Lying

by Lauren Slater

  Once, when marching, I had seen a cardinal. He was Chinese red, and he kept staring at me. “Three steps more,” the cardinal had said, and so I went three steps more. That bird got in my blood and ordered me around. “Three steps more,” he said, and the next day four steps, and sometimes I longed to let the cardinal go, to open my heart and have him soar out, but I couldn’t. Instead I went three steps, then four, then five, all for fear and maybe a little love.

  But after the epilepsy began, and then got worse, the skating stopped. This is how it happened. I had my first seizure in Barbados, my second one in our kitchen back in Boston. And then, the winter of my tenth year, I started to seize a few times a week or even once a day. Still, I did my glides and my bends, until the January morning, just at dawn, when my mother took me to the pond for practice. I clumped out over the ice in my skates, pushed off, and started my moves. I remember the day was warmish, with a little slick of sweat over the ice, and the reeds had thawed so their boggy smell came out. “Pivot and turn,” my mother shouted, and as I did, as I entered the thawing air, a memory suddenly came to me, a memory so clear and absolute it must have been engraved in the back rooms of my brain for a long time, and I was finding it just now, perfect and whole. A memory that was moving slowly even while I spun fast, even while I felt my legs get big, get bloated, and my hands—huge now—filled with helium. Help me, I thought, and that was when I recalled that a boy had once drowned in this pond in the summer, and I’d heard about how they’d dragged for the body, his limbs all swollen and soft. Help me, I thought, and the smell came, bad, like a sewer when it’s open, and at the same time an exquisite sense of pleasure, of trumpet, I couldn’t breathe. I came down out of the sky. I think I came down fast, and a little chicken was running around, Chicken Little! Chicken Little!—and then the sky was falling on me as I sank below the surface of the pond and I saw the boy down there in the murk. “Help me,” I wanted to say, but in water there is no voice; there is no speed; there is just a terribly slow suck.

  When I woke up, I was in the hospital, but I didn’t know that right away because my head hurt so much. “Did I drown?” I asked.

  “No,” the nurse said. “But you’ve had another seizure.”

  Apparently, then, the ice hadn’t broken.

  I lay there for a while in the monstrous bed. The sheets were made of meringue; they crackled whenever I moved. I stopped moving. I closed my eyes. I knew, even before the doctor told us, that this was the worst seizure I’d had so far. “I didn’t die; I didn’t die; I didn’t die,” I kept saying to myself.

  The doctor came into the room. It was Dr. Patterson, my pediatrician. I liked him, even though his stethoscope was always cold.

  “Am I going to die?” I said to Dr. Patterson.

  He came over to my bed. He looked down at me. Then he smiled, took out his stethoscope, and put it on my nose. “I don’t think so,” he said, listening to my nose. “I think you’ll be just fine.”

  How could I believe that, though, when Chicken Little, who was supposed to be a silly chicken all in a dither, was really right? I was learning, now, that at any minute I could go in a dangerous way. I was not a girl at all, but a marionette, and some huge hand—my mother’s hand?—held me up, and for a reason I absolutely could not predict, that hand might let the strings go slack, oh, God.

  My mother came into the room. Dr. Patterson said to her, “Just a little sprain in the wrist, a few bruises. But this seizure was more serious than the others. I can’t emphasize enough how important the phenobarbital is going to be. She needs a very high dose, six hundred milligrams.”

  My mother nodded, but she didn’t like the idea of drugs at all.

  “And,” Dr. Patterson said, “I think, as we discussed before, she should go to Saint Christopher’s for a stint.”

  They had told me about Saint Christopher’s. It was a special school in Topeka, Kansas. The doctors wanted me to go to Topeka, Kansas, where Dorothy and her little dog had danced off the earth and fallen into a land of lemon drops and witches. They wanted me to go and board there at the special school funded by the Epilepsy Society, so I could get a physical education, and learn to fall the right way, and not break my bones, and it would all take only a month.

  “That school,” my mother said, “is run by nuns.”

  It was night. I was back at home, listening through the toilet bowl as my parents discussed the pros and cons.

