by Daniel Smith
It is then that the woman coughs. It is a rattling, hacking cough. A cough of nicotine and phlegm. And the vagina, which is connected to the cough’s apparatus by some internal musculature I could not possibly have imagined before this moment, winks at me. With its wild, bushy, thorny lashes, it winks. My heart flutters. My breathing quickens. I have been winked at by a vagina that looks like Andy Rooney. I feel a tightness in my chest and I think to myself, Oh dear lord, what have I gotten myself into?
2.
hurricane marilyn
I’ll call her Esther. The plump blonde with the unkempt pubic hair and the penchant for teenage boys—the penchant for me. I met her while working at a bookstore in Plainview, New York, at the rough longitudinal and latitudinal center of Long Island, where I was born and raised. She took an instant liking to me and then she took my virginity, and going on two decades later my mind still hasn’t recovered. Esther set my anxiety off. She was the match that lit the psychic fire. It all starts with Esther.
Either that or it starts with my mother. I can never decide. Losing my virginity in a way that even my most depraved friends find unfortunate had an immediate and profound impact on me. But my mother set up the circumstance whereby there could be a trigger like Esther, whereby it was only a matter of time until something set me off. In every important way—cognitive, behavioral, environmental, genetic—my mother laid the foundation of this intractable problem of mine.
This is no recovery memoir, let me warn you now.
• • •
Months ago, when I told my mother I was writing a book about anxiety, she said, “A book about anxiety? But that was my idea. I had that idea. Sheila”—her close friend of many years—“and I were going to do it together. Then she dropped dead, so we didn’t. But we talked about it for years. That’s not fair!”
I didn’t know what she meant wasn’t fair—my writing a book she wanted to write, Sheila dropping dead, or both. I pointed out that writing about anxiety was not an original idea. Freud wrote a book about anxiety ninety years ago. Kierkegaard wrote one eighty years before that. Spinoza wrote one in the eighteenth century. In any case, I hadn’t known she wanted to write a book about anxiety, or about anything for that matter.
“We should do it together!” she said. “We could coauthor. A mother-son book about anxiety? People would eat it up. We’d make a fortune!”
I replied that it was a good idea but it probably wouldn’t work. I’d never written with anyone before. I had trouble writing if a person’s photograph was in the room with me. How would I handle an actual human being?
Later, before we hugged good-bye, I asked my mother if she would mind if I wrote about her. She didn’t hesitate a moment. “I don’t give a shit. I’m old! I’m tired! I work too much!”
• • •
The first of these three claims is relative, the second hard to believe. In her late sixties, my mother has more energy than most college students I’ve met. She has more energy than most squirrels I’ve met. My brother Scott and I have a nickname for her: “Hurricane Marilyn.” We use the nickname when we catch sight of her climbing out of her Prius just before a visit to one of our homes. We watch her cross the street, arms flailing, keys and receipts and gifts for the grandchildren spilling from multiple bags, a fast-moving storm front of narration and complaint and anecdote and fervent family affection—a Jewish mother, in short, of the first order—and we shout, “Batten the hatches, everyone! Hurricane Marilyn’s about to make landfall!”
My mother’s third claim, however, is true. When my father died, fourteen years ago, of cancer, he didn’t leave much money, and it’s unlikely my mother will ever be in a position to retire. She complains about this, but the truth is she loves her work. She takes pride in her talent and her experience, and in the value she adds to the world. For here is the most telling fact about my mother’s contribution to my psychological life: She is a psychotherapist. She treats all sorts of people with all sorts of complaints. But she specializes in the anxiety disorders.
Like most clichés, it is fundamentally true that the anxious, the melancholy, the manic, and the obsessed are more likely to become shrinks than other people. Before she was a therapist, my mother was a sufferer and a patient. She is still a patient, but she claims not to be much of a sufferer anymore. My mother portrays herself as an anxiety success story, a living example of how will, wisdom, and clinical psychology can triumph over nature.
