Lisa, Bright and Dark

by John Neufeld

  I smiled at her. “We thought it was worth a try.”

  “That’s right,” Mary Nell said, sounding a little stronger. “And while I was with your mother, Betsy went to talk to Mr. Bernstein.”

  “And?” Lisa asked.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  “He’s a nice man, though,” Lisa said. “I feel sorry for him.”

  “So do I,” I said, “but that doesn’t do us much good.”

  “What will?” Lisa wanted to know. “Listen, I’ve tried to talk to my family. M.N. was there once. She knows. They think I just want to do something everyone else is doing. That’s a laugh! I’d love a little company! They won’t pay any attention to me until I’m in some violent ward on a third floor behind bars.”

  “But you can’t give up!” M.N. protested. “There must be something to do.”

  “Well, what were you thinking of when you asked me over?” Lisa asked.

  M.N. hesitated. “I guess it sounds a little funny,” she said, “but I—we thought that by letting you know we cared, that we were worried and didn’t want to lose you—we thought we could work together on it.”

  “How?”

  “Well, nuts, Lisa!” M.N. said. “You’re not making this very easy.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy in any case, darling,” Lisa said with a sad smile. “No matter what you decide to do, I won’t be able to help you very much.”

  “All right, then,” M.N. said, thinking about this for a second. “All right. Lisa, what we thought of doing was trying to help you ourselves. A kind of group therapy thing, where we could talk and try to learn and understand, and maybe beat whatever the thing is.”

  This was news to me! M.N. was winging it! The minute I heard her idea I knew she needed support. And as I spoke, I began to think she might be on the right track after all. “What we hoped was,” I said, “that by knowing we cared and were concerned, you could talk to us about it and take some of the pressure off. It would give you a way of getting away from it, of looking at it and trying to figure out exactly what’s going on and what is going to go on.” God bless M.N., I said to myself.

  “Betsy,” Lisa said, “that’s what scares me the most. I already know what’s happened. What I don’t know is what’s coming next. I can’t turn anything off. I tried to, in Florida. But now it’s here and almost comfortable, if you know what I mean. Familiar. I even like it a little, though it scares me. About the only thing I can think to do is sink into it. Sink in and let them take me away when the time comes.” She said this without bitterness, without fear, like a weather report on the telephone: flat, emotionless, distant.

  “That’s exactly what we meant,” I said. “You see, you can talk to us about it. Wouldn’t that be any help?”

  “It might be,” Lisa said. “I don’t know.”

  “And I think if we ask him again, Mr. Bernstein will help a little, too. As long as he doesn’t have to get involved personally,” I said. “You know, he’s very insecure about some things, and he’s worried about—”

  “Part of the answer is here,” Lisa said out of nowhere in an out-of-nowhere English voice I hadn’t heard before. It was cold and deep and new to me.

  “What?” M.N. asked quickly. “What did you say?”

  Lisa looked at us a moment. “There is, actually, one person who might understand,” she said, nodding to herself a little as she spoke in her new voice. “There is just one who might very well know.”

  “Who?” I asked. “Tell us.”

  “Frazer,” Lisa answered, standing up. “Elizabeth Frazer, actually.”

  “But why her?” M.N. demanded.

  Lisa looked at M.N., smiling coolly. Then she walked out of the study, down the hall, and out into the night and the darkness and the world of soft pink living rooms.

  9

  We closed the study door and stared at each other.

  “M.N.,” I said, “that was the supreme clutch play of all time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That group therapy business,” I said.

  “Have you got a better idea?” M.N. asked sharply. “Besides, it just might work.”

  I smiled as warmly as I could. “It just might.”

  “So,” M.N. said, “what now?”

  “You’re the resident genius. My only question is did Lisa say she would let us help or not?”

  “She didn’t say we couldn’t, so we’ll assume she meant we could. And we may as well begin now, since we’re here together.”

  She stood up and went to the wall of books behind her father’s desk. “The first thing,” she said, “is to write down what we know so far about Lisa’s symptoms. The second is to try to match them here, in Father’s books.”

