In the photo, he’s wearing a white sweatshirt and matching white sweatpants. His clothing choices seem like another opportunity to describe his character.
In the coldest winters, he wore a fake fur hat that looked foreign. The rest of the year, insecure about his balding, he wore newsboy hats or plain khaki baseball hats. He refused to wear anything with a name on it. “Why should I pay money,” he said, “to advertise for some company brand?” I repeated this to friends, as if the opinion originated with me. I often claimed his practicality as my own.
In his younger years, he always dressed stylishly. In his brief time at Fort Dix, during World War II, he annoyed his sergeant by not pitching a tent in the rain. Instead, he stood underneath a tent and directed his fellow soldiers. He didn’t want his uniform or nice thick hair to get wet.
Traces of those days carried over. In our garage, when he built me toys and shelves, he wore his button-down dress shirts tucked in. But he refused to buy new clothes for himself. For Christmas, my mom put socks in his stocking.
But after I reached high school, he alternated between different pairs of sweatpants and sweatshirts. He no longer could dress himself. I should have known then that he would die. His clothes, though, remained plain; no brand names, no words.
MENTAL ILLNESS
After a few months in New York, I stared at my closet and cried. I stared at my shower and cried. I stared at my food and cried.
While at the Paris Review, I’d take breaks that involved crying in stairwells and Tribeca alleys, anywhere I could be less seen. I suppose that’s one reason I loved New York City. I could disappear into the crowds. I could cry in public at 2:00 PM or 2:00 AM, and no one noticed.
Rachel, my senior-year roommate, called every morning from her home in Chicago.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Like crying,” I said.
“You are crying,” she said, and we laughed and I cried.
•
With alcohol, my mood lifted. I’d laugh and talk to anyone who’d listen and drink free liquor at parties until bartenders refused to serve me.
Then, at one party in downtown Manhattan, mid-conversation with a writer, his eyes narrowed, squinted, darkened; he hated me. I looked around and everyone in the room wore that same hatred.
“Where are you going?” he said as I walked away and kept walking until I reached my apartment in Brooklyn. I vaguely remember crossing the Williamsburg Bridge.
A doctor said he believed I had schizoaffective disorder and recommended I apply for disability. He worked at a public clinic, which required me to arrive at eight in the morning for an early afternoon appointment. The nurses brought everyone in the waiting room free brown-bag lunches. On the television, a woman always seemed to be throwing a chair and shouting, inspiring the others in the waiting room to begin clapping their hands and shouting.
“What does he know?” I said to Rachel afterward.
“Jeannie, I really think you need to go somewhere for a while—a good hospital. Not these public clinics. My mom said she’ll pay for it.”
My mom would have done anything, sold everything, to pay for my treatment; I knew this. I remember when she bought herself a brown winter coat at the Salvation Army; that same day, she picked out expensive saddle shoes and a red velvet dress for me. I must have been six or seven. She never called attention to her selflessness; she simply was selfless.
“I’m fine,” I told Rachel.
•
After the internship ended, I worked jobs that paid the rent but not health insurance. I pieced together freelance work: manuscript editor for a wealthy French philosopher, research assistant for a documentary TV series about media accountability, administrative assistant to a poet. Jobs that allowed me to avoid consistent in-person interaction. I worked mostly from my apartment or local cafés. I moved from sublet to sublet if I thought my roommates suspected anything was wrong with me. The stress and risk of my unpredictable moods left me afraid to be surrounded by the same people for too long.
MOM
“Maybe you should take a break from writing,” my mom says.
Can she tell that I spent an evening crying about my dad’s death?
“But I promised Dad a book,” I remind her.
“Your dad didn’t believe in deathbed promises.”
MENTAL ILLNESS
I was crossing Eighth Avenue in downtown Manhattan when I hallucinated my eyes had fallen out. I ran into the nearest drugstore and found a mirror. Was it on the turning stand displaying sunglasses? Was it on the turning stand displaying reading glasses? Either way, there were glasses. I pried open my lids. The mirror angled down, reflecting empty sockets. I blinked and my eyes appeared.
Next thing I knew, I was on a train.
“Socrates feeds you breakfast. Socrates feeds you bacon and eggs. Socrates don’t make you leave like the rest of these places,” a woman was telling another woman on the train.
I got off. I hailed a cab. I tried making conversation with the driver.
“My dad was a cab driver,” I said, “here in New York.”
I climbed down to the floor of the cab and held my head.
“You okay?” he asked.
My mouth felt dry. I kept licking my lips.
“Talk to me,” he said.
And then I realized: “Socrates is a soup kitchen, isn’t it?”
DAD
I called my college ex-boyfriend.
He still lived in an apartment near campus. He worked in Chicago.
“How do I seem?” I asked him.
I didn’t tell him about the hallucination.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Let me visit,” he said.
So he flew to New York. In bed, he confided that he was with someone else, “but I’ll break it off,” he promised.
“My dad’s first wife cheated on him,” I said, “and it destroyed his confidence.”
