Lying

by Lauren Slater

  “Lauren,” my mother said.

  I raised both my hands. Sometimes I did that just before I went. It was because my hands felt so funny, so big and drifty, I just had to raise them.

  This, then, was her sign. I felt her hands lock on to my shoulders, and with all the vigor in her vigorous suppressed self, she shook me and yelled, “No! No! No!”

  The good news is, it worked. Not 100 percent, but we got a fair result. I had a small seizure in the supermarket, but nothing anyone could really see.

  The bad news is, the public misunderstood. My hat had fallen off my bruised-up head, and I had bitten my lips down to blood again. Picture this: a big person shrieking at a little person, hauling her around, the little person pocked with contusions and oozing from various sensitive spots, it doesn’t look good for the big one.

  We were both in a daze, I think, and when we came to, the whole damn supermarket was silent and staring.

  “Well,” my mother said, and smoothed her hair back with the flat of her palm.

  A woman with a baby in her stroller glared at us, and then walked away. I saw the butcher holding his knife. “Someone help that child,” he bellowed. But no one moved.

  “It’s not,” said my mother, “it’s, people, it’s not what—”

  She started to cry.

  “Oh, Mom,” I said. “Oh, Mom.”

  The two policemen came forward. One knelt down by me and gently blotted my lip with his handkerchief. Right then and there I fell in love. Every button on his suit was copper, like a coin.

  “Ma’am,” the other one said to my mother, “ma’am, may we step aside and talk?”

  We all stepped aside to talk. There are many private places in a supermarket, you would be surprised.

  My prince kept his hand on my shoulder the whole time. The other one said, in the privacy, “Ma’am, we have to file on you.”

  “File what?” my mother said.

  The policeman sighed. He looked genuinely pained. “Child abuse,” he said. “It’s against the law.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” my mother said. “I don’t—”

  “And, we’ll have to take her with us.”

  “This is my daughter,” my mother said, starting to shake like she was having a seizure. “This is my daughter and she’s not going anywhere.”

  “The law states,” the policeman said, “that if we deem a child to be in imminent danger, we must place her in the custody of social services.”

  “Oh please,” my mother said. She was shaking with fear and snorting with contempt at the same time. I felt bad for her, but I also hated her snorts.

  “I don’t abuse my child,” she said. “My child has epilepsy,” she said. “Epilepsy, do you hear me? She has seizures,” she said, “and that’s why she looks like she does.”

  “Ma’am,” the policeman said, “we witnessed you shaking the child, and hitting her with an open hand, and she is severely bruised.”

  “I never hit her with an open hand.”

  “Do you have epilepsy?” the princely policeman asked me.

  I thought if I said yes, they would let us go. And part of me wanted us to be let go, but part of me didn’t. I had had the dream of houses, the view of all the other houses I might get to live in. I knew about social services and getting put up for adoption. I’d seen Sunday’s Child in the newspaper. Maybe I could be Sunday’s Child, and have my picture in the paper.

  “Do you have epilepsy?” he repeated.

  I wanted to answer, but the words got tangled in my throat.

  “Tell them, Lauren,” my mother said. I heard the desperation in her voice, the fragility behind her mask of muscle, and it made me sad, so sad. I’m sorry, Mom.

  And then they took me.

  • • •

  I went to a large brick building in the city, and a woman named Suzie Norton tried to interest me in Monopoly. I didn’t want to play Monopoly. I’m sorry, Mom, I kept saying inside my head, but then I also had this little odd feeling of excitement, like there was mourning and happiness both.

  “I could maybe go home with the policeman,” I said to Suzie Norton. “The one with the black hair.”

  She left the room. A long time passed, and the day grew dark. The taillights of cars burned in the blue darkness, and the horns honked. Rush hour. Winter dusk. A time of black cats and sad poems. I started to cry.

  The door opened. “There’s been a misunderstanding,” I heard someone whisper in the hall. “She does have epilepsy. We’ve done a home visit. There’s no violations that we could find.”

