by David Leite
“Maybe it’s me, but I don’t see why you have to go see a psychiatrist,” my mother said one night over her Weight Watchers dinner. “You seem absolutely fine.”
My father was poking at his plate, something Portuguese, of course. “Elvira,” he said, shooting her a look. Translation: Let it go. Head bent, I stared at my usual dinner: three hamburgers slathered with ketchup, which didn’t put a dent in the seventy pounds of ground beef we got from the half-steer my father had bought that winter.
“I’m just saying—”
“Ma, I just need it, okay?” I said, cutting her off.
What my mother didn’t understand was that I didn’t feel better because somehow the crushing blackness and anxiety that had dogged me for more than four years had suddenly lifted. No, I felt better because I had done as instructed: I’d dumped everything in the lap of that sweet, coffee-drinking young woman, answered every question truthfully, balked at nothing. In exchange, I was no longer responsible for figuring things out. There was a team, I was told, of psychiatrists, psychologists, and educators consulting each other and figuring out what was wrong with me.
In short, I wasn’t my problem anymore.
I often wondered if my mother was afraid I’d spew a geyser of family secrets as I lay on the doctor’s couch. (Oh, God. Would I be lying on a couch? That’s such a cliché.) But what secrets? My parents weren’t mean or neglectful. If anything, they were the opposite. I certainly hadn’t been sexually abused—apart from what had happened with Mr. Goode, and I thought I had handled that with aplomb, especially for a ten-year-old. None of us kids had been physically abused. Sure, my grandfather had a particular fondness for The Strap, but that had been reserved mostly for my cousin Barry. But still, my mother was skittish. If I am holding on to secrets, I thought, I don’t want them any longer. I wanted to talk the energy off of each mystery, to vomit up every last hunched and gnarled fear so that they would never again haunt me.
At Bradley, we sat down in a row opposite the doctor: me, my mother, my father. My mother sat with her legs crossed, hugging her purse, the one with the big yellow smiley-face button pinned to the strap. I don’t remember the doctor, just some somber presence behind a big expanse of desk. Nothing like my Coffee Girl. He explained that I had a lot of fears, like that was some great and impressive discovery we should be in awe of. No shit, Sherlock. He continued, saying much of the fear and nervousness I was experiencing was actually related to how I dealt with anger. In his opinion, my reactions to House of Wax and The Poseidon Adventure were actually fear of my own aggression, projected huge and in glorious 3-D Technicolor. I squirmed, like my ass was suddenly itchy. I didn’t understand all that he was saying, but his words—anger, aggression, rage, hostility, tension—rang true. Hadn’t I savagely bitten Barry? Hadn’t I thrown that glass at my mother, missing by inches, it shattering on the wall as she hunched away from the shower of winking shards? Hadn’t I beaten Duke with his leash because he refused to be tied up in the basement, as he always had for the half hour between my leaving for school and my mother coming home, and he’d borne it as long as he could until he turned on me? And hadn’t I sat there weeping, my eyes slits, my nose dripping, bewildered at my behavior, pleading with him to come to me, but he refused? The doctor knew none of this, had no proof of anything, yet I sat there flayed and exposed, shocked, as if he knew every one of my secrets. He leaned in on his elbows, lacing his fingers together, and smiled. It was the first time I liked him. He recommended I start psychotherapy, the sooner the better, and that my parents participate in casework. My mother began flicking her foot like the tail of a pissed-off cat.
He finished, expectant, waiting for a response. That’s when my mother stood. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, extending her hand to him, her Courtesy-Booth Girl smile blazing at ten thousand watts. She explained she’d be happy to drive me back and forth as many times as needed, but as far as therapy for them—well, she didn’t see the need. But thank you. It was the first time I ever saw anyone in my family say no to a doctor. She then looped the strap of her purse over her shoulder, and she and her smiley-face button stood at the door—twin grins—waiting for my father to open it. He and I thanked the doctor and scuttled after her.
