by Anna Berry
“You know Anna, I might believe you if you persuade me otherwise. Why don’t you spend some time trying to convince me?”
That appeals to me a little. I chew my lip for a minute or two, mulling it over. “All right. Here goes.”
I am ten years old. My parents are divorced now. I live with my mother and brother in a roach- and rat-infested welfare apartment on the bad side of town. My mother is strung out on drugs.
Not crack, or cocaine, or heroin, or LSD, or even pot. Mom is strung out on various tranquilizers and benzodiazepenes, very legal, but also very potent, psychiatric drugs. Her doctors give them to her. They write the prescriptions. They hand her “free samples” under the table when the Medicaid drug benefits for the month have run out. The Medicaid shrinks have picked up right where Dr. Nickelback left off. The Medicaid shrinks are Mom’s dealers, and they charge by the pill.
My mother—a white, formerly middle-class, formerly competent suburban housewife, a formerly prim, proper, and precise non-crazy spouse of a successful engineer with a Level Four federal security clearance—is a pill-popping nutjob. But Mom’s not a drug addict. No way. Mom has a prescription for every pill she takes, so that makes it okay, they say. It’s okay that she hasn’t gotten out of bed in four weeks. It’s okay that her bedroom floor is littered with dozens of pill bottles, food-encrusted dirty plates, and filthy underwear. It’s okay that she speaks in unintelligible, slurred gibberish and forgets her own children’s names. It’s okay that there aren’t any groceries in the house, it’s okay that my brother and I run wild while our mother rots under a prescription drug haze. It’s all okay because my mother is only doing what the good doctors tell her to do. Take the pills, and rest. Rest, and take the pills. Draw the blinds, stay in bed, ignore your children, don’t bathe, and take twenty or thirty different pills a day, and you will feel better, say the psychiatrists from three separate free clinics that don’t communicate with each other. Rest and heavy meds are the way to beat severe depression with psychotic features, they all say. They are doctors—they are MDs. They know what they’re talking about. They’re following clinical guidelines. They don’t know that Mom is seeing three different doctors at once, all of whom have her on conflicting medication regimens simultaneously. She fills little plastic trays with seven compartments each—one for each day of the week—with all the pills she’s been prescribed and in the correct amounts. This pill with water, that one with milk, this one with bread, that one with a small meal that I cook for her from our ever-dwindling supply of nonperishables.
But Mom doesn’t feel better, so she figures she must need more drugs. She asks the doctors for more drugs, and they give them to her, they tell her how much more to take, they promise that the increased dosage will work wonders for her illness, will lift all the dark clouds and hallucinations and obsessions until she feels fresh and happy as a daisy. The psychiatrists make promises, promises.
But Mom never, ever gets better. She just gets worse.
I am ten years old. My brother is eleven. Our father is gone, and our mother is basically comatose. We are out of control, both of us. We are “problem children,” we are “at-risk,” we are “delinquent.” And nobody cares. Teachers send concerned letters home that Mom never reads. My brother and I do all manner of “cry for help” behaviors—getting into fights, staying out all night, compulsively lying, running away from home for a day or two just to see if anyone will notice—and nobody cares. We are the unwanted, ignored children of a drug addict, lost in space because we don’t have another hit of pills on us.
My brother Mark is failing all his subjects in school. He gets into fights. Thanks to his long, lanky figure, his Coke-bottle glasses, his dirty, thrift-store clothes, and his tendency to hallucinate and mutter unintelligible nonsense in class, the playground bullies eat him alive. So do the teachers, who can’t seem to handle an eleven-year-old boy who sees green men coming out of the coat closet and spiders covering the blackboard and who hears little devil voices in his ears. My brother freaks out in class like a hippie on a bad acid trip, but the only drug tripping him out is the excess of serotonin in his brain. The playground bullies hit Mark at recess, and sometimes he even hits back—but when he does, the people he hits aren’t the ones who beat him up in the first place. They’re shy, fragile girls, or hefty lunch ladies, sometimes even teachers. He hits, pulls hair, bites, kicks. Mark is full of something the principal calls “misplaced aggression.”
