“Really? What do you think’s going on?” he asked, alarmed.
“I don’t have a clue. I’ve never felt this before in my life!” I said, taking in little desperate gasps of air, feeling as though a large hand was gripping my throat.
“Okay, what can we do? Should we take you to the emergency room?”
“Yeah, I think maybe I need to see a heart specialist—like right away!”
A production assistant rushed me to the nearest medical clinic. After examining me and hearing about all my symptoms, the Lithuanian doctor sat me down in her sterile office cubicle. She was a small, masculine-looking woman with short, pomaded hair. She pulled out a heavy blue medical book written in English from her cluttered shelf. She leafed through it, and pointed to a chapter heading that read “Chronic Anxiety Disorder.”
I would have laughed if I could have found the breath. Instead I managed to wheeze, “Oh, no, that’s not it at all, this is some kind of heart attack or something. Why aren’t you giving me an EKG?”
With a slight shake of her head, she tapped her finger on the bold letters at the top of the page. She repeated her command, “Reat dees!”
“Yes, I know, I saw it. But you don’t understand—I’m not crazy! There’s no way that anxiety could be causing this. I’m a calm person, I never even get stressed out!” I replied, clearly stressed out. She looked at me blankly. Then she glanced at her beloved book again and held it up inches from my nose.
“Doctor, please, this is absurd,” I panted, shoving the thing away from my face. “I’m usually incredibly healthy. I work out every day. I have a treadmill in my hotel room. Please just check my heart!” I begged, shivering on my ice-cold prison-style chair.
“Reat dis whole page,” she barked in her heavy, dictatorial Lithuanian dialect. “You are hafink a panic attack. Your symptoms are classic. You neet to take Prozac ant Xanax daily ant a strong sleepink pill every night.”
Sure enough, every symptom listed on the aforementioned page of her book matched mine.
I was about to film my dream role based on the true story of a Jewish doctor from Hungary who was a prisoner at Auschwitz; while there, she risked her own life by performing countless abortions to save the lives of pregnant Jewish women. I’d been preparing for months, perfecting a Hungarian accent, and we’d just completed a full week of rehearsal in Vilnius. And now my heart’s about to explode through my chest? I can’t say a line without losing my breath, and we’re supposed to start shooting tomorrow?!
I left the austere Lithuanian clinic and immediately called my doctor in LA—because, panic attack or not, there was no fuckin’ way I was taking all that medication. My LA doctor said that tomorrow I should try just a half a Xanax and nothing else. Then I called my husband, at 4:00 a.m. his time.
“I don’t know what’s happening to me! I’m going crazy. I can’t catch my breath. We’re supposed to start shooting tomorrow!”
In a calm, steady voice, he reassured me I was going to be okay and then asked me what he could do.
“You could help me get a ticket home. I need to get out of here tomorrow! Please?” He knew that I had no history of anxiety-related issues and that, as an experienced professional, I’d normally never let anything interfere with my work. “Christine,” he said, “you are about to play a Holocaust survivor whose entire family is killed. You’re on the other side of the world from your own children. It would be weird if you weren’t terrified. You can do this, but you should share what’s happening with your director.”
He was right. Within the last few months, I’d watched every single movie and every documentary on the Holocaust in existence. I’d also devoured every book I could get ahold of. Previously unaware of many of the details, I was now filled, apparently to the breaking point, with images of concentration camps, the mountains of skeletons left unburied, the emaciated inmates barely able to walk. I was playing a woman who had to watch the black smoke rising from the chimney of the crematorium where her children were being burned to death.
“Really? Tell him I’m having a panic attack because I’m too inside my character, and as a result I may not be able to do the scene? I can’t. He’ll think I’m some kind of unprofessional wack job!” Unshowered, with greasy hair, I sat gripping my knees on the cold tile floor of my hotel room.
