Easy Street, page 11
Jim pats my leg through the comforter and replies with a warm, habitual “Merry Christmas, Mags.”
Meanwhile, my heart bangs in my chest, my scalp tingles with terror, and just like it had when I was nineteen in that student union movie theater in Ithaca, New York, my lungs begin squeezing shut. I try to figure out whether I need to inhale or exhale, but soon find I can barely do either.
My mind focuses on that little bottle of pale green tablets in my medicine cabinet. Why had I stopped taking them last month? How could I be so stupid? Why would I take the risk when there was nothing to gain except the alleviation of a fifteen-second element of a bedtime ritual? Was it pride that led to my recklessness? A reaction to the shame of needing assistance in order to function in the world? Or is it covetousness? Do I covet mental health without enslavement to pharmaceuticals? Envy? Do I envy the lot of the normal?
Which deadly sin has felled me?
The pills are green. The green of envy, I think.
With both hands, I begin to wipe the sweat from my face but pause and let my fingers rest over my eyebrows and the heels of my palms to press into my chin. I rock back and forth slightly; an ancient, barely remembered self-soothing technique. Back and forth. Back and forth.
“What’s going on, Mags?” Jim asks, pausing the documentary. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
I notice my hands are shaking and quickly steady them on my thighs. “Oh, yeah, totally. You know,” I manage to say, “Franny and Zooey has one my favorite lines ever. ‘I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.’”
“Something’s going on.”
“No, no,” I say with forced cheer. “I want to keep watching. I love this. Hopefully they’ll talk about Franny’s breakdown and how Salinger thought of that.”
Jimmy leans back and resumes the film, unconvinced. “Okay,” he says.
I wipe the sweat from my head with the corner of the comforter and breathe out slowly through pursed lips.
Why this word? Why Auschwitz? I ask myself.
Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz.
What has Auschwitz to do with me, or I with Auschwitz?
Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz.
I’m not thinking about the camp in Germany. Or the documentary. Just the word itself. It’s not like I am caught in some sort of aftershock from witnessing an abominable trauma firsthand. It is simply a word, a word that came into my mind from watching a documentary while cuddled in bed with my husband on an unseasonably warm October night in Los Angeles, a word that certainly was imbued with some sort of tone; a note, a chord, like the Hitchcock Psycho chord, the minor major seventh chord, the terror chord, my terror chord, but still, it is just a word.
I’ve heard Joanna repeat words many times, but for her the word repetitions seem to provide a form of comfort, like rocking in a chair, or rubbing the worn corner of a blanket to one’s cheek.
Not me.
Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz invades my thoughts without asking permission and without providing any benefit whatsoever. It is an unwelcome guest I attempt repeatedly to thrust out the door. It is a violation I perpetrate on myself, as if were saying “Stop hitting yourself!” while slugging my own face.
Why would someone do this? Why would someone repeat a word like this, when it was the exact thing they didn’t want to do? My guess would be the Pink Elephant Phenomenon: if you tell yourself not to think of pink elephants on the wall, a herd of them will stampede through your mind.
The prohibition provokes the violation.
Don’t eat that apple. That one is forbidden.
Don’t play with that toy. That’s your sister’s.
Eve reaches for the apple.
The child grabs the toy.
But with thoughts, it’s slightly different because the prohibition contains the violation. The prohibition and the violation arise mutually. “Don’t think about pink elephants” contains the idea of pink elephants.
It’s a double bind. It can’t be resolved. Indeed, a strange loop.
But so what? Who cares about thinking about pink elephants on the wall? Certainly not the most exciting thing to contemplate, or the best wallpaper, but who cares? I don’t, and I’m guessing you wouldn’t. And when we don’t care, the whole system just peters out. We just stop thinking about it and focus on something else. Not caring is the secret. Not caring is what prevents the double bind.
It’s the way out of the Chinese finger trap. A way to settle the imp. I know this.
I’m doing it to myself, that’s clear, but the generating impulse is not subject to my will.
The only entity I can blame is me, whoever that is.
Because if “I” can’t stop what “I’m” doing, then who am “I?”
