by Mary Karr
Looking into Dev’s face, I could almost feel the darkness leave me, but something in me held on to it.
(Where is God in this scene? my current spiritual advisor would ask. Now I’d say, He’s right there. In full power in the body of the boy, whose light I had to defend my misery from.)
Dev said, No more work.
I said, No more work, just play.
Which in some lackluster fashion, I did until his father came to keep him for the weekend, while I disappeared into my sublet. Before Warren got there, Dev was Superman, and I was a distinctly unwondrous Wonder Woman.
Check.
In the hospital dark, lying there, crying for my son, I realize that one of the last big suggestions I’d failed to take regularly was praying on my knees.
Janice’s voice comes back: You don’t do it for God.
In the hospital, I have this urge to kneel, yet to do so in public—in front of my sighing, unsettled roommate—seems, well, obscene somehow.
I tiptoe to the bathroom and bend onto the cold tiles. Thanks, whoever the fuck you are, I say, for keeping me sober.
I feel small, kneeling there. Small and needy and inadequate. Pathetic, even. Like somebody who can’t handle things.
Which is fairly accurate, after all, for the average inmate.
If you’re God, I say, you know I feel small and needy and inadequate. And tonight I want a drink.
The silence fails to say anything back. I glare at it. It feels like judgment, the silence. And at that silence I give off rage; I start a ranting prayer in my head that goes something like this: Fuck you for making me an alcoholic. For making my baby sick all the time when he was so tiny. You’re a fucking amateur, torturing a baby like that, you fuck. And my daddy withering into that form. What pleasure do you get from…from smiting people?
I feel something stir in me, a small wisp of something in my chest, frail as smoke. It is—strangely—the sweetness of my love for my daddy and my son. It blesses me an instant like incense.
My eyes sting, and I blurt out, Thanks for them.
I feel the stillness around me widen a notch.
Thanks that my son is sleeping safe at home without fever or coughing; and my husband, who may yet take me back.
The boundaries of my skin grow thin as I kneel there squinting my eyes shut. For a nanosecond, I am lucent.
Inside it: an idea, the thread of a different perspective than any I’ve ever had. It’s a thought so counterintuitive, so unlike how I think, it feels as if it originates from outside me. The voice—the idea—comes in solid quiet in the midst of psychic chaos, and it says, If Dev hadn’t been sick so much, you’d have kept drinking….
Which is wholly true. If Dev had been one of those blank-eyed, anesthetized little blobs who slept infancy away, I could’ve sotted up his early years. Staying up with him—what with the trips to the hospital, which I’d thought were my punishment or ruin—I’d found a strange kind of rescue.
(Vis-à-vis God speaking to me, I don’t mean the voice of Charlton Heston playing Moses booming from on high, but reversals of attitude so contrary to my typical thoughts—so solidly true—as to seem divinely external. And quiet these thoughts are, strong and quiet. View it as some sane self or healthy ego taking charge, if you like. By checking in to the hospital, I’ve said in some deep way uncle, or—as they said in my old neighborhood—calf rope, referring to an animal hogtied in a rodeo arena. I’ve stopped figuring so hard and begun to wait, sometimes with increasing hope, to be shown.)
Then it hits me. I’m actually kneeling before a toilet. The throne, as other drunks call it. How many drunken nights and slungover mornings did I worship at this altar, emptying myself of poison. And yet to pray to something above me, something invisible, had—before now—seemed degrading.
And I start to laugh, kneeling there in a striped industrial robe—a barking laugh that devolves into a skittery madwoman’s giggle, so I have to cover my mouth before somebody comes in thinking I’ve gone off.
32
The Nervous Hospital
What fresh hell is this?
—Dorothy Parker
After fourteen hours sacked out in the bin, I wake to find my mouth glued together. Beside my bed are a pair of green foam slippers embossed with smiley faces, which design seems a grotesque mistake on somebody’s part. I step right into them. I tie on the striped robe they’d given me, then stump out to accept whatever I’ve signed up for.
At the nurses’ station, I’m handed a paper cup with another double dose of antidepressants to toss down.
