“Pal” in my family was a euphemism for slave, in a game invented by us three older siblings to ensure that the three younger ones would help do our chores. But more importantly to me, since I hated being alone, it guaranteed I’d have a playmate. My other sisters (Carol and Cathy), brothers (Jim and Ted), and I all clamored for Linda as top pal/slave, because she would likely be the most obedient. There would always be a fierce bidding war for her.
“Hey, Leelee, come here for a sec,” I’d beckon from the corner of the upstairs hall that connected all of our bedrooms, holding out my half-eaten pack of Lik-M-Aid as if it were a bag of gems. “If you’ll be my pal for this week, I’ll give you the rest of this and half of my Pez,” I whispered.
“Well, hmmm, actually Ted already offered me all of his—”
“Okay, fine! All of my Pez and my wax lips. But here’s the deal—you have to play Barbie and Ken dolls with me, help me clean my room, and go to the corner store with me to get more Lik-M-Aid since you’re taking—”
“Well, I’m not really taking your Lik—”
“Don’t interrupt! That’s not very nice pal-like behavior!”
“Okey-dokey, we’re pals!”
Yes! She was mine! I felt like I’d won a trip to Disneyland. I didn’t think to ask her what she felt about it. None of us did. She was the youngest, the quiet, sweet runt of a loud, demanding litter.
Then once the rest of us had left for college or to start our adult lives, she was the only kid living at home for a couple of years. She was a senior in high school when she called me. “It’s really weird, Chris. It’s so quiet and empty here in this big house. I feel like everyone’s left me. I mean, who’s going to be my pal?” I’d not heard her express many needs of her own before. So that next summer, we hopped in my orange VW Bug and I took her on a road trip to visit our older sister, Carol, in Colorado. Linda was in high spirits the entire twenty-hour drive.
“How many miles have we driven, Chris? Because we could split the driving, you know. Let’s see, if there are a thousand miles left to Colorado and you’ve already driven three hundred, then we could split the remaining seven hundred—that would mean, let’s see, three hundred fifty miles a piece, oh wait, but since you’ve already—”
“Leelee, whoa, have you had a lot of coffee?” I asked, laughing.
“No, I’m just so excited to be taking this road trip with you, and I want to make sure we split the driving time equally so—”
“Hey, listen, Carole King’s playing, your favorite!” I interrupted. She loved to sing, and I knew that Tapestry was her favorite album. “‘But you’re so far away’—harmonize with me! ‘Doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore . . .’ Leelee, sing!”
But she just went on and on about our mileage sharing. I thought, Well, maybe she’s just making up for all those many years when she happily let the five of us do all the talking.
Once we arrived in Colorado, I asked my older sister, “Hey, Carol, do you notice anything different about Linda?”
“No, not really. She just seems really up, you know, really perky.”
“Yeah, you’re right. She’s fine.”
Our gift for denial was clearly a family contagion.
Six months after our road trip, during Linda’s second semester as a freshman at U of M, I received a frantic call from my mom. “Christine, Linda’s had some kind of psychotic breakdown. She thinks she’s been impregnated by God! They found her on the steps of the student union, and they called me to pick her up.” She went on to explain that when she arrived at the school, the university security guards coaxed Linda into the back seat of Mom’s car. On the way home, our shy sister took off all her clothes, and for forty-five minutes she screamed at the top of her lungs, “goddamnshitmotherfuckincocksuckinpieceofmotherfuckinfuck!”
Linda refused to go to a hospital, so Mom was forced to call the police.
“Oh, hello, Officer, yes, my name is Betty Lahti. Oh . . . fine, thank you, and yourself? Good, well, I’m so sorry to bother you, but I have a little situation over here. My daughter seems to be—”
“Shitfuckingfuck!” Linda spit out her words, her sweaty hair glued to her face.
“Shhh, honey!” whispered Mom. “I’m sorry, Officer, I’m actually in a bit of a bind here, my daughter’s having some kind of . . . honey, please put your clothes back on!”
