by Leigh Stein
“What decisions am I qualified to make? Should I be operating heavy machinery? Do you think my outfit looks okay?”
I was still taking the antidepressant cornucopia she’d prescribed, but my anxiety was escalating, and the idea of seeing her again only made me more anxious. I had a days-of-the-week pill case just like my grandfather in Boca Raton, which organized my pink and blue tablets like characters from the board game LIFE. Every morning, I swallowed a bride and a groom with a glass of milk.
But they didn’t seem to be working like they used to, or maybe it was just that I was getting worse, so I wanted an MRI. I wanted to see a map of my brain and an arrow pointing to what was wrong with it.
I had ended up calling my mom’s doctor’s office and telling them I’d take an appointment with whoever had availability, which was probably not the best way to set up a mental health consultation, but I couldn’t imagine anyone worse than Dr. Libman. Unless I had an appointment with a flesh-eating zombie, or Neil Patrick Harris.
“Ms. Kohler? Esther Kohler?”
A very tall nurse in scrubs printed with scenes from Dr. Seuss books took my blood pressure and left. Before even introducing himself, the doctor looked at the readings, and when he saw that my blood pressure was 84 over 58 he told me that I was almost alive, which confirmed what I suspected: I had an inoperable brain tumor, and he wasn’t going to waste time with formalities because I wasn’t long for this earth.
“Would you say my blood pressure’s indicative of a fatal illness?”
“Young, thin women typically have low blood pressure,” he said. There was a compliment in there somewhere and I took it, and stored it somewhere I’d be able to access later.
“You can lie back on the table.”
I did as he said. Maybe my life could be saved with a lobotomy. Do they perform lobotomies anymore? I wondered. The doctor was putting on gloves. I was staring at the ceiling, where a picture of a deserted beach had been torn from a calendar and pinned with a thumbtack. Wasn’t there a Tennessee Williams play about lobotomies and cannibalism? And wasn’t it set on an island?
“When did you say your last pap smear was?”
“That’s not why I’m here,” I said, and sat back up. “I don’t need one. I get them, like, all the time.”
“If you’ve had one within the last year, we don’t have to do one today,” he said, clearly not a fan of jokes, laughter, or hyperbole. “What can I help you with?”
“I can’t sleep,” I said. “Or when I do sleep, I wake up throughout the night, feeling panicked. And I forget the right words.”
“Such as?”
“The word I want. The right name for something. The other day I couldn’t remember what Pop Tarts were called and I like kept thinking, Toaster pastry. Toaster pastry, but it never came. It’s like I have a brain tumor.”
I was wearing shorts. The white paper on the table stuck to my thighs.
“Deep breath in, please.”
He put the stethoscope above my heart.
“And another.”
My pulse always raced at the doctor’s. I tried to slow my breathing, but I didn’t even know if that would help anything. As I breathed, I wondered if any measure of my physical health could be considered accurate if recorded under circumstances that actually disrupted my health.
The observer effect. The act of observing changes the phenomenon being observed. Where I had learned that? I could see the textbook page in my mind.
“Any vision problems?”
“I wear contacts.”
“Any blurred vision, double vision, loss of peripheral vision?”
“Not usually.”
“Occasionally?”
“I guess not,” I said.
“Any pins and needles sensations? Loss of feeling in your arms or legs?”
“No.” To compete with his cool skepticism, I was tempted to lie, to answer yes. I had been on the Internet and I knew what I needed to say in order to convince him I was dying.
The doctor removed the earpieces of his stethoscope and felt the glands in my neck.
“History of depression or anxiety?”
“I’m on Wellbutrin and Zoloft.”
I didn’t tell him that my parents had sent me to a therapist for the first time at my fourth grade teacher’s request because of what happened after we learned the definition of the word “utopia.” Mrs. Taylor told our class that we were each to build a clay model of our own idyllic land and write an essay describing its inhabitants and code of laws. Mine was a lush tropical island full of orphans and small, furry animals, such as guinea pigs and chinchillas, which were kept as pets and never eaten. The animals could speak, in a language the children understood, and they said things like, Eepity bip bip! Shimminy pop! Slithery twility coo! In retrospect, the language sounded a lot like a combination of doo-wop and the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky.”
The orphans on my island were egalitarian. They recycled and rode tandem bicycles and looked like Precious Moments dolls. I knew I had to explain what had happened to their parents, to explain the missing adults, so at the very end of the essay, after all my cutesy bips and coos, I described a horrific plague that had swept the island in the 1980s and killed everyone over the age of twelve by cooking their bodies from the inside out. In my utopia, all the adults were dead and the children survived upon their parents’ roasted flesh.
“More than two depressive episodes in your life so far?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “A few. I just had one before graduation.”
“Where’d you go to school?”
“Northwestern.”
“Good school. My eldest daughter is applying there this fall.”
“Small world,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
Dr. Humorless told me to follow his pen with my eyes without moving my head. I pretended I was a cat, stalking a bird.
