by Edie Meidav
“No antipsychotics,” Lana instructed one of the kinder white coats one time, her memories starting to jumble. “No Thorazine. No electroshock.”
With the male psychiatrist who became her mainstay—my squeeze, she called him to her roommate—a stooped vulture upset with what life had doled out, Lana stayed defiant, stuck in this mode until she realized she had landed on an alien planet and had failed to heed its rules:
The first question to ask when landing should always be who is the leader in charge?
This part she had neglected. The aliens may have already captured her. She had imprinted like a duckling on the blue-eyed woman psych resident, following the wrong person until she realized that resident equaled powerless, that really the male vulture controlled the planet. He must be placated and made to move toward sympathy. Had Lana been just a bit more compliant from the start, she realized, the vulture doctor would not have ordered biweekly electroshock. Finally she clicked to it and stopped wearing a nightgown. Instead she raided her father’s unconscious in order to assume the dim smile of a madonna dressed as a fifties girl, hair pulled back and ankles crossed, carrying books prim across the chest, arms slim, breasts full, cribbing her affect from the pages of The Bell Jar, a book she had read first semester in college in New York. She would drill deep into the vulture’s secret heart, try to come off as milky and compliant.
But would it work? Would they discharge her? And to what? And why would no one visit?
How are treatments going? the vulture always asked.
O really well, she started to say, doctor, inside telling herself: milky, compliant, sometimes orienting her womb his way to give off the message of you’re a big man, you protect and serve. Disembodied, she could enter the story they were creating together, see herself as a tall wisp of a girl in a nightgown ready to be snapped around his will, ready to run away and let him spawn monster vulture babies in the seedbed of her compliant womb.
Who was the one who had betrayed her by leaving her to rot, her parents or Rose?
Only once do her mother and father come, pulled from France as if from their own distant bunny planet. They come on a day when Lana is so drugged—or could it have been after a treatment?—that she registers mainly what a silly fuss they make about getting her some fresh air and that her father is weaker than the orderlies when wheeling her out into the garden. The family Mahler sits near black-eyed susans, a flower her mother used to love. And if Lana’s tongue is too thick to explain that milky compliance toward the vulture has helped lessen the frequency of electrocution, there are documents in a clear plastic file pasted near her bed, its contents her reading material on lucid days, stating all her parents need to know:
Given that the medical team deems it advisable for electrotherapy to continue for unknown duration
Later Lana will wonder if her parents’ visit did help her case since it seems that on a day not long after—was it seven days, a month?—the vulture’s face cracks toward a simulacrum of a smile, asking: “How do you feel about being discharged in a few weeks? If all goes well?”
“O good,” she says, milky, compliant, “no, really, super, great.” The day arrives and she tells herself all is well, though she feels faint, taking a breath, going through glass revolving doors clutching her purse, following Mary into the parking lot with the childish urge to hold mommy’s hand as they pass other cars and head toward a maroon stationwagon chosen by every parent of her generation, a vehicle strong in its frame if poor in its high center of gravity and handling around curves. Lana cannot stop seeing herself from the outside, cannot find a moment of sensation within, and it is only when she imagines telling Rose about her sojourn in bedlam and the pity she would be met with, Rose’s sensitive face mirroring how bad it has just been for Lana, that her knees buckle and her eyes well up. With each footfall Lana tells herself ACT NORMAL, willing her voice to stay unquavering while asking Mary: “Where’s Vic?” using his first name on purpose and accepting Mary’s near-silence as they enter the car to drive to the airport, Lana sly in her role of prim fifties girl throughout, purse on lap all the way, even on the plane back to California, even when flight attendants make her quiver, so much like orderlies in their concern that Lana stay buckled down. Finally Lana dozes off, head on Mary’s shoulder, shaken by a dream in which a stewardess takes her to the No Smoking bathroom to administer a shock, small but sexual, so that Lana wakes to the plane’s din in which voices scream in code. For a second, Lana looks amazed at the reassurance to be found in the softness of her mother’s arm but then pulls back. When Mary asks what the matter is, at first Lana cannot speak through the voices, the high yappy sort that used to teem in her head before a shot of tranquilizer hit the bloodstream and though she tries listening to whatever Mary says next, her mother’s mouth opens and closes like a fish flopped onto a beach where someone had asked her to play parent.
