The Suicide Index

by Joan Wickersham

  “Mommy,” he gasped, “that man just threw a pie in the other man’s face!”

  You called your father that night, and told him the story. He laughed. He said: “See? The oldest joke in the world is suddenly new again.”

  Now, watching Rocky and Bullwinkle scheme and bumble their way through whatever the plot requires of them—you don’t know what’s going on most of the time—you see your son laughing, and you know this is the sort of thing that has always delighted you. But it doesn’t, now. You’d like it to, but it doesn’t. Now you’re just glad that there’s something you and your son have found to do together that amuses him and doesn’t demand much of you. In a dull way, you’re angry: you worry that the numbness, if it goes on too long, will cheat you and your son of something you would have had if your father hadn’t done this.

  You’re not angry at your father. Just dully angry at “this.” At “what happened.” At “it,” whatever “it” is.

  There’s a part where Rocky and Bullwinkle go to a place called Submervia. It’s a city under a glass dome at the bottom of the sea. If the dome cracks and water gets in, the city will be destroyed.

  You lie there watching the tapes over and over. Your son laughs and leans against you, resting his chin on your hip.

  Suicide: numbness and

  chicken pox

  CHICKEN POX SWEEPS THROUGH THE NURSERY SCHOOL. YOUR son gets it. You give him oatmeal baths, watch a lot more Rocky and Bullwinkle, tell him not to scratch.

  After a week, when he’s almost completely better, you notice a red spot on your chest.

  The next day you wake up and there are more spots, and your legs ache. You smile at your husband. You’re sick; you can lie in bed all day without feeling you should be doing something else. Too bad you can’t read. You haven’t been able to pick up a book for two months, since your father’s death. You can’t remember sentences after you’ve read them.

  You can feel yourself getting sicker. It’s sucking you down. Wool is all over your skin, hot and itchy; someone is rubbing it into your skin, someone is igniting it. It’s in your mouth, under your breasts, between your legs, on the soles of your feet. You are festering, you’re wet and sticky, all the little spots of fire are leaking. You take a sip of hot tea and feel it igniting all the spots inside you, down your throat and inside your chest and belly. You lie in bed with your head thrown back against the pillows, shivering, letting the air ignite you. You scratch and it hurts; you scratch more. Your eyeballs are molten. You fill the tub with cool water and oatmeal and lie down flat, put your whole head under and feel all the little fires on your scalp go hissing out; you laugh and imagine cartoon steam curling up out of the water.

  “Is there anything I can do?” your husband asks, sitting down gently on the edge of the bed.

  You shake your head. You have everything you need. He’s intruding. The bed is full of sweat and oatmeal, filthy and wet and sweet. Your bones are hurting and shaking. Your skeleton is dancing, thudding inside of you.

  Finally the burning recedes. You get up, shower, change the sheets, put on clothes instead of a nightgown. You are numb again, smooth, bereft.

  The spots take a long time to fade. Every day you look in the mirror and see that they’re fainter. You miss the feeling of them, alive and blazing.

  Suicide: numbness and

  duration

  YEARS.

  Suicide: numbness and

  food

  YOU EAT. GOD, HOW YOU EAT.

  Brownies. Dark, sweet, rich ones that you bake yourself, adding chocolate syrup and chocolate chips as well as the chocolate called for in the recipe. Deliberately undercooked, these brownies have the texture of very thick frosting. You can slice them, sort of, into squares, stopping after each cut to rub the chocolatey blade of the knife and then sucking your fingers. These brownies are gritty black sugary warm mush in your mouth. You bake them all the time.

  But if none are handy you’ll eat brownies from the rack at the gas station, the dry bland ones wrapped in plastic.

  You eat Ring-Dings and Yodels, with their sweet smothery white centers.

  Kit-Kats, whose layers you flake apart with your tongue.

  Potato chips, the not-too-salty kind, thick, golden, translucently oily.

  Croissants—plain, chocolate, and apricot.

  Lasagne, especially the crisp brittle browned parts at the edges of the pan.

  Pistachios.

  Grilled-cheese-and-bacon sandwiches.

  Hot chocolate with whipped cream.

  That’s the pleasure in each day, the lust and the delight, waking up and figuring out what to eat. You read cookbooks while you eat your lunch. You make your family homemade guacamole, souffles, Sacher torte. You learn to bake Portuguese sweet bread.

  You get fat.

  The food is, literally, sensational. Sweet, hot, spicy, creamy—your mouth is always a lively place.

  There’s something self-pitying about this kind of eating, of course. You know this and don’t care. Or, rather, you know it’s self-destructive and you do it anyway. You can’t stop. You enjoy it and hate yourself for it. It comforts you and makes you miserable.

  You feel you deserve it.

  Suicide: numbness and

  husband

  HE SEES THAT YOU ARE NUMB. IT WORRIES HIM. HE DOESN’T try, in any big heroic way, to do something about it. He accepts it. He knows you hate it, that it feels clogged and unnatural. You call it “the ice.” Sometimes you are able to cry for a minute or two, and then you say hopefully to him, “I think maybe the ice is starting to break apart.”

  But nothing really changes; the ice stays frozen.