  Suzie Norton then drove me back from where I came, from where I would probably always have to come. Her car smelled like cigarette smoke and strawberry lip gloss. She played golden oldies on the radio as we sped through town, down highways, up hills, cresting and cruising, for a little while free, chitty chitty bang bang, I was saying to myself, and I saw us up in the air, driving between the stars, jumping over the moon and the ocean, to Spain, maybe, or to Jupiter, where there was a different world.

  • • •

  That episode did change my world, and my mother’s too. No more Dr. Swan. Good-bye, Dr. Swan. A high dose of drugs. Hello, drugs. And the school for falling children, in Topeka, Kansas, where Dorothy and her little dog had once lived.

  “I don’t,” I heard my mother say to Dr. Swan on the phone, “I don’t want to do the, the Startle and Shake Intervention anymore. Anymore!” she said, and hung up.

  The days following the supermarket incident, she was in a rage. She was in a state. She paced the floors. She practically forced the phenobarbital into my mouth, saying, “Swallow, Lauren. I said swallow!”

  I understood that I had betrayed her, and while I felt guilt, I also saw it was possible to betray her. After all, she was still standing. So was I, for that matter.

  Those days, I cried easily and a lot. My skin felt tender to the touch.

  For one month I would go to the special school. I got my own personal steamer trunk, with drawers and a little closet in it. I loved that steamer trunk; I loved it even through the depression, because it was a dollhouse, a box full of rooms and niches. My mother washed all my socks, and we put them in the top drawer, where they looked like rabbits resting.

  “Here,” she said, the morning I was to leave. She handed me a clay owl, small enough to tuck in my palm.

  It seemed an odd gift. The owl had no purpose that I could understand. But when I folded my fist around the bird, the clay felt warm, the grooves suggesting feathers, suggesting flight.

  My mother’s eyes were rimmed with red, her face haggard.

  “I love you, Mom,” I said.

  She nodded with her lips clamped, and then a little cry came out of her throat; she turned away.

  Later on, when I was seated on the plane, I took the owl out from my pocket. I touched him, and then, like a little girl, I put him in my mouth.

  • • •

  Saint Christopher is the patron saint of epileptics. His statue stood in the front foyer of the convent, a dark foyer with pictures of holy people on every wall, pictures I, a Jewish girl, had never seen before. The images fascinated me. I saw angels with wings as big as monarch butterflies’; I saw a lady in blue, her robes billowing in a biblical wind. I met Christ himself, for the first time, and if I tell you I saw myself in him, would you believe me? Jesus stood at the end of a long clean hallway, perched on a marble pedestal. His limbs hung limply from his wooden cross, suggesting, to me, the sleepiness that follows seizures. His eyes half closed, a mouth as bright as a tulip, as bright as blood; I knew what he’d done, bitten his lips in pain. I loved his heart, how he made it so available. There it was, a valentine on his bony ribs, a little love message with maybe words on the underside: Be Mine.

  The nuns were our teachers for the month. They were not our physical therapists; we had specially trained people to do that, but the nuns took us into classes and taught us all about our disease. “Julius Caesar!” Mother Fernanda
wrote in bold letters on the board. “Napoleon Bonaparte!”

  They told us all the famous people who had had epilepsy, and then we had to memorize the names. The nuns themselves thought memorization very important. They had rules and expectations. Whenever they passed one another in the hall, their hands folded inside their habits, they gave a graceful bow that was wonderful to watch. I heard them chanting prayers every evening at four, and every day at dawn, before the sun had risen. I opened my eyes in my bed then, in the convent dormitory, and listened to their disciplined voices float across the snowy field, and into the windows of the room where we lay.

