“I’ve been okay,” I said. I smiled.
“Your seizures?” she said. “How have they been?”
“Eight months seizure-free,” I said.
“Well,” she said. She looked a little irritated. “Well, I’m not surprised. I always knew you didn’t really have epilepsy. I always knew these seizures were just a thing you had to grow out of.”
“Well,” I said. I shrugged. “Looks like you’ve got your hands full.” I reached up to touch a wedding dress hanging on the back of the kitchen door. “It’s pretty,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, her voice softening now. “It’s pure silk.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, even though I thought it was ugly.
“You think so?” she said. “You really think so?” Suddenly, my mother sounded like a child.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I, um, I love the flow of it.”
“It has flow,” my mother said. “That’s what makes Adela’s designs so artistic. Their flow. In the dress, a person has movement, even when standing still.”
Then the kitchen was quiet, both of us touching the dress like it was a living thing, a spirit.
“Why don’t you try it on?” my mother said. “It’s just your size.”
“I’m not getting married,” I said.
“I know,” my mother said.
Then it was quiet again. Upstairs, I could hear my father dressing to take us out to dinner.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll try it on.”
I went into the bathroom, took off my clothes, put the dress on. It did have flow. I’d always thought a wedding dress would be stiff, but this one—Adela’s special design—was soft and cool, a sheath of silk, a skirt with a small flare, a bodice that clasped me gently. I stepped out.
“Look at you,” my mother said. She did up the pearl buttons in the back.
We stood together, looking in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. I have to say, on me the dress looked good. It looked great. It wasn’t ugly anymore. I was transformed.
And we stood like that for what seemed a long, long time. I saw the setting sun blaze in the bay windows. Shadows accumulated. “You could be a pretty girl, Lauren,” my mother finally said, “if you would just pay more attention to your style,” and then she tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. And we stood staring, and I remembered me, long before I’d ever had a seizure, when I dressed in white and went skating at Dehaney’s Pond, when, in Barbados, I rolled in the sugar mounds and came to her like candy: a gift. A gift. And in that mirror we saw who I had not become, the gift I hadn’t given her, so I gave it to her then. We stood for what seemed hours, for what seemed days, and she fussed with my hair, and my father came downstairs. “Here comes the bride,” he said. And we all laughed together in a nice way, a little bit close, a little warmth, an ending of sorts, except this: I was still in costume.
• • •
I didn’t tell my parents about AA. We went out to dinner that night, and my mother got tipsy on her red wine, and it occurred to me that maybe she should be in AA, that I was doing it for her. When I got home, Amy called to check in on me, and I told her all about my mother’s drinking. “Not only are you an alcoholic,” she said, “but you’re also the child of an alcoholic, which is very common. Alcoholism is a disease. It’s in the genes.”
That seemed unlikely to me, it being in the genes. Also I wasn’t sure that my mother was an actual alcoholic. She just drank. So did a lot of people. In this one sense, my mother was like a lot of people.
“So it’s important,” Amy said, “because of your family history, to get the twelve steps early on in life. Have you done your fifth step yet?”
“No,” I said. A lot of people in AA considered the fifth step to be the most critical. That was the step where you got absolutely honest, where you told another person about all the wrongs and deceits and manipulations. You came clean. The fifth step was called a fearless and searching moral inventory. AAers liked to say, “You are only as sick as your secrets,” and how well I understood that. I wanted to do a fifth step. I wanted to tell someone in AA about all my deceits, how I had stolen words, stolen things to fill me, faked fits to fill me, changed my name; Munchausen’s. I wanted to do a fifth step, but in order to do it really right, I would also have to admit I was not an alcoholic, and I didn’t really see how that could happen.
In a way, this memoir is like my fifth step. I am not an alcoholic and I may not really be an epileptic either. Perhaps I’ve just felt fitful my whole life; perhaps I’m using metaphor to tell my tale, a tale I know no other way of telling, a tale of my past, my mother and me, a tale of pains and humiliations and illnesses so subtle and nuanced I could never find the literal words; would it matter? Is metaphor in memoir, in life, an alternate form of honesty or simply an evasion? This is what I want to know.
