by Mary Karr
Before I was twenty-two, I knew a spate of successful (is that the parlance?) suicides. On my childhood block, three fathers took the wrong end of a gun into their mouths. Of my six California roommates, I buried two as drug casualties. Quinn the Eskimo shot himself with the gun he’d brought to California to defend his old man’s honor.
But Forsythe went most crazy of us all. On the beach, he’d picked up and brought her home a girl with a baby, and after the girl passed out in his room; he dumped a bag of pot all over the infant in its portable bassinet. Forsythe’s roommates found the walls scrawled with toothpaste, the baby wallowing in marijuana, and an album going on the turntable with a framed photo of Forsythe’s father propped up and circling. Within the year, Forsythe died in the family garage of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Suicide as an idea seeps into your lungs like nerve gas. No precipitating event prompts my fixation on dying, just the dull racket of my head’s own Chihuahua-like bark—death death death. It becomes the one rabbit hole that will hide me: I can just cease to be. Picking up a drink would betray everybody who’s poured effort into my sobriety—like my suicide wouldn’t? But death—now, there’s a one-stop-shopping idea. Over the months, I start to convince myself that Dev’ll be better off without me (a grotesquely self-indulgent notion no parent can afford).
One Saturday morning, after sitting up all night rewriting a suicide note whose maudlin, pathetic details are thankfully lost to time, I take a call from Deb in the halfway house. She offers to buy me lunch. I can interrupt my death for lunch, right? Writing the suicide note made me feel good enough to have lunch.
At some point, I confess that I have a garden hose and duct tape in my car trunk.
She signals for the bill and stands, saying, C’mon, I’m checking you in to the bin right now.
But I begin to backpedal and prevaricate. I’m joking, I say. She presses, and I press back. Warren could get custody of Dev if I go into the hospital. We may divorce, and he has all these lawyers in his family, and he’ll get custody….
Promise, she says, promise you’ll call or go to the hospital if you need to.
The next day, after a sleepless night when the dead space inside me spread like spilled ink, I drive off under the cobalt blue summer sky with the garden hose in the back of my car. But with every small click of the odometer, my doubt grows, for starting to glow inside my shadowy rib cage like a relentless sun is Dev’s face. I can’t leave him the legacy of suicide, I think. I just can’t. He’ll find out somehow. Flying past me are objects I might swerve into instead—telephone pole, tree, a ramp I could sail off the edge of into oblivion. I unclick my seat belt and try to imagine my face shattering the glass into exploding stars. But I’m a coward, and I also suspect it’s just my luck that I’ll only crush my body to live on wired up to a breathing machine.
Finally, I pull off the road into a gas station, where I bend my head to the steering wheel, sobbing, and suddenly flying through me comes a new image of Dev charging around my study with his red cape behind him. He’s coming for me, I think, like a superhero. He’s flying me out of myself.
A teenage girl taps the far side of my windshield to ask, Are you okay, lady? And I nod and wipe my eyes. I reattach the seat belt and edge up to the road with my blinker on to turn around. Heading to the halfway house, I drive for the first time in my life under the speed limit, obeying every arcane law, slowing to let grandmothers cut in front of me. It’s a relief to place myself before the staff person on duty, asking him to call my doctor, because I’m fixing to off myself.
PART IV
Being Who You Are Is Not a Disorder
Being who you are is not a disorder.
Being unloved is not a psychiatric disorder.
I can’t find being born in the diagnostic manual.
I can’t find being born to a mother incapable of touching you.
I can’t find being born on the shock treatment table.
Being offered affection unqualified safety and respect when and only when you score pot for your father is not a diagnosis.
Putting your head down and crying your way through elementary school is not a mental illness…
—Franz Wright, “Pediatric Suicide”
31
A Short History of My Stupidity
The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.
