by Zaina Arafat
As I sat alone in my apartment, I thought back to that night at the restaurant in SoHo, the last time I’d seen or spoken to my mother, by then nearly a month earlier. I’d trailed behind her all the way to the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. Once I caught up to her, she stuck out her hand to hail a taxi. One pulled over immediately. She opened the door, and before stepping in she turned to me, her top lip resting on her lower lip in that furious non-smile. “I don’t care what you choose to do anymore,” she said, and I crumbled. I needed her to care. Worse than anger was indifference: her approval was my compass, even when that meant resisting it. She then shot me a piercing look before shutting the cab door. “Good luck finding someone to love you like I did.”
I WAS FOUR WHEN THE FIRST INTIFADA BEGAN. AS A FAMILY, we would gather around the box-shaped TV in our wood-paneled basement in the D.C. suburbs and watch the seven o’clock news. I would spread out on the floor, taking in scenes of distant carnage while laying my Barbies atop one another in unintentional 69 positions. Karim would spring up and down in his bouncy chair. My father would pour some of the newly introduced Cool Ranch Doritos into one ceramic bowl and medium-spicy Old El Paso salsa into another. He’d then empty an already-cold Heineken bottle into a frosted pilsner glass from the freezer. Often I’d go searching for chocolate chip ice cream and instead find mulukhiya, a vegetable you could only ever find in Middle Eastern supermarkets, along with the frosted glasses on the freezer shelves. My mother was the only one who kept her eyes glued to the television, the distance from her homeland enhancing her longing and attachment as she felt it slip away.
On the television screen, scenes appeared from Nablus of coffins shrouded in Palestinian flags. Young men in stonewashed jeans and bandanas peeking out from behind graffitied walls and stacks of flaming tires, throwing a seemingly endless supply of stones. Israeli soldiers in tan uniforms and laced-up combat boots pacing around checkpoints with machine guns, chewing gum and looking both vigilant and bored. These were my first images of the conflict that shattered our homeland and scattered my family. Terms like civilian casualties and Molotov cocktails and cease-fire, later replaced by negotiations and peace talks and Camp David, resounded in the Peter Jennings voiceovers as the footage of violence played on screen. We watched at a cool remove while enjoying the comforts of our American suburb, seemingly untouched, oblivious of the underlying trauma.
4
“YOUR LAST STOP BEFORE HEALING.” THE WORDS WERE displayed in bubbly cursive across the Ledge’s homepage. I’d stumbled upon the website after a semi-targeted search with the words destructive, relationships, help.
I was mildly put off by the fatalistic tagline, but I was also desperate. The past week alone in the apartment had felt like a year. The days I’d tried to spend writing dragged on with no productivity. I was constantly aware of Anna’s absence, each time I sat down on the couch and she wasn’t on the other end, or ate takeout for one at the kitchen table, or when I crawled into bed at night, now at a reasonable hour, since I no longer DJed. I could never fall asleep, so instead I’d watch reruns of shows I’d already seen dozens of times. Anything that entailed minimal thinking. I couldn’t resist reading through the emails she had found, cowering in embarrassment, imagining her reading them. Soon I began taking pills to numb the pain—I’d gotten the number for a notoriously irresponsible psychiatrist whose contact info had made the rounds among my coworkers at the club. He put me on a cycle of amphetamines during the day and Xanax at night, to come down and get a bit of sleep. The uppers had the added benefit of stripping away the need to nourish myself, my appetite for food entirely diminished. Soon I was stick-thin, almost back to my pre-recovery weight, which provided a comfort akin to an old friend and a semblance of control. Each day I woke to an excruciating crash, the pain-numbing meds no longer in my system, and thus the cycle began again. I wanted nothing more than to escape my life.
In an attempt to do so, I went out every night, sometimes with friends, often alone, situating myself on a bar stool, pushing my chest forth as I scanned the room in the hope that I might meet someone, anyone—for love or for sex, either would do. I revived every flirtatious email chain, but no one wrote back—not one bite. I needed a distraction. I regretted quitting my DJ gig so early in the summer, and I tried to undo the mistake. But when I went to the club to ask for my job back, or at least a few shifts, the owner told me that he’d already hired someone else. Apparently I was easy to replace. By the time I got home I felt suffocated by depression. Desperate, I turned to the internet.
