Resilience

by Jessie Close

  I learned that our Mouse House had been built in 1901 as a schoolhouse for the local ranch children, and now that Mattie was nearing five I decided to turn one room into an impromptu classroom so I could homeschool her. I sent off for materials from the Calvert School correspondance course, and we both would get excited when boxes arrived with textbooks and instructions. I found a long-forgotten book of mine, in Old English, about Robin Hood, and I read that to her, too. Mattie loved that story so much I decided we should perform it. Mattie always got to be Robin Hood; she would protest if I insisted that I wanted to be Robin Hood, so I adopted Little John as my character, although she would have preferred that I play Maid Marian.

  Those moments with Mattie were some of my happiest, but there were black shadows in between this light like the strips of dark and light in winter woods. I began drinking more and more as my moods began making me anxious and the migraines continued to torture me. I reached a point where I couldn’t face taking the garbage outside without putting the tied bag down at least ten times to do something else. It was a personal victory for me to get the garbage bag tied in the first place. I struggled over the decision about whether to use a tie or to simply grab the sides of the large bag and tie the tops together. I knew there was some evil force lurking outside, and I was afraid. I didn’t believe the market was really at the end of the road, so I didn’t buy food regularly. Looking back now, I believe my paranoid delusions—e.g., that the market wasn’t there—were spawned by my fear of actually having to go inside the market. From the time I parked outside it until I finished shopping and braving the checkout line, I would feel dizzy and nauseated. It was easier to leave the garbage in the kitchen by the door and easier to eat all the food that was in the cupboards, no matter what it was.

  If I did get outside the house, I would generally be okay. But sometimes not. This was always much easier when Mattie was with me. She was my ground, the simple reason why I persisted in living. This little girl was the person who held me on this earth at this time.

  Alcohol obliterated my cyclical moods, both the terrifying, sad ones that kept me prisoner inside my house and the manic ones that electrified me with energy. I drank myself into oblivion many times over and explained my hangovers to little Mattie by telling her I had the flu. Too many times Mattie found me on the couch, pretending I was sick. I was sick a lot. She would find something to eat or protest the lack of food loudly enough to get me up and into the car. Many times, after shopping, we’d stop at the local bar, the Bear Claw, on the way home. She was allowed to sit at the bar and eat her dinner until 8:00 p.m. Then she sat near the pool table. Mattie learned to play pool from the old cowboys there. I would drink along with everyone else. It was always a relief to feel the vodka warm my body, and the fellowship of the bar warmed my heart. My hands would stop shaking, and the nausea I always felt by afternoon was quelled by the alcohol.

  I realized I was a functioning alcoholic but had no interest in changing. My parents and siblings had no idea that I drank so much because I hid it from them. Only my friends and Mattie knew. Alcohol defined my life and, sadly, Mattie’s, too.

  Mattie told a friend of mine, who offered us her guest room one night to keep us from sleeping in my car, that “when Mommy has one drink, we go home; when she has more, we sleep on a friend’s couch.” When my friend told me this the next day, I was deeply ashamed.

  Having settled into the Mouse House with Mattie, I was free to begin pursuing Phillip, the man who had first attracted me to the area. We became drinking buddies, then lovers, and we decided to marry but not actually live together, because we both wanted to keep our houses. He owned a house in McAllister near the Bear Claw, and I had no interest in abandoning our Mouse House. It was a union doomed from day one for a variety of reasons.

  At first, Phillip was understanding. When I fell into one of my down periods, he would help out with Mattie and try to lift my spirits. But he quickly realized that I was a closet drunk and tried to get me to curb my drinking. For a while I did, and the three of us were happy. But when my migraines came back with a vengeance, I started hitting the bottle again.

  I was driving home from the grocery store in nearby Ennis one afternoon when a migraine headache became so horrific that the solid white line at the edge of the road became a series of dashes. I couldn’t bear to keep both eyes open, so I covered my left eye in order to continue driving.

