Rat Girl: A Memoir

by Kristin Hersh

  This doctor has what looks to be a seven-syllable name, which I avoided trying to pronounce on the phone with his secretary, who also didn’t mention the doctor by name. She used the name of the clinic instead.

  Walking to the appointment, my snake bag on my shoulder, I feel heavy. The heaviness of guilt for bringing a potential being into the world who probably can’t stay and the heaviness of responsibility to do everything I can to keep it here. If an abortion is smarter than bad chemistry, then I’m going to have to rise to that occasion. If the light can become a child, then I need to reinvent myself as its mother. Right away.

  How’s the band gonna live in a van? That’s child abuse, isn’t it?

  Everything in this office is either brown or gray, including the psychiatrist himself, who is both brown and gray. A pleasant-looking Indian man, he leans back in his chair and smiles. “What are we talking about today?” he asks.

  I sit in a brown chair on a gray carpet, hands folded, ankles crossed in front of my snake bag, and tell him my story, asking him if I can forgo medication for the duration of the pregnancy. I have no idea what he’ll say. He is a soother, so, in my experience, he’ll seem obsessed with both life and drugs—it really could go either way.

  I feel so awful right now, it’s almost hard to care. Don’t know what’s morning sickness and what’s withdrawal, but I have my nails dug into reality right now, just catching glimpses of the world through a swirl of exhaustion and nausea. Abortion or pregnancy? I can’t root for one or the other. They both seem like bad ideas.

  The psychiatrist looks alert but thoughtful. “I think that we should look into other medications or possibly alter the dosage of your current medications, but not having met you before, it’s difficult to say. Are you delusional? Do you have mood swings?”

  This is embarrassing. Way harder than I thought it’d be. Why is doing the right thing never the easy way out? I talk to his left shoulder instead of his face. “No. I mean I only ever had the one mood swing: up.”

  He stares. “What medications are you taking?” I place the bottles of pills on his desk and he picks them up, one by one. Reading the labels seems to make him tired.

  Staring at the pill bottles on his desk makes me tired, too. I waited trustingly for therapeutic levels to kick in, lived through sickness, shakiness and imitation calm. And now the pills seem dangerous. I mean, all that brain-fuzzing can’t be cool, can it? “So what do you think will happen if I stop taking them?” I ask him. “ ’Cause I already did.”

  “Any number of things; I can’t really predict.” He puts his elbows on the desk and leans his chin on his hands. His tone of voice sounds like he’s talking about the weather or lunch. “You may become manic again. You may experience a psychotic episode. It’s also possible that you could become depressed, suicidal.” We sit, looking at each other. Then he smiles. “Or maybe you got better!” he yells, throwing his arms up in the air. I laugh. “Did you at least taper off?” he asks pleasantly.

  “No. Cold turkey. I can’t keep them down.”

  “That can be extremely dangerous,” he says, a wide grin still on his face. “And you’d like to remain free of all medication?”

  “If possible.”

  His smile flattens. “Of course I’ll take your feelings into account, but you should know that manic depression is a serious disease. It isn’t called that any longer, by the way.”

  “So I hear.”

  “Many bipolar individuals commit suicide,” he continues. “Twenty percent, in fact—that’s a lot. Some, while in manic states, even die of exhaustion.” He thinks for a minute, looking sleepy. “Most of my bipolar clients struggle with the depressive aspect of their condition, however. Given that you were in a manic state for such an extended period of time, I imagine your experience is quite different from theirs.” He looks at me for a response, but I don’t have one. I don’t know any other bipolar people. “Let me ask you this: do you hallucinate?”

  I glance down at my snake bag. “Not really.” Looking out the window behind him, at the bright green and orange leaves blowing back and forth, I wish feverishly that I was outside and not stuck in this brown and gray room. I like this guy, but his office doesn’t match what happened to me this year. My experience of manic depression was so physically and emotionally intense that it’s hard to relate it to a clinical setting. I know psychiatry is a science, but how do you measure a systemic effect like soul sickness in a cold, flat room? It was messy, huge; a muscular panic. It actually felt more like . . . art.

