Unhinged

by Anna Berry

  “I just ran over someone, Anna. I killed someone. I’m a murderer.”

  “No you didn’t,” I say, and climb back down to the back seat. I buckle myself in. “You didn’t kill anybody, Mom. That was just the curb. You ran over the curb. Can we go home now?”

  “Okay,” Mom says, wild-eyed. But we don’t. We drive around and around and around the block for another hour until Mom finally decides all the dead bodies have been raptured up to Jesus.

  And then we go home.

  “Well?” I ask an unusually subdued Dr. Chatterjee. “What do you think?”

  Dr. Chatterjee takes his glasses off and polishes them on the hem of his Nehru jacket. “What do I think about what?”

  “The earliest memory I have of my mom is all about how she was a total nutjob. That’s what you wanted to hear, right?”

  “Are you telling me the truth, Anna, or are you just telling me what you think I want to hear?”

  I suck on my thumb, which has started bleeding. “I thought you wanted to hear the truth.”

  Dr. Chatterjee looks bored. “So your earliest memory of your mother is of her mental illness.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you ashamed of your mother?”

  I shrug.

  “Was your mother ill for most of your childhood?”

  “Yeah. She’s still sick now.”

  “I see. How do you feel about that?”

  I wipe the blood from my thumb on my jeans. “I dunno.”

  “Surely you must have some opinion of your mother’s illness, Anna.”

  “Not really.”

  Dr. Chatterjee is surprised. “Why not?”

  “My mom has been sick for basically my entire life,” I say. “It gets to a point where you don’t have an opinion about things like that anymore.”

  “Is that so? Why?”

  I roll my eyes. I don’t understand why, with all his advanced degrees and training, Dr. Chatterjee just doesn’t get it. “Because it’s pointless to think about something that’s never going to change.”

  “Why do you think your mother will never change?”

  I roll my eyes again. This guy is really dense—no wonder his sessions are free. “Because she won’t. She’s always been this way, and she always will be. There’s not really anything I can do about it.”

  “Why not?”

  I stamp my foot. “Because! Because she’s hopeless. My mom is hopeless. And so am I. Honestly, I don’t know why you think you can help me.”

  Dr. Chatterjee frowns. “I see. What makes you say that you’re hopeless?”

  Now I’m furious. This is really too much. “Look buddy. Everybody in my family is a fucking nutjob. My mom is a nutjob. My brother is a nutjob. My dad is a nutjob. So it goes without saying that I’m a nutjob. You of all people should know that by now. But my mom and my dad and my brother aren’t the ones who are in here talking to you. I am. What do you think I’m doing spending three afternoons a week in your office? You’re supposed to be helping me get back together with Dieter, and all you’re doing is asking me how I feel about having nutjobs for a family. What a crock of shit.”

  Dr. Chatterjee is noticeably irritated. “Why do you think talking about your family mental illness issues won’t help you deal with your abusive relationship with this Dieter person?”

  My palm slaps my forehead with a sweaty whack. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “My relationship with Dieter is not abusive. We’re just having some problems, is all—”

  Dr. Chatterjee shakes his head. “Look Anna, I’m going to level with you. You have a personality disorder. You’re what we call borderline. You actively seek out destructive relationships with people, and then don’t understand why you feel miserable all the time. You’re so scared of being alone and abandoned that you trap yourself in one bad relationship after another. Then you act out in rage whenever someone reaches out to you or tries to help. All classic symptoms of the borderline personality.”

  I scoff. “Okay. So I’m a nutjob, just like my mom—”

  Dr. Chatterjee holds up his hands. “No, not just like your mum. It seems to me your mother had advanced obsessive-compulsive disorder, among other things. This is quite different.”

  I grab my purse and get up to leave. “All right. So now that we both know what’s wrong with me, can I go now? And by the way, fuck you.”

  Dr. Chatterjee finally loses his patience. “Anna, sit down.”

  “No.”

  “Sit down. We still have fifteen minutes left in today’s session. If you choose to leave now, you will not be permitted back into the free-therapy program.”

  “Fine.” I sit, but leave my jacket on and clutch my purse tightly in my lap, just in case I need to make a quick getaway.

