The Gretchen Question

by Jessica Treadway

  But he dismissed the suggestion. “I have to fight it,” he said. “Otherwise it’ll win.”

  I came up with another idea: what if he asked his teachers if he could sit near the classroom doors? He could tell them that he was having a claustrophobia “issue.” Maybe if he believed he could get up and leave whenever he wanted—if the teachers gave him permission to do so—the fear and the nausea wouldn’t be so bad.

  He listened with an expression that was mostly doubt, but that also contained a hint of hope. Well, I could try it, he told me. I asked if he wanted me to write a note. No, he said—he’d take care of it himself. He was skeptical, but he came home that first day and said, “Hey, guess what, it kind of works. It’s worse when I have to force myself to sit there, better when I know I have the option to escape. It makes a difference to have an out.”

  I knew what he was talking about, but of course I didn’t tell him. An out was what the bush in the cemetery had been once, for me.

  I was more relieved than I can say when he seemed to be okay for the next few years, through most of high school; after a while, with the “emergency exit” strategy in place and the relaxation he felt from his tai chi practice, the thought of puking in public hardly ever crossed his mind. I allowed myself to believe it was a phase he’d survived, something unfortunate he’d endured once but wouldn’t have to go through again.

  Then, when he was a senior, it came back with a vengeance. I don’t use that term lightly; it really did feel as if some force had finally gotten fed up with being ignored, and decided to return and punish the person who’d done the ignoring. I know better—I know it was just part of his own mind, not an actual soul with a score to settle—but whatever the reason, it recurred worse than ever.

  I can only assume it was related to my diagnosis and surgery. He’d been doing so well, and then that happened. Do I feel guilty about it? Of course, even though I guess getting cancer wasn’t my fault. It caused him to falter, his nervousness came back. Not that summer, but as soon as school started, he was in trouble again.

  The initial wave came over him during the first week of the semester, in an assembly on lockdown procedures and other safety protocols, when he forgot (that’s how far the whole thing had receded) to make a point of sitting at the end of the long auditorium row. From the stage, the speaker was instructing them all about what to do in the case of an active shooter when all of a sudden Will felt the old, familiar urge to vomit, and the certainty that it was about to happen. He stood to make his way to the aisle and out of the room, but a teacher he didn’t know, two seats away, snapped at him to sit back down. Afraid of making a scene, Will obeyed and then proceeded to suffer through the next hour, trying to do tai chi routines in his head and slow his breath, but for some reason, probably because it slowed his mind down, too, this only made things worse.

  Think about what that would feel like—the moment before you know you’re going to throw up, only it’s not just a moment, it’s ten minutes, half an hour, an hour. He managed to tolerate the sensation (which he later described to me as agony) for the rest of assembly, which you might think would make him feel confident that he could do the same the next time. But no, the experience took so much out of him that when he got home that day he went to bed, not coming out again for dinner or anything else, and I heard him crying. Sobbing under the sheets.

  He needed help, I knew. The next day, I let him stay home. At home he was all right—he knew it didn’t matter if he threw up or not, so he didn’t worry about it. It was the public part he dreaded.

  An idea occurred to me, springing up through a memory from my own childhood. I dismissed it at first, then fought long and hard with myself. Then decided it was worth trying, because what if it worked? I thought it might work. What if it would have worked, and I hadn’t done it? I would have hated myself.

  I went to the supermarket. You could buy it on the shelves at that time, only a few years ago—over the counter, even in the grocery store, in the same aisle as teething bracelets and Enfamil. Why would they let us do that if it was so bad? I mean, it comes from a plant. It was a mistake, I know that now. It’s been taken off the shelves. But at the time, being able to buy it along with toilet paper and apples and the ice cream bars Will liked—it reassured me.

  I do things for him, as you know (went the letter to Sosi I composed in my head but would never write). Less so than before he left home, but probably more than I should. This includes making his breakfast. The day I let him stay home, after the active-shooter assembly, was a Friday. Though he didn’t say anything, I could tell he worried all weekend about returning to school. Monday morning I made him oatmeal the way he liked it—almond milk, brown sugar—and held my breath as I took the ipecac out of the spice drawer. Squeezed a few drops into the cereal and mixed it in. Kept my hand on the bowl a few moments before I picked it up, wondering if I should go through with it. I was still holding my breath, though I hadn’t realized. I let it out, then brought the bowl to the table and set it down in front of him.

  It’s hard to describe what it felt like to do this, knowing it would make him so sick. It’s for his own good, I told myself over and over. Short-term pain for long-term gain. When he was nearly two years old and loved his pacifier too much—it was affecting how his adult teeth would come in later—the pediatrician advised me to cut it in half while Will was napping. “That way he won’t associate it with you, he’ll think it happened while he was asleep. You don’t have to be the bad guy.” So I did this, though it kind of killed me. Took a scissors and snipped straight through the thing he loved, the thing he could count on to comfort him. I heard him stir when he awoke, and went in to the crib to get him. He was holding up the destroyed pacifier, asking me to fix it. “Oh, it’s broken,” I said, in a tone of sorrow I hoped would convey to him that it was beyond what could be repaired.

