We hugged and she walked across the atrium, and then she joined a group of other students, laughing.
We could be wrecked inside, and pissed off and exhausted, and still be happy to see our friends.
We could be so many different things at once.
I arrived for my next therapy session confident and bored, which seemed to me a sign the therapy was working. I was handling my mother better, which is why I had come in the first place. I knew I might never have a professional diagnosis for her, but I was confident that the lens of schizophrenia was clear and focused: through it, she was much easier to see. For the first time in my life, I sat in the waiting room without an agenda.
Helder opened by saying sometimes he would talk about other patients, changing key details so as not to reveal personal information. There was this woman, he said, who had a lazy eye. Lots of abuse, very violent childhood, he said. After three years of therapy, she decided she was ready to have a simple operation to repair her eye. She then married a wonderful man and now they were very happy. She still came in around once a month. It had taken her a long time to take that action. But when she was ready, it was that simple.
I stared at him, bored, a little annoyed. I noticed IMAGINE and wished it were not there. What did I care about a woman with a lazy eye? I didn’t have a lazy eye. I didn’t need a minor operation. I wondered why he was telling me this story. My eyes were fine. But the subject of eyes reminded me what wasn’t fine. What I hadn’t mentioned in this room. I didn’t want it to ruin his impression of me as the nice girl with the crazy family.
I decided to just tell him and get it over with. Perhaps whatever it was that was wrong with me could, like the lazy eye, be fixed. I knew it couldn’t. But I wanted to see what he would say.
“There’s something else weird about me,” I said.
He leaned in. “Go for it,” he said. He looked very happy.
“It’s hard,” I told him. “Because it’s going to change the way you look at me.”
“Great!” he said. He was grinning wildly, as if to say, Come on in!
I told him about not being able to recognize people. How at the party the night before I called him, I’d left in a panic because I kept introducing myself to someone I evidently had worked with for years. How I couldn’t tell Janis and Beth apart until they started talking. How Dave was terrible with names and I never forgot names, but I often didn’t know if I knew someone or not. I avoided department meetings, functions at the boys’ school. People expected me to know them, and I didn’t. I told him how I’d carried around the face book at Hope when it was still a printed thing with everyone’s photograph, name, and department, but even with the directory, it was hard to tell people apart. I blamed it on Michigan: midwesterners were bland, homogeneous, indistinguishable. Women were easier, because they had jewelry and purses and shoes I could remember. I was good at people from the back and far away. I told him how when I was little, I’d found a deck of cards—some kind of FBI or civil service preparation, perhaps—with photographs of faces of 1950s men and women on one side and data on the reverse: name, age, place of birth, occupation, a few habits (smoker, golfer, race car driver, travels to China). I’d carried those cards with me everywhere, memorizing the facts on the back and matching them to the hairstyle on the front.
I tried to tell him what I had read so far about face blindness. “It’s in fusiform gyrus twelve,” I said, which I’d thought would sound really smart, but made me realize I didn’t really understand face blindness at all. Fusiform gyrus, conceptual configuration, covert recognition—when I had the article in front of me, it all made sense. But when I tried to explain it to Helder, it was as if I didn’t know anything. I felt like my students when I returned their failed quizzes: “But I studied!”
Helder was very excited, though. He suggested the experience of living with a schizophrenic was very similar to the face-blindness experiences I was describing. Never really knowing what to look for, never knowing exactly the reality of things. The two experiences seemed to amplify each other in very complicated ways. And he couldn’t help wondering: Had my mother’s inability to mirror me interfered with the face-reading mechanism at a crucial developmental stage?
No, I said. Nothing in the literature pointed to anything like that. This was a whole separate thing, I said. Early on, I’d read a few articles that had made me consider this. But I had discarded the theory. It was true that babies with cataracts turned out face-blind: you had to see things at certain stages in order to get the face recognition processor laid in correctly. But my mother hadn’t blinded me. She wasn’t that bad.
