The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it. My sister’s completion rate was pathetic. She would never get into the Suicide Hall of Fame with her record of attempts and failures.
And so I finally decided that the way to kill myself would be in my Plymouth Duster. A midnight high-speed single-car crash into a rock wall. This had a number of advantages: it involved heart-thumping action, collision, blood, and a pretty quick resolution. It also seemed a likely success, and in any event, it would be colorful, and it would put Lara’s paltry efforts to shame.
I cruised around the Chestnut Hill Reservoir in search of optimal conditions to carry out my plans. Too many intersections, not enough walls. I would have to go out of town, perhaps even out of state—to New Hampshire, where one was encouraged to live free or die. But thinking about New Hampshire always put me in a good mood. I’d take my snowshoes, go camping for the weekend, and feel better. I’d forget to kill myself till I got back to Boston Monday morning, and there, in court, would be all the pretty guns.
* * *
At last I called him. Not because I needed to. Not because I had really scared myself into thinking I would kill myself, but because I finally grew tired of myself. It was a Friday evening when I left a message for Flak to call me. This was an extraordinarily bold move, and my heart was racing at the sheer audacity of calling a doctor—an important man! A man with patients, employees, a wife, children, countless pressures I could only guess at. And here was I, Little Helen of the Perpetual Worries, adding one more complaint to his burden. And what was it, exactly, that I wanted from him?
I couldn’t admit it, but what I wanted, quite simply, was a bit of his warmth and attention. Or maybe more than just a bit. I wanted him to say, “Helen, I love you. You are the most amazing person in the world.” Or maybe he could just say something reassuring, and we would talk like coach to athlete: he would tell me I was brave and strong, and I would be fine. “Now, just go back out there and stay loose,” he would say. “You’ll do fine, I have every confidence in—”
The phone rang. I practically jumped out of my skin.
“Hello, Helen? This is Dr. Flak.” He sounded brusque, all business.
I sat with the receiver pressed to my ear, paralyzed for a moment, before a stream of words rushed from my mouth. “Thanks for calling back,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you—I mean, it’s really not a big deal, but, um…”
He was silent. A cold emptiness on the other end of the line. He was probably listening, I thought with rising alarm, in that shrinky way—with narrowed eyes and pursed lips, evaluating my sanity.
“I’m okay,” I said quickly. “I mean, I guess… maybe it’s getting worse.”
“What’s worse?”
“I don’t know! I’m not sure what I expect you to—”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“At home.” I was sitting on the mustard-colored shag carpeting, propped between my desk and my bed. “I don’t know what I want,” I said. “It’s not like I—”
“Well, I expected this,” he said flatly.
This was disappointing. He didn’t sound the least bit loving.
“I think you need medication. I thought you needed this before, but I figured we’d see how it goes, and—”
My face went cold. Everything in my body lurched forward. “No!” I said.
“Listen to me,” he said. “This is what I want you to do. I’m going to call in a prescription for imipramine to the CVS on Charles Street, near Mass General. It’s open till midnight. Do you know where that is?”
I did. I often went to the movie theater a few blocks down the street. But I was horrified to think that I was being sent downtown to get psycho medication on a Friday night, like it was some kind of emergency.
“I don’t want any drugs,” I said in a thin voice.
“Well, I think you need them.” He’d turned into Dr. Authority. No more Mr. Nice & Listen. I was mortified at what I had unleashed. If only I’d kept my big mouth shut! What had compelled me to call him? I was never satisfied, I thought. Always wanted more.
“Please,” I sniveled. “Please, no drugs.”
“Can I trust you to pick these up?” he said.
I held my breath. What could I say to start this conversation over again?
“Helen?”
“Yes,” I said meekly.
“Can I trust—”
“Yes.” I was the obedient, good girl after all. I would have no tantrums, no hysterics like Lara. I would gather whatever dignity was left me and drive downtown to the drugstore, where I would wait until they bagged my prescription and cashed me out.
Once home, with a sense of resignation, I read the label, swallowed a pill, and chased it with a glass of water as instructed. Then I allowed myself the unsatisfying indulgence of hopelessness. I would sink now, I thought. There was nothing left of me, a hollow shell. Flak was no different from my father, from anyone else. They were autocrats and they would treat me in the order in which I placed my call. Like anyone else who asked for help, I would be given the dosage recommended by the Physician’s Desk Reference, and left to live somehow on my own.
Sleep hit at some point in the middle of the night, and knocked me to the side of the bed, where I stayed until late morning. Groggy, I stumbled to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and then felt the world tip on its side. I grabbed the edges of the spinning shower stall and gradually dropped to the floor. Side effect: dizziness. I was a mental patient. Just like Lara, I was now taking a mind-altering drug that would make me crazy.
* * *
A few weeks later Lara called and asked me to go hiking with her in Vermont. I hadn’t spoken to her in half a year, and the sound of her voice—so friendly and gentle—made me cry. It was like hearing the voice of a long-lost love.
I didn’t want her to hear me sniffle—it seemed weak and shameful. Neither of us said much. She asked me how I was. “Okay,” I said. “And you?”
