I emerged from the place with some stuffed animals that I had been given as going-away gifts; a batch of odd new friends—including the obese lesbian—with whom I had been told by the unit staff I wasn’t supposed to remain in touch (but did); a taste for Crystal Light, a chemical-ridden drink that was served in the cafeteria; and a newly undeluded sense of the institutional world.
Although I felt very tentative about leaving, something must have been internally renegotiated over those weeks in a subterranean way—beneath my ability to recognize it. Perhaps it was no more than my realizing that there was no rescue on offer, no amount of Psychodrama that would restore my job at HBJ or fix my marriage—never mind fix my parents. I came home and gradually resumed my life where I had left it off, enjoyed playing with Zoë, and got back in touch with friends I hadn’t spoken to in months. After some time I even started writing again, taking on assignments with an enthusiasm I thought I had permanently misplaced, occasionally mining my own experience for material; a piece I wrote for The New York Times’ “Hers” column about losing a scarf in a taxi became a stand-in for all losses, big and small, sung and unsung.
23
Within four years, despite my efforts to keep afloat, I was back in the hospital. I had been working as a freelance writer, writing pieces about the voyeurism inherent in watching movies and my resistance to attending my college reunion, as well as the book reviews that paid next-to-nothing but drew on a writerly side of me that I liked, discerning but fair-minded, erudite but not snobby. All the same, without an office to go to or an allegiance with a particular magazine, I felt professionally unmoored. I was on handfuls of prescribed pills that left me woozy and dry-mouthed but didn’t seem to penetrate the severe depressive episode that had been steadfastly circling me for months, cutting off my air, sealing all exists. I felt unsteady in my being and caught up once again in long-ago grievances and privations.
I also felt propelled to get out of my marriage even as I realized I had never really given it a chance, never accepted Michael on his own terms instead of borrowed ones—modes of assessment that I had inherited from my parents but that didn’t necessarily reflect who I was, much less suit Michael. The very qualities I had once been drawn to—his artistic bent of mind and ease with the physical world, what I thought of as a kind of masculine fluency—now seemed of questionable value to the life we lived.
It didn’t help that my parents had continued to view Michael as a foreign entity, a garrulous hippie imported from the terra incognita of California, or that he was unhappy and undervalued in his work, or that both of my in-laws were problematic in their own ways. Michael’s mother, who had married his father twice and left him the second time when Michael was a year and a half, was a self-made woman possessed of great resourcefulness—eventually managing a lingerie store in Los Angeles. But she was also a stubborn and dominating creature who exerted her claims on her only child with all her might. Michael’s much-married father, meanwhile, was a moderately successful Wall Streeter who had taken Michael into his business with as little graciousness and generosity as possible, paying him poorly and treating him like a personal handyman rather than a broker-in-the-making.
In addition to which Michael and I continued to fight, as we had from the moment she was born, over who was to be Zoë’s primary parent, who possessed the know-how and emotional wherewithal to best look after her. Michael, who had two daughters from his first marriage, thought he was ideally suited to supervise every aspect of Zoë’s care, from her diet (he insisted on feeding her broccoli every night as soon as she was old enough to digest it) to her toilet-training. I wasn’t used to so much fatherly involvement and felt that my role was being usurped. But the bigger truth was that I had never stepped into the present with Michael, never really seen us as a grown-up couple, the parents of a child conceived between us. Despite the passage of time I remained, to paraphrase a line from one of my favorite writers, the novelist Malcolm Lowry, “a small girl chased by furies.”
In the weeks before I entered the hospital, the usual symptoms struck: I became paralyzed by anxiety, unable once again to get up and function, or read, or eat. At some point I packed a few items of clothing and moved back into my parents’ apartment, mostly to escape the scrutiny of others, leaving my daughter in the care of my husband and Desi, our elderly Jamaican housekeeper. I didn’t want witnesses to my radical deterioration, especially Zoë. When she was brought to visit me by Michael or Desi, she was her usual chatty self, eager to talk about everything from the illustrations on the backs of cereal boxes to the cute little boy on the television show Barney & Friends. It was crucial to me that she not sense that anything was wrong, yet the possibility that she had no idea of how I felt also pained me, making me feel far away from her.
I wanted to pick her up and hold her in my arms, inhale her freshly shampooed hair—hair the color of burnt sugar that regularly elicited admiring comments from women who paid high amounts to skilled professionals to mimic its nuanced caramel tones—until it blocked out the angry whirring in my head. But I lacked the energy to answer her nonstop questions or to invent one of our usual jolly games. “Let’s pwetend,” she’d say to me, at which I could only smile weakly. How could I keep up a fount of maternal enthusiasm when all I wanted was to lie down forever?
