As I took my ten-step stroll back and forth, phone in my hand in case of an emergency, I was thinking not about the fall air, which must have been getting cooler, or about squirrels, which must have been scampering busily, or about sentences, which I wasn’t writing, but about atriums and ventricles and the heart’s incessant work. It was serious thinking, much like the thinking I do on planes, when I’m reasonably certain there’s no reason we shouldn’t be dropping straight out of the sky: the heart, magical fist-size ticker that it is, defies my most basic logic. And as I was thinking about these things—about mitochondria and cell death and deadly rhythms, something moved beside me. I caught it in my periphery: large and dark and coming at me. I shrieked and jumped forward like a grasshopper, and my heart pitched into full speed. The culprit? My own shadow.
I was beginning to wonder if I was really going crazy. I thought about my mother’s sister, Nanette, whom I saw only once or twice a year when I was a kid and we drove from Baltimore to Queens to visit my grandparents. At their house, everyone was always talking and clinking wineglasses and singing and dancing and clapping their hands, and next to Grandma, Nanette was my favorite person to dance with, her long blond hair whipping around with each dramatic turn of the tango. I loved hearing her laugh because her voice was always a bit hoarse and her laughter rolled out like a fun bumpy road. You sound like Stevie Nicks, I used to tell her. She sang, laughing, “Women, they will come and they will go . . .” Her blue eyes appeared huge beneath the bifocals she wore, and I thought that was magnificent.
Once, when everyone had gone out and left the two of us alone, my aunt started to drink. I was nine by then, old enough to realize, when she passed out, that the pills she took with her whiskey were what had made her lie limp, her eyes half open but not seeing. I tried shaking her awake, calling her name, shaking her harder until the bed began to scuff the wall. I was also old enough to know that the ipecac in the bathroom would make her throw up, so I forced it down her throat. I could have killed her, but I wasn’t old enough to know that. Instead, she vomited, over and over, on the flowery pillows, on her own face, on my hands and arms. I held her in it, and later when we washed ourselves clean, she thanked me, that warm husk of a voice.
A decade later, on an unremarkable day, my aunt sold her condo and walked onto the streets of New York City, homeless. Schizophrenia, the doctors diagnosed—a paranoid schizophrenic. I would see it for myself once while I was visiting my grandparents. She turned up one afternoon covered in black shoe polish—not just her face, but her entire body. She wore a man’s haircut and baggy jeans. She had lost her glasses and most of her teeth, and she held a magnifying glass up to one giant eye when she arrived. “Look at you,” she said, running the spyglass up and down. “You’re all grown up now. So pretty.” She spoke to me as if she were the aunt I remembered, as if her face weren’t smeared black, as if she didn’t smell of sweat and urine. “It’s a lovely day,” she said, smiling a gummy smile. Then her eyes shifted around the room, squinting. She poked her head forward and began to sniff. “Tell me,” she said, locking her gaze on me, “do you ever smell the mafia?”
I told her I didn’t think I did, and she told me that she was really a black boy named Tony, that my grandparents had castrated her when she was a baby, that people kept operating on her mouth and taking all her teeth. “Do you remember when we used to dance?” I asked her. “When I was little?” She laughed—she still had her same laugh—“Of course I do.” But her eyes quickly narrowed. “They’re doing experiments on me,” she whispered.
She had been nearly my age when the doctors diagnosed her with schizophrenia. And now I wondered if it was my turn, if this was how she’d lost those pieces of herself, quick as a fire destroys a forest. What I knew was this: each second of my life felt like a near escape from death, the way the bridge falls apart in cartoons, rung by rung, just behind the runner’s feet.