  “Broken?” He knew the word, but obviously he had never in his short experience of the world considered that it might apply to his binky. Too young to know enough to ask how or why, or to understand how easily a binky could be replaced. That was the first time I ever saw in his face the shock induced by the most savage of life’s jolts.

  He ate the oatmeal quickly—you know him, he never leaves enough time to eat. Very often he forgets to thank me for the breakfasts I make him, but not that morning; he got up and rinsed the bowl, then kissed me—kissed me! Did he think that kissing his mother would grant him some magical resistance to the thing so hell-bent on crippling him?—before grabbing up his backpack and heading out. It was too late.

  I’d done some reading about how to treat emetophobia, and they said exposure therapy—like the way they bomb-proof ponies not to startle at sudden noises—could be very effective. You expose yourself to the thing you’re afraid of, and find out it isn’t so bad. Eventually, you stop being afraid of it.

  I wanted so much for him to stop being afraid. Look at the lengths I went to.

  Well, I guess I don’t need to go into too much detail about what happened, after he left the house. Ipecac takes effect in about half an hour, and it was as he was walking into his homeroom that it kicked in—triggered a severe, uncontrollable spasm in his stomach muscles—and he did what he’d been afraid of doing for so long, puked his guts out in public. And not in front of strangers, but among the kids he’d gone to school with for years, including some friends, yes, but also those who thought he was a freak (his word, not mine) because he did tai chi instead of soccer, because he always had to sit at the edge of the classroom, because he was friends with Derek Foote. And (he was convinced) because he didn’t know who his father was.

  He vomited up his breakfast and much, much more on the threshold between his homeroom and the hallway, meaning that they were all trapped in the classroom until the janitor came to clean up. There was some delay—the janitor’s day hadn’t officially started yet, it took some time for him to be tracked down—so Will cou
ld not escape everyone’s reactions, as they could not escape the sight and smell of the mess he had made. “Hey, you want fries with that?” somebody yelled, amid the cries of disgust. A girl in the back said, “Oh, my God, I’m gonna puke, too,” and retched a little over the wastebasket. The teacher tried to settle everyone down, but there wasn’t much she could do. Will slumped to the floor and hunched into himself, his gut still heaving even though there was nothing more to expel.

  Needless to say, my plan backfired on me, or at least I thought so at first. As soon as the janitor had finished his work, everyone rushed to the hallway and on to their first class, except for Will, who walked out of the school without telling anyone and called to ask me to pick him up. I was expecting the call; I hadn’t logged into my work queue yet. Instead I paced in front of the window, praying to the big elm though I wasn’t sure what for, waiting for whatever came next. The ride back home he spent bent over, his face pressed against his knees. “I’m so sorry,” I told him, reaching across to place my hand on the back of his neck. Feeling it, he jumped.

  “It’s not your fault.” He sat up in order to speak, and I saw that he was crying. I couldn’t tell who this upset more, him or me. “Mom, I have to see somebody. I need an emergency appointment or something. Isn’t there somebody you work with, who you could call? Who’d take me right away, like now?” I opened my mouth to respond, but before I could, he kept talking. Which was just as well, because I’m not sure what I would have said. “This is as bad as it’s ever been. This time it actually happened. Here I was thinking it would never actually come true—that I just had to find a way not to feel sick, even though I knew I probably wasn’t going to puke. Now I’ve done it, now I know it can happen. It could happen any time. I’m not going to be able to go anywhere, ever.”

  We were almost home. I looked straight ahead through the windshield instead of at him. “It is my fault,” I murmured. “Oh, my God. Honey, I made a terrible mistake.”

  “What are you talking about? How was that your fault?” He jabbed a finger behind us, toward the scene of his mortification. What had I been thinking?

  I waited until we pulled into the driveway. I turned the car off, but remained in my seat without moving to open the door, and he seemed to understand that I wanted him to do the same.

  “You got sick back there,” I said, knowing that things could never be the same again between us, “because of something I gave you.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said again.

  I kept my eyes averted from his. “I want you to know that I really thought it might have the opposite effect. I honestly thought it might work.”

  He waited, and I knew he saw no point in repeating his question another time. I told him I had put ipecac in his oatmeal.

  “What the fuck is ipecac?” He’d never said fuck in front of me before, and I tried not to flinch.

  “It’s a thing you use to get kids to throw up, if you think they might have swallowed some kind of poison. It’s an emetic. A syrup. It comes from the root of a plant.”

  Why did I say that last thing? Did I think he might feel less chagrined, or less angry at me, to know it derived from nature?

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” His throat was raw from the vomiting, and the words came out ragged. “You’re kidding, Mom, right?” I saw that he was begging for me to confess this, though I don’t why that would have been any better—to have kidded him about such a thing.

  I told him I thought what I read was true. I told him I had no idea the reaction would be so severe. (This was a lie; I’d watched my mother give the syrup to my sister once, after she’d gotten into the Borax under the kitchen sink. I would never forget how sick Steph was—what her face looked like, the terrible sounds—but I remember my mother saying the ipecac had saved her.)