In the dayroom, I find a game show blaring at two women. One’s a large woman holding a teddy bear missing both eyes. The other’s fortyish, with a flapper’s curly bob and a small, muscular frame.
I’m Tina, she says, manic-depressive.
I’m Mary, I say, depressive-depressive.
On TV, the correct door has been chosen by a woman who bounces up and down and claps at a new bedroom set.
Tina’s dressed in bike shorts and a lime-green striped athletic jersey with the Italian flag on the sleeve. She says to the other lady, Do you want to tell Mary your name?
I’m Dimples, she says in a little girl voice. She’s white as parchment, with soft flesh that spills as if poured from her sleeves and shorts legs.
On TV, a horn honks. The audience sighs with disappointment.
Tell her your bear’s name, too, Tina prompts. But Dimples just covers her face with the eyeless animal and falls quiet.
We’re supposed to engage her, but she’s no Dale Carnegie. Multiple personality disorder. Tina says, Do you work out?
This starts me crying.
For the first few weeks, I turn into a regular waterworks. In my family, we claim to cry at card tricks, but with no card tricks in sight, I sob my guts out. Anybody who’ll listen to my sorrows gets an earful, and since each shift features a nurse ordained to hear me out—Mary, preeminently—at least twice a day, I boohoo my head off. Plus group therapy. Plus a shrink they assign me three times a week. Which makes those first days dissolve together into a kind of steam-room fog I sit red-faced in the middle of, blowing my nose.
I mostly cry about the pain I know I’m causing Dev by going inpatient. And I sob about his dad, whose tenderness for me has perhaps been killed off by my small black heart. And I wail in abject terror that—now I’m not only an alcoholic but also a lunatic—Warren will divorce me and take Dev.
When Warren comes in wearing khaki shorts and a kind, owlish expression to meet with the social worker and me, saying he wants to work on loving each other better, I blubber with hope at our prospects. I swear forever to love him till death, and while there’s still a blank between us, I mean it.
(Here, I mistrust my memory, which holds no long talk between us of the type I’d have insisted on if our roles were reversed.)
He and Dev come every afternoon to eat dinner with me in a private room. I cry before they arrive, then weep when they stride out.
I cry for Mother to come. She’s about to head off on a spiritual retreat in Mexico counseling other alcoholics. Ponder the likelihood of that one—Mother as sober guru. Landing here is final proof I can’t outrun her, but neither can I get her to spring into action for me. Our phone call is brief.
I’m in the hospital, I say. I wanted to kill myself.
That’s terrible, honey. Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?
No, I was gonna use carbon monoxide, but I never did anything.
Why’d you pick that? She sounds curious, like somebody idly shopping for suicide attempts as she might a ball gown.
You don’t make a mess. You leave a very livid corpse.
That’s just awful. Does Warren have Dev?
Yeah. I get to see him every afternoon. Warren seems like he wants to really work on things, but we’ve been living like strangers for so long.
Y’all should work things out.
I know, Mother, I know. Since I was sixteen, you’ve wanted to paw
n me off in matrimony to somebody.
I just want you to be taken care of….
This marriage hasn’t exactly brought comfort and succor, otherwise I might not have planned to cash in my chips.
He’s just so sweet with Dev.
I don’t suppose you want to come up and help out a few weeks. (Actually, Warren had said it’d be awkward, the two of them in the house alone. Despite that and despite a marrow-deep certainty that she’d never come, I want her to want to.)
She says, I just can’t, honey. You know I’ve had this trip to Mexico planned for a while.
After she hangs up, I cry because part of me still wants to drag her behind my car. But the other part still wants to crawl into her lap.
On the phone, Lecia tells me to snap out of it.
That’s a Republican thing to say, I say, sniveling.
She’s a fixer, and her inability to fix my mood makes her crazy. Or afraid, or both.
I’m serious, she says. Tell me what you’re so miserable about. Do you want me to come up there and kick somebody’s ass? What?
I feel like I’ve turned into Mother, I tell her.
