Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  I told her how I wanted to throw myself off of his balcony that night and just be done with it, this life, this body. I told her I didn’t believe in God but that I wanted to join my sister. I told her I changed my mind as I stood on his terrace and looked down: I saw a pile of what I imagined to be ripped-up canvas and discarded paints. I refused to die on his terrible paintings.

  I told her I called Jedediah instead of jumping. His voice had a gravelly quality, like sandpaper words caught in his throat. I’d woken him up. I hadn’t remembered that from this great distance, his night was my earliest morning. “Jedediah?” I answered, relieved to hear his gentle voice. “I can’t do this.”

  “You can’t do what?” he asked. He sounded worried and tense but also distant. He had the familiar sound of fatigue that I recognized from my own voice. I used to take this tone with Cara when she’d call me from one of her nights.

  “Live,” I told him and started to weep. “I’m calling from another man’s bedroom.”

  “Where are you?” he sighed.

  “I’m still in Rome,” I said. “But I need to come home. I have to change my ticket.”

  “Do you think I can save you when you’re all the way around the world if I can’t even do it from our living room?”

  “Probably not,” I answered quietly. “I just needed to hear your voice.”

  “You can’t keep calling me like this,” he said. “Just tell me you’re going to be okay, that I’ll see you at home. Can you do that?”

  “I’ll see you at home,” I told him and hung up, even though I wasn’t sure that was true. I told the woman on the plane that I imagined him coldly holding our phone in his hands. I told her it no longer mattered to him who I’d lain beneath. I’d hurt him so much that his heart had gone dead.

  By the time I had told the woman everything, we were in mid-flight. She sat beside me and cut the food on my dinner tray into tiny pieces. She buttered my bread and asked the attendants to bring water and hot coffee. The woman nodded and listened. She listened until the plane landed and I had lived.

  Chapter 24

  I kept my teaching job throughout my first year of mourning but I dressed in Cara’s clothes. I wore them down to holes and stains. I dated a handful of men I’d met on the Internet, though I was still married. All the while, I was perfectly convinced that I could talk to Cara, and that she was asking me to become her, to give her life and ruin mine, to join her in death.

  There hadn’t been a single day since she’d died that I’d been without medications. As more time passed, the drugs grew in number and dose. There were pills to wake up, to stimulate appetite, and to mollify. Pills to keep me upright, and pills to put me out, deep into sleep. I kept them in a line on the windowsill in my bedroom. I identified which I had in hand by shaking the bottles. I knew the proper pill even in complete darkness by the sound they made as they rattled against the bottle’s lid. The medicines worked their magic: I hadn’t walked in front of a bus, even though I so wanted to. But the pills made me hard to live with.

  My job was our ruling battle. Jedediah had been planning his departure from our marriage since we’d returned from Hawaii and, understandably, he feared I’d lose my income. Neither of us had much money. Jedediah wouldn’t be able to support me even for a short time, though he would have if he could. My unemployment meant he’d leave a very sick wife with no financial means of her own. He couldn’t bear to do that, so he gently and sometimes not so gently pushed me into work.

  In the early hours before teaching one morning, the autumn after we lost Cara, I woke up peeing the bed. And when the spring semester was near, it was this incident that fueled my argument to Jedediah that I shouldn’t return to work. I was clearly no better off than the semester before.

  I had been a bed-wetter as a child; Cara used to joke that I’d flood her out of the bed we shared. She had a recurring dream that a monsoon would sweep the landscape of her nocturne. Cara clung to a life raft. No matter where she was in her dream, she was washed away.

  Without her, I was doing it again.

  This time Jedediah was awake and drinking his morning coffee in the kitchen. I cried out from our room and he ran in and pulled open the drapes. The morning light exposed me. “I’m scared,” I said.

  “What’s going on?” He sat down beside me and then jumped back up. The seat of his pants and his palms were damp.

  “I wet the bed.”

  “I can see that.” Jedediah looked down at his hands in disbelief. “It’ll be okay.” He took me into his arms.

