Mistakes to Run With

by Yasuko Thanh

I got two flaming anchors tattooed on my chest above the names of my children. I wanted to be anchored. By my children, by love. I successfully applied for a research grant to write a book of short stories with a historical component. Historiography, I’d written in my application.

  * * *

  —

  At UVic, I had an instructor who was brilliant at creating individual exercises to break the idiosyncratic habits each student’s writing tended toward. A student who wrote only third-person, past-tense stories was asked to write a piece in the present tense from the first-person point of view. Another, who relied too heavily on exposition, was asked not to use any at all. Since my writing tended toward the cryptic, the axiomatic, the structurally experimental, i.e., confusing without purpose, he asked me to write a story with a linear structure and scenes of no less than three pages each, in chronological order.

  As I wrote, I felt as though I were simply recording. As though I’d gone from being a “writer” to a “reporter.” Feeling pedantic, I finished the short story I called “Floating Like the Dead.” The premise was based on true events, the quarantining of Chinese lepers on an island visible from Cordova Bay, a short drive up the street from my house.

  I sent the story off and had it rejected, more than once, before it found a home in a now-defunct magazine, The Vancouver Review, during the spring of 2009.

  To my surprise, the editor told me she’d like to submit my story to the Journey Prize contest—the yearly anthology of shortlisted stories on the cutting edge of Canadian literature. How absurd—yet sweet—that they should think of submitting my piece.

  In comparison to other stories I’d written, I didn’t think this one shone.

  To my further surprise, the story made the top three. Then it ended up winning the prize for “the best short story published in Canada” in 2009.

  * * *

  —

  Was everyone nuts? I couldn’t believe the win had anything to do with the strength of my writing. The characters were Chinese, and I had an Asian name. I was a member of a visible minority, and a woman, and had pointed out the historical racism of my region and its apathy. I concluded that the story had won only because it was politically correct.

  Swept up in a maelstrom of readings, I couldn’t breathe. My lack of confidence made me undeserving of everything that was happening to me. At any moment I’d stumble. At any moment the dream would be yanked away. Forced into the public eye, I verged on vomiting and shook from the podium. I craved the safe anonymity of my living room, the boundaries of whatever story I was writing and hiding in, at a table in sunlight. I no longer belonged to the streets. I didn’t belong in this artistic, intellectual milieu either.

  I came home from Toronto, where the prize ceremony had been held, to find a message on my machine from one of Canada’s best agents. Denise Bukowski was a rock star of the literary world. For years, reading authors’ acknowledgments, I’d been seeing her name.

  * * *

  —

  Professionally, things were looking up: after the Journey Prize, a contract with McClelland & Stewart, a book deal, a short story collection that would be published in 2012. Personally, they were worsening.

  I told Eddie about my pain, my past. It hurt to have him respond that everyone’s pain was the same.

  “No one pushed me through high school,” he said in a misguided attempt at understanding. “So I didn’t get the last credit I needed.”

  How is your not finishing high school like feeling the world would be better off without me? I thought. What I said was “Lots of people never finished high school. Including the producer of 60 Minutes,” hoping Eddie would stop dwelling on what he didn’t have, exaggerating his lack of education as a fatal flaw that excused him from not going after what he claimed to want: better paying, more rewarding work.

  And yet. In the summer of 2010, we married. The date was June 27, three days before my thirty-ninth birthday. He landed a job that allowed him to contribute half the rent and bills. But he kept using my student-loan money to cut albums and print up gig posters.

  From the fall of 2011 to the spring of 2012, I tutored, worked as a teaching assistant, marked papers, trying to paddle my way out of the vortex. Eddie lost his job, and the months when I failed to make ends meet, I’d vow that Maisie would keep up her gymnastics lessons no matter what, even if I had to return to the sex trade to pay for them. I’d sit through her two-hour class simply because my parents never had, as if they were at fault for my financial situation, as if my presence in the viewing box could set things right. I’d watch Maisie through the glass, clapping at her cartwheels, cheering—I’d be the kind of parent that nurtured, that paid for the cello, the saxophone, the flute lessons, the private music teacher, the band trip. No matter what, I’d do the opposite of what my parents had done. Then a writing gig would come along and save me from the brink of disaster.