The two of them manage.
Crossing the threshold of Spruce Street, some questions return. Is Lana supposed to stay in what never had been a home? A house once refuge with its closets now all reproach, its spiritual life discernible in the fridge hum. And where is her father? Have her parents foundered on unimaginable shoals?
That night Vic does return and Lana, from her room’s garrison, hears how grand he makes the front door’s initial bluster, cloaking himself within fatherly loudness, a role she readily understands: he is covering the sin of having padlocked his daughter. As she hears him tramp upstairs, she buries her mouth in a musty pillow, mouthing you believe in freedom? at the moment he enters without knocking just as if they have shared an unbroken reverie of good nights.
“You’re okay now,” he instructs, as ever speaking his worst questions in the imperative.
Anything she says could scar and anyway her eyes have nothing left to give. “Yeah,” she tells the depths of her pillow, fully deceiptful, “I am.”
A month or two since her release and in a major feat of avoidance, the house sustains its hushed rituals, broken only the evening Vic enters her room again to come sit on her bed with intent, telling her that though he has never talked much about his childhood, he needs to explain a little about his life. She leans against the wall, pretending to continue the charcoal sketch she was doing when he entered, wishing instead to hide in the light cast by a jeweled deco lamp he had once bought on an outing. One for Lana, one for Rose. But she cannot hide, the rainbow light filling his eyes with mania, his words orchestral, first a violin’s grumble but on a speedy trail toward crescendo and trill. Because of how he speaks, she has to believe what he says: this is no longer Vic of the patient teacherly cadence and hypnotic pause but Vic rushing to exit some maze of his own.
First he must tell her the truth: he had not been an orphan. What is true is that his mother had been a prostitute and he’d had to watch her—how could he have avoided the curiosity?—sleeping with men.
“What are you saying?”
Caught in his moment, he doesn’t hear. His mother’s legs up around pallid buttocks, animals scuttling together, little Vic caught peeking in. Afterward his mother made him sniff one of the men’s leather belts, left behind as if for this exact purpose, before using it to cross-hatch Vic’s back and legs. “How people did things in the old days.” He cannot shrug away the burn in his eyes. “You got it easy, right?”
That she won’t give. “So why,” nonetheless delicate around this subject, “did you always tell people you were an orphan?”
“Tell me in what way am I not? This must be one of the reasons I ask people to be so careful when considering choice. Clearly we do receive a bounty of choices in life. That said, choice cannot become some global fiend devouring what is actually given. So much is fixed and immovable.”
“Please no lecture. Not right now.”
“Let me just finish. To be seen is the ambition of ghosts. Instead I found one of the best ways to be born again. You give up being seen. You rescript your origins.”
“That means you
lie?”
“You have no idea what my upbringing was like. When my mother was angry, she locked me in a wooden pen. Big enough for a colt.” He looks gratified by his daughter’s sympathy. They have never talked like this before, have they? He is confiding; he could inspire her.
“I found a way to weaken the latch. Enough to escape to a neighbor’s house. I’d get back in an hour without anyone ever knowing.”
She keeps scratching charcoal on paper because his eyes are danger. “Wow.”
“We tried giving you everything. Probably made a mistake. Too much liberty becomes no choice. Worse than a wooden pen.”
“You’ve said that a million times.” She goes back to her paper. “But why wait until now to tell me all this?”
“You’re not afraid of much.” He says this as if just noticing.
“I’m tired, Vic.” She uses his name on purpose, insult and rebuff, suffocated by how he watches. From him she has tried to learn the card-player tactic of giving up little. Nonetheless she thinks this could be the first time he has ever tried looking into her.