I’d never met the girl my ex-boyfriend was dating.
“Please at least let me help you,” he said.
“I don’t need anyone’s help. I miss my dad is all.”
MENTAL ILLNESS
“You can’t keep going to these public clinics,” Rachel said. “You need a good doctor. So what if it takes a year?”
“A year?” I said.
“My parents will pay.”
“No.”
“Then you have to tell your mom,” Rachel said. “Does she know you don’t have insurance? Does she know you need medications?”
I ordered my medications from an online Canadian pharmacy.
“If you don’t let anyone help you,” she continued, “you’re not going to get any better.”
The next day, I called Rachel and she didn’t answer. I called the day after that, and she didn’t answer. I stopped calling and I stopped expecting her to call. I no longer listed her as my emergency contact.
MOM
“It wasn’t easy,” I tell my mom on the phone, “with you preparing for your death. I’d just lost Dad. And then you were saying things like, ‘When I go . . .’”
“I just wanted to make things easy on you for when I die,” she says. “Your dad and I always meant well. I know we weren’t perfect.”
“But you were the perfect parents.”
“You can’t idealize us. It’s not good,” she says. “I probably shouldn’t have talked about dying, but it’s going to happen eventually. I don’t want you bothering with all that stuff. I know it’s not easy to hear. And I was so depressed. You got to understand, you left for college and then he died, and I was alone with Gigi. And then not long after that, she died. I was just so depressed.”
MENTAL ILLNESS
One, two, three years passed, and I visited Sandusky only once. I didn’t tell my mom why. I didn’t think I needed to explain. She hated being where he died—but she couldn’t afford to move. She was stuck in that uneven house, with memories of his
uneven breathing.
So she visited me in New York, usually on holidays when she could take more time off from work.
“Maybe we could both move to a more affordable city,” I told her on one of those visits.
I think she heard the emptiness in my offer.
“Don’t do things for me,” she said. “I’m glad you’re doing the sorts of things I didn’t have the guts to do. You love New York. I can see why.”
But the house wasn’t the only reason I avoided Ohio. I never could predict my episodes of mania or depression, or mania and depression. Each appointment at the public health clinic, I met a diagnosis I didn’t want (bipolar disorder I, schizoaffective disorder, borderline personality disorder)—and I didn’t want my mom to know. I worried about her worrying about me.
I forget most of my depressive episodes, maybe because each felt the same. My manic episodes, in retrospect, felt great—but in reality I’d lose friendships over petty arguments and lose money because of impulsive choices, such as booking a one-way ticket to Paris, where I argued with border control—to the point of having my passport stamped with a travel deadline—and soon returned home.
But mania wasn’t all bad. A few years after my Paris Review internship ended, I met one of its board members, impressed her with my “energy.” This was a sentence I heard a lot: “You have so much energy,” or “Where do you get all your energy?” She introduced me to the editor of Lapham’s Quarterly, where she also served on the board.
JEANNE
It was a Sunday afternoon. I was in the office of Lapham’s, where I now worked, editing an essay about the history of dissection. No one else was there. I often worked weekends because I found it impossible to concentrate around my coworkers. Two of them, I felt certain, thought I was incompetent, and the three of us shared a small room. I wanted to prove to them—and myself—that I deserved the job, but I had to reread everything, it seemed. During our weekly editorial meetings, I forgot my arguments, which I practiced the night before. Afterward, I sat in the stairwell, between the sixth and seventh floors, and cried. On my commutes home, I cried.
“Some mornings, I have trouble dressing myself without crying,” I told my psychiatrist.
I had health insurance through work, but I couldn’t find a therapist who’d accept it. So I relied on the psychiatrist whose office was only a couple blocks away from Lapham’s. She prescribed two medications to stabilize my mood and one medication for anxiety. She met with me for five minutes every month. Then she hurried me out.
“What I do is a science,” she said. “I see so many people with your symptoms.”
I thought of all this while trying to edit the essay. I needed to focus.
The essayist wrote that the English physician William Harvey dissected the bodies of his father and sister. At that moment I felt as if a gust of wind had opened a heavy door. I thought of my dad and Jeanne. What did his body look like in the coffin? What did Jeanne ever look like?
I went online and typed “Jeanne Vanasco” in the search box. I clicked on a link to her high school’s memorial page and scrolled down. There, for the first time, I could see her face. I tried to enlarge the small grainy photograph, but she only became more difficult to see: dark wavy hair cut above the shoulders, head turned slightly to the left, a pearl necklace. I stared at the photograph as if looking at her for long enough might allow me to enter the mind of the girl whose death had almost destroyed my dad.
Below the photograph, a childhood neighbor and high school classmate had posted that Jeanne had died in a car accident, along with two high school boys.
MOM
I called my mom.
“I thought Jeanne was in the car with two other girls.”
“That’s right,” my mom said.
“And I thought she was the only one who died.”
“That’s right.”
I told her about the boys.
“Why would he lie about this?” she asked, sounding distressed.
I regretted calling her.