I should have known something was wrong when I had difficulty leaving my room that first week in Vilnius. Usually when traveling I’m a captivated tourist, but I had no interest in exploring anything. I couldn’t even socialize with the rest of the cast. I just wanted to stay in and watch more Holocaust documentaries. But that seemed normal for me when preparing for a challenging role like this one.
If all the extensive research wasn’t enough, this was in 2002, just after 9/11. As my husband reminded me, I was several continents away from my family. Before texting and e-mailing, the only way of contacting people was a long-distance phone call, which was nearly impossible given the extreme time difference. Never comfortable with being needy, I wasn’t even aware that I was in trouble. I didn’t notice the red flag when I left to get food one afternoon and an unfamiliar dread hit me as I got lost in a football-stadium-sized grocery store. Disorientated, I dropped my bags of apples and pretzels in somebody’s grocery cart and left without buying a thing. I was also having violent nightmares and, uncharacteristically, suffering from insomnia. Jesus, how bad do things have to get before I can admit I need help? As a psychiatrist later told me after I shared what happened, “You can pretend all you want, but in the end your body doesn’t lie.”
My husband responded: “No, just tell the director what’s going on with you and to please be patient if you need a moment to do your work. You’ll feel better knowing that you’re not alone with this.” I closed my red, swollen eyes and imagined my husband’s warm hand holding mine.
I couldn’t sleep much that night. The next morning, I took my half Xanax. I got through hair and makeup while going back and forth in my mind, trying to decide what to do. Then, just before we started shooting, I asked the director to come into my trailer and told him everything . . . in a Hungarian accent. We’d made a pact that I would only speak “in character” to him and to the other crew members while on set or in my trailer.
“Joe,” I gasped, “dis ees so embarrassink for me to admeet, but I neet to tell you vat iss goink on vit me. . . . Vat de doctorr sait vas det I vas havink an anxiety atteck and det I needed to . . .” Then, after a few minutes of still trying to be a good girl, I apologized for breaking the dialect rule—then finished explaining the situation, in my own voice.
“I understand. Don’t worry, Christine,” he reassured me. “Take as much time as you need. It’s even fine if you ever have to leave the set for a while.” He closed the door gently. Within minutes, I was finally able to take a much-needed deep breath.
Luckily, once I got through that first day of shooting, I didn’t need any more Xanax, although I always kept it with me. By the end of that first week, I could relax enough to try to understand what the hell had happened.
In the five years after that incident, I never had another episode like that one, but I continued to travel with that little plastic Xanax bottle safely tucked into a zipped pocket of my purse, just in case. Once you have a panic attack, you’re always panicked that it might happen again.
A critic who reviewed the Holocaust film in New York magazine said, “Christine Lahti is the new Glenn Close, a strong woman for all occasions, an adult no matter what.” Ha! If he only knew I hadn’t a clue what that meant. It had never occurred to me that real strength, the kind that can pull you up off the floor, involves knowing that you’ve fallen and that you might need a hand. If I had known that, I could have saved a lot of money on Xanax.
And no matter how much I try to delude myself, my body doesn’t lie. Even while sleeping sometimes, I dream in character.
17
Brother
When my older brother died last year, I never cried. As my si
blings and I tried sharing some positive memories about him, all I could come up with was that he played a mean game of Ping-Pong. Oh, and that I used to love the stick-figure cartoons he would draw when we were kids.
“Hey, Joe, where’s Bob?” asked Sam.
“Oh, he’s just hanging around the corner,” replied Joe.
The next drawing was a picture of Sam going around the corner only to find Bob, his eyes popped out, hanging by a noose. I laughed until my stomach ached at that joke when I was eight years old.
When we were growing up, our parents lived by the old proverb “Children should be seen but not heard.” However, in our house, I’m not sure how much they even saw the six of us. Did they not notice the red flag that my brother waved in their faces when, at only seven years old, he threw that large metal trash can onto the head of our then five-year-old sister?