  He holds you at night, if you want to be held. Most nights you don’t. It has nothing to do with sex—which oddly has continued to be great, after the first month or two, when you didn’t think you’d ever feel like having sex again. The numbness isn’t about sex, or about him, or about loving him, you say.

  He says he knows that.

  It’s years, more than a decade, before you know how angry he is.

  One night the two of you are fighting in the kitchen, and he says, “Your father really fucked this family over.”

  You’re shocked, furious, betrayed. Your husband loved your father. He’s always understood your father’s goodness and sadness. He has understood that suicidal depression is an illness, not a moral failing. But suddenly here is your kind, compassionate husband, his face red and twisted, yelling about how your father’s suicide fucked everyone over.

  “It did not,” you say—fat, numb you.

  “Look at you, look what it did to you,” your husband says. He is not referring to the fatness, which he claims loyally and almost believably not to care about.

  “What did it do to me?” you say, your voice ominously low and even. You’re like a snake uncoiling, rattling its tail.

  Your husband sees it, hears it, starts to back away. “Nothing,” he says. This is something you hate about your marriage: that your husband is afraid of you when you’re angry.

  “No. Tell me. What?”

  He doesn’t back away farther, but his eyes are wary. He holds his ground, but only just. “I’m thinking about what it did to all of us. How much space it takes up.” He looks at you. Then, as you continue to watch him, to glare at him, he startles you. He makes a decision. He takes a breath, steps forward, and grabs the snake. He says, “I resent having to protect you all the time.” He says, “I feel like this terrible thing happened to you, and so my job is to shield you from any more bad things that might happen.”

  “What do you mean, your job? Who the hell hired you?” But even as you spit out these questions, your rage is only about half of what it was before he told you this. You know what he means. It’s a relief to hear him say it. It’s also horrifying; you see instantly that it’s true. “I’m sorry,” you say.

  The sudden capitulation rattles him. “No, no, it’s not your fault,” he mumbles.

  You look at each
other for a while. Then he says he’s scared about your son.

  “I know,” you say. Your son is sixteen now, depressed, seeing a psychiatrist, taking medication. Some days he can’t get out of bed. You and your husband have talked a lot about how hard it is to gauge the seriousness of all this. Certainly it’s something more than just ordinary adolescent misery. But you don’t know how much more. Because of what your father did, it’s hard not to be engulfed by the most drastic fears about where your son’s sadness might lead.

  You know that this is what your husband is thinking about now as he says, suddenly, savagely, “I hate your father.”

  Those words are taboo in this house. No one is permitted to even think them. But hearing them, tonight, you’re not outraged. You’re even a little glad your husband has said them. You, yourself, can’t, but you’re glad someone did.

  You stand there in your kitchen wondering if perhaps the ice really is, finally, starting to break up.

  Then your husband says, still furious, “And I hate that I always have to be scared about what you might do.”

  It takes you a minute to understand what he means.

  And another minute for the numbness to envelop you so that you can shrug and answer him, in a flat voice that makes it clear the conversation is over, “Well, don’t be.”

  Suicide: numbness and

  psychiatric response

  YOU START SEEING THE FIRST PSYCHIATRIST FIVE MONTHS AFTER your father’s death. The words that come to mind when you think of her are “perky” and “glue.” She tilts her head sideways after each thing you say, looking startled and interested. Her interest is like balm to you: you can’t cry about your father, but her frank interest makes you want to weep with gratitude. No matter what you say, she says she understands.

  You picked her because you thought she might get it about the money. You’d been given a couple of names, and you picked one after driving by her enormous house, in one of Cambridge’s fanciest neighborhoods. Money seemed to play such an important part in your father’s death: growing up rich, growing up poor, being close to family money all his life but never having any of his own, being close to people who were making money but never making it himself. And the mess of Neil asking for his money back, and your husband’s father selling the Boudin—it could all sound so bizarre, and spoiled, if told to a shrink who didn’t understand. You thought this one might. And she does. She tries. She’s nice. You’re nice. The two of you sit there being nice ladies together.

  Her view is that the suicide doesn’t invalidate what you thought you’d known about your family. It is a sad, new thing to add into the mix. She sets about helping you remember the good things: how much your father loved you, how much you loved him. She gets very excited at one point when you mention that among your father’s medical problems was a dramatically elevated level of alkaline phosphatase, a liver enzyme. She hypothesizes, her eyes flashing behind her large glasses, that since the liver’s function is to filter out toxins to the brain, and since your father’s liver wasn’t functioning properly, then maybe unfiltered toxins to the brain were a chemical factor in his suicidal depression. Hmmm, you say. It is sort of comforting to you, the idea that there is medical detective work possible here. A clear, clinical, causative explanation of what he did. In the months after his death, you are still hoping that a single culprit might be apprehended and brought to justice.

  You relish the chance to create him, fresh, for a new audience. Someone who didn’t know him, and who wasn’t personally hurt or angered by his suicide. Someone to whom you can tell the story of his life, and the catalog of his attributes—his tenderness, his tolerance, his subtlety, his love for you—who will listen gravely and come up with a judgment that you can accept as objective and fair: “He sounds like a wonderful man.”