  “I don’t want to go to work today,” I said. “I don’t feel well.”

  Jedediah walked across our bedroom and drew the curtains closed. The bedroom had a wall of windows, each of which was tricky to close in its own way: a loose hinge, a broken spring, chipped wood where the window met the sill; a gap that invited the chill of winter. Drafts had always been a problem in that house. We learned to hold each other close during the coldest months to keep warm.

  Jedediah slept soundly with a thin blanket and a hard pillow. I favored down comforters and velvet shams to cover goose feather pillows. Jedediah never snored, he only purred and sometimes talked in his sleep, although I can’t remember what he’d sleep say. There was a time when I was able to recount each and every word; I savored them and I’d tell him what he’d said the next morning. Now I’d peed the bed and my young frightened husband slid the top drawer of my dresser open. He looked carefully through the garments that lay before him in the drawer and took out a fresh nightgown. Jedediah motioned gently for me to lift my arms; he pulled the soiled nightwear over my head. I sat naked in our pee bed with my arms extended, waiting for Jedediah to serve me my clean dressings.

  “Get up, honey. We’ve got to change the sheets and get you into a shower. I don’t want to put this on you until you’re clean.” He looked at the stain I’d made on our white sheets. I stood up and walked naked to the bathroom. Jedediah waited patiently for me in the kitchen; he slipped the new gown over my shoulders.

  “I can’t call in.” I hugged him, a plea hug. “Could you call the administrative assistant for me and tell her I have diarrhea?” That was our nearly decade-long joke. Diarrhea was a sure-fire, nonnegotiable reason to skip a workday. Who’d take issue with it? It was best in a call-in situation to try to disarm your superior with a little bit of self-humiliation. I wished Jedediah would shush me and change the sheets, send me back to bed, and keep the curtains closed. Maybe I’d sleep it off. I could wake in a couple of hours and forget it all, start the day at noon and sip coffee with him; in my fantasy we’d both pretend I’d been faithful. I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled down tighter than I should have. He dialed the phone and left the message.

  “Christa won’t be in today,” I heard him say into the phone from the other room. He hesitated on the reason. “She’s not been sleeping. Actually, she’s not slept for days.”

  Chapter 25

  At last, Jedediah decided to move out. I sold our house and moved myself and all of my things to Keene, a small mill town in rural New Hampshire. I would teach at Keene State College.

  I taught a full load of photography classes that year: three courses in the fall and three in the spring. I was known, at the time of my hire, to be competent and reliable—if a bit intense and flamboyant. I had good recommendations and the right language for critique. I was young enough that my students trusted me as one of their own, pretty enough that they thought me harmless, and old enough that they understood I knew something about photography that they didn’t yet know.

  Keene is quaint, as long as you’re not a newly separated woman in her early thirties with a long-distance love prospect and no local friends, and as long as you enjoy kayaking and mountain biking. All the shoes I brought were pumps. I owned a badly house-trained barky Chihuahua that I’d procured from petfinder.com, a pair of Siamese cats I’d bought in my early twenties and no longer had the wherewithal to care for, a collection of hundreds of e
therized exotic butterflies, wings pinned with map tacks and stuck behind glass. I’d bought them from a junk shop and spent my entire faculty moving allowance on the five-case collection. The owners of the store had tried their best, in earnest, to discourage my purchase: a single woman ought not to spend that kind of money on extravagances; a single woman might find herself in an uncertain economic position.

  Somehow I did not fully realize that I would be a single woman in Keene. I moved into a sunny yellow, wood-sided Victorian with white painted shutters and doors, and I considered what a perfect place it would be to bring a baby home to. I fantasized that D, the man I’d just begun to date, would appear on my doorstep on bended knee. I pictured a winter wedding, followed by an autumn baby.