  There were fifty children altogether at the school, and ten in my dormitory. We were on a strict schedule, cooking class, sewing class, Living with Illness Discussion Group. We were up at six and in bed by eight, and so busy all the time I hardly had a moment to miss my home. It was a grueling education, but it made me muscular in a new way. I learned things my mother never would have thought to teach me, like how to wash a floor on my knees, I could do it. I learned how to scrape paint, sand wood, fix a faucet, and bake bread from scratch, pummeling the dough with my fists and then setting it to rise in its yeasty smell. I learned to milk a cow, squeezing its teats and stopping to rest, scratching the beast on its barn-warm haunches. I wired my own lamp that I made from a bottle, and when I plugged it in, it glowed, because of me. The nuns were proper, yes, proper like my mother, but also tough and handy. They hired no plumbers, no electricians, no cleaning ladies to do it for them. “You do it for yourself,” they’d say, “and for the love of God.”

  There was one nun whom I never saw in daylight, but whom I came to love. She was the nun who carried the candle and the basin of holy water, and every evening, after lights out, she came to us. Sister Mary. She was old, and hunched up, and she carried her basin from bed to bed, so any child who wanted to be blessed could be blessed. I had received strict instructions from both my parents not to partake in anything Christian, but I wished I could. The holy water smelled perfumed, and Sister Mary, if you wanted, would dab it on your forehead and say, “You are a sweet thing.”

  I would never let her do it to me, because I was a Jewish girl, but she touched me anyway, on my cheek, my throat, where the little throb of sadness lived, on my forehead where the band of fear cinched tight. “You are a sweet,” she’d say to me, “God’s girl,” and it was to those words I fell asleep.

  • • •

  The whole point of the school was falling, not nuns. When we weren’t in classes with them, we were in the gym with the physical therapists. Epilepsy is a dangerous disease because you can hurt yourself crashing down, and so you have to learn the right way to crash. The physical therapists started us in water. We stepped into a warm, heavily chlorinated pool, and we learned to let ourselves go in that, drifting backward, our hair coming out as kelp around our heads. I watched the other girls in their bathing suits in the water; I watched them stand in the water up to their waists, and then topple backward, and then the lovely squelching sound when they hit. With their eyes closed, they drifted on their backs, and if they were twelve or older their nipples pushed out from beneath their suits, lilies those girls, every one.

  I was a lily too. I could fall in water. The pool was warm and I angled back into its embrace, into the brine of a body, her body, mother. I could go there.

  Two weeks into our training the physical therapists moved us onto land. Now, years later, I can see the sense in all this, how evolutionarily correct it all was, how they were teaching us much more than falling; they were teaching us living. From fish to amphibian, from flippers to feet, we walked onto mats and the therapists said, “Take a deep breath and let yourself go.”

  Have you, I want to know, ever looked at the ground as a crash site? Try it now. Look down from the couch or chair where you’re sitting. See the sheen of wood, hear the sharp smack of the skull as it hits. That’s what we were supposed to do.

  I couldn’t.

  Day after day the other kids learned. They let themselves loose and went flopping and survived it all to stand. I, however, was not that kind of girl. And no matter what the nuns said to me about how it was all right to let yourself go, I knew they didn’t think so. They were, day after day, stern and white, upright angels. They bowed with beauty and never tripped. They floated on their feet and slept, so they said, flat on their backs, with their hands folded on top of their chests, so if the Holy Ghost should see fit to take them in the night, they would be ready for their maker. How was I to fall in a world like this? When I looked at the nuns, Mother Fernanda, Sister Agnes, young nuns, pretty nuns, I saw the skater in me. I saw how I had once leapt off the pond in a silver swirl, and everything was elegant. I saw my mother on the shoreline, clapping and clapping, my mother. I had marched in the snow without shoes, and it was will that made the world go round, right?

  Right?

  “Will you fall today?” the physical therapists said to me. “Lauren, will you fall?”

  I did everything I could to be good. I baked bread, scoured the floors, memorized the names of famous epileptics. “Julius Caesar. Napoleon Bonaparte. Georg Friedrich Handel.” I could learn it all except for falling, because I was a marionette, and even hundreds of miles away, it was her huge hand that held me up.

  At night, lying in my dorm bed, after the holy water and the evening prayers, I took the owl out. He had yellow eyes, and I soon discovered they glowed in the dark. In the dark my mother’s owl watched me, its shining eyes, the rustle of its feathers as it said, Fly.

