Easy Street, page 24
“Pretzels or peanuts?”
The flight attendant has returned to offer snacks, and I look over while removing my headphones.
“Pretzels,” Jimmy says. “Mags?”
I search my body for an appetite but can only shake my head.
“Let’s take some peanuts, though,” Jimmy says, “in case you change your mind.”
Our pilot lands his two-hundred-ton Dreamliner with a soft thump, and we taxi toward the gate.
I called Dr. Eleanor Calabrese from my car parked in front of Daishin’s house and she had been able to see me the following day.
Eleanor struck me immediately as a woman who might have been a great Italian stage actress in her day. Not that there was anything especially dramatic about her presentation—her clothing and jewelry were modest and her hairstyle conservative, a square cut with even bangs—but her strikingly large turquoise eyes and the articulation of her hand movements made me think she could have once captivated an audience at the Arena di Verona and carried off the great heroines with ease.
After saying hello and offering a seat and the standard HIPAA notification form for me to sign, Eleanor skipped the introduction of her approach to therapy and questions about why I was seeking help at this point in my life and whether I slept well or poorly at night. She began our first session with three simple words.
“So, tell me,” she said.
Her invitation seemed like an extension of Daishin’s benediction, warm, familiar, tender, and I felt at once as if I were a child in the care of a trusted adult. How easily she does it, I noted to myself, how different than Kalene, or any of the others who in all our sessions had never managed to communicate such uncomplicated concern.
The FASTEN SEAT BELT sign blinks off and before Jimmy can rise to get our bags from the overhead bin, I take his hand.
“I’m glad I’m coming with you to see your dad this time,” I say.
I like Bill Vallely, and I always enjoy our visits to Jimmy’s hometown. The days are soothingly predictable. Weekday mornings at eleven, for example, we will reliably watch The Price Is Right. I will express my opinions about which of the models are decent human beings and which are monsters, information I’m convinced I can divine from how the young women open a refrigerator or run their hand over the hood of a brand new car.
In the afternoons, the three of us will place bets on various sporting events, including ones depicted in movies and on television shows, always hoping to reach the height of excitement we experienced one afternoon when the betting got out of control, when dollar bills were flying and quarters clanking, as wagers were doubled and tripled and quadrupled while we watched, with bated breath, the Golf Channel special “Go Down Swinging: The 1999 Open at Carnoustie” as if it were a live event.
Jim and I and his dad will eat together; three friendly, chatty meals a day. I’ll try to eat, at any rate. Or sip an herbal tea. Then Jim and I will sleep in the guest room side by side on twin mattresses, I on the main bed, draping an arm down to Jimmy on the trundle below. When we pull out the trundle I will, as always, think of Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies is a wee one’s trundle bed.
Baggage claim goes smoothly, which feels like good luck. Having run out of midsized sedans, Hertz offers us an upgrade to a powder-blue Chevy Malibu and we feel happy to have been given something for free, even if we didn’t want it. We ease over the WARNING, SEVERE TIRE DAMAGE bump, and as Jim follows the turns dictated by the navigation app, I feel a welcome lift.
Then, about a quarter mile down the road, I see the golden arches of a McDonald’s lifting into the sky and feel a lurch in my gut that I recognize only after several seconds of investigation as hunger.
I’m hungry!
I experienced a similar appetite awakening one time on a group outing from Grace Point to McDonald’s. I hadn’t eaten properly for weeks, but then either the new medication or cognitive techniques I had begun to practice, or maybe both, kicked in that afternoon and inspired a meal that to this day I consider the most satisfying of my life.
“Jimmy,” I shout without warning, “pull in there.”
“Where?”
“McDonald’s.”
“Really?”
“I’m hungry!”
Jimmy reacts to my cry as if I’ve just announced that I’m about to give birth rather than merely feeling a basