“I know you don’t.”
“I’m going to make everyone feel bad about it” was followed by but then I need “to fix everything up.”
“Like you did with your parents.”
“Yes … but I don’t want to be gratuitously mean.” This is one of my fears—a thing my sister accused me of when we fought. I hate mean people and I didn’t want to be one of them.
“Overwhelming betrayal that takes the breath away,” he said then, almost to himself. He applied mercy where I’d installed a raft of doubt and shame.
“If sadness and despair is present after November trip then consider Prozac,” he wrote in mid-November, prior to Thanksgiving break.
∗ ∗ ∗
I’d been seeing Dr. Kohl for four months at a low point in November. The frost had wiped out every trace of green but no snow had yet fallen to camouflage the ugliness of the landscape. I felt myself winding down, going soft, giving up. I’d invited Matt for dinner, desperate for a connection of any kind beyond 112 Church Street. Returning from work, I showered and then, to fill up the emptiness, gratified my self-loathing by gorging myself on ugly carbs and throwing up before he arrived. The action of bingeing and purging mirrored, as Dr. Kohl pointed out, my deep ambivalence about sex with Matt, “Something I try to say no to but can’t.” I guess I was warming up.
At these moments of abandon hatred eats me as if I’m the dessert; the demolition of my will to resist followed by gulps of ice cream’s frozen cream and sugar, the crunch and give of frosted cookies, bowls of crispy, milky cereal and other dainties ending in the final sad, sweet thrill of denial.
Numbly eating whatever the fuck I want in whatever quantity I desire is relaxing, but it’s the feeling I have after I throw up that I return for.
“Haven’t you realized how calm you feel?” Dr. Kohl asked during one of our seemingly unending discussions of why I did it, what I got out of it.
“Calm … yes,” I said, acknowledging the post-purge euphoria, the afterglow that is the bewitching reward. My uneasiness soothed for at least an hour.
I’ve long detested my physical self. I’m tall but just plain big when I’m overweight, well proportioned, but ungainly. Changing my body, manipulating it, was all I could come up with as a focus; to be thin had long masked itself as a prerequisite to change, as if rapture waited if I could shed the burdensome twenty pounds of flesh that weighed me down. To be thinner has always represented a tiny triumph over chaos, although I’m not sure it represented the desire to disappear or return to a prepubescent state as is so often said of girls who want to waste away.
As the inability to master the desire to eat for sport failed, my mind contracted into a taut loop of disgust. I’m ashamed of my vanity, of caring about how fat I am and eating too much anyway. What kind of feminist am I? But I wasn’t able to stop. I’d increased the frequency of bingeing and purging, often throwing up two to three times every day and as many as six times in one day. If only food were like air—necessary to life but never chosen, impossible to overindulge in. I thought I was truly hungry once but desire has gobbled up too much of me. Now I can’t tell the difference between filling up and eating. The familiar raw, scraped feeling I know so well as the aftermath left me wondering that day, waiting for Matt, what to do next.
I remember that chilly, late autumn day so well. I felt light enough to float into the cool austerity around me. A Camel Light was all I needed to pull myself together before Matt arrived. I sat outside on the stair, the porch boards’ shiny gray splinters clinging to my wool socks, the arctic air getting the better of the angled sun.
Before my cigarette had burned through Matt appeared, calling to me, his stride energetic and playful. As he leaned for a kiss, his cold nose grazed my cheek. He’s a VW mechanic. That day he was fresh from his cars and men, clothes stinking of engine oil and exhaust, breath heavy with cigarettes and beer. As usual he’d spent the day on his back, floating around on a mechanic’s creeper looking at the undersides of antique Volkswagens, making small talk about the dynamics of metal, rubber, grease, gasoline, and sparks. He’d no doubt finished the day by passing a pipe or jay with his boss and the other mechanic. Rarely have I seen him not at least slightly stoned.
I went inside with him that day and observed him take a chair and yank open the broadsheet Burlington Free Press, turning the pages slowly, taking time to read each headline, lingering on the comics’ splashy colors. I was in the kitchen cooking when he caught me watching. From experience he knew he was expected to speak—as if I was always eager for him to ask me about my day, how busy I’d been, and to talk about his day. I remember catching his weary consciousness of duty snap-to. Afraid to be caught out by letting too much time pass, he deliberately folded the paper and set it aside. I then watched the machinations of his lips and eyes as he clumsily attempted to pay attention to me.
“You have a good day?”
“Fine,” I said. “Not too bad. Slow. How’s yours?”