What “I” keeps defying the “I” who keeps clearly and vehemently commanding “I” to stop?
Is it me?
I can’t answer these questions because I no longer know who I am . . . or is . . . or are. Did J. D. Salinger suffer from something similar? Is that why he wrote about Franny repeating that prayer, the Jesus prayer, over and over and over and over? Envy riddles my mind, even now. Why can’t my wounds enable me to write a generation-defining novel about a disturbed young man in a red hunting hat who hates phonies or insightful stories about a family called Glass? That would at least be some sort of compensation. Why can’t I invent a character like Franny, who has a breakdown in college and begins obsessively repeating a prayer she discovers in an obscure Russian text?
My mind spins faster in familiar little cyclones. Blood drains from my arms and legs. I can feel it.
Joanna says I live on Easy Street, and I know what she means, but we’re both suffering. Joanna’s life shattered on July sixteenth, mine splintered into pieces on the seventh of October.
Joanna’s damage is overt, apparent to anyone, while mine lies within me, hidden from all. I am functional in society, while she is obviously broken. I am cared for, while she has been abandoned. I am a phony, while she offers defenseless honesty.
I can drive a car, file taxes, make small talk, chew with my mouth closed, inquire with my eyebrows raised, and smile when I feel like scowling. I can give compliments when I feel like insulting, laugh when I feel like jeering, offer warmth when I feel withholding, and say “Glad to help” to friends from college when I’m thinking I hope you fail in a spectacularly public fashion.
Joanna can do none of these things.
But we live together on the same street nonetheless, despite what she thinks, and it isn’t easy, for either of us.
We enact our patterns and repeat our words, hers flying out of her mouth, mine imprisoned in my head.
Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz.
“She killed her.”
Blastoff, blastoff, blastoff.
“That’s exactly the opposite of taking care.”
Stop hitting myself, stop hitting myself!
“And it was a hard birth, a hard birth, more than a whole day.”
Blasphemy, blasphemy, blasphemy.
“More than a whole day!”
Auschwitz, Auschwitz, Auschwitz.
7
It Is Back
My pillow has slipped away during the night and the side of my face is lying flat on the mattress. I do not yet recall the panic of the previous night, so for the time being my greatest concern is whether or not there are eggs in the refrigerator that I can microwave in my recently purchased as-seen-on-TV Egg-Tastic Ceramic Microwave Egg Cooker for Fast, Flavorful & Fluffy Eggs.
The Egg-Tastic Ceramic Microwave Egg Cooker cost me only $7.99 and turns out to be a truly eggtastic product. Not so much because it allows me to poach eggs. Poach isn’t really the right word. Not like at fancy brunch spots with names like Oeff and Töst where morning-sun yolks and cumulus-cloud-on-a-summer-day whites smile up from crab Benedicts. The Egg-Tastic Microwave Ceramic Egg Cooker does not poach eggs like that, but it does cook them. There is no denying that.
Before my purchase, I never managed to poach eggs at home. Carefully cracking open the shells without breaking the yolks, gently dropping the fragile orbs into barely boiling water and swirling them just so, and the inevitable mishaps of splashed egg matter, overcooked centers, and the cursing such semi-accidents lead to—and on top of all of that, the cleanup—always just seemed like too much work, especially given how fast two eggs are consumed. You get maybe ten bites of eggs and then that’s it, you’re done. Time to wash the pot.
I like to microwave-poach two eggs in the morning for breakfast and sometimes I zap two more in the evening for a late snack. Since I’ve been going at the eggs so feverishly recently, I’m afraid I’m going to find that I’ve blown through the two dozen I purchased on Friday.
In this state of slight suspense, I motivate myself off the bed, pad sock-footed into the kitchen, and open the refrigerator. When I see two AA light brown eggs perched happily in their compartment, I breathe a sigh of relief. “Hey, you two,” I say with a smile in my voice.
But then I remember.
Auschwitz.
It all comes back to me. Salinger. The bodies. Auschwitz. Auschwitz. Auschwitz.
