The Gretchen Question

by Jessica Treadway

  “The saddest thing about it, JonBenét had a red heart drawn on one of her palms,” he continued. “Most people think it was the mother who killed her. And that her husband helped cover it up.”

  “Mothers don’t kill their children,” I told him. “Not unless they’re insane, like that one who drove her kids into the ocean. Or the one who drowned her kids in a tub. Or like Gretchen in Faust.” I was really proud of myself for that literary one, it occurred to me at the last second, but I don’t think Fenton noticed because he started talking again before I was done.

  “They didn’t think she did it on purpose.” At least he seemed willing to concede my point about mothers, as he prepared to make one of his own. “They thought it was an accident, like maybe she just lost it when JonBenét wet the bed or something. There were lots of things that pointed to Patsy. They couldn’t exclude her as having written the ransom note, and one of the cops said that when she was supposedly wailing in grief after the body was found, with her hands over her face, what she was really doing was watching the cop between the slits of her fingers.” He raised his own index finger toward me and made a Gotcha sound, at which point, finally, I said, “Mothers don’t hurt their children” before excusing myself.

  Trudy and Fenton were the parents of Derek, who’d been friends with Will in school until eighth grade, when Trudy decided to take Derek out and teach him at home. The boys had originally met in the nurse’s office of the elementary school. Derek had food allergies and Will had asthma, so they overlapped on visits to the nurse. Then there were the tennis lessons they took together. More than a few times, I’d done the favor of picking up Derek and shuttling him to Apex and then back home, because that was the year Trudy had some mysterious illness or syndrome that never got diagnosed. Grettie started out having sympathy for her, but as time went by and Trudy could supply no name for her disease, Grettie expressed suspicion that it was just one of those “fatigue disorders,” suggesting through her tone of voice that she did not have the patience for or a belief in such things.

  Derek and Will spent a fair amount of time together, but that was when they were little. When Derek didn’t start high school with the rest of his class, the boys lost touch. A year ago, Will suspected Derek of being the one to call in the bomb scare before commencement. As a home-schooled kid in the district he was allowed to graduate with Will and the other seniors, but Will’s guess was that the prospect embarrassed him too much, because he wasn’t really a member of the class. “His mother would never have let him skip the ceremony,” Will said to me, “so he had to come up with some other way to get out of it. I’d bet good money on it being him.”

  Though I’d never held anything against Derek before, I grew angry hearing Will explain his theory. I’d been very excited about graduation, not only for the usual reasons, but because, as the class’s salutatorian, Will was scheduled to speak from the podium. At first, he told me he intended to decline—they could let the Number Three person go up and give a speech, he said, after the valedictorian gave hers. When he saw how disappointed I was, he said he’d think about it. Shortly afterward he told me he’d changed his mind, but only on the condition that I didn’t ask to see the speech beforehand. He didn’t want help, and he wanted it to be a surprise. I said of course, whatever would make him the most comfortable. I was thrilled that he decided to go ahead with it, especially considering that in the past, any kind of attention like that would have been unthinkable because of the emetophobia. And he’d worked so hard, so hard to get the grades he did, it was nice to think he’d be recognized for that. I couldn’t wait to see him be honored—I was so proud of him. Needless to say, I was devastated when the news about the bomb threat came and they canceled commencement.

  A week later there was a makeup ceremony, but Will didn’t want to go. He said a lot of kids had already left for summer vacation and wouldn’t be there; “You’d be bummed, Mom,” he told me, “it would be totally lame.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I said, but I couldn’t dissuade him.

  Would he read the speech to me, then? I asked. He seemed to consider it briefly, then shook his head, saying the moment had passed.

  Derek Foote had stolen that moment from me. Standing in front of me now, his mother appeared to have recovered from whatever disorder she suffered back when our sons were young. When I could see that she was generating some other question I would not want to answer, I headed it off by asking one of my own. “How’s Derek? At …?” It was acceptable, I knew, to forget the name of the college attended by an acquaintance’s son. Given how little I saw of him anymore, I gave myself bonus points for remembering her kid’s name.

  “Oh.” It took her longer than it would have taken most people to switch gears. She lowered her face as she gave a final twist to the plastic bags dangling from her wrist. “He’s fine. He’s actually living at home now, taking some online classes—it gives him more options, in the long run. The wave of the future, I guess. Online. And yours?”

  It was not lost on me that what Trudy was essentially saying was that her kid had dropped out of real school, and that she, like the tennis pro, had forgotten Will’s name. I know I should not consider conversations with other mothers to be competitions, but I couldn’t help thinking I win.