  “Agreed,” my father said. “That’s a problem.”

  “And many of the children who go there,” my mother said, “are Down’s.”

  I didn’t know what downs meant. I pictured goose feathers, fairy children as delicate as feathers all dropping from the sky and blown around.

  “Then maybe we really should increase the drug,” my father said.

  But my mother didn’t want to increase the drug because a high dose of phenobarbital gave me a rash all over, a rash so persistent I even got little red bumps along my lower eyelids and in my vag too. Vag was the word I used, my own private word for vagina. Even back then I had private words, places apart from my mother. There was my vag, which now had bumps in it, there was my earlobe, which I liked to touch, there were the woods, where the trees arched and dripped. Sometimes I wanted to go and live in a place apart forever, a place where I could roll around in the dirt and lick things.

  And so at night, when I was alone, I took to touching my vag bumps, running my fingers over them lightly so the pain was just the merest shiver, the air on the rash like a damp cloth pressed to a fevered forehead, and I would lie there night after night on the cusp of coolness and heat, and I tried to find someplace soothing.

  Instead I got smaller.

  I got fears.

  One day, soon after the seizure on the ice, I saw Seventeen magazine in a store window. Someday, I thought to myself, I will be seventeen, and then I will be eighteen, and then before I know it I’ll be eighty, and I got so scared by that thought I had to sit down on the curb.

  I saw a hearse drive by, with blue curtains in the windows. I started to wonder if the spirits of dead people stood under trees and waited to grab at you. It was a shame to be scared of trees, those natural chuppahs, those homes in the middle of the widest world, but scared I was, and so I stood out in the unsheathed sun.

  “If you pay attention,” my mother said to me, leaning in close, “if you try very hard, you’ll be able to stop these seizures.”

  I could see her face clearly at these moments, eyebrows tweezed in taut lines. My mother had a mole which she tried every day to cover with cream, but its blackness bled through, a little tip of dark, and that was the only part of her I could ever think to touch.

  She read a book called The New Cure for Epilepsy, a book which talked about going off drugs completely and learning to breathe in a deep way.

  One day we went together to a psychologist at a special epilepsy clinic called the Center for Voluntary Control over Internal Processes. We had to drive an hour to get there. We passed men in orange helmets fixing the highway. The helmets made me so sad I felt everything turn to dust in me. That’s the way it was after the seizures began. Anything, at any moment, might become unbearable, might be a sign of some absurdity we would never escape. Helmets. Ponds. Trees. Pears. Just let me close my eyes.

  Now I know that depression and epilepsy often go together. That’s why I take Prozac now, as an adult. One of the reasons, anyway. It’s a proven fact that those who have epilepsy also have a higher incidence of depression, but I wonder if the epilepsy causes the depression, or if the depression is because of the epilepsy, which is, when all is said and done, an illness so existential, so oddly spiritual, you are stuck out in the stratosphere with Sartre and Kierkegaard, with dead dogs and owls.

  Dr. Swan, maybe, would help me. She had a lot of posters on the walls of the clinic, posters of mountaintops and streams with inspirational sayings on the bottom. One poster, though, really stood out. A human brain on a green stem. The brain was bump
y, like it really is, but ringed with pale petals, and in the background a sky suspiciously blue, the kind of sky they show in decongestant commercials. Underneath the stem was a poem in bold letters:

  The Brain Is Essential to Life

  I Want My Brain to Act Calmly and Normally

  I Will Do Everything I Can to Help My Brain Act Calmly and Normally

  “Come in,” said Dr. Swan.

  We went into her office.

  “What are your triggers?” said Dr. Swan.

  My mother and I were in the office together. It was our first session.

  “Triggers?” my mother said. Both she and I had gotten all dressed up to see the special doctor, my mother in a stole made of fox fur, with a fox head biting a fox tail, and me in my white muff.

  “Yes, triggers,” Dr. Swan said. “Oftentimes a seizure comes after a period of stress—”

  “Oh yes,” my mother said, interrupting. She folded her hands in her lap. “I’m aware of that phenomenon.” I could see she was going into her impress-a-person mode. “The stress hormone cortisol and all.”