I knew I needed help. And I decided it should come in the form of a mother. Though I had let my own mother go a couple of years earlier, I still hadn’t let the idea of a mother go. I still hadn’t stopped wanting that particular and important kind of love. The mother I often imagined was an amalgam of several mothers: Carol Brady from The Brady Bunch; several of the hefty no-nonsense brown-skinned women I’d encountered through my years in lockup; and my horse-loving friend Jennifer’s mother, who once wrapped a towel around my shoulders when I’d gotten out of their pool shivering. My new mother would arrive replete with her sensible shoes and a plate of still-warm banana bread. She would say, “Hey, you silly child panicking on the sofa. You quit it now and come get yourself some banana bread.” And I would.
So that was my plan. And I heard no God laughing. I was going to go out and find myself a mom, plain and simple. A calm fell over me then, and I was able to get up and let the dogs out without panicking at all.
Later that day I found a long chain in the back of a kitchen drawer, with a small white plastic device at the end of it. It was roughly two inches long, with a button in the center and the name of our alarm company printed above it. Below the button was the word PANIC. My very own panic button! I must not have noticed it when we’d moved in, but without another thought I promptly pulled the chain over my head. All I would have to do, in the event of robbers or a deteriorating arrhythmia or the accidental inhalation of a dried apricot, was press the button. It was a revelation. It was my new necklace.
EIGHTEEN
My second lesson on Shaddad was roughly a repeat of my first lesson, even down to Tommy’s reprimanding me about bridle parts. But to a novice, a bridle is an evil thing, a leather contraption full of loops and buckles that you have to manage while maneuvering a metal bar, the bit, into the horse’s mouth. “Look,” Tommy said, holding up the bridle. “See the shape of the horse’s head? Now look at the shape of the bridle and you can see how it fits.”
But what I saw didn’t appear to match the shape of Shaddad’s head at all. “Yes.” I nodded, not wanting to let on that I was failing some kind of basic IQ test.
“Then go ahead and do it by yourself this time.”
Tommy handed the bridle to me, and I looked at Shaddad, and he blinked, and then he sighed. “Okay, let’s see here,” I said, slipping one of the loops over Shaddad’s nose.
“Nope,” said Tommy. “You forgot to put the reins over his head. You always, always have to put the reins over the horse’s head first, so that if he tries to go somewhere, you have something you can stop him with.”
I tossed the reins over Shaddad’s head, and then attempted to reinsert his nose into the same loop as before.
“Nope,” said Tommy. “That’s the browband.”
“Oh.”
It took me several tries, but Shaddad, in his tremendous patience, stood calmly while I wrestled with the bridle, fumbling the various straps against his nostrils and cheeks. Finally Tommy, who could no longer bear the spectacle, took the bridle from my hand. “One day,” she said, easily slipping the bit into Shaddad’s mouth, “you’ll be able to stand right beside him like I am and put the bridle on without even looking.”
But I was discouraged. And for a moment I felt foolish for attempting to enter a world that I had no business entering. All the other people I encountered in the barn seemed so at ease around the horses, and I wondered if that was the kind of confidence a person could learn only as a child—if maybe it was too late for me.
But when I climbed onto Shaddad and wrapped my legs around him, I could feel that between my first lesson and this one, something had already shifted: immediately I remembered the sensation of the straight line my spine was supposed to make over his back, and I sat up tall, and Tommy said, “I see you remember something from last time,” and I beamed with the learning.
And then Tommy flicked her whip and Shaddad began to trot, thumping into all the already sore parts of me, and the glowy feeling I’d been enjoying was promptly swallowed by desperat
e pain. After a few minutes I asked Tommy to please make him stop, but like the last time, she refused. “If a horse is bolting on you, you might not be able to make him stop. Then what do you do?” But I couldn’t answer her question because every iota of my consciousness was focused on one thing: making the horse stop.
“I’m serious,” I said, flailing in an endless loop around Tommy. “I need to catch my breath.”
But Tommy kept the whip moving across the ground, which kept Shaddad trotting. “I once had a sixty-year-old asthmatic woman ask me to make the horse stop. And you know what?”
“I . . . really . . . mean . . . it . . . Stop!”
“I kept him going, that’s what I did. She was so mad. But later she thanked me, because she learned she could push herself farther than she thought she could.”