  “Now Anna, you told me a bit about your mother’s illness at the beginning of session. But it seems to me there’s a lot more you haven’t told me. And you haven’t talked much about how your mother’s illness affected you. Why don’t you spend the rest of today’s session talking about that?”

  “Okay, sure, whatever.” And even though I think it’s pointless, I start to talk.

  By the time I’m in the third grade and my brother Mark is in the fourth, we are both known throughout the local public school system as “the kids with the crazy mom.”

  My mother is insane. Very, very publicly insane. She comes to pick my brother and me up at school wearing dirty, stinking clothes that are on backward and upside down. She has psychotic episodes at the neighborhood pool and uncontrolled raging-screaming-crying fits at PTA meetings. She hears voices talking to her when she’s at the mall—sometimes she even answers back. She cries all the time. She stays in bed for days, sometimes weeks at a time without even getting up to take a bath. She drives around the block looking for dead bodies. She screams in the supermarket. She hasn’t washed a dish in almost a year, and the house smells of curdling milk glasses and rotting kitchen-sink food that never seems to make it down the garbage disposal.

  Mom takes pills. Lots and lots of pills. She has a psychiatrist who gives her as many pills as she wants, and the pills just make her crazier. Mom’s favorite book is the Physicians’ Desk Reference. She pages through it almost every day, looking for attractive bargains. Mom lusts over the pages of her Physicians’ Desk Reference the same way other suburban moms daydream over the polyester suits and designer bedroom sets in the JC Penney Big Book Catalog. The bathroom counter is littered with dozens of amber prescription bottles. Her purse rattles with them too. She’s a walking pharmacy.

  My mother is insane. Everyone knows it. Even my brother and I know it. But nobody seems to know what to do about it. Least of all my father.

  My father is a chemical engineer who works for a government defense contractor. He has a Level Four federal security clearance and is not allowed to talk to anyone about what he does for a living. I think his job has something to do with making nuclear warheads. I’ve overheard him use the words “plutonium” and “tritium” in late-night telephone conversations. U.S. Marines with M-16 machine guns guard the entrance to the chemical plant where he works.

  My father likes everything in his life to be precise—neat, clean, sterile, and perfect, like weapons-grade plutonium. And if her high-school yearbook pictures are to be believed, Mom used to be neat, clean, precise, and perfect. My mother’s high-school yearbook, which I find in her room and read when I know she’s too drugged to care, is bookmarked to a shot of her standing next to my father—he in a white tuxedo, she in a yellow prom dress and matching long evening gloves, her makeup 1968-gaudy-perfect with electric-blue eyeshadow and fake lashes, her hair a shellacked beehive that glistens like the sun. The glossy photograph in the dog-eared, mothball-smelling yearbook shows what my parents were like before insanity killed them both and turned them into the walking, talking corpses my brother and I have learned to hate. At eighteen, my mother was neat, clean, precise perfection. At thirty-three, my mother is anything but. And my father hates h
er for it too.

  Mom is a contradiction in terms. She pathologically fears germs, but she lives in filth. She shakes uncontrollably even when she’s fast asleep. She fawns and fusses over the cat for hours, then forgets to feed her own children. She laughs hysterically at Sophie’s Choice when it plays on HBO but sobs through Carol Burnett reruns. She seems to have problems remembering how to stay alive.

  Dad is pissed off most of the time now. The only words he speaks to Mark and me nowadays are shut up, goddamn it; stop it, shitforbrains; and settle down, both of youse before I talk a strap to the both of youse. He’s stopped talking to my mother entirely. These days, Dad mostly has conversations with the blue-and-teal-striped pattern on the dining-room wallpaper. Every night, when he’s sitting alone in the dark dining room eating a dinner of Welch’s grape jelly on Wonder Bread, he asks the wallpaper questions. He asks the wallpaper what he ever did to deserve a lunatic wife who hasn’t cooked him a goddamned decent dinner in at least two years. He asks the wallpaper why the hell is it he can’t just have a normal wife who doesn’t drive around the block looking for dead bodies like a military ambulance driver in a world war, who doesn’t spend entire days scrubbing her hands raw with Brillo pads and Lysol. He asks the wallpaper why he’s the father of two spoiled selfish brats who are both bound to grow up as crazy as their mother.