It is a rough nature. To hear my mother tell it, her teens, twenties, and thirties consisted of an almost unbroken chain of hundreds of full-blown panic attacks—a riot of flop sweats, hyperventilation, and self-reproach. Her nerves were so exquisitely sensitive to stimuli that in order to dull them she would sneak shots of vodka before walking to school in the morning. She was scared of driving, public speaking, parties, open spaces, and men. She experienced feelings of unreality and dizziness. She suffered from acid indigestion, heart palpitations, and tremors. She had panic attacks at school. She also had panic attacks at home, at the grocery store, at the laundromat, at the bank, in the shower, and in bed. She had a panic attack when my father came to her work to propose to her. “My hands shook,” she says. “The thought of having to stay still while someone put a ring on my finger made me nuts!”
Recently, I asked my mother how this all ended. How had she gotten to the point where she no longer experienced the world as one giant firecracker at her back? She answered with a story.
When she was around forty, my mother said, she had a therapist who worked at a renowned clinic for people with phobias, a clinic that was attached to a large private hospital. The therapist was impressed by my mother’s intelligence and pluck; she felt that my mother possessed a strength that, unlike many other people prone to panic, compelled her to do things in spite of her fear of them. She asked, not entirely ethically, if my mother would like to come work for her at the clinic. My mother’s job would involve leading groups of phobics out into the world to expose them to situations that typically made them hysterical with fear. She would be the blind leading the blind, therapeutically.
The first people my mother took out were four elderly patients afraid, in various combinations, of driving, shopping, and generally being among other people. My mother was still afraid of these things, too, particularly driving. She decided to take them to a nearby shopping center. She drove them in her own car. At first things didn’t go badly. No one passed out, no one threw up, no one ran screaming into the parking lot. Then, on the way back to the clinic, the car broke down. This was before cell phones. They were on the narrow shoulder of a busy four-lane road. The cars hurtled past, making unnerving Doppler noises. Everyone’s blood pressure started to rise. Everyone started to pant just a little. What happens when five clinically anxious people have a simultaneous panic attack in a 1983 Buick LeSabre? My mother didn’t want to find out.
She tried to flag down a cab, but no one would stop. The drivers took one look at the passengers—all that papery skin, all those wild, rheumy eyes—and pressed down on their accelerators. Now my mother was starting to spin out of control, her mind devising catastrophic tableaus: in police stations, in hospitals, in morgues, local television crews filming the whole thing. She started to shake and sweat and enter a kind of waking nightmare state.
Just then a cab stopped at a red light. My mother hustled the old folks to the corner, threw open the back door, and over the driver’s angry objections shoved them inside. It was only when the light turned green and the driver was forced to submit that my mother saw why he’d been reluctant to take them in. It wasn’t just that they looked like cornered animals or that they had basically commandeered his vehicle. It was that he already had a passenger and that passenger was—I’ve made my mother swear to this fact—a pregnant woman in labor. The driver dropped the woman off first.
• • •
This is not what I thought my mother would say when I asked how she had conquered the worst of her anxiety. I thought
she would say something like, “I worked hard, with the help of medication, targeted psychotherapy, vigorous exercise, the support of your father and friends, and various meditative, yogic, and muscle-relaxation techniques, to change the way my mind operates.” All of which is true. To my surprise, however, what helped my mother first and foremost wasn’t a conscious, critical analysis or counterbalancing of her fears, but tossing herself—and in this case being tossed—into direct confrontation with the very things that most terrified her.
Clinical psychology has a term for this sort of approach. It is “flooding.” The first patient on whom flooding was used successfully, in the 1950s, was an adolescent girl who suffered from a paralyzing fear of cars. “She was kept compulsorily in the back of a car in which she was continuously driven for four hours,” reads one description of the treatment. “Her fear soon reached panic proportions, and then gradually subsided. At the end of the ride she was quite comfortable, and henceforth was free from phobia.”