  Dr. Swan’s office was wood paneled, and Dr. Swan, I’ve failed to mention, looked nothing like a swan. She wore a dark serious suit, and she was old, and had her gray hair in a bun on top of her head.

  “Cortisol, adrenaline,” my mother said, still trying to make a splash, when, really, she’d just read this in a pamphlet yesterday.

  “I said triggers,” Dr. Swan repeated, her voice low and severe. She was a formidable woman and didn’t like detours.

  My mother stopped, snapped her mouth shut, and for just a moment she seemed flustered. Then it passed. She lowered her head like a bull lowers its horned head for the charge and said, “My daughter has no stressors. She has an exceptionally placid life.”

  “Mrs. Slater,” Dr. Swan said, sighing. “This is not psychotherapy. I am a behaviorist. I have neither the time, nor you, I’m sure, given the cost of this treatment, the money, to dismantle your denial. Every child has stressors.”

  I thought, at this point, my mother would grab me and leave, but she didn’t. Instead she crossed one leg over the other and said in a voice suddenly open and warm, “Dr. Swan. May I call you Emma? That might make it easier to talk.”

  “If you wish,” said Emma.

  “She did,” my mother said, lowering her voice, “take a bad fall when she was three. Her father, well, it was her father who—in a rage—”

  I had known nothing about this fall, and my father, who now, years later and long after their divorce, lives alone in a retirement home in Florida, says it’s simply not true.

  Dr. Swan must have thought so too, for she turned impatiently from my mother and looked straight at me. “Stressors?” she said, as though I were forty, not ten.

  I shrugged.

  Her voice softened. “Let me explain,” she said, leaning across her desk toward me. “Sometimes people get nervous and upset, it’s perfectly normal. In school, maybe a person gets nervous before a test. Or in families,” she said, glancing back briefly at my mother, “it’s all right for there to be stressors in families, and if we know about them, we can help you avoid them, and any seizures that follow.”

  “Thank you,” I said, stupidly.

  “Lauren,” my mother said. She made a show of putting her hand on my knee. “We have always talked openly. Tell the doctor about your stressors. It’s normal.”

  I looked at her. I looked at Dr. Swan. I went back and forth between them with my eyes, but with my mouth I could do nothing.

  • • •

  Three times a week we went, my mother always in the waiting room from that time forward. The second session she stood to come in with me, and Dr. Swan held up her hand and said, “That won’t be necessary.”

  There, in the dark-paneled office, it was just me and the swan and the leaded-glass windows. When it snowed, the flakes through the glass looked huge and ragged and the bare branches out there were networks of nerves like the pictures I’d seen in the neurologist’s office. As spring came, the nerves grew buds that did not seem beautiful to me, little green cysts with pus in them. I wanted to tell Dr. Swan about the sick trees. I wanted to tell her about the seizure on ice, and the boy I’d seen at the bottom of the pond. He’d been there, and as time went by I realized he had tried to talk to me. He had tried to touch me as I fell, reaching out a hand, a white waxy thing.

  I said nothing, though. I felt to speak would be to betray my mother, especially because, at the end of every session, she grilled me about what had happened in the office, her gloved hands holding tight to the steering wheel. “Why don’t you tell me about your mother?” Dr. Swan sometimes suggested, and then I wanted to let out the truth, to say, “Oh, I hate her! Oh, I love her!” Sometimes, after I’d woken up from a seizure, I felt so sorry for her. I felt it was really she who’d had the seizure, she whose muscles really ached, and over and over again in my mind, I brought my mother milk.

  Dr. Swan, for her part, seemed to feel genuinely sorry for me. Every time I went in there, she had a plate of cookies on her desk. She taught me deep breathing, which my mother and I practiced three times a day at home. “Breathe!” my mother shouted, and so I did. “One one one,” she told me to chant to myself at every inhalation. “One one one,” I chanted, which meant you’re the one, the only one, the one mom one mom one mom, until I felt I would choke.