Linda started moaning, swaying back and forth like a rocking chair.
“I’m so sorry, Officer, but . . . could you get over here, please, as soon as possible?”
The police arrived. Helpless, Mom watched as they forced her daughter into a straitjacket and hauled her, kicking and screaming, to the local hospital psych ward. That day, as my little sister broke down, so did the myth that we Lahtis somehow floated above the fray in our pretend suburban bubble. This was our breaking point. No amount of smiling could make this one go away.
“Yes I’ve been broken-hearted, blue since the day we parted . . .”
I look over at my daughter; she’s singing softly under her breath. She looks back at me. We’ve sung this song together a hundred times. I take her small hand and sing along.
“. . . Mamma mia, why, why did I ever let you go . . .”
I put my arm around her and breathe her in. I forget the words. How did my family live under one roof for so long but hardly ever see each other? How many other signs did we miss? I rarely noticed Linda having a mood, let alone a mood swing.
“She’s schizophrenic, no, she’s psychotic, no, she’s bipolar!” The doctors didn’t know what the hell she was, so they gave her Thorazine—buckets of it, apparently, because when I saw her many months later I hardly recognized her. Having just come home from the hospital, Linda came into my room. Her twenty-year-old face was so puffy from the medication that her skin looked stretched and shiny like a balloon. Her blond hair was brown from not having been washed. She’d gained seventy pounds and was shaking and shuffling.
“Well, Chris, I guess, it turns out that . . .” She suddenly lost her train of thought.
“That what, honey?”
“Oh, that I’m, uh, bipolar. They think it’s from the hash that I smoked the night before my first breakdown, but the doctor said that it was, uh . . .” She drifted away again.
“Linda? What did the doctor say?” I asked, trying to bring her back.
“Oh yeah, that it was possible that I may have developed this anyway, even without the hash, but he said . . .”
“Wait, they think the hash triggered it?”
“Yeah, apparently hash and grass can do that. They don’t know for sure, but he said . . .”
“What, sweetie?”
“Oh, that if I take my medication, I should be able to get stable and, you know, be okay.”
Oh my God, I thought. Would she be okay, or was she going to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution? Would I get this? This was hereditary, right? I had extreme mood swings. I’d not only smoked weed, I’d taken LSD and psilocybin mushrooms. How the fuck could I still be okay while my sister was severely mentally ill? Jesus, please let her be all right, I prayed. She had to be—once they figure out the right medication for her, she’d be okay. A lot of people were bipolar, and they were able to have successful, rich lives. She’d have the best doctors, Dad would make sure of that. And Mom would make sure she always took her meds and stayed balanced.
The next year there were no more manic incidents, but Linda seemed muted, more subdued and slowed down, almost as if submerged in sludge at times. We’d talk a lot on the phone, and I’d see her for holidays. She didn’t complain much, but it was clear that she had to put great effort into pretending to enjoy the festivities. Then I got a call from her.
“Chris, I’m going to California. I want to try to find Carole King!” she announced with the old enthusiasm and energy she’d lost since her breakdown at college.
“Honey, come on. You’re going to look for Carole King?”
“No, not really. I want to
see friends out there. But wouldn’t it be great if I ran into her?” She laughed.
We thought maybe her doctors had finally found the right medications for her. What we didn’t know was that she’d stopped taking them.
She told me later that with the help of a “Map of the Stars,” she actually found Carole King’s house and knocked on the door. When no one answered, she decided to wait in the rented car all day, until finally Ms. King drove into the driveway and headed inside with several bags of groceries.
Linda leaped out and introduced herself. Then she paused for dramatic effect. Startled, Carole turned and stared at her.
“You know, Linda Lahti,” my sister repeated. “I’m the girl you’ve been writing about all these years!”
“Huh? Excuse me?” asked Carole, shielding her eyes from the California sun.
