by Anna Berry
Dean starts behaving strangely too.
I find him waiting for me on the sofa one evening when I arrive home late from work, arms folded, a deep frown painting his features ever downward. He’s alone in the apartment. All the lights are out, and he throws an ominous question at me in the darkness.
“Did you really graduate from the University of Chicago, Anna?”
The words hit me like a left hook. I drop my briefcase to the hardwood floor in shock. It lands with a hollow crash. “What? Yes!”
Where the hell is this coming from?
My framed (and very, very expensive) master’s degree from the U of C’s Humanities Division, the degree I paid for with work-study jobs and massive student loans that will take me twenty years or more to pay off, hangs on the wall of our bedroom, right next to Dean’s bachelor’s degree from the college. We’d graduated only two years apart—I started as a grad student the year after he finished undergrad—we’d even had some of the same professors. We laughed over our shared hatred for the East German Communist comparative literature professor on our first date; we once spent an entire evening passing inside jokes back and forth about two seedy South Side bars that are favorites with U of C students. After all that, how could Dean possibly think I didn’t go to school there?
I’m shocked. “Why the hell would you even ask me that question?”
Dean looks at the floor. “No reason.”
“Bullshit. Tell me why.”
Dean purses his thin lips together, sheepish, and doesn’t speak for almost a full minute. “Raj says that you’ve been deceiving everyone about who you are. He says you’re a fraud.”
“What?”
Dean sighs, looks even more sheepish. “Raj says there is no way in hell somebody like you could ever have graduated from an elite school like the University of Chicago.”
“What do you mean, someone like me?”
“I mean—I dunno.” Dean puts his face in his hands and snuffles, obviously close to tears.
Rage starts a slow simmer in the pit of my stomach. Within days, it will boil over and explode. But that evening, I am able to keep it mostly under wraps. Mostly.
“Dean, I’m your freaking live-in life partner here. Answer the question, please, for God’s sake.”
Dean’s lower lip quivers and his body shakes. Finally, he speaks. “I mean, somebody with—well—your background. You don’t come from—no offense—you don’t come from a good background. Your family is—well—odd. Not normal.”
I don’t contradict him. “That has nothing to do with where I did or did not go to school.”
“And you come from a low-class background,” Dean adds, his voice barely a whisper. “Don’t you?”
“Yeah. In some ways. So?”
“Raj says—Raj says that somebody from a low-class background like you could never get accepted to the U of C, let alone pay for it. You know, because of bad public high schools, lower intelligence—”
“Fuck Raj,” I hiss. “The guy doesn’t know shit about shit. He’s obviously a freaking lunatic. You realize that, don’t you?”
Dean stares me down. “I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean, you don’t think so?”
“Raj’s been doing a lot of research on you. And he says you’re a fraud.”
“What do you mean, a fraud? Why am I supposedly a fraud?”
“Well, the U of C thing, for one. He said he Googled you, and—”
I stomp off to our bedroom, where I retrieve a pile of student-loan bills from a file. I toss them in Dean’s lap. “If you ever think for a minute I lied to you about going to the University of Chicago, take a look at these.”
Dean stares at the pile of bills—nearly forty thousand dollars’ worth of student loans that I’d taken out to attend graduate school with zero grant funding, zero money from parents, zero trust fund. I’d mortgaged my future for a degree that Raj now says as a low-class, mentally unstable bitch I couldn’t possibly have earned. The fact that my own live-in life partner is even willing to consider that possibility turns my stomach. I’m so livid I can barely breathe.
Dean’s eyes widen at the huge balances, tears form when he sees that on every single statement is a reference to the University of Chicago.
“Jesus,” he sputters. “I knew you had bills, but Jesus H. Christ. No wonder you’re broke.”
“Yeah, no fucking kidding. And why in God’s name would you listen to a bunch of baseless bullshit from Raj over what you know yourself? Over me? Why?”