Our elementary school doesn’t employ a school psychologist, and the underpaid, half-time school nurse doesn’t know what to make of a mentally ill eleven-year-old boy, other than to call him a “troublemaker.” The principal requires he be sent back a grade, so now he’s in the same class as me, hallucinating so many spiders that my English lesson on My Side of the Mountain turns into something out of Stephen King. Our fed-up teacher wants Mark placed in an institution, but of course there’s no money for that—and Mom’s too strung out to sign off on the consent forms, anyway. So he comes home from school each day covered in bruises, then goes to his room, where he mostly spends his time punching holes in the plaster and then eating the resulting chunks. When he’s not eating plaster, Mark subsists on a diet of Frito-Lay Canned Cheese Dip, Domino’s pizza, New Coke, and Tostitos. He’s as hyperactive as a Rhesus monkey in glucose shock. He doesn’t sleep, and he doesn’t bathe much either. His room smells like a zoo cage. His bedsheets are encrusted with dried semen. He’s starting to hang around some weird teenage boys from down the street who are into Dungeons & Dragons, petty theft, and dogfighting.
Mark needs a Strong Male Role Model. But the closest thing in our vermin-infested welfare apartment to a Strong Male Role Model is the picture of Chef Boyardee on our nightly cans of Ravioli-Os.
On the very few days that Mom isn’t lying comatose in her bedroom, she runs about the house in a mad frenzy, as if powered by invisible jet engines. She talks at light speed, she can’t sit still, she stays up all night for three or four days at a time, sometimes even forces Mark and me to stay up with her. These manic episodes happen every couple of months and are always followed by yet another increase in Mom’s massive medication dosage.
Whenever Mom has a manic episode, she engages in mad bouts of “cleaning.” But what Mom calls “cleaning” is more along the lines of industrial-grade waste disposal.
I come home from school one day to find our toothless neighbor and her two kids collecting my belongings from the Dumpster behind our apartment building and carrying them up the fire escape.
“What are you doing?” I scream at the girl, Angie, who carries my lilac Formica kiddie-nightstand in one hand and my stamp collection in the other. “That stuff’s mine!”
“Your mama done throwed all this out,” Angie’s mom calls down to me from the fire escape. She in turn has my battered Sony boom box in one hand and a stack of my favorite cassette tapes in the other. “So we’re a-takin’ it.”
“Yeah!” Angie’s little brother Rodney shouts at me as he plucks my prized Care Bear and my pink electronic keyboard from the Dumpster and dashes up the fire escape. “We’re a-takin’ it!”
I glance inside the Dumpster and find it full of stuff from our apartment—dishes, clothes, books, most of my toys and games, even a good chunk of our furniture. By the looks of it, there can’t be much left upstairs besides our kitchen table, beds, couch, and television.
I stomp up the stairs to our apartment. I find Mom in the hallway standing beside a mountain of overstuffed garbage bags. “What the hell is going on, Mom?” I yell. “Why are you throwing out all our stuff?”
Mom folds her arms and looks down her nose at me. “We had to throw it out, honey. It was dirty. It was all dirty, and we can’t have anything dirty in the house, or we might get sick and die.”
I gasp. If Mom thinks our entire house is contaminated and poisonous today, at the rate she’s going, sooner or later Mark and I are going to find ourselves inside a Dumpster because she thinks we are contaminat
ed and poisonous.
“Mom, that stuff isn’t dirty,” I hiss. “It’s just stuff. And most of it is my stuff! You gave away everything! The neighbors are stealing it from the Dumpster! How could you?”
Now I’m screaming, and my mother is crying hard enough for her tears to land on the pile of garbage bags with audible plastic tinks. “Why do you have to embarrass me all the time?” I shriek. “Why do you have to ruin everything?”
I stomp off to my room, which by now is devoid of almost all my belongings save for my bed, an ancient record player dating from the 1960s, and a few meager outfits of clothing. My toys, stuffed animals, records, tapes, boom box, and most of my books are pretty much gone except for a badly scratched Madonna album and a couple of overdue library books. The unkindest cut of all was watching Angie carry my prized stamp collection—which had taken me years to compile—up the fire escape to her own room. The knowledge that she’ll get to enjoy the exotic stamps I’ve collected via mail-order from around the world since I was in first grade is the final straw.