“Good, good. Worked on that blue ’67 bus. You know the one, big white roof rack? Needed brakes, shocks, muffler. Darla, she used to work with me at Blondin’s. I don’t know, it was good to see her again, you know. Nice bus. You know the one? Blue, new paint.”
“No, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. So your day went okay? That’s good.” It’s always been easy to be chilly when he was oblivious, trying to make conversation and failing. I was playing nice. That day I was barely pulling it off, with an inchoate rage building that had little to do with him. I was better off without him but I needed more reason than my own estrangement to give up and shut him out for good. So there I was, making him dinner.
He picked up the paper, unfolding it. Released, he was soon engrossed. I thought, fuck him and fuck everyone. Not worth the bother. The surface of the pasta water rose and broke, the edge green with olive oil. My lenses captured and held the steam, rendering the scene’s clean lines a milky distance.
I had nine minutes remaining on the timer when I heard a flourish of rustling as Matt neatly folded the newspaper to move on to the glossy pages of Popular Mechanics—or maybe it was Car and Driver.
As if it’s before me now, I see the sauce sputter, bubbles exploding with force enough to blot the white enamel surface of the stove with red circles. It’s caught the pox and what a little wife I was and I knew I’d probably fuck him later, half willing, almost present. Later, tasting him, I’d wonder why. Occupying the role—daughter, friend, sister, employee. I still can’t tell why I need to pretend that I’m okay. I hated Matt for failing to notice how not okay I was that night.
I was hardly there as I poured tomato sauce over the pasta, scattered cheese, rolled and tore basil. The bruised herb focused me for a flash, flooding the present with a woozy pleasure; I remember recognizing the smell as the best thing that had happened to me all day.
I studied my plate as Matt ate, his chewing too loud. Distracting myself in an effort to hold back any display of weakness, I remembered Goethe’s line “You don’t know what life tastes like” unless you’ve cried and eaten at the same time. No way. Explaining the tears was work I didn’t want; Matt has never known how to respond to my inarticulate misery or understood how cooking and eating dinner could be a lie concealed by a performance. I keep many secrets.
I waited for words. Not giving up hope of hearing a whisper to catch me, to draw me in and hold me. Instead, the quiet snuggled right up close until I was adrift, easily far enough away that words could no longer find me. I then observed the scene from outside: vertigo did me in at that insufficient supper.
In the bedroom I lay facedown on the mattress, suffocation position. I could have drowned in the sheets and blankets, warm and quiet. Just me.
Why did I ask him over that night? He never demanded much more than sex from me and that he has expertly exacted with flattery and a palpable desire that even I find worth a response. Until I don’t.
What happened to me? Didn’t I once yearn for more than pure
sex, for the feeling of skin on skin, arms and legs entangled with another body? I simply wanted to be left alone. Human contact could never quite hold me in place.
CHAPTER 6
Chiclets or Razzles?
How did I go from being a mildly depressed bulimic with a history of abandonment and neglect to pressing cigarettes on my skin until the pain is used up? How did I go from a highly functional, responsible twenty-five-year-old to a patient heading for a locked psychiatric ward? I’d say there were two reasons: the 11s and Dr. Kohl.
The number 11 represents my own, entirely personal dark magic. Appearing with unnerving frequency, it is the icon of my nutty religion or maybe, less generously, the sign of my private cult.
The way a Jesus fanatic sees an outline of the Virgin Mary burned into a slice of toast once in a lifetime I repeatedly see 11s. On the clock when I walk into my bedroom at 11:11 P.M. and again when I wake right at 2:11 and again at 3:11. Important things happen on the 11th of the month. Too often the total for my morning bagel, coffee, and newspaper is $5 and 11 cents on the same night my change at the grocery is 11 cents and when I leave the store I’m greeted by an 11 in neon red blinking at the crosswalk. It’s as if the entity the number represents is communicating with me.
When the 11s appear I read them as a reminder directed at me from an unknowable, vaguely menacing power that must be placated. The power behind the 11s—but not the number—dates to memories of myself at five or six years old, growing up in Aspen. I remember thinking about this abstract, scary power as I methodically tied an inexpert bow to secure my blue Keds or while pondering my tenuous place in the world as I pulled a turtleneck over my big head, painfully yanking my straight brown bob down with it. Back then, in a corner of my messy young-girl mind, I was loosely aware that a misplaced move might end it all—with me as the primary object of this ruination. I suspected and sometimes firmly believed my world was a play put on just for me. At any moment the curtain might come swooping down to cover me in darkness. Looking back at this self I’m reminded of James’s observation of Maisie, “Her little world was phantasmagoric—strange shadows dancing on a sheet. It was as if the whole performance had been given for her—a mite of a half-scared infant in a great dim theatre.”
