“I think she understands. Maybe she’s pulling the wool over my eyes.” She looks me up and down. “But I don’t think so.”
* * *
That afternoon, I leave the kids with Aaron and go downtown for a meeting. I turn off my phone. When I come out an hour later and turn it back on, there are three missed calls and seven texts from Aaron’s phone.
I just 0uked ebryehtrt ypu need to come home
This is nico dad just puked out blood all over the seconed floor please come home
Nell im teally sick you need to come home
Im pukinkubf blood
Please come home now
MOM GET HOME NOW dad might pass out!!!!!!
Please mom
I call back. I’m coming. Put Nico on. Tell me what happened. Nico is crying. It’s okay, I say. Dad will be okay. I’m coming home and we’ll take him to the doctor. Get your shoes on. Get your brother’s shoes on. Bring your homework. You did great, I say. I hang up and make the ten-minute walk up the hill in five minutes.
“Dad throwed up!” Henry says when I come in the door. “Nico was crying!”
“Shut up, Henry!”
“He throwed up everywhere.”
Aaron is on the couch, moaning under a blanket. Last week he had a bloody nose, was coughing up blood, and now there is blood on his jeans, on his white socks. Upstairs, the house looks like a crime scene. I follow the trail of blood-colored vomit from the bedroom to the bathroom. It’s on my office floor. It’s on the bathroom floor. It’s blasted across the toilet and walls, and there are several inches of it in the bathroom sink, along with what looks like a brain. Upon closer inspection I see it is a nest of undigested ramen noodles. Three-minute, spice-packet, Oriental ramen noodles, the only flavor that is vegan, if the ingredients inside could be judged as actual food. It is Halloween—will the kids be able to trick-or-treat?—and for a moment I think of the Halloween festival at my elementary school, where I stuck my hand in a box to feel spaghetti brains—what a sick thrill that was!—and I wonder if this is some Halloween prank. A trick.
Not a trick. “But I did drink a lot of cranberry juice,” Aaron remembers.
He is delirious, and his left arm still hurts, so everyone piles in the car and we drive to urgent care, where last week we left without being seen because of the hour wait. Today they see him right away. The kids are now elated: they can stay in the waiting room with the retro Pac-Man arcade game and unlimited play! The nurse asks a thousand questions. Family history? Medications? What does he take the Seroquel for?
We look at each other.
“I have issues,” Aaron says.
“Depression?” the nurse asks.
“It’s a drug prescribed for schizophrenia,” I say.
“That’s okay!” the nurse says sweetly. “Did you throw up that blood on your shirt?”
No. That’s blood from his skin. He lifts his T-shirt to show them. The Ohio-shaped steak is scabbing over. He has been wearing the shirt for a week straight because why ruin seven shirts? Then the doctor comes in and asks the questions all over again. She is kind, ponytailed, smiling with concern while we take turns repeating the details. “Any other medical issues?”
“Oh, hell yeah,” he says. By the time he’s done, finishing with the knot on his head he got while closing the car trunk that morning, she says, “Well, you’re just a hot mess, aren’t you?”
We laugh. It’s another diagnosis that brings the comfort of truth. It’s a feminized moniker, borrowed by the ponytailed doctor and applied to the helpless male who lies trainwrecked, trapped on his back on the butcher paper, half Amy Schumer, half Gregor Samsa. This is what we will write on the medical form next time. So much more accurate than schizophrenia. Any medical issues? Hot mess. Outlier. Too much fire.
They do an EKG. Normal. No fever. Last week he had chest pains, couldn’t breathe, but now, this moment, he is okay. She prescribes ointment for his sore arm and physical therapy. The blood, she is pretty sure, is cranberry juice. Who knows what caused him to spontaneously vomit all over the house? Other than ramen noodles? It is a body’s sensible response, we conclude, to expel it.
I take the kids trick-or-treating and Aaron stays home in bed. It’s not the first Halloween he’s missed, so we’re not surprised but we’re sad. The boys are Ghostbusters. They aren’t sad for long. They are shrieking down the street with their friends, fluorescent bands circling their wrists in the dark.