It was at that moment that I felt unadulterated terror. My life was in the hands of a virtual stranger, a stranger with obvious control issues, and my lungs and legs and crotch were burning, and Shaddad was moving along as if he would never tire, and it occurred to me again that I might panic, but I was too busy trying not to die to panic, and just when I was sure I was seconds away from collapsing, Tommy asked Shaddad to walk. And though I never would have admitted this to her, what she’d said was true: I was learning, in those many circles of torture, that I could push myself farther than I thought.
Weeks went by, then months, and in that time I came faithfully to ride Shaddad and get yelled at by Tommy. The learning process was slow and repetitive, and my inner thighs were constantly sore, and the world of horses continued to feel like an elite club to which I was undergoing a seemingly endless initiation. But I was learning. After a while, I could put on Shaddad’s bridle without poking either of us in the eye, and I could post the trot without wishing I were wearing a jockstrap. Some days I wanted to cry and some days I did cry and some days I gave Tommy the evil eye when her head was turned, but what kept me coming back were the horses, plain and simple. Just being near them felt like an oasis, as if the rest of my life switched off and there was only horse smell, horse sound, horse motion, horse stillness.
NINETEEN
A few days after I resolved to find myself a mother, on a day when I was courageous enough to travel the two miles to the local grocery store, I scoped out potential mothers in the produce aisle, because the way a woman chooses her fruit and vegetables says a lot about her. I watched women delicately cradle tomatoes in their fingers and others tear them roughly off the vine. I watched women knock on watermelons, shake water off romaine, stuff their bags with fiddlehead ferns.
When I spotted a possible candidate, I’d smile at her and ask her how she planned to cook her vegetables. Most women love to talk about what they’re making for dinner that night. “Oh, Brussels sprouts are easy—you just roast ’em in the oven. Cut ’em in half, drizzle with olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and you’re set. Four hundred degrees. Delicious.”
After a few trips to the produce aisle, I’d acquired several cooking tips but no mother. It had been more than two months since my first panic attack, and almost as long since I’d driven farther than a five-mile radius on our local country roads, and I had to face what I’d become: a woman who accessorized her outfits with medical gear and security devices. Even Meet the Parents was losing its charm. I needed a mother, fast. So I called a dog sitter.
My plan was simple: (1) find a sweet and nurturing older woman who loves animals; (2) invite her over for a trial visit with my two dogs; (3) charm her with my sad but eager eyes; (4) become her daughter.
When the dog sitter arrived, I was instantly disappointed. For one, she didn’t smile. And she didn’t acknowledge my two dogs, now in a frenzy of tail wagging at her feet. But I was willing to forgive the first impression. She had every right to be wary about entering a stranger’s house at night. So I smiled at her and knelt down to introduce her to my dogs, giving them both a good scratch under their collars.
“What breed are they?” she asked, still standing.
Maybe she had a bad back, I thought. “They’re a Jack Russell–dachshund mix. I rescued them from the pound when they were ten months old. Littermates. The white one is Aramis, and the black one is Starlet.”
“Pound dogs are the best,” she said.
I can work with this, I thought. “Come, sit down. Can I bring you a cup of tea?”
I took the opportunity to quickly check my pulse. Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, I told myself while the water rushed into the kettle. Of course, I panicked. Then I sat at the other end of the couch, with the dogs between us, and shakily held my teacup.
The dog sitter looked at me. “Aren’t you going to, you know, leave?”
“Oh, I thought I explained. I wanted this to be a get-to-know-you visit.”
“It’s just that people usually run a few errands or something, so their pets and I have a chance to get to know each other.”
Was this woman kicking me out of my own house? “If it’s okay with you, I’d prefer you guys get acquainted while I’m here.”
As she sighed and looked up at the TV, I examined her profile, the sharp point of her nose, the kinky fair hair obscuring the side of her cheek. I wondered if she had been attractive when she was younger, if she had smiled more then. There had to be some way I could connect with her. “I’m a writer,” I volunteered. “But I haven’t been writing lately because I’ve been going through a pretty intense bout of anxiety.” And that’s when I learned the quickest way to get rid of a dog sitter.