“‘When you’re down and troubled and need a helping hand?’ . . . How did you know? Tapestry . . . that whole album is about me. ‘So Far Away’? Well, I’m not anymore, I’m here!”
“Okay, what was your name? Linda?” shouted Carole, keeping her distance. “Look, this is private property, all right? And you are trespassing, so you need to get into your car right now and—”
“No! No, you don’t get it, I came all this way just to thank you for understanding me and for writing all your songs about—”
SLAM. Carole escaped into her house. Linda got out of there just before the police arrived.
“Waterloo, couldn’t escape if I wanted to . . .”
Now people are getting up, dancing in the aisles. I attempt to dance, too, but it seems I have someone else’s arms and legs attached to my body. I sit back down. All I want to do is call my brother. I glance at my program. Ah, it’s the last song before intermission. I sneak a look at my phone for messages, but there’s nothing.
Finally. Blackout! The curtain comes down. The house lights come up. I turn to my daughter, whose face is lit up like a birthday cake.
“Oh, Emmie, I know, this is so amazing, right?”
“Mommy, are you okay? Don’t you like it?” whispers my daughter. Nothing escapes her.
“No, sweetie, I love it.” I feel the sting of my lie. “I just . . . well, I got an upsetting call about Aunt Linda before the show. Actually, I want to call Uncle Jim really quickly to make sure she’s okay, so would you mind going to get us some M&Ms? Here’s some money. It’s right up there, and come right back, okay?”
The phone is cold in my hands. “Hey, Jim. What’s the news?” I ask, waving at my daughter up the aisle.
“Well, they’re saying it looks good—I mean, they can’t be sure, but they’re hopeful. They said she’s resting now, and if everything goes well, the family can talk to her in the morning.”
“Oh, thank God!”
My daughter returns from her candy mission. “Thank you, honey!” I say, hugging her. She wraps her body around me like a small blanket.
“How’s Aunt Linda?”
“She’s doing better! They said she’s, uh . . . oh, it’s starting!” The house lights go down. The music comes up and . . . Mamma mia, here we go again! My arms glued to the sides of my body in a chair that was designed for tiny people, I try to think back to the first time my sister might have felt she’d be better off dead than alive.
“I have no thoughts, Chris, I can barely get out of bed taking all this stuff. They’ve tried everything, nothing’s worked. I’d rather be manic than be brain-dead,” she confessed to me after the Carole King episode, during the next of her many debilitating depressions. But I didn’t see that as a red flag, just another huge bump in the road. I knew her to be, like the rest of our family, a fighter; tenacious and unsinkable.
Linda once said that after a while Dad didn’t really want to listen to her complaints anymore; about trying to lose weight, finding motivation . . . to do anything.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” he would lecture her. “Just work hard, hold your head up, smile, and be friendly.”
He never believed she needed therapy for her bipolar disorder. “Not necessary. Just stay on your medications and you’ll be fine.”
Mom would accuse him of being too tough on Linda, reminding him that she was mentally ill, not lazy. When he refused to send Linda extra money, Mom would mail her secret checks.
“You’re doing more harm than good by coddling her,” he’d say. “She’ll never be independent if you keep treating her like a baby.”
But ever since that first episode on the steps of the student union, she’d always managed to be a warrior of resiliency. No matter how many times she’d been knocked down and flattened by her illness, no matter how many emotional roller coasters she’d been forced to endure, she’d always declare, “Chris, I’m going to do it this time. I’m going to finally lose these hundred pounds no matter what. I’m going to stay on my meds from now on. I have to just accept that this is a part of me and remember, as Dad taught us, to always just—you know—‘buck up!’”
Then there would be many long periods when she did seem fine, or relatively fine. One time after she’d moved away from Michigan to Dallas, she got her own apartment, held down a job as a receptionist in a large office, and completely supported herself. She called me from work.
“Chris, guess what? You’re not going to believe this! I finally have some good news! I just won the Worker of the Month contest at my job, and they’re putting my picture on the front page of the weekly newsletter!”