I decide to go across the hall and demand my things back. Then I’ll go down to the Dumpster and take back whatever hasn’t already been ruined by sticky garbage residue. I’m not sure how I’ll carry the furniture up by myself, but I figure I can call my Memaw and Papaw Jones across town for help if I need it.
I trudge past my mother, who is still bawling over the garbage bags in the hallway. I know that those bags are probably full of my stuff too, but I can deal with that later. Getting my stamp collection and boom box and Care Bear back from the neighbors is my first priority.
Mom will have none of it, however.
That is, the voices will have none of it. The voices have taken over my mother’s mind and body, making her fearful and irrational and strange—and they’ve also given her tiny five-foot frame superhuman strength. Just as I reach the back door so I can cross the hallway to the other apartment, Mom tackles me before I can get a hand on the doorknob. At ten years old I’m already almost as big as she is, but that doesn’t stop her. Mom drags me to my room by the wrists and throws me like a boomerang onto my stripped bed. Her eyes take on the yellowish tinge of a predatory animal. Her voice drops from its usual timid soprano to a rough, masculine growl.
“YOU. WILL. NOT. TAKE. THOSE. THINGS. BAAAAAAAACK!” the green-eyed monster who moments ago was my thirty-five-year-old mother howls as she stands over me, her hands bent into raptor-claws and her pointy canines dripping saliva. “THOSE. THINGS. ARE. DIRRRTYYYY. They will kill you.” The primal rage in my mother’s eyes is terrifying. At that moment, I know that if I dare disobey her and retrieve our discarded belongings now, the voices in my mother’s head will take hold of her hands and use them to kill me.
Mom lets out a bloodcurdling shriek, then slams my bedroom door shut and locks it from the outside. I hear her drag a heavy piece of furniture—my brother’s bunk bed—in front of the door, lest I somehow manage to jiggle the rusty old lock. I am trapped inside my bare room until well past midnight.
“There,” I say. “Do you believe me now?”
Dr. Chatterjee blinks, then rubs his eyes. I notice dried sleep crust in the corners. He must have been up all night with one of his psych-ward patients. “What do you mean?”
I wonder if he’s been listening to me at all. “If you’d grown up with a mom like mine, wouldn’t you have wanted her lobotomized? Hell, you could have probably even done the job yourself. I’m sure they still teach how to do that in med school, even if nobody does them anymore.”
Dr. Chatterjee rubs his chin carefully, and frowns. He seems to be having a lot of trouble with this. “Anna, I can certainly believe that growing up with a mother as severely ill as yours was as awful as you say. But no matter how sick your mum might have been, it still wouldn’t justify ripping out her frontal lobe with an ice pick. The scary thing is, if you’d been born just fifteen years earlier than you were, your mum might indeed have been lobotomized. And if you think you were bad off under your mum’s care while she was ill, it would have been twenty times worse for you had she been lobotomized. She’d have been institutionalized for life, and then you would have had no one to care for you at all.”
“I would have been even better off if I’d just never been born.”
Dr. Chatterjee winces. “Now Anna, that kind of talk isn’t going to help you.”
“These sessions aren’t helping me anyway. I’ll never get back together with Dieter at this rate. What’s the point?”
“You keep coming back to this Dieter issue again and again, Anna. And frankly, I don’t understand why you’d want to rekindle a romantic relationship with a man who treats you like you’re less than nothing.”
I immediately go on the defensive. “He doesn’t treat me like less than nothing! Until we started having problems, Dieter treated me like a queen.”
Dr. Chatterjee sighs. “Perhaps. But he hasn’t treated you like a queen for a very long time. Surely you can acknowledge that much.”
I don’t say anything. I just study the blue-gray pattern in the carpet until it runs together and melts under my tear-filled gaze.
“Anna, this friend you call Dieter is just a typical sexual predator. A narcissist too. He swept you off your feet with expensive trips, lavish romance, and so on. He fed you a bunch of grandiose lies about being madly in love with you on the very day you met him, promised to marry you within a week. You had a week or two of wild sex, and when Dieter got bored with that, he discarded you. And now he’s using you for free proofreading services. I say, the man certainly has a talent for using people. And I’m sure you’re not the first woman he’s done this way, nor will you be the last. But that doesn’t mean you have to keep allowing this man to toy with you sight-unseen from the other side of the Atlantic. Does it?”