“You have to consider how the mother in a situation like this might influence the developing brain,” he said kindly. “And all that trauma,” he said. He believed chaos alone might cause the infant brain to wire itself in dysfunctional ways.
No, I said. Face blindness wasn’t caused by psychological trauma. If it was related to schizophrenia, it was, I believed, genetic, neurological, congenital. As the session went on, I was getting very angry at him. He hadn’t read all the articles I had read. He didn’t know. Why had I even brought this up?
He said, “I think this is trauma. I think this is going to clear up as we work together. There is a chance. There is a chance.” He was rubbing his hands together.
“No,” I said. “It’s not trauma.”
“I think it is. I think you will be able to see faces again. Could. You could, Heather. Everything you are telling me.”
“No,” I said. I knew he was wrong. I wanted to protect my mother. I wanted to be related to her in an elegant, fascinating way. Plus, I had only just figured out I must have face blindness. I hadn’t yet worked out how to teach it to someone else. I didn’t know how to summarize my experience, to show someone who could recognize faces what it was like not to have this ability. I didn’t actually know how schizophrenia and face blindness were related, only that they must be, somehow, and that my mother wasn’t at fault.
“Let’s find out if this can be fixed. Through surgery or retraining.” Helder wondered if there was something like Brain Gym for it. He also thought I had to come out, right away. “You have to tell people you have this, people have to know. All you go through to hide, to cover, to keep this a secret—it’s making your interactions with people—simple interactions—impossibly complicated. There’s all this background noise. It’s isolating you. You’ve got to come out.”
I laughed. “No, no, no,” I said. Telling was unthinkable. “No one can ever know. They’ll think I’m crazy.”
I was certain there was some kind of biological connection—as yet undiscovered by scientists—between schizophrenic mothers and face-blind children. I knew face blindness wasn’t mental illness—far from it. But some part of me was still in shadow. For nearly forty years, I had thought: I’m mentally ill.
“On the first day of class, this is what you say when you hand out the syllabus: ‘Hi, I’m—’ What do you call yourself? Professor Sellers?”
“Heather.”
“ ‘Hi, welcome, I’m Heather and I have’—how do you say it?”
“I say ‘pro soap,’ like you are for soap. And then ‘agnosia,’ like ‘agnostic.’ I’m a face doubter.”
“So you say, ‘Hi, I’m Heather, I have prosopagnosia.’ Did I say it right?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“I’m just asking you to keep an open mind on two counts. Practice telling one person. And know that this condition could change for you. It’s a possibility.”
It wasn’t a possibility, though. I would always be face-blind. I knew that for sure. And I couldn’t imagine telling anyone about face blindness—ever. Even if I didn’t have my particular mom to love and hide, face blindness was too weird. It was too hard to explain. I barely understood it myself, and I had spent hundreds of hours reading about it. It sounded crazy.
Our next sessions were contentious, and more than once I said this would be our last. Helder h
ad to accept that face blindness was fixed, incurable, or I was quitting. And he, just as dug in, insisted that I come out.
“It’s not a mental illness. You experience it as overwhelming confusion. That’s exactly why you have to tell people!” Helder urged me to tell and he urged me to research a cure, to get clarity on what was face blindness and what were the feelings and emotions around it. What was me and what was Mom.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear to think of my mother loving me but unable to face me, to stare into my eyes, to care for me emotionally, to offer me her face. Like any daughter, as much as I wanted to separate from her, I wanted to be deeply connected to her, I wanted to redeem her, I wanted to protect her. I wanted to love and to understand, in that order.
Four
My mother was not my first choice to drive me to Tallahassee, but she was the one who had agreed. Then she changed her mind. She would not condone this behavior after all. I told my father he had to take me. He didn’t say yes but he didn’t say no. The day before we were to leave, I gathered all my belongings in the foyer. My black Schwinn road bike, three spider plants, all of my books and records, a garbage bag of bedding and another of clothes, a pink comforter and matching curtains from Kmart that my mother had purchased for me. Then I wedged five egg crates of stuff—blow-dryer, radio, an old popcorn popper that Ruby had given me, shoes, clothes, art supplies—into the trunk and backseat of Fred’s car. I watered the plants and set them on plastic bags behind the seats. I locked the car and went and sat in my room and thought about how good college life was going to be.
