by Ariel Leve
When stress hormones are being released in a developing brain, the physical shape of it changes. These hormones mold the brain to overreact and overrespond. A permanent state of living on high alert.
“But,” he adds, “what gets really complicated is that not everybody who gets exposed to something threatening activates and runs. Sometimes people freeze. Sometimes people shut down. Sometimes people dissociate.”
AND WHAT HAPPENS when this software is defective? How does a child who lives with sustained instability and emotionally volatile psychological confusion process it? The collateral damage of living in terror of unpredictable moods?
“A child cannot understand when a mother feels one emotion but expresses another,” he says.
It makes sense. I ask, “When the nutrients that are needed to develop trust and security are missing, are they missing for life?”
Dr. Teicher closes his eyes and tilts his head back as he thinks. He doesn’t know the answer.
MCLEAN HOSPITAL IS known for its former residents who, with their distinguished madness, gave it a noted reputation. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. There are tree-lined paths and red-brick buildings, and the tranquil New England setting resembles an Ivy League campus. It’s serene, as I walk around, with raindrops causing the autumn leaves to stick to the soles of my shoes. I eat lunch in the cafeteria near the window, looking out on the hospital grounds, thinking about my altered brain.
If my brain was deprived of adequate levels of hormones needed and overloaded with unwanted hormones that were too much to handle, then no wonder the wiring went askew. Surely this must have short-circuited my ability to develop a feeling of safety.
I THINK, TOO, about the distinction Dr. Teicher made between chronic exposure and a single instance of trauma. He compared this to trees that grow in an extremely windy climate—they will be bent in certain ways. “They’ve developed in a way that is warped or abnormal—but it’s not the same as being hit by lightning.”
I AM HUNCHED over my notebook, reading this quote several times: “You try to blunt certain emotions, but your tool isn’t a scalpel, it’s a sledgehammer. And you’re blunting all of them. To protect yourself from feeling the horrible things, you prevent yourself from feeling some of the positive things.”
TO COPE, IN childhood, was to be on guard at all times. Sentiment was not to be trusted. Hope would be met with disappointment. This was an operating system that allowed me to function, and it carried over into adulthood. The result was to live a life within brackets. An abbreviated life.
26
I have shown my father a photo of me with the girls. “It’s a beautiful photo,” he says. And then, because seeing me relaxed is not something that happens often, he looks suddenly wistful. “It’s nice to see you like that.”
THE GIRLS ARE sensitive little people and their emotions are unfiltered. They express themselves without hesitation, without using their brain first to process. It’s purely instinct. One minute they are at ease, playing lovingly with each other, and then a minute later, this can change. The hurt, the rejection, the anger is intense. The disappointment is catastrophic. One might burst into tears and say, “I hate you! I wish you were dead!” and in that instant, the emotion is unregulated by any intellect or understanding of logic. And then it will pass. Maybe in seconds, maybe in minutes. In a calm, steady voice, their father will soothe the one who is angry. He’ll lift her up in his arms and take her aside and talk to her and ask what she’s upset about. Or sometimes this soothing will come from me.
THE FIRST TIME it happened, I was shocked that the instinct was there and I knew what to do. I kept it to myself. “Sweetheart,” I heard myself say, with a gentleness I didn’t recognize, “what’s going on?” As she started to talk, I listened. It felt like a scene in a movie where the agitated child gets what she needs, and I wondered if maybe that’s where I learned what to do.
THEIR FATHER WILL focus on one while I turn my attention to the other, who is sulking—both of them getting the attention they need until they are once again in harmony. Then, without prompting, one of the twins will apologize to the other for being rude.
She says, “Let’s never fight again, okay?”
The other one nods. “I’m sorry.”
They hug each other and resume playing joyfully.
The girls are allowed to feel what they feel and express this emotion. They are permitted to be angry or to be upset and to cry—without being castigated or instructed to get over it. Even when their anger is directed at their father, he doesn’t take it personally. I never say, “Don’t be angry”—I only accept and validate their emotions. I let them be who they are. I hear myself talking to them in the way I wish my mother had spoken to me.
ONE OF THE girls says, “I know what you are afraid of.”
“What’s that?” I ask. We are in the kitchen.
“Spiders!”
“That’s true,” I say.
She looks at me and smiles. “I knew it.”
“I’m afraid of spiders, too,” she says.
The other one is facing the fridge. She has been arranging the wooden fish magnets into the shape of a heart. She turns around. “So am I. I’m afraid of spiders, too.”
Now they are both looking at me. They are wrinkling their noses and making faces. The expressions are different, but they both transmit disgust.
“No,” I say, reminding them of a truth they aren’t sure of. “You’re not afraid of spiders. You are much braver than I am. Remember the time you caught the spider in the bathtub?”
I have learned to withhold my instinctive reactions in front of them. Mario pointed this out to me when I screamed the first time I saw the giant spider. The spiders in Bali are prehistoric.
“You will make them afraid,” he said. “And I don’t want that.”