And that’s what happened: Every Friday for about two years, she picked me up after school, drove me to the hospital, and waited in that same Jay Gatsby living room as my father had. On the way home, we always stopped at McDonald’s, which had just opened in Swansea. I ordered the same thing: two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, fries, and a chocolate shake. We sat down to dinner with my father at the snack bar in our kitchen, my mother stealing a french fry every so often in between bites of her meticulously measured and carefully weighed Weight Watchers dinners. We talked about everything, except therapy.
I don’t remember much about the psychologist assigned to me; most of the details have bleached from memory, like newsprint left in the sun. Thirty, maybe. Blond hair. His name is gone, too, so I’ll call him Dr. Copley. Therapy with him felt right. It was logical, the same way geometry class was logical. Practical and logical and familiar. Sometimes, now, I wonder if it was therapy or just the passage of time that made the difference. It was so quiet, uneventful. There was no arc to it. No months of stony-faced silence followed by sobbing breakthroughs, with me a giant fetus curled in a corner, my head in Dr. Copley’s lap, drool and snot staining his pants. Yet somehow, my moods lightened, nerves quelled, grades rebounded.
One thing I know for certain: I was heard in a way I had never been before. He encouraged me to talk, endlessly, ceaselessly. And as I did, I found new ways of explaining what I felt. I recounted the “hot molten lead being poured on my chest,” the “internal combustion,” the sensation of “looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope.” I described a “blackness” that was always ready to consume me; sometimes I called it a “bottomless hole” that I was on the verge of tumbling into. I characterized myself as “frozen,” “trapped in amber,” “spacey,” or “logy.”
I came to realize that fear wasn’t just a feeling, but a blooming of physical reactions, and I became very good at slicing open my body, an emotional autopsy, to root out where it lived and how it affected me. First, up in my throat, I explained to him. A constriction, sometimes accompanied by a thickening of my tongue and a pop in the back of my mouth when I tried to swallow, signaled a ticky nervousness, the kind I got when I lied or was caught doing something I shouldn’t. Kids’ stuff. It always passed, easily and on its own.
Lower down, in the bull’s-eye center of my chest. That terrifying explosion of heat, which I’d first felt during House of Wax, was always a harbinger of a quake of anxiety so massive, it caused me to forget myself and barrel from theaters, friends’ homes, classrooms, as if it were somehow possible to outrun the feeling. What was worse was the malaise and muddle that it left behind, with its body aches, disconnection, impenetrable heaviness.
Last, still lower, in my bowels. The most primitive of all the sensations was a sudden thicket of nerves twisting in my guts, which indicated grave dread. It didn’t signal a flight response, or even a girding of myself to fight, but rather an immobility, a hunkering down, as if I needed to go unnoticed to survive. It’s what I felt when waking to the bluish light of predawn and knowing that to move, to leave the bed, meant I’d be a target for an offensive of feelings I just couldn’t handle. Because of this response, I said, I came to understand how people in extreme cases of fear can shit themselves; it’s that unnerving.
Due to this white-hot obsession, this veneta to verbalize what I was experiencing, I had begun falling in love with language—a slap of a surprise, because I was such a lousy reader. I loved the musty almond smell of old books and how the deckled edges of pages fluttered over my fingers, but what was on those pages often eluded me. I wasn’t always able to dive through sentences to their meaning. Words like to, two, and too confounded me; I couldn’t comprehend the difference. Because of that, I can count just t
hree books that seduced me growing up: The Incredible Journey, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and The Andromeda Strain.
But in therapy, I saw how my words, my descriptions, registered with my doctor. They landed like seeds in the space between us and took root, growing into something substantial and vital. The idea that I could take some unfathomable, inchoate sensation deep inside, translate it into language—and have someone understand me—was intoxicating and triumphant in its validation.
Words, it seemed, were a way out of this hell, and I relished everything about them: how they sounded, and especially how they sounded coming out of me. (“Hey, Leite, your nuts finally dropped!” one of the boys at school had said when my voice lowered to the richness of a string bass. I would never be called “Ma’am” on the phone again.) Their musicality thrilled, hard consonants clanging against one another, soft sibilants whispering, all creating emotion. My favorite letter, if one can have a favorite letter, and I think one should, is J, as in “jump” or “judge.” The vibration revving up behind my teeth, building power, until it’s at last released into the waiting, open vowel.
