Hillbilly Gothic

by Adrienne Martini

  “Family history?”

  And so I lay it all out. My maternal great-grandmother abandoned her kids, fell into a bottle, and was never heard from again. Most likely, she was bipolar, but no one has proof. My mother’s mother hopped in and out of mental hospitals, then died very young from cancer. My mother’s brother shot and killed himself after he got back from Vietnam. My cousin, after giving birth to her first baby, couldn’t stop laughing and did some serious time in the Psych Ward. Oh, and my paternal grandmother darn near succeeded in killing herself when I was in college. I spent most of my adolescence living with my own mother, who was often not home, irritated at me, or sobbing in her bedroom for hours on end. Good times.

  Then she says, almost smiling, “So it was really just a matter of time before you wound up here.” This is only half a joke. Truer words have never been spoken.

  During the rounds of phone calls that marked my admission to the hospital, some friends are rounded up and pressed into service. I suspect it’s hard for them to really understand what’s going on, because Scott and I are the first in our circle to reproduce. They don’t know how much chaos that tiny lump of life can create. Plus, I don’t want word of my psychological decline to get out, given how vicious Knoxville gossip can be. I know this because I’ve been too catty myself to believe that others are kinder than I.

  I’d forgotten, however, that your true friends are friends no matter how strange your life may be at any given moment. Zak and Joey, the couple at whose wedding I figured out that I was pregnant, come over to our house to help Scott take care of the baby during that first night I’m away. Zak, a tall, blond TV producer with a wicked sense of humor, and Joey, a raven-haired, devastatingly beautiful and sensitive writer, stop at the Fellini Kroger on their way to pick up a can of formula that the baby needs. Also in the bag is a six-pack and some beef jerky. They settle in for the first shift.

  Shelley, the one with the sane mother who reminds Steph and me of a zoo exhibit, takes the night shift in my hospital room so that Toni can get some sleep and a change of clothes. It’s so good to see someone who knows what I used to be like before all of this that I start to cry again. Shelley, bless her, has gone to our house, rummaged through my drawers, and tossed a bunch of clothes in an overnight bag. In it, along with some clean underwear and a hairbrush, are the spring green floral pajamas that I’d initially bought to wear after having the baby. They seemed perfect for the Maternity Ward, cheerful and motherly. I even made sure they had a top with buttons on it, so that I could easily access my breasts. I had not got the chance to wear them, until now, where they just look wrong.

  Shelley also flung in a copy of Vanity Fair magazine, just in case I want to look at big pretty pictures of celebrities while I recollect my marbles. We chat for a bit, about families and babies and brain chemistry. A nurse comes in to let me know that the doctor who has been assigned to me started throwing up and had to go home. I’ll see him in the morning, she says, but first I have to take these. She hands me some pills and watches me swallow them. Shelley’s voice drifts away and I sleep.

  At some point during my stay in the regular hospital room, Toni the doula tells me that she wanted to know what I was like when I wasn’t like this. She thought I was probably smart and funny, when I was in full command of my moods. “I am,” I tell her. “I am a big hit at parties.” But I don’t mention all of the other stuff—how I don’t know that I can ever be that person again, how I’m going to feel like this forever, how I can’t live like this. And I don’t mention how much I hate who I am, how I can’t forgive people who hurt me yet love me, and how much I burn to be the radiant woman on the cover of all of the glossy magazines, the one who glows from the joy of having a new baby. I can’t do this mom thing. I can’t be perfect like that woman in the picture and I can never be perfect like her because of the chemicals in my brain and all this past history, which wrap around my ankles like quicksand and suck me down.

  From my journal, July 13:

  “The baby books don’t prepare you for this, this wonderful event that can also lead to such angst and turmoil. I feel cheated somehow, as if I missed out on all of the cute bunnies and duckies of motherhood and got stuck with all of the poopy diapers. Part of me wanted your birth to be more celebrated, with all of the extended family throwing a big party for you and by extension (and selfishly) me. And it hurts to be so selfish. It’s hard to let the spotlight rest solely on you. You deserve it, little one, but it is hard to admit that it is hard to no longer be the center of attention.”