—Czeslaw Milosz, “Account”
Remembering the day of my suicide, I see myself at the hospital’s intake desk, holding in my nail-bitten hand a red and white health insurance card embossed with the seal of Harvard University. Veritas, it promises: Truth. Weighing in the low triple digits, I’m sheathed in a black knit minidress with a boat neck (Vogue headline: SUICIDE DRESSING: THE FINAL CHALLENGE).
In sobriety, I haven’t so much gone insane as awakened to the depth and breadth of my preexisting insanity, a bone-deep sadness or a sense of having been a mistake. Maybe because I feel I am not now who I was then, I have to stare askance at that time, squint to see past clotted and curdled thunderheads to the initial instant of what then seemed like my last crash—a time I now call my nervous breakthrough.
The woman who takes my insurance card has tangerine-colored nails and a soft Caribbean accent. She hands me a fistful of pink tissues and asks do I want some herb tea. She keeps some in her drawer. It’s Sunday, and the office is empty but for her and a guy in golf clothes in the corner.
I want the tea but say no thank you, for that’s how I believe the human economy works—on some perverse system in which people who offer to do nice things for me are furtively pissed off by acceptance. So it’s better to refuse most kindnesses I come across, an interpretive model of human behavior that—it’s clear enough now—fosters the crappiest of conceivable attitudes in me.
It’s no bother, she says. I’m getting some tea for myself.
The warmth beaming from her face can’t reach me. I’m too bent over some rotted core, as if to protect it from her. She stands, and a glance from the golf-clothes guy makes me want to crawl under her desk.
God how pale I look in the hospital. Crying through my globbed-up mascara has pinched my lashes into clownlike points, and the swollen eyes give me a lizard look. And rivers of snot I keep honking into wads of pink tissue. How long have I been crying? Days, in some ways, years.
(If I could tap my own shoulder, I’d say, Of course you’re crying, honey. You’re fucking starving. Drive through a burger joint. Hell, super-size it, spring for a shake. Then go home and take a bath with some dish detergent. Tell your son you’ve gone to Tahiti for an hour. Take the longest bath in the world.)
I’m so watery at my edges, so permeable, so easy to hurt, and my inner monologue—what you would hear more or less constantly, should we turn up the volume on it—went, Oh shit, stupid bitch. What’ve you done now? Fuckup fuckup fuckup…The only way I know to twist the volume off is to choke it with exhaust.
Hence my need for custodial care at the place all Harvard spouses go. The diagnosis was underwhelming: severe depression, along with insomnia and unfettered sobbing. With the tagline—persistent suicidal ideation—came the inpatient recommendation of my therapist, whose house I’d been driven to by Granada House staff. My shrink had been on her way out of the country, and maybe I had the sense to go inpatient before she vanished.
The intake nurse brings me back a steaming mug of tea, taking from her drawer packets of honey and sugar and little red plastic stirring sticks, and the small civility of this makes me want to run out the door. I’m in a state of mind that can only be described as feral.
She settles back to typing the form, asking, You and your husband are at the same address?
We go back and forth, I say. We’ve been separated less than a month.
I’ve refused to call my husband so far, though my therapist rang him before she arranged for me to get admitted. The mere sound of Warren’s voice would slam down on me a sledgehammer of guilt at leaving him to care for Dev solo.
If my four-year-old has a nightmare—a new trend since his dad and I split up—I pretend to unscrew his head and shake the scary parts out, and that’s what I hope the hospital staff can do for me. (Ever notice, a lady in a meeting once said, that people only shoot themselves in the head?)
After the paperwork is done, two large but understated men show up to steer me to the ward.
Before I walk out, the Caribbean lady studies my face with a notch in her brow. (Where is she now? Maybe she told her husband about me that night, or maybe she just got on her chubby knees to pray for some peace in me, and maybe that’s why I’m alive to type this. Dear Caribbean lady, last seen typing up my plastic wrist bracelet: You mattered.)
One guy offers to carry my purse, and I start to say no thanks when I realize I signed away my purse and who gets to carry it the instant my name flourished across the paper saying I was a danger to myself.