“Okay.”
We were both lying, pretending that nothing had happened over the past six months: her suicide attempts and threats to kill me, my panic attacks and exile from home, my parents’ insistence on secrecy—it was safer to say nothing. Instead we agreed to meet at the Appalachian Trail south of Bromley Mountain for a weekend in the woods.
I got up before dawn, threw my gear in the trunk, and drove to Vermont. A nor’easter was thrashing New England, and the wind hurled sheets of rain onto the roads. Three hours later I was sitting in my rusting Plymouth at the trailhead off Route 8 in the pounding rain. In another five months I was supposed to graduate and become a lawyer—a ludicrous idea to me at the time. I was much too young and immature to be a lawyer. I couldn’t even figure out how to be me.
* * *
Headlights turned into the parking lot. Through the driving rain, I could barely make out the shape of my sister’s drab-green Chevy Malibu with its dented fenders and broken defroster. She rolled up beside me and lowered her window an inch. I did the same. We eyed each other across the no-man’s-land of angry rain. She did not look any different than she usually did, except her hair was combed, and although it billowed out behind her ears, it looked quiet. And she looked lonely and a little scared; her shoulders were hunched as if she were protecting herself from a blow. Under her mountaineering parka, I could see her stretched-out cotton turtleneck. She was a third-year medical student, but she didn’t look any more like a doctor than I looked like a lawyer.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
“This sucks.”
I nodded.
“Want to get a cup of coffee and see if it lets up?”
My face brightened. We wouldn’t have to trudge out in this mess, slip on rocks, and crawl into soaked sleeping bags at the end of the day. We didn’t have to hurt ourselves too badly. The competition was postponed due to good sense.
I followed Lara’s taillights down the mountain, through the lashing rain. We parked at a coffee
shop in Manchester, bought coffee and blueberry muffins at the counter, and slid into an empty booth. We were the only ones there. A long-haired boy drifted behind the counter, scruffy and sleepy-eyed. Somewhere in the back, the Stones were on, Jagger singing I sit and watch the children play.…
Lara looked thinner than when I’d last seen her in the spring, when she was so angry at me. She seemed gentle now, with a shy, sweet smile, and warm green eyes and a perky nose. I suddenly realized how terribly I’d missed her. I had felt part of myself sliced off, an arm, or perhaps both arms, and as I’d wandered through my days at law school and through the streets of Boston, I had felt stunned by my loss, unable to grasp anything, clumsy and mute with pain. And now she was here. She was whole—her round face and strong shoulders, the terribly ravaged fingers; my sister was here before me, sipping coffee from a tall paper cup.
“I don’t know where to begin,” I said. And then we began, patching together the intervening time.
“I wasn’t allowed home last summer,” I said. “As long as you were there, Mom and Dad said I couldn’t set foot in the house. I guess they were afraid of what you’d do.”
Lara looked bewildered.
“You were in really, really bad shape,” I said. I stared at my coffee, unable to meet her eyes. I was burning to talk about the past summer, about meeting my father on the sly at the hospital coffee shop to get updates on Lara’s condition. About Mom showing up in my apartment over Labor Day. But it seemed cruel now to remind Lara of how she’d acted, of how frightened we’d all been. I separated the wax paper from the muffin and broke off a piece. Lara tore into hers, spreading crumbs across the table. “Mom and Dad said you were… well, they said it was very, very dangerous,” I said carefully. “They were afraid you’d kill yourself. You were furious at me.” I took a sip of coffee and sneaked a glance at Lara to see how she was taking this.
Lara shook her head slowly. “That’s nuts,” she said. “That’s completely wack. They told me you wouldn’t have anything to do with us. That you refused to see us.”
What? Did she really believe that? “I used to meet Dad,” I said.
Lara’s eyebrows went up.
“We’d have coffee at the hospital.”
I used to get up before six on Sundays and drive through the sleepy streets of Troy and west to Schenectady, and I would park on the opposite side of the hospital parking lot, so as not to be seen. And I would go into the familiar halls of my father’s hospital. He would be standing there in his gray suit, waiting inside the doctors’ entrance next to his nameplate, on a wall panel of all the doctors’ names. He would flick the little switch, lighting up his name to show that he was there, he was on the premises, and if anyone needed him, all they had to do was page him over the loudspeaker.
I always felt a surge of pride at seeing this, the simple flick of my father’s index finger lighting up his presence in the world. It spoke to his importance, that he was actually ingrained in the walls of this hospital, that he was part of the edifice of healing. I followed him down the hall to the coffee shop, and people stopped and greeted him; everyone knew him, everyone admired him and joked with him and smiled at me and shook my hand when he introduced me as his daughter. And my head swelled to think that I was attached to this great man, and through no credit of my own, I had managed to gain this exalted position as my father’s daughter. It wasn’t just doctors who stopped to talk with him, but nurses and orderlies and cafeteria workers and janitors and patients and volunteers who worked the gift shop and the flower stand.
“We got together once a week,” I told Lara.