I don’t answer. I chew my lip until it bleeds.
“Anna, I think you and I need to agree that you are not really here to learn how to mend your relationship with Dieter. You’re here to learn how to mend yourself, and the first step in doing that is for you to cut off all ties with this man immediately.”
“No way.” I get up to leave. “I won’t do that. You can’t make me.”
“You’re in a bloody rut, do you not realize that, Anna?”
“No.”
Our time is up.
On a whim, I decide after that day’s session to try taking Dr. Chatterjee’s advice, just to see what happens. I go to read my e-mail and find a message from Dieter.
Hi Anna—attached is document with latest version of my thesis. I have been wrking like an idiot and I fnly have draft done now. Hope you can edit this for me. I need it edited/back to me by Friday, that gives you three days. Thx.
I feel my stomach churn as I read Dieter’s latest attempt to get me to do his bidding. Maybe Dr. Chatterjee is right. Maybe I should cut off all ties with this man. It’s worth a try, I suppose. On the one hand, I’m terrified of what Dieter might do to me if I do try it. But on the other hand, what could really happen? He’s almost five thousand miles away and too busy with his high-paying consulting job and his doctoral thesis to fly back to Chicago just to hurt me, right? Of course.
I dash off the following e-mail, hold my breath, and hit SEND.
Dieter, I have decided that I will not edit this stuff for you any more. Please DO NOT contact me any more. It’s over. Good bye.
I shut down my computer and go to bed, where I toss and turn all night, scared to death of what might await me the next time I check my e-mail. I finally get to sleep around three, but I’m awakened an hour or so later by the phone. I answer it, groggy and fearful.
“H-Hello?”
Dieter’s heavy-accented Austrian growl is on the line. “You fuckingk bitch.”
“Wh-wha?”
“You fuckingk bitch. How dare you cudt me off afdter all zat I have done for you? You agreedt to edidt my thesis as repaymendt for ze Vienna trip, the San Francisco trip, all ze expensive dinners and thingks zat I bough
dt for you—”
I gasp. “I did no such thing! You told me it was just a favor! You said you would pay me!”
Dieter sputters a string of unintelligible German that I assume are swear words. “You LIE! You vill finish ze edidt, or you vill pay.” He hangs up.
I try to go back to sleep, with no luck. I finally drag myself out of bed around five a.m. and log onto my computer, only to find about fifty raging e-mails in my inbox, all from Dieter. I read the first one only, and delete the rest.
You fucking childish bitch . . . you will complete the tasks I gave you or I will come to US and sue you little bitch . . . I will sue you for many thousands dollars US, and you will lose. Do the job, or PAY.
I don’t know what to do. The logical side of me knows that legally, Dieter has no leg to stand on.
On the other hand, I’m afraid of him. I know he is smart; I know he is a powerful, highly paid international businessman with lots of connections all over the world, connections he could use to extort money from me, even to physically harm me if he really wanted to. I know that even though doing so would be crazy and wrong and totally illegal, Dieter could indeed use his whim and will to force me to repay him every cent he spent wooing and manipulating me into his beaten-down mind slave. But even considering all that, there’s something I’m even more afraid of.
I’m most afraid of losing Dieter forever.
I skip my next several sessions with Dr. Chatterjee. As far as I’m concerned, this whole situation is his fault. After all, it was Dr. Chatterjee who told me to cut all ties with Dieter Franzl, the supplier-in-absentia of the love-drug that I need to fill the gaping black hole in my brain. And as far as I can tell, it’s Dr. Chatterjee’s fault that Dieter Franzl is leaving me twenty raging voicemails and fifty obscenity-laden e-mails a day, all demanding thousands of dollars in “restitution” if I fail to edit his doctoral thesis as I promised to do. It’s Dr. Chatterjee’s fault that I’m getting intimidating FedExs sent postage-due from Austria, all demanding that I send immediate payment in cash or a certified international money order or face an immediate international lawsuit filed by a former lover I’m having a harder and harder time admitting was never really a lover at all.