When I was seven, I dreaded him; the way he’d straddle my tiny body, then drool close to my face. I can still see his spittle snakes slithering closer and closer until they nearly bit my nose. Other times he’d hold me down, put his butt inches above my nose, and fart. He found it hilarious. I just figured that’s what older brothers got to do to their younger sisters.
Then when I was around eight or nine, he started beating me up. He hurt our older sister, too. If we heard him coming, sometimes we would hide together behind Mom’s garment bags of sequined gowns, afraid to breathe, in that walk-in cedar closet that reeked so much of mothballs that our eyes would water.
Admittedly, I could be bratty. Like that time in the car when I was mad at him and he stuttered. Time always stopped during these frequent stutter spasms. In this instance, it was the “F” sound. His mouth battled with it explosively for several excruciating seconds during which fragments of it shot out like shrapnel—“F . . . f . . . f . . . f . . . f . . . f!”
Sitting in the front seat of our green Buick, I turned around to him. “Stutter butter! Stutter butter!” I taunted. I shouldn’t have bullied him. But I’m not sure if that’s what even instigated that first beating. Did I tease him because he beat me, or did he beat me because I teased him? Does it really matter?
The specifics of the assaults remain a blur, as if covered with layers of gauze. But I do remember it would happen at night, when our parents were out. Either he pulled me down the stairs to our basement, or I was already there practicing Mozart Made Easy on our upright piano.
I see his red, acned face, the tiny slits of his eyes. There is his large sweaty hand locking both of mine behind my back, while his other one slugs me in the stomach over and over again. There’s the burning of his fists through my body, the losing of breath, the cold of the black-speckled floor tiles against my skin.
When our parents finally returned, I’d tell them, but they wouldn’t believe me, no matter how forceful or urgent the telling.
“Mom and Dad! Ted hit me!” I’d cry.
“Liar!” he’d say.
“He’s lying. He almost killed me!”
“I didn’t touch her!”
“I swear to God. He pounded me as hard as he could!”
Then Mom and Dad would glance at each other. As he turned his back and walked into his office to refill his pipe, Dad would bark, “Both of you go to your rooms and stay there. I don’t want to hear another word.”
And, as was the custom in our house, that would be the end of words. Gagged, I’d storm up to my room to the solace of my stuffed animals. As my brother followed, I’d hear him snickering under his breath, as though plotting his next attack.
This abuse happened many times, although I can’t say exactly how often. I’m still confounded by the fog encasing these memories. How can something so jagged and razor-sharp as trauma become so blunted? But apparently I said “as hard as he could” so often during that period that our parents’ only course of action was to ban that phrase from our family’s vernacular. When I dared to utter those words, I’d get grounded. Maybe they just thought that if I couldn’t say it, then they couldn’t hear it, then it didn’t happen.
As far as I knew, there were never any repercussions for him. My parents never exactly accused me of lying; they just dismissed it as “normal sibling rivalry” or “boys will be boys.” I was also the girl with the too-big feelings, the only emotional creature in our otherwise mostly stoic family. “She must be overdramatizing it,” they could have muttered to each other.
But the violence Ted inflicted on me still lives in me. It’s become as much a part of who I am as my name. I find that I’m still hypersensitive to people touching me too hard. Even if just in play, if I’m tickled or poked too roughly by my children, that old feeling of helplessness is reignited. His abuse remains visceral.
If I had ever confronted Ted about it, he might have said, “What’s the big deal? We were kids. Let it go!” But there have been lasting consequences. Whenever I see a man being emotionally or physically abusive to a woman, I feel the urge to intervene—and I have, sometimes unwisely. His abuse has also fueled my activism, leading me to become a board member of Equality Now, an international organization that fights the global epidemic of sex slavery and violence against women; to speak at marches for women’s rights; and to become involved in such organizations as the Equal Rights Amendment Coalition.
If I see men not listening to women or talking over them, my blood begins to boil. Even today, it’s still hard for me to trust that I’m really being heard. I find myself sometimes exaggerating things because I subconsciously fear I won’t be believed just telling simple truths.
