Her: A Memoir

by Christa Parravani

  I weighed my options at 9 p.m. on the blustery, preholiday Sunday night. The prospect before me was an early rise and the long drive north to my afternoon class at Keene. Faded autumn leaves blew in hurried gusts through the Brooklyn below D’s apartment, scratching the sidewalk with their dry pointy lobes. I assessed: students, or a poisoning? I choose death over teaching undergraduate photography.

  I lay down on D’s soft white carpet and waited for the pills to kick in. According to the Internet, it would take forty-five minutes to feel anything. It never occurred to me that D would find me lying dead in his living room when he arrived home. I couldn’t consider anyone, not even myself. D and I had been seeing each other on and off since Jedediah and I had separated. We’d even recently gotten serious enough that I had my own set of keys. But I wouldn’t allow myself to feel happiness over our new commitment. I was still wracked with guilt that I’d failed Jedediah. Although I couldn’t see it then, there was no way I’d make a decent partner living with those regrets. I think D knew that, too.

  That night the thought of leaving D’s apartment and returning alone to Keene was like a vise grip twisting my heart. Pain radiated in waves that thumped with its beat. I couldn’t breathe. If I have a soul, it was floating just outside of my body, an inch or so above my shoulders, kept from traveling to the ceiling only because anxiety, rage, and panic had frozen me in place. Hours, days, and years had brought me to this: sisterless, divorced, and without a clear idea of where I’d escape to fix myself. I must die, I thought. Even if I had to do it by my own hand.

  And then, in a stroke of luck, my cell phone rang, interrupting my suicide attempt. It was Jedediah. I’d called him earlier that day and begged him to take me back, to reconcile. He was resolutely opposed. It wasn’t the marriage I craved, but the solace of habit, the peace of our home. I’d found myself raging over the phone at him for not wanting me, raging in the exact way Cara had raged at me for my not wanting her. I’d wanted her though; just not the part of her that didn’t allow me any other life. Now I couldn’t access Cara or myself. With infidelity and pills and harsh words, I’d crushed down the good-enough person I’d once been. Why? I’ll never really know. But I was that raw and pained, like a naked woman in a winter whiteout.

  Jedediah had called to apologize for his rejections. He said he hadn’t meant to be harsh and regretted that we’d had to part ways. There was no way to articulate my real worries in my poisoned state. I didn’t really want the marriage back. I wanted Cara. No man could be her or provide her return. And because of that, I punished them all.

  “Whatever you say,” I slurred. “It’s not like you loved me anyway.”

  Jedediah’s voice shook. “Please, don’t—don’t say that. I did everything I could. You were everything to me.”

  The pills were working. “Soon you’ll be sorry.”

  “Have you taken something? You don’t sound like yourself.”

  “I took lots of something.”

  “Where are you?” He was frantic. “You’ve got to tell me where you are.”

  “That’s not your business anymore.” I couldn’t tell him I was at another man’s house. “It doesn’t matter where I am. You don’t need a pathetic ex-wife, a beggar. You don’t want me,” I said. “I get that now.”

  “But I do. I need you alive. Maybe we can fix this.”

  “Really?” I regretted the pills for the first time. “You’ll do that? You love me enough to come back?” I pulled my shoes on and walked out of the apartment, wobbling down the three flights of stairs to the street. “I don’t want to die.” I tripped and fell on the sidewalk, scraping my knee, blood trickling down my leg through the run in my tights.

  Jedediah stayed on the phone. “Steady,” he said. “One foot in front of the other.”

  “We can have a happy life,” I managed through my Zyprexa cloud. “I love you. I forgive you for leaving when it got hard.”

  “We both did regrettable things.”

  “We did?”

  “Where are you now?”

  “Outside of the emergency room.”

  “Good, get in there.” He was calm. “Give your phone to the receptionist.”

  “Thank you, Jeddy,” I whispered, thankful. “We’ll be okay.” I gave the nurse at the information desk my cell phone and she spoke with Jedediah for a minute. She finished and handed it back.

  “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Christa, be safe,” he begged through labored breath, crying. “I won’t be able to come back to you like you want me to. I needed to say that to make sure you’d get help. I’m sorry.”