  The wallpaper doesn’t answer.

  One night, I decide to answer on behalf of the wallpaper. When Dad asks the blue-and-teal vertical stripes where his goddamned dinner is for the fifth time this week, I answer, “It’s on your plate, Dad.” Dad stares down at his plate of soggy jelly bread for a minute, then picks up his copy of Perry’s Chemical Engineering Manual, which weighs at least eight pounds, and whacks it upside my head.

  “Shut up, goddamn it Anna.” Dad whacks me again—this time on the other temple, so I’ll have a matching set of bruises. I’ll wear my hair feathered over them tomorrow so my teacher won’t call Child Protective Services.

  Dad’s starting to lose it too, and no wonder. Insanity is contagious, after all. It spreads like kudzu, then consumes flesh and bone like the Ebola virus. Dad’s already half wasted away. He’s grasping at straws. When Dad’s not at work or yelling at the wallpaper, he spends a lot of time on the phone with Mom’s psychiatrist, Dr. Nickelback.[5]

  Dr. Nickelback’s guiding psychiatric philosophy is drugs, drugs, and yet more drugs. He passes out pills like cotton candy at the carnival, and my mother inhales the treats he offers her like a four-year-old on a sugar binge. Whenever Mom gets too weird, too sad, too loud, or too dirty for Dad to handle, he calls Dr. Nickelback and asks him to give Mom some more drugs. And Dr. Nickelback is always happy to oblige.

  I’ve never actually seen Dr. Nickelback. But even at age eight, I feel like I’ve known him my whole life. He’s as much of a fixture in our house as our burned-out console television. He’s an invisible force that’s always there, projecting grainy, full-color images of what kind of happy, healthy, well-balanced family we are really supposed to be. But like the families on television that are just a little too perfect to be real, we never quite match the family image Dr. Nickelback and his drugs tell us is possible. No matter how hard we try, the best we can do at our house is a snowy picture that flips every few seconds, and even that’s only with a lot of extra aluminum foil on our antennas.

  Dr. Nickelback is so good at pushing all manner of controlled substances on suburban Indiana housewives, he makes the worst Dr. Feelgoods of Beverly Hills look like 1950s soda jerks. He can effectively blow out the brains of a thirty-something woman without the blood or mess of a .38. He’s elevated the act of prescribing tranquilizers and sleeping pills to a tactical arms sale, and my father—top-secret designer of nuclear warhead components that he is—has latched onto the deal with as much gusto as a Libyan terrorist in a Soviet bargain basement. Dad signs the three-carbon insurance forms that pay Dr. Nickelback’s bills as if they are seven-figure Hollywood movie contracts and a one-way ticket to a better life, not to mention a better wife with a notarized certificate of permanent sanity.

  Mom gets refills on her dozen or so psychotropic drug prescriptions at least once a week. We visit the pharmacy more often than we buy groceries or fill up on gas. I’ve got a huge supply of cheap plastic toys that I’ve convinced my mother to buy for me in the small convenience store near Dr. Nickelback’s office. She’s always easy to convince when she’s waiting around for her pills—strung-out pill addicts are the easiest overpriced-toy sell ever created. Dr. Nickelback’s preferred pharmacy even has a home delivery service for when Mom is too out of it to move, let alone drive the fifteen minutes to his office. She’s been using the delivery service a lot this week. But this week, it seems that no matter how many drugs Dr. Nickelback has delivered to our house in their little stapled white paper bags, Mom just isn’t going to “snap out of it” this time.

  Dr. Nickelback calls Dad tonight, interrupting his jelly-and-bread dinner to inform him that Mom has to go to the hospital.

  Mom will be locked up and pumped full of more drugs, lots of them, especially the heavy, intravenous kind that are only available behind the locked, heavy steel-reinforced doors of the booby hatch. All the drugs will be administered with huge hypodermic needles before, during, and after electroshock treatments, just like I’ve seen in the movies.

