Raising Myself

by Beverly Engel

  I had always liked and admired Sunny’s spontaneity, just as I had admired Ruby’s. Like Ruby, Sunny never worried about what other people would think about her, and this was very attractive to me. Being around her was a way for me to rebel against my mother.

  But Ruby wasn’t only spontaneous and adventurous, she was reckless. She had been reckless with herself and she had been reckless with me. Over the past few months, I had come to realize that Sunny was also reckless. And now this last car crash had moved her into another category entirely—someone who was not only reckless but dangerous. I started to feel unsafe around her.

  chapter 37

  At some point, Sunny started therapy. I don’t know what prompted it, or even how she found a therapist; it may have been that Yvonne referred her to someone like she had with me. However it came about, she began seeing a male psychiatrist once a week, and even though it was the proverbial elephant in the room, she didn’t talk about it with me.

  A few months into her therapy, Sunny had what appeared to be a psychotic break. Her mother called me to tell me what happened. Apparently, her psychiatrist had decided to call in another therapist to get a second opinion. He’d explained to Sunny that the other psychiatrist would be joining them for their session but he did so only a few minutes before the man arrived, and something about the other psychiatrist’s shoes acted as a trigger for Sunny and she began to scream. She ran out of the psychiatrist’s office. Both men and the receptionist chased after her down the street. Once they caught up to her, she had to be physically restrained because she was fighting them so hard.

  She had been taken to Kern General Hospital, her mother told me, and admitted to the psych ward.

  Several weeks after Sunny was admitted to Kern General, her mother took me to see her. I think she told the nurses I was Sunny’s sister so I could get in.

  When I got to the hospital, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Sunny was no longer Sunny. Instead, some pale, mousy, crazy-eyed woman had taken her place. It was like someone had pricked her with a pin and all the air had drained out of her. I felt a mixture of fear and sadness at the realization that somewhere inside this stranger was my dear friend.

  At first, she didn’t seem to recognize me. Finally, the light of recognition flickered in her eyes, but even then she didn’t seem happy to see me. Looking back on it, I’m sure she must have felt embarrassed. After all, she prided herself on being a strong person, someone no one could mess with, and here she was locked up, helpless, in a mental hospital.

  I asked her how she was but all she did was look down at the picture she was drawing with crayons. Then she began to beg her mother to take her out of there.

  “I don’t belong here, Mother,” she said. “Take me home, please!”

  Her mother looked down and mumbled, “I’m sorry, Sunny, you have to stay here. The doctors tell me you are sick and need help.”

  “Okay, but I don’t need to be here, Mother,” Sunny said. “If I need help, I’ll just keep going to Dr. Walters like I have been.”

  “You need more help than Dr. Walters can give you. And I’m sure you won’t have to stay long, they just need to observe you for a while.”

  Sunny stopped pleading with her mother and fell silent.

  We didn’t stay long. I was horribly uncomfortable and I’m sure Sunny’s mother was as well. Sunny had stopped talking to us and just continued looking down at her drawing. But as we were leaving, she physically clung to her mother, begging once again for her to take her home.

  “Please, please, Mother, take me with you. Tell them you’re going to take care of me. Tell them I won’t do anything but go to therapy and come straight home. Please.”

  But Sunny’s mother pushed her away and scurried out of there as fast as she could.

  Shortly after our visit, Sunny’s mother told me Sunny had been put on suicide watch because she had hidden herself under her bed by clinging to the metal bars that held up the mattress. They thought she was trying to kill herself, though Sunny told her mother she was just hoping to hide long enough to escape. I could see Sunny doing something like this because she was so bent on getting out of there, and I didn’t understand why the people at the hospital considered it a suicide attempt.

  I called Sunny’s mother a few times over the next few weeks to ask her to take me with her to see Sunny again, but she told me each time that she was taking one of Sunny’s siblings instead. The next time I called, she told me Sunny had been transferred to a state mental hospital in Camarillo, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive away. She had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and would have to be hospitalized indefinitely.

  I was in shock. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I imagined Sunny being confined to a mental hospital indefinitely and I felt devastated. I wondered what life was like for her. I imagined that it must feel like a nightmare to be locked up—especially for someone as active and who loved her freedom as much as Sunny did. But I also thought about something else. It slowly started to dawn on me that it wasn’t a coincidence that Sunny and I had been in three accidents in the span of a few months. Yes, Sunny was reckless. But there had been more to it with the last accident, when she crashed her VW. It finally occurred to me that maybe Sunny had been trying to kill herself.

  I began to feel lucky that I was alive. And while I felt horribly sad for Sunny, I was also glad she was getting the help she obviously needed. It was one thing to want to take your own life. I could understand that. But I couldn’t understand her trying to do it with me in the car. What was going on in her head? A sinister thought creeped into my head like a slithering snake: Had she intended to take me with her?