  “I understand,” I said and hung up on him. I couldn’t expect him back; I’d done too much harm and ultimately it was my responsibility that our marriage was blown. I’d lost the two people in my life that I truly loved and, at that moment, I felt the losses were all my doing.

  * * *

  When Jedediah had finally moved out, eleven months after Cara died, I’d stood, defiant and physically frail, at our front door and handed him the last of his boxes.

  “If I’d been sick with cancer, would you still have left?” I asked him.

  “You don’t have cancer. You have a problem keeping your clothes on.”

  “But I’m sick,” I pleaded. “I hate what I’ve done to our lives.” I tried to explain that my encounters had had nothing to do with sex. I was on my hands and knees. I was crippled and everyone was telling me to walk. But there was no remembering how. There was no getting up.

  “It’s always about you,” he’d snapped. “I’ve thought of nothing else but you since we married. I must think of myself, cancer or not.”

  In the emergency room, dizzy from Zyprexa, I repeated the word cancer to myself over and over again. It distracted me from the waiting room filled with patients who stared at me shamelessly—the young woman wearing four-inch wine-colored suede heels and ripped leopard-print tights streaked with blood. I gave in to the pills. My legs folded and I hit the floor. I was falling down into a well with no bottom, no water.

  When I came to, in an emergency-room bed, having just vomited the last of the charcoal dispensed to rid my stomach of pills, I was thinking not of Jedediah but of Mike.

  In 1988, our neighbor had adopted a kitten, a fuzzy black ball with white-booted feet named Sebastian. Cara had grown so fond of this kitten that she’d traded her only pair of designer jeans with a classmate for a larger litter box and a harness and leash for him. She carried him in a pouch she had fashioned from her book bag.

  One whole afternoon, she had played with the kitten at the neighbor’s house, trying to convince him to lap some milk from her hand instead of from his bowl. Cara and the kitten sat together in the grass beneath a shady tree; it was a perfect Sunday spring afternoon. Cara was about to head home when the kitten caught sight of a squirrel, and chased after it just as our neighbor backed her car out of the driveway. Cara leapt after the kitten, but he was too fast. He was crushed beneath the car’s back tire. Yowling in pain and fear, he sprang from the car’s undercarriage to find Cara’s comfort. He died at her feet.

  Mike heard the ruckus and ran like a good solider to survey the threat. He found his stepdaughter crying inconsolably over her lost friend’s twisted body.

  “Why did this happen?” Cara sobbed to Mike, needing a father’s consoling answer.

  “There’s no telling,” he said, and wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. “I will tell you,” he added, “you’ll be lucky if this is the worst thing that ever happens to you.”

  As years went by, Cara’s pain from losing Sebastian faded until, finally, her memory of the day was centered around how absolutely pitiless she’d found Mike’s advice. “Can you believe we were raised by that man?” she’d ask me rhetorically. “I mean, who says that?”

  It is the job of the Marine to keep his men safe, to watch their backs when they’re “in the shit,” as Mike would say. We two girls were Mike’s men, like it or not. In w
inning my mother’s hand, he’d also taken ours: rambunctious, curious, dirt jammed beneath our fingernails from digging for worms in the herb garden; he’d hold our dirty hands as we crossed the street, pull us back at even the hint of a car—the low purr of an engine or a twinkle from headlights. He’d stand guard, manning the living-room window while we romped in the yard, watching from the safety of air-conditioning. He kept a good eye on his brood, ready to rock ’n’ roll, to pummel and destroy any invader: stray dog, storm, stranger. He was armed and ready: pepper spray, umbrella, or his fist, as solid as stone. It wasn’t only weaponry Mike deployed. He was chock-full of advice, and he didn’t care about a warm and cuddly delivery. As much as we’d troubled him, he must have loved us.

  Nearly twenty years later, alone with beeping hospital machines and my frantic desire to die, I found myself thinking that Mike had been right. Cara and I had both been very lucky the day the neighbor’s kitten died.

  Would this worst thing ever end?