But I know why. Because I’m not exactly the picture of stability, here. I come from a broken home and a bad family. My mother is crazy, my dad is a nymphomaniac, and my older brother is a paranoid schizophrenic. I can barely hold things together myself, I’m flat broke, and I’m about three seconds away from tearing Dean to pieces with my own bare hands. Why would anyone believe anything I have to say? Why would anyone want to be with me at all? I’m not good enough, I’ll never be good enough, and I’m probably better off dead. The same mantra that has plagued me and my brain for years has simply jumped out of my head and come to fruition right here in this cramped Chicago apartment’s living room. Dean is drawing the same conclusion anybody in his shoes would make. And it certainly doesn’t help that Raj is an asshole, either. I don’t stand a chance here.
Dean looks helpless, and for a brief moment even seems to pity me. But mostly he just stares at me with contempt. “I’ve known Raj a long time. And he’s my friend. I care about what he thinks.”
“What about what you think? Doesn’t that matter?”
“I don’t know what I think,” he says, his voice like a little boy’s. “So I asked Raj to do more research on you. So I can figure out what exactly I do think.”
“What the fuck—”
Dean holds up his hand. “You’re not who you pretend to be, Anna. That much I know for sure. You’re a different person from one day to the next. You have too many different personalities, your behavior’s so unpredictable, I—I just need an outsider’s objective opinion. So, I’m having you investigated. Raj and I, we’ve tracked down and contacted a lot of people who used to know you, people from your past, so we can investigate what kind of person you really are. Psychologically speaking. Raj’s even thinking of hiring a private investigator. Thought maybe you should know that.”
Investigated. They are having me investigated.
I feel the floor drop out from underneath my feet. Granted, I’ve never considered myself the portrait of mental stability—and in the interest of full disclosure, I told Dean as much from the get-go—but to say that I have too many different personalities? To tell me, to my face, that my behavior is so unpredictable that I have to be investigated as a possible fraud?
What the hell is going on in my relationship? Who is this man that I sleep beside every night, cook and eat meals with every day, and for all intents and purposes have settled into a reasonable facsimile of married life with—to investigate me?
And yet, it all makes perfect sense. I’ve been in a downward spiral for the past two months, ever since I met Dean. And I wasn’t exactly sane when I met him, either. In the past two months I’ve lost my job, my home, all of my money. I live in an overcrowded apartment with people who hate my guts, and I don’t even have the wherewithal to do anything about it. I don’t bathe or even get dressed half of the time, and I spend most of my free time online. Sure, I’ve been job-hunting, but I also waste a lot of time reading newsfeeds, trolling Craigslist, and typing away in theater chatrooms. My angry tirades about how much money my theater production is losing alienates almost everyone in the cast and crew—they call me a “bitch” and a “bully” behind my back. For all I know, they think I’ve just blown all the box-office receipts on myself. That’s something Raj would do—hell, he already does that with his rent money—so why wouldn’t he have those kinds of suspicions about me? Besides, he has plenty of motivation to poison Dean against me since I keep telling Dean to stop l
etting Raj use him as a financial gravy train. I’ve stepped right into the middle of a perfect storm, and it’s not like I can just pack my boxes and bags and move home to Mommy and Daddy’s comfortable home in the suburbs. As a daughter of nutjobs from a broken home, I don’t have that option. And so, the nutjob pattern of my family DNA just loops and repeats, loops and repeats.
I can’t comprehend any of this right now, though. I don’t have the benefit of hindsight when I’m about to make a complete psychotic break with reality.
I stare right past Dean out the living-room window and watch the traffic pass for a moment or two. I feel sick to my stomach. My head starts to spin, my heartbeat to race. I take several deep breaths, will myself not to fall apart on the spot. I’ve spent my whole life building an airtight outer facade around myself to hide the chaotic, empty blackness I am inside, and now I can feel that facade crumbling down right onto Dean’s living room floor. I’ve been exposed, found out for what I really am—a borderline psychotic. It doesn’t matter that at this moment, I don’t believe that I’m borderline psychotic. It doesn’t matter how much I’ve always tried to hide the gaping black hole in my brain, especially from Dean. The gaping, oozing, pus-covered sore of my mental illness is right out in the open for Dean to see now, whether I like it or not. It’s pretty apparent that Dean is revolted by it. And who wouldn’t be?