  “I hear music sometimes,” I say. “I think there’s a snake in this bag. Even though I know there isn’t. I mean, I know it isn’t here the way you and I are here. I just believe in it.”

  Now he’s awake. “Is it more of a dream image?”

  “Sort of. I’m a musician and I suspect that it’s a song image.” He stares intently. “It’s me seeing sound.”

  He looks down again and begins to write as he speaks. “That makes sense.”

  This was the last thing I expected him to say. “It does?”

  “Yes.” He looks up from his writing. “Art and dreams are very closely related and they’re worth listening to, as long as your hold on reality remains intact.” I sit, stunned. “It’s also entirely possible that you hear music because you’re a musician. It’s certainly not considered normal, as you know. But at the present time, though you aren’t asymptomatic, would you say that your symptoms are mild and not exacerbated by discontinuing your medication?” I nod. He hands me the piece of paper he’s been writing on.

  “Of course, you know it may be some time before the medications you’ve been taking are completely gone from your system. Do this for me: tell one friend, one family member and one work associate that this is what you’re doing. If you show symptoms of any kind—a change in energy level, speech or thought patterns, any mood swings, visual or auditory hallucinations—you or one of your contacts must call me right away. We will try this as an experiment, but you should know that bipolar disorder may be as dangerous for a fetus as psychotherapeutic medications.”

  I glance at the paper. It’s not a prescription; it has a phone number on it, nothing else.

  “In the meantime, I will go over your medical records and speak with your obstetrician. Together we’ll try to come up with a regimen that works for all of us. Please leave his or her contact information with my receptionist on your way out.”

  I’m so relieved, I can’t even think. The light won’t be put out. It doesn’t feel like heavy responsibility; it’s light, like spring landing in the room after a desperate winter. I’ll cross the living-in-a-van-is-probably-child-abuse bridge when I come to it.

  ♋ hope

  i saw hope in my backyard

  “Any questions?” he asks.

  I don’t know what to say. “Yes. How do you pronounce your name?”

  He laughs. “You don’t! It takes too long!” Then he stands and walks me to the door. “Eat well and sleep. You’re not very pregnant, I assume?”

  “No. Hardly pregnant at all.”

  “Ah. Enjoy vomiting!” He laughs again and closes the door.

  I leave the office, my head spinning. Finally, I’m outside with the autumn leaves.

  So I really am pregnant—time to grow up. What’re the rules here? Do I have to call Ivo and ask him to fire me? Do I quit playing clubs? Do I quit the band?

  Wait, did he say “obstetrician”? I don’t have an obstetrician. I gotta get one or I won’t have a phone number to give his receptionist. How’ll I pay for that? People say babies are expensive. Why? Are they expensive right away or not ’til they have to go to college? Do diapers cost a lot of money?

  I better go back to the library.

  My witch hat falls down over my face as I vomit into my trick-or-treat bag. I am deeply disappointed by this. I know that the green makeup which took my mother so long to apply is smearing to reveal green skin.

  My small companion, dressed as a hobo
, smokes a plastic cigar and watches me. “You done yet?” he asks.

  I look up. “Almost,” I answer weakly.

  Moonlight fills the gaps on the sidewalk left by streetlights; there is no place to hide. A small crowd of trick-or-treaters gathers to stare. I continue to throw up while Aqua Man, a princess, Gilligan and their basset hound watch.

  “She okay?” Gilligan asks.

  The hobo removes the plastic cigar from his mouth.

  “Yeah,” he says. “She’s just really drunk.”

  ♋ ether

  this gnawing emptiness

  seeps in like a cold mist

  Wow. Dr. Seven Syllables wasn’t kidding. I lean against the tiles as the shower sprays my face. I’ve heard of projectile vomiting, but never seen it. It’s like a special effect—it’d be cool if it didn’t feel so terrible. “Morning sickness” turns out to be a misnomer, by the way. This sickness goes on twenty-four hours a day, coloring the world an intense palette of garish grays. I can’t even keep water down.