But I was nervous too. I didn’t know anyone in Tallahassee, not a single soul. I didn’t know anyone here, either. But I didn’t have enough money saved up to make it in Tallahassee for even one full year. So what was the point of going? I’d just love it, and then I’d have to come back to Orlando and go to community college. And I’d be ruined for community college, having had courses in philosophy and a wonderful university boyfriend who was probably a poet. I’d be spoiled and stuck-up and unfit for Orlando, and I’d end up killing myself. Florida State University. How on earth did I think I was going to make it there?
Chicken was browning for dinner. I noticed Fred was having trouble walking. Moving from the stove to the fridge, he had to hang on to the countertop, push himself along. It was five in the afternoon. He was insistent and loud and garbled, yelling at me to set the table. I’d already set the table. “Mow the lawn!” he yelled. I pretended to go mow. I sat outside in the corner of the backyard. By the time dinner was ready, Fred was weeping on the sofa. He wanted me to sit with him. I sat next to him; I held his wet hands and I wanted to get away. He was upset now because no one had come to dinner. Ruby hadn’t materialized for the last couple nights, maybe longer. “Where is everyone?” he cried. He shook his hands, with my hand trapped in there. He begged me to call people up and invite them over. He named old friends of his, his first lawyer, a judge he considered a friend. His stockbroker. “Call him up, call him up,” he said.
“It should be just us,” I said. “It’s my last night.”
“We got this nice dinner here. Going to waste now.”
I got him another drink. Straight gin, two ice cubes.
“No, no, no,” he said. “Nothing decided. You’re not leaving.”
He hit the table. It was like a sunset how his mood changed, from weeping to rage, purple to dark.
I cleaned up the kitchen, mopped the floor, wiped down the counters while he watched television out in the den. I told myself I was like a character in a fairy tale, and I told myself I was a whiny, melodramatic, spoiled baby: lots of people all over the world had it way worse than this. I was dusting off the swinging doors when he wandered in. He held on to the fridge to remain upright.
“Time for inspection,” he said. He rubbed his hands on my shoulders. I stepped back, behind the bar stool. My main concern was his being sober enough the next day to drive back from Tallahassee after he dropped me off.
He pulled one of the heavy pans off the stove, where I’d set it to dry itself. “They have two sides!” he hollered. “They have two sides!” His words were slurry and I felt so sorry for him, wavering there in the kitchen, waving the pan around, his face full of judgment and condescension and confoundedness.
I smiled. I just needed to get through the next seven hours. I said, “You can be the person who does the backs from now on. I’ll do the fronts.”
He shook his head. “What?” he yelled. “No.”
“Seems like a good plan to me.”
Even as he swung, I could see that he would miss me. I ducked and the pan hit the counter hard, but I didn’t hear a sound. I saw only the divot in the Formica where the black line was broken. He dropped the pan and lurched toward me. I came out from behind the bar stool; I didn’t want to be trapped in the corner. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t anything. This was just a night, this was just a night. He grabbed me. He pulled my hair, put his hand hard on my rear end and clamped it there; I was wearing my little red shorts. Then he socked me in the temple with everything he had—not much. He was crying. He stumbled; his foot was hooked around the rung of the bar stool. I tried to stabilize him, to lean him more on the counter and get out of his grasp at the same time.
I slipped out the front door, past my stuff. Half walking, half running, I went down to the little bridge that spanned the channel between Conway Chain of Lakes. People honked as they went by. I waved. I waved to everyone, all the time. They were all probably crazy Belle Isle guys with a buzz going who didn’t know me, but I didn’t think it hurt anything to wave back, just in case it was someone I might have known, if I was a different girl.