  A not-guilty verdict is what you are after, and what you get.

  And it is balm, because in different ways almost everyone who knew him seems to be saying that he was guilty of something. Your mother: of abandoning her. Your sister: of weakness, or a kind of hollowness at the core. His partner: of bailing out. Your husband’s stepfather: of leaving him holding the bag. Even your friends, most of whom hadn’t even known him, seem to be convicting him, at a sad distance, of having been a crazy man, since anyone who had committed suicide could not have been fundamentally sane.

  You hate that he is dead and everyone is angry at him. He needs someone to stand by him.

  The psychiatrist seems to understand this, and agree with it.

  You stop seeing her after a year or so. Her optimism has glued you back together—not perfectly, but a kind of imperfect gluing is what you need at this point. You probably couldn’t have stood anything else. You are like a nearsighted person who can see the cracks in the bowl when she’s wearing glasses—and so chooses not to wear glasses while looking at the bowl.

  You are fine. Numb, but fine.

  You start with the other psychiatrist nine years after your father’s death. You are not fine. The cracks are opening; sharp edges are protruding. This doctor is your father’s height, and only a few years younger than your father at the time of his death. (When your husband meets him, at one point, you are taken aback that he can’t see any resemblance, physical or otherwise, to your father.) You feel safe and comfortable with this doctor right away. Balm again.

  You tell him everything you’ve figured out. How your father was a gentle, kind, sensitive man. How he was much harder on himself than anyone had realized. You tell him all the contributory factors in your father’s death: his brutal childhood, his business failures, his health problems, the fact that your mother was angry at him and flirting seriously with someone else. “None of those things, by itself, would have killed him,” you say, wisely, to the psychiatrist. “It was the combination. And the loneliness. The sense that he’d let people down. He didn’t know how to tell anyone how bad things had gotten.”

  “What did his death do to you?” the psychiatrist keeps asking.

  You sit there. You shrug. You’re blank. Whenever he asks what it did to you, you see a blank white room, brightly lit, with no windows and nothing on the walls. You see yourself sitting on a stool in the middle. It’s a waiting room, you say.

  “What are you waiting for?” he asks.

  “Duh,” you say.

  You spend a long time with him, waiting. The two of you sit across from each other and wait together, like fishermen trailing lines in a still, opaque pool of water that is reportedly teeming with ravenous fish.

  He watches you. He’s waiting with you, for the feelings to hit hard or to trickle out. But he’s also watching you wait.

  You’ve gotten good at explaining to him what the feelings would be, if you had them. You can locate and analyze the places where the wires are crossed. The numbness feels unnatural. Not credible. You tell your shrink that you’re suspicious of it. Come on—nothing? You feel nothing? You’re not even mad at him for sticking a gun in his mouth?

  Nope. No anger. You can see that the anger ought to be there. You can plot it out with exclamation points. Your father shot himself! In the house! He knew your mother would be the one to find him and he didn’t care! He abandoned everybody!

  But: nope. Nada.

  You have some theories. You posit that you can’t get angry because your father already turned such appalling anger on himself; he’d done a terrible thing, but in doing it he’d also given himself the worst possible punishment. One day you say, “I hate the way things keep canceling each other out. I can’t just miss him, because of what he did. But I can’t hate him for what he did, because I miss him so much.”

  “So what are you feeling, right now?” your doctor asks.

  You sit for a moment. “Nothing,” you say.

  “Nothing? Or too much?”

  “Maybe too much,” you agree, though it feels like nothing.

  Occasionally you do cry in his office, talking about your father. It’s something of a relief, but it also
feels a bit circumscribed and fake: even when it’s going on, a part of you is thinking, “Wow—how therapeutic.” The crying is brief and soundless. What you’d really like to do is roll around on his floor howling and clutching your stomach.

  “You’d like to do that now?” he asks, when you mention it.

  You shake your head. You almost say politely, No thank you. You say, “I wish I had to restrain myself from doing it.” Then you ask him if people ever scream in his office.

  “Sometimes,” he says. He watches you. You wonder if he’s waiting for you to scream, now that he’s given you permission. No thank you, you almost say again.

  Then one day you’re talking about how for you, men are divided into two categories: the nice ones and the killers. “My father was one of the nice ones,” you say, with a dreamy mixture of adoration and pity.

  “Until he became a killer,” your doctor says.

  Ah. Now he has your attention.

  Suicide: numbness and

  various reprieves

  IT’S NOT LIKE YOU’RE A ZOMBIE. THE NUMBNESS IS SPECIFIC TO your father.

  You can actually remember the moment, seven months after his death, when you first realized that happiness was still a card in the deck. You were apple-picking with your husband and son, and you all sat down on the ground to rest. Your son got up again after a moment and ran into the next row of trees, and your husband went after him. You could hear them, though not what they said—your son laughing, your husband’s low voice answering. You lay on your back in the orchard grass, looking up. It was a clear deep-blue September day, almost cloudless. You thought, with sudden wonder and gratitude, “I’m happy.”

  Since then you’ve had a lot of happiness.

  The birth of your second son, good times with friends, love for your husband.