  I told her Will was majoring in neuroscience (I admit that sounded more impressive than “psychology” to me, and he had used that word—he wanted to study the connection between the brain and the body), and that he had a beautiful girlfriend he’d brought home for Thanksgiving. I could have added that I had not seen him in more than six months—six months! How was that possible?—but of course I did not.

  I sensed that Trudy was struggling, trying to decide whether to say what was next on her mind. I waited. “Listen, Roberta, if you happen to see Derek around anywhere, will you let me know?”

  A quick shot of apprehension spiked through me. “Why? Is he missing?”

  “Oh, no. Nothing like that.” She gave an obviously forced laugh. “I just need him to do something. Just—if you happen to see him.”

  I said Sure automatically before adding, “I’d better go in and get it,” all too aware that I had still failed to identify the it. She watched me as I fitted my key into Grettie and Jack’s door. From their stoop, I watched her as she walked slowly back toward her own porch, then—instead of dumping the bags of poop into her own barrel, as I expected—carried them up the steps toward her house.

  It would have disgusted Will so much, to see those bags she was carrying. Dog poop was one of the things that set his stomach on edge. When we walked Scout together, he had to turn his back while I gathered the turds in a bag—I used the opaque bags the Sunday Globe came in, so he wouldn’t be able to see through to what was inside. At one point I’d tried to persuade him that it would be good for him to muster the strength of mind to clean up after Scout himself, not because I minded doing it, but because it was better to face the things that make us nervous. Get over them, manage our fear. And to his credit, he tried—once, before he began gagging and then retched at the side of the street. After that, I stopped pestering him about it. He’d grow out of this phase, I remember thinking—the weak stomach, the sensitive nerves. Of course, he didn’t grow out of it, he got worse. It was my fault for not forcing him to keep at it, to do a little more each day until the sight and smell of a dog’s turd didn’t have that kind of power over him.

  But by the time I found it in myself to encourage him to try again, it was too late.

  Dear Sosi, went the letter I wrote in my head, which of course I would never send. It’s not “the ipecac story.” It’s the story of how I tried to save my son from something that might have killed him.

  If that sounds dramatic, I’m sorry. But I know all too well—it’s one of the things from my own past I’d like to forget, but I can’t, I know because I’ve tried—how dangerous a place your own mind can be. Some poet, I’m pretty su
re it was Milton, said the mind can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven. I think about that a lot. I’m pretty sure my life wasn’t a heaven when my mind felt like hell, but the point is that it’s hard to get yourself out of that danger sometimes; you need someone else to help.

  He’d always had the weak stomach. Got carsick over the smallest bumps. Dog poop wasn’t the only thing that made him retch; it could be the smell of fish or mayonnaise, the sight of sausage or cheese. In fifth grade his class dissected fetal pigs, and even though I thought it would be better if he went to school and proved to himself that he could conquer his dread, I let him stay home that day. This decision might have been the worst one, the one that allowed it to snowball after that—his emetophobia.

  For him, a fear of doing it in public, especially in front of people he knew. When I asked him, he said he couldn’t imagine anything worse happening to him. People looking, pointing, laughing—making revolted faces. “But it’s a natural bodily function,” I told him. “Everyone does it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” I tried to reassure him with my background as a medical professional.

  “Try to think of yourself as a biological organism,” I advised further. “Like, think of a snail. You don’t think they’re embarrassed to trail slime behind them, do you?” Too late, I realized this wasn’t a good example; hearing slime made him feel sick all over again, I could tell.

  When he got through shuddering he said, “Are you telling me feelings aren’t real?”

  “Well, of course they are.” I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant.

  It used to be, when he was little, he’d look in my eyes when I told him something, and I saw that it had entered his head and heart. There was a little dent over one of his eyebrows that pulsed with how hard he was listening. He believed me, then. What I said to him mattered.

  When he was older and I tried to persuade him that throwing up was not a big deal, even if it happened in front of other people, I could tell that he barely heard my words before he rejected them. Though he’d always had the weak stomach, it took hold of him—this fear—during his first semester of sixth grade. He was sitting in World History, listening to the lesson about Hiroshima, when all of a sudden he felt the moment of panic that signals imminent vomiting. He left the classroom, and once he was out in the hallway, the nausea passed. But instead of going back in, he went to the school nurse, who called me to pick him up. That was the beginning of it, I think. The beginning of the grip it had on him. Though he was not physically sick, the next day he was afraid to go back to World History, and within a week he was afraid to go to school at all.

  Maybe it was the idea of the bombing that did it, I suggested. Hiroshima had been a terrible thing.