  When I began slipping from my own expectations as a mother, I turned a dark corner. Believing I’d failed, I became convinced that my presence on earth was harming my children. I was a murderer. Nothing anyone said could persuade me I wasn’t killing them slowly. A harmless comment made about Maisie forgetting to say please drove me to my basement office, where I shut the door to burn my arms with a lighter until they blistered. I’d julienne the blister open with a paper clip. Rub cinders from my overflowing ashtray into the wound as if seasoning ground beef, then pour whisky onto it in preparation for another flambé.

  I heard voices in my head. Music, Christmas songs of all things, that kept me up and whose volume I tried to lower by picturing a stereo and turning down the knob. It didn’t work, despite the sedatives I’d take like candy. Once asleep, I couldn’t stay asleep for long. Food tasted wrong; I couldn’t swallow it. And I gradually came to feel that my parents, who to keep us from starving had begun dropping off groceries every Tuesday—loonie-store chili, discount bread—were trying to poison me.

  * * *

  —

  Here a psychiatrist could step in and point to how the symptoms of borderline personality disorder may include paranoid delusions under stress. These grafted themselves to the Asian half of me—the half that believed in curses, demons, bad spirits, hungry ghosts, shape-shifting devils who took on human form and acted as conduits for bad luck and diseases, like Typhoid Mary. Comorbidities like psychotic depression leapt on board the bandwagon like circus monkeys.

  I was working too hard, eating and sleeping too little, and stressed about money. My simmering resentment of Eddie, who’d left me holding the bag, went unexpressed, my desperate need for him preventing my voicing any objections. Then everything grew worse when Donna, Eddie’s adult stepdaughter with his ex-wife, moved to town. She’d been living in Washington State but had lost the green card lottery.

  My first book, which also formed my master’s thesis, had come out in April, 2012, and by June of that same year, I’d started work on my next book, a novel.

  “Why is she coming?” I asked.

  Her Canadian driver’s licence needed to be renewed.

  He’d told her he’d get her a job. Help her get settled. Do anything she needed until she found a place of her own. Amid my turmoil I couldn’t understand what moving to Victoria had to do with renewing her licence.

  “What’s Donna’s relationship like with her mom?” I asked Eddie. “Did she leave on her own or was she asked to leave? I’m just trying to wrap my mind around it because—and I don’t mean to sound cold—but I can tell you that never, never in a million years would I let Maisie or Jet move to some town you and your new woman were living in.”

  “I don’t think I’m insignificant to the kids.”

  I knew he was. Relatively. I thought back to all the times I’d encouraged Maisie to respond to his jokes. Asked Jet to do me the favour of saying good morning or goodnight to him. Bought Eddie a birthday card for the children to sign. Asked them, for my sake, to repeat a story they’d heard in school or to recount what had happened o
n the playground. The way they’d grudgingly comply, the way they avoided eye contact at the dinner table, broke my heart.

  As did the way I tried to elicit praise from him on the children’s behalf. “Look, honey, isn’t that a great cartwheel Maisie just did?” “Jet got an A on the science quiz. Isn’t that wonderful?” “Hon, have you noticed Maisie’s hair?” “Doesn’t Jet look cool today?”

  I was convinced that, if not for my efforts, days would go by without their interacting at all. That was the true curse: there was no practical reason why they should. It was Mom who got breakfast ready. Mom who got Maisie dressed for school, who got her there and back, helped with homework, gave her a bath, read the stories, put her to bed.

  Donna wanted to be picked up at the airport, saying she didn’t think she could manage all her bags. Practical women carried backpacks. How else could they negotiate the jungles of Borneo, the hills of Cambodia?

  Besides, it was my birthday. I was turning forty-one. My father had made dinner reservations weeks before.

