The Opposite of Music

by Janet Ruth Young

  Must get home, must get home, I chant. I burst into a sprint at the bottom of our hill. The sound of my wheels brings Mom and Dad to the picture window. They’re already in their bathrobes. Their silhouettes are dark against the bright glass, like two lighthouses in negative, and I open the door.

  TREATMENT REPORT: DAY 84

  Mom tried to reprimand me for running out like that, but since she had been home at the moment and I had no specific responsibilities at the time, her complaint slid through my head without gaining traction.

  “But you really upset your father,” she said. She said it’s disturbing for Dad to hear us fighting with one another, and we all have to be really careful not to argue in front of him.

  A FRIENDLY VISIT

  The doorbell rings and it’s June. Not the month of June, but June from Dad’s office.

  “Hi, sweetie!” June says when Mom opens the door. “How are things?”

  Mom looks like someone has squeezed three drops of water inside the back of her collar with an eyedropper. June begins to reach toward Mom for a hug, then, thinking better of it, puts one hand back on the doorknob. She’s carrying a paper cone of white carnations.

  “I’m sorry, June,” Mom says, “but this isn’t a good time. I was just doing the dishes.”

  “Oh, do you want some help?” June asks. “I’ll do anything you haven’t had time to do, including wiping out unidentifiable green liquefied substances that may have congealed on your refrigerator shelves. Just toss me a pair of rubber gloves and put me to work.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Melman.” June is wearing a sweater and pants in the palest shade of pink, the color of rose petals.

  “Billy, honey, are you doing all right?”

  “Not too bad. I guess we’re all a little tired and worn out.” I feel like collapsing against her and breathing in those roses.

  “Who is it?” Dad asks from the bedroom.

  “It’s June!” June sings over Mom’s head, at the very moment that Mom mutters, “It’s June” at the lowest end of her register, so the two of them sound like a woman and a man performing a duet.

  Dad comes into the living room.

  “Hi, Bill,” June says softly. She intertwines her free hand in Dad’s and hangs there with him for a minute, standing with her head down the same way he does. “Everyone says hello. They are counting the days until your return. We don’t have anyone to play ‘Guess That Opera’ with us anymore. It’s a very quiet place these days.”

  She turns to Mom. “May I put these in water, Adele?”

  “I’ll do it.” Mom walks briskly to June and removes the carnations from her hand.

  “Let’s sit down for a minute, Bill, and I’ll bore you with all the current office problems. The whole sorry state of things. You know, Adele, I’d be glad to cover for a while if you need a break. Why don’t you take a rest, go out and see a movie or something, and I’ll stay here? Lisa’s at a friend’s house, but I can have her get dropped off here when she’s done. Is Linda home? The bunch of us will order Chinese or something.”

  Despite my reluctance to leave Mrs. Melman, I go into the kitchen to see what Mom wants to do. Filling a vase with water, Mom stares stonily out the kitchen window at the darkened backyard. “Typical, typical June,” she says to me in a low voice. “No sense of the situation. I can’t believe she didn’t call first.” Another drop rolls down Mom’s spine.

  Mom returns to the living room with the vase. Her back is rigid.

  “June,” she says finally. “Have you noticed that Bill is not quite himself? Don’t you see that he’s not behaving as usual? Do you even notice that you’re talking to him and he’s not answering you?”

  “I’m sorry, June,” Dad says, not meeting her eyes but ruffling the tips of the white carnations in the vase, until the petals are bent and brownish. “That’s right. I’m not feeling well.”

  “That’s all right, Bill,” June says, still sitting on the couch beside Dad. “I know you’re not well. That’s why I’m here. Adele, I didn’t stop by expecting anyone to entertain me. I didn’t expect a big cocktail party when I showed up unannounced. I didn’t expect a lot of laughs. Just a short, pleasant visit, to check up on you and see if you need anything, to say everyone at Liberty Fixtures is thinking of you two. Today I entertain you; another day, when I need entertaining, you’ll entertain me, right? That’s how it goes. That’s a corny old practice that some call friendship.”

  “June—Mrs. Melman,” I interrupt. I’m standing in the living room near Dad. Mom and I thought we sent a clear signal by not sitting down. “I’m sure Dad appreciates your visit, but we haven’t been in that type of situation for a while. We don’t want anyone to entertain us.”

  “We’re just trying to get through the day here,” Mom adds. “Doing the bare minimum that needs to be done. Getting up in the morning and trying to eat a meal. Putting one foot in front of the other. Trying to make it from Monday to Tuesday to Wednesday.”

  June stands, smoothing her sweater and slacks. “Are you saying you don’t want me to come back? Should I tell everyone at Liberty not to come?”

  Mom shrugs—let June draw her own conclusions. “There’s a lot of suffering in this house,” she says, so low you can barely hear.

  “Why suffer alone?” June says. “Why not share it? I just came from tennis—my brain is flooded with endorphins. I was singing in the car on the way over here. I can stand a little of someone else’s suffering.”

  “Thanks for these, June,” Dad whispers, pointing to the flowers.