I clicked through the various pages on the Ledge’s website. The place was in Bowling Green, Kentucky, a two-hour drive from Louisville. That was one of the few concrete things I came away with; the site was rather cryptic—what exactly was this place? Healing, how? I clicked to the “Contact Us” tab, where an email address and a phone number were listed. I began to draft an email, then decided it was easier to just call. It rang four times before someone picked up. “This is Nancy,” said a strikingly upbeat voice on the other end.
“Oh,” I said, startled. “Hi!” I hadn’t expected an actual human to answer, more like a somber recording. “I think I called the wrong number.”
“Are you looking for the Ledge?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then you’ve got the right number! What brings you to us?” She sounded breezy, too casual, as though she were taking my order at a drive-through.
“I don’t know exactly,” I said. I looked at the wall in front of me, where Anna’s cat clock eyed me accusingly. “I guess I just know I need help.”
Nancy proceeded to ask me a series of questions about my childhood—“happy until it wasn’t”—my family—“if you can still call it that”—my relationships. I told her about the professor, about Anna, our breakup. “I’m not sure what’s wrong with me,” I said.
“Let me ask you,” said Nancy, “have you ever heard of something called love addiction?”
“No,” I said. “Is that a real thing?”
“Do me a favor,” she said. “Look it up. And feel free to call us back afterward.”
At the Strand bookstore that evening, I slinked into the personal growth section. Google had informed me that a woman named Pia Mellody, who ran a treatment center in Arizona that was far more expensive than the Ledge, was the foremost expert on love addiction. She sounded like a character out of a self-help fairy tale; I pictured her with a tiara and a wand. I picked Facing Love Addiction off the shelf and opened it to the beginning: “Love addicts have an uncontrollable appetite for the object of their affection.”
Her Barthesian language was slightly off-putting, but I felt soothed by the sentiment. “When love addicts reach a certain level of closeness with their actual partner, they often panic and do something to create distance. Frightened by healthy intimacy, they devote an obsessive amount of time, attention, and value to someone who cannot or will not love them back.” I ran through the list in my head: The nutritionist. The editorial assistant. The ambassador’s wife. The sacrifice. The professor. And in a way, Kate. I kept reading: “Unable to be present in their own relationships, they find an escape hatch to numb the pain.”
I felt myself light up—this was a real, diagnosable condition! One that seemed to perfectly circumscribe my behavior. It was a designation that abstracted my obsessions from all context and almost sanctified them, while obscuring their actual source.
I bought the book and tucked it deep in my bag.
I called the Ledge again at nine a.m. the next day. Nancy picked up. “Morning!” she said, chipper as an Egg McMuffin.
“I read about love addiction,” I said. “Do you treat it?”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “We treat all kinds. Alcoholics, drug addicts, sex and love addicts—you name it, we got it covered.”
I asked about the daily schedule. “Well, you’re in group all day, then dinner, then meetings. On Tuesdays and Thursdays you’ll do an hour of yoga, and equine therapy on Wedn
esdays.”
“Will I be able to drink coffee there?”
“You’ll be able to drink decaf anytime. Caffeinated is only served from seven thirty to seven fifty a.m.”
“Does that mean that if I’m not done at seven fifty, they’ll take it away?”
Nancy paused. I imagined she’d hadn’t encountered many people who anticipated every hypothetical. For a moment I felt slight shame. “I doubt it,” she said.
I then asked about food.
“I think you’ll be quite pleased on that front,” she said. “We’re proud to offer a range of gourmet options. Our chef’s from the big city, Louisville.”
Her reference to Louisville as the “big city” inspired skepticism. “Can we eat whenever we want?” I asked.
“Breakfast is at eight, lunch is at noon, and dinner is at five.”
“What if I’m not hungry at those times?”
“You still have to eat.”
“Will they force me to finish my plate?”