When the kids are asleep in their candy comas I use an entire plastic canister of Seventh Generation antibacterial wipes on the bathroom. I don’t mind. It is satisfying, scrubbing each honeycomb tile, the blood-vomit disappearing as if in slow-mo rewind, and then the bathroom is clean and white again.
SEYMOUR, AGAIN
1999
We didn’t break up. But after two years, in the summer, the lease on the yellow house came to an end. The architects were expanding their business upstairs.
Down Seymour Street, we found another one-bedroom apartment, this one in a slate blue house above the apartment of an aging cat lady named Linda who wore a comb in her hair. Aaron said she reminded him of Julie Hagerty. Out back was a garage turned into a hostel. Our apartment was a square with the stairway rising in the center. There were more slanted ceilings, and a gas stove you had to ignite with a barbecue lighter, a claw-foot tub with a shower curtain that went all the way around. We had our first dinner party in that apartment, inviting our friends Esther and Eva, sisters who worked at the bakery with me. I made: potatoes.
Linda owned four cats, and so didn’t mind when we adopted a new kitten we named Blue. We kept her in the bathroom while Ratboy hissed through the door. Once we’d introduced them, the kitten slept in our bed. I was a fretful co-sleeping parent. That first night, I was awake more than asleep. At some point, the kitten squirmed out of my reach to nestle on my grandmother’s quilt at the end of the bed, and managed to pounce between my legs, one of her new claws impaling the inside of my right butt cheek.
Linda, did, however, mind when we asked a friend to house-sit for us. We were going to visit our family in Florida that summer, and Esther had offered to stay there to take care of the new kitten.
“I’ve looked at the lease,” Linda said, “and it doesn’t have anyone else’s name on it.” She would be happy to take care of the cats herself, she said.
Aaron was pissed. Fine, he said. But he vowed to me that, when we got back, we’d look for another place. “I’ve looked at the lease,” he told me, “and it doesn’t have an end-date on it.”
* * *
Aaron’s father had a psychiatrist, Dr. Delano. He worked for Veterans Affairs. It was decided that Aaron, when we went to Florida, would see this psychiatrist.
It wasn’t therapy, per se. He was seeking medication. For the first time, I thought, My boyfriend is depressed.
He had lost so much. His mother, in the divorce. His ex-girlfriend, who had been killed. His best friend, Ashmat, who died when they were twelve, shortly after Aaron moved to Florida. Another friend, who died in his twenties of cerebral palsy. I had always thought of Aaron as haunted by these ghosts. Seeing him as clinically depressed was less romantic, but I wanted desperately for him to feel better.
We returned to Florida and the two of us slept in my twin bed. There were my old posters and books and photos, the collection of ceramic elephants, the peace-sign collage I’d made from magazine clippings, the SAVE THE RAINFOREST poster. There were my old sheets, the turquoise ones with red flowers. I don’t know if it was the safety of being outside of our regular life, like the magical pool water that made my parents so loquacious. Maybe he was trying to explain the appointment with the psychiatrist. But it was there, late one night, that he told me, quite out of the blue, that he’d been abused.
“Like, sexually abused?”
He nodded. He was a man in my bed and he was also a little boy.
“Oh, honey,” I said. I held him.
“For a while, I didn’t remem
ber it,” he said. “And then it came back.” For all those years he’d been on drugs, he’d pushed the memory to the back of his mind. Then, when he got off them, the memories had nothing left to cloud them.
Oh. I’d thought I understood the appointment, the weed.
“Who was it?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You won’t tell me?” I asked. “Or you don’t remember?”
“I remember.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “But I’ll never ever tell you.”
* * *
We met his dad at the VA hospital. We spotted him in the cafeteria on his motorized scooter, in the sea of other old men in turquoise suit jackets. He was a volunteer.
Downstairs, for some reason, Morris and I waited for Aaron outside Dr. Delano’s office. Morris sat quietly on his parked scooter. I had the absurd recollection of my mother waiting outside the bathroom door while I, at thirteen, tried to insert a tampon for the first time. I could hear her whispering to my father. I was furious.
