by Cole Cohen
If I’m going on a road trip, I print out the directions from a map site in list form, so that I can read them to the driver instead of looking at a map. To my credit, I am also an excellent playlist maker and snack provider. And I never ask if we are there yet.
“Do you remember,” I ask my mother, “did I seem this afraid of crossing the street before? It’s getting so I’m getting confused and I can’t remember straight.”
“Well, if other kids wanted candy, they would just run across the street to the candy store,” she says. “But you always wanted to wait, to go with someone else. And when we crossed streets, you always stayed close. I didn’t think anything of it; I figured if you wanted to wait to cross the street with me, well, that was fine. But you were the first. Maybe if I had Carly or Marni to compare you to, and they were crossing streets on their own and you weren’t, maybe then I would have been worried. And then when you got older, you learned to hide it; you just crossed when all your friends crossed, and you learned to hide it from yourself as well.”
“All that happens is that you’re more cautious than other people when you cross the street,” one of my friends later weighs in, and I nod. But I’m thinking, That’s all that happens to you. I pause, I frown, I hesitate, I pause again, I wait, maybe put a foot out, and eventually I cross. I’m striking a terrifying bargain between the moving object (a car), and a fixed object (myself). I can’t really say what I thought of this before the diagnosis because I didn’t know that there was anything to think about it. When I did get down on myself for being so cautious, it fell under the umbrella of being a generally anxious person. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be anxious because I was processing information differently from the way other people process it; I didn’t think about processing information at all. The generally anxious person crosses the street to get to the other side, just as the person with the neurological condition or the blind person does. Like the crossing chicken, I thought “why” was beside the point. At the time, thinking about crossing seemed to be the problem itself, rather than a step toward a solution.
* * *
Dr. Volt wants my father to have an MRI too. Everyone—Volt, my father, my mother, my sisters, me—is certain my father will have a black hole like mine on his MRI. It’s the only explanation as to why my father and I are both terrible at math, horrible with directions, and unable to keep track of time. We are not allowed to partner off on errands together, lest my mother or my sister Carly be sent in to retrieve us when we become lost or forget why we even set out on the road to begin with.
My mom and I are seated across from each other in a wooden booth in a coffee shop down the street from Nell’s office. Mom has just picked me up from my latest neurofeedback appointment with Nell, and now we’re waiting together for my father to call from Dr. Volt’s office with the results of his MRI. If he has a hole in his brain as well, it may prove that a genetic link is the cause of the atrophy. However, these holes with cranial fluid in the brain are more common than most people realize, though not usually as large as mine. If my father also has a hole in his brain, the next step will be to call in my sisters for scans. Dr. Volt has urged us to get in touch with relatives on my father’s side who may be willing to have an MRI, but most of my father’s side of the family are Orthodox Jews who don’t speak to us.
One of my fondest memories of hanging out with my father is when he picked me up from my job selling books at the Borders in the newly opened Bridgeport Village, a ritzy mall in the suburbs. It’s the only open-air mall in Portland, where it rains nine months out of the year, but a little rain never got in the way of anyone’s lust for Egyptian linen or sea-salt scrubs.
That day, my father stepped out of his car, surveyed the landscape of lunching ladies and manicured teenagers with armfuls of shopping bags, and proclaimed in his thick New York accent, “All of these people deserve to have hot molten lava poured down their throats.” I loved him for saying loudly and succinctly what all of us working there spent all day thinking to ourselves.
It was not as much fun, however, when I brought home my first boyfriend and my father looked him over and quickly labeled him “mediocre.” Or when he tells me that I don’t really need that bowl of ice cream. The man has no filter and no interest in attaining one. He also has three daughters and one wife, who volley back, or cry, or yell, or sulk, or stomp away to their respective rooms. While our reactions vary, his do not. “Can’t you take a joke?” he says. Sometimes we can, sometimes we can’t. Humor is our best defense, to deflect the joke back at him or draw attention to another relative. When I’m the target, I’ll shoot back a joke about Marni’s nipple rings getting stuck in her sweater. This is how we show love, and how we survive.
I anxiously play with the straw in my iced coffee. My mom is gripping her cell phone. “If he doesn’t … if it comes up clean, well, then, I guess I just married an asshole.”
The phone rings. There is a short burst of chatter, ending with my mother asking my father, “Well, what now?” She snaps the phone shut. “No hole. Clean.” She is clearly disappointed. Shock is becoming a familiar sensation rooted in my stomach. It’s official. I am the only one with this condition. I hadn’t realized how much I had been counting on my father’s company, partially resenting sharing this with him and also grateful for a physical validation of our link.
When my father is overtaken by dark periods of depression, he always turns to me and intones, “You know how it is.” He has witnessed my own dark periods. When complicated theories come easily to me, I know it is his gift that I am using. I was certain that we shared this too—that the vague sense that he and I were more strongly linked, for better or for worse, than he and my other sisters, would be brought to light on the stark, undeniable film of an MRI.
When we get home, my dad tells me that Dr. Volt asked him if he had any difficulties telling time. “I explained to him that time is merely a construct. That’s Hegel,” he says, gleefully.