  “I meant to ask you,” I said, “how come your father has all these screwy things, anyway?”

  “Well, he’s on the front lines, after all,” M.N. said. “I mean, he sometimes runs into people who are disturbed. If he’s up in psychology and theology, he’s better equipped to help them.”

  “Does every minister do that?” I asked.

  “This one does.”

  M.N. opened the top drawer of her father’s desk and took out pads of paper and pencils. She gave me one of each and sat down at the desk with the other. “Now,” she said, “what do we know about Lisa?”

  “Do you want to start with what we think might be wrong, or just the signs?”

  “How much do we know about the different illnesses?” Mary Nell asked, not expecting an answer. “Not too much. We know what paranoia is, yes?”

  I agreed. “And sort of what schizophrenia is.”

  “Right. Now, what signs of each does Lisa show?”

  “You can’t miss the good and bad days. There are two entirely different Lisas, day to day.”

  “True,” M.N. said. “A classic case of split personality.”

  “Then again,” I remembered, “when she first showed signs of anything, she said why wouldn’t people stop watching her and leave her alone. She was defensive for no reason.”

  “True,” M.N. said again. “She imagined we were somehow criticizing her. That we were against her. A perfect example of persecution complex, otherwise known as paranoia.”

  “Oh, swell,” I said disgustedly. “She’s got two of them! Why don’t we just ask your father? Maybe he could help.”

  “Because Daddy would simply tell us to stop muddying waters that even doctors can’t clear. He’d tell us to stop playing games and to let Lisa’s parents handle this. Of course, he’d be a little curious, but I think he’d forbid us to do what we want.”

  “So we have to do it ourselves?” I asked, worried for the first time that playing amateur Freuds could be dangerous.

  “If we want to help Lisa, yes,” M.N. said firmly. “Otherwise we don’t have to do anything.”

  “So we have to do it ourselves,” I said again, this time without questioning. Mary Nell is like that; if she believes strongly in something, you can’t argue with her. “But still,” I said unhappily, “it does sound like Lisa is twice as sick as she should be.”

  “We don’t know that yet,” M.N. said. “Tell you what. We’ll start researching with the encyclopedia. That’ll give us the big picture, and later we can go deeper with other books.” She stood up and turned back to the bookshelves. “Here,” she said, handing me an enormous volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, “you take P for paranoia. I’ll take S for schizophrenia. If you find something that screams Lisa at you, read it aloud and we can discuss it.”

  I took P and began looking through it. M.N. got S and put it on the desk, taking first a minute to go into the corner to the phonograph to put on a stack of records. We had both agreed years ago that music was absolutely necessary for thinking. That night we had Dionne Warwick and Simon and Garfunkel.

  I found paranoia on page 266, and then I had a sudden, worrisome thought. I flipped back to the front of the volume. “Listen,” I said. “This may not be the most
trustworthy sort of book. It was published in 1959. This edition, I mean.”

  “We have to begin somewhere, Betsy. After all, the diseases can’t have changed much in such a short time.”

  “No, but maybe the treatments have, or the amount that’s known about each illness.”

  “Forget it and read,” M.N. said.

  So I did. But I didn’t get far before I interrupted again. “Listen, M.N., this isn’t so hard. It says here, ‘a feeling of being slighted, unappreciated, avoided and disregarded becomes a suspicion of being watched and pursued, and then slandered: plotted against, covertly attacked.’ Obviously,” I went on, “being slighted and unappreciated would come from just living in the same house as her parents. They couldn’t care less whether Lisa lived or died.”

  “Betsy,” M.N. said seriously, putting her own book down. “We can’t accept just simple answers.”

  “But if the answers are simple,” I argued, “there’s no reason not to pay attention to them.”

  “But we need more than that,” M.N. said positively. “We need histories and symptoms and we need to know in what direction her illness is likely to move. There are hundreds of things we need to explain.”