By now I’m desperate. I cannot—will not—let myself be abandoned again. I have to salvage this relationship somehow. I have to hold onto Dean at all costs. At any cost. “I’m not crazy,” I shriek, my voice high and sharp as razor wire.
Dean won’t meet my eyes. “A lot of people say you are.”
“Who? What people?”
“Just people that Raj and I have been talking to. People who know you.”
“Who?”
Dean hems and haws for a moment or two, obviously trying to find a way to avoid the question. But I won’t allow it. “Look, Anna, I’ll tell you once I have more information. Raj is doing all the legwork,” he finally says.
I start hyperventilating then. Adrenaline starts coursing through my body—it’s fight-or-flight time.
I know what I have to do then. I know because I’ve done it so many times before whenever a domestic situation goes bad—I’ve done it over and over again from the time I was a child being torn between a psychotic mother and a selfish nymphomaniac father.
I run.
I dash to the bedroom, grab a backpack and start stuffing it with items I grab at random—cell phone, shirts, shoes, underwear, a half-empty bottle of cologne, a paperback novel, a pair of earrings. I pull my heavy parka out of the hall closet and head for the front door.
Dean suddenly jerks upright from where he’s been sitting slumped on the couch. “Where are you going?”
“I’m leaving. Goodbye.”
I dash out the front door of the building and stand on the corner, watching taxicabs and SUVs roll by for ten full minutes before I realize I have no idea where I can go.
I walk up and down block after block of dark, sleet-slick city streets, my mind’s gears spinning out of control.
In my mind’s ear, I hear two passionate voices—both of them young and female but neither one my own—having a rapid-fire, passionate argument.
One says, I can’t stay with Dean. I can’t. The man obviously doesn’t trust me, seems to think I’m some kind of lying robot alien. Staying with him would be like shacking up with the KGB. Staying with him would mean that I believe what he believes about me. Staying with him means that I believe I am a crazy, lying, low-class, trailer-trash, borderline-psychotic fraud. This voice sounds more like a normal person. This voice makes sense.
But there’s another voice in the conversation. This one is louder, faster, meaner. Shrill, scheming, and screaming. Scary. And totally mesmerizing.
You cannot let this happen. You cannot. You will go back right now and you will fix this. You will use whatever means necessary. You will not lose this man who has become your mind, your life, your soul, your very reason for existence, because if you do, you will die. Use whatever means necessary to keep him from leaving you. Whatever means necessary, because if he leaves, you will die.
I do not want to die.
I will go back, and I will fix this. And I will use whatever means necessary.
My mind has raced so far and for so long that I’ve walked almost twenty blocks north and west without realizing it. I stop short on the corner of Clark and Winnemac, and stand there staring into space for several minutes before I can get my bearings. The beginnings of a violent mood swing take hold, and I suddenly switch from a bottomless ravine of despair and terror to a mountain of manic power and pride. I have given myself a purpose—to hang on to my tiny, narrow, precarious ledge of a domestic situation at all costs. I hail a cab, my dark mood bubbling up into something brighter, sharper, and potentially lethal as the taxi heads south on Clark Street back to Dean’s Lakeview apartment.
You will fix this. You will fix this. You will fix this, or die.
I do not want to die. I do not.
I arrive back at the apartment in a euphoria and find Dean hunched over in our bedroom. He clutches at his stomach as if poisoned. His mouth hangs open, and he breathes through it in short bursts. I can tell he’s been crying.
“I’m sorry,” he snuffles. “I’m so sorry.”
“We need to get out of here,” I say. “We need to get away from those two. They’re like, destroying us.” My breath comes in short bursts too. Soon Dean and I are hyperventilating in perfect unison, like Siamese twins who share the same pathetic set of lungs. “We have to get our own place. Have to.” I grind my teeth and dig in my heels, prepared to fight to the death for that objective. But for the moment at least, I won’t have to.