This is a chilling passage, especially that “compulsorily.” How did they compel her, one wonders? Did orderlies hold her down? Did they remove the door handles? In four hours you can drive from Midtown Manhattan to the Washington Monument, if you don’t stop for gas.
My mother’s afternoon with her four elderly phobics was a kind of informal flooding treatment. What greater terror for a woman afraid of losing control than an outing in which she is the authority and control doesn’t hold? All the world conspired to make her panic. Yet she didn’t. She couldn’t. If she panicked, the situation would have disintegrated. Equally as therapeutic was the fact that disaster did not come. Returning her wards safely to the clinic, arranging for a tow truck, and making it home that evening was like a gradual waking from a dream in which she had been pursued and mauled by wolves—and was fine. She scanned herself. No bites? No scratches? No wounds? It had all been in her head.
So began my mother’s career as a therapist, a flooding cure slower yet more radical than anything even the most reptilian of behaviorists might prescribe. In the kingdom of the anxious, those with simple phobias have it easy. If you’re afraid of heights, lean over a railing. If you’re afraid of germs, lick a floor. But what do you do if your greatest fear is of being afraid? This was the essence of my mother’s predicament. She had been diagnosed with “panic disorder,” a condition that comes down to this: panicking about panicking. You have one panic attack and it leaves you uneasy, vigilant for another. You search for threats to your stability and, because this is life, you find them, and have another panic attack. That attack makes you more vigilant, which leads to more attacks, which leads to more vigilance, and so on and so forth until your mental existence is as cramped and airless as a broom closet. There are ways to break out—the world is stuffed with theories on how to escape anxiety—but none as extreme as the one my mother chose.
3.
monkey mind
I was nine when my mother went back to school to become a therapist and twelve when she graduated. For most of my life she had worked as a teacher, first in the public schools, then as the codirector of a day care that operated out of a neighbor’s basement. Now she bought an ad in the Pennysaver and began to see patients at home, in a large, low-ceilinged room on the bottom floor of our house. For her children, this meant a slew of new rules and obligations.
Rule one was silence—or as close an approximation of silence as three pubescent boys could manage. When my mother was in session with a patient, we were forbidden to stomp, shout, wrestle, fight, or anything else that, in a moderately sized suburban house, might resonate through the drywall, which was basically everything except reading or muted self-abuse. There was a cracked cement path leading to the patients’ entrance, in the back of the house. In the fall, we had to rake the leaves from the path; in the winter, we had to sprinkle rock salt on it; in the spring and summer, we had to water the rose bushes in the flower beds beside it. We had to do these things far in advance of a patient’s arrival. My mother didn’t want some trembling neurotic startled witless by the sight of a shirtless boy wielding a spray gun. For the same reason, it was firmly suggested that we stay indoors throughout all fifty-minute hours. My mother’s office had a long window that looked out onto our backyard. The therapeutic couch (overstuffed leather, beige) faced in the opposite direction, but there was always the chance that a client would look over his shoulder, with unpredictable clinical results. Say my mother was treating a man whose wife had taken the kids and left. How would he react to seeing my brother and me idyllically tossing around a football?
So we stayed out of sight and out of earshot. It was the new domestic order, and it stung like exile. Before my mother hung her diploma on the wall and laid in a supply of tissues, the room that became her office hadn’t been vacant. It had been the den, the sweetly dim, subterranean place, wall-to-wall carpeted, where we watched movies and played Battleship and rode out bouts of chicken pox and the flu. It was the cultural and recreational soul of our house, and its sudden transformation made me feel the way Parisians must have felt when the Nazis invaded and took all the good tables at the cafés.