  “Do you want me to phone, is that it? May I visit again if I phone first?”

  “We’ll see you at the bat mitzvah when the time comes,” Mom says to her.

  “Adele…” June widens her eyes and shakes her head, as if this will help her understand better. “Do you need anything from the supermarket?”

  Mom swings her head—no.

  “All right, Bill,” June says. “I’ll see you back at work…soon, I hope.” Dad is sitting on the couch, nervously ruffling the flowers. June squeezes his shoulder, winks and smiles at me. Then, at the door, she hugs Mom more tightly and for longer than anyone expects.

  IN PRIVATE

  A man and a woman kneel beside their bed. He wears a tired pair of geometrically printed pajamas, and she wears a white kimono with gray at the edge of the sleeves. Their heads are bowed, their hands folded. She speaks for both of them, in a low, unassuming voice.

  Dad has always called himself an agnostic, saying he does not know whether there’s a God, and cannot know, but that if there is a God, then that God is most likely an all-knowing, understanding God who will understand why Dad might not believe in Him. That Dad’s older child has attempted to cover his bases in the same manner is disappointing to Dad. Because Dad seems to think, or did once think, that the larger the number of believers in the family, the greater the chance that the entire family would be saved. Or if “saved” is too strong a word, the greater the chance that the entire family would be entitled to whatever Treats are in store when this candy store is closed for business—eternal life being the ultimate, of course, and forgiveness being nothing to sneeze at either. Dad has also hoped that one believer, one very strong believer—Mom—will produce enough salvational energy to carry him to Heaven on her coattails if necessary, so he won’t miss anything.

  But for now, these philosophical questions must be put aside. For now, Mom must speak for both of them, because over the past two weeks Dad has gradually stopped speaking. He sits with us at mealtimes, still getting up to pace, he watches the painting show with a slight smile on his face, and it’s hard to know whether he thinks the show is pleasant or whether he is sneering at the whole endeavor of painting. He might say a few words—“yes,” “no,” “it’s on the nightstand”—but he no longer initiates communication, and he shares nearly nothing about his inner state. He seems to have put himself away, placed himself in another room for safety, while the him we see walks among us, acting
convincing enough to distract us from the body in the closet.

  Mom stops murmuring and shifts her position, and it looks like she’s going to get up. But instead she positions herself behind Dad’s shoulder and wraps her arms around him from the back. She clasps her hands around Dad’s hands like a parent helping a child to hold a pencil. She murmurs again with her cheek pressed to the cloth on Dad’s back. Either she’s showing him how to pray, or she’s doing Dad’s praying for him, transmitting from another station, faking God into thinking that the prayers are coming from him.

  TREATMENT REPORT: DAY 89

  Having stayed up with Dad for three nights, Mom doesn’t have the energy for leading calisthenics or cooking special meals. Linda has her own interests. Investment in the multi-pronged treatment plan is at an all-time low. With my long-term doubts, I won’t push to continue it.

  Under the treatment plan we disagreed, but we worked as a team. Now our minds have chosen separate corners, like four strangers dividing the space in an elevator.

  What is it that Dad finds when he hides in his inner room? That’s what I want to know. Maybe it’s some sadness that’s stuck in there and isn’t coming out, like the opposite of music.

  THE VOICE

  I remember an article I printed out at the library when Mom and I were doing our research. It’s by Robert W. Firestone, from a 1986 issue of Psychotherapy.

  The voice refers to a system of negative thoughts about self and others that is antithetical to self. Our operational definition excludes those thought processes that are concerned with constructive planning, creative thinking, self-appraisal, fantasy, value judgments, and moral considerations. The voice is not an actual hallucination but an identifiable system of thoughts experienced much as an actual voice. The author feels that suicide is the ultimate conclusion of acting upon this negative thought process.

  The voice refers to a generalized hostile attitude toward self and as such is the language of an overall self-destructive process. It is an overlay of the personality that is not natural, but learned or imposed from without. Although the voice may at times be related to one’s value system or moral considerations, its statements against the self usually occur after the fact and tend to increase one’s self-hatred rather than motivating one to alter behavior in a constructive fashion.

  The voice becomes the core of a negative concept of self when it goes unchallenged. The process of “listening” to the voice predisposes an individual toward self-limiting behavior and negative consequences. In other words, people make their behavior correspond to the distorted negative perceptions they have of themselves….

  The voice operates along a continuum ranging from mild self-criticisms—thoughts that promote self-denying and self-limiting behavior—to vicious abuse or self-recriminations that are accompanied by intense rage and injunctions to injure oneself….

  Our clinical material indicated that a process of actual self-denial on a behavioral level parallels the voice attacks, and that this self-denial can lead to a cycle of serious pathology. As a person gradually retreats from seeking gratification of self in the real world of object relations, he or she becomes progressively indifferent to life. He or she tends to give up more and more areas of experience that were once found pleasurable and worthwhile. Actual self-harm is much more likely to be acted out after the individual has withdrawn his or her interest and affect from the external world and from an active pursuit of personal goals, a form of “social suicide.”

  THE CASE OF MIRIAM H.