After my husband asked me the other night how many times my brother hit me, I immediately responded “Fifty.” Yet it might have happened only a handful of times. I must have still felt, so many years later, that I had to say a number like that to convince him that it happened at all.
The beatings stopped when I was about eleven and my brother was fourteen. Again, I’m not sure why. Maybe because I grew taller than him around that time. Perhaps my newly sprouted body scared him. It’s harder to break a tree than a twig.
Ted went after our eleven-year-old little brother a few years later while driving all of us kids to go skiing. When our younger brother hit him back, Ted pulled the station wagon off the road so he could pummel him outside in the snow. We four girls couldn’t watch. Grateful it wasn’t us, we just sat in the car, focusing even more intently on keeping our legs stick-straight so the new stretch pants we’d gotten for Christmas wouldn’t bag in the knees.
For a couple of years in high school, Ted and I grew a bit closer, although only superficially. Mostly, we just used each other. When my parents went away for weekends, he’d organize huge keg parties in our basement, hire a band, and, always the entrepreneur, charge $4 for admission. He invited me because I knew some of the “popular” people he desperately wanted to be friends with. At sixteen, I thought it cool to be able to drink beer, dance, and flirt with older guys. One Sunday morning my parents came home unexpectedly early and discovered a couple of Ted’s sloshed guests passed out in the sauna. This time there were consequences for both of us.
Things really started to unravel for my brother after he started pre-med classes in college. Because he was Ted Lahti Jr., my dad expected that he’d follow in his footsteps and become a doctor. But Ted never wanted that. What he really strived for was Dad’s approval. For him, that became an unachievable lifelong obsession.
I shared that goal with him, but the bar was not as high for me. Since I was a girl, my status equaled that of a non-VIP—but in my family, the pressure for Ted to succeed, as the firstborn son, must have been viselike.
After having a nervous breakdown, Ted dropped out of med school. With Dad’s financial help, he proceeded to get into real estate, and within a few years he made millions of dollars. At long last, Dad seemed proud of him. Once, during this period, Ted came to a party I had, opened his wallet, and flashed his wad of hundred-dollar bills to all of my unimpressed, bewildered hippie friends.
Just two y
ears later, after making many ill-advised real estate deals, Ted lost everything, including the $100,000 that Dad had invested—much of my parents’ retirement money. Needless to say, that loss put an irrevocable strain on their relationship. Ted threatened to sue our father; he even pulled one of Dad’s guns on him while Mom, cowering in the corner, pleaded for him to put it down.
Out of desperation, Ted started writing bad checks, got caught, and called me collect one day to tell me that unless they were paid off, he’d have to go to prison for two years. He was broke. No way would Dad bail him out again, so he had to turn to me—his only sibling, at the time, who could afford it. I gave him the money, but in retrospect, who knows how much of that story was even true?
Then, in his mid-thirties, he went through debilitating depressions and heavily self-medicated with alcohol and drugs. While drunk driving one night, he rolled his truck in a Michigan cornfield. It landed on top of him and cut him open. His organs fell out of his bloated belly. He spent a week in the ICU. He survived but left the hospital with a scar that slung across his torso like an angry purple banner.
Soon after that, I came face-to-face with his delusions and mania for the first time. There was that visit to New York City, when he swore he had an appointment with Walter Cronkite. He didn’t. He’d recklessly take walks in Central Park at 4:00 a.m.
Then he showed me his drawings: meticulously detailed plans of sound stages he proposed we build in Hawaii for my fledgling career. He said I needed to put up the initial investment, but that he’d already lined up several other interested parties, and we could make whatever movies we wanted in our Hawaiian mini-studio. Sitting together on the imitation Persian rug in my tiny studio apartment, I stared into his furtive eyes, trying to ascertain whether he’d become a pathological liar or had truly begun to lose his grip on reality.
True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness Page 12
