn to death in a fire, but it just goes to show, you never know what story, in the end, you’ll be stuck with.

  And then I recall dashing into the room, which was by now aflame in several spots, only one of those spots was the body of my husband. I remember grabbing him and trying to pull him out of his study, for there were very flammable chemicals stashed everywhere in this room and soon—at any moment—the whole house would surely explode into a fireball high in the warm night air; we would glow in our incineration, so come now! Run now! I recall trying to pull him out as he, with his bare hands, plunged them into the thicket of fire on his head and the fringes of fire on his body, squelching the flames with his bare hands, slamming his hands onto his body again and again, starving that fire of air, smashing the O out of it, and then, successful, racing back into the burning room and grabbing the fire extinguisher with his crisped hands, saying, “Shit shit shit,” as he fumbled for the plug you never think you’ll have to pull. He pulled it, and the extinguisher ejaculated hissing white foam that instantly quelled the impish, vicious, spreading fire, his entire study dusted down with a frozen smoking white. “Run now!” I screamed, and we ran; all the smoke detectors dancing and swiveling on the ceilings, shrieking their singular song over and over again, unable to calm down until I’d thrown open every window and we had watched the white ghosts of smoke take off into the night air, Caspers, each one, they lifted off and drifted up, up, at last out of reach, dispersing into particles of our past. My husband was alive.

  I remember running to the freezer, then, and throwing all its contents at him: the frozen peas, pints of Ben and Jerry’s, bagels in a bag, cubes of ice squared in their plastic trays, throwing everything frozen straight at him while saying, over and over and over again, “I love you I love you I love you,” standing on tiptoes to kiss his crumbling lips, my own lips, later, dark with char, “I love you,” and then hurling at him as hard as I could a bag of frozen string beans—wack wack wack—he was so stunned, everything fell at his feet. At last, when the freezer was emptied, I picked up the packages and pressed the crystallized bags to his curling skin, already starting to ooze.

  I love you.

  The fact is, our seven-year itch ended then, ended high on the flames of his near death, ended in the stench of smoke and the rundown batteries of all our alarms. We both had enough adrenaline emptied into our bodies to last us another seven years, which is probably just what happened, because now it is seven years later and, well, perhaps I should torch him tonight?

  Coda

  It’s winter again; it’s dark in here again; no, don’t give me a match. I don’t want a conflagration just so I can know I love him, but what about, tonight, a controlled campfire, after the children are asleep, in the cold November air? I can picture it, the forked flames, the delicious smell of lit logs, our voices, when we speak, very visible. I see silver smoke—a sign of safety—and also a time for us to talk. If I can see it, then does this mean we might do it? We’d have to bundle up and find the wood. We’d have to strike a match and touch its tip to what was once a tree. Who knows, maybe we’d even lie back on the frosted grass and watch the smoke spin up. On and on, up and up, the sky would turn us tiny, together, two imperfect people so imperfectly paired, these facts ashes in the face—in the space—of vastness. The fire would crackle; the heat would seep; we’d
press together and tilt our faces skyward, smoke rising, this couple called us watching their ghosts go.

  5

  Uncurling

  Every house has its finest piece of furniture: the heirloom bed your Aunt Bonnie gave you, the Chippendale table; in mine, it’s my medicine cabinet. My medicine cabinet is huge, handsome, with painted angels and delicate scrollwork rimming a mirror of finest glass. Open it up. Inside this antique are bottles filled with all manner of modern pills—Prozac in sleek, bicolored bullets; shining orange Klonopins; little lithiums in a dazzle of white. I take these pills every day, to keep my mind intact.

  I have mental illness. That’s an unfortunate phrase, mental illness, as old fashioned as the cabinet that houses my cures. I wish for a different descriptor, something both mythic and modern, like chemical craziness, like brain bruise. My particular form of illness is called obsessive-compulsive disorder, with a dash of depression thrown in. Years have gone by when my whole head was hot, when hospitals have been a haven. I had my first hospitalization when I was fourteen, because I could not stop cutting myself. I no longer cut. Now I count, in increments of three. I count to keep planes from falling out of the sky, to keep the moon in orbit. I count for luck and safety.