This draws an actual guffaw from her. You are crazy, she says. You’re nothing at all like Mother.
I’m here in the Mental Marriott, like her.
Well, you pay your taxes, for one, she says. You never shot at anybody…
Wanted to, I say.
Who doesn’t, she says. Then she adds, Also, unlike Mother, you have a job. Several jobs, if you count writing a book and raising a kid. Your second book!
Three years ago, I say, my book came out.
Whatever! You’ve got the yeah-buts, she says. If it’s Dev who worries you, notice the ways he’s Pete Karr’s grandson.
He is, isn’t he? I say. And it’s true that I see Daddy’s fire in Dev’s limbs. His grit.
I’m hanging up, Lecia says. I gotta go make a living. I love you senselessly. Don’t kill yourself till I give the go-ahead.
Checking into the hospital, I surrendered to a sobbing that I’d always held back, thinking if I started in on it it would never, ever, ever stop. Then it stops after a week or two, as if a lifetime’s portion of grief has boiled out of me. The ferocious internal motion I’ve been praying would end finally—almost in a single nanosecond—stops. It’s a pivot point around which my entire future will ultimately swivel. That first night, kneeling before the toilet, I let go, as they say. Or call it the moment my innately serotonin-challenged brain reached level X.
The change happens before my eyes, the muted colors of the room brightening from gray to a cool azure. Now when I begin obsessively to gnaw on my fears, I try to wrestle them loose from myself (who are these two halves?) the way you’d take a slipper from a Doberman. It’s in my higher power’s hands, I tell myself. They say More will be revealed, not More will be figured out.
I feel well enough one afternoon to ring Walt and give him the lowdown. (His wife was ill with cancer at the time, so the call was brief.) You’re in the best place, he says. I wish I’d known you were having such a hard time.
That’s the nature of it, though, I say—isolation.
But you’re feeling better? You need me to fly out there and bring you a hot-fudge malted?
Hold that thought, I say.
That afternoon, when Warren and Dev show up, I feel a rush of delight just seeing them. Warren opens the stairwell door with one hand so Dev can slide past him, and the instant stays haloed in gold, for it’s my first conscious memory of something solidly good. Though their afternoon visit is always the day’s highlight, it routinely sends a volcano of guilt up my middle, since Dev always steps onto the ward with such hesitance, a posture almost soldierly in its wary vigilance. (Even now, from a distance of eighteen years, he remembers how scary the place was.)
Dev was born into a bold certainty of feeling. About nearly everything, he held convictions. As a newborn, he had the appetite of a jackal. As a toddler, once faced with a tea service at my in-laws’, he’d stuck his fist in the sugar bowl and upended it, sugar spraying all over as Mrs. Whitbread hissed that no other child in that house had ever interfered with a tea. While other toddlers had winced at new food, he had a taste for sashimi, for steak tartare with raw onion and egg yolk. He approached stray dogs with his arms open, ran full speed into waves.
Yet he was all sensibility. (In a few years, I’d see Dev stand once for a long time before two Cubist paintings—one Braque and one Picasso—announcing, I know I’m supposed to like the Picasso more, but this one’s stronger. And so it had been.) He was sturdily resolute in all his tastes.
That day in the hospital, Dev comes in dressed in a Hawaiian print shirt, looking like a miniature Miami dope dealer, and wary that way, as if expecting to find machine guns in the hands of rival gang members as he slides under Warren’s arm.
But, instead of my usual stab of concern or guilt, I see this as a single instant in his life amid a zillion other instants with attendant feelings—love, curiosity, desire. His curls are damp around the edges from the heat. I heave him up and inhale an odor of wet earth in his hair, and he plants a dry kiss on my cheek. I let him down and greet Warren, balancing a coffee holder with two steaming cups and a crumpled pastry bag. His white shirt, rolled up at the wrists, shows the lineaments of his brown forearms. He holds the coffee to one side, bending so I can kiss him, and in his preoccupied expression is infinite gentleness. I place my lips on his square jaw and taste the living salt of him.
