“It’s fine, Linda,” Mom says. “Have fun with it, Marty.”
Mom had announced that we should keep our gift buying fairly simple this Christmas. Now we go around the room opening one present apiece, expressing more fake delight than usual. It’s hard to know whose benefit this is for—Dad’s, Mom’s, Marty’s, or the camera’s. Dad is the only person who isn’t playacting, although he tries to say something appreciative each time. It must be good for him to keep busy—even with the bass incident, he hasn’t had to get up and pace. Marty has given Linda a handheld video game console, Mom a personal digital assistant, and me a fancy electronic odometer I’ll never use.
“Cool!” Linda shouts, winding her face into a grimace that she’ll be embarrassed about five years from now.
“I haven’t got your gift yet, Bill,” Marty tells Dad. “I need a little more time. I wanted it to be really, really special.”
Linda made friendship bracelets for everyone—plain ones for the men and a daisy-patterned one for Mom. I bought a small box of oil paints for Dad, soap for Mom, and socks for Linda. Nothing for Marty because I didn’t know he was going to be here. “Don’t give it another thought, buddy,” Marty says. “You’re good to me all year round, right?” Mom gives each person thermal underwear and a box of hard candy.
“Now it’s time for your father’s presents,” Mom says.
“You had time to shop, Dad?” Linda asks. “You didn’t have to get us anything.”
“Not exactly,” Mom says. She takes a handful of small envelopes from the top of the brick room divider and gives one to Marty, Linda, and me, and takes one for herself. “Let’s open them all at once,” she says.
Inside the envelopes are note cards saying
WHEN I AM WELL
I WILL TAKE YOU
Mine says “to the Museum of Fine Arts.” Linda’s says “on the Swan Boats.” Mom’s says “to the North End.” Marty’s says “to Fenway Park.”
“Fun!” Linda shouts.
“God, bro, that’s so nice. I can’t wait.”
“Adele helped me with them.”
Marty’s chin begins to shake. “It’s been such a tough year, with the separation and everything. You’ve been amazing. Everyone else got sick of hearing about it.”
“There goes another one,” Linda says.
“Excuse me,” Marty says. He goes to the hall bathroom, flushing the toilet as soon as he gets inside.
“I guess that’s it, then,” Mom says, taking the big tray of cookies back to the kitchen.
Linda and I collect the wrapping paper and stuff it into bags. When Marty comes back, he takes Dad by the elbow.
“Let’s go for a walk, bro,” he says, walking him to the coat closet. “We’ll stroll up and down the street and see everybody’s decorations. Let’s get you good and bundled up.”
Once they leave, Mom retrieves the turkey leg from beside the armchair and wraps it in foil. She turns off the room lights. Only the tree is still glowing.
“That wasn’t such a bad Christmas,” she says.
FRITZ SAYS
Fritz says:
“It’s important for you to feel as functional and normal as possible while this is going on. So shower each day. Get dressed right away, as soon as you get out of bed—don’t sit around in your pajamas. Get some exercise daily, even a twenty-minute walk or some calisthenics, sit-ups, and mild push-ups in the living room. Be sure to eat something, especially protein. Even if it doesn’t taste good, just get it down. Okay?”
Fritz says:
“I realize that you’re just trying to help, and I appreciate that. You’re very good people, and I value your thoughts and ideas. But it’s important not to interrupt. Although I really am treating you as a family to some extent, I’d like to keep your husband and father as the focus. So I’d like you to try, even though I know it feels difficult, to hold back a little bit…in fact, quite a bit. Thank you. Let’s try that again, okay?”
Fritz says:
“Let’s see if we can work out some really effective techniques for helping Bill be able to answer the questions in his own way, in his own time. Now, let me model for you how I ask Bill a question and wait for his answer. I ask my question; then I keep looking right into his eyes—see the direct line from my eyes to his—and I wait calmly and patiently while he formulates his answer. I might even be willing to wait five minutes if I have to. Why not? What’s to lose if I do? What I really don’t want to do is to squelch his answer in any way. He tends to speak very quietly right now, so I don’t want the relative loudness of my own voice to drown out his answer. He’s also speaking rather slowly, so I wouldn’t want the relative quickness of my voice to beat him to the punch and perhaps drive his own answer right out of his head. Once he does begin to speak, I’ll listen receptively until I’m sure he’s finished. So could all of us take turns trying that?”
HOWL
Someone in the house is shouting.
It’s Dad who’s shouting. An intruder has broken into our house. An intruder is trying to kill Dad.
I sit up in bed. My body runs alongside my heart, trying to jump on.
I feel for my bike frame and grab the tire pump. It’s light but would deliver a solid blow.
The lights are on in Mom and Dad’s room. Dad’s eyes are shut. Every time he shouts, his head rises off the pillow. Mom kneels on the floor beside him, shaking his arm.
“Wake up, Bill! Wake up! Bill! Stop it!”
“What’s wrong with him?”
Linda runs in from the hall, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt.
Dad shouts again.
Linda shouts back, sounding just like Dad. They’re not shouting words. It’s a preword and I don’t know where they learned it.
“Linda! Stop it!” Mom says.