  My red-headed husband and I did what married people do: we got pregnant. I will never forget the test I took. Six in the morning, standing in the half-dark bathroom, watching a blue cross swim up on the white test wand, yes. The cross was a warning and a wish. I closed my eyes and said, “Go.”

  I did not want to have a child. Before she came to me, and before I came to love her, I dreaded the thought of motherhood, all those hours spent on the playground or in Chuck E. Cheese’s. I had heard women talk about “baby lust” and knew I possessed not a drip, not a drop, the drive towards procreation almost absolutely absent in me. My husband wanted our first. Motherhood went against my nature, which is brooding and acerbic and self-consumed. Plus there was my wayward mind, an issue. “And what about your illness?” friends said to me. “How will you mother when you struggle so much with anxieties and depression?” These are good questions. I’d spent my adolescence and young adulthood in mental hospitals, and then one day I swore I’d never go back. And I did not. I have not. I found my place and people. But still, the symptoms come, no matter what my will or situation. So here’s my question: Should a woman who is mentally ill become a mother? Are mental illness and motherhood by nature mutually exclusive? Was this a mistake, and a selfish one to boot?

  My doctor, the one who has treated me for more than a decade, was definitive. “It is dangerous for you to have a baby,” he pronounced. “You have too many periods of instability.” Still, something in me said go.

  Months went by. My belly bulged. Sometimes people asked me whether I was worried I might pass my bad genes on to my child. I didn’t mind that question even though, when I think about it now, it seems crude and unkind, assuming, as it does, that genes are both omnipotent and simplistic. My genes are difficult genes, different genes, but I’m not sure they’re bad. After all, the same genetic structure that drives me to check and tap also spurs me to put words on a white page, to garden until the yard is a riot of reds, yellows, and delphinium blues each summer. My genes, like everyone else’s I think, are both flower and thorn, little twisted things on their cones of chromosomes, such surprising, complex shapes.

  These shapes, however, can be difficult to hold. Illness, without doubt, is a challenge. There has been a lot of talk about the contemporary female dilemma of juggling two balls, motherhood plus career. But there is a third ball here, and it has been overlooked: mental illness. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, one out of eight women will suffer a serious depression in her lifetime. Mothers with toddlers are the most psychiatrically symptomatic group in the United States, and a woman is a much more likely to experience psychosis after the birth of a child than she would be otherwise. The challenge of having children for many women, then, lies in keeping three bright balls in the air, and one of those balls is burning: there is the child, the job, and the mind, which, I imagine, is shaped like a sphere, shadowy, full of fire, holes, and roots.

  My baby was born one month early, in a bad way. My water broke, full of green gunk. There was an infection, an emergency. I was sliced open and torn up. The little girl was gorgeous.

  The first few months of motherhood were so easy, it was a dream! The baby slept all the time. She was well-mannered and pinkish. I thought, “Why did I ever worry about this?” The baby had a soporific effect on me; as soon as she was in my arms, I just wanted to doze. I occasionally worried that she was autistic, because she seemed to be so much in her own world, but mostly, for me, early motherhood was more powerful than any pill in its calming, centering effects.

  Soon enough, though, things changed. The baby got an attitude. She started to stand up and refuse food. Winter came. The sun set earlier and earlier, sinking down like the lopped-off head of a golden eel, and then gone. My symptoms returned. Whereas in the past, however, my obsessions had usually focused on light switches and numbers, now they focused on the child. I began to count her calories. I spent hours calculating kilos. Worried that she was losing weight, I bought a scale. Then I worried that the scale was inaccurate, so I bought a second scale. I got the idea in my mind that the baby would eat better in darkness. I don’t know why I got this idea, but I started insisting on feeding her with the lights out. My husband came home one day and found us in her nursery, scarves over all the windows, a tiny silver spoon, just shining.