After one English class that spring, I approached my teacher, Mrs. Barnes. She had mentioned a writing contest for ninth graders and asked if anyone wanted to enter. When she’d first told us about it, I’d ignored her; I still felt stung over the F she’d given me on our assignment to write an original aphorism. For years, my mother had chirped, “Some people eat to live; others live to eat,” as a way of reminding herself she didn’t necessarily have to devour the contents of the refrigerator in one afternoon. How the hell was I supposed to know she hadn’t made it up? It sounded exactly like her. When I told Mrs. Barnes my plan, she smiled and handed me the entry form, wishing me luck.
I worked every night for weeks on what I thought was a heart-wrenching story of two boys who went camping together, only to end with one of them killing the other in a car accident. My mother bought me erasable typing paper with red double-margin rules on all four sides. As I typed endless drafts, she acted as editor. Tapping a pencil against her teeth, she read, then every so often attacked the pages, correcting typos, circling confusing words, making suggestions. The story was shot through with clichés, painfully overwrought metaphors, bursts of irrational emotions, and thinly veiled homoeroticism. She mentioned nothing of its themes. I think she was relieved that I was taking an interest in something, and that my grades were buoying back to A’s.
I didn’t win, but later I did take second place in a civics essay contest. The fact that I lost to Lise LaPointe, the only other person who entered, didn’t dampen my enthusiasm. I thought back to when I’d announced to my parents I wanted to be a writer, but realized I had nothing to say. I was beginning to see I might have a story to tell after all.
Words saved me when Vu Costa died from old age, when I was sixteen. They weren’t mine; they were Dr. Copley’s. They pulled me back from the edge where I stood, arms windmilling against another plummet.
The afternoon of the funeral, I sat off in a corner of the restaurant where we were having the reception. My parents, my mother’s brothers, and their wives were at the door greeting people as they ducked inside, pumping their umbrellas to chuff off the rain. It was a gunmetal gray day in October. Some people brought food and dropped it off on the long table, smiling their Poor-Thing smiles at us as they shrugged out of their coats. I heard the soft shushing from the women nearby who were unwrapping plates of desserts and Tupperware containers of hot food. I hunched over, elbows on knees, absentmindedly picking at a malassada, one of the fritters that Vo Leite had made and brought all the way from Boston. I wasn’t hungry.
As I sat there, all I wanted was to look inconspicuous, to disappear into that crowd of grief and avoid anyone’s questions. I was scanning for any internal rumbles of panic again. Like a Geiger counter. I’m a human Geiger counter, I remember saying to Dr. Copley. I was always measuring, monitoring myself. “That’s what being an ‘identified patient’ means,” he said. Something about being the person in the family who registers and acts out the feelings of everyone.
I was still gutted from the wake two days earlier. We had walked single file into the funeral home, my mother ahead of me. I could hear the slow rising of sobs and cries from my godparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and my father ahead of us. With each cry, I felt more terror, but it was my mother’s scream that ripped through me. My last hope, my last refuge to get through this was lost with her. When I entered the room and saw my dead grandfather, I felt myself become unmoored. That horrid, familiar feeling of hot lead being poured onto my chest and seeping into my arms and legs returned.
I started flapping my hands like dishrags. “It’s happening again,” I repeated to no one in particular. “It’s happening again.” I heard my mother somewhere, still screaming.
“Elvira, STOP!” someone yelled. Men from the funeral home, who until then had stood at a respectful distance, like stolid sentinels, bolted to the front of the room, arms outstretched as if to catch something. I looked over, and she was grabbing at the casket. My grandfather was tossing inside, like cold, hard rocks in my father’s wheelbarrow.
Dina grabbed me and pulled me through a side door into the parking lot. “Here.” She put something up to my nose. I pawed it away. “It’s smelling salts,” she shouted. She tried again, but I knocked it away and held on to her, breaking down. “I know, I know,” she murmured into my ear as I sobbed. “I know.” She knew it wasn’t my dead grandfather but my very much alive mother who was unraveling me.