  • • •

  A new desire came to me. I had never seen a real true dead person, and I decided I wanted to. We had a funeral home in our neighborhood, and so I went there when there was a funeral. The line to see the body was so long it was out the door and down the street. I stood with the other mourners and tried to look sad, but I wasn’t sad. I was nothing.

  I never got to see the body, though, because right there in public I had a seizure and pissed myself, and I became the body to be seen. Understand? I was ashamed.

  “You should not be ashamed,” my father said. “There was once a rabbi in Jerusalem,” my father said, “and a sick man came to him and said, ‘Rabbi, take away my stigma.’

  “And the rabbi, who was a wise man, shrugged and said, ‘Sickness is sickness. The sun is the sun, laughter is laughter and tears just tears. There is never a need to make more of God’s world than what is.’ ”

  My father told me this one morning, four days before winter break was to end and I was to return to school, where kids would see me different.

  “Would you like an egg?” my father said.

  “I don’t know what the story means,” I said.

  “Of course you do,” he said, and then I did. And I felt comfort come from a place where I had never even sought it, not from my mother, but from this man, who that morning made me an egg.

  • • •

  If comfort could come from him, then it must be hidden in other places too. This is what I started to realize, the wisdom that would, finally, lead me away from her. Comfort must rest within other people’s palms, in their flower beds, in the saucers they keep stacked on painted kitchen shelves. The next day, my mother and I drove to the supermarket. I looked out at all the houses we passed, and I had a dream of houses. There, a blue one with a wide, pretty porch, a hammock hanging in the still air. A stone house, with tiny Christmas lights in every window. A house with a birdbath on its lawn, a house with white curtains and white steam coming from its laundry vent. Inside those houses there were girls my age, every one of them cooking eggs. They cracked egg after egg against a skillet, and ate them fried and frilly, soaked in butter, with toast their mothers had made.

  I thought I might like to live in another house. I thought that in other houses girls could sleep instead of skate.

  What I hadn’t told her. Lately I had taken to playing a secret game, to wandering around neighborhoods and peering in whatever windows I could. If I liked what I saw, I then rang the doorbell and hid in the bushes. The best part was hiding there, seeing the door open wide, a man with rumpled hair, a sleepy-looking lady,
a kid with a cup of cocoa, all opening the doors and looking around, and I, in the bushes, seeing a space I might enter.

  Now, my mother and I entered the supermarket parking lot.

  “Put your hat on,” my mother said.

  I had bruises on both sides of my face, from falling, and the hat, with its own built-in earmuffs, covered things up.

  I put my hat on, but in a wrong way. She sighed, reached over, and jammed it down so hard it hurt.

  “Put your Chap Stick on,” my mother said. My lips were crusty, from biting them during seizures, and the ointment softened the sores and absorbed the blood.

  She peered at me. Slowly she shook her head back and forth, back and forth. “Look at you,” she said.

  I sat very still.

  “Look at you,” she said again, her voice oddly quiet, disgusted, and soft in a way that scared me.

  “Mom,” I said.

  We went in. On that particular day, there were policemen in the supermarket. Now, I have no idea why they were there. They were just hanging around, with guns on their hips.

  We started our shopping. After a while, I got hot in my hat and when she wasn’t looking I loosened it. My mouth ached, from chewing at it during seizures, the linings of my cheeks all ragged.

  We went to the produce section, where there were many grapefruit. Each one was pudgy and yellow on the outside, but I knew, on the inside, the sting of its secretions, the tartness in my open sores. Just looking at the grapefruit I started to feel sick.

  With my head in a whirl, I reached out toward a grapefruit and began to peel it; I had no idea what I was doing.

  “Lauren,” my mother said, “don’t do that to the fruit.”

  But there was a little motor going inside me, a key clacking in my back, and I kept on, and the swelling in my hand, and, this time, a feeling of intense fixation—fruit fruit fruit, I was saying to myself, and I wanted to wreck every piece of that stinging citrus stuff.

  Dr. Swan, in our last session, had told my mother and me about a new trick for stopping seizures. If you recognized a seizure coming on, you were to grab the person, shake her hard by the shoulders, and scream “No!” It was called the Startle and Shake Response, and it had, supposedly, gotten some good results across the country.