  Feeling desperate, I called Dad, and he set up an appointment for me with a neurosurgeon friend of his in Salt Lake City. Although Dad didn’t tell me, he suspected that I might have a brain tumor. As soon as he shared his suspicion with Glenn, she offered to meet me in Utah so I wouldn’t have to go through a battery of tests alone.

  I felt better the moment I saw Glenn at the Salt Lake City airport. She had dropped everything to be with me. As we were walking to a cab, I reminded her that in the 1970s we had been together in Central Park on a stroll and I’d told her that I no longer needed her to be a mom to me. I was big enough to handle my own problems. Or so I’d thought. Here she was again doing just that—being a mom to me. She laughed and said she wouldn’t want me to be alone during my tests.

  The neurosurgeon ordered an MRI, and I was told to lie on a pallet that would slowly roll my body into the center of a doughnut-shaped machine. As soon as my head hit that pallet, I began feeling panicked.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” I told Glenn. “I’m claustrophobic.”

  She suggested I close my eyes and think of something pleasant. I did, but when the pallet under me began inching forward into the machine, I had to open my eyes.

  “Get me out of here!” I screamed, my entire body shaking. I felt as if I were being buried alive. The technicians stopped the test and wheeled me out. I was covered with sweat.

  Glenn calmed me down and got them to give me a sedative. When I was knocked out, they put me back into the machine. The tests showed that I didn’t have a tumor, much to Glenn’s and my dad’s relief. However, it left the big question unanswered.

  What was causing my migraines?

  The psychiatrist in the same hospital interviewed me next, and when I asked him why I couldn’t control my moods, he told me that at my level of intelligence, if I had been able to do something about them I would have. That sounded comforting.

  “You need medication,” the psychiatrist explained.

  He already knew that I’d been taking Zoloft for depression. When he heard about my manic periods, he came up with a different diagnosis.

  “I believe you have bipolar disorder,” he said.

  He explained that bipolar disorder is considered a severe mental illness, as serious as schizophrenia. The difference is that bipolar disorder and depression are “mood disorders.” Schizophrenia is a “thought disorder” that causes people to hear voices, see things, or think things that aren’t real.

  The hospital psychiatrist prescribed Tegretol, which he said would stabilize my moods. To deal with my depression, he prescribed Celexa, an antidepressant. He warned: “You need to stop drinking.”

  I smiled and nodded and assured him that I would follow his orders, but I didn’t mean it. I was psychotic, a symptom that this doctor didn’t address, and I thought the psychiatrist and my dad were trying to poison me with medication. I probably wouldn’t have taken either prescription if Glenn hadn’t urged me to take my pills.

  “Richard Dreyfuss has bipolar disorder,” Glennie said.

  She’d worked with him in a Broadway play called Death and the Maiden, and he’d talked openly to her about his mood swings. Because Richard Dreyfuss was able to control his moods, my diagnosis seemed less frightening. If he could do it, so could I!

  Glenn said good-bye at the Salt Lake City airport, and I returned home to McAllister determined to get better.

  My enthusiasm quickly waned. My new medications left me lethargic. All I wanted to do was sleep. At times, I felt as if I were riding an elevator. The Tegretol brought me down; the Celexa bro
ught me up. I stayed off booze for about a week, and then one afternoon Phillip, Mattie, and I stopped at the Bear Claw. It took only one drink to get me tipsy, thanks to my new medication, and I thought: Think of all the money I’m going to save buying drinks!

  I soon discovered that nothing is simple with medication. Not long after beginning my new regimen, a nasty rash appeared on my arms. Red spots quickly spread over my entire body. The ones on my arms itched so terribly that I scratched them, and they soon turned into nasty, weepy pustules. I kept scratching until the pustules became ugly open sores. They became so painful that I drove myself to a local emergency room one night.

  “I have no idea what’s causing this,” the emergency room doctor told me. “You’d better go to a dermatologist—and fast, before they get any worse.”

  Worse? Was that possible?

  When a dermatologist examined me, she immediately asked me about my meds.