  The next morning, as I’m waking up I think my father is visiting me, despite the fact that I know he is still in Ohio and not due to come to Knoxville for a few more days. As it turns out, the solid, balding, vaguely ethnic man sitting across from me is my new shrink, Dr. G. The resemblance fades after I wake up a bit more. Freud would have had a field day.

  Dr. G, I later learn, is a Jew from Brooklyn and not, like my dad, an Italian from Pittsburgh. Briefly, before going to med school, Dr. G was a stand-up comic. People are interesting, even when you’re not at your best. Dr. G opened his act by apologizing for not seeing me the previous night. I simply start to cry. It feels like I’m on the edge of a tall building, peering over the side at the pigeons circling below.

  He does doctorly things like inquiring about my night’s rest and how much I’ve been eating. He chitchats. I don’t. He makes jokes. I don’t laugh. Somewhere along the way, my sense of humor decamped for sunnier climes. He asks me to go through the chain of events again, then he gives me the medical headlines.

  First bit of news is that I have a urinary tract infection, the first one I’ve ever had in my life, and the reason why I was having so many issues with my bladder. Insult, meet injury. It’s probably the result of the catheter during the birth but it’s hard to know for certain. I should be in more discomfort because of it, but am not because my pelvic nerves are still in a bit of a snit over the labor trauma. Simple UTIs can be cured pretty quickly, fortunately, with a course or two of antibiotics. The crying, however, is going to take a bit more time.

  Second bit of news is that I officially have postpartum depression. Knowing that what I am feeling has a name is a strange comfort. My feelings are real and not just something I can get over with a Protestant backbone and a stiff upper lip. Dr. G mentions what every psychiatric professional brings up sooner or later. “You wouldn’t tell a person with diabetes to just snap out of it. This is no different.” If I had a quarter for each time I’ve heard this, I could pay for all the years of therapy.

  Sad thing is, it’s not true. Diabetes, at least Type I, lacks the stigma attached to mental illnesses. The public at large has no problem believing that a diabetic can manage her condition and live a fairly normal life. Once you’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, however, you are suspect, as if any sudden movement could make you take a hostage and climb the clock tower. We are always on the verge of collapse, in the eyes of the inexperienced, and the media only helps to promote this idea with its wall-to-wall coverage of the country’s Andrea Yateses.

  As Dr. G puts it, I have “a disorder of mood rather than a disorder of thought.” As of last night, I’m on an antidepressant called Remeron (aka mirtazapine), which also acts as a booster for the Zoloft, pushing it to work a little faster.

  “Remeron will also increase your appetite and acts as a soporific, which is…”

  “I know what ‘soporific’ means,” I snap. It pisses me off that people assume the crazy are also stupid. “I’m a writer.” I don’t know why I’m compelled to tell him that.

  “Oh,” he says, and smiles. “What do you write?”

  “I work for the weekly paper. I write about music and movies and books and people,” I say. “I’m not the kind of writer who pens poems about her cats.” Tears are still streaming down my face, yet I feel it’s important that he know I’m not some sad, lonely little woman who dreams of being the next Emily Dickinson. It’s weird when the ego butts in
at inappropriate times.

  “My son’s in a band,” Dr. G says. He gives me the name. I’ve actually heard of them and they have a small following in town. “You should do a story on them.” It’s a comfort to know that at least one of us thinks that I’ll be back to my old life eventually.

  The third bit of news is that I’m to be transferred to Tower 4 after dinner.

  I pass the day with doula Toni and my Vanity Fair. Scott’s mom is on a plane, heading back to Knoxville. The baby is spending another day in Scott’s office, being cooed at by all of the women who work there. I am a worthless wife and mother. I don’t know why Scott’s stuck around all of these years. Oddly, this thought doesn’t make me cry.