  On my dash out of D’s apartment to the emergency room, I’d forgotten to close the computer, exposing my search for Zyprexa overdose instructions. D came home late that night to find the empty pill bottle tipped over on the floor next to the computer. He sat down calmly and called all of the hospitals in Brooklyn and New England until he located me, at 2 a.m. I woke in the early morning from my Zyprexa hangover, D standing at my bedside rightfully glowering down at me. He stood, hands in his pockets, next to the guard they’d assigned to my cubicle to make sure I didn’t try to run. D was still wearing his early-winter navy wool overcoat with the smooth wood buttons. He’d wrapped his favorite yellow cashmere scarf around his neck and it hung in a blazing drape over his collar and down onto his chest. He was tall and handsome. I was certain he hated me. He didn’t. He went on loving me in his own way for years. He loved me until I was no longer sick, neither of us knowing what to do with a sane me.

  “I love you,” I said, and lifted my hand to my mouth and wiped. Charcoal smudged the back of it. My light blue paper hospital gown was specked with vomit and tears. I was drowsy and not in complete control of my speech. My unsteady heart was unforgivably on the sleeve of my flimsy hospital dressings. D and I hadn’t even weathered a flu yet. I was certain this health emergency would be our end.

  “I love you too, C.” He brushed the side of my face with his fingertips, tenderly, paying no mind to my absolute filth. “But,” he conceded, “you’re not coming back into my apartment like this.” He’d spent months making his home into a place where I’d be safe from my own ideation. I’d just defiled that. “I can’t have you at home anymore, not without help,” D worried. “You need to be someplace with professionals, doctors who know what they’re doing. I’m a writer, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I don’t want to be locked up.” I pouted. “I have nowhere to go, D. Please?”

  “I can’t risk another episode like this.” He pulled the thin hospital blanket up over my shoulders, tucking me in. “You might not make it next time. Losing you would be maddening. I can’t risk it.”

  “Fine, then. I’ll figure it out.” I turned away from him and stared at the hospital equipment on the wall. D hadn’t slept all night and was near tears. I pushed him further. “If I can’t stay with you, would you mind moving my car? I’m parked in a tow zone. I don’t want to get a ticket. The keys are in my purse.”

  * * *

  I was discharged from the emergency room late in the morning and though D kindly escorted me to my committal, I’d made the choice to be hospitalized. I had ideas about a particular hospital this time. Marilyn Monroe and Robert Lowell had gone there for treatment, for exhaustion and for clinical depression. Payne Whitney is a sprawling, idyllic campus scattered with mortared stone buildings that look like castles. I imagined therapists wearing herringbone suits with elbow patches, rushing in and out of the residences, holding patients’ charts. I pictured the interior of the hospital as highly and regally decorated with floral wallpaper and gilt wood settees. I was right about the look of the campus, for the most part. But the offices are staffed by workers slumped over desks piled high with paperwork. The decor is Victorian and the furniture is a mix of richly colored wine and paisley fabrics. Romantic landscape paintings and realist portraits of the founding doctors of the hospital hang in the foyer. The ward, in contrast, is stark. The floors are linoleum tiled for easy body-fluid cleanup; the place is lit entirely with fluorescent track lights with flickering, dim bulbs.

  With D alongside me, the doctors and nurses kept asking if I’d like my father to be informed of my treatment plan. I corrected them at first but grew tired of explaining to new staff members, who observed D weeping like a frightened parent in the waiting room. “I don’t think my dad needs any more information.” The admitting doctor pressed a stethoscope onto my bare chest. “I think he’s had enough.”

  * * *

  There were enough of us at Payne Whitney then that I don’t remember the bearded lady’s name. She wore a knit brown hat and cargo jeans. I looked at her cap and thought about the rebellious brain beneath it. She sprouted opposing personalities. Her beard grew in black wooly wisps; she didn’t fuss over it, but stroked it in group therapy the same way my male colleagues had stroked their beards in our art department faculty meetings.

  The common room at Payne Whitney was also the group therapy room, the arts and crafts room, and the room used for containing us whenever they hauled a new, resisting patient into the unit by force. They’d signal us in by blowing a whistle and usher us inside single file. We’d wait in a confused mass of medication-induced twitching, nervous chatter, and, in the case of the youngest patient on the ward, uncontrollable skin picking.