“Mom! Why is he doing this?”
“I don’t know, Billy. He just is. He just started shouting like this.”
“Why don’t you make him stop it?”
“I can’t!”
Linda looks into the hall, hopping up and down. “Where’s Dad? He’ll know what to do! I’m going to go get Dad!”
Mom grabs her by the shoulders. “Linda! Linda! What are you talking about? This is Dad. He’s already here. He’s the one who’s yelling.”
“Oh! He’s already here. I forgot.” She starts to cry and leans on Mom.
“Linda, you have to calm down. You have to help me.”
“But I’m afraid!”
“I can’t wake him up. Somebody try something!”
“Come on, Dad,” I urge. My voice leaves my throat in shreds like splinters. “You can do it. You can wake up.”
I really don’t know if he can. What if he can’t?
I drop the pump and climb across the bed to shake him. How long has it been since I’ve crawled into my parents’ bed—ten years? Back then it was a tract, a room to itself.
“Come on, wake up. It’s not real. If you wake up, you won’t be scared anymore.”
“In another minute,” Mom says, “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Dad, stop,” Linda says. “Please stop, okay? Please wake up. You’re scaring me. Okay. Okay.” She breathes deep the way the doctor told us to, but each breath has a rattle in it like she’s swallowed cellophane. “I know. Let’s pry his eyes open.”
Bending over him with one fingertip, she slides up his eyelids. He’s still shouting without looking at us, in a separate world that we can’t get to.
Then Dad’s irises contract.
“He’s awake,” Linda says.
I press Dad’s arm. His pajama shirt is soaked. “Dad, it was just a nightmare. Come on. Sit up. Sit up.”
“He’s awake, Mom. Dad, it’s okay,” Linda says. “You’re home in bed.”
“All right.”
“You’re home. You were having a nightmare.”
“Was I? My God.” Dad’s voice is rough, like that night in the kitchen.
Linda and I surround Dad, but Mom stays
back. Dad’s nightmare must have scared her. She looks like someone who walks along the edge of a pool not knowing what they’ll find. A koi, a piranha, a dead body, their own reflection.
“Are you going to be all right, Bill? I was just about to call an ambulance.”
“Maybe he should keep sitting up, Mom. Keep sitting up. You’d better stay awake for a while, until you’re sure it’s gone away.”
“I’m awake. I’m awake.”
Linda tugs the corner of his pillow. “I’m the one who woke you up, Dad.”
“Thank you, honey.” He feels for her hand, squeezes it.
“When you saw me, you were all right.”
“What was this nightmare?” I ask. “It must have been a whopper.”
“What was it, Dad?” Linda echoes. “Was it pretty scary?”
“I was alone….”
Crawling back to Mom’s side of the bed, I settle against the headboard. “So, you were alone?”
“That’s right. I was sealed up in a metal box…with a window in it.”
“Mom,” Linda asks, “can I turn on all the lights so we feel less nervous?”
“If it will make you feel better.”
“Don’t say anything important till I get back.”
Lights come on in rooms, shaping our box of life beside the highway. The drivers on 128 may notice a lit-up house, but they know nothing about Dad’s nightmare. Probably no other family is awake in this section of Hawthorne.
“What do you think the metal box was?” The obvious thought is a coffin, but I hope he’ll say “phone booth” and break this mood.
“It was like a submarine, because I was dropped into the ocean. But nobody knew that I was inside. First it was bobbing on the surface. Then it started to sink. I could see the water through the window.”
Dad links his phrases slowly, but we listen without interrupting, as the doctor said we should. I try to picture the dream, picture myself in it. I feel that if I get it right, just the way Dad dreamed it, the spell will break and it won’t bother him again.
“I wanted to get out, and I knew it had a door in it when I first went inside, but when the box began to sink the door had disappeared.”
“Why were you inside it in the first place?” Linda asks.
“Does that really make any difference, Linda?” Mom asks.
“I’m trying to figure out what it means.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t you see what the problem is? It’s those pills they’ve got him on.”
“That’s what it must be,” Dad says. “Those pills.”
Of course. “Well, that’s good then, isn’t it?” I comment.
“How is it good?”
It’s good because Dad is not really in a metal box that’s sinking.
Mom finds a clean pajama top in a pile of folded laundry on the dresser. She holds it out to Dad while he takes off the soaked one. “I could kick myself. How could I let you take anything without looking into it more closely?”
“Dad,” Linda asks, “do you think that if you had stayed asleep, you eventually would have found a way out of the box?”
“I don’t think we need to know any more about this,” Mom answers without looking at Linda. “It doesn’t matter what the nightmare means, it’s just bad enough that it happened. Try to get it out of your mind, Bill. Do you want to read something?”
“Maybe we should have made the decision together,” Dad says, buttoning the new shirt.
“Together? Bill—” It seems like Mom wants to say that Dad hasn’t been able to decide anything for at least a month now. But how can she tell him this? No one ever actually says to him that he’s anything less than normal. “Well, do you mean you didn’t want the pills? If we had decided together, would you have not gone ahead with it? Do you want to go off them?”