  Shelley stops in after work. She’s with me when the orderly comes in, pushing a wheelchair. She carries my bag as we weave our way through the bowels of the hospital, which wasn’t so much coherently designed as randomly evolved. It’s a maze down there. It’s hard to tell one wing from the next when you are surrounded by white, waxed linoleum and clean white walls. The orderly confesses that he used to get lost a lot when he first started. Now he knows the routes well.

  One last elevator ride and we are at the glass doors that separate the Psych Ward from the sane world. I’m wheeled through. Shelley surrenders my bag. The door closes. On the other side are Scott, his mom, and Shelley. Scott is holding the baby. I want someone to hold me, to touch me long enough to remind me that I’m human. They aren’t allowed to visit tonight and can only wave through the glass. They all look terrified, like they’ve seen ghosts.

  From my journal, July 12, evening, first night on the ward:

  “Please get me out of here.”

  8

  Like most healthy, mostly functional folks, my exposure to the inner workings of the average mental institution was limited to random media. I’ve seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Nuts. I may have read Girl, Interrupted at some point, but the only detail that stuck was the bit about the chicken bones under the bed. I also suspect that I saw an indie slasher flick set in an abandoned psych hospital, but, again, details are hazy. There may have been a chain saw.

  In real life, I’d set foot on the property of such places only three times. In reverse chronological order and from most unthreatening to most threatening, I’ll start with Lakeshore Mental Health Institute in Knoxville, a lush, hilly complex in one of the tonier parts of town not far from Knoxville’s University of Tennessee. Lakeshore—technically on the shore of the Tennessee river, not a lake—has always been an active mental health facility that houses patients in its vaguely Gothic buildings. But, in recent years, it has opened up the campus to community members, building hiking and biking paths that are mobbed on pleasant days by southern ladies who lunch and moms with baby carriages. I’d walked the loop myself a few times, and it was always difficult to imagine that behind the locked doors of the well-kept buildings were actual crazy people, some of whom might be watching us enjoying the weather. The soccer field was always a chaos of kids and calmed any misgivings we might have had about being spied on. Surely kids wouldn’t be allowed someplace unsafe?

  Less innocuous, but still fairly unthreatening, was the Austin State Hospital, which, like Lakeshore, is a campus and not just a single building. It also takes up some prime city real estate and is about the same distance from Austin’s UT as Lakeshore is from its UT. The State Hospital, during my Austin years, hadn’t really embraced the idea of allowing the public unfettered access to the grounds, but it did allow some groups to use its community room for meetings. A theater company for which I occasionally stage-managed rehearsed in that big, white, vinyl-tiled space. We all viewed it as something of a lark, kismet that artists who were on the bleeding edge would rehearse near the lunatics. At least once during each and every show I worked, on a particularly frustrating evening when Melpomene had abandoned us for more fertile endeavors, someone would comment that it was time to check ourselves in.

  According to my back-of-an-envelope calculations, adding up all the time I spent at the Austin State Hospital over the years would come out to three consecutive months of twenty-four-hour days on the grounds. If I had been a patient, it would have made a significant impression. But when you know that the guard at the gate will let you out when you drive past, you fail to notice the details of others’ confinement. Only in hindsight do I remember the process of getting the community room key, which required producing some ID and being buzzed in and out of a security office every time. Looking back, I can remember how eerily quiet the grounds were most of the time, despite the fact that a significant population of people was locked behind closed doors. Then, I subconsciously chalked it up to the seasons—only fools would be outside wandering about during the hellishly hot Texas summers, springs, and falls. Now, however, it is slightly more sinister that the only people I ever really saw were those I knew who were directly involved with the company.

  There was only one time when the reality of the location pointed itself out. During a rehearsal the phone rang. This was in the days before everyone and his dog had a cell phone, so the one phone in the community room was our only lifeline to the outside world. On the other end was a security guard, who advised us to stay inside the building and make sure the doors were locked. “Why?” I asked. “One of our patients wasn’t around for bed check,” security guy said, “and he can be a little dangerous.”

  They promised to call back when the rogue loon was buttoned down for the evening but never did. We all eventually ran to our cars en masse, giggling with anxiety and the thrill of the perceived danger. It was oddly fun, at the time. Now, I wonder what was going on behind the scenes. How much of a tizzy was the place in? I can only guess. Still, all of the doings at the state asylum were backstage to me. All I ever saw was the surface.