  “Go without me,” Eddie said.

  I sat with Jet and Maisie and my parents in the sushi restaurant, trying to celebrate. My heart wasn’t in it, especially when my father asked “Where’s Eddie?” with an admixture of judgment and concern.

  When we got home Maisie was still awake. I’d hoped the car ride would put her to sleep, relieving me for once from her nightly bedtime rituals. Even as a baby she’d disliked change, but lately her need of routine had morphed into a strict adherence to compulsions that had to be performed. Ten bathroom trips. Touch the stickers she’d put on her headboard, “One, two, three…” Like a pony on a merry-go-round she’d circle the room to open and close the blinds, the closet door, the cupboards of her craft shelf, riveted to a track from which she couldn’t escape. Measuring her mattress, making and remaking the bed, five storybooks read in a certain order. Her stuffies lined up according to a design only she and the workers who lived in her ceiling knew or understood. If any step was omitted, any one done wrong, the ride would start again from the very beginning.

  Eddie had noticed that Maisie’s OCD got worse when I was around. Either I was the cause or I enabled her rituals. The conclusion in either case: I was a shitty mom.

  I remembered my own childhood compulsions to count or touch things, yet I never made the conscious link between my history and Maisie’s symptoms. Each night she and I would be up till two a.m.—appeasing the workers who had cameras, who recorded everything, who checked their video surveillance for mistakes. Seven or eight hours of “getting things right.”

  Maisie’s bedroom window looked over our front yard with its ornamental cherry tree that blossomed so profusely people would stop to take a photograph. Snow globes were arrayed on her orange-painted dresser that my mother had stencilled with green gecko designs. From her ceiling hung a turquoise mesh organizer holding silver dress-up shoes the length of my palm, feather boas, tutus, my old gymnastics bodysuits. Her life was beautiful. What was driving her behaviour?

  I scoured the internet for information. Bought two books online, Talking Back to OCD and What to Do When Your Brain Gets Stuck. I tried practising cognitive behavioural therapy with her. If you’re afraid of spiders, sit with one in your lap.

  As art and life fed off each other, the protagonist of the novel I was working on—tentatively titled Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains—began seeing and hearing things, began believing the world was poisoning her. Salvation came in the form of her baby, born golden and glowing with magical protective powers. Scenes that I later cut from the book.

  That birthday night, I experienced such violent anger about Donna’s arrival that I wanted to kill everyone around me. And now Maisie stood in her room, still naked from her shower, terrified of going to bed: her sheets were crooked. I tried to straighten them, but when I didn’t succeed she screamed “I have nails in my head!” Then she ran outside with no clothes on and hid behind a bush, in the dark, in the cold. That settled it.

  I made an appointment with our family doctor, who referred us to Saanich Child and Youth Mental Health. We were added to the waiting list while I fought a worsening battle with the bars holding Maisie prisoner, and my own despair when all I could do was share her cell. I’d struggle to grasp her fists so that she wouldn’t punch herself, to pin her arms to her sides while I’d yell “Leave her alone!” at the ceiling. SCYMH couldn’t tell me the cavalry’s ETA, when a psychiatrist would be available.

  Three weeks later, they called to say we’d been fast-tracked through the system. We had an appointment.

  Maisie and I sat down with Dr. Nixon, a pediatric psychiatrist, who pried apart the two sides of a plastic toy brain to show Maisie where hers was broken. She explained the function of her hippocampus, her thalamus, her orbital frontal cortex. She took Maisie’s finger and had her point at the centre, where her striatum lay.

  “This is your caudate nucleus. Right now it’s like a malfunctioning stoplight. But the exciting part is—we can fix it.”

  Maisie was diagnosed with pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder and put on a course of psychotropic treatment: Prozac medication titrated to a dose large enough to put a horse to sleep.

  I had faith in her psychiatrist. But my own obsession, centred on the originating thought that I’d been cursed—by who? a fan of Eddie’s?—only grew stronger, like a river that rises with the melting snow to quit her banks. Impossible to fight with sandbags of rationality.