  “I’m taking Tegretol and Celexa,” I replied.

  “This is a Tegretol rash,” she declared. “If these pustules are already showing on your skin, you can be sure they’re on your internal organs, too. You need to stop taking it immediately.”

  I telephoned the psychiatrist and told him what I knew already, that I was being poisoned by my pills. From his voice, I could tell he wasn’t convinced. When he’d interviewed me, I’d showed signs of paranoid thinking—after all, I thought he and my dad were trying to poison me—and he must have thought I was exaggerating about the medication, even though I told him about the red sores on my arms and what the dermatologist had said. The more I tried to explain, the more frustrated I became. Why don’t doctors listen? Our call ended with him telling me that he couldn’t treat me if I didn’t take my medication.

  Ignoring him, I stopped taking Tegretol, and my rash began to disappear a few days later.

  I wouldn’t let it go.

  As soon as the wounds on my arms were nearly healed, I would begin scratching them open again, keeping the sores going. I knew this was going to cause scarring, but I couldn’t help myself. Before long, my arms looked like the lines of a crossword puzzle had been drawn on them. I started wearing long-sleeved shirts to hide the scabs and scars. I had been reintroduced, subconsciously, to my old “worry spot”—which I’d discovered as a young girl at the MRA compound in Dellwood. It was there where I learned how to stifle anxiety by rubbing the skin between my thumb and finger until it bled.

  Intellectually, I knew what I was doing was foolish. But that didn’t stop me from doing it. Within days, I had sunk into one of my depressed moods. I went into my bathroom one morning, picked open a sore on my arm, and poured hydrogen peroxide on it, scrubbing it open until blood began oozing from it. The stinging pain calmed me down. It was as if opening that wound allowed all the tension, anxiety, and bad feelings welling up inside me to escape. I think my brain needed physical pain in order to free me from my anxiety.

  In the midst of all this, I received a phone call from one of Calen’s teachers at Holderness.

  “We need to send Calen home,” he announced. “I’m sorry, but I’m worried he might be suicidal, and we can no longer be responsible for him.”

  Suicidal? Calen?

  Calen’s teacher told me that there were only two weeks left before school would adjourn for Christmas break, so he wouldn’t miss much if he came home early and got patched up before returning after the New Year.

  I picked up Calen at the Bozeman airport, and he immediately claimed that the teachers at Holderness were overreacting. He was not suicidal. He simply needed time to think. I brought him to the Mouse House, where I settled him into my “studio”—the one-room outbuilding that came with the property and was about forty feet from the main house. I’d lined it with bookcases and equipped it with a kitchenette and a tiny bathroom for guests. I’d planned to do my writing there, but I had not written anything for quite some time and had abandoned work on my second novel.

  Calen went directly to the studio and fell on the bed. He was exhausted, so I left him to sleep, but when I looked out my kitchen window a few minutes later, I could see him through a studio window, pacing the floor, chain-smoking cigarettes.

  Now what? I asked myself.

  Calen told me his experiences at Holderness had been horrible. The hazing by upperclassmen had gone beyond words and involved physical assaults. I certainly was not sending Calen back. Instead, he would live in the studio, where I could keep an eye on him and help him heal. He would get his GED by taking online classes.

  I was determined to help Calen, but the truth was that I was in as bad shape as he was. I began rapid-cyling, a condition that caused me to feel mania for about half an hour, become depressed for half an hour, then start the cycle all over again.

  My instability and Calen’s problems scared Phillip. He retreated to his house and stopped coming over as much. When he did come over, we argued. I would scream at him in a depressed mood, then moments later turn manic and become apologetic and laugh. To him, my laugh became as irritating as my sadness.

  Phillip called two friends who were psychologists and told them that I had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Their advice was simple.

  “Get away from this woman ASAP,” one of them said. “If she is bipolar, she will ruin your life. And it sounds like she’s rapid-cycling—not something you want to be around!”

