by Lolita Files
Ripkin had been encouraging Beryl for years to tell her employer about her condition, but she refused. There was no way she was going to tell Anna Barber after the woman had given her an opportunity to be an editor in spite of her educational handicap. To announce her other issues would have been a death wish.
And now, she decided, after so many years had passed without anyone catching on, there wasn’t a need to tell anyone. The new drugs had made it so there were no glaring indications. The doctor suggested a narcoleptic support group, another idea she rejected. What was the purpose? But she did take his advice about napping whenever she could, even if it was just for five or ten minutes.
She lapsed into microsleeps, although they were rare. She’d be in an editorial meeting, at a book party, or on the phone in the midst of a discussion and would begin rambling about something that had nothing to do with anything. Her mouth would be doing what it was supposed to do, talk, but she would actually be in a deep microsleep. She might walk into a broom closet instead of the bathroom, her body on unguided remote control and needing to pee while the rest of her caught a quick snooze.
She never experienced a cataplexy in public. At least, no one ever realized that’s what had happened. But there were times when she’d collapse after someone on the phone made her laugh too hard. Moments later she would regain muscle control and resume the call, the person on the other end of the line baffled at her sudden disappearance. The same thing might happen if she became angry, which was rare.
The medication made narcoleptic incidents so infrequent that, when they did occur, she was able to pass them off as something other than what they were, and people accepted it. That was just Beryl, they reasoned. She was brash and outspoken, in a cheerful harmless way, ambitious, and damn good at her job.
Even though she sometimes acted a bit loopy.
The narcolepsy was now the least of Dr. Ripkin’s concerns. The clomipramine proved effective in doing half what it was supposed to. It all but eliminated the symptoms of narcolepsy.
It did nothing, however, for Beryl’s OCD, which was, officially, off the Richter.
Despite the doctor’s best attempts, all he had been able to do after sixteen years was shift her OCD into a sort of haphazard rotation. In the beginning, she used to obsess over making everything, and everyone, good, better, best. Now the attention was focused mostly on herself. Once she began making decent money, she sank a great deal of it into what she believed was self-improvement. She overleveraged herself financially in the pursuit of perfection, but she juggled it well, with meticulous care, rotating through a balance of credit cards, taking out loans, always paying just enough to be able to get more. She had excellent credit. She had excellent debt.
Ripkin had seen Beryl subject her body to endless harassment, all of which she confessed to while lying on his couch. There had been six weeks of frenzy about the cut and color of her hair. It went from a high-luster black to a lovely, much-complimented strawberry blonde. Then honey. Light copper. It finally ended where it began, high-luster black. Her brows and pubic hair were dyed each time to ensure a match.
She had developed friendships with a handful of prominent designers because of a series of style books she’d done. Because of these relationships, dull-faced Beryl slowly gained entrée to the New York fashion circle. She was invited to the best parties in town. She received minor mentions in a variety of magazines, from In Style to Vogue to Jane. Her name began to appear in the gossip pages. She caught the attention of the media because of her ever-morphing style, something unusual among the normally staid book publishing set. Her waifish frame made her a well-suited style horse. Hip companies offered her swag. The newest lowrider jeans, sunglasses, bags. Designers sent over dresses when she needed to attend upscale affairs.
She had a flair for putting herself together. While most editors tended to stay on the conservative side, Beryl eschewed the bookish look. She rocked jeans and fur-sleeved jackets, couture skirts with baby tees. She was always incredibly packaged, complete with four-inch heels, her style more befitting someone at a fashion magazine than CarterHobbs, the publishing giant. She got away with it, even though it was starkly different from the rest of her peers. The top dogs liked her. She was a hitmaker.
She studied the details of the rich and successful. She read magazines to learn what the rich wore, where they lived, how they decorated. She emulated it all by degrees, according to the constraints of her budget, then put her personal spin on it.
Beryl became someone to know. The designers had motives. They didn’t just dream of clothing. They sometimes dreamed of book deals, too.
Even if it was just a coffee table book.