  * * *

  —

  Before Eddie had moved in with all his stuff, before Maisie became sick, she and Jet had happily played on the futon, lying on its pink barkcloth cover, floating on its pale green and yellow polka dots. With Maisie’s head in the crook of Jet’s arm, Jet would read to her from picture books; or, head to foot, they’d watch cartoons on the tiny pink TV I’d bought to match.

  Eddie hadn’t asked whether it was okay for him to lend the futon to Donna.

  I was not insane. Unlike Picasso—who refused to donate used clothing to strangers and once beat his wife for giving away an old sweater instead of burning it—I’d contributed children’s clothing to the Salvation Army, toys to the church-run thrift store. And I preferred buying my own clothes secondhand.

  But Eddie’s lending out my futon shook my tenuous hold on reality. Maisie’s OCD became part of what I now saw as a broad-spectrum evil eye that had hexed me as well as my children.

  “It has to be your ex-wife,” I said to Eddie one night in bed.

  “What the what-what?” He didn’t look up from his book, a paperback copy of a Tom Petty biography he’d picked up from a garage sale.

  “The futon. Because you lent it to Donna. And your ex-wife. She’s trying to break us up from afar.”

  In my head, the connection between my depression, Maisie’s OCD, his ex-wife, his stepdaughter, and the futon was crystal clear.

  Frustrated, Eddie wondered what was wrong with me and what I wanted him to do about it.

  Find me a counter-curse, I wanted to say.

  I knew that no generic version would work. Apart from those hokey websites that sold crystals and essential oils and bats’ feet, there were no guidebooks for what I wanted, no lists of instructions.

  I purified the house with incense. I burned candles, opened windows to let the demons out. I swept breadcrumbs and hair-balls and rogue cherry blossoms as though evil could be cleansed with a dustpan and elbow grease.

  * * *

  —

  I asked Eddie, “If a zombie bit me would you shoot me or tie me to a post in the backyard?”

  “If I were a quadriplegic would you stay with me?”

  “If I’d been on the Titanic would you have risked your life to save mine?”

  I tried the impossible: to measure degrees of love.

  I needed him to be the kind of man who’d throw himself on top of me when the shooting began.

  I filled my day with tasks: to keep my mind from stumbling, I scrubbed the kit
chen until the house smelled of bleach, yanked dandelions, stopped Maisie from bashing out her brains on her headboard and screaming at two a.m., knowing that Jet had to get up at five for a paper route. Still, my already shaky grasp of reality began slipping like fried eggs from a greasy plate.

  Meanwhile we celebrated Jet’s birthday, Maisie, Jet, and I, by going to the lake and having corn dogs for dinner. I hid my delusions from my classmates, my children, their friends, their parents. I was known as the mom who’d host a party for twenty, parents dropping their kids off at my door with looks of astonishment overwritten by doubt. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I’d say, winking, “we got this.”

  Jet’s friends called me the “cool” mom because I’d rent them movies and then drift around, offering bowls of chips and slices of pizza.

  “And then he was like, We only made out for like three seconds and—”

  “Don’t you like how like every time you hear something that’s bad about a guy that you like—”

  “And, like, that time I was with Brian on the phone?”

  “Oh, my god.”

  “Do you know what my favourite thing is, when we’re in the Pharmasave and he starts singing? Have you actually heard him sing? Yeah, he’s such a great stylist.”

  I let them eat chocolate brownies for dinner. Hot Wings and Dill Pickle chips for dessert.

  * * *

  —

  I burst into tears at my doctor’s office when she asked me whether stepping in front of a bus seemed like an appropriate solution.

  I wept in relief. Oh, yes. Yes. And if a zombie tried to eat me, I’d turn the other cheek. And if I was on the Titanic with my children, I’d hold them tight and welcome the water as it covered us.

  As she returned from the photocopier with my prescription I mentioned how I’d always thought I was stronger than people who needed meds to survive.