  This particular kind of nausea is a gnawing, icy hunger, like your blood is hungry and your bones’re hungry. Your bones and blood think they’re starving. But somehow your confused stomach has convinced your eyes to recoil at the sight of food, your nose to object to any scent: everything’s poisonous garbage, it says; let’s starve! If you sneak a bite of food or a sip of water past your eyes and your nose, your stomach knots and spits it right back out again. So you wait . . . until the hunger and weakness are so overwhelming that you try to sneak a bite of something again. Then your stomach whips around, pissed off, and spits it back out at you.

  This is my new job. The other Muses noticed, of course. They’ve never seen anybody this sick before. “And I know some dead people,” said Dave gently.

  So I sat them down on my bed, shut the bedroom door to keep the aliens from overhearing, and told them I’m pregnant. They took the news soberly, sort of like when I play them a new song. No one suggested that we not be a band anymore. Nobody questioned our dream of living in a van. They seemed more concerned about me than future career repercussions. “Are you happy?” asked Leslie.

  “I have no idea,” I answered. “I don’t think so. But I’m not unhappy.”

  They all sat there, leaning against the wall, their feet sticking out over the side of the bed. I joined them. Leslie turned to look at me. “How about . . . one day at a time?” she said.

  That made sense. Nothing has really changed yet and we don’t even know how it’ll change when it does. Since we have shows booked, we’ll play shows. That’s as far as we got. Our record is probably in jeopardy; I just don’t know these rules and neither do my bandmates. One day at a time.

  Each morning, when I wake up, it’s clearly a day to be spent puking, not breaking up the band. I don’t actually know what it means to be pregnant yet; I’m still sort of in shock. Didn’t see this coming, you know? Don’t even know what it is, really. People grow inside each other? Weird.

  The bus is now a major endeavor: a frozen and feverish sea of nausea, the autumn leaves out the window my only relief. But it takes me to a fascinating place where I hang with a subculture I’ve never paid much attention to before: breeders. I mean ones who’re actually breeding. Like me, I guess, but . . . on purpose.

  I don’t talk much at the midwife’s office, mostly just smile and listen. Everything the other pregnant women do is interesting to me, because they’re all two people, not one. Crazy.

  Even more fascinating than the breeders themselves are the already-born children they bring with them. Tiny, beautiful and disarmingly honest (they’re even honest about lying), they’re like little space creatures who just moved here. The babies are so punk rock: bald and drooling, yelling and grinning, learning how to work their new spaceships made of bone, muscle and skin. And the toddlers are all far more graceful than their mothers, even when they fall over, which they do a lot. All motor development aside, gravity’s a bitch goddess.

  These tiny people aren’t TV-plus-hair-gel yet. They seem to have the built-in grace of animals—something their mothers have lost. Maybe because being alive is a child’s reason to be here, since they aren’t asked to prove their worth in any other way. They’re here, here on purpose and they celebrate here by feeling it out, gravity and logic be damned.

  Some of these children seem to keep feelings to themselves, but not many of them. Impulsive is not the word—thoughts erupt, questions and ideas fly out of their mouths the instant they’re formed. These little space creatures remind me of songs. They’re offshoots, but they’re super creatures; better than us.

  ♋ i’m alive

  fan your flame and can your heat

  As I sit in the waiting room pretending to read a National Geographic, a little girl I’d been watching out of the corner of my eye sidles up to me and holds out her fist. “Do you know what’s in here?” she asks gravely.

  “No,” I answer, “what?”

  Her mouth twists up. “Well . . . it was a secret. Are you a nice girl?”

  “I’m pretty nice.”

  “Just don’t tell her.” She points to a woman across the room reading a magazine. The woman looks up.

  “Why not?” I ask. “She looks nice enough.”