“No, it’s cafeteria style, you can eat as much or as little as you want.”
“What if I get hungry late at night?”
“They usually keep yogurt and fresh fruit in the fridge at the women’s house.” Not true, I later discovered, when I snuck into the kitchen for a nighttime snack and found just a rotten apple and some Smucker’s jelly packets pilfered from the cafeteria.
Still disgruntled about the early-bird suppers, I asked, “Dinner’s really at five? What if where I’m from we never eat before nine?”
“Doesn’t matter, sweetheart,” Nancy said. “Here, we’re all Americans.”
•
The first thing I noticed when I walked into the main office at the Ledge was that Nancy was wearing short shorts. She stood by the photocopy machine and smiled a tight smile, and her shorts were at least eight inches above her leathery knee. The rules I’d received before arriving, along with a credit card authorization form, explicitly stated that tank tops and short shorts were forbidden at the Ledge. So I went to the Gap and bought knee-length shorts. I then scoured my closet for T-shirts and came up with three. They hung on me like curtains. I showed up looking like either a cabana boy or a seventh grader. And there, standing in front of me, was Nancy, tanned and glowing with an aura of recently laid contentment, wearing freshly cut Daisy Dukes. She extended a manicured hand and said, “Nice to meet you in person!”
Nancy offered to show me around the main lodge. As she led me down a long corridor I was both surprised and annoyed by how unclinical the place felt. The carpeted floor was covered in redundant shaggy rugs. There were houseplants and skylights overhead that brought in lots of sunlight. There were paintings of dull-colored landscapes alongside motivational posters with random nouns like Persistence and Teamwork scrawled beneath droplets of water. I could’ve easily been at a friend’s summer cottage or a bed-and-breakfast. The warm home-style feel seemed suspicious—white walls and the smell of ammonia inspire trust. I followed Nancy to her personal office, which appeared to double as a bookstore, the shelves lined with books by authors whose names I recognized from the website, price tags dangling off of their spines. She directed me to a wooden desk at the front of the room, pulled out a file, and proceeded to read off the medications that I’d listed in my pre-screening questionnaire. “I’ll need the Adderall and Xanax from you now,” she said, the smile never disappearing from her face. I rummaged through my bag and handed her two green-tinted rows, both with seven separate compartments marked by letters, four pills in every slot, enough of each med to last a month. “You’ll need to give me your cell phone, too,” she said, and then looked down at my pocket, where white wires poked out. “And your mp3 player.”
I asked where she planned to put them, how she would remember that they were mine. “What if someone else checks out before me and pretends they’re theirs?”
•
One summer a few years earlier, I’d stood against a fence outside the Israeli customs office at the Allenby Bridge, on the way to Nablus, my parents’ hometown. Depending on the political climate, some of our summer trips were worse than others when it came to crossing the Allenby, the main entry point into the West Bank for Palestinians living in the diaspora. In the late 1980s, during the intifada, it had been a consistently hellish process; the holding room a swarm of families all kept waiting for hours with no water or air-conditioning in desert heat.
Though the intifada had long since ended, that particular summer had been an especially bad one for crossing, even for American citizens, which is how I would usually enter the West Bank. As an American. I’d tuck my Jordanian passport away, along with any visual sign of my Palestinian heritage. I would sport my Asics Tigers, flaunt my Hanes V-neck. I’d flash my American passport. Nationality is partly a matter of convenience.
Still, a guard called me over that day and instructed me to hand my luggage to another guard on the opposite side of the fence, who took it and tossed it into a tube that looked like an MRI machine. He placed no tag on the bag, no receipt was printed, and no record existed to show that it belonged to me. The look on my face must have signaled worry. “Calm down,” he said. “You’ll find it once you get through security.”
I was the last person to get through that day, likely because of my twentysomething, volatile, and presumably rebellious age. The Lebanese stamps that decorated every other page of my passport didn’t help, either. When I finally got to the luggage area my suitcase was gone.
