Lights On, Rats Out

by Cree LeFavour

  I encounter a similarly transformative magic in Dr. Kohl. He’s wiser than I am, much wiser than anyone else I’ve met. It doesn’t matter what we talk about; being in the same room with him enlightens, animates, and liberates me. Letting him take me in, listening as he slowly makes something sensible of my words and reported actions, intoxicates me more than booze, sex, ecstasy, sex on ecstasy, coke, or speed. “‘Seven and four,’ said Hans Castorp. ‘Eight and three. Knave, queen, king. It is coming out.’”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I never imagined that going to talk to this kind man, this wise doctor, would precipitate a crisis. We built what Freud called a “special affective relationship.” Preoccupied as I was with Dr. Kohl, I failed to anticipate how thoroughly my weary consciousness could dissipate, grinding into low gear, slowing, and coming to a halt as something new crawled in beneath.

  “Are you getting more depressed?” he asked in February.

  “I can’t tell how I feel,” I said. “I gave up old ways of defending myself, my life’s philosophy, structures are gone. I have hints of what to move toward but they’re not strong enough. Leaves me with very few ways of living.”

  “Coming here makes you feel more vulnerable.”

  “Yes,” I said, more vulnerable as the desire for him chiseled away at my equilibrium. In my family, I told him, “There was always something wrong with wanting.”

  “As if you didn’t feel badly enough already,” he said sympathetically.

  His presence and the knowledge he’s listening to and looking at me have been among the great pleasures of my limited life. I leave the better parts of myself in his office.

  “You haven’t learned how to take ‘here’ outside of here and not feel vulnerable,” he told me. I feel kind, smart, funny, and charming when I’m with him but none of it travels well.

  “Alone I feel ugly and strange,” I confessed. But each time I returned I knew I’d find a better self tucked away somewhere in his office, ready to animate.

  I need him and, as evidenced by the bed waiting for me at Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, I’d rather commit myself than lose him. Although I haven’t sorted it out with the 11s, I know I’m unwilling to give up the terrifying mix of sexual excitement, longing, and anxiety that nearly asphyxiates me in his presence.

  As distressed as I’ve been and as earnest as my efforts to feel better have been, I’m sure the symptoms are keeping Dr. Kohl close, listening to me, thinking about me, working on me. I vowed not to be simple and easy. I wouldn’t let him grow bored or frustrated, sending me on my way, all fixed up or possibly hopeless, but as ready as I’d ever be for the world. No, not a simple case: DSM-IV 309.28 “Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Anxiety and Depressed Mood.” Not so fast. I’m not nearly done.

  CHAPTER 7

  An Unnatural Teenage Fantasy

  My mother had often told me I’d make a good shrink because I had long acted as hers. Never having had one of her own, she wasn’t particularly qualified to judge. I was it.

  One night when I was thirteen I lay reading in bed when my mother’s voice came to me distinctly—happy, very, very happy! Inflections of love and togetherness filtered upward from the kitchen like so much helium. Laughter cut her words apart, turning them into rambunctious pops, the way she sounded when drunk and still drinking. I knew she wasn’t talking to my father, who was probably already in bed. My mind capered to a guess. The sole possibility—she was on the phone with Dick Millington.

  She’d been passing unnatural intervals of time with the Millington family—sleeping over at their ranch house in Picabo, riding, trading livestock, traveling. She had even acquired a pet that was their doing—a raven she’d named Edgar. He was her take of three hatchlings plucked from the nest with the benefit of Dick’s piloting license and a rented helicopter.

  Was my mother unfaithful? Cheating on my father? Betraying us all for this slip of a man, a nothing? That conversation ended in whispers and then the screen door banged and the door clicked closed. Gone. We lived at least ten miles from anywhere with a light on. It was as obstinately cold and black outside as winter far into the Northern Hemisphere can be. The ground white, with hard-packed snow cemented at 5°F.

  I grabbed a towel, tripping after my mother through the icy, bobsled-worthy chute that formed the path through the snow to the Ranch’s high-volume natural hot springs pools. I spotted her white skin glowing in the dark, her nude body crouched as she inched into the scalding water. Peeling off my clothes, I followed her through the sting of the frosted air into the keen luxury of the sulfured heat. Passing her on the broad slippery wooden steps, I headed to the center. I would have a confession; never mind that part of me must have not wanted to know. I would fix the mess between my parents.

  “Are you in love with Dick Millington?” I demanded. Happily unable to see her expression in the dark, I anticipated her answer, expecting a scene. The undeniable answer—simple—would soon be in the air between us. Obvious. Stupidly apparent as I thought back on all the time she spent there with him, how often she was on the phone, how many excuses she made to leave the ranch to go to Picabo, where their hundred-acre property sprawled—the latest crippled excuse for leaving falling flat even before she’d unpacked her bag and washed her clothes from the prior liaison.

  “I’m in love with Pat Millington.”

  I had no words as the absurdity of her words dented my consciousness. Pat? Dick’s wife and the mother of my best friend, Poppy? The woman in the large plaid shirt and Levi’s, the big drinker, the attentive, warm parent of my friend? I couldn’t imagine this woman sexually connected to my mother. It seemed strange and unnatural.