In the kitchen a few minutes later, the first creamy sip of strong coffee gives me a distinct flood of pleasure. I remember a few similar instants when I first quit drinking.
Nothing has changed, really. The uncertainty of my marriage is still there. But some equanimity exists, as if some level in my chest has ceased its endless teetering and found its balance point.
In my life, I sometimes knew pleasure or excitement but rarely joy. Now a wide sky-span of quiet holds us. My head’s actually gone quiet. Some sluggishness is sloughed off. I am upright all of a sudden, inside a self I find quasi-acceptable, even as I’m incarcerated. Maybe this giant time-out has given me rest I sorely needed. Basically, some fist pounding on the center of my chest has unclasped itself. I’ve let go.
I don’t know if Warren notices the difference, for—other than two sessions with a family social worker—we don’t see each other except with Dev, which speaks volumes about the space between us. (Were we both waiting for me to come home? Why didn’t this wall between us stay down, even when we both willed it? Because we didn’t trust each other as much as we trusted the distances we’d grown up in?)
The morning after this sane visit, I lift my just-scrubbed face from the towel to meet my own gaze in the metal mirror, and I almost see a bold outline around myself, as if inked with magic marker. Alive, I am, a living, breathing Mary of myself.
Hello, stranger, I actually say out loud.
In occupational therapy, the other women in the ward—who’ve been vague holograms viewed through a scrim of tears when I checked in—have turned into full-fledged human units whose stories I begin to follow like daytime soaps.
We’re supposed to be fashioning decorative wreaths, those circles of dried flowers and herbs that happy housewives hang in suburban kitchens from grosgrain ribbon. A grassy aroma rises around us as we work. I sit before a styrofoam ring, concentrating on the dumb task of wrapping florist’s tape on a green wire.
Across the art table from me sits Pam, a strapping blond psychopath—a diagnosis she stays volubly pissed off about. Pam claims her broke-dick husband has slam-dunked her for partying with truckers at roadhouses, which is preferable to folding his effing socks and stuffing the faces of her five mouthy kids.
In group therapy that day, Pam got called out for wearing a Please Kill Me T-shirt. This message terrorized the only guy on the ward, a schizophrenic kid named Willy. Willy has scarlet acne emblazoning both cheeks, as if he’s being continuously slapped from the inside.
He’s at the next table hunched over watercolor paper, meticulously painting a Greek keyhole pattern using black ink and a brush made up of only a few hairs. Two seats down from him is beautiful Flora, whose raving red hair hangs a torch in any room she enters. Often screaming in psychosis, Flora spends a lot of time in a padded room, tied down by leather four-point restraints. Medicated into a stupor, Flora is that day, and a nurse helps her odd crafts projects of gluing together hunks of foam into a kind of arctic-looking city.
Pam says, You know what we should call this?
The Maniacs’ Art Club? Tina says.
Crafts for Cunts, Pam says.
Please don’t use that word, says skinny Betty. Lovely Betty with the swan neck and the shiny black hair. St. Betty of the Perpetually Ducked Head. Age about thirty, looks sixty. As a child, Betty was consistently raped by her famous professor father, which kept her ever after starving herself almost to death. She’s assembling a wreath of fragrant eucalyptus using shades of muted green with faded yellow roses.
You’ve gotten really good at this, Betty, I say, and it’s true she’s found a meticulous but subtly tinted order.
You should work in a florist’s shop, Tina says. What do you do, anyway, I mean, for a living?
She shrugs. (I’d later find out she took care of the wheelchair-bound father who’d raped her.)
Do you find it morbid, Tina says, that we’re making wreaths? What does that conjure for you?
Wreaths make me think of Christmas, skinny Betty says. That is my least favorite time of year.
I meant gravestones. You find them on gravestones, Tina says.
Maybe they want us all dead, Pam says. Well the feeling’s mutual. I hate those bitches.
Which ones? I want to know.
All of them.
I say, What’s not to like? They’re nothing if not nice.
You’re like those people who fall in love with their kidnappers, Pam says. Like what’s-her-name. Who held up the bank. The rich bitch.