“I didn’t want them. I knew they wouldn’t help.” Dad suddenly seems more wise instead of less, like his dream packed him something to carry back to the rest of us. His calmness spooks me, and I wish there were more lights for Linda to turn on.
“Why didn’t you say something at the time?” Mom asks. “Why didn’t you refuse to take them?”
“Because you seemed so happy.”
“You were making me happy?” Mom is still holding the sweaty pajama top. “You took them to make me happy? But I did think it was going to help. Something had to.”
“Are you all right, then, Dad?” I ask. “Can we go back to bed now?” I was thinking of getting up extra early. I have an oral report to give tomorrow, and I haven’t even started it yet. I feel like my blood has slowed down finally. A section of my face, right between my eyebrows, had actually been jumping.
“I don’t feel like sleeping,” Linda says. “Dad, do you want to sit up for the rest of the night with the lights on and watch TV? There might be an old movie on. Then when the movie’s over, I’ll make pancakes.”
“That’s all right, honey. Your mother and I will sit up for a few minutes and talk. Oh, God.”
“I’m going to bed. Maybe you should move into a different room,” I suggest. “To just, you know, forget things. Remove the reminders or whatever. Maybe you should sleep on the couch tonight.”
“He’ll be all right,” Mom says. “But I vote with Linda. Anyone who wants to can leave their lights on.”
DAD, HOW CAN YOU GO TO CALIFORNIA?
That same night I have my own dream, that an airline introduced a special reduced airfare from Boston to California. In my dream, the fare was extremely cheap—$142 round-trip—because of the volume of passengers that could be conveyed on a single plane. Each passenger’s head, you see, was separated from the body and sealed in a plastic bag. The body was maintained at home with intravenous feeding until the “extra-value passenger” (the head) returned.
Dad’s head went to California in a plastic bag, stacked as palletized cargo in a freight compartment with the heads of other budget travelers, most of whom were traveling for business. They would be able to do all the necessary negotiating and communicating in this compact state. Who needed a body to attend a meeting?
But after Dad’s head had been away for several days, it struck me that he might be in jeopardy. I rushed into his room to find his body seated upright in a special chair, wearing white hospital pajamas. His systems were hooked up, his blood was pumping, his chest moved in and out. The only bad sign was that his skin looked shiny and goldish. But how, I shouted in my sleep, could we have let him go to California? If his head were somehow diverted, like a piece of lost luggage, we would never be able to put him together again.
In the dream I stayed for a week beside his body, always awake, watching every rise and fall of his chest, waiting for his head to come back—across the country, through the dollies, trolleys, hand trucks, and conveyors of Logan Airport, back home to us.
A NOTE TO THE READER
Oh, I know you can never walk a mile in my worn-out bedroom slippers.
But can you see how important all this is?
I want you to see it.
So you will know what was lost.
So you’ll never think, while reading this, that I tried to do too much.
BULWARK
“Dr. Fritz, please. Adele Morrison. No, I can’t wait. No, I can’t hold. I don’t care, I need to talk to him right now. How long? Tell me specifically how long I have to wait. How many minutes? All right, but no longer.”
Mom holds on to the phone, watching Dad. Dad’s at the table in his pajamas, breaking a Pop-Tart into small pieces. I finish my cereal and put my breakfast dishes in the sink before Mom starts to speak again.
“Dr. Fritz, the medication you’ve started us on…No, it’s not a good morning. No, I’m not going to tell you how I am, and I’m not going to ask how you are. The medication you and Dr. Gupta prescribed for my husband is completely unacceptable. He began shouting in his sleep last night and frightened our children. My daughter was completely terrified, and I almost called an ambulance…. Y
es, he was shouting. He was having nightmares. Extremely bad ones, apparently, from the sound of it. I had difficulty waking him. All of us are rattled by the experience…. Well, your questions are certainly very impressive-sounding, but to return to my original point without getting bogged down in specifics: This medication is unacceptable…. Oh, this nightmare thing is uncommon? Well, that changes the situation, doesn’t it? What do we care how uncommon it is if it happens to us?
“No, I’m not willing to ‘wait it out.’…I don’t think we can afford to wait another two weeks for him to adjust. If this is what it’s like, we’re not going to wait two days, or even two minutes. Here are your choices: You and Dr. Gupta can switch him to something different today, and it has to be more effective than what you’ve given him so far, or you can try to cure him without medication. Which is it?”
Mom listens to Fritz while watching Dad put an edge of Pop-Tart crust in his mouth. Her cheeks are full of air, like she’s saying a word that starts with B. She puts the receiver back on the wall without saying good-bye to Fritz.
Mom leans against the kitchen counter, her eyes avoiding Dad’s chair. “He says he’ll discuss it with me at the next appointment.”
PSYONARA
Mom says the medical establishment has let her down again. She’s entirely disillusioned with Fritz. He’s fallen off his pedestal. Mom says that Fritz never really cared about helping Dad. He only took the case to help pay for his sailboat.
TREATMENT REPORT: DAY 41
Mom and Dad stay home at the time of the next scheduled appointment with Fritz.
The phone rings and rings.
part two
COMPOSED IN A CHEMISTRY NOTEBOOK
“The Happy Pills”
The Opposite of Music Page 5