He took the girls to remove the spider from the bathroom. He showed them how to do it with a plastic container and a piece of paper that slips underneath until it becomes a lid. He did this with the same stealth that accompanies his confronting the cobras and other assorted creatures that populate the tropics. The rats that come out at night and visit the kitchen.
Mario’s nonchalance extends to illness, too. When the girls are sick, there is no panic. No assumption it will soon become fatal. If they have a fever, they lie down with a cold towel and rest. When they cut themselves or fall and bleed there isn’t a frenzy. “Poor you,” he says in a sympathetic tone and tends to the wound. They do not feel they are in peril. I am in these moments an intrigued spectator. This is how it works, I think, looking on.
27
The times I remember my mother most at peace is when she would stand without moving, unaware of passing time, reading or rereading passages from a book that she’d picked off the shelf. Words were liberation from the frantic world she occupied. She could lose herself temporarily in the sanctuary of the lyricism. Unlike people, words were always enough.
WHEN MY MOTHER would talk about literature or poetry, she was hypnotic. She would explain why the work mattered in such a passionate way that had it not been created, her life would not be worth living. When she was excited about sharing a book, the title was spoken with astonishment. How could such a thing of beauty exist? The poet was majestic. The writer was heroic.
As I got older, I discovered who I was with my writing, and my mother said she was proud of me. Her generosity soared in this department. She was able to transcend her needs, if just momentarily, to support me in a way that gave confidence and strength. She championed my imagination. And this was a kindness I could use. A life raft of encouragement that saved me from the undertow. Because of her, I am a writer.
THE DINING ROOM at 180 was called the dining-room-library. It was always spoken as one word. Just off the kitchen, the walls had floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves and a heavy oak wooden ladder that slid along a brass railing near the top. As a child I climbed the ladder, and when I reached the top shelves, I sneezed beca
use of the dust. I was curious about what was up there. One shelf held a row of Proust, a collection of small olive-green bound books with faded binding. Another shelf was filled with volumes of Shakespeare. These books were leftovers from my mother’s days at college. The middle shelves were mostly novels and nonfiction—old paperbacks with yellowing pages that fell out and sprinkled down to the floor if the book was cracked open too far. These relics sat alongside out-of-print hardcovers with austere book jackets. Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature reminded me of a textbook. An ancient, drab copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I picked it up and put it back. Boring! No pictures!
Remarkably, my mother knew where every book was, as though she had an inner compass. The books weren’t alphabetized or organized in any particular way, but if she needed to find a certain title, she would move toward it, magnetically pulled to its location.
Each book was a friend who would never let her down. They hung around, waiting patiently, without demands. They never abandoned her. Poems were lovers who would never leave.
“OH MY GOD!” My mother would exclaim with the enthusiasm of a schoolgirl. “You haven’t read The Magic Mountain?” She would stop whatever she was doing and immediately take Thomas Mann’s novel off of the shelf. “This book changed my life.” I could not last another day without reading The Magic Mountain. It was imperative. She held the book in her hands, gazing at it as if she was marveling at the existence of the sea or a mountain—a creation that surpassed human understanding. Death in Venice. The Sorrows of Young Werther. She explained why these books moved her—telling the story in a way that captivated me with the richness of their ideas. Talking about books made her feel less alone, I could tell. But there was, too, a subtle message that was never lost. To be cultured and literate was necessary. Essential for being a person of worth. And the contempt for those who didn’t abide by this decree was equally severe. The worst thing anyone could be in this world was bourgeois.
ON MY THIRTIETH birthday my mother hands me a hardcover copy of Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow. The novel is about the life of the poet Delmore Schwartz, whom she knew. She wants me to read Humboldt’s Gift because it’s crucial, and she talks about Saul Bellow. She respects him and holds him in high regard.
When I open the book there is an inscription: “Dear Ariel, your mother is one of the greatest poets of our time!” It is signed: Saul Bellow.
It’s in her handwriting.
“You wrote that,” I say.
She giggles in her childlike way. “So what? He thought it.”
MY MOTHER WAS always writing. She had to create. It freed her. There was a need to make people feel the things that she felt.
Her disappointment, in later years when no one was interested in her work, was never a deterrent. She would write anyway. As I began to be published, she would say, “I want you to share with me what you’re working on.” I would tell her about an article I’d written. But I would be wary of giving too many details. “Tell me more about what you’re doing—I want to know,” she says.
If I mentioned difficulties or frustrations that mirrored her own, she became impatient.
“You don’t know how good you have it. No one cares about me anymore.”
I AM THIRTY-EIGHT years old and standing in a darkened aisle of the Strand Book Store in New York when I spot a title that I recognize. A collection of mother and daughter poems. I reach for the slim paperback and remove it from the shelf. On the cover it lists some of the writers who have contributed to the collection: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich. I see my mother’s name. I am proud when I see her name. I know how much it would mean to her that I have discovered this book by accident and realized she was in it. That she was worthy of this company.
I hear in my head the conversation we would have.