I got up at five, showered, and made us eggs and grits and toast. Fred was in his bathroom. I loaded up the car with the last of my things: makeup bag, a pillowcase of clothes, my little white suitcase from when I was a kid. In it, I had packed The Nothing Book, all my love letters from Keith Landreu, menus from restaurants Wayne had taken me to, and the leather belts and purse Wayne had made me, plus letters from my mother, all the poems I’d written when Fred and I had lived in the terrible roachy place on McLeod Road. I knew I had way too much stuff. I knew I wasn’t coming back here ever again. I had to take everything I wanted, plus anything I might ever want again, when I was older, when I wanted to look back.
I put my ear to Fred’s bathroom door.
“Occupied!” he said.
Finally he came out. We stood in the foyer. I was jangling the car keys. “Well,” I said softly. “I loaded up like you said.”
“The deal’s off,” he said. “You’re not going.”
“Daddy,” I said. I laughed. “Everything’s in the car. Everything’s all set.” I was thinking how else I could get up there. I could hire someone to drive me. Maybe I could take the bus.
It took hours on the telephone to persuade her, but my mother drove me downtown to the bus station. As we scuttled oh-so-slowly along the back streets of Orlando in Suzy Q, her new used white truck, she said my father loved me so much, so very, very much, and neither of them wanted to see me go. He’d come around, she said. She said that if I left now, and she certainly hoped I would not, I shouldn’t expect to be able to come back. “You can’t waltz in and out,” she said. “Once you take this step, you’ve made a permanent decision, Heather. With implications for forever. When we get to that bus station, you have to really, really be sure.”
“Well, I’m not sure.” With my mom, I had to pretend the opposite of what I thought—and I couldn’t quite figure out what that was in this case. So I kept mostly quiet. I was so scared she would change her mind. Again. It seemed wisest to act uncertain, temporary.
I said something like Let me try, and fail. I said it was, in actuality, the last thing I wanted to do. I made the whole thing sound like an experiment that would last only a few days.
“It’s an expensive mistake, Heather Laurie, a costly mistake.”
But I could see she w
asn’t going to stop me. I took my suitcase and boarded the bus. I couldn’t believe she let me. I sat in the front row, catty-corner behind the driver. I could see his face in the giant rearview mirror. I couldn’t wait for him to close the door.
My mother waved and waved, not crying, not happy, just serious and forlorn behind the wheel of Suzy Q. She was watching me like a hawk. Would she make a scene? I could see her charging across the street and up the little steps, grabbing me, screaming at the bus driver, She is a minor! I’ll charge you with kidnapping!
Finally, we launched. I watched my mom until I couldn’t see her anymore for certain. I held my purse tight in my lap and wished the driver would go faster. Almost an hour later, we were still not out of Orlando. I couldn’t think about my parents: I had to sit straight and still, and it seemed that if I could stay like that—not worry, not look ahead or back, just center myself exactly in the moment—I wouldn’t risk them changing their minds.
From the short time my family had lived in Tallahassee, I remembered it as pretty, hilly country, with a capitol building and a cemetery with a French prince, the graves all above-ground. But nothing looked familiar to me. Instead of libraries and cool-looking professor-y people, I saw a crazy, wild street lined with bars running through the middle of campus like a freight train. It was the opposite of what I thought I’d find, but it was still good to be on my own and to be so far from home. I got off that bus and breathed the hot, still air and thought: This is my life beginning now, and it was all my doing.
The night was hot and the sky was spooky; the clouds were thin and creepy, not like Orlando at all. There were hills. The sidewalks were bumpy. Walking down a steep hill toward a motel I’d seen on the way in, the Ponce de Leon, I kept banging my little white suitcase against my leg.
A cab prowled up to me. “Where you need a ride to?”
“No,” I said. “I’m fine.” I kept thinking any second my mother was going to pull up. Any second it was all going to be over.
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