Immediately I tumble in the foaming undertow of icy panic. Auschwitz. Auschwitz. Auschwitz. I grasp at the solid marble of the kitchen island and gather my bearings. Auschwitz. Auschwitz. Auschwitz. The skin on my arms prickles, my scalp freeze-burns, and I feel a cold draft chilling me from behind.
The refrigerator is standing open.
With one hand anchored on the countertop, I reach back to nudge the door closed with my foot. But I keep shivering, and I know why.
“It” is back. “It” is the name I have for my mental illness, an umbrella term for a variety of symptoms: anxiety about the afterlife, unexplained anxiety, obsessive word repetition, and a sense of destabilization that revolves around the question what is I? It’s a big umbrella, but the symptoms are all connected, I’m convinced.
Focus on the normal, I think, turning to open the refrigerator again and pluck out the two eggs. Look at the ordinary morning. La, la, la.
“Everything is normal,” I hear myself say, bracing against the flood. “Normal, normal, normal.”
I tap the eggs against the porcelain cooker one at a time, cracking their shells and dropping the contents into the round containers. “Normal, normal,” I murmur as I work. “Look outside. It’s normal. Look at the coffee maker. Look at the butter dish. Look at the sink. Normal, normal, normal.”
I delicately poke a hole in each yolk, ladle a teaspoon of tap water into each container, and hit the timer button on the microwave.
Just like I did yesterday. Normal.
It is possible, I tell myself, that this time the brain dysfunction can be resisted, the chaos warded off. But can it? What will be different this time? How had it happened before? I need to remember. I need to inspect the previous malfunctions in order to prove to myself that this time could be different.
My first breakdown hit me during sophomore year in college. Cornell, the film trigger of Kurosawa’s Dreams, fear of not being saved, and hell rush to my mind. The cause of that crisis was clear enough: theological poison that I worked hard to get rid of. And I had, to a great degree. First I began, within the framework of Christianity, to believe in a truly loving God, one that wouldn’t revoke His love if you picked the wrong answer on the Great Test. I stopped listening to what Christian mystic Thomas Merton called the “magicians who turn the Cross to their own purposes and commit the awful blasphemy of making the Cross contradict mercy.”
Then I read Joseph Campbell and for the first time thought, Oh my goodness, the Bible doesn’t just contain metaphors. The whole dang thing is a metaphor. I began to see how it’s not just that “Father” is a metaphor for God, but that “God” itself is a metaphor for something that transcends language or imagery, something we don’t know how to explain, something not our ego. And that somehow, if we die to the ego, we’d rise to something else. And somehow, that something else has something to do with God.
And that is true resurrection.
Fear of hell still nagged at me, but intellectually the concept began to seem increasingly ludicrous. Sure, it was still a possibility. But it was also a possibility that I would wake up when I died and find that I’d been reborn as a hippo in my favorite childhood game, Hungry Hungry Hippos. That would be horrible too, an eternal realm of a hungry, hungry me, competing with hungry peers, but what were the odds? So the fear of hell started to seem as silly as the fear of hippos, and both started slowly, slowly slipping away until locating them was both hard and unnecessary.
So now, standing here in my kitchen, using the island here as ballast, I’m no longer dealing with the theological component of my obsession, so in that sense, I’m not as vulnerable as I was.
I try to remember how my second breakdown started.
That one’s murkier, I think as the microwave timer blinks 1:03, then ticks through 1:02 and 1:01.
Time pushes the descending clock past 1:00, :59 and :58, and I feel my panic rising.
Focus.
:57, :56, :55.
I try to catch a memory from my soup of swirling thoughts. When, exactly, did the threads start snapping in my brain? Where was I? What I was doing? An image comes into view and I quickly stab it like a beetle through the thorax and peer intently at the mounted specimen.
I see myself in school in the spring of 1997, walking through a campus sculpture garden next to the theater buildings at UCLA. It’s breezy and pleasant, like most all days in Los Angeles. Two undergraduates huddle together on the grass, reading from a script in low voices; three workers from the scene shop break for lunch on the long benches under the coral trees in front of the performance hall, saying nothing but passing a bag of potato chips back and forth; and somewhere, someone I can’t see smokes a clove cigarette.