We cross the sloping green hills as evening comes across, me bookended between the two men. The high windows on the redbrick buildings with shades half drawn seem like lidded eyes looking down at my collapse. The grass level is straight as any crew cut. The grounds seem grander than my college.
Are you at Harvard? one guy says.
My husband works there, I say. I teach one class.
I feel so dead inside, as if the giant oaks are moving across us rather than us under them. I wonder aloud if I’ll keep that teaching job after my stay.
No worries, the other guy says.
It’s true that Warren’s former teacher Robert Lowell wrote of himself among the blue-blooded “Mayflower screwballs” here in Bow-ditch Hall.
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases…
We reach a metal door, gray as a slab, and one guy draws a heavy ring of keys from his belt. Without warning, I think of my son. The image comes unprompted and hits me like a linebacker’s tackle, with the force of Old Testament thunder that all but knocks the wind out of me.
If I were right in the head, I’d at that instant be bathing him, gathering his slippery body from the suds, rubbing his head hard with a towel. I could pause to bury my face in his buttery neck.
I could ponder Warren making the bed as Dev bounced naked on it, his sturdy body flying under the flapping mainsail of our king-size sheets. How Warren would bundle him up like a ghost and wrestle him down and let him escape—the pure loving ritual of all that I’ve walked away from.
The attendant slides the key into first one heavy metal door, then another. Each man holds one open for me, and it’s all I can do to keep from buckling in half, folding up like a lawn chair.
But my legs obediently carry me into the metal stairwell. I hear the deadbolts twist behind, and a clawed panic starts scrabbling through me.
We face a final door whose long glass window is embedded with chicken wire. Through it, I see people move as in slow motion. The door swings open, and their heads turn curiously to stare at me, and stepping onto the ward, I smell piss.
Piss is the territorial marking of the predatory animal. It also signals the uncontrolled release of fear in terrorized prey. I know people pissing in hospital corridors is frowned on and must be quickly mopped up. But the smell persists anyway, and as I enter that urinous climate, the kernel of fear I’d kept buried in my center cracks through its shellac casing. Terror begins to sprout its black ivy up my spine and down along the insides of my arms. I become very small then, telescoping down in some inner tunnel as the world shrinks and gets far away.
And pumping through me like methamphetamine is the screaming message that I’ve lost Dev, lost Dev, lost Dev…
I sit woodenly before the next intake nurse, water coursing down my mask face.
She has an open face—Italian, maybe—round as a skillet. And she’s tiny. She could be in fourth grade, except for being pregnant enough to use her belly as an armrest.
By the time she asks, Did you have a plan?, I’ve already told so many strangers, I forget to be embarrassed. I was gonna spirit away our rusting car to a town called, metaphorically enough, Marblehead—the very name seemed apt—like I have a big, swirly marble on my shoulders where a human face should sit. There I’d suck off a garden hose purchased for that purpose.
We can take care of the insomnia starting tonight, she says.
I don’t want any barbiturates, I say. Nothing addictive. No valium. No ambien.
I’m almost crying again. It’s as if some paper-thin membrane in my head holds back this flood, and any discomfort tears through, cranking the sob machine to full bore.
The nurse looks up from her notes to describe some old antidepressant I can take as a sleeping pill—only if I need to. Not addictive at all. No side effects other than dry mouth in the morning. She sets down her pen, saying people who are sober take it all the time. (She pronounces it sobah, in the manner of the inner-city Bostonians at the halfway house.)
Do you mind if I talk to somebody about it? I mean even tonight—on the phone. Before I take it.
She fixes me with her almond eyes, and the calm she gives off reaches me. Maybe it’s some pregnancy hormone juju, for her skin is dewy in the manner of the seriously knocked up. But just sitting there, I sense a warm light the color of faded violets settling around us.
She asks, Are you in some kind of recovery?
Nine months, I say, digging into my purse side pocket for the little medallion I’d gotten. I suddenly notice that the hand holding the medallion has a plastic wrist bracelet. I tell her I’m not exactly a poster child for the sober.
