“Have you ever considered suicide?”
“My father died. What do you expect?”
Every question he asked seemed to me irrelevant.
“All you need to know is my father died.”
He turned off the recorder, prescribed an antidepressant, and a month later I came back full of energy—uncomfortable, restless energy.
“I feel on edge,” I told him. “I go running in the middle of the night. And I hate running.”
“That’s not the antidepressant doing that,” he said.
He told me to keep taking the pills, so I did.
•
I sat in the empty campus chapel for daylong stretches and cried.
I wandered along the lakefront between afternoon classes and cried.
I pressed my phone against my ear, pretended my dad was listening, and cried.
I researched how to overdose, slit arteries.
“How are you feeling?” my psychiatrist asked.
I cried.
“What’s been happening?” he asked.
“This,” I said.
He increased my medication and recommended I attend the grief group on campus.
“You’ll meet other students going through the same thing,” he said.
MOM
My mom and I spoke every day, but one Friday evening I called and she didn’t answer.
Maybe she’s still at work, I thought.
I called again.
Maybe she’s in the basement, I reasoned, or maybe her ringer is off. I let an hour pass.
I called again.
I let the evening pass.
Still no answer.
I called her friend Sharon.
“Your mom didn’t have work today,” Sharon said. “Is everything all right?”
“I can’t reach her,” I said.
Sharon volunteered to go to the house. Half an hour later she called me. All the lights were off. Sharon had knocked on the front and back doors several times. Still no answer.
“She probably went to sleep early,” Sharon said.
That night I slept with my phone beside me.
The next morning I had a message from Sharon. She’d gone back to the house and knocked several times, yelled my mom’s name. Still no answer.
I tried my mom again.
“Hi, Mom,” I told her voice mail. “Call when you have a chance. I love you.”
Then I called her local police, told them that it was unusual for her not to answer the phone.
“We talk every day,” I said.
“When did you call?”
I searched through my call history and reported the precise times.
“A day hasn’t passed,” the officer said. “Do you think that maybe her phone is off?”
I explained that my dad had died more than a year ago.
“She still wears black,” I said. “Can you please go to the house?”
Less than an hour later my phone rang. I looked at its screen: a call from “Mom and Dad.”
“My hearing is so bad,” she said. “I didn’t hear the phone.”
I covered the receiver, not wanting her to hear me cry.
MENTAL ILLNESS
“You can’t keep crying like this,” my psychiatrist said.
He handed me a blue sheet of paper with information about the campus grief group.
“You gave me one already,” I said. “I’m not good in groups. I get anxious.”
“You need it.”
The paper sat crumpled on my desk for weeks before I threw it away.
One evening, on my way to my boyfriend’s dorm, I noticed a crisp blue sheet of paper pinned next to a poster about some sorority fundraiser. The group would begin in an hour. I called my boyfriend, asked what he thought.
“Give it a chance,” he said.
It met in a poorly lit room on the third floor of a building near the campus chapel. I listened as students shared stories about those they’d lost: a dog, grandparents, a best friend.
“You’ve been quiet,” the leader said, her eyes meeting mine.
“My father died,” I said, “and I wasn’t with him.”
MOM
Then our dog, Gigi, died in her sleep. My mom was left with no one at home. She called to tell me the news.
“Gigi is with your dad now,” she said.
I wanted to believe her, but I didn’t agree or disagree. Instead, I said I’d visit.
Spring break I took the train to Ohio, and my first day back we visited the animal shelter. A scrawny Brittany was cowering in a cage too small for her.
“She’s the one,” I told my mom, and my mom agreed. “What do you want to name her?”
“Shu Shu.”
“Huh?” I said.
“I like the sound of it.”
JEANNE
When I told stories about my dad to anyone, I almost always mentioned Jeanne’s death.
I’d explain the circumstances: he gave her permission to go out that night; he didn’t know her mother already had said no.
“It wasn’t his fault,” I’d say, “but he blamed himself.”
I understood that her death changed his character, affected the father he was to me. I wondered how he mourned her, and if I was mourning the right way. I talked to him every day, cried every day. I needed to mourn him on Jeanne’s behalf, was that it?
I don’t know.
I loved him. Wasn’t that reason enough?
DAD
Alone in the campus chapel, I prayed to my dad. I told him about my days. I told him I wanted to be with him.
I told him I could see only two reasons to stay alive: my mom, and the book I had promised him.
I wanted him to say, Your mom will be fine.
I wanted him to say, Forget the book.
I wanted him to say that he was somewhere I could be.
MENTAL ILLNESS
I studied, or tried to study. I never could tell which facts were the facts that mattered. I highlighted almost every sentence in my textbooks, seeing relevance everywhere. And instead of making mnemonic devices, I found ways to connect the material with my dad. The same year my dad was born, James Joyce published Ulysses in Paris. One hundred forty-five years earlier, in the same town where my dad was born, the Continental Army hatched plans for the American Revolution.