  “Explaining isn’t the same thing as caring,” I said softly.

  “We just don’t want to be conned too soon,” M.N. answered. “We have a long way to go.”

  So I went back to my own beautiful P, determined to find complex answers instead of simple ones. And feeling stupid.

  A few minutes later, M.N. raised her head. “You know what, Betsy? You may have been right about Lisa having two problems at the same time. Listen to this: ‘The paranoid type’—of schizophrenia—‘usually arising later in life than the other types, is characterized primarily by unrealistic, illogical thinking, delusions of being persecuted or of being a great person, and hallucinations.’”

  “Hold on,” I said. “It said that that happens later in life. Lisa’s sixteen, for Pete’s sake! Besides, we don’t know whether she has hallucinations, do we?”

  “Hang on, Sloopy, and let me finish,” M.N. said, beginning to read again. “‘These types of schizophrenia are by no means mutually exclusive. Mixtures are to be found, especially in the early acute phases but also in some later chronic phases.’”

  “That’s not a lot of help, M.N.”

  “Here’s something else, though,” M.N. said, for she had been reading still. “‘In addition to mixtures within schizophrenia itself, there may be mixtures of schizophrenic symptoms with those of other psychoses, notably with those of the manic-depressive group.’”

  “Swell! What does that mean?”

  “Oh, you know. Ups and downs. Good days and bad ones. Manic means up and depressive means down.”

  That seemed easy enough but I reached for the dictionary just the same. No luck. I stood up and got volume M from the shelf. I leafed through it quickly, looking for manic-depressive. Nothing.

  “Ohhh, Mary Nell,” I said, “this is endless! Every time they mention one thing we can understand, they mention something else we can’t. We could be years learning all this stuff.”

  “We haven’t got that much time,” M.N. said. “Don’t worry. We’ll split the reading up between us—between us and Elizabeth, I guess, since Lisa seems to want that. Between the three of us, we’ll do just fine. You’ll see.”

  “I hope so,” I said, but I was doubtful. Dionne Warwick was still trying to get to San Jose, and we were trying to find Vienna. There was a big difference.

  We stopped reading then for the night because it was late and we both had homework to do for the next day. We decided that M.N. would speak to Elizabeth at lunch, and I would go back to Mr. Bernstein and ask him just to guess what might be wrong with Lisa. That would at least give us some direction in which to begin looking for answers.

  As I walked home, I wondered if what we were doing was the right thing to do. After all, we would only be flailing about in a sea of books, trying to catch hold of little pieces of driftwood that came sweeping by with impossibly difficult words and ideas printed on them. They might be lifesavers in someone else’s hands, but I doubted whether M.N. and I, and Elizabeth, were strong enough to throw them out to Lisa. The distance between us was growing greater every day.

  10

  The next day, instead of waiting until lunch to get to Mr. Bernstein, I went to school early to tell him what we were doing to help Lisa. He listened, swiveling back and forth gently in his chair. He seemed to think what we were doing was futile. He did tell me where to go if I were really interested in learning about mental illnesses, and he offered to lend me some of his books if I promised to take care of them and return them to his office each day. I saw myself trudging to and from school every day with forty pounds of words and no pictures. I thanked him anyway.

  In spite of the incident beneath Mr. Milne’s desk, Mr. Bernstein still needed to be convinced before he risked anything. Even then, later, when and if he did help, he would probably do it through other people.

  From some people you learn to expect nothing fast. Mr. Bernstein wasn’t one of these, exactly, but he had his own hang-ups about getting deeply involved in anything. So when he said he might be able to talk to me occasionally about Lisa and perhaps help direct our sessions through me, I was grateful he had come that far out of his particular shadow, even if he wanted only to stick one toe in the spotlight.

  Having got to Bernstein early, I was able to join M.N. at lunch when she talked to Elizabeth. I found them at a table in the cafeteria during first lunch. Mary Nell’s plate, as usual, was full of fattening things. She puts mayonnaise on everything and it never seems to make any difference to her figure. Elizabeth sat quietly, listening, with a fruit salad and some diet crackers in front of her.