  In a matter of weeks, I’d lost my best friend and confidant. I desperately missed having someone in my life who understood me and what I’d been through in my life. The deep, painful feelings of loss I felt reminded me of how it had been when I lost Pam. It felt like whenever I had the good fortune to meet someone I could really get close to, I always lost them; whenever I got really happy, something always happened to take that happiness away. Like when my mother spoiled my happiness by telling me I was illegitimate. I railed against the injustice of it all. It wasn’t just my mother wanting to take me down a notch or two. Now it seemed as if God was taking me down as well.

  I had to start taking the bus to college, and this meant having to get up much earlier in the morning. Fortunately, Florence’s parents had talked her into going to junior college too so she started driving me home, but it wasn’t the same. I missed going to Sunny’s house and being with her siblings. I’d come to love those kids, each and every one of them. I missed laughing with them and singing and dancing with them. Now, once again, I came home from school to my dark, lonely apartment.

  chapter 38

  As if things weren’t bad enough with Sunny in the mental hospital, I suffered yet another loss the winter of my freshman year at Bakersfield Junior College. That year, just as she had done when she first arrived in Bakersfield, Yvonne summoned all the Y teen girls downtown for an important meeting. The air was filled with electricity as we all waited anxiously to hear what she had to say.

  “I asked you all here to announce that I will be leaving the Y and Bakersfield,” Yvonne announced first thing.

  There was an audible gasp in the room. For the first time in my life, I understood what people meant when they say, “My heart sank.” I felt like my heart retreated deep inside me—so deep that it would never be found again.

  “I’ll be moving to LA to be the director of the YWCA in Pasadena,” she explained. “I’ve loved being your Y director and I’ll be sad to leave. I will miss you all . . .” She continued speaking, but I could hardly hear her anymore. I was far away. Along with my heart, the rest of me had retreated.

  I felt utterly abandoned. Yvonne meant so much to me. She had listened to me when I needed to talk about my mother, and she’d been there for me when I found out Sunny had been hospitalized. And though I’d feared the worst after drinking
at her apartment, she hadn’t seemed to hold it against me; she’d continued to be her usual friendly, albeit demanding, self.

  To me, Yvonne represented hope and the ability to create change. During her time with us, she had galvanized the girls in the clubs to reach out to our community to help those less fortunate, she had increased the popularity of the Y clubs, and she’d helped girls like me to feel empowered and respect ourselves.

  She was the most accomplished person I’d met so far in my life. At twenty-seven, she had graduated with a master’s degree in social work and been hired as program director of first one YWCA and now a larger one in a big city. She was the first person I ever knew who was a visionary. She had many creative ideas and was able to get other people to climb on board with her plans in order to bring them to fruition. She was the one who’d had the idea to open a teen nightclub for the kids in Bakersfield in order to get them off the streets. She’d had us put on the musical South Pacific to raise money for needy families in Bakersfield. And she’d brought all the Y teen clubs together for weekend retreats where black, Latino, and white kids all danced, played, and sang together. Before that, everyone had stayed on their own side of the tracks—literally—and had little or no exposure to other races, cultures, and ways of life.

  Yvonne was also the first person that I consciously viewed as a role model. I wanted to be just like her, to be just as accomplished and to inspire people the way she did.

  So for me, losing Yvonne was not just a personal loss; it represented a different kind of loss as well—a loss of hope. I tried not to allow her leaving to affect me in that way. I tried to stay inspired by what she’d accomplished. But without her presence, it was difficult. It just felt like one more in a series of losses— losses that I felt were taking pieces of me away.

  Sunny was in the state hospital for about three months when a visiting psychiatrist re-evaluated her and determined that she wasn’t schizophrenic after all. As Sunny’s mother explained it, he said she had been re-traumatized when her psychiatrist called in the second therapist. Being in a room with two men must have triggered memories of her gang rape. They gave her further treatment and then released her to the care of her psychiatrist in Bakersfield.

  Sunny had dodged a bullet. When she got home, she told me that, had the visiting psychiatrist not agreed to see her, she would most certainly still be in the state hospital, probably indefinitely.

  I was so happy to see her home. But things were different between us now. She was distant and uninterested in talking about her experience in the hospital. In fact, she didn’t seem interested in talking about anything regarding her feelings. The sad truth was that the Sunny I had felt so close to, the Sunny who had seemed to be a soul mate, was no longer available to me and probably was no longer available even to herself.

  Somehow, she got hooked up with some new friends who introduced her to skydiving, which was right up her alley. This way, she could be reckless and risk her life as often as she wanted.

  She took me with her one day when she jumped from a plane. I watched anxiously from the ground as she floated back down to earth. She had taken lessons and tried to get me to do the same, explaining how safe it was, what you needed to do to land safely, and what equipment you needed, but I wasn’t having any of it. It was too scary for me. Besides, it was expensive, and I was saving money for books for my second year of college.

  Sunny had decided not to go back to college and I guess she started spending most of her time with her new friends because she didn’t call me very often and she always seemed to be too busy to get together. Then one day, about a month after she was released from the hospital, she called to tell me she was moving to LA. We didn’t even have a chance to see each other before she left. She promised to keep in touch.