One of the places to which I retreated after my mother changed careers was my parents’ bedroom, directly above the purloined den, where there was a large TV, a queen-sized bed, and a wealth of thick down pillows. As it turned out, there was something revelatory there as well, something that would start me wondering, hazily at first, about my mother’s mind and its influence on my own. I made the discovery by accident one evening when, yawning, I knocked the TV remote off the bed. I looked for it the way kids look for fallen remotes: upside-down, hanging off the mattress, bent at the waist like a hinge. That’s when I heard it. In the dusty gap between the bed and my father’s nightstand there was a corrugated central-air vent, and coming from the vent was the sound of voices:
WOMAN (HUSKY-VOICED, FORTIES OR FIFTIES):
. . . like it’s going to collapse. Like it’s just going to cave in. Like it’s going to cave right the hell in. Steel beams, wire cables, asphalt, road signs, cars, trucks, steamrollers. Whatever. The whole thing. The whole fucking thing just collapsing right into the goddamn Sound.
MY MOTHER:
How often do you have to drive across it?
WOMAN:
Twice a week! Twice a week across a bridge that looks like it was built during the fucking Depression! I could kill myself. . . . Not really. I’m just kidding. You know that, right?
MY MOTHER:
Mm-hm.
WOMAN:
I don’t have the balls to kill myself.
MY MOTHER:
Mm-hm.
WOMAN:
If only I did, I could avoid that commute. . . . God! It’s the look of those bolts that really rips my heart out. Those whaddya call ’em—rivets? The things that hold the I beams together?
MY MOTHER:
. . .
WOMAN:
They look rusty. Like they could just snap at any minute. Like they could just buckle and snap and then that’s it. Game over! End of story! Down we all go! And probably we’re not even dead before we splash down. How long does it take to fall, what, a hundred feet? Two hundred? Do we die on impact? Do we die of hypothermia? Do we drown? How long does it take to drown?
MY MOTHER:
. . .
WOMAN:
I’m actually asking. Do you know how long it takes to drown?
MY MOTHER:
No.
WOMAN:
Well, I die. That’s all I know.
MY MOTHER:
. . .
WOMAN:
. . .
MY MOTHER:
And what frightens you?
WOMAN:
Are you kidding me? Haven’t you been listening? Plummeting to my death! That’s what frightens me.
MY MOTHER:
. . .
WOMAN:
Isn’t that enough?
MY MOTHER:
Well, there are several parts t
o what you’re telling me. To the scenario. There’s the thought that the bridge will collapse, there’s the act of falling, and there’s the actual dying. Which part makes you anxious?
WOMAN:
All of them.
MY MOTHER:
. . .
WOMAN:
The dying.
MY MOTHER:
Why?
WOMAN:
Because of R__________.
MY MOTHER:
What about her?
WOMAN:
What’ll she do without me? Who’ll take care of her?
MY MOTHER:
How about her husband?
WOMAN:
Her husband! Her husband can’t even make an omelet.
I found the remote a couple of minutes into this exchange, resting against my father’s slippers, and turned off the TV. This was far more interesting than Matlock. Now I can see it as fairly unremarkable stuff: A middle-aged woman with a bridge phobia is hardly therapeutic dynamite. But, then, it wasn’t the patient who for the next half hour kept me dangling from the bed in a state of rapt fascination. It was my mother. Or rather, I should say, it was the impostor who had taken my mother’s voice. For what entranced me was the sense that I had inadvertently gained access to an identity radically out of joint with the one I knew. The mother I knew was the impulsive, uncontainable one I’ve described, a Bronx-born grocer’s daughter with a hug like a carpenter’s vise. The one drifting up through the vent was, by comparison, a Zen master: cool, circumspect, mindful. That my mother could placate suffering came as no surprise. She was my mother; she’d been placating my suffering since the maternity ward. But that she could do it logically and dispassionately; that her soothing could come from a place of reason rather than from her guts; that she could choreograph her healing, restrain it, direct it, mete it out with deliberation—these were stunners. These were the revelations that drew me back to the vent day after day, week after week, spying on the sacrosanct with blood pooling in my ears.