“As far as mental illness goes you’re what we call a lifer,” he decided, and wrote something in my file that was too illegible to read from where I sat. A lifer. He made it sound like I was an alcoholic. Part of me resented that he could say something like that after knowing me for approximately six minutes; part of me worried that he was right: I would always be like this. The therapist I’d seen when I was ten worked in a cozy office with stain-resistant carpeting and an actual sandbox filled with G.I. Joes and plastic palm trees. There was a Newton’s Cradle on his desk. The metal balls hit each other hypnotically, incessantly, for no other reason other than that they could.
This one thought I suffered from hypochondria. He thought my brain tumor was psychosomatic. I was going to have to be direct.
“I need something for my anxiety. You know my mom. You know I’m legit.”
The doctor didn’t show any indication that he’d heard what I’d just said. He was busy writing. Attached to the front of my folder was a form with every possible diagnosis and a little space to put a check. It seemed overwhelming, the great number of things that could be wrong with me: “chronic indecision,” I imagined as one. “Hypochondria precipitated by general apathy towards life; crippling deficit in goal-setting.” I waited to see how many I’d have (Tell her what she’s won, Doc!), but he didn’t do anything with the form.
“Who is prescribing the medication you’re on now?”
“Her name is Dr. Libman. I was seeing her when I was in school, but it’s hard to make the drive up there now.”
“I’d like to run some blood work to rule out a thyroid condition,” the doctor said, a propos of rien, “but I’ll write you a prescription for a small quantity of Ativan. For the anxiety. Come back in about a week for the lab results, and we can discuss your medication management then. I also think you should find someone to talk to. Sometimes we just need someone who will listen. Any other questions?”
I looked over my shoulder, to see if there were cue cards he was reading from. Nope. He’d memorized his lines.
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“So you don’t think it’s AIDS?” It never hurt to be too sure.
He looked up from his prescription pad. “Do you have unprotected sex?”
Only with transsexual prostitutes.
“No,” I said.
“Are you an intravenous drug user?”
“No.”
“Probably not, then,” he said, “unless you’ve been drinking breast milk lately,” and resumed writing, in even smaller handwriting, shielding the paper from my eyes with his arm like I had to be protected from my own diagnosis. Then he left the room with my chart.
When the technician took my blood, I watched her put the needle in my vein so I would know when to expect the pinch.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “He doesn’t think it’s AIDS.”
• • •
After my appointment, I drove to Walmart to fill my prescription. Find someone to talk to. Pay someone to listen. No more Dr. Libman. In the car, a Modest Mouse song came on 93XRT that went, While we’re on the subject, could we change the subject now? I brought a book inside to read while I waited, and held it in my lap so the cover wouldn’t show. The book was a gift from my mom called Calling in “The One”: 7 Weeks to Attract the Love of Your Life. I wasn’t sure what her hurry was. I’d never had a long-term boyfriend, so maybe she was holding the promise of one in front of my nose so I would just get my act together, fix myself. Calling in “The One” didn’t have any characters or plot. It just had Katherine Woodward Thomas, M.A., M.F.T., who wanted me to know that I would never find a soul mate until I let go of my past and lived from one fleeting moment to the next, like someone with Alzheimer’s. Is that what you mean, Katherine? Like someone with Alzheimer’s? It reminded me of a story by Alice Munro about a woman named Fiona with Alzheimer’s, who falls in love with a man at the home where her husband puts her, the home where she’ll spend the rest of her days.
I wished I were Fiona. I wished Jack and Jocelyn would get married, and then in forty to fifty years when he developed Alzheimer’s we could be institutionalized together, and fall in love, and each and every dawn would be the most beautiful dawn we had ever seen, because we would have no memory of those that came before it.
FLOATIES
A wide golden frame, about as deep as a window box, hung on the Browns’ dining room wall. It was a strikingly ornate toy theater Amy had built. Inside, a tableau was already set so that only one play could be performed: Joan of Arc.
A tiny Joan was attached to a tiny metal skewer that slid her back and forth along the frame. If you turned a knob on the side of the box, flames made from red cellophane erupted from the bottom. I pointed out that she was missing some angels.
“May got ahold of the angel puppets and decided to make them bath toys,” Amy told me. “I told her it may look like a toy theater, but it isn’t a toy toy theater. I don’t think she got it. So in my version of the story, no angels, Joan just hears voices in her head, and gets burned to death.”
“So your Joan is psychotic.”
Amy sighed and nodded. “I won an award for it, back in college. I used to win all kinds of prizes.” She went up to the frame and turned the knob so the flames moved, and engulfed Joan’s tiny body.
“Ahhhhhhhh,” I screamed, in a small voice.
“My voices have deceived me,” Amy answered.
During the first two weeks I watched May, Amy went up into the attic and stayed there all day, while May and I wove crowns, and went wading in the kiddie pool in the backyard. When it was time for May’s nap, I would tidy up. And by tidy up, I mean snoop.
I felt like a detective in an Agatha Christie novel. I was looking for evidence of what had happened to these people. The before and after. I wasn’t just the babysitter; I was an investigator, a collector, a memory-keeper. I was obsessed. This wasn’t benign curiosity; this was deliberate privacy invasion. My leftover acting habits. It was as if I wanted to know everything so that I could recreate them as characters in a play that would never be performed.