  • • •

  I think you can hold out for only so long. I think secretly each and every one of us longs to fall, and knows in a deep wise place in our brains that surrender is the means by which we gain, not lose, our lives. We know this, and that is why we have bad backs and pulled necks and throbbing pain between our shoulder blades. We want to go down, and it hurts to fight the force of gravity.

  One day there was a serious snowstorm. The wind blew hard. Cobras of snow swirled off the ground and flakes as big as hunks of torn-up bread came straight out of the sky. It was Sunday, the Christian Sabbath, and the nuns had gone to pray. The snow smothered their voices, so I couldn’t hear the chanting, or the melodies. I watched for them out the window. Soon, I knew, the doors of the church across the field would open, and they would file out one by one, and march across the white expanse to dinner.

  In the distance, a radio tower light blinked. A plow with chains on its wheels crawled through the thickness.

  And then the red church doors opened and the nuns moved across the field toward me, and it took my breath away. I was only ten, but I knew beauty. Children do, you know. The nuns lifted their legs high in the drifts, and their white habits were a part of the weather, blowing around. A catch in my throat. A tip.

  Sister Maria was the first to tip. It must have been the wind. Down, down she went, and I heard an “oh my goodness,” and saw a cluster of nuns come to help her up, and she stood up, laughing, shaking the snow from her folds.

  And then, just like that, still laughing, maybe giddy on the excess of weather, Sister Maria pushed at Sister Agnes, who in turn threw a scoop of snow at Sister Katherine, and in the snap of some of the strangest seconds I’ve ever seen, this holy place became a beach party, a white-water fight, waves of snow hurled left and right, and habits flapping, and laughter, and laughter, and laughter, it caught, was fire, and I felt the glow in my chest, like my heart was Jesus’ heart on the outside of my skin. I sprinted out the door and whooped with delight, it was war, it was peace, it was wet, it was warm, I pranced with the silly nuns, and to this day I don’t know which sister it was who pushed me down, but down I went, the holy hand moving me down, falling onto ground, and all the snow was singing.

  • • •

  And so it was that I learned how to fall. The next day, and the next, and the next, I did it in class, for my physical therapist, who was so surprised and pleased she hugged me. I learned to buckle my kn
ees and let myself loose, slipping southward, away from her, betraying her, yes, I did it, all my muscles slack.

  • • •

  You’ve probably heard of him, William James, brother of Henry, the Victorian novelist. Anyway, William was not a novelist but a philosopher who, in my opinion, had some things to say. I love it most when he writes about will. Years later, years and years after the falling school, when I had long moved on from the nuns, and my mother, and my illness itself, I read a book by William James, and, like any good book, it did not teach me something new, but drew out the wisdom that was already there, inside me.

  William talks about there being two kinds of will. Will A and Will B, I call it. Will A is what we all learn, the hold your head high, stuff it down, swallow your sobs, work hard kind of will. Will B, while it seems a slacker thing, is actually harder to have. It’s a willingness instead of a willfulness, an ability to take life on life’s terms as opposed to putting up a big fight. It’s about being bendable, not brittle, a person who is brave enough to try to ride the waves instead of trying to stop them. Will B is what you need in order to learn to fall. It’s the kind of will my mother never taught me, and yours probably never taught you either. It’s a secret greater than sex; it’s a spiritual thing. Will B is not passive. It means an active acceptance, a say yes, and you have to have a voice and courage if you want to learn it.

  If you know Will B, you know your life.

  You know what my mother never learned. That it is only by entering emptiness and ugliness, not by covering it up with feathers and sprays, that you find a balance so true, no one can take it away.

  Sometimes you can crack open a cliché and find a lot of truth. If you don’t understand what I mean, think of the phrases ride the wave, harness the energy of your opponent.

  Epilepsy is energy. It’s a windstorm in the brain. I had that kind of energy when I left for Saint Christopher’s, but when I came back home, I was a different sort of girl. I still had epilepsy, but my energy was Eastern; it was the blue petal in the inner chambers of the flame, it was hot, but it bent to the shape of the breeze blowing through.