You’re laughing at yourself, she says. That’s good. Were you depressed before you quit drinking?
A thousand times worse then. That’s the nutty part. I’m actually better now, but look where I am.
She’d twisted her black hair up the back of her head, but it’s that frazzly kind of hair that could tear loose any instant. She asks, Do you have a higher power yet?—pronouncing it hi-yah powah in a way that loosens the knots in my shoulders.
Telling her about the few sentences of prayer I march through morning and night, I notice around her neck a small gold cross. She says, So nothing changed with the praying?
It sounds so fake to say it, but only after I started praying was I able to put sober days together.
The nurse is looking at me with a steady gaze. You know what’s amazing? she says. Even planning a suicide, you didn’t pick up drugs or alcohol.
I knew they didn’t work anymore, or I would have.
Which is both miraculous and true. I tell her how many people helped me, how drinking or doping would feel like letting them down.
When I ask what I should call her, she tells me her name is the same as mine.
On the narrow bed, I lie in the sweaty certainty that I’ve saved my own life but lost my son. Surely Warren will divorce me now and take him from me—that’s part of the fear that has kept me in the marriage, his family redolent with lawyers. Every fifteen minutes, a flashlight shines on my face to be sure I haven’t hanged myself, and—so I’m not unnerved by the light—the person whispers check, which process I intend to speak to them about tomorrow. If you’re not suicidal when you get here, these intervals could drive you to it. Check.
My roommate looked at me with glassy eyes when I came in. She didn’t budge then, but now, every time they shine the light and say Check, she shifts around under her sheet.
I think back to the morning when I’d worked on the suicide note feeling already dead. It’s a thousand years ago, the writing of that note.
Six A.M. I’d been in the old house alone with Dev, getting ready to leave for a few solo days in the sublet. I stared into the small screen of the big honking computer, typing onto its moss green surface, which was free of any welcoming iconography, a blinking letter C is the cursor. The C had a greate
r-than sign after it: C>.
C for cunt, I thought, for that’s what I am, a worthless cunt of a mother who can’t take care of her own kid without ingesting enough alcohol to stun an ox.
To my left, the light shifted, and there was the red-cheeked Dev in his Superman costume, half the cape listing in back. To his blue shoulder, he’d attached one side with Velcro and kept reaching behind himself and twisting in a valiant attempt to find the other piece of Velcro on the opposite shoulder so he could fly right.
I captured one arm and dragged him to me. I sank my face into the doughy flesh of his neck. His shoulder rose to squeeze my face out. For a few minutes, he airplaned around the small office.
He stopped abruptly to lay a pudgy arm along the chair rest. He picked up the photo of Mother sketching when she was about my age.
Is this you drawing? he wanted to know.
It’s Grandma Charlie, I said. Dev fingered his grandmother’s profile with curiosity. She has your face, he said. Now she was alive and newly sober, and her demon had entered me, her face submerged my own.
He’d inherited her artist’s eye and the keen intelligence that found subtle likeness. As a room parent at his daycare, I’d recently planned an activity that involved making faces to show different feelings. But I’d discovered that most three-year-olds have only sad and mad and glad. Dev had surprised—eyes wide, mouth a perfect O, eyebrows lifted. He had hungry—a leering look at imagined cookies. He had worried—a subtle look in which the twin trajectories of his royal-blue eyes dragged themselves inward. He had guilty, which was sad with the inwardness of worried.
I have a monkey face, I said, adding, Your nose honks when I pinch it. I pinched his nose and made the squeaky clown-nose noise—ee-oo, ee-oo.
The note I would leave for Warren told him how, within weeks of scattering my ashes, he’d find some cheerful, barrette-wearing Elizabeth of a girl, a blonde from Smith or Barnard or Wellesley. Her Fair Isle sweater would fit better into her in-laws’ Christmas photo than my black schmattas. She would give Dev blond siblings. I’d get scissored from his memory like some grubby nanny from a distant past. He needed to be rid of me if he was to thrive.