Men weren’t flocking to be with her (“she’s got a butterface”), but she was on the social radar of the greatest city in the world. It had been a marvelous stroke of luck on her part, but Ripkin and a handful of medical professionals knew that, behind all the stylish flash and flair, lurked a troubled (and sometimes troublesome) woman.
When Beryl’s face and pubic region erupted in angry rashes as a result of all the hair dyeing, the obsessive behavior shifted to her skin. She believed the way to fix all the breaking out was by attacking her skin even more. She had sixteen facials inside of a month (at varying locations throughout the city in an attempt to avoid the embarrassment of repetition). She wound up at her dermatologist’s office, legs agape in his mortified face.
“See?” she said, pointing. “See them there? The whole mound is covered!”
“I’m not a gynecologist,” the man said with a frown.
“Doctor, please. It’s so humiliating. I can’t go to my gynecologist for this. It’s a skin problem. I got it from dyeing my hair and shaving my bikini line. I know, I know, I shouldn’t have been shaving once I got the rash, but now it’s worse. I just need you to fix it. Please?”
Beryl’s rash-ridden loins came a bit too close to the doctor’s face for his liking. He backed away and wrote a prescription.
“I’ve never looked between a woman’s legs in my entire post-intern career,” the doctor said to his nurse after Beryl was gone. His head was over a sink as he splashed his face with cold water. “God help me, I don’t ever want to look between her legs again.”
Alpha and beta hydroxies. Scrubs. Ointments. Sitz baths. Beryl wasted thousands of dollars (charged, of course). The rashes at both ends were cured fast, but her face remained inflamed and peeling for weeks, unable to handle the stress of all the chemical assaults.
Her pubic hair fell out.
She was devastated. What would Mr. Right think if he should happen to show up?
She visited her dermatologist at once. He refused to indulge her.
“Look at it,” she said, her skirt hiked. “All the hair is gone.”
The dermatologist was cold.
“Come back in six months. Give your skin a chance to naturally heal.”
Beryl flashed the only physical gimme the universe had allotted her: a dazzling smile. The man was unmoved.
“Six months,” he repeated as he escorted her out of the examination room.
It didn’t take long for Beryl to begin obsessing about something else. She was on her third nose, despite her plastic surgeon’s warnings about the fragility of her septum and a dangerous diminishment of cartilage. After meeting with the voluptuous actress Carmen Electra to discuss a possible children’s book, Beryl showed up at work a week later with a fleshy set of 34Bs, even though her chest had been flat before. The implants were removed two months later when a Marc Jacobs gown—a gift from the designer—didn’t fall just right over her new Electras.
Page Six in the New York Post was the first to acknowledge the missing tits.
Just asking…
Which fashion-forward publishing wiz had a sudden case of the chest mumps that seems to have been cured overnight? According to an in-house source, the flighty plain jane is more concerned about her bra size than books these days.
Beryl was inconsolab
le when she saw the paper. It was the first time Page Six had taken a bite out of her. She spent the day locked in her office, refusing to show her face. She wore a coat for the next two weeks. She couldn’t believe that her boobs warranted a mention in one of the most powerful gossip columns in the world. On the one hand, it meant she was someone to be watched, but Beryl was an emotionally fragile girl, an insecure girl, and the idea that her breasts were being ridiculed was like a knife to the heart.
But she got over it, and these days, the focus was on her abs. She was a gym rat now, even though, at five feet two inches, one hundred and one pounds, there wasn’t much of her to begin with. Her stomach had been crunched into a spectacular six-pack. Upon seeing a smoother, more feminine belly on a model on the cover of Cosmo, she decided she didn’t want to look like someone who was ab obsessed. She stopped cold turkey and let the muscle definition lapse. Then she happened across a couple jogging together in Central Park. Both were in great form with classic six-packs. As she watched them go by, it occurred to her that when he came—and, of course, all of this was about him— he might want a woman with good abs. It was on with the crunches again.
For now.
Ripkin found himself playing guessing games about where the compulsion would travel next. Her mind, of course, was in a perpetual state of reinvention, which guaranteed him years of guessing and reliable income.