  The little girl leans in and stage whispers, “I took it out of her pocket.” The woman’s eyebrows shoot up.

  “Maybe you should give it back,” I suggest.

  Confused, the girl opens her hand to reveal a piece of lint. “Do you think she wants it?”

  I figure if you can’t do one day at a time, one minute at a time still counts. Probably a good rule for almost anything.

  Interestingly, the white noise couldn’t do it at all; it whispered, then fell—a pregnancy casualty. No more waves, no more wind chimes. I still hear music sometimes, but one song at a time, quietly, clearly. As if Throwing Muses were playing next door.

  My Brain That Wouldn’t Die seems to have taken a backseat to the Body Monster, letting it drive for a while, ’cause it has a job to do. I don’t hear too much from evil these days and I’m softer than I was before, gentle. It could be all the puking, but I feel okay: peaceful. Peaceful with a single-mindedness of purpose I’ve only ever associated with music.

  The purpose is this: the baby’s heartbeat. I heard it. A heart beating. A little light, unconcerned with this universe, having created its own. I’m not one person, but two.

  Crazy.

  ♋ golden ocean

  your baby takes your balls

  and gives you back your teeth

  your baby takes your balls

  and lights a fire in your belly

  On my shelf in the pantry now are prenatal vitamins and bananas, whole-wheat this and organic that; the fridge is full of wheat germ, yogurt and apples. I bought my first dozen eggs. I have to eat on this nausea planet, eat right through the threat of special-effect vomiting. I stare into the fridge wondering how the hell to keep my bone-deep hunger and suspicious stomach from fighting with each other. I can’t even do hippie food anymore ’cause it has flavor in it.

  “No, it doesn’t,” says Dave, leaning against the kitchen sink, eating a plate of spaghetti.

  I look at him, surprised. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know why I said that. My stomach changed all the rules.” Tea and Leslie make their dinners around us. It all looks and smells awful to me.

  “Can’t you tell your stomach what to think?” he asks. “I mean, you know hippie food tastes like a bowl of paste. Your tongue must know it, anyway.”

  “Don’t knock hippie food, Dave; I said you were right.”

  “I’m just saying it seems right up your alley now. Don’t you like to eat paste?”

  Geez. “Don’t say ‘eat paste.’ ” He shrugs and goes back to his spaghetti. I’m so jealous of his ability to eat food and keep it down. “Pasta means paste,” I tell him in my misery.

  He holds his plate out to me. “Want some?”

  Tea interrupts with her idea: P
epto-Bismol. Chalky, pink goo. She holds it out to me. “Are you high?” I ask her. “Chalky, pink goo?”

  She gets a spoon. “Remember the commercial? It coats your stomach.”

  “With chalky, pink goo,” says Dave.

  “Yeah!” she says brightly. I shake my head at her. “Just taste it.” She pours out a big spoonful and sticks it in her mouth. In a flash, her expression goes from encouraging to disgusted. She covers her mouth with her hand, trying to swallow, then gives up and runs to the sink, spitting the pink goo into the drain. Such a crazy color—it looks like something from Dr. Seuss. We watch her run the water and wipe her mouth, then take a deep breath. “Okay,” she says, turning to me and grabbing the bottle of Pepto-Bismol, “now you.”

  Leslie stops her with one hand. “Not cool for pregnant chicks,” she says. “I have a better idea.” I warn her that I’m not going to do leaves and bark, no matter how cool Santa Cruz was. “How about flowers?” she asks.

  “Eat flowers?”

  Tea frowns. “Don’t make her eat flowers, Les.”

  “I was gonna make them into a tea . . .”

  Dave finishes his spaghetti and drops his dish in the sink. “You’re gonna make her drink flowers?”

  “Sure!” She seems so . . . perky. Everybody seems perky now. Everybody but me. “Hibiscus flowers!”

  “I’ve heard of those,” I say. “I thought you only ate magical forest roots.”