  Speechless, I buckled my knees to submerge my head beneath the surface. The black water closed over me, hot on my dry, cold scalp, as liquid slowly displaced the air bubbles clinging to each follicle; my eyes closed, and the abrupt absence of sound, the obliteration of my mother’s voice and form, secured me. I stayed under until breath propelled me to the surface. As F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in Tender Is the Night, “Fifteen minutes ago they had been a family.”

  Eventually the ranch was sold to Carole King, the earthy singer-songwriter still flush from her first big album, Tapestry. She played a few songs for my mother the first time she came to look at the place and then showed up with her white goats and trailer once the papers were signed. By then we’d dismantled our life as a family and dispersed the possessions that had given us definition—art, sculptures, books, photographs, linen, china, silver, furniture.

  Sun Valley, Idaho, 1979: My mother left Nicole and me to live together, popping in now and again to pick up some clothes from her unoccupied bedroom or to complain that the place was dirty. I was about to turn fourteen, going into ninth grade. For the first time in my life there was a television in the house. Other than that there was nothing on the walls of the Sun Valley house, hardly any furniture, and none of the residue of our previous lives. It was as soulless as the cement slab it rested on, as unattractive as the bulldozer tracks that served as a yard.

  Living without adults around throughout high school was an unnatural teenage fantasy. Without knowing it, my sister and I had been practicing to live this way since we were born. A steady regimen of casual parenting combined with an extremely high value placed on independence did the trick.

  My father, far away in California, reinvented his life. Making what he could of his abruptly child-, wife-, and pet-free condition, he lived alone for the first time in seventeen years while the rest of us adjusted to our own versions of a strangely unfettered existence.

  My father had to know my mother lived with Pat at her house in Picabo and later at Tunnel Rock. We called my father frequently to referee our arguments or just to hear his voice. For the longest time I blamed my mother while letting my father off as the victim of her infidelity. Given how I maintained his innocence all those years, I must have desperately needed to believe he’d been magically released, making it okay for him to save him
self even if that meant leaving my sister and me in the nearly nonexistent care of our alcoholic mother.

  It wasn’t until Dr. Kohl questioned the arrangement during the early days of therapy that I began to recognize and believe that living alone all those years was out of the ordinary. It was just as he’d written in the IPE on day one: “Severe family deprivation (left totally alone at age 13.)” When I pointed out this oddity to my sister it took her a minute to realize how right I was. Her astonishment at our blind acceptance of this level of neglect equaled mine.

  That was living. Teenagers never want a parent around—until they do. What teenagers desire is simple: food, money, and freedom. We had all three. With this bounty in hand I closed the door to my room, listened to the radio, made faces in the mirror, painted my nails every other day, shopped for clothes, read, and studied the novelty of my budding breasts while trying to resolve if I was pretty or ugly, smart or dumb, weak or strong, good or bad, worthless or important. I told nobody when I first got my period; I just sneaked a few of my sister’s tampons. The general absence of adults in my life other than my cross-country skiing coach, Kevin, left me free to draw my own conclusions about who I was while eating a pint of Rum Raisin Häagen-Dazs for dinner. Or nothing.

  Thanks to Idaho’s farm laws, my sister had her agricultural license. It was meant for teens in rural areas living on ranches and farms. Whatever its restrictions, she didn’t follow them. There were no tractors or mowers within sight. She drove the beat-up blue Datsun 510 over the hill from our tract house in Elkhorn to the Ketchum–Sun Valley Community School, snuggled down along Trail Creek, not two miles away. When I was stuck at school I rambled home over the blunt, freshly cut grass of the golf course, hitchhiked, or begged my sister to come pick me up.

  Nicole and I were free to stay out all night, drink, have sex, do drugs, or sleep all day. We generally didn’t. A curfew or rules might have made rebellion more appealing—as it was, we did our homework and muddled through our teen years more steadily than many. I’d never wanted anything to do with the marijuana, cocaine, and, when we had guests back in Aspen, hallucinogenic mushrooms set out like Chex Party Mix. As I learned without knowing it long ago, it’s almost impossible to rebel against indifference. I went to a few parties in high school, got a little drunk, and found my way home. I wasn’t comfortable with boys or the party scene where the guys lurked, intent on getting their hands up my shirt and down my pants.

  As always, but perhaps even more during that period, my mother drank a lot. There were two DWIs. Aside from the weed she smoked, she took up snorting coke again, having more or less left off the habit in Aspen. Dieting or not, she effortlessly peeled off forty pounds of accumulated marital sludge. When I was fifteen she offered me a line as we sat together in the cab of her red-and-white 1972 GM truck. Manipulating a razor to arrange three slender stripes of white powder on a compact mirror kept for the purpose, she held it out to me. “Want a hit?” She was taking me to dinner while she was in Sun Valley for the day; we were about to join her new girlfriend, Polly, at the restaurant. I remember thinking what a stupid child she was. I didn’t want her drugs. I didn’t want anything to do with her.

  Our family had collapsed in on itself, unable to bear the weight of its competing parts.