  Phillip and I both filed for divorce almost a year to the day after we walked down the aisle. This was my fourth divorce. Mattie was crushed. She loved Phillip, and she felt abandoned. Guilt folded me inside its thorny arms. I knew my mood swings had driven Phillip away.

  I didn’t want Calen sitting around all day, so I pushed him to get a job. Handsome and personable, he found work at the only restaurant in McAllister. Two weeks later, he quit, explaining that he didn’t like being around so many other people.

  I suggested he attend an acting camp just for fun. He did and ended up playing a major role in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which was being performed during the summer festival in Bozeman called Sweet Pea. Glenn used her influence to get Calen a bit part in a television movie that she was co-producing and starring in for Hallmark Hall of Fame. That role earned him a Screen Actors Guild card, and he decided to follow in Glenn’s footsteps. He landed a second job, appearing in a movie called Bad City Blues, being shot in Kalispell, Montana.

  Although Calen was able to memorize lines for the movie, his behavior started to become bizarre. Voices began taunting him, and many days he would appear on the movie set completely lost in his thoughts and voices. When filming finished, he came home. I began to notice that most of his friends were distancing themselves from him, so I was happy when Calen decided to get a border collie for company. He named his dog Jack. I would watch Calen put Jack in his gray truck and take off for the mountains.

  I always felt better knowing that Jack was with him. Calen would sit for hours on a rock simply staring straight ahead while Jack sniffed and ran around close by, searching for squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits. One afternoon as the two of them were returning home Jack leaned too far out of the truck window. Calen made a sharp turn, and Jack went flying out from the truck, hitting the loose gravel with a crack, completely shattering one leg. Calen hurried Jack to a vet, who put Jack’s leg in a cast, but the healing didn’t happen; a month after the accident Jack’s left hind leg was amputated.

  When they came home after Jack’s operation, I realized that Calen and Jack made quite a pair. Both were broken in their own way—although Jack, taking easily to having only one rear leg, didn’t miss a beat, whereas Calen was lost.

  I also realized that I didn’t know how to help my son. How could I, when I didn’t even know how to help myself?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  It was time to move again. Mattie and I were arguing about everything, mostly because of my frequent “flu” spells. There was no way I could continue homeschooling her in the Mouse House in my condition. I decided we had to return to Bozeman s
o she could enroll in the same elementary school that the boys had attended.

  Suzy Nixon, a friend of mine, said her boyfriend wanted to hire me. He lived in California and was the absentee owner of two Bozeman businesses that were hemorrhaging cash. Suzy had bragged about how well I had managed the Leaf and Bean and Poor Richard’s, so he hired me by phone. He told me to start work the next morning, because the sheriff would be escorting his shops’ current managers, a couple, out the door at 9:00 a.m., and he wanted me there.

  I told Mattie and Calen that I had no intention of selling the Mouse House and the adjoining studio, where Calen stayed. We could use it on weekends as a getaway.

  Suzy invited us to stay at her house with her three children until we could find an apartment. In addition to my kids, I brought along three dogs. Suzy had dogs, too, as well as cats. We had two women, five children, five dogs, and seven cats all under one roof. It helped that Mattie was close friends with Suzy’s daughter, Madison, who was the same age. Suzy’s sons, George and Tommy, were friends with Calen and Sander, although Sander was still at boarding school.

  I jumped right into my new job and quickly deduced that both businesses were heading for bankruptcy. Suzy’s boyfriend asked me to keep them open as long as possible so he could consider his options. I spent most of my time fending off creditors. It was exhausting, and by the end of each workday I was badly in need of a drink—or so I thought.

  Suzy and I soon developed a routine. I would come home from work in my business clothes, briefcase in hand, and yell, “Honey! I’m home!” She would laugh and pour me a large goblet of red wine. Suzy would cook dinner, and afterward I would wash the dishes while she gave our girls and Tommy their baths. I would read to them and put them to bed. We worked well together, but the stress of so many people living under the same roof and the pressure from my job soon got to all of us. After several weeks, Mattie, Calen, and I moved into an apartment over one of the stores that I was overseeing.