  I told Will I’d give anything to take back what I’d done. At this he opened the car door and got out slowly, then walked slowly into the house. He stayed in his room, with Scout as his consoler, for the rest of the day and night, saying he wasn’t hungry for dinner. At one point I did hear what I thought were the sounds of him doing some tai chi movements, but I couldn’t be sure. I slept hardly at all that night, because the guilt kept waking me up.

  But the next morning, he sat down to breakfast and ate the eggs I served. He even tried a joke, wondering out loud whether it was safe to drink the juice I poured for him. When I tried to apologize again, he said we could just forget about it, if that was all right with me. Even though I know better—that it’s impossible to “just forget” such a thing—I agreed, eagerly. We never spoke again of what I’d done.

  And you know what? After that, the emetophobia didn’t bother him as much. By a lot, actually. I guess maybe it’s come back a little lately, that’s what it sounds like, I don’t have any details. Have you witnessed it in him yourself? You can imagine that it wasn’t easy for him to go back to school the next day, but he did it, and when he got home and I asked how it went, he shrugged and said that a few people had called him Spew or Hurl, but then that died down and things seemed pretty much back to normal. After a few days, he wasn’t feeling the nausea in class anymore. “I guess I had an inflated sense of how big a deal it would be to other people,” he told me. “I guess it wasn’t that big a deal.”

  In short—I would say to Sosi—it worked. What I did, as terrible as it sounds. Did he mention that to you, too, as part of “the ipecac story”?

  But you poisoned him, I hear her say back to me. If it is her voice I hear.

  I was just doing the best I could by him. The same goes for what I told him about the man whose biological matter mixed with mine to make this boy Sosi and I both love. And it’s true—despite how much Will might want me to, I can’t bring myself to call that man a “father.”

  I watched to make sure Trudy had gone into her own house before I unlocked Grettie’s and stepped inside. Everything was in order, as I knew it would be. Grettie has always been the kind of person who cleans up pots as she cooks, alphabetizes the books on her shelves by their titles, and uses a ruler to draw a line after the recipient’s name when she writes a check. In college, I used her notes instead of my own, even if we’d been sitting next to each other in the same class. People are often surprised to learn how organized she is, maybe because her appearance suggests the opposite: even indoors, that frizzy hair flies away from her face, and she never bothers to try to keep it in place with an elastic or band. It makes her look untethered, unrestrained, free. But it also gives the impression that she doesn’t care. It’s a false impression, which anyone who wants to be in her circle must come quickly to understand and respect, or else be refused entrance.

  Even when Cam and Bella were toddlers, you would never find a stray toy on the stairs or a piece of cracker under a sofa cushion. Those kids had been taught from before the age of walking that it was their responsibility to keep their play areas neat. I thought it was too much to ask of children, so I always helped Will tidy up after himself. It had an unfortunate effect, which was that even now he leaves plates in the sink for me to wash and laundry for me to do. Well, soon enough he’ll have to learn to take care of these things himself, the hard way. Unless Sosi is willing to pick up where I left off, but that’s not my problem.

  In the kitchen I found a surprise: an empty tube of Pringles overturned on the counter, surrounded by crumbs. Grettie always bought Pringles because she said that if they had to keep potato chips in the house, at least they’d have ones you could stack. There was no way either Grettie or Jack would have left the house for a week-long vacation knowing that those crumbs were there, or without putting the empty tube in the recycling bin. Feeling a small but distinct uneasiness, I set the tube upright.

  No sign of the trash trucks yet; no sound of them even on a street in the distance. I walked upstairs and wandered into Grettie and Jack’s bedroom, feeling vaguely guilty even though I told m
yself they would not have minded.

  It was rare for me to be in their house without any of the family present. In fact, I couldn’t remember if it had ever happened before. Although I had been in her bedroom plenty of times, sitting on the bed while Grettie got ready for us to go somewhere together. With anyone else, it would have bothered me that I had to wait. But since it was Grettie, I never minded. I liked watching her dry her hair, slap on some foundation and blush, and run a lipstick across her mouth. I liked watching her pucker her lips at the mirror. I’ve been watching her do that for almost thirty years.

  I walked over to look at the photographs decorating her bureau. There were pictures of family, of course. But where did she keep the one of the two of us from Halloween of our third year living together, dressed as Thelma and Louise? We kept the framed picture on the mantel of our apartment in Amherst, over the fireplace that didn’t work but made the room feel cozy. When she moved out, I had a duplicate of the photo made, so we could each have a copy where we lived. I always kept mine on my desk—first in my apartment in Allston, now in the one I share with Will. But in her bedroom I didn’t see Grettie’s copy of us, in its distinctive red frame, anywhere.

  Without quite thinking about it, I opened her top bureau drawer. Underwear, bras, balled socks. No photograph. I straightened one of the bras before shutting the drawer.

  I knew she kept her journal in her nightstand. Of course, I would never read it without her permission. I slid the nightstand drawer open, just to make sure it was where she still kept it. Yes. But instead of the leather-bound journals I remembered, she was writing now in a spiral notebook, which was open face-up to the last page she’d filled in a few days earlier. I took it out.