  The house was directly across the street from an elementary school. The school rang its morning bells and began the students’ day at a surprising 6:30 a.m. Jaw clenched, hands gripping my down comforter, hung over on Ambien and Valium, I’d lie in bed in the early morning and listen, learning to distinguish the piercing trill of girl screams from the low vibrato of boy yowls.

  At 7 a.m., my alarm would go off. I’d groan into my pillow, put a foot on the floor, an arm through my dress sleeve, and drive to work with my brain still sleeping (the pills having not worn off yet). I’d coast the car into the faculty lot and grab the parking hangtags from the glove box.

  Gradually, combing my hair in the morning became out of the question. Brushing my teeth began to take the kind of effort that, say, taking the bar exam might require. I hadn’t opened my mail in six months for fear of delinquent bills. When I did not get to work on time, my students knew to tack up their photographs and wait for me. I’d trained them to do it with care, without putting holes in the corners. They used the tacks around the edges of the photographs to keep the images in place and preserve them from the damage of display.

  If I had an anxiety attack during the fifteen-minute class break, I’d hide in my office to cry. I’d crouch bomb-drill-style beneath my desk. I’d extend the break to a full half-hour—then get back to my students.

  My classroom at Keene was on the third floor of Fern Arts, a sand-colored brick building with tract windows running its perimeter. Fern Arts also housed a professional-level theater program and a nationally recognized art gallery. Equipment wasn’t brand-new, but it functioned. And floors were swept. Chalkboards were wiped clean at the end of each day. Chairs and desks were reset into neat rows.

  I came in early one morning and observed a man from the maintenance department drilling a green placard with my name on it onto my office door. I sipped my coffee in a quiet panic, drinking the only calories I allowed myself for the day. I weighed the responsibility that came with such a public declaration as a placard, and then spent the morning drafting and redrafting a letter of resignation, explaining why I wasn’t deserving of such a public acknowledgment.

  I called the dean’s office and spoke with the administrative assistant. “I’m not sure I deserve to have my name and title listed on a door,” I said.

  “It’s your office, Christa. It’s only a formality,” the dean’s assistant answered with a twinge of annoyance.

  “Basically,” the assistant went on, “that nameplate isn’t an ‘acknowledgment,’ it’s just a way for students to find you easily, so you can sign their add/drop forms.”

  I drafted dozens of resignation letters during the months I taught at Keene, filing them in the metal cabinet under my desk. One of them read, simply: Dear Dean: I’m dying and I’ll not be able to fulfill the duties of my position upon my death. Regards, Christa Parravani.

  But beneath my name placard, a colleague had congratulated me on my hire by tacking a hand-typed Henri Cartier-Bresson quote into the wooden door with a single sewing pin: “Photography is to place head and heart and eye along the same line of sight. It’s a way of life.” And as my students were helping to keep me alive by requiring that I get out of bed each morning and go somewhere outside myself, I tried to give them my best performance.

  They brought in pictures that revealed courage: drunken family members, posing in cluttered living rooms, first sexual encounters and bashful studies of the body, attempts to describe lost loved ones through landscapes or crumbling homes.

  They’d also bring in some of the same pictures class after class, different students photographing and then printing the same places. The covered bridge as subject reappeared most of all. The rickety wooden Queenpost bridge was over two hundred years old. It had been painted red, though the paint had long since chipped and peeled. Winter snowstorms and driving spring rains and summer mold had eroded the bridge. It is now bowed and unsound; the decrepit bridge feebly provides passage over a shallow arm of the Ashuelot River.

  My students centered the bridge in their pictures, put its wooden plank road directly in the middle of their frames. They set their cameras low, which caused a tunneling effect. It’s an amateur’s mistake to overlook the left and right sides of an image. All four corners are important, more important than the middle square. But in every bridge picture light glowed from the end of the tunnel; the saving grace of every bridge image was this quarter-size ethereal spot, an orb that eased the failure of bad technique.

  My students’ projects were endless and I encouraged each one. I inspired them to snap their shutters, to expand and contract the diaphragms of their lenses. They brought their lives into the classroom through their picture making: eight-by-ten-inch, double weight, and printed on fiber glossy paper. The pictures my students made were personal and often missed the mark and, at other times, didn’t miss it at all.