  I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without Nicole. What she and I were to each other then, what we’ve always been to each other, was much bigger, more inscrutable than the honeyed word “sisters” suggests. There was no sharing clothes or make-up, no boy talk; there were no friends in common. We’re too unalike for any of that. But for all that she has always been the one person who knew me. We were stuck with each other—nobody else in the house, no other consistent presence in our lives. Like prisoners sharing a cell, we’ve long had an unspoken solidarity.

  In spite of our differences we had a hell of a time signing our names to the standing account at the local grocery store, Atkinson’s, for milk, cereal, ice cream, cookies, peanut butter, and the occasional whole chicken that one of us would stuff with thyme and parsley, slather with butter, salt, and roast on high. The most formal meals my sister and I shared were taken standing at the kitchen counter, eating these crispy birds with our hands, paper towels serving as an imperfect bone dish, glistening fat shiny as lip gloss on our mouths.

  My loneliest, unhappiest year of high school was when Nicole left for Berkeley and I was farmed out to live with Mrs. Thorson. She boarded kids who moved to the area to join Sun Valley’s world-class Alpine and Nordic ski teams. I couldn’t live alone—even I knew that. I was afraid of noises in the night and of the dreams that followed me into sleep. So I moved my books and clothes into a room in the Thorsons’ big house with two other boarders. They all ate dinner together at night, soaked in the hot tub, watched movies, and sat in awe before the novelty of MTV. I tucked myself away in my room to avoid them, grazing from the refrigerator when nobody was looking.

  CHAPTER 8

  Catch Me

  Time, quick and stingy when I’m in session, slows to the pace of cold honey every other minute of the day. Waiting. Always, it seems, anticipating the next appointment.

  My frustration with Dr. Kohl arises out of the inherent tension between the formality of the office setting and the emotional intimacy I experience within it. The tension I feel is no mistake; it’s highly productive—an emotional and intellectual hot zone generated by the friction between form and content. I was caught in this heat as an unambiguous rage built in me. Its object was Dr. Kohl. The bastard.

  As Freud would have it, Dr. Kohl’s “excessively warm interest” in me amounted to no more than expert professionalism, “evinced only as a means of psychic treatment.” Session after session, the thought bore in on my fidelity to this perfect man, sullying his take on my past and present.

  C. G. Jung thought the doctor should “catch” a patient the way one “catches a cold”—becoming entangled with, perhaps even possessed by, the patient. I hoped I’d provoked such a “psychic contagion.” The patient of a lifetime. But did I pay him to pretend he cared so much? I wanted to allow myself to care without doubting, but it was as though a window tax had me bricking over his access. I could be satisfied only if I knew I’d infiltrated his professional shell, getting far more than money could ever buy. All I needed was a hairline fracture to slide past what he practiced professionally to a private region where I could mark him. I wanted him to be mine as much as I was his; never mind that he never asked me to give myself over to him.

  He cared—it was not a complete sham. I believed that much after a single session. Soon afterward he made me feel exceptional with offers to call him at home. But wasn’t that simply his job, taken perhaps one step beyond the norm? It was a role he performed with grace for hordes of patients who sat in the same leather chair where I sat. Never cooling, the chair carried the heat of their flesh like a toilet seat in a busy bus terminal. My greatest fear was that it wasn’t just me calling but all of them. I imagined his home phone ringing throughout the evening like an insistent bell for service, patients on the other end of the line desperate as I was for him to impart calm with that voice of his. Picking up the phone, I often wondered how much his wife hated me for inserting myself—even invited—into his domestic life.

  Freud knew all about patients like me, even deploying the feeble word “love” when he warned doctors against reciprocating the patient’s feelings. “He must recognize that the patient’s falling in love is induced by the analytic situation and is not to be attributed to the charms of his own person.” He adds, “It is always well to be reminded of this.”

  In early winter I asked him if there was “One thing I can do to feel better—just one.”

  He wrote to himself that day, “This is an indication of analytic despair or totally giving up.”

  Sagging through the solo nights unnerved me; the excess hours were plastered to me, indelible as my own skin. After a long argument about how it messed with my authenticity,
I agreed to take 20 mg of Prozac. When I felt like it I drugged myself to sleep for twenty-four hours with the Trazodone he prescribed around the same time. Relentless insomnia peeled away at the contours of whatever normality I was clinging to.

  He observed I was using the Trazodone “to sustain aloneness. (Sleeps during day to survive.)” I took it when I couldn’t sleep at night and on weekends I took it during the day to melt the long hours of waiting until I’d see him again.

  “I’m afraid I’ll die,” I told him in February.

  “Unusual response to dependency,” he wrote in my chart. In April he wrote, “Atypical Depression/Compulsive Urges,” and around the same time, “Doubt Bipolar.” He suggested hospitalization as an option if I felt dangerously suicidal. I didn’t think he was serious.

  “I feel like running away,” I said.

  “I will try to find you,” he said. This felt impossibly good until he said, “I will not stop until I do.” That’s when I thought I might have cracked his professional shell by somehow eroding an invisible line of protection. He couldn’t promise all his patients he’d try to find them if they disappeared—forever after. This was an impetus to push further.