  Sleeping through the night is difficult in a mental hospital. Fifteen minutes after lights-out, there is bed check. Nurses go from room to room to observe patients while they’re sleeping, to make certain they’ve not gotten up and tried to hang themselves, or stolen a spork from the cafeteria, fashioning it, while they should be dreaming, into a shiv. Doors are left open a crack, tapped lightly, and patients are viewed. Sometimes there is a small square window at the top of the doors covered with a thin curtain. The curtains on most of the doors at Payne Whitney were light blue and strung up with thin silver hooks that resembled fishing line. The nurses slid the curtains open and observed. My door was curtainless and cracked; it creaked open. I anticipated the noise; lying on my side, I stared through the semidarkness of the room at the opening door. The night nurse looked in. She closed one of her eyes, as if she were staring at a distant planet through a telescope or glimpsing me through a peephole. She took pity through her open eye.

  “I’m awake,” I said to my peering nurse. “I need more meds.”

  “It’s not time,” she said. “Meds are taken at seven a.m., you know that.” The door whined closed, as closed as was allowed.

  The door opened, again. “I’m still awake,” I said.

  The nurse came into my room and sat on my bed. I was lucky. I was one of the few patients who didn’t have a roommate. “See yourself on a beach listening to the waves break,” she said. “Rest. Feel the sand beneath you, holding the weight of your head.” I closed my eyes. I thought of Cara full of formaldehyde. My fluttering lids and medication-puffy face didn’t just resemble hers. They were hers. It’s like the adult moment when you understand that you’ve turned into your own mother or father, except it’s psychotic. “If that doesn’t work, take this.” The nurse handed me an orange pill.

  “Why did she have to die?” I asked.

  “God always takes the good ones,” she said blankly, as if she’d practiced it. “Now, try to sleep.”

  I imagined again that I was Cara in my Payne Whitney bed. I took my hands and held them out in front of my face. My bitten-down fingernails were painted red and they were Cara’s hands, my twin hands. I tried to change the visual; I saw myself as a skinny tiger stalking through a jungle full of poachers. They’d need a blow dart to take me down.
/>   Fifteen minutes passed.

  The nurse peeked at me through the slit of the open door, careful.

  “I’m awake,” I said.

  “Still?”

  “Please?” I sat up. “I need something more, another pill.” I was wearing the brand-new pajamas that my mother brought me during her day visit: black yoga pants and a red T-shirt, both soft from washing and perfumed with fabric softener.

  “Let me make a call.” The nurse came back with a paper cup with a couple of Benadryls inside. “You can’t have anything more than this.” She shook the pills from the cup out into my hand.

  “Thanks.” I took the pills without water. I started to cry, sorry for myself. “Will I ever get better?”

  “I can’t say I know that,” she said. The nurse put her arms around my shoulders and rocked me.

  * * *

  On my third day on the ward I was alerted that Dr. Otto Kernberg had taken an interest in my case. He’d devoted his life’s work to defining and discovering borderline personality disorder, the illness Cara had been diagnosed with while at The Meadows. Kernberg wanted to meet with me to assess my condition.

  A young medical student, a woman who wore a tight pencil skirt and matching pumps and wore her long black hair knotted into a bun at the base of her neck, delivered the news with a hushed voice. She told me of Kernberg in such a way that I was to know that what I’d just received was near an invitation from God himself and I must accept. She took great pains in explaining why I ought to meet with Kernberg and consider staying at the hospital indefinitely to remain in his care.

  I asked if I’d be allowed to leave the hospital and go outdoors for the visit and was told that there was a short walk across campus to Kernberg’s office. I accepted immediately.

  * * *

  I was no longer the witty professor who sparred with students over composition and photo theory, or the artist full of fire and cutting compassionate vision. I wasn’t the loyal friend, loving daughter, or faithful wife I’d once thought myself. I was a fugitive and a schemer. I hadn’t been at Payne Whitney long enough to earn the privilege of walking the courtyard; meeting with Kernberg could help me make a break.