  I felt hurt about Sunny leaving without me—it had been our plan to leave together after we got our associate degrees. But I also felt that Sunny needed to do whatever she had to do to leave Bakersfield and to start her life anew. And honestly, I can’t say I was devastated when she moved away. I’d been gradually letting go of her ever since she’d first been hospitalized—maybe even before that, when I’d realized I wasn’t safe with her. And I was learning an important lesson: life is unpredictable. You never know what can happen tomorrow. No matter how much you love someone or someone loves you, there are no guarantees. People can change overnight. It was best to not depend on only one person for your happiness.

  Don’t get me wrong, I still loved Sunny, and I hoped we would reconnect with each other once I moved to LA—but I wasn’t holding my breath. She just seemed too unpredictable to be counted on, and I needed people around me who were stable and safe.

  After losing Sunny and Yvonne, I felt rudderless and abandoned. I fell into a deep depression; I didn’t feel like getting up in the morning and I couldn’t get to sleep at night. I obsessed about all the things I had done wrong—especially about wrecking my mother’s car and drinking at Yvonne’s house. I wondered if my causing us to lose our studying place had added to Sunny’s stress level. Normally, I tried to forget my past mistakes—to block them out of my mind and just move on. But even though both Yvonne and my mother had seemed to have gotten over my blunders, when I was depressed like this I dwelled on all the bad things I’d done.

  I didn’t feel motivated to study. I loved my English, sociology, and psychology classes but I was barely passing chemistry, which made me seriously rethink becoming a nurse—especially since I’d also recently found out I was squeamish about taking or giving blood.

  For a time, I had considered being a social worker like Yvonne. Under her direction, the Y had started a program to help young people who had been in a mental hospital adjust to normal life once they were released. I was attracted to the program because of my experience with Sunny, so I often attended the “social hour” held every Wednesday afternoon at the Y, where I—along with other Y teen girls—talked and danced with the former patients.

  There was one young man in his early twenties whom I connected with more than the others. He had been a student at Bakersfield Jr. College when he’d had a breakdown, and he was planning on going back to school soon. He was quiet and sad and I wanted to help him come out of his shell.

  We talked and danced together several Wednesdays. Yvonne wasn’t always there, but on one particular Wednesday in early December, she was. I was waltzing with him when I got a glimpse of Yvonne. Much to my surprise, she gave me a critical look.

  Confused and upset, I excused myself and went over to her.

  “You’ll never make a good social worker,” she said harshly. “You don’t have good enough boundaries.”

  I didn’t understand what she was talking about. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re just supposed to socialize with the patients, not get romantically involved with them.”

  I was shocked. I wasn’t getting romantically involved with the young man. I felt badly for him that he’d had a breakdown like Sunny and been hospitalized at such a young age, but I wasn’t coming on to him. I wondered if perhaps I hadn’t noticed that he was attracted to me. I often missed signals from guys because I didn’t feel attractive. Nevertheless, Yvonne’s reprimand caused me to question my ability to be a good social worker. Would I end up getting too involved with my clients? If being a social worker meant being cold and critical, as Yvonne sometimes was, then maybe it wasn’t for me. So now, in addition to all the other losses I was experiencing, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

  As the months went by and I reflected on my relationship with Yvonne, I realized that while she had inspired me to reach for more in my life and to be the best version of myself, there was a critical side to her as well—a part of her that was diffi-cult to please, a part of her that had unreasonable expectations. She had gotten in the habit of saying to me, “Get on the stick, Engel!” and each time she said it I felt criticized. She seemed to be saying that I could do better, even when I was trying as hard as I co
uld. In more ways than I wanted to admit, she reminded me of my mother. Realizing this was very depressing to me. I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before. I had put her up on such a pedestal that I’d been blind to this aspect of her, just like I had been blind to Sunny’s recklessness.

  Fortunately, Sharon and Grace, two of my friends from Medical Careers Club in high school, invited me to the snow for winter vacation. I’d never spent much time around girls like Sharon and Grace—normal girls who hadn’t suffered abuse, their parents’ alcoholism, or worse. They each had two parents who loved them, who had stayed together and seemed devoted to their children. It was comforting to be around these girls and to see that normal families actually existed.

  Although they weren’t wealthy, Sharon and Grace’s parents had enough money to send their girls to nursing school after they graduated from Bakersfield City College. And they had enough money to rent a cabin for us to spend a week in the snow at Big Bear.

  Sharon’s father drove us there and picked us up a week later. I was impressed that her father trusted us to not get into trouble, but Sharon, Grace, and Sharon’s cousin, Jennifer, who also came along, weren’t the types of girls who even thought about it anyway. They didn’t smoke or drink and they hardly talked about boys at all. Instead, they talked about scholarships and where they were going to go to college. Up until that time, I hadn’t even been aware that a scholarship was a possibility.

  I had never been in the snow before, either, except for the little bit of snow I’d seen on my first day in Sonora. I loved how it looked—the stark white beauty of it. I loved how it felt to walk in it, to feel and hear the crunch under my feet. I welcomed the clean air and the smell of pine. And I loved how I felt with snow around me. The quietness and stillness of it. The feeling of everything being clean and pure.