  During a late October group critique, I stood at the front of the classroom and studied a collection of images that a female student had tacked to the wall. All of her pictures were of young women posed in positions that suggested suffering or malaise. I pointed at a picture of a blond woman who sat on a linoleum floor. The girl in the picture appeared to be reading a handwritten letter. She shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand; her elegant fingers, her visor. She clutched her willowy neck with the other hand, a sign of difficult news. The cursive script of the letter she read was legible in the photographer’s print.

  I congratulated the student on her darkroom technique, and then went in for my composition kill. “If it looks like a Paxil ad it’s not working,” I said. “The woman in this photograph is too aware of the camera and of the photographer to properly articulate the kind of anguish over love or loss that the photographer is trying to convey. It’s contrived. Your self-conscious approach to the camera creates an uncomfortable feeling for the viewer.” The student eagerly took notes and set her pen dolefully on her desk. “You’ll have to try harder to be invisible next time,” I said, “to make your model comfortable enough to be herself.”

  I moved on to the next image. “This photograph is working.” It was a picture of a young woman with black hair, styled in a Louise Brooks bob that sharply framed her face. Thick straight bangs cut across her forehead, made a harsh line just above her eyebrows. The woman was too thin. Her shoulders looked like weak, bent hangers that could barely hold her clothes. She wore a dark dress and a tightly fitted, cropped black vest. She sat on a table with her legs crossed, looking down at a thick, open book on her lap. She had drawn one hand up to her forehead, touching the place right above her nose. “The woman is looking at the book but she isn’t reading it,” I said. “You can tell by the way she’s averted her eyes from the page. She’s looking at the book but she’s somewhere far away from it. The photographer was able to capture this woman in a telling moment of reflection. Her thinness and her gesture tell us something true about her possible life situation. Is this woman going through something wrenching?” I asked, proudly.

  I’d been looking at pictures long enough to know I was right on the money with my reading of the picture. The woman in the frame was fucked up; it was obvious from her body cues. The photographer had done an excellent job of being invisible. She’d found a s
ubject who was comfortable enough to show herself—or who was so entirely strung out on pain that she’d been unaware that her image was being taken. “Am I right?” I asked. I received no response. I’d hoped I’d been able to intuit what the young photographer had asked me to see in her photograph, but nobody in the class made a sound or moved an inch. I turned back to the picture of the frail woman and studied it. The woman in the photograph was me.

  Chapter 26

  The bearded lady and I watched romance movies in the television room.

  It was just the two of us most of the time. The other patients on the fourth-floor personality disorder wing were usually too agitated or sedated for movie privileges. The personality disorder wing at the Payne Whitney Clinic housed patients who fell into categories ranging from dissociative identity disorder to psychosis; major depression could land you in there, too, if you’d lost an identical twin and had bouts of turning into her. I spent a week with a handful of the seriously disturbed. I did the New York Times daily crossword puzzle, made origami swans, and painted ceramic reindeer in craft group, and I’d go into my room and write poetry in my small clothbound red notebook.

  I’d checked myself into the Payne Whitney campus in White Plains several days before Thanksgiving the year after we lost Cara, after I’d flipped open a bottle of Zyprexa and swallowed all of them. My doctor had told me to take two a day to relieve anxiety; swatting an elephant with a newspaper, that’s what my dose was. I’d talked her into giving me a sixty-day supply so I wouldn’t have to get refills, but I hadn’t taken a single one of the medium-size, smooth-coated, baby blue pills, not until my impromptu end night. Each of the pills was imprinted with a stamp that read: Lily 4415. I was visiting my boyfriend, D, in Brooklyn, when I Googled “How to overdose on Zyprexa” on his computer; I followed the directions carefully. D was out at a business dinner and I knew he wouldn’t be home until nearly midnight. I’d have time to spare if I decided to die.