“He could have told me anything and I would have loved him.”
She began to cry.
“Dad was probably ashamed that Jeanne died in a car with boys. It was the 1960s.”
“I guess so.”
But she kept crying.
“He went crazy,” my mom reminded me. “Your father told me he almost crashed his car on one of them cement blocks.”
I stared at Jeanne’s photograph. That my dad had contemplated suicide only reinforced my belief that if you lose someone you love, you lose your mind and that’s an entirely natural thing to do.
“He was very depressed when I met him,” my mom said. “His daughter had been dead for decades, but he was still very depressed. You don’t get over a thing like that.”
MENTAL ILLNESS
A sleepless week of writing followed. By Friday evening I found myself in a bed much like the one my dad died in. There, hooked up to tubes, I looked up into the concerned face of a coworker I trusted.
The evening returned to me in fragments: the outline of a house made with pills on my bedroom floor; my phone ringing; two friends—one of them the coworker—helping me through a doorway, or maybe into a car.
I was in an emergency room.
The doctors explained what had happened: I’d overdosed on mood stabilizers, antianxiety pills, and methadone.
“Methadone?” I said.
And then I remembered: the pills from the online Canadian pharmacy. Before I had health insurance, I’d consulted a friend—who later spent a year in rehab—and he recommended a website that sold prescription medications. I ordered pills, thinking they were mood stabilizers. I took them on and off for a year but stopped when my mood seemed worse. I’d stashed the remaining pills in a shoe box under my bed. To throw them away—even if they weren’t helpful—seemed wasteful.
I explained my mistake to my doctors.
I explained to them that my dad had died.
“Recently?”
“Seven years ago,” I said. To prove that I wasn’t a complete idiot, I added, “Odysseus cried for his wife for seven years.”
A doctor returned and informed me that I’d be admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Westchester.
“But my father died.”
I tried to explain to him, as I’d been trying to explain all along, that my dad had been a tremendous man.
“This is grief,” I repeated.
“You have an illness.”
“I have work. If I miss work—”
“You will not lose your job.”
“It’s not that. People will know.”
My first day at the hospital, a nurse asked me my name.
“Jeannie Vanasco,” I said.
“I have a Barbara Vanasco,” she said.
•
For two weeks I was Barbara. The day the hospital released me, my doctor said, “You’re a risk-taker, Barbara, and I can see you’ll always be a risk-taker. You’re not going to change.”
I nodded, thanked him for his help.
A friend—the coworker who found me passed out—met me at the hospital, and I asked him on the train ride to my neighborhood, “Do you think I’m too much of a risk-taker?”
“You drink a lot,” he said. “You overdosed.”
Back at my apartment, another friend joined us. We talked. Or mostly I talked.
Slow down, they said.
Are you feeling okay? they said.
You’re talking too fast, they said.
“I’m great,” I said, beginning to cry and laugh at once.
They insisted I return to the hospital.
I ran outside, hid underneath a tree in a park near my apartment. My cell phone rang. It was my boss.
“You need the hospital,” she told me.
My friends took me in a cab to a different hospital. I stayed only overnight. The doctors determined I was fine.
FOURTEEN
My reaction to my dad’s death echoe
s his reaction to Jeanne’s death, but my reaction to her death orbits my interpretation of his reaction to her death, and that interpretation in turn influenced my reaction to his death. I think too much to avoid feeling too much. I think that’s it, or I feel that’s it.
If I suspend any summary or scenes about his death, his character dies without foreshadowing, paralleling my own experience: I never believed he’d die, not even when hospice arrived.
I’ve written so much about his death and its effects on me, I’ve lost sight of my dad’s character and my mom’s.
Grief isolates me from myself, and it isolates me from them; all I see is his death.
I saw his death when I saw my mom during my early years in New York. I think that’s why she’s largely absent from my New York scenes—not because I literally didn’t see her. She visited. It’s just that on her visits she no longer looked like herself. She looked broken in her unbroken black: black shirt, black pants. If she wore a black skirt, she wore black tights. She was of that generation. She showed her tears when she talked about my dad, and she often talked about him. When we were physically apart, I called almost every day but I tried not to talk about him, not with her, because it hurt to hear her cry.
Still some might wonder: How did your mom not notice your illness? And why did you think you couldn’t tell her? I’d developed a skill for pretending to be okay. She still doesn’t know that I cut my wrists and feet in grade school and junior high. She doesn’t know about my friend sexually assaulting me. But eventually she’ll read this. (There should be a support group for parents of memoirists.) I can’t let myself worry too much about anyone reading this, not yet anyway.
Also, as an adult I didn’t think I was hiding an illness. I thought I was hiding grief. She had her own crowded sorrow, and I didn’t want to burden her with mine. I like how “own crowded sorrow” sounds, but what do I mean by that? Explaining grief seems like explaining a joke; it diffuses the intensity of emotions. In some ways, it’s easier to write about my dad’s death than it is to write about my mom’s pain.
The Glass Eye Page 10