“When that feeling happens again,” Dr. Copley had said, “try focusing on just one thing.”
I looked at the malassada in my hand. It was brown and round, the size of a saucer. Focus closer, I could hear him say. Its surface was pockmarked with blisters, little bubbles of batter that had formed when the fritter was slipped into the hot oil. Good, but be more specific. It was cold and damp, because the sugar had dissolved. I hated that. Why did my grandmother always make a bunch of these, put them in plastic bags, and freeze them? They’re never as good defrosted as they are fresh.
I tossed the sticky malassada into the trash and wiped my hands on my dress pants. No one likes cold donuts; everyone knows that. My mother walked around the food table and came up behind me. She yanked on a hank of my hair.
“Ow! Why do you always . . . do . . . that?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Use a napkin,” she said. “You don’t want people talking.” I stared at her, trying to cow her, but I couldn’t. I never could. She was imperious, impervious, implacable. Imperious, impervious, implacable, I repeated to myself. The rhythm and sounds calmed me.
After Vu’s death, I braced for months of pain, but they didn’t come. No more hot molten lead, no looking through the wrong end of a telescope, no lying awake waiting for the sun to rise. Although we all were grieving, and, much to my embarrassment, my mother wore a small black corsage for a year, I was able to settle back into my schoolwork without much trouble, despite the fact I wondered how long it would take for two-fourteen in the afternoon, the time my grandfather had died, to lose its charge.
Is this normal?
I’d seen other kids miss school for several days because a grandparent or aunt or uncle died, and they were no different from me: picking up where we left off, catching up on all the drama that is high school. Normal felt so oddly anemic compared to the torrents of emotions of the past five years. I didn’t miss them—at all—but I did feel suddenly aimless. Gone were the radioactive feelings I had used as touchstones. Vu’s was the first family death I’d experienced, something that I’d been dreading ever since he’d had his stroke four years earlier, and now here I was, actually sitting in psychology class listening to Mr. Cote talking about Freudian theory, and feeling perfectly fine. Cocky, even. He’s a sensitive kid, I remember everyone telling my parents. Give him time, he’ll grow out of it.
As we were ending therapy, I asked Dr. Copley what my official diagnosis was.
He had told me when we’d started, but it had meant nothing to me.
“Generalized anxiety disorder,” he said. We had studied anxiety and panic in Mr. Cote’s class, and I had recognized myself in some of the symptoms. Actually, I’d recognized myself in just about all of the disorders we studied—from anorexia and schizophrenia to borderline personality disorder and trichotillomania—an obsessive need to pull out your hair. Ironically, manic depression never rang true.
During my time with Dr. Copley, though, we never once discussed boys, although I was aching to and terrified to, in equal measure. I wanted to talk about my locker-room predicament, about my penchant for blond boys who, of all things, played sports, and about Billy Lyon. Billy had these high, planed cheeks that flushed ruddy when he was embarrassed, and even though he used me to get an A on a project for French class, I didn’t care. But I said nothing about it in therapy. I knew what psychiatry and the law thought of homosexuals; I’d read it in Boys & Sex. I didn’t know if Dr. Copley had an obligation to turn me in to the police, and I wasn’t about to find out. More important, I could never disappoint this man, this wonderful doctor who had helped me so much, by letting him know I was a pervert.
13
WATERMELON-FLAVORED DELIGHT
My mother waggled her fingers behind her, motioning for me to take her hand. She led me through the kitchen and dining room, and into the living room, with its expansive tropical-ocean mural above the couch. My father came in and took his place beside her, slipping his hand over hers.
Deep breath. “We have something to tell you,” my mother announced.
“Okay . . .” I looked from one to the other, worried.
“We’ve accepted Jesus Christ as our personal savior. Your father and I have become Charismatic Christians.” There was something odd about how she said it. No, not how she said it, but how she looked. Glowing, as if lit from behind, like my old Jesus candles.