“I know,” he says. “We’ll get one. We’re going to be okay.”
But it’s not going to be okay. Not by a long shot.
Dean and I go looking at one-bedroom apartments the next day. We find an affordable one we like in a neighborhood further north and west. We sign a lease, but we can’t move in for another two months.
Dean promises he will tell Raj and Amy that we are moving out soon, but he keeps making excuses to avoid it. Meanwhile, the situation between us and them is getting downright nasty.
Every night, I take my dinner alone locked in our bedroom while Dean sits out in the living room listening to Raj and Amy rant about everything that is so horrifically wrong with me. According to them, my clothes, appearance, and behavior are slutty. I am a sex-crazed lunatic who is out to bilk Dean for money. My few remaining personal items and housewares are chintzy junk that must be disposed of—along with me—before they and I can infect and corrupt everyone in the apartment with my working-class, mentally unstable contaminants. They belittle Dean for ever wanting to take up with me in the first place, call him “weak” and a “victim.” Raj and Amy have even somehow managed to get into contact with some of my old college classmates (whom I haven’t seen or spoken to in years) that have all supposedly vouched for my cruel, manipulative insanity. The worst part is, I know that at least some of what they’re hearing has to be true. I worry and wonder who their sources are, and whether there is anything I can do to silence them.
Dean sits and stonily listens to all of it without a hint of complaint. And not only does he not complain—after a few weeks of Raj and Amy’s nightly rantings about his live-in girlfriend’s purported mental and socioeconomic degeneracy, Dean begins to believe every word. He starts avoiding eye contact with me, then almost all conversation altogether. We stop having sex. He stops wanting to be seen with me in public. He even leaves some pamphlets for Stone Soup—a low-cost communal housing building for single young women up the road from our apartment—sitting out on my desk as a passive-aggressive suggestion that I consider moving there, alone.
I know then that something bad, very bad, is going to happen between Dean and me. I don’t know what and I don’t know when, but part of
me knows it is inevitable.
Everything comes to a head a few days later—the last week of April 2002.
On Monday of that week, I go to my temporary research assistant job—a job that just a week earlier the employment agency that had placed me in it had said would soon switch to a permanent basis with a good salary and full benefits—and am summarily told by my boss that my services are no longer needed. Apparently, the job is indeed going permanent, but my boss prefers to hire one of his former colleagues recently laid off by another company than offer it to me. He gives me the choice of staying for the rest of the day and training the woman who will replace me, or going home.
I choose to go home. There will be no paycheck for me that week, and with Chicago’s economy still in the toilet, maybe no paycheck for a very long time to come. And since I’ve lost a temporary job, there is no possibility of unemployment benefits. I have no savings, only credit cards that are still maxed-out from my first unemployment stint. I have only a few dollars left in my checking account and a pile of bills due by the end of the month. I have no idea what I’m going to do next, but I hold on to the hope that my live-in boyfriend will help pick up the slack until I find another job.
I call Dean at work from the apartment and tell him the news. He sucks in his breath, but doesn’t speak.
“Dean? Dean, are you there?”
He isn’t. There is a click, then dial tone.
Dean doesn’t come home from work that evening. He doesn’t come home at all, in fact. When I wake up alone in bed the next morning with no sign of him anywhere, I begin to panic.
I sit on the couch that morning, nervous and twitchy as a mother hen as I wait for word. There is none. I call Dean’s parents in the western suburbs to see if he’s surfaced there. He hasn’t. I call his office, where a receptionist tells me he’s failed to show for work that day. A hundred different scenarios run through my mind. When I have visions of Dean and his mint-green Honda Accord splattered across concrete pylons on Interstate 94—the highway he takes to and from his Japanese translator’s job in the north suburbs—I start calling hospitals. I can only imagine that something terrible has happened. My nutjob brain is simply unable to conceive the notion that the only reason I can’t find Dean is because he doesn’t want to be found. To me, that is the same thing as Dean being dead.