  The most up-close and personal experience I’d previously had with a mental institution before my own confinement was just after my freshman year of college, when I was home for Christmas break. After my Dad and I had made the two-hour drive from school to his condo in Pittsburgh, he gave me a few minutes to fling my bags of dirty laundry artfully around my room, then asked me to join him on the couch. This was unusual. Most of our father-daughter chats happened in the car. Last time we’d had a stationary discussion was shortly after I’d gotten my first period. Both of us would rather have been swimming through a lake of hot lava than having that conversation about tampons.

  This was different. For the first time, I noticed how old my father had become while I’d been gone. What remained of his salt-and-pepper hair was now mostly salt. He looked tired and somehow small.

  “Your grandmother’s in the hospital,” he said. This wasn’t that shocking. She’d had a run-in with shingles over the summer and had not made a swift recovery. Then, the shoe dropped. “She tried to kill herself a few weeks ago.”

  His voice dopplered out into mumbles.

  Perhaps the only thing I will ever find appealing about the second Gulf War is the phrase “shock and awe.” It unfolded in stages, my particular shock and awe. The first stage was anger that no one had bothered to tell me about the attempt until now. This is a bit of tradition on both sides of the family when there is bad news. No one wants anyone to worry about what might happen, even if the circumstances are dire. I still wonder what would have happened if my grandmother had actually succeeded in offing herself. Would I have found out about it when she didn’t show up at the next family gathering? Oh, yeah, your grandmother’s dead. Sorry. We didn’t want you to be upset. Have some pie?

  While my righteous indignation was growing like kudzu in a southern summer, the cognitive dissonance set in. If I had to make a list of people I thought would attempt suicide, Courtney Love and almost any member of my mother’s family would have been near the top. But my paternal grandmother would have been somewhere near the bottom, not far from Mother Teresa and Tom Hanks.

  I don’t mean to imply that my grandmother is saintly, just that taking her own life wa
s out of character. Until that point, my grandmother was one of the few stable points from which I could navigate the adolescent seas. Every Sunday, we went to her house for dinner. Every Sunday, she and I would sit up in the kitchen and talk while the guys watched the Steelers or the Pirates or the Penguins on the downstairs TV. She’d tell me stories about the old neighborhood—by now, almost all of the family had moved out of the increasingly slumlike Brushton and into upscale Penn Hills/Churchill. She’d try to convince me to go to Mass. She’d tell me about growing up coveting peanut butter sandwiches because her mom would pack school lunches only with sausage and peppers or white pizza, foods that made it clear she wasn’t an American. She told me about her mother, who died before I was old enough to know her. She’d try to teach me Italian, which I still don’t speak. Sometimes, we just talked about school or my mom or nothing in particular while she made macaroni, meatballs and gravy, pasta “fazool,” or manicotti.

  I have never once referred to my grandmother as “Granny” or “Grandma” or, heaven forbid, “Meemaw.” From the outset, she simply didn’t answer if I called her something other than “Grandmother.” I suspect that if I suffered some tragic accident, like falling down a well or something, she wouldn’t answer my calls for “Grandmother” if I chopped off the last few syllables because I couldn’t draw a full breath. My younger cousins can get away with “Grandma,” which makes me peevish. As the first grandkid, I was the one who broke her in. They should thank me.

  She has never been the archetypal grandmother, quick to kiss a skinned knee or forgive a broken vase. Instead, she’s generally been a rigid hard-ass, although she has mellowed a bit as the years have passed. I escaped most of her wrath, because my parents and I spent the first nine years of my life living elsewhere. Still, she had her rules, even for me, the first grandbaby to grace that side of the family. During my first weeks of life, she visited my folks in Delaware. Unhappy, I suspect, with the general new baby chaos, she got both my mom and me on an old-school feeding schedule, where I got a bottle every four hours no matter what else was going on. Feelings about hunger were irrelevant. Order must be maintained.