At this point, I was afraid of going outside, and spent most of my time sleeping. I shed ten pounds in as many days—which would have delighted me under any other circumstances, but felt irrelevant now. When I did venture from my bed to see my shrink, someone had to accompany me lest I lose my way—or never get started. Once again, I had been ruminating obsessively about killing myself, conducting a running internal debate on the preferability of one method over another. Jumping seemed the most satisfactory as a statement of my rage—splashy and decisive—but it was also the most scary, and potentially painful; pills were too female and too iffy; slitting my wrists seemed poetic, but, again, I wasn’t sure how foolproof it was. I had finally hit upon walking into oncoming traffic as the best tactic; it might look accidental, and my daughter, who still slept with a night-light, would be spared the ordeal of grappling with the reality of my suicide as she grew up. On one or two occasions, when I insisted on going out by myself, I experimented with crossing the street on a red light against the oncoming traffic. An irate driver, who screeched to a halt within inches of hitting me, yelled, “Hey lady, are you nuts?”
I checked into the hospital, which was in midtown Manhattan, on the same day that I met for a consultation with a psychiatrist who had been recommended for his expert diagnostic skills. His office was in the hospital, where he was head of the inpatient depression unit. My mother, who had brought me in a cab, waited in an ugly reception area with aqua-colored plastic modular seating. The doctor wore a white coat, unlike other psychiatrists I had known, which gave him an extra air of authority. All the same, he seemed like a logical man, and I tried to get him to see things my way. I spoke haltingly, my voice dropping to a lower register than usual, mostly about why it was crucial that I kill myself. I didn’t care anymore what caused my depression, I said, who or what was to blame. I felt exhausted by the effort to explain what seemed self-evident: there wasn’t anything left to do but kill myself. It was a siren call I had been ignoring for too long and the time had come to heed it. I was prepared to be dead, I announced matter-of-factly.
The doctor, who sat behind a desk, asked me what I wanted to accomplish—whom I wanted to get back at—and I answered that I was doing it for myself. I simply wanted out, I explained. He mentioned my daughter, and I said she’d be better off without me. He assured me that I wouldn’t always feel this way, and I answered that I couldn’t remember ever having felt any differently. It was at that point that he suggested, quite casually, that it might be a good idea for me to come into the hospital. I shook my head, but I felt a surge of relief. Somewhere inside me I knew that he knew I had come here because I could no longer remain on the outside, “moving from pain t
o pain,” as Styron put it. Later that afternoon, after sitting in the hospital cafeteria with my mother, saying little except to ask her repeatedly whether she was sure it was a good idea that I go in and what people would think of me, I went back up to the doctor’s office and he escorted me into the unit.
24
Once inside, I felt strangely safe. I remember feeling most protected against my despair when I watched TV late at night with several other insomniacs. I had been prescribed sleeping pills, as had almost all the other patients, but I resisted the pills’ effect (or, more likely, was inured to it after years of taking sleep medication), the better to enjoy those cozy hours when the unit was cast in darkness except for the nurses’ station and the flickering, multicolored nimbus of the television.
I would sit in my robe and watch the eleven o’clock news, in which all the catastrophes and crises seemed to take on an almost anthropological cast, so far removed were they from the constricted life of the universe I now inhabited. After the news, the group of us would go on watching a movie or talk show, usually chosen with little disagreement. When the talk-show audience laughed, we laughed along with it. It was like staying on at the zoo after closing time, and not only finding yourself stuck in a cage with other strange creatures but discovering that you actually liked being there. I wasn’t lonely, for one thing, which I often was at home. Although I wasn’t living among friends, exactly, no one around me appeared to feel much more hopeful than I did, which was a form of company.
When I look back on the time I spent on 11 West—an unlocked ward with about twenty beds, occupying half of a floor—I think first and foremost of the sound of a Ping-Pong ball being volleyed back and forth, an endless game played in a small, still space, under the watchful glare of fluorescent lights and a hospital aide or two. The competitive spirit was surprising, given that most of the players were heavily sedated. I used to play quite a bit with Bruce, a patient in his mid-thirties who was tranquilized into a half stupor, and who wore the same stained crewneck sweater and dragging trousers for days on end. He was one of the few men among a mostly female patient population, which made me wonder: Where were all the depressed men? Drowning their sadness in alcohol, seeking diversion by going on homicidal sprees? At some point, I discovered that Bruce was the cousin of a friend of mine from childhood—a girl I first met on the bus going to sleepaway camp, who wore her hair in two looped braids on either side of her face. I thought I could detect something of my friend in Bruce, a slight querulousness, which made me warm to him, despite the fact that he was hard to warm to.
The two of us were well matched at Ping-Pong, and we played in steady volleys, both of us concentrating on getting the little white ball over the net so that it could be sent spinning once again, making that satisfying pok sound when it met the rubber paddle. I enjoyed those sessions and I sometimes entertained a vision of Bruce and myself, spruced up in matching boy-and-girl outfits, like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, playing in tournaments across the land. Ping-Pong could be played at almost any time, but it was played with greatest fervor after dinner, when people in the outside world were going to cocktail parties or meeting in restaurants or helping their children with homework.
Dinner on the unit was served at the nursery hour of five-thirty. Trays of food were delivered on two steel trolleys, which were parked outside the large, windowed space that functioned as the dining room and general meeting place. You picked up your tray (meals were selected at breakfast on the previous day, via flimsy paper menus that made everything sound more appetizing than it actually was) and carried it into the room, where you looked for an opening in the straggly lineup of patients, who sat across from each other at two long, narrow tables, like monks. The whole meal took about fifteen minutes, tops. During my first few days, I wondered why people didn’t linger, since it was a relatively normal social opportunity in the midst of an abnormal social environment. But there was some intangible pressure to hurry, to replace the trays on the trolleys as quickly as possible—perhaps so that the aides could be done with their day.