I liked finding pictures of Amy that were taken when she was pregnant, because in them she looked so young and soft, so helpless and aglow. She looked more like the Amy I’d met at the party than the Amy I knew now, whose arms were sinewy, and whose face was sallow and pockmarked without makeup. If you saw the woman in the picture board your bus, you’d give her your seat. If the woman told you she was an artist, you’d imagine watercolors of waterlilies, pastorals, paintings of small children tethered to balloons.
There was an entire album of the three of them on vacation, before Annika was born, holding one another on sandy beaches or posed in front of landmarks: the Washington Monument, the steps of the Art Institute, a lighthouse. Nate had the All-American features of a glasses-wearing J. Crew model, and Amy was usually wearing a garishly patterned dress, a dress to show the world that even though, yes, she was a woman who stayed home with her child all day, she was not one of those women who stayed home with her child all day.
• • •
One afternoon Nate came home early, and instead of sending me home, Amy asked me to make some iced tea.
May followed the three of us onto the back deck, which was covered in damp maple leaves from a recent midnight storm. She picked up a broken branch and carefully descended the stairs—two tiny feet to every step—to the yard, holding the branch ahead of her like a torch to light the way.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To get little bugs,” she said.
“No little bugs in Daddy’s briefcase, though, okay, sweetheart?” Nate looked at me and raised his eyebrows, indicating that, in case I didn’t already know, this was one of the perils of fatherhood.
“I DIDN’T DO THAT! THAT LITTLE BUG MUST HAVE JUST WANTED TO BE IN THERE!”
Nate leaned closer. “I found this cicada,” he explained. “You tell me: why would it want to be in there?”
His shirtsleeves were rolled to his elbows, but Nate still wore his tie, and it gave him the appearance of an actor in the wrong costume. Someone’s prom date. A huckster. When the sun moved from behind the clouds I could see a few drops of sweat along his hairline. It was the first time I had seen Nate since the party the previous winter—no, it was the first time I had seen Nate since browsing hundreds of photos of him, and it was like seeing a celebrity in real life and comparing the static image with the flesh; my brain began to improvise scenarios in which it was just the two of us, on a beach, in the south of France.
I felt confused. I drank my tea.
May was crouched in the yard near the protruding roots of a tall tree, poking at the ground with her stick, willing the earth to yield its tiny creatures.
Nate and I watched in silence. There wasn’t really anything to say, since I knew I couldn’t say any of the things I wanted to say: How are you, no, how are you really, why are you home so early, I don’t know if you should wear your shirt like that, what do you and Amy do when I’m not here?
“Good to finally get over that heat wave,” Nate said.
“Yep,” I said. I watched a mosquito land on my arm, and smashed it.
“Auditioned for any plays lately?”
Before I could answer, Amy came out of the house with a hand-painted ceramic plate, covered with sticks of string cheese and baby carrots, and set it on the picnic table without looking at either of us. I watched her watch May, her eyes squinting against the light of the setting sun, the fingers on one hand twisting and untwisting the charm on her necklace as if trying to unscrew it from the chain. Nate reached for a carrot and then turned to watch, too. May was oblivious to our vigilance. She could have no idea that we were watching her in order to protect her from every unthinkable, unknowable danger, that we watched her because we all thought that we knew what had gone wrong with Annika. If only someone had been there in the room, wide awake while she slept; if only they had always held her, and never put her to sleep in a bed, Annika would have never died, she would have been in someone’s arms right then.
After another minute, May turned around, held her stick in the air, and announced that she had found one that wasn’t moving, and could she please bring it inside the house.
• • •
For a few days, the best clues I found were the photographs, but then I decided to enter the nursery.
May was napping. Before I’d joined them, Amy told me, she didn’t really have a routine for May. They’d play, and eventually May would pass out somewhere—on the living room floor, on the couch, curled up in Nate’s desk chair—and Amy could work for an hour or two until she heard May wake up and start to cry for her. When I asked my mom about it, she said, “Oh no, kids need routine. Put her down for a nap at the same time every day.” Then she shook her head and said the “whole thing” was “so sad.” So that’s what I told Amy I’d do.
That day, Amy was at the doctor and May hadn’t wanted to take a nap when it was time for one. She had fought and fought me, and it had taken two and a half readings of Green Eggs and Ham next to her in bed with her chiming in on the refrain, before she finally closed her eyes.
I carefully untangled myself from the covers and the stuffed animal mountain range atop May’s narrow bed, and shut the door to her room, but not completely, because the doorknob stuck, and if she couldn’t turn it when she woke up she felt trapped.
Then I went and stood in front of the door, the closed door I passed every day, the door that I assumed led to a nursery. I imagined the room would be preserved exactly as it had been six months earlier: pink wallpaper, a pretty white crib from Pottery Barn, a mobile that played Brahms’ Lullaby. Or, if not that perfect room, then an empty room. A territory without a history. A space in limbo.