But if I couldn’t connect the material with him, I couldn’t remember the material.
The class that I struggled most with was Law in the Political Arena. The professor struck me as smug. When I described him to the maintenance man, I pushed my nose in the air.
One afternoon I asked my professor if I could speak with him privately before class. I asked for his advice—a legal question for my mom: “Her house is across the street from a baseball park and the net doesn’t catch the foul balls. So they keep coming into her yard. One of them hit her when she was mowing the lawn.” I explained that she lived alone. I explained that my dad had died the previous year. “When I was in high school, he was in his late seventies. So he couldn’t take care of the problem.”
“I really don’t know,” the professor replied, and then announced to the class, “Let’s get started.”
I went to my seat, opened my notebook, and began to take notes. Instead of analyzing what to write, I tried to transcribe everything.
“So let’s say we have a man living in a gated community for seniors,” the professor said. “He’s sixty-five. And he decides to marry a woman twenty-five years younger.” The professor laughed. The students laughed. “You know the type.”
I raised my hand. The professor looked at me, looked away, and continued.
“The board approves the woman to live there. But now let’s say they have a mistake.”
This time I didn’t raise my hand. I suspected what he meant. I stood.
“A mistake?” I said.
“A beautiful bouncing baby,” he clarified. “So now this couple has to move.”
“Go to hell,” I sa
id.
The walls disappeared. The students disappeared. The professor stood behind his lectern, said nothing.
You should die, I heard. Get into the ground, Jeannie.
The voice came from below. I looked at the floor. I was standing on grass.
I gathered my things and walked straight to the campus health center.
“Something is wrong with the medicine,” I told my psychiatrist.
“You have to want to get better,” he said.
His voice sounded strange. I didn’t know how to explain to him that his voice sounded strange.
“Let’s try a higher dose,” he said.
ELEVEN
This is “The Glass Eye Poem” all over again. When I was in college, that poem swallowed entire days whole.
Writing the poem replaced sleeping.
Writing the poem replaced eating.
Writing the poem replaced talking.
Writing the poem replaced studying.
I finished the poem—according to my professor—one month before deadline, but with the poem done I felt restless, irritable, sad. So I worked and reworked its lines. The last two: “with the help of a black crayon, I / undraw him.”
My old drafts are here, next to my desk. My professor insisted I save them. Some of them include my ideas penciled in the margins: “Somehow express the ages of the daughter and father without stating them directly. Maybe have the girl draw her father’s face. She’ll crumple the paper and hand it to him and say that the wrinkles in the paper are for the wrinkles in his face.” I also kept some of my classmates’ feedback. Some of them interpreted the ending—in which the daughter blacks out a drawing of the father’s face—as showing anger toward the father. I didn’t see it that way. The crinkled drawing never existed. It was a detail to demonstrate their ages—as quickly and effectively as possible.
In the poem, the daughter is angry that her father died but not angry at him for dying.
I’m angry at myself for leaving my dad when I did.
If the ending shows anger, it’s the daughter’s anger at herself—for having portrayed him the way she did in her drawing. The art emphasized his age. It failed to capture the father he was. She thinks the picture must have tormented him, reminding him of how little time they had together.
I received an A and some writing awards for the poem, but it didn’t accomplish what I’d meant to accomplish. To me, I’d failed.
This can’t be “The Glass Eye Poem” all over again.
MOM
My mom mailed me letters, even though we spoke every day. Usually they mentioned how much money was put aside for me: “I don’t want it. At least you’ll have something.” Always they mentioned my dad: “He often said he wished we had met when we were both younger. We would have had six kids.” Even when they didn’t mention him outright, he was there: “Sorry about crying on the phone Sunday night. Sometimes I get overwhelmed.” Every letter contained: “I love you so much,” “I’m always worried about you,” and “I’m very proud of you.”
The winter of my sophomore year, a letter confirmed that I’d succeeded in hiding from her the extent of my unhappiness. “I’m getting the biggest kick out of you,” she wrote. “You’re having fun and that makes me happy.”
“You always sounded upbeat on the phone,” my mom would later tell me. “You would talk about the lectures and poetry readings and how great your professors were. You really did seem happy.”
JEANNE
Late one night my junior year, unable to sleep, I opened my web browser and typed “Jeanne Vanasco.”
If I could understand who she was, then maybe, I thought, I could better understand him.
It never occurred to me to understand myself.
“Did you mean Jeannie Vanasco?” the page of search results asked.