• • •
Elaine came up to me a few days later. She said, “I want to tell you how my life really was. I want to do my fifth step with you, even though you’re just a child.”
So I went over to her house. She made me another delicious dinner and then, over coffee in the den, she started to confess. She took a deep breath and said, “Okay, Lauren. Here goes. I’m coming clean.” I felt all excited. It was very dramatic. For her confession, she had lowered the lights, and small candles burned on the bookshelves. We sat on the fluffy couch and Elaine, in bare feet, drew her knees up to her chin. She started to cry. I mean, she started to sob, and while on the one hand I felt bad for her, on the other hand I just felt coldly curious, like, my God, what had she done, was she a pedophile, did she have sex with a ten-year-old, did she hijack a plane when under the influence? I suddenly had a crazy image of her, a black mask pulled over her head, her face hidden, a pistol pointing at passengers in a 747.
“It’s okay, Elaine,” I said, trying to make my voice gentle. “Whatever it is, it’s okay.”
“You’re a dear,” Elaine said.
“Go on,” I said, because I was curious.
“I,” Elaine said, sobbing anew, “I have been a manipulator my whole life. I have cared about no one, nothing, but me. I have drunk in front of my children. I have loved alcohol more than my children. I have missed PTA meetings because I was drunk, and then told people I had the flu. I missed my daughter’s confirmation because I was drunk and then told the congregation I had a sinus infection …” and so she went on from there.
I found myself growing bored. Here, there were no hijackings, no murders, no pedophiliac sex. Just the miserable small sins that constitute our small lives. And yet her sins really hurt her. I realized my sins were just as small, just as silly. I stole a picture from the Slotnicks’ house. I misused emergency rooms, I filched phrases here and there, I made up illnesses—big deal. Nothing to write a book about. And yet our sins, no matter how small, made us feel bad. Sin makes you bad. Sin is separation from God and from yourself. Sin, like love, is something beyond weight, beyond measure. Like love, a little goes a long, long way.
I went home that night and prayed. My prayer was very simple, two words: “Help me.”
I was helped.
• • •
It happened like this, small steps. People say AA is not a Christian program, but it is. It’s built on Christian concepts, like love and forgiveness, Jesus’ words. Everyone in that group was Christian, either born again or confirmed. After the meeting, after the refreshments, there was Bible study twice a week. Twice a week we put away the AA Big Book and pulled out a gospel: John, Luke, Mark. We cleared the table of food and sat around it; me too. I didn’t plan on becoming a Christian. I went because I liked the people and it was something to do.
The Bible study was basically an extension of AA. We always started with a song:
Amazing Grace
How Sweet the Sound
That Saved a Wretch Like Me
As a Jew, I’d been brought up with a certain kind of God, an Old Testament God, punitive and judgmental,
his love shown through law. My epilepsy had made Judaism difficult. It had ruined my memory, and so I couldn’t have a Bat Mitzvah, which depended on memorization of your Haftorah portion. I couldn’t daven—the back-and-forth bows—because the movement set off seizures. Most of all, I couldn’t connect to the high, clean whiteness of it all, the stern uprightness, I stinking and dark, a girl straight out of Gomorrah.
Jesus healed the epileptic boy, took him by the hand, lifted him up and he arose.
And Jesus said, “I love the lepers and the scabs.”
“I am the way,” he said. “Surrender yourself to me.”
“Fall into me,” Jesus said, and I knew how to fall.
“Fall,” Amy whispered in our prayer circle.
I saw the nuns, falling in the snow. I saw the pool where girls floated, lilies every one. I saw the broken bodies coming down, and then rising up again, in Kansas.
“When we give up our desires, when we are willing to sit in emptiness, our new beings are born,” Helen whispered.
We sat in the prayer circle.
“Yes,” Brad said.