  He shook his head and told me it was more than that. He said he was pretty sure he needed therapy. Could I take him to see someone?

  I tried not to show any reaction when he said the word therapy.

  “Let’s not jump right to that,” I said. “If it ends up being absolutely necessary—if there’s no other solution—then sure. But let’s try some other things first. What about if you said to yourself ‘I’m feeling a little nervous, but I know there’s not actually anything to be afraid of.’ Do you think that could work?”

  The look on his face and the sound he made between his lips were enough of an answer: You’ve got to be kidding.

  “Then how about medication?” I asked. “There are some good anti-anxiety meds, I could ask my friends at the hospital.” It’s a measure of how much I didn’t want him to see a therapist that I jumped straight to the idea of drugs.

  I know this was wrong. I knew it then. But I can’t change what happened. It was the best I could do.

  He did not want to try medication. First of all, he worried the pills would upset his stomach, which would defeat the purpose of taking them. But he said it also went against everything he believed in, everything he was learning from tai chi. He wanted to rely solely on his mind for this, he told me: it was a psychological problem, not a physical one.

  “There’s a reason you named me Will,” he reminded me, smiling grimly. I smiled back; it was a joke between us. Well, not a joke, but a routine. An exchange we’d been having ever since he was old enough to understand that will was a noun as well as a name. He often got asked what his real name was—William, or Willard, or even Wilhelm—but I told him it wasn’t short for anything, I’d decided on just Will because I wanted him to embody it, I wanted him to have a will that nobody else would ever be able to bend or break.

  I also wanted him to have a name that meant something to him, a name that was his alone. My sister and I were named after our mother’s father and husband, Robert and Stephen. It’s hard to feel that your name belongs to you when it’s just a variation of somebody else’s.

  And I figured it was a simple, solid name, one that wouldn’t cause him any grief, any stupid nicknames. In fourth grade some joker, some new girl too precocious for her own good, said to him, “Will Chase? What will you chase, Will? You Will chase what?”—but that was about it.

  I was proud of him when he said he wanted to use his Will Power (yes, I’m afraid we did call it that) to solve his stomach problem, even as I worried that willpower would not be enough.

  Maybe he saw this doubt on my face. “Where do you think this comes from?” he asked me. “Is this what Grandma had?”

  He had never met my mother because she died before he was born, but he’d always referred to her as “Grandma.” It made me sad, first because they’d never know each other, and second because I guessed that using the intimate nickname allowed him to pretend he had more family than he actually did. I know how jealous he’d always felt when he heard his classmates refer to their grandmas and grandpas. Almost as jealous as when he heard them say Dad.

  “No,” I told him. “What Grandma had was depression.” And alcoholism, I thought, but didn’t say—why pile on with a fact irrelevant to his own suffering? “This is something else, a form of anxiety. If we can figure out how to help you feel less anxious, the fear of throwing up should go away.”

  “That’s why I thought maybe a therapist,” he said.

  “What about that poster in your bedroom?” I was grasping at straws now, but (I wished mightily) maybe he wouldn’t realize. “‘Yield and overcome—?’” He looked at me without understanding.

  “Maybe you’re fighting it too much. Remember what you told me when we did that exercise with the hands? Don’t try so hard, you said. Maybe it would help if instead of trying so hard to control it, you gave up control.”

  Saying this, I remembered suddenly the Saturday morning years ago, when he was a year and a half old and Cam was almost three, that Grettie and I took them to a water babies’ class. We stepped into the pool carrying the boys and formed a circle with other parent-baby pairs and the instructor who led us in splashing, singing, and chasing plastic balls she skimmed across the water’s surface. At one point she sat all the kids on the pool’s edge and gave the parents Styrofoam noodles, instructing us to try to balance on our knees. No problem, I thought, but it was deceptively awkward. I kept slipping off the thing, and so did everyone else. The children loved watching the grown-ups topple into the water. They giggled so hard that one little girl actually fell in herself.

  Don’t fight it and it will be easier, the instructor called to us. I thought I had never heard such magical words in my life. The moment I stopped trying to balance, I could kneel on the noodle without any problem at all. The same was true, I saw, for Grettie and everyone else. Remember that, I told myself. Don’t fight it and it will be easier.

  “This is what I’m going to teach your children,” the instructor said.

  Will didn’t want to go back for the second week. He didn’t like the water, he was afraid to dunk his head. I thought about the teacher’s phrase from time to time for a few days, but then it went the way of so many other thin
gs, and I forgot, until I found myself flailing in the search for a way to help Will stop being afraid of vomiting in public.