Constantly mindful of this arbitrary universal design that chose to keep me—for the time being—as a kid, I believed all the world was in on it, watching me, waiting for the right moment to trip me up. Was my dog complicit? My sister? Now I wait for the whim of the machine to smite me but with the perspective twenty-five years confers. I can examine and question the utter lunacy of a belief system I’ve hung on to way past the glorious peak of natural childhood narcissism. And yet, even though I know this, the menace of the 11s fills me with inchoate dread, the evil behind it spilled ink spreading through my brain.
Before Dr. Kohl I’d never told anyone about what I had at times understood as a relatively harmless if strange and illogical thought pattern mixed with rituals wound up in divining and then selecting the right object—a cigarette, a carton of milk in the dairy section, a coffee filter from a box of thirty, the left or right door.
When I was with my sister, my dog, or both I was shy and quiet but not preoccupied with this particular danger. We ranged over the whole of Little Woody Creek valley from our house at the end of the dirt road: past or into the houses of our friends and neighbors, through groves of scrub oak and aspens; among the horses and cattle in the pastures beside the road. It felt idyllic in so many respects, while in others my mind was in contention with its authenticity, making my world a confused mix, at once strange and wonderful but ultimately unreliable. I did not believe the world was real.
On allowance day we’d trek to the Woody Creek Store with a fortune of $5 to fill brown paper bags with candy. Throughout I heard the dim background hum of the lethal organizing principle that later came to be represented by the 11s patiently directing me. Candy wasn’t just candy. Which candy—both which flavor and which particular piece from a box of ten or twenty? I must divine the correct choice even if I feel a little sorry for the ones left behind. It was a vaguely crazy-making test, the echo of it there even now like a poorly written, nonsensical song … Teaberry, Beemans, Clove, Black Jack, Fruit Stripe, or Juicy Fruit? Chiclets or Razzles? Hot Tamales, Cinnamon Bears, Red Hots, or Atomic Fireballs? 3 Musketeers or Milky Way? Candy Buttons, Pez, Bottlecaps, or Jaw Breakers? Mary Jane or Squirrel Nut Zipper? Grape, Orange, Raspberry, or Cherry Pixy Stix? Bonomo’s Banana Turkish Taffy, Banana Laffy Taffy, Kits Taffy, Banana BB Bats, or Banana Split? Candy Cigarettes or Necco Wafers? Whoppers or Mallo Cup? Junior Mints or U-No? Saf-T-Pop, Unicorn Pop, or Charms? Caramel Cube or Ice Cube? Jolly Ranchers, Life Savers, Root Beer Barrels, or Brach’s Butterscotch Discs? Milk Maid Royals or Hershey Kisses? Cherry Mash, Big Cherry, or Cherry Bomb? Heath, Krackel, or Crunch? Almond Joy, Mounds, or Coconut Slices? Red Vines or Twizzler? Mike & Ike, Chuckles, Jujubes, Jujyfruits, or Dots? Cracker Jack? Abba-Zaba or Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup? Milk Duds or Raisinets? Good & Plenty or Licorice Pipe? Bubble Gum Cigar, Double Bubble, or Super Bubble? Wax Fang, Bottle, or Lips? Butterfinger or Kit-Kat? Candy Corns or Pumpkins? Rocky Road Chunky or Pecan Chunky? Lemonheads, Lemon Drops, or SweeTARTS? Goo Goo Clusters, Charleston Chew, or Zero? Sixlets or M&Ms? Hershey’s or Nestlé’s Milk? Mr. Goodbar or Snickers? Caramel Creams or Bit-O-Honey? Tootsie Pop or Blow Pop? Candy Bracelet, Necklace, or Watch? Rock Candy or Candy Crystals? Pop Rocks or Zotz? Tootsie Roll, Slo Poke, or Black Cow? Sugar Daddy, Mama, or Baby?—Precisely which pack? The one in the back? No. Front left? That’s it. I’m safe for now. Once the trial was over I ate my candy, as I now smoke the cigarette I’ve selected, without a qualm.
These beliefs, choices, and the elaborate superstitions about the magic qualities of objects I owned were manageable. The order had long been best left undisturbed. I played along as the presence waxed and waned through adolescence and young adulthood, never much questioning the rules or logic or considering the possibility that my behavior is strange.