We opened a book by Paul Tillich. “Our whole lives,” Tillich wrote, “are defenses against emptiness. We defend against emptiness by creating masks and false idols, because we fear honesty will bring—”
What? I wondered, What will honesty bring? I tried to picture honesty and I saw the sea, vast and frightening, the globe-girdling sea.
“Honesty,” wrote Tillich, “is the truth inherent in our existential emptiness, the emptiness of Genesis, the silence behind every story. Sit. Still. Love lives in the gaps, in the barren, prairie places.”
I reached up to touch the scar on my scalp, beneath which lay the surgical gouge; was it possible love lived there, in that darkness? Spirits lived in darkness. Ghosts lived in darkness. In the darkness of roadside ditches, there were sometimes daisies.
Often, during Bible study, we lit candles. Or incense. The incense had many sweet smells—vanilla, hyacinth, jasmine. Remember jasmine? The room was filled with the smell of it, a special, secret world, this time heralding health.
• • •
At home, in my apartment, I thought about these things. I thought the real rock-bottom truth was in surrender, was in giving up the ground and taking to the air, like Jesus said, like the nuns had long ago taught me. We create all sorts of lies, all sorts of stories and metaphors, to avoid the final truth, which is the fact of falling. Our stories are seizures. They clutch us up, they are spastic grasps, they are losses of consciousness. Epileptics, every one of us; I am not alone.
“How do you change?” Jesus said to his disciples. “You change by changing.” Marvelously simple. A nursery rhyme. A seashell. Let the tide take you.
• • •
I went to the dean’s office. “I want a leave of absence,” I said.
“Why,” the dean said. “Are you ill?”
I could have said yes. I could have said, “seizures, terrible, headaches, grand mal,” and she would have felt bad and let me off easy and maybe even said I could take all my courses pass/fail. But instead I said, “No. I am not ill.”
“Then why?” said the dean.
“I am not happy here,” I said. “The classes are so big, I feel lost. I am the kind of person who does better with individualized attention,” I said.
We sat there in silence for a moment. The silence was uncomfortable. I had the urge to fill it, to say, “You know, I am a writer with a publication record. Have you seen ‘The Cherry Tree’? Could you get me a single, my seizures are so bad?” I said nothing.
I was born from nothing and to nothing I will return. And yet, when I say the word nothing, when I admit, at last, “I am nothing,” I feel mysteriously like something again, ground zero, genesis, the pull of possibilities.
I felt refreshed, like I’d just washed my face with a Handi Wipe. The air on my skin was prickly.
“Will you be back?” the dean asked.
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’m not really sure.” It was May, the semester almost over. I wanted to get a job, do a good day’s work, simple, clean work, like I’d learned at the convent. I wanted to find that falling girl.
I left her office. Two years later I would go back, ten years later I would get a graduate degree, fifteen years later I would be a psychologist in my own white office, stuffed animals and puppets sitting on the shelves for children to hold. I would offer people things to hold, ways of telling their lives, but behind those ways I would offer them the challenge of nothingness, to which we must always return, that radical, far-flung freedom. I would be married to a man who loves me, but who, more important, I would slowly learn how to love. I would feel fear and holes, but in the mornings, in the sweet times of early light, we would drink coffee together, this man and I, and I would think, A life lived well is a life of perpetual prayer.
But on that May day, not even nearly halfway through my college career, I left the dean’s office knowing nothing of this outcome. All I knew was this: something spiritual was calling.
• • •
I went home. I fell asleep. Like Rip van Winkle I fell into a deep sleep that was not normal, no REM, no snores, no bed, a slumping sleep sitting up, the velvet wash of auras, wave after wave. After the dean I went home and had an aura.
In Greek, the word aura means breeze, and this is what it feels like, like winds washing over you, gentle or menacing, always full of meaning. The medical term for aura is prodrome, which means running before. Auras run before seizures.