“It’s hard to be a parent,” he says finally. “I’m not talking about the values you exchange with your kid. Really it’s all one-sided thievery. One day you’ll see.” As if about to cry. “You’ll see. How to keep a stiff upper lip.” Her charcoal furious in scratching the paper because how palpable it becomes that her parents are foolish overindulged children, the whole mess combining in her as the burden of understanding. “You think you create your reality?” he asks, his tone not letting her go.
This she has also heard a million times: how, if you think you create your reality, you don’t have to deal with the fallout of social inequity, you can ignore mass misfortune, environmental catastrophe, class injustice and theodicy because create your reality and you can always say victims choose their reality. To his latterday adherents, trying to set them straight, Vic preaches that Californians, like so much of humanity since the rise of market economics, lack humility. This hubris might be his favorite idea to hate, one he has called the prime misunderstanding the shaggies have about his work.
Create your reality? “No,” she says, glowering. “You know I don’t believe that. But I’m not in a real mood for talking.”
“You know,” he says, contemplating his outstretched palm long enough that she looks up. “At first I didn’t want to have children. Your mother was the one who said we had the money and her age might be a problem. Back then, you know, she was pushing what we thought were the outer limits so I let us be careless. We had our fun. I let her use Ivory soap as protection.” He smiles. “But when she was about three months pregnant, we had some words. I told her I’d never wanted a kid. You understand this was a bad moment. But after that she started bleeding and had to take to bed for a couple of days. And then she always blamed me for the moment and how you turned out. The truth is that once I saw you, I never regretted the decision. Maybe without kids I could have written three more books but—”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asks, this time unable to guard herself. Embarrassed, he jerks up, stammering the usual need to retreat into work, the sham something not even her asylum time could make her parents surrender.
After their moment, he appears to abandon most any desire to talk to her. She comes to regret the conversation. Secretly she had wanted him to say more. She had loved and hated that he had come—to her!—for confession and absolution.
He will never start again. Raped by others’ stories, sure, she’d had tons of that in the asylum. Maybe in this case he had offered his stories as a blind man would, a gift for a lame girl, a blanket to sling over all the ways he had failed her. Once she had been just a mere blood spot and in his own clumsy way he was saying he was glad she had been born.
In the following month she almost forgives him, a quiet closeness living between them, something like the understanding she used to have with Rose. Yet the three, Mary, Vic and Lana, shuffle around as if choreographed by a vigilant demon in the wings whose commands make them puppetlike when crossing rooms, unsure of the score. Feeling orphaned too, Lana writes half-finished letters to Rose, all of which end up in her wastebasket, only to have Mary pore over them later as if they were runes.
Also it is true that the electrotherapy seems to have altered her brain. Odd facts arise, quotations from a Chinese revolution class almost in their entirety:
Chang Ch’un-ch’iao handled the task of rebuilding the new power structure with coercion and persuasion. The Chinese notion of justice used the moral concept of good and bad rather than the more familiar legalities of innocent and guilty, though good persons could make mistakes,
but little coheres, nothing sticks. Cinnamon and cayenne she tells herself, a little mantram for trying to be a docile shell, trainable, awaiting good influence.
Summer coming on, she wants escape, a job, and so sticks the initials B.A. on her résumé after Studio Art. This fakery doesn’t help since in interviews, despite Lana’s ostensibly fancy pedigree and qualifications, people sense the hole and no one hires her, not as a film intern, babysitter, waitress, dance-store salesperson, overnight homeless-shelter watcher, pet-shop cashier, editorial assistant, rental-car dispatcher. She quits the search.
Afternoons she avoids the intensity of the Spruce Street manse to walk West Berkeley’s windward side, traintracks zippering the bay. To optimistic self-blinded winos she says hello while feeling how easy it would be to fall into a rift, how much pleasure could be found in becoming a hard-lot case who can’t even get things together enough to camp out on some scholar’s lawn.