Although it was monstrously dangerous to say it out loud to Dr. Kohl—an unambiguous violation of the rules of the 11s’ power—I conceded minor obsessions when he first interviewed me and then, once I couldn’t keep it quiet any longer, I fully explained the 11s and their history to him. Dr. Kohl framed my pact of silence with the 11s in the context of my propensity to protect the sanctity of my thoughts, fears, ambitions, and emotions by keeping secrets. As Dr. Kohl noted, my credo has long been “Keep your mouth shut to survive.”
As I understand it, in psychiatric terms this fixation on 11s and the mildly paranoid structure that predated it fall between an obsession and a delusion, the difference between the two being one of degree. My preoccupation with 11s causes anxiety and compulsions—choosing objects, seeking signs of the number, attributing extra power and significance to various objects like mugs, sweaters, my copy of The Magic Mountain. What makes the 11s border on a delusion is how insidious, incorrigible, preoccupying, and idiosyncratic they are. A well-seated delusion carries the danger of blurring reality’s edges, which my 11s have been doing a lot more of lately. As often as I’ve tried to talk myself out of them since I first explained them to Dr. Kohl, there’s a strong, important part of me that isn’t conceding the argument. I can’t shake my belief in their external reality.
“There’s something about being here that makes me feel really good, like I never expected it would.” But “I have to create, justify, make myself useful to be paid attention to, listened to. I don’t feel like I have a place….”
“In anyone’s life,” he finished for me. Yes. But now he’s linked to the 11s, possibly their foe, maybe my friend.
“I feel my attachment to you is scary, very risky,” I said.
My infatuation had corroded my defenses and it was vacation time for him (the first and least significant I’d encounter while in treatment). I confessed my dependency.
“It seems really scary but is it a good thing to pr
ogress in a relationship with you so I trust you more? It’s a good thing to rely on you more—right?” I was stuck because, as I pointed out, “You know more about me than anyone else but me.” From that point on he’s been dangerously on the inside.
By admitting he’s the idealized center of my existence, I risked rejection from both him and the caprice of the 11s. They haven’t quite settled on where he stands. But it’s worth the gamble or, as Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain calls it, “the whims of the card-goblins, ensnared by the fitful and fickle favour of fortune, which sometimes let the face-cards and elevens pile up.”
I envy Dr. Kohl’s purpose, his ability to escape the devastating relativism that makes so much of what I do pointless. The best I have is the 11s, a malignant structure that engages me in rules within a larger, incomprehensible system. I fear their wrath. I’ve never read even the most essential religious texts. I fall on the most extreme end of the nonbeliever spectrum. Bearded gods, fairies, sprites, and prophets have never had any appeal for me. The novels I read with reckless urgency have been my moral and intellectual guides—Hemingway’s crisp purpose; Fitzgerald’s idealized beauty; Dostoyevsky’s grubby existentialism; Harrison’s western landscapes and manly men; Tolstoy’s flabby effulgence; Thomas Wolfe’s gorgeous musings; Wharton’s class-conscious brittleness; Cather’s lovely rustic longing; Flaubert’s stylized dreams; Mann’s intricacies of time and death; Morrison’s racial rage and mourning; Bellow’s sexy male bravado; Rushdie’s mind-bending brilliance; V. S. Naipaul’s seductive, sleepy elegance; Melville’s broad informational scope; Faulkner’s self-indulgent stylizing; James’s layered interior complexities. Those and the fairy tales I read and reread.
As I told Dr. Kohl at one point, “When I feel like I’m really losing it I read fairy tales.” Unlike the 11s, they never fail me. Like the orderly world Dr. Kohl embodies, a fairy tale’s transparent logic of good, bad, just and unjust, strong and weak, wise and dumb, greedy and generous never falters. In “The Goose Girl,” a Brothers Grimm tale, a maid (who is, of course, a princess) confesses to an iron stove the secret of her identity that she’s “sworn before the face of heaven on pain of losing my life” to keep. Finding such a confessor to relieve her of the lethal secret in the form of an inanimate, utterly trustworthy object marks one of the form’s most pleasurable tropes: that objects, beasts, and even nature speak truth. In “The Goose Girl” the wise voice comes from what remains of the horse Falada, who has been decapitated by the knacker, her (talking) head nailed to a dark gateway. The all-knowing magic of the advice Falada offers up saves the Goose Girl from destruction and restores her rightful identity.
Lights On, Rats Out Page 4