Ever since I can remember, when either of my sisters or I have complained about doing the dishes or other chores, my father will intone, “Aristotle says, ‘There is no justice in the family.’” I probably wasn’t even ten yet when my father first asked me whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if no one is around to witness it. I am still learning how to answer him.
(Months later, while I am studying writing at CalArts, my mother begins reading about a condition called Asperger’s Syndrome. She begs my father to call Dr. Volt and set up a screening. My father calls the receptionist, who puts him straight on the phone with Dr. Volt. After an hour-long conversation with my father, he says, “Don’t bother coming in for a formal screening. You’ve got it.”)
* * *
“Do you remember my parents?” my mom asks. I am sitting with her at my parents’ kitchen table. Taken off guard by this new line of questioning, I’m unsure of how to proceed.
“Yeah … of course I remember.”
“What do you remember?”
I squirm and shrug and try to answer her question. “They were always very nice to me; I don’t know, I was really young when they died.”
“You were twelve.”
“Oh. I guess that’s not that young.”
Silence.
“Your mom liked musicals. Grandpa bought me a dollhouse once, and it made me kind of anxious because it cost like a hundred dollars, which to me at the time was like a huge fortune—why are you asking me this now?”
“Amy said I should. She says I have no identity of my own.”
I furrow my brow. Amy is my mom’s therapist. She is in her early or midthirties; I remember that her office is decorated with photographs of distant and exotic lands she’s visited with her husband. I went to her a couple of times, but we never really clicked the way that she has with my mom, who loves her. Not long after I stopped seeing her, she suggested to Mom that I attend Dialectical Behavior Therapy.
“You’re a really good mother,” I say.
&
nbsp; “Yeah. Amy says I have no identity outside of being a mother.”
I don’t know how to begin to answer this.
She suggests more appointments with specialists, more exercises and strategies. If I am cured, who does my mother become?
July 2007
Seattle, Washington
I’m meeting Minerva at her brother Charlie’s place in Seattle to work out plans for her wedding next summer. Minerva and I have only recently been back in touch—she found me online earlier this summer—but we’ve quickly picked up where we left off in high school. A friend who worked with me at the essential oil factory is driving to Seattle from Portland, and she agrees to drop me off at Charlie’s apartment.
I arrive in the early evening. Charlie opens the door, shakes my hand firmly and brusquely, and then sits down at his desk. He looks back up at me standing in the middle of his apartment and just stares at me, expressionless. I remember his intense green eyes from when we first met in the art room ten years ago. In that moment I make a secret decision about Charlie that I won’t tell myself until winter. I store it away like a squirrel until it gets cold out and I need more to survive on.
Minerva walks in from the kitchen and gives me a big hug. “Hi! How are you?”
She seems like a different person from the loud, opinionated, irresistible girl that I hung out with in the art room at lunch hour. Minerva is finishing up a degree at Georgetown law; her new fiancé is also a lawyer. How do people do this? Commit to a track, a person, and a career? I have no idea. Her certainty frightens me. I’ve been to only a couple of weddings of friends my age, both of which left me feeling as if I’d just watched a school play. I wanted to encourage and congratulate the newlyweds, but I also felt awkward. I am hoping that participating in Minerva’s wedding might change my feelings somehow.
“There won’t be any bridesmaids, but I’d like you to be my official wedding buddy.” She and I sit on the couch and chat about the dress that her mother is making her while Charlie bounds around the room, ignoring us completely. He picks up a tangle of cords from his desk, screws open the back of an old Casio keyboard, and puts it down in favor of another old keyboard, begins ripping some knobs off it, goes outside to check out his tomato plants in the front window of the apartment, steps back inside.
When he steps back in, Minerva and I are sitting over my laptop, looking at the site for a label that specializes in re-creating dress patterns from the 1940s. I point out a navy blue dress with an iris embroidered on the shoulder. “That’s the one I’m thinking about wearing, if I can afford it.”
“I think my wedding dress is going to be knee length,” Minerva says. While we’ve been talking, I haven’t been able to stop tracking Charlie’s jerking movements as he busies himself around the apartment. When he steps outside again, I whisper, “What’s up with Charlie?”
“Oh, his back hurts. It hurts for him to sit still. His back hurts most of the time; walking around helps.” She shrugs, but she doesn’t meet my eyes as she explains, “Scoliosis. His spine is basically a question mark. The nurse caught it at school; you know those checks everyone has to do, touch your toes? I have it a little bit too but not nearly as much. Anyway, our parents weren’t exactly together enough to do anything about it.” Minerva often emphasizes every other word when she speaks; Charlie almost never stresses words.
We step outside and find him downstairs in the parking lot, adjusting the handlebars on his motorcycle, a black machine with a body like a wasp. “It’s a redesign of a Kawasaki from the seventies,” he begins, gesturing up and down the handlebars and around the body of the machine as he talks about each piece. While neither Minerva nor I care about the mechanics of Charlie’s motorcycle, we can’t bring ourselves to interrupt him. There’s a soft-spoken persuasiveness in his tone, a level of investment in the people who are listening to him that I didn’t expect from a man intent on explaining how something mechanical works to two women standing in a parking lot.