What did Aaron’s father know about why he was there? About what had made him depressed? I wished he could share his secret with his father. I thought it would make things better, bring them closer.
It was not a long visit. Soon Aaron emerged from the office. He had a white paper bag in his hand. The psychiatrist had, in a few minutes, dispensed Aaron’s first antidepressant. Zoloft.
For the life of me, I cannot remember one word I exchanged with his father in that hallway. I remember only Aaron’s nervousness, his face edged with anger, as he emerged from the room: that we were waiting for him, worrying about him, together.
IRONY 1
The pain inflicted on my husband as a child prevents him from sharing the bed with our sons.
Sharing the bed with our sons would be, perhaps, the best medicine for the pain inflicted on my husband as a child.
SEYMOUR, AGAIN
1999, STILL
The third apartment on Seymour Street, which we moved into at the end of that summer, was the downstairs of a rambling cream-colored house with porches falling off in every direction. One porch looked out at the barn-shaped garage. Another looked over the Otter Creek, and the tall, otter-eaten trees that threatened to fall on the house. From another you could see an honest-to-goodness covered bridge.
The rent was $750 a month. Fifty percent more than what we’d been paying. The amount staggered me. My father told me it was a foolish idea. What was wrong with the one-bedroom apartment with the cat lady?
Here, our landlords would live in another state, oblivious to our cat-sitters and our comings and goings. Above us lived a recent Middlebury graduate who wrote for the local paper. She left a note on our door when we moved in. Come up for drinks sometime! Or tea for the teetotalers. I pretended I knew what the word meant, but I had to look it up. Teetotalers! That was what we were. Well, sort of. Was I a teetotaler if I wasn’t technically old enough to drink? Was Aaron a teetotaler if he was smoking pot pretty much every day?
We had made, somehow, a pretty little life for ourselves. In the morning, Aaron would drop me off on campus, or I’d ride my bike. I’d go to class, study in the library. I wrote papers and went to office hours and filled notebooks with notes. I read Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams and Ralph Ellison and Virgil and Shakespeare. I learned Ancient Greek. In warm months, I liked to find an Adirondack chair and write under a tree, and for a moment I’d be the girl in the college brochure I’d always wanted to be.
In winter months, I’d retire my bike, and more than anything, I remember walking through the snow. On those short winter days, it always seemed to be dark. The silent march over the dark, icy sidewalks, across campus, to campus, from campus to home. On weekends, I’d wake up at five thirty in the morning and walk through the snow to work, rounding the corner where the post office sat dark, following the dead-quiet streets of Middlebury. Sometimes I’d pass some college kids stumbling home from their parties. It wasn’t what I’d pictured in the college brochure. But it was mine. All of Main Street, at six o’clock, was mine. And then there was the warm, yellow glow of the bakery windows at the far end of the street. You could smell the bread baking from a block away.
Then, after class, after work, I went home. I cooked with Aaron, watched TV, did homework. I had my wisdom teeth removed, and Aaron drove me home, loopy on anesthesia, and helped me to the couch. He helped me change the bloody gauze on my gums. He gave me the Vicodin, then held my hair when I threw it up. He made me chana masala, then put it in the blender and spoon-fed it to me. My mouth was still numb. It dribbled down my chin, and Aaron cleaned it. I was laughing because I was still high and laughing because I loved my boyfriend and loved the way, when I let him, he took care of me.
* * *
It was a compartmentalized life. Aaron dipped into my worlds occasionally. He attended a lecture, or stopped by the bakery to refill his mug with hazelnut coffee. But largely he existed, to me, in a domain sealed off from the rest of my life.
It was not exactly a case of split personality. I was me in every domain. But I could adapt to what each world asked of me, adopt a language, a culture, a vocabulary. I prided myself on this, the way I could read a room and be what it wanted me to be.
But such division tires the mind. The mind does not want to collate itself. The mind longs for integration.