She said it with the pride of a Nobel Peace Prize winner. She also joined a weekly group therapy session, where she met Erick, a young man with multiple-personality disorder who would become her best friend and roommate. I think she liked being the caregiver for someone else for a change. She adored him, looked after him, and found him endlessly entertaining. I never knew which Erick would answer the phone.
“Hello, this is Erick, who am I speaking to p-p-p-p-please?” he’d ask shyly, in a high-pitched voice.
“Hi, Erick, this is Christine, Linda’s sister.”
Then he’d switch to flamboyant, enthusiastic super fan. “OMG, is it really? Oh, Miss Christine! i love you! Ahhhhh! I can’t believe I’m talking to a real live Hollywood movie star! Could you send me your autograph, please?”
Or sometimes I’d call and get the monosyllabic, withholding tough guy.
“What?”
“Hi, Erick, this is Linda’s sister. Is she there?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, uh, do you think you could look?”
“Whaddya want?”
“Well, I’d like to—”
“I don’t know where she is.”
“Well, could you give her a message that I—”
Click.
Linda would say, “Hey, I’m lucky! I get five roommates for the price of one!”
Even when she was depressed, she would pretend otherwise. “I don’t want to bring everyone else down,” she used to say. But her eyes always betrayed her. They remained muddy and lifeless, no matter what role she tried to play. At times she seemed to drift off into some private dark lake, alone and out of reach.
But somehow, in spite of everything, she managed to have a sense of humor about herself. When questioned about her California stalking adventure, she’d respond, “Oh yeah, Carole King and I go way back!” I would be reminded of something photographer Diane Arbus once said: “Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with theirs. They’ve already passed their test in life. They’re aristocrats.”
But no matter how long Linda’s periods of “stability” lasted, I’d eventually get a call.
“Christine, can you call Al Pacino for me? Like today? It’s really important. I have an idea on how to remake . . . And Justice for All.” She sounded out of breath, like she’d been sprinting.
“Uh . . . sure, Linda, but you know it’s still playing in the theaters, right?”
“No, I know, but I think the ending is all
wrong. Al shouldn’t be in the courtroom like that telling—”
“Honey, are you taking your lithium?” I interrupted.
“Yes! Oh, and I need to talk to the Supreme Court justices—do you have their phone numbers?”
“Yeah, let me just get my Rolodex!” I said, trying to humor her. “Honey, what are you doing right now?”
“Ah, well, actually, I’m putting all the rubber bands on my counter here in a line, and ordering them by color, size, and elasticity.”
“Sweetie . . .”
“Uh, sorry, Chris, I’ve got to go, David Letterman is trying to reach me.” This particular manic episode became so severe it landed her in the psych ward again.
This time they couldn’t bring her down from her mania, no matter what amount or combination of medications. So Linda called and informed me, “They’ve run out of choices, Chris. They want to try electroshock therapy.” Horrified, I instantly pictured Jack Nicholson’s character in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but she assured me that EST had come a long way since that movie, that it was now state-of-the-art and extremely effective. She ended up having it done several times—once to get her down from that mania, twice to bring her up from depression. Although she’d lose her short-term memory temporarily, it always seemed to help, but not for very long.
Then, just a few years ago, on her fortieth birthday, she finally made a real commitment to never go off her meds again. “If I do, I’ll have to go through this whole cycle again and I can’t. I can’t deal with another one, there’s just too much wear and tear on my soul . . . ya know? I don’t have a choice really,” she declared.
But it didn’t matter. The mania actually broke through the lithium. My brother found her walking in the middle of rush-hour traffic, trying to get a check to Bill Clinton to “help him save the world.”
Then, after this episode and nine months of yet another severe depression, Linda told me that, inexplicably, her doctor had let her know that if this new “cocktail” of drugs didn’t stabilize her, he’d be out of options. There would be nothing else for him to try.
True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness Page 14