Later that evening, Larry came home and took me to the grocery store. He was selecting cuts of meat for one of his stews while I lingered in the bakery, which is arguably the happiest place in any grocery store. I ordered a fruit tart laden with fresh berries and smiled at the baker. I had noticed her before, on first glance because she was taller than everyone else, but also because she seemed to carry a sadness in her eyes, as if any moment they could fill with tears. “Do you make these?” I asked, as she placed the dessert in a box.
“I make all of it,” she said. Her voice matched her eyes; it held a slight quiver.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s a lot of sweet.”
She looked very serious then, and I thought I’d somehow misunderstood something. “This is just what I do here,” she said. “I’m a trained chef. I can make more than pie.”
On a whim, I asked if she ever gave cooking lessons. Her eyes shone. “Yes. I do.”
I’d never really learned to cook. After the roast chicken dinner that went so wrong when we were kids, my mother’s exclusive use of the oven was to heat the foil-wrapped Swanson TV dinners of fried chicken, with the small partitions of corn, mealy mashed potatoes, and rubbery apple cobbler. I didn’t complain; I loved those things. I would zealously pick the breading off the chicken before giving the meat to my sister and starting on the potatoes. Years later, in a kitchen of my own, I figured things out as best as I could. But I didn’t know basic things, such as the proper way to hold a knife or cut an onion or peel a butternut squash. I wasn’t exactly sure what a roux was or what it meant to deglaze something.
“Where do I sign up?” I asked.
The woman quickly wrote her name and number on a piece of paper and handed it to me. Her name was Helen. It was a good name. It was in my pocket.
That night I showered and came to bed in my new lingerie: the stethoscope. After Larry was asleep, I studied him in the dark. He was on his back, naked in the yellow glow of the hall light, covers kicked off. His left leg was bent off the bed. His left hand was reposed straight across his heart, his wedding band gleaming at his sternum—as if at any moment his voice would come through: “I pledge allegiance . . .” I miss you, I thought, watching him.
What I wanted from Larry seemed so simple—to have compassion for whatever this thing was that was going haywire inside me—but as I came to him with my fearful mind and turbulent hear
t, I realized it wasn’t simple at all. He was impatient, disappointed, unsettled. I knew this from his curt reassurances, from the disdain in his eyes, from his unwillingness to ask me about my panic, about how it felt to be scared of the most basic tasks—and ultimately, about where I’d come from.
Though Larry was, in many respects, boyish, he was also a brave man. Sometimes I referred to him as my hero, not because he once received a Shock Trauma Hero Award from the University of Maryland’s Shock Trauma Center, but because he had more integrity than anyone I’d ever met, and because I trusted him more than anyone I’d ever known. Part of that trust came from his humility. On the night of our first date, he didn’t try to impress me by casually mentioning all the lives he’d saved, though there had been many; instead, he told me how upset he was with himself over a patient he’d seen that day. He’d thought the patient had radiation necrosis, a side effect from radiosurgery, but it had actually been a recurrence of a metastatic tumor.
“Do they look different on a scan?” I’d asked.
“No, that’s just it. They look very similar. And he was in the expected time window to have necrosis.”
“So then any surgeon would have thought the same thing?”
“Maybe, but I just wish I hadn’t.”
That was the beginning of us—this honest moment, this confession of possible failure, this deep concern for another human being—and it warmed me through. Larry was a healer. He removed tumors, clipped aneurysms, cleared out blood clots, dislodged bulging disks in the spine, dealt daily with the aberrations of the body. And his specialty was brain tumors—all the varied masses that, if left untended, displaced the other parts of the brain, causing the most basic functions to go awry.
Larry healed brains. Yet here he was, married to a woman whose mind was out of control, and he didn’t know how to touch it.
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