  In the eighth month of motherhood, my doctor increased my medications. I went back to work and that helped. However, every day, driving to work, I had to pass the hospital where I spent so many years. The hospital took on a new meaning for me. It wasn’t just about illness anymore. It was about separation. I pictured myself in the hospital and my daughter alone at home. One day, I parked the car in the lot and stood at the entrance for a while. Truth be told, it is quite likely that at some points during my daughter’s childhood I will have to be admitted. My medicines don’t always work. My illness augurs abandonments big and small. But then again, is not abandonment intrinsic to mothering? From the very moment we expel our children from the womb, we abandon them. No one is perfect. It occurred to me, standing at the entrance to the hospital, half in, half out, that my very desire for perfection, for complete control, for counting every calorie and shining every spoon, put my mothering at risk far more than any hospitalization such symptoms may cause. I decided to dance.

  I went to a dance studio at the corner of our street. Maybe I was not in my right mind. Maybe I was. “I’d like to learn to tango,” I said. When I was very young, I had seen a woman tango, and the image stayed with me, her limpid form, the simple spine visible beneath her black bodice. Tango requires flexibility, spontaneity, exactly what obsessive-compulsive disorder was not, and exactly what one needs to manage motherhood.

  My instructor’s name was Armand. He had an oiled black pompadour and slick shoes. “Doublestep, doublestep, doublestep,” he’d cry as he whooshed me across the floor. Armand taught me the intricacies of tango and milonga, the drag and sweep, the circle and swirl. In the center of the circle I pictured my brain, my red-hot head, which I was dancing around, letting it flame and seize without me. Dancing was my meditation. Through it, I learned not to control my mind but to bypass it completely.

  As a new mother, especially a mother with mental illness, tango has been an indispensable tool. There are many times when I am caught in the snarl of my own obsessive symptoms, my child’s needs, and the regular, daily demands of life, and to navigate these currents, one needs a swashbuckling step. Let me be specific. My daughter is a year old now. I no longer worry about her food. Lately, I have been concerned with a particular pattern of stars only I can see in my ceiling. I keep needing to trace this pattern with my eyes. My brain is bad, so bad! Some people say OCD is purely neurological, a tic-like illness similar to Tourette’s. I bel
ieve this. My brain seems to have the hiccups; it seizes and cramps. All day I need to count the stars in my ceiling. The worst part is, my daughter needs me, and I need numbers. “Mama, mama, mama,” she calls, but I’m stuck, and then I say to myself, “Drag left, uncurl,” and I picture myself doing it—uncurling—swirling between the stars, back down to where she waits, to where we live, together.

  I take tango lessons twice a week for one hour. It’s a spiritual practice for me, a meditation through movement. I know I am extreme; most mothers go to a gym or to a therapist for support, but I believe the difference with me is one of degree, not kind. What mother doesn’t have to dance between her own needs and tugs, her child’s cries, her dreams, his desires? What mother doesn’t come at this most complex of projects with a handicap of some sort, somewhere? You tell me, what mother is perfect? To my daughter I say this: I am sorry. I am so far from being able to give you all that you need, but know one thing. You have my whole effort. You have my whole heart, for whatever it’s worth. I love you.

  Yesterday, this girl I love did something very strange. We were in her bedroom and she began to knock on the wall, for no reason I could see. I thought, “Oh god, she’s going to turn out like me.” To distract her, I put on a tape. It was Peter, Paul, and Mary singing about lemons. I sang too. The words wooed my daughter, and she, for the first time after a mere twelve months on this blue planet, began to dance. Tap tap. Tap tap. But these were not obsessive taps. These were good taps. Strong taps. Foot taps. Hand claps. She has beautiful rhythm.