•
“They’ll go in a safe,” Nancy assured me, “in a plastic bag with your name on it.” She handed me a roll of masking tape and a thick red marker. I ripped off a piece and wrote my name in all caps, and then pressed it onto the Ziploc. I was about to ask if I could at least keep my iPod when a man with a soft brown beard, bulbous red nose, and topaz-colored eyes walked into the room. He wore khaki pants with a hunter-green polo and Merrell shoes. He looked like one of those doctors you see in the movies, the kind from the 1950s, like he could administer shock therapy on you and make it home in time for a TV dinner and the six o’clock news. He knelt down beside me and spoke quietly, smiling. “Hi, I’m Richard. I’m the psychiatrist here.”
I looked into his eyes and saw it, that familiar thing. Rage. I could tell he’d acted on it before, a number of times, but had since built his career on repressing it. I smiled back at him. He stood and patted me on the back. “Glad you’re here,” he said.
“Well,” Nancy interjected. “It’s four thirty now, so dinner’s in half an hour. Why don’t you go out into the living room until then and meet some of the other clients?”
I looked over my shoulder and into the other room. “Just go out there?”
•
On my first day in treatment for anorexia, nearly five years earlier, I walked in with my hoodie pulled over my face. The center was just a few blocks from my summer sublet in Porter Square, and I was afraid I might see someone who recognized me. It didn’t matter that I’d only been in Cambridge a few weeks and knew practically no one. During dinner a counselor tapped me on the shoulder and told me I’d put too much food on my plate, a move that propelled me to enact an independent seventy-two-hour hunger strike. Across the table a woman started crying onto her burrito. “Will I ever escape this?” she wailed.
I turned and faced the wall to hide my laughter. We were all so perfectly absurd, so perfectly pathetic.
•
“Yup!” Nancy nodded. “Just right through there.”
Suddenly I didn’t want to leave her. I wanted Nancy to take my hand, lead me into the living room, and introduce me. But she was rearranging plastic baggies in the safe to make space for mine. Why wouldn’t she stop smiling? Her permanent grin made me afraid I would say something I’d regret, so I turned toward the living room. And I closed my eyes.
The notion that everyone will eventually cease to exist brings me great comfort and temporary courage. Often I try to visualize the coming apocalypse: barren tree branches,
scrap metal, tumbleweed. As the images appear in my head, a wave begins to curl in my stomach. Together they propel me forward, and I act.
Right then, it wasn’t working. I kept trying, but all I could picture was Nancy. When I opened my eyes, I focused my gaze on the floor. It was as if by not looking at anyone, they couldn’t see me either.
Toys were scattered all over. Nerf guns, bouncy balls, teddy bears. I noticed a bongo drum in the corner. I sat down on a denim-duveted love seat while two guys arm-wrestled on the opposite couch. One of them had sun-bleached hair that was almost white, thick muscles, and a strong jaw. I watched him pin down the other guy’s forearm. “Booyeah!” he called out, claiming victory. He then looked up at me. “Hey, little lady,” he said. “I’m Greg. What’re you in for?”
I was surprised by the bluntness of his question. “What’re you in for?” I asked in return.
“Heroin.”
My stomach twitched, and for a moment I wondered if I wasn’t supposed to be there.
“I want you to really sift through your baggage and face it.” That line from Anna’s last email played in my mind like a chorus. I’d held on to her words, as if they justified coming to such a place. Anna and I hadn’t spoken for weeks until right before treatment. She’d ignored all my attempts to communicate—every call, text, and email—until the night before my twenty-eight days. She picked up, as though she could sense my desperation. “I’m scared,” I confessed. “I don’t want to do this.”
Anna said nothing, just breathed heavily into the phone as I continued. “But I know I need to, even if it won’t fix things with us.” She kept breathing in a way that I recognized, a way that used to betray hesitancy. “Right?”
“Yes,” she finally responded. “That’s exactly right.”
I asked Greg where he was from. South Carolina. His voice was deep and his mouth barely moved when he spoke. “I’ve been to Charleston once,” I told him, not mentioning that I’d felt completely strange there, like the only Arab for hundreds of miles, maybe thousands. I asked him about the toys.