Beryl made it clear right away, at the very first session with Dr. Ripkin, why she had sought psychiatric help.
“There’s some things about me that might scare a guy off.”
“Some things like what?” the doctor had asked, wondering to himself what kind of parents would send their daughter to therapy because of what some boy might think.
“Oh, it’s nothing major.” She was smiling. “Little stuff. Stuff a professional like you could probably fix real easy.”
She was young then, just sixteen. She sat across from Ripkin, her legs crossing and uncrossing nervously. She kept smiling at him. He found it fascinating the way her smile seemed to turn an otherwise bland face into something rather electric. It was bizarre.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked as he watched the petite girl shift in the chair. “Would you like something to drink?”
“No,” said Beryl. “I’m fine.”
“Did you come with your parents? Would you feel better if I brought them in?”
“My parents are dead.”
Ripkin had been jotting on a notepad. He placed the pad and pen on a stand beside his chair.
“Who brought you?”
“No one. I came alone,” she said, gesturing with impatience. “But that’s not what I’m here to talk about, Doctor. We can talk about that later. Not just yet.”
Her words were casual, abrupt. Ripkin still bristled when he thought about it. She spoke as though she were the one in charge, still smiling that smile that looked as if it had been nabbed from a prettier face.
“My apologies, Miss Unger. What would you like to discuss?”
Beryl stared at him. Her legs had stopped moving.
He waited for her to speak, but all she did was stare.
“Miss Unger?”
He waited. Another teenage brat, he mused, ramping up for a lifetime of analysis.
“Miss Unger?”
Ripkin leaned forward.
“Miss Unger!”
Her face was frozen.
Ripkin’s butt was halfway out of his chair and he was about to go over to her when she started speaking again.
“I’m concerned that I might be what’s perceived as ‘a little difficult.’”
Ripkin lowered his butt into his seat and leaned back, wondering what the frozen silence had been about.
“What do you think they mean by ‘difficult’?”
Beryl was smiling again, shifting in the chair.
“Well…” She toyed with her hands, weaving the fingers together. “I tend to be really anal about stuff. One of my teachers said I was a perfectionist. I thought that was a good thing. It is, isn’t it?”
“Where do you go to school?”
She exhaled.
“I don’t go to school. I dropped out. But I don’t want to talk about that just yet, all right? So stop with the sidetracks already.”
It was funny in retrospect, the nerve of the girl. He might have terminated the session at that point, but her jigsaw smile saved her. It was a right piece that somehow fit into the wrong spot. It held his attention.
“I want you to help me fix it so that people don’t think I’m weird.” Her legs were moving again, x s and l s, x s and l s.
All the nervous crossing made Ripkin suspect that she might be manic-depressive or have OCD. It was only the first meeting and there was no concrete proof, but more than likely one of the two would bear out.
“So you hear that a lot? That you’re weird?”
“Sometimes. I don’t like it. I don’t think I’m weird. Well, not for that.”
“For what, then?”
“That’s the other reason I came to see you,” she said. “I need help with this thing. It’s a family problem.”
“What is it?” Ripkin asked.
“I think it’s narcolepsy.”
“You think it’s narcolepsy?” The words came out harsher than he intended and startled the girl. She rushed over and stood in front of him in a panic.
“But you can fix it, right? It’s gotta be fixed. I don’t want to be like the rest of my family and not do anything about it. I don’t want to miss out on him. I came all the way here, all the way to New York, just for him.”
“Hold on, hold on. Calm yourself down. Take your seat, please.”
“I don’t want to sit.”
“Then take a deep breath, relax, and tell me who you’re talking about.”
Beryl ignored the first two suggestions.
“I’m talking about him.”
She paced. Ripkin was thinking he would take a pass on this one. Refer her to another psychiatrist.
“I’m sorry, I’m still not clear. Who is ‘he’?”
She stopped walking and gave him a full-on look of irritation.
“My husband!”
“You’re married?” he asked. “But you’re just a kid.”