“Aren’t you proud of your mommy?” she asks.
“Mm-hm.”
The parsimonious response displeases me. Because I know how grateful she would be if I told her how I felt. And I wish I could give that to her. I wish I could give that to her and have that be enough. Knowing it won’t be, I keep it private.
I turn to the table of contents. The poem is called “Thoughts About My Daughter Before Sleep.” I know this poem. She has read it to me before. Many times. It begins: “Ariel, one true miracle of my life,” and as I read it, I begin to cry.
BECAUSE HER LOVE was a vapor. It didn’t touch, it didn’t heal, it didn’t soothe. The words on the page weren’t compensation for what was missing.
My mother imparted her devotion through words. But words were also weapons. They could embolden and they could destroy. They provided security and ripped it away. She was sensitive to words and she passed that on to me. I inherited the belief that what was spoken could always fix what was broken.
28
Mario doesn’t live in world of words. There is an absence of analysis and deconstruction. His feelings are communicated in actions. A discussion is an anathema. He seeks an economy of words—the fewer the better. Intimacy is nonverbal. This is uncomfortable for me. But then, it is also a source of relief.
WHEN I ASK Mario, “How was your day?” he replies with a timeline of what he did. A recitation. Introductory dive, then lunch, then kitesurfing, level two. When he asks, “How was your day?” I begin with “Today I realized” or “Today I felt.”
If I ask him, “How do you feel about that?” the response is factual, without scrutinizing or editorializing. He feels good. There was wind. He feels tired. The wind was eighteen knots. If the dive went well, he will demonstrate enthusiasm about the conditions of the water. “There was very good visibility,” he says with an appreciative nod. “Very clear.”
This gratitude will extend to what he saw. Turtles, sharks, lots of Manta; dazzling descriptions of fish. This is a good day. Sometimes he will add, “I had a German student who told me she is a journalist.” A surprising amount of detail. “What kind of journalist?” I’ll ask, even though the response is as expected: he didn’t inquire. His taciturn nature means he does not ask questions.
HE IS SITTING quietly, staring ahead.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“I’m thinking,” he begins slowly, and there is a long pause. As if unsure he’s ready to disclose his secrets. “It’s time to cut the bamboo.”
“Why?”
“To create the current in the pond so that the fish will enjoy the flow.”
HE IS PACING in front of the fishpond for several minutes and appears perplexed.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I am missing two fish. It’s a mystery.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t see any casualties.”
“What if they were eaten?”
“I would see the leftovers.”
WHEN I USE a word that he doesn’t understand, he will ask, “What does that mean?” and I become impatient, forgetting that he is Italian. He speaks English fluently, but it isn’t his native language. Occasionally, though, there will be a word that is the same in both languages. Oblique, for instance. “Obliquo,” he said, nodding. “When someone says something but means something else. If it’s oblique, something is hidden.”
He knew what that meant.
WE ARE SITTING on the porch, looking out at the sky, which is black with a crescent moon.
“What’s your favorite word?” I ask. My head is resting on his shoulder. The breeze moves through the leaves of the Cambodia trees, and they seem to be shivering. Mario doesn’t respond. A few seconds pass.
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I’m thinking.”
“Okay.”
A few more seconds pass.
“My favorite word is . . .” He pauses. “Family.”
SOMETIMES I WILL write him a note. I will express myself in a way I couldn’t during a conversation. He will read what I’ve written and comment, “I understand.” Two w
ords.
And then one day he said, “You say all these words and write all these words, but it doesn’t change how you are.”
I PAID ATTENTION to this. Because I can’t talk my way out of how I make him feel. I can’t alter it with explanations. Or reset with elucidations. So I fight against what feels natural—using words as reparations—because what feels natural is defective.
29
I am nine years old. Before leaving for Thailand that year, a plan was conceived. I had been begging my father to let me stay in Bangkok. Every summer that I spent with him, before I had to return to New York, I would plead, “Daddy, don’t make me go back. I want to live with you.”
The summer of 1977 was to be the beginning of my new life. Before I left for Thailand that year, we’d arranged an escape plan. That summer I would stay with him. After the years of reports from Rita and from Josie about the “horrors at 180,” he had to do something to rescue me. But what could he do? He was a single lawyer living abroad in Southeast Asia and knew it would be impossible to gain custody of me through the legal system. There were many reasons an attempt would be futile. My mother had money. She would hire lawyers to crush him. I was her property. She was a gladiator poised for battle. He was the nail that her mallet would bear down on with such force, he might never get up. She was capable of inventing stories impugning his integrity, loyalty, devotion as a father. The case would go to court and I would have to testify. I would have to choose, and state in her presence that I wanted to live with him. The courts at that time were not inclined to side with a father. Especially an absent father who lived on the other side of the world. No matter how unfit she was as a parent, he knew that when the time came, she would pull it together, streamline her mental state, and perform with credible conviction. She would manipulate, charm, and bully to get her way. She was, as his lawyer had declared during their divorce, “the champion.”