  Mom is going to the booby hatch. I’m jealous of Mom for getting to spend time in the hospital pumped full of drugs and wrapped in a nice, comfortable straightjacket. To me, going to the hospital to be pumped full of drugs—preferably with a slim plastic tube slipped elegantly just under the nose for extra oxygen—is glamorous and exciting. I wish it was me going and not Mom. I guess I’ve watched too many episodes of General Hospital with her after school. All the patients on General Hospital are crazy and beautiful, after all, and the longer they stay in the hospital, the more beautiful they get. By all logic, this means that by the time Mom comes home from the psych ward, she’ll be Miss America.

  In my jealousy of Mom’s soap-opera-glamorous predicament, I secretly hope Dr. Nickelback gives my mother a lobotomy as soon as she arrives at the hospital. That way, she’ll forever have those two little ugly red scars on her forehead, just like Jack Nicholson does at the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That would suit me just fine.

  Dr. Chatterjee stops me mid-sentence. “Pardon me, Anna. Say that again.”

  “Say what again?”

  “What you just said. What would suit you just fine?”

  I chuckle. “Are you hard of hearing?”

  Dr. Chatterjee clicks his pen a few times. “No. I just want to make sure I heard you correctly.”

  “I said, I wish my mom would have had a lobotomy, like Jack Nicholson did in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

  Dr. Chatterjee tosses his pen and paper aside, disgusted. “Why would you say such a horrible thing about your mother?”

  “I thought you psychiatrist types liked giving people lobotomies.”

  Dr. Chatterjee looks ready to puke. “Anna, frontal lobotomies were a barbaric, inhuman practice that destroyed people’s brains and turned them into vegetables. They haven’t been used to treat people for more than thirty years.”

  “Yeah, well, I would have been a helluva lot better off if my mom had just been a vegetable instead of a drugged-up nutjob.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You tell me. You’re the shrink.” I glance at the wall clock and notice with glee that we’re out of time.

  I’m back in the cramped, dusty waiting room of Dr. Chatterjee’s office at the university medical school for my next session two days later. He’s keeping me waiting today, probably in revenge for what an obstinate bitch I was in our last session. Fifteen minutes go by, then thirty. I count the leaves on the office philodendron over and over until my eyes cross. I glance at my watch and see that my lunch hour is more than half-over; my boss over at the library will surely start asking questions if I’m gone
much longer. The scheduled hour of our session is nearly over when Dr. Chatterjee’s square brown head finally appears around the flimsy office partition.

  “So sorry to keep you waiting, Anna. I’m so glad you’re still here.” (Dr. Chatterjee’s Cockney lilt does nothing to hide the fact that he’s lying.) “We had a bit of a tricky situation with one of my test patients on the locked ward today, and it held me up a bit.”

  “Whatever. I have to go now anyway, or I’ll get into trouble with my boss.” I get up to leave.

  Dr. Chatterjee stops me. “You work for the university, right? I can call your boss and explain that you’ll be a little late. I’ve done that for many of my other patients who are university employees.”

  “No way. I don’t want him knowing I’m a nutjob in a crummy free-therapy program.”

  “I have no intention of breaching your confidentiality, Anna. I have a ready-made canned rubbish story I use for my patients at times like this.”

  I wave my hand at him. “Whatever.”

  I have to work hard to keep from laughing when Dr. Chatterjee calls my boss over at the library and tells him that I passed out at the campus free clinic after I got a flu shot on my lunch break and will need at least an hour to recover before returning to work.

  “You’re a good liar,” I say.

  “I’ve had a lot of practice.” Dr. Chatterjee picks up his notebook and pen, flips back a few pages until he finds the sheet of notes he took at our last session. “As I recall, at the end of our last session, you and I had a little disagreement about lobotomies.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “I seem to recall you saying that your mother would have been better off if she’d been lobotomized. Why would you say rubbish like that?”

  “Because it’s true.”

  Dr. Chatterjee flips his notebook shut. “Really? Because I don’t believe you.”

  “Whatever.” I silently wish that I really were in the free clinic recovering from a fainting spell. My session with this annoying British quack is going nowhere.