After the dean I went back to my apartment, fell into a sitting, slumping sleep, and years passed. The universe turned over twice. The sun died and then was born again, in a flare of lemons. A breeze blew, a running before, and then I was flying over the earth. Jesus held my hand, both of us were naked, and, I hate to admit it, aroused; we just held hands. We flew like Peter Pan and Wendy. From above I saw a wheel of fire, and then I realized the wheel was really someone’s head on fire—seizure, seizure—and when the fire passed, and the smoke cleared, Jesus pointed to the place. The head had become the earth, which I saw from outer space, blue lakes for eyes, red clay skin, so gorgeous I cried.
I opened my eyes. Or maybe I had never closed them. Or maybe I had actually had a seizure, because I did have a headache and my mouth was dry. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the prodrome and a very small seizure. In any case, it didn’t matter. It was physical but spiritual. God had visited me. He was here.
• • •
I had an appointment with Dr. Neu. “No seizures, but auras,” I said.
“Or very small seizures,” he said, “that’s what I think, but the point is, you’re not having grand mal, and it’s not getting in the way of your functioning.” He paused. “Or is it?” he said. “How is your functioning?”
“I am changing,” I said. “For the first time in my life I feel like I’m actually starting to function well.”
“How’s that?” he said.
“Well,” I said, and then I got embarrassed. It’s hard to talk about religious things in our society. “I guess,” I said. “In my auras,” I said, “I’m sometimes seeing God. Don’t take that the wrong way, it’s not like I think I’m God or anything, but I have the feeling God is close to me.”
We were sitting in his office. He suddenly looked very interested. He leaned forward in his seat.
“Like how?” he said.
I didn’t tell him about AA, but I did tell him about Bible study, the prayer circle, my feeling of being drawn to churches, my memories of the convent at Saint Christopher’s coming back, and this desire I had to read the words of Jesus.
“That’s the TLE personality,” he said. “There it is again.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Epileptics,” he said, “are often drawn to creative and religious pursuits. There seems to be something about the neural discharge that lends itself to these states. There was,” he said, “Saint Teresa of
Avila, Saint Paul, Moses, you know, Mohammed, the prophet Ezekiel.” He paused. He looked genuinely excited. “Epilepsy,” he said, “is truly fascinating. Over and over again I am awed to see how consistently my TLE patients display the same symptoms.”
First, I felt flattered. I mean, it’s hard not to feel good being put in the same class as Moses and Mohammed. I looked out the office window and waited to see if the bushes would start to burn. However, they didn’t. They stayed stubbornly, resolutely, bushes.
“Amazing,” Dr. Neu murmured.
Then I got mad. “Do you mean to tell me,” I said, “that my spiritual feelings are just symptoms of a disease? I don’t think so,” I said.
“Look,” he said. “It’s not an either/or thing. Who knows, maybe the disease is God’s way of reaching certain people; God causes the disease, the disease gives way to God. Who knows?”
“Who knows?” I said, but I still felt angry. “You know,” I said, “you know, Dr. Neu, all those seizures I had right before the operation? I brought a lot of them on myself, because I liked the attention. I think I fooled you. I went to the library and read books about seizures and said I had a lot of symptoms that I never really had.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said. “Exaggeration, trickery, we know that’s part of your personality profile. I suspected all along you were hamming things up a bit.”
His demeanor disturbed me. He seemed utterly unfazed. “I lied,” I said, my voice rising, a bit righteously I might add. “I lied and a lie is a sin and a sin is never small, because it’s a form of separation from God.”
“Okay,” he said, “you lied. But really, Lauren, I don’t want you to feel guilty. In one sense you lied, but in another sense you didn’t, because trickery is so hinged to your personality style, and, therefore, you were only being true to yourself.”
• • •
Well, he was right, but I was still mad. I felt like that visit diminished me. I lost a little bit of faith. Here, I’d dropped out of school and was going to live cleanly and honestly and close to the spiritual pulse of things, and maybe that was all just chemical. Maybe none of it mattered.
Lying Page 15