  “How far have you got?” I asked as I sat down.

  “We’re just beginning,” M.N. said, trying to catch a glob of mayonnaise as it slid out of a sandwich into the air. She missed. “I’ve just told Elizabeth what we think about Lisa. I mean, that she needs help and isn’t going to get it anywhere except from us.”

  “What do you think?” I asked Elizabeth.

  “I think you’re probably right,” she said expressionlessly. “So what?”

  “So,” M.N. said, “we have to help her.”

  “How?” asked Elizabeth.

  M.N. paused for a second. “How?” Elizabeth asked again.

  “You’re no easier about this than Lisa is,” M.N. said curtly.

  “I’ll tell you something, Mary Nell,” Elizabeth answered. “You’re right about Lisa. You can’t even begin to imagine how sick she is. But if you’re going to sign up here, you have to expect a lot of rough play.”

  Elizabeth’s tone wasn’t patronizing, exactly. Just impressive. M.N. sat still for a minute, looking at Elizabeth without blinking.

  “Elizabeth,” I said. “Lisa said something last night about you, about how maybe you could help. Will you?”

  Elizabeth smiled, more to herself than to me. It was a little chilling. “You still haven’t answered my question,” she said. “How do you expect to help her?”

  “Well,” said M.N. between bites (she had recovered), “we told her we know. That we believe she’s ill even if her parents don’t. That we want to do whatever we can for her.”

  “Which is?” Elizabeth wanted to know.

  “We are going to … well, therapy-ize her,” M.N. answered, a little embarrassed.

  “How?” Elizabeth asked for what seemed the tenth time.

  “By talking with her,” I said. “By letting her know we care. She can talk about it, I think. She did a little last night. We would be a kind of decompression chamber for her. A place where she’ll know people understand, and—”

  “You can’t,” Elizabeth said flatly.

  “Can’t what?” M.N. asked.

  “Understand,” Elizabeth replied. “You can’t.”

  “Well,” M.N. said, “we might be able to. After all, we d
o care, and we’re the only ones who do.”

  “So what?” Elizabeth said. “Caring and being able to understand are not the same thing.”

  “Now you listen to me!” M.N. said, having had it by this time. “You can criticize if you want, tell us we’re idiots. The only question that matters is, will you help us anyway?”

  Elizabeth Frazer smiled again, this time directly at us. “Yes,” she said after a minute. “All right.”

  Mary Nell’s shoulders sank a little in relief, and she was able to begin eating again. At last! I could tell she was thinking, Mary Nell is very fond of food.

  “Elizabeth,” I said, “may I ask a question, a sort of personal one?”

  Elizabeth looked quickly at me and picked up her tray. “No, Betsy,” she said, standing up. “You may not.”

  She walked away to leave her tray on a clearing table on the way out of the cafeteria. I watched her go, a tall, blonde girl who seemed contained from within by taut wires strung from shoulder to shoulder, from head to hip. Self-contained and beautiful and distant, and suddenly mysterious. I was mostly concerned for Lisa, of course, but I knew now we had another stone to overturn.

  11

  At the end of school that day, we all met on the front steps to wait for Lisa. Elizabeth stood next to M.N., watching kids pour out of classes, jump into cars or walk in groups to the nearby shopping center to hang around doing nothing. M.N. faced another direction, hawk-eyed for Lisa. I watched the side of the building, in case Lisa should come out a side door and miss us.

  Which is exactly what she did. Miss us, I mean. She never appeared from any direction at all. M.N. went back into the building while Elizabeth and I circled it, in opposite directions, just in case.

  We didn’t find her. Elizabeth and I thought Lisa had probably just forgotten about meeting us after class. M.N. was convinced she had escaped on purpose, that Lisa had a sly streak a mile long and that this was just the beginning of deceptions and broken promises. (It seemed to me that M.N. had stayed up rather later than I the night before, reading more than encyclopedias.)