I wanted to fuse with Aaron’s world, to puncture its membrane, get under its surface. But I was scared to. As well as he might have appeared to the outside world—he had two jobs and a Range Rover, two cats and a girlfriend—his interior world, I was beginning to suspect, was a place of chaos and distress. Since confessing his childhood abuse to me in my childhood bed, he hadn’t shared much of that world with me, and I didn’t ask for much access. I wanted to respect his trauma. He played the keyboard. He played the guitar. He recorded songs on minidiscs and sent them back to his old bandmates in Florida. He smoked a lot of pot. He took the Zoloft. Whether it was working, I didn’t know.
In a computer lab at school, I wrote a letter to my friend Esther. I wrote down all the sadness I felt for Aaron and with him, all my disappointment and worry and regret. It felt like an unspeakable betrayal, that letter. I must have chosen the computer lab because my own desktop at home felt too unsafe. I printed it out on the lab’s laser printer and sealed it in an envelope, and after carrying it around like a bomb in my backpack for two days, I went back to the computer lab and ran it through the shredder.
I could handle it, I thought. I had control of my worlds, of my access into each of them. We were behind on the bills, despite his father’s continued allowance. That $750 rent was beginning to weigh on us. I was managing a lot. I was working almost as much as Aaron, and I was in school full-time. Finally I worked up the nerve to say something about it. One winter night, we sat in the dark living room, Aaron playing with a flashlight against the wall. We watched our shadows. Maybe it was the safety of that darkness. I said, “I see you working twenty hours a week, and I wonder why it’s not more. It’s not enough.”
The beam of the flashlight dropped to the floor. It was exactly as though a light had been switched off—or on? I had crossed a threshold.
Here was his disbelief, his anger. Who was I to question his work? His integrity? Who was I to say what was enough for him? It was the same as the fight about finding his pot. It wasn’t his fault; he was depressed.
We fought, yelled, cried. For months, years, we’d held it all in. Then it came tumbling out.
Sniffling, I held my ground. I didn’t have a dorm room to return to. The residential life director, short on housing, had approached me at the bakery the previous summer. Are you still living with that boyfriend? My parents had been glad to save the money on an unused room.
Instead, I spent the night on the futon on the floor of my office. We didn’t have a second blanket, and I was too cold, too worked up, to sleep.
In the morning, I walked to campus and went to the residential life director’s office. Were
there any rooms left on campus? She handed me a box of tissues. “Aaron and I are going to spend some time apart,” I said. I could barely get the words out.
There was a room in Hepburn Hall, on the fifth floor, and it was mine if I wanted it. I did. I dialed Aaron’s number from the pay phone of Bicentennial Hall. I was serious about spending time apart. I would hold my ground.
There was his voice, bright and solid and apologetic. Light was streaming in the massive windows of the building. Outside the window, a cluster of yellow campus bikes was capped in snow.
How was it that my lives were split too rigidly and also that, at twenty, my life had become so entangled with my boyfriend’s that I couldn’t tell them apart? We call this paradox “codependency,” but I didn’t know it then. My dorm room in Hepburn Hall was the first nervous step I took out of that tangled nest.
But, okay, I still loved him. I admitted it on the phone. Given the distance, the morning, the fresh coat of snow, it felt possible to love him and to be me at the same time.
“Good,” he said, relieved. I could hear him smiling. “’Cause I think I’m a pretty good guy.”
* * *
He drove me to Ames and we bought a lavender sheet set, twin XL, to fit the bed in the dorm. I arranged the framed pictures of me and my boyfriend on the dresser. I stacked my CDs in my CD tower. Aaron bought me a stereo with a minidisc player and a white TV with a built-in VCR, and I thought both were the most impressive devices ever made. I was exultant, moving into that dorm room. It was a hundred square feet that belonged to me. My parents may have been less exultant, scrambling to find a credit card for room and board again.
“Sorry, dude,” my brothers said when I called to tell them I’d moved out. They were shocked and sad. For Thanksgiving they’d visited us at the house on Seymour Street. They’d played Sega Dreamcast with Aaron and took turns shooting a BB gun at the otter-eaten trees in the backyard. We went out to eat for Thanksgiving dinner, and they’d peer-pressured him into eating turkey, and I’d shaken my head at them, bad influences pushing my boyfriend off the vegetarian wagon.
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