I scrolled past news stories about my being “volunteer of the month” in my hometown, about starting the high school newspaper, about making my college’s honor roll. There was my dad’s obituary, the one that I should have written. Then there was another obituary. I didn’t know he had two.
I opened it.
A New York paper published this other summary of his life. The details were spare, much like in the Ohio version, except that in the list of surviving family members I couldn’t find myself. I read it again.
I called my boyfriend.
“I’m listed as Barbara,” I told him.
“What?”
He sounded half-asleep.
I tried to explain the obituary.
“Slow down,” he said.
“I’d understand if it was my half sisters who did this,” I said. “They have their reasons.”
“But they know you don’t go by Barbara.”
I didn’t feel like Barbara. I didn’t feel like I survived.
“It is accurate,” I said.
•
I knew Jeanne was born and raised in Newburgh, New York. I knew she received a medal from a church. I knew she was sixteen when she died in the car accident.
The town, the medal, the accident—those details, however vague, could have led to others.
I could have added “Newburgh” to my search.
I could have added “car accident” or “medal.”
I could have added her sisters’ names.
Our dad’s name.
My name only confused the search.
I carried my attention elsewhere.
DAD
I planned to live with a friend my senior year, but the apartments she wanted featured gyms, indoor pools, security systems, modern appliances.
“I really want us to be roommates,” she said.
The next day she signed a lease with someone else.
My other friends already had signed their leases. My boyfriend had signed a lease. So a friend put me in touch with her friend Rachel who was looking for a roommate.
“I just told someone I’d live with her,” Rachel said after we met. “But how about the three of us live together?”
Rachel introduced me to her friend Elizabeth, and a week later they found a three-bedroom on a tree-lined block. The apartment was bigger than my childhood home. I asked about the rent.
“I found cheaper places,” I said.
“But this one is such a good apartment,” Rachel said. “I’ll pay the most.”
Her father did something with investments. Her family owned a private jet. They vacationed in places I’d never heard of.
“My situation is absurd,” she said. “I could live by myself if I wanted, but I want roommates. Elizabeth’s dad is a judge. We should pay more.”
“I’ll take the smallest room,” I told her.
The first few months I’d hear Rachel laughing on the phone with her father or Elizabeth telling hers about her plans to be a dramaturge.
“Dad?” I’d repeat alone in my room, half expecting an answer.
MENTAL ILLNESS
“What are you doing?” Rachel asked.
I was standing over our bathroom sink, running cold water in the dark. My thoughts sounded like radio static.
“Something is wrong,” she said, or maybe I said it.
She led me into the living room.
“I haven’t been sleeping,” I said. “I should sleep.”
The windows looked smaller than usual.
•
“I can’t help you,” my boyfriend said.
We were studying in his apartment for our senior finals. I was on his floor, surrounded by open books. He was on his bed. His mother’s painting of a stark landscape, an even proportion of sky and land, hung above him. He might as well have been inside it, he felt so far away.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
We’d planned to live together the summer after graduation. I’d move to New York in the fall, for an internship at the Paris Review, and my boyfriend would maybe follow. “It’ll work out,” he’d promised.
But now he was citing scenes that I’d tried to forg
et: he’d stopped me from stepping off a train platform, from throwing myself out of his moving car. I cried too much, he said. I cut.
“I just don’t love you anymore,” he said.
•
“This is not about your father. It’s about your breakup,” my new psychiatrist said.
“Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone,” I said, “if I went back to the old psychiatrist?”
It was too hard to start over, to explain everything again.
But because I’d used my ten allotted free sessions, my previous psychiatrist had referred me to this new psychiatrist, allowing me ten more free sessions.
“Are you sleeping?” she asked, ignoring my question.
“Not really,” I said. “Could it be the medicine?”
“It’s not the medicine.”
•
Twenty-two, there should be twenty-two pills, I reasoned. I was twenty-two years old.
I swallowed the first pile. I’d accomplished something. I swallowed the second pile. I called the campus hotline.
“Something is wrong with me.”
I was asked what was wrong with me and I said my thoughts were moving too fast and I took too many pills, “in that order,” I specified. The voice asked me to hold. I looked into the mirror and my eye sockets were empty and black. I curled up on the floor and started sobbing into the receiver.
“Hello? What seems to be the problem?”
The campus psychiatrist. That afternoon I’d told her my medication made my thoughts move too fast, and she’d replied, “That’s impossible.”
“I’m prying open my eyelids,” I said, “and there’s nothing there.”
“Is this Jeannie?”
I swallowed the third pile.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know anymore.”
•
I remember the ambulance outside my apartment and the streetlamps shaped like question marks. The street sign said Noyes Street, pronounced noise.
I felt dizzy. I felt tired. I tried to lie on the grass, but two men pulled me back.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Can you tell us your name?”
The Glass Eye Page 8