I am holding my Samuel French copy of William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker as I walk and think about the character I will be portraying, Helen Keller’s mother, Kate. I am trying to imagine what it would be like to be a mother with a daughter so damaged, so disconnected and estranged from the world. I am as serious as a wartime surgeon about these internal imaginings, otherwise known in our graduate acting program as the work, which feels so important, so necessary for the world, that if the performance were called off, I would still think, Well, at least I did the work.
As I walk by the statue of a leaping boy peeing into a basin of water and listen to the delicate splashing sound, I imagine my daughter will never have this small consolation. I pass the bronze of a woman squatting on her haunches and looking out into the distance. My baby girl will never see a horizon, I think, digging around in my psyche, trying to locate a feeling of profound heartache and maybe even produce a tear.
Walking toward the giant, headless Auguste Rodin’s Walking Man, I attempt to let “me” slip away and become Kate with her worries and fears for Helen, Kate with her disappointment at how motherhood has turned out, Kate with her feeling of being taken hostage the day her daughter was born.
But then, Who is “me” really? I start wondering. What do I really mean when I think of that object pronoun? It’s the most basic and ordinary of inquiries for a young acting student walking through a campus garden doing the work, but at this particular moment, as my eyes move up the headless walker’s muscular left leg, I suddenly feel as if something inside me has given way and I don’t have anything solid to hang on to.
The ding of the microwave pulls my attention back to the kitchen.
I open the door and see that the two yolks are still covered in a white film. Too soon. I click the door shut and add thirty seconds, reaching for my interrupted train of thought. I remember I had a class coming up. I must have headed back to the theater building. I must have left the big Rodin, returned past the female bronze, approached the leaping boy. I must have walked across the bricks and pushed through the glass door to the lobby where we had our mailboxes, but what then?
An image comes into focus of the women’s restroom, off the lobby. I’m standing in front of a sink.
I’ve heard people say you should never look in a mirror if you’ve taken acid. Maybe the same advice applies if you’re disoriented, have a history of mental illness, feel a catastrophic panic coming on, and have wandered into the women’s restroom before an afternoon acting class.
“How is that face my face?” I had asked. “I see it there on that shiny, two-dimensional surface over the sink, but what does it really have to do with me?”
I leaned closer, focusing in on a small brown birthmark that had always dotted my cheek just below my right eye. I remembered thinking when I was a toddler that this tiny splotch was a bit of dirt and rubbing and rubbing to get it off until my skin was red. I remembered covering the mark with pale-beige concealer when I was in junior high. And I remembered dabbing the dark pigment with a darker eyeliner when in I was in college, in celebration of imperfection and also in emulation of Cindy Crawford, whose beauty and supermodel lifestyle (and marriage to the Dalai Lama’s bestie Richard Gere) had more influence on my personal aspirations in the early 1990s than I would like to admit.
That little speck beneath my right eye had always just been there, a constant part of my experience of reflected self. In some genuine way, it was me, to me. And yet at this moment, under the fluorescent lighting of the women’s bathroom, as I focused on that small “Maggie mark” that had always been with me, I started to wonder, Why do I think of it as my Maggie mark? Where did that come from? And who is Maggie, anyway? What if the mark has nothing whatsoever to do with Maggie, for one thing, and for another, what if she has nothing whatsoever to do with me? And what if the physical entity I perceive reflected in front of me is nothing more than a meaningless shell that houses my . . .
I tried to dodge the end of that phrase, but soon enough “soul” provoked “eternal soul,” and “unrepentant soul,” and “lukewarm soul,” and finally “soul damned to hell.” Memories of watching Billy Graham on television after spaghetti and meatloaf dinners filled my head, and I was watching again with my family, the river of people on the screen flowing down to his pulpit to repent and save their souls, souls caught in frightful jeopardy. I was sitting next to my infant sister on the sofa with my eyes peeled and my scalp burning, furiously repeating to myself, “Jesus, I accept you into my heart; please be my personal savior. Jesus, I accept you into my heart; please be my personal savior. Please be my personal savior. Please.”