“No, I’m not married. And I’m not a kid, I’m sixteen. You’re not listening to me. I’m telling you he’s here and I know it.”
Ripkin was doing a mental retreat at this point, getting his bearings in case the whack job in front of him did something rash like try to attack. He was large enough to subdue her if necessary. He wondered if she was carrying a gun. She had on a sundress. Didn’t look like she could be hiding a gun underneath. Her hands were empty. It could be in her purse. Teenagers were crafty. He decided to remain cool and keep her talking until he could think of a way to get her out.
“Is he your boyfriend? Your fiancé?”
“No. I don’t even know him yet. He’s my soul mate.”
“Your soul mate. I see.”
That was it. The girl was certifiable.
She had calmed a bit.
“He’s coming, and I need your help.”
It had been a long day that day, sixteen years ago. Ripkin had seen six patients prior to her. His ex-wife had called to complain about the house in Cape Cod he was letting her use for two months for free. He was giving a speech at the Princeton Club in an hour. His head was throbbing, and this black-haired, mismatched-mouthed teen ranting in front of him was making it worse.
“I’m not sure I can help you,” he said. “But I can make some excellent recommendations. In fact, one of my colleagues on the West Side has expertise in this very kind of thing.”
Beryl’s eyes widened.
“Of course you can help me. You’re the only one who can help me. I read about you in the paper. They said you’re the best. Please, Dr. Ripkin. I know I seem crazy right now, but I’m not. I’m really not. It’s just that I’m young and, and, and, I’m kind of small for my si
ze, but I’m not crazy. I just know what I want. I’m definitive. Definitive, Doctor. That’s not crazy. It just means I know what I want.”
Crazy people were always announcing how crazy they weren’t. It was their battle cry before the chaos began.
“I’ve been waiting my whole life for him.”
“You’re just a teenager. You haven’t lived your whole life. That may not make sense to you now, but in a few years—”
“But I don’t know when I might meet him, and I can’t afford to take any chances.” She was frantic again. “I don’t want him to reject me over something as stupid as narcolepsy. Or for being too anal, even though I don’t think I am. I need you to fix me. Please, Dr. Ripkin. Please. You have to help me.”
She was crying, hysterical.
Ripkin was about to open his mouth when she collapsed in an unconscious heap at his feet.
That was how it had started. This invisible man, the one who was coming, was the primary topic every week. Even as Ripkin worked steadily to help her get the more pressing conditions under control, it was all she talked about.
He got the backstory along the way. The narcolepsy had started when she was twelve. Her parents had done nothing to address it, even though school officials desperately tried to enlist their involvement. Beryl became a social misfit. Because of the collapses and erratic behavior that came with the condition, school friends began to distance themselves. Other kids, cruel kids, saw her as a comical oddity, a punch line for jokes.
“You’re getting veddddddddy sleeeeeeeepy,” one boy used to taunt.
“Sleep on this!” teased another, grabbing his nuts.
A group of boys peed on her when she dozed off in the stacks at the library. The librarian found her there moments later, soaked in tears and urine.
Her parents moved her to a different school, but that was worse. Four years later her parents were dead, victims of a car crash that Beryl survived. Narcolepsy ran in her family, and now the tribe was nearly extinct. She was the last of the Ohio Ungers, and she didn’t know her mother’s side of the family.
Her paternal grandfather had been run over by a tractor he was driving after having a cataplexy and falling out of the seat. His wife had been working with him in the fields, on foot just a few feet ahead, planting seeds. The tractor mowed her down as she tried to outrun it. After their deaths, Beryl’s father, Neil, was raised by foster parents. He was also narcoleptic. His foster parents were embarrassed by it, but did nothing to help. Neil couldn’t keep a steady job because of the fits. He went into a microsleep at the wheel as he drove his wife and daughter to McDonald’s one Friday night, his typical way of celebrating payday. He veered headlong into a semi. His wife snatched the wheel but it was too late. Neil Unger was a proud, simple man, just like his father. He chose to risk putting his family in harm’s way to avoid the shame of having to admit he needed medical help.