She stared at me. I couldn’t tell whether she was puzzled, or angry, or what. My father had told me he’d had to sneak out of the house unnoticed, to prevent Lara from finding out he was meeting with me.
“In the beginning, I called Mom,” I said. “I wanted to see her. But she said you were too sick, and she couldn’t leave you alone.”
“Sick?”
I nodded. “And she said I couldn’t come home because you were ready to kill me or something. And you’d flip out if you found out she was even talking to me. So she hung up.”
“What?” My sister fidgeted. Her fingers found each other on the table and she began tugging at the skin over her cuticle.
How could Lara have forgotten how crazy she’d been? I glanced at her shaggy brown hair falling over her face. She looked like one of those lovable mutts in Hollywood movies that chew up the carpets and then win you over with their sheer scruffiness. Oh, who cares? I thought. Let it go. I was exhausted from years of trying to make sense of Lara and my family. All that mattered now was that my sister was here, sitting across the table from me, and that we were friends.
Lara got up to get more coffee, and when she sat down again, I realized that she and I were no longer in competition; we had both failed to make our parents happy. As I had done so many times before, I now rearranged what I knew about my sister to accommodate my loneliness, my need to be aligned with her. Perhaps, I now thought, it was our parents who were nuts, and it was Lara who was my real friend and ally.
“They had me drugged to the gills,” Lara said, staring at her coffee. Her fingers picked at each other as if they were separate entities beyond her control. “I didn’t even know what was going on.”
There was something so plaintive in her voice, I felt the solidarity of a fellow sufferer. I could no longer pretend that I was the healthy one, the normal one, and she the crazy one. I had finally joined her ranks in the battle for mental health: I was a walking, talking psych patient, with a panic disorder and imipramine running through my veins. I had lowered my head and offered it to the profession, and I was now in their clutches, just as she was.
“That must have been awful,” I found myself saying.
She shrugged. Her hair had begun its outward stretch, growing like a hydra as it absorbed the humidity in the air. “I missed you,” she said.
I nodded, and smiled. “Well, you were also really pissed at me.”
Her head snapped back as if struck, and her brow furrowed.
Alarms went off in my head. Just like always, I thought. She’s conveniently forgotten everything she did. “At the end of May,” I reminded her. “When I called home from the mountains—remember?”
Lara was shaking her head and slouching lower in her chair. She seemed to grow smaller before me, a snail curling into its shell. I couldn’t bear to see it. I changed the subject. I told her about my panic attacks. It was an offering—to show her that I too was crazy.
“They come out of nowhere,” I said. “I’ll be standing on the subway platform, and all of a sudden, I’ll get a tingly feeling. And then I can feel my lips trembling, and I know it’s coming. It’s like holding your breath underwater, right before it hits.”
I could see that she wasn’t listening to me, she was still lost in the words I’d left in the air before. I could see her working over the details of that phone call in May, when she’d screamed that she would kill me, and Mom too, if I ever tried calling again. So complete was her grip on me then, I’d been certain she would kill us. But now, sitting across the table from her, with her hunched shoulders and bleeding fingers, it seemed impossible that she could have ever struck such fear in me.
“Lara, you listening?”
She rolled her shoulders wearily and brought her eyes even with mine. “Yeah.”
I didn’t know where she’d gone, but I tried to get her back. “Listen, never mind about last summer. It’s over. It doesn’t matter. I’m glad you called me. I’m glad you took that chance.”
And at this moment, sitting in a coffee shop in Manchester, Vermont, I was so grateful to have my sister with me, to have the warmth of her presence, the light in her soft green-brown eyes, her shy smile. I needed her, pure and simple. I did not understand my own unhappiness, but I knew this much: I loved my sister and had missed her terribly, and something of that wound was healing here at this table. I felt myself being repa
ired by her presence and by her friendship. I might not be able to solve the problem of my life, but I could bask in the glow of our friendship. We were together again.
thirteen
Rubin Vase
I first saw the image in my psych textbook in 1974 as a college freshman—a stark white goblet on a black background. The caption under the picture asked whether you could see the two faces in profile, facing each other.
All I saw was a white goblet. I read further, and it said to focus only on the black “background” of the picture and bring that image forward. It took me a few minutes before I could find the two identical faces in silhouette, their noses almost touching each other. Seeing these two faces was like an electric shock. How could I have studied the picture so closely, yet missed something so obvious? Once I found the two faces, the goblet simply disappeared.
The text went on to talk about human perception; about how the brain receives stimuli and matches patterns to make mental interpretations of what we see. When you look at the picture, you cannot simultaneously see both images at once. It was called a Rubin vase after the Danish psychologist who had developed the image and similar optical illusions.
The goblet with the two faces became an image for my relationship with my sister. When I was younger, I saw Lara as the goblet filled with some toxic fluid that would burn on contact. But then, for no apparent reason, my image of her would flip, and all of a sudden I would see my sister and me as two identical faces, joined together, aligned. The goblet was gone. It was just the two of us—Lara and me looking directly into each other’s eyes with love and devotion. She and I were exactly the same.
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