The next morning, we stop at a nearby coffee shop and take our coffees to Green Lake, the park next to Charlie’s apartment building. Minerva and I are in the empty playground sitting on one of those merry-go-round-type structures, the ones that you ride by kicking off the ground with your feet until there’s a strong spin going, and then you place both feet on the metal floor as it goes faster and faster and you get dizzy, and once it slows down you do it again. Charlie is pushing it for us as he explains to us how subprime lending works. He just helped his mother sell her house in Sacramento, the house that they grew up in, moving her into an apartment. I am less than half listening to him. His drone is lost in the wind as Minerva and I spin.
“Faster, Charlie, faster!” Minerva yells, and Charlie rolls his jacket sleeves up and gives us a big push. He hops up on the nearby picnic table between spins.
When we get back to Charlie’s apartment, Minerva says casually, “You want to see some pictures?”
She pulls out a stack of photographs. The photos are of piles of garbage, rolls of paper towels, bags of McDonald’s, empty soda cans, plastic liter soda jugs. “It’s my mom’s house, before we cleaned it up and sold it.”
I had been to their mom’s house once or twice during my high school years. I remember high ceilings and a constant hum of anxiety, as if the whole house was an ornament hanging from a string. I don’t know how it is I don’t remember the mess, but it must have been there then. It must have been the origin of the incessant twinge of tension that Minerva seems, at least externally, dulled to.
I look away from the pictures, embarrassed. “That’s about what I expected,” I say quietly. It’s not, though. Minerva and Charlie were like Hansel and Gretel, two children in a dark fairy tale. I thought that I knew what their world was like because I’d heard their stories, but I didn’t have a clue.
September 2007
Valencia, California
In the bag I receive during CalArts orientation is a keychain with the logo of the city of Santa Clarita, the town next door, SANTA CLARITA—1987, the year when the town was incorporated. I was six. Valencia, a suburb about an hour and forty-five minutes away from Los Angeles, is best known for its Six Flags amusement park. It is also home to a Walmart, a Target, and strings of gated suburban houses with names like Artist’s Terrace.
My old Portland roommate and college friend Miranda volunteers to fly with me from Portland, sparing me the otherwise inevitable caravan with my parents. She is finishing up a degree in naturopathic medicine. My dad calls her “the Not a Doctor” and asks if she “tells people that their chi is fucked up.”
At the Orange County Airport, we pick up the rental car, buy cheap whiskey, lemonade, and fried chicken at the grocery store, and head to the Motel 6 where we’ll be spending tonight. We take a brief swim in the motel pool and then towel off and climb onto the queen-sized bed with our dinner. We wipe our greasy hands on toilet paper and yell at the America’s Top Model marathon on TV.
In the morning, I wake up bleary-eyed and smelling of fried chicken. The sun blasts through the thin motel shades. Miranda drives to the 99 Cents Only Store, where I pick up odds and ends for my new room: hangers, detergent, a trash can, and a laundry bag.
When we arrive on campus, Miranda decides where my mirror goes best, where to place the hooks for my purses and cardigans, where my shoes go in my closet. She walks up and down the halls of CalArts’ main building with two copies of the map we were given during orientation week. On the copy that I will keep with me once she leaves, she marks arrows in green highlighter marking paths to the main stairwell, the library, and the cafeteria. Her written directions, broken down into steps with noted visual landmarks, accompany the translated map.
The hardest part is envisioning how to set up systems and routines. The second-hardest part is maintaining them. I am habit Teflon. Routines do not stick.
In Valencia, the only places in walking distance of graduate housing are two strip malls containing negligible variations on the same stores. A
Starbucks here, a Peet’s there, this way a Vons, and that way a Safeway. I tell myself that being unable to leave Valencia of my own accord has a lot to do with one’s mind-set. I am a monk; art school is my abbey.
The walls of the school are constantly repainted: one day beige, one day blue, one day pink. Every Thursday there is gallery night, where art students exhibit in the main gallery and everyone drinks wine from Trader Joe’s and eats cheese and walks around and pretends that we are in an art gallery instead of a giant hall with linoleum floors that looks like a high school gym.
In the mornings, I can hear the gamelan troupe practicing from my room. When I stop for coffee in the cafeteria, there’s always the same girl wearing the same leopard-print lingerie and ripped fishnets, toddling around on the same pair of broken black kitten heels. She wears a small heart-shaped sticker on her face, which sometimes moves from one cheek to the other. I quickly learn not to visit the bathroom across from the dance auditorium because the seats are splattered with vomit left behind by bulimic dance students.
On the walk back from class, every so often I see a bearded campus security officer in his dark blue uniform peel open a tin of cat food and place it on the ground for the tribe of feral cats who live in the bushes. When he comes back, the tin will be empty.
In the campus housing unit I share with an actor, a photographer, a filmmaker, and a stage manager, the locked cabinet holding the radiator and air conditioning emits a pulsing screech for possibly one minute at random hours.