There was a TV at one end of the room and a pay phone at the other; the phone would ring in the midst of whatever wobbly efforts at conversation were being made and invariably disrupt them. Whoever answered the phone would act visibly annoyed, as though he or she had been called away from important business, and then leave the receiver to dangle forlornly until the person for whom the call was meant picked it up. Sometimes ten or more minutes would pass as one of the elderly patients, retrieved from down the hall, shuffled with excruciating slowness over to the phone. But it was mostly the same two or three girls in their late teens or twenties who kept getting calls, as though they had won Miss Congeniality awards in the outside world and carried their charmed aura with them into the hospital.
The other detail I remember vividly is the astringent, not unpleasant smell of the detergent that was used to swab down the floors daily. Workers in gray service uniforms would suddenly appear with big aluminum buckets and stringy, gray-haired mops; when they left, the beige linoleum shone with an incongruous brilliance. The wastebaskets were also emptied every day, and the communal bathtub and shower kept clean, if not spotless. It sometimes seemed to me that an inverse relationship existed between the high standard of institutional maintenance and the quality of patient care; no one, it appeared, paid such loving attention to any of us. Although in theory you were in the hospital because you needed more emotional bolstering than was available on the outside, in practice the prevailing atmosphere, under the routinized monitoring, was one of benign neglect: We’ll leave you alone if you leave us alone.
The hardest part of the day was the early morning. I always woke up—in my narrow bed, which I made up with hospital linens consisting of a single unyielding pillow, worn cotton sheets that were oddly comforting to the touch, and two paper-thin blankets—feeling bleak, wishing for nothing more than to go back to sleep. But unlike my life at home, where I also woke up feeling bleak, life here did not require me to put on a face to greet the world. After all, wasn’t I in the hospital precisely because I had given up on the tiresome chore of self-presentation, of feigning a cheerful countenance, an onward-and-upward energy I didn’t feel? Other people were out there, striving, hustling, competing, winning. You were in here, having temporarily retreated from the battle, attending to your wounds. True, patients were supposed to dress for breakfast, but after a few days I realized that no one made much of a fuss if you didn’t, so I began appearing in a terry robe and slippers along with the other laggards.
I was usually one of the last to pick up my breakfast from the trolley standing in the hall. No plush bedside service here, as described by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. No blue china decorated with white daisies, either, or scalloped glass shells filled with orange marmalade—merely an individual box of cornflakes or a plate of overcooked scrambled eggs. Clearly, I had been born too late: with the advent of managed care, drastically shortened hospital stays, and increased pressure to medicate rather than listen, private psychiatric hospitals, like so many other things in life, weren’t what they used to be. The glamour days of nuthouses, when wealthy patients—“thoroughbred mental cases,” as the poet Robert Lowell described them—strolled across two hundred acres of manicured grounds at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, a site chosen for its beauty by Frederick Law Olmsted, were a thing of the past.
“Time hangs heavy in the hospital,” Styron wrote in Darkness Visible. For me it wasn’t so much that time hung heavy as that it began to take on a different, less imperative dimension, to recede into the background. For the curious thing about life on the unit was that, even after breakfast, the day never really started up. The hours passed, and at some point it became lunchtime and then the afternoon, and soon enough it was five-thirty. There were various interruptions, of course—the chief ones being your therapy session and the dispensation of “meds,” when a queue would form at the nurses’ station while each pill was laboriously freed from i
ts individual plastic wrapping and dropped into a tiny paper cup—but mostly you were at leisure to perambulate in your own mind, peeking in at various nooks and crannies. You could sit around, or lie on your bed, and muse upon the basic question that you’d never been able to answer satisfactorily: Did you want to live or die?
Indeed, from a certain perspective, entering a psychiatric hospital could be viewed as an implicit challenge to the status quo—an affront to the defensive maneuvers, the self-protective habits, of those who managed to soldier on. What was so special, so delicate, about you, that you couldn’t bear up? (In Jane Kenyon’s poem “Having It Out with Melancholy,” a friend suggests, “You wouldn’t be so depressed if you really believed in God.” I guiltily wondered from time to time whether I would be less depressed if I had stuck to the rules of my faith and remained Orthodox.)
I remember picking up a glossy magazine one day and paging through its breathless coverage of anyone with a claim on the spotlight. It seemed inconceivable that I, not so long ago, had written for such magazines myself, had been courted over expensive lunches by editors eager for my work. For a moment, I felt panicked. Did anyone—not just at the red-hot cultural center, but anyone—care that I had withdrawn from the fray? Would people mourn me if I never returned, never took up my place again? On the other hand, perhaps withdrawal was the nobler choice: if my soul—my psyche, my neurochemistry, whatever it was that had foundered—was in need of mending, it comforted me to think that maybe there was something flinty and superficial about those who continued to rise at the shrill call of their ambition.
This Close to Happy Page 16