Not even a shaggy. She hadn’t meant to get on some elevator shooting down but perhaps it’s too late. Her parents try acting out normalcy while she cannot. Or maybe what has fled is the prospect of seeing outside herself, while her parents seem flies caught in their belief about the importance of toil. She sees no way to continue living inside their world.
During one dinner, green-flecked sausage and new potatoes, pity overwhelms Lana to the point that she can’t breathe, the only one with superhuman vision enough to see, as if plastered to the ceiling, their forks moving like the legs of overturned insects, trained to perform the serene, synchronized dance called family. She barks out a laugh. “What are you looking at, Jinga?” Mary asks and only then Lana realizes her face hovers inches away from her empty plate, staring into its reflection.
Perhaps it is during the next course that they all come to some agreement that it might be a good idea for Lana to get back to what they keep calling her life back east, one that seems made up of brownish placed items from a Morandi painting. Nothing living, nothing that Lana remembers.
Mary says it this way: “Maybe it would be good for you to get back to being an adult in New York.”
“Ship out the problem?” Lana asks. “So the problem doesn’t crack?”
Their only answer is the scrape of a fork on a plate, redeeming the last of the andouillette.
A few days later Mary drives her to the airport. At the gate, mother presses a bottle of water into daughter’s hands while studying molecules somewhere to the left of daughter’s face. “What?” asks Lana.
“This time will be good for you,” her mother says. “I see it.”
“You’ve always been good at convincing yourself.”
“Maybe.” Mary cocks her head, quizzical, letting Lana in a second before she remembers herself as mother. “All this will help you return to your other life.”
“My other lie?” Low in Lana’s throat lives the itch to be like any other traveler around her. Someone who could hug her mother, who could say I love you without hearing parodic echoes. For the long journey to reach the place where this particular idiom won’t ricochet, Lana lacks stamina. Her mother then offers the most mysterious send-off Lana will ever receive. As if she were parroting Vic. “Parents are never perfect.”
“Sure,” says Lana, starting to turn. What she means to say is goodbye and partly I forgive you but als
o please get out of my body, her mother’s frail-bird look already starting its haunt.
1987
They will never get over the thing with Lana, which is what they call it, the thing, never the lock-up. How had the thing started, a thing recalled so often, it keeps slipping off the shelf of the past with a hot little sputter. Vic says he is certain the thing began with Mary, as it was definitely Mary who had set it off, Mary who in France had mentioned some kind of therapeutic retreat for their daughter, though later she ended up doubling back, saying she could not have guessed how thorough Vic would be in his follow-up.
But could his followers ever have believed how conservative their Mahler is? Mary knows. At his core, despite all Vic’s advice to others, an inconsistency for which the Hermes character had taken him to task, Vic believes in institutions, the university, the nuclear family and the university as one big happy nuclear family, so Mary tells him that she is unsurprised that Vic would think a sanitarium—a nuthouse, an asylum, true bedlam—could have helped Lana.
Sometimes his breed of rage enters her: what is this stink of marriage, to use his axiom, this body-sharing habitation with a demon? She cannot help remaining permeable. Though she had grown up in California’s dust plains and hills, she writes in diaries about feeling like a sea creature, someone with edges like oyster-colored frills. And she had chosen this man Vic with his fire that rendered all her nuance irrelevant.
In France before and after the lock-up, she does seem to concur with his demonic energy, letting her rationalizations bloom a full bouquet. For one, when they are leaving France, she tells herself they are merely heading back to New York to check on their Lana, a teenage girl having a breakdown, the breakdown being a phenomenon they have heard about from east-coast friends. Breakdowns out east seem to happen to colleagues’ children after they hit adolescence. She cannot help but feel relieved after Vic says Lana’s problems are not specific to them or the professoriate in America since it is also the case that in remote village societies across the world, people pray over the blossomed body of a particularly confused or libidinous teenage girl, commanding demons to flee.