  This sends me back to a chapter from Mind and Motivation by Missy Bernard Welton:

  Miriam H. was a vibrant, talkative thirty-five-year-old who was building a successful career in finance. She enjoyed the lifestyle of a single young professional, with a large circle of friends and a variety of regular activities that included cooking classes and swing dancing. Several months before commencing treatment, however, she was passed over for a promotion at work. Shortly afterward, she served as a bridal attendant in the nuptials of a younger sister. These two events caused her to reevaluate her life, mostly in the form of a running internal critique of her own value and abilities. An interview with Miriam showed the progression of her self-critical thoughts:

  Miriam: I had this speech in my head, like a tape recording. “You’ve been deluding yourself all this time. You thought things were okay, and they really weren’t….” It was as if my life were being lived behind a facade or a veil, and someone had lifted the veil off and I could see how ugly everything really was…. My happiness was an illusion, and now I was being shown the reality.

  MBW: And the reality was…?

  Miriam: That I wasn’t really valued the way I thought I should be…. That I had been kidding myself. People pretended to think a lot of me, but when push came to shove, there were a number of other people that were held up as superior. I was in a lower category, like, a lesser category. Something seemed to tell me that I should try to isolate myself as much as possible, and prepare, because those incidents were just the beginning, and the end was coming soon.

  MBW: The end?

  Miriam: That the end was coming, and that it would be a relief. That I could hurry it up. I was in control, you know? It was all up to me. And the more I hurried it up, the sooner I would be free.

  Could this be why Dad has stopped communicating?

  CONVERSATION #1

  CONVERSATION #2

  CONVERSATION #3

  TREATMENT REPORT: DAY 91

  Why does Dad refuse to discuss the voice? Is he protecting the voice by not talking to me?

  My best hope is to go in, way in, into what you might call enemy territory, and see if I can hear the voice myself.

  CONVERSATION #4

  LINDA

  “You have to tell us,” Linda says.

  “Yes, tell us, Billy.”

  “You’re not supposed to go off in your own direction and make up your own treatments. We’re supposed to be a team, remember?” Linda insists.

  I take Linda and Jodie into Linda’s room and tell them what I’ve been working on. When Linda hears that I think Dad might have a voice in his head that could make him hurt himself, she doesn’t start to blubber the way she did that first night, when we talked about the suicide movie. Instead, she looks completely calm.

  “Okay, well, the most important thing,” Linda says, “is that we not tell Mom about it. We have to take care of it ourselves, and not worry Mom with it, because she has too much going on and she couldn’t handle it.”

  “Should we tell my mom?” Jodie asks. “She always knows what to do.”

  “Could she keep it to herself?” I ask.

  “Probably not,” Linda says.

  “Then no.”

  “Then it’s just us,” Jodie says in a small voice.

  CONVERSATION #5

  LINDA’S DREAM

  The next afternoon, while Dad’s watching TV, Linda tells me that she had a bad dream, just as bad as Dad’s with the metal box. In the dream, all of us were dead except for Dad, who was walking around outside. The rest of us had been lying for weeks inside the house with the door and windows sealed up, but Dad couldn’t get to us and so there was no one to help him. Linda takes this as a sign that he is about to hurt himself soon, just like I said when describing the article. She says she needs to do something about it, she just doesn’t know what. And we both agree not to tell Mom about the dream.

  CONVERSATION #6

  CONVERSATION #7

  CONVERSATION #8

  THE INVENTORY

  On the afternoon of February 25, I set Dad up to watch TV while Linda, Jodie, and I begin to gather all the dangerous objects in the house—medicines, sharp knives, sharp tools, razors and scissors, drain cleaners and other toxic chemicals, and rope or anything that could be used as rope—and hide them in a metal box that will go in the attic. We start in the utility room with the tools, then add my pocket knife and Grandpa Eddie’s fishing knife, and then we move on to the bathroo
m cabinet. The pills Dr. Gupta prescribed in the fall were flushed long ago, but Jodie does the same with the white placebo sleeping pills. In the kitchen, we disagree about which utensils are dull enough to be kept downstairs for Mom to use in everyday cooking. Linda is standing by the utensil drawer with a carrot peeler and eight serrated table knives, I am testing the cheese slicer, and Jodie is holding the box and padlock. This is the way we look when Mom finds us and decides to go back to the doctor.

  TACKING

  We file into the office, Mom first, then Dad, then me. Linda and Jodie are home with Jodie’s mother. Most of the lights are out in the waiting room, and the receptionist has gone home. We’ve been squeezed in at the last minute, the last appointment of the day. The sky outside the large windows is dark. A set of headlights illuminates the snowy hedge briefly before swerving out of the lot.

  Fritz closes the door behind us. Our folder is right there at his fingertips and he had obviously been reviewing it before we came in. He bites his bottom lip and looks around at each of us.

  “How’s everyone doing today?”

  I evade Fritz’s gaze and open my mouth to speak. No sound comes out. Then the room starts to blur and swim, and a repetitive sound, between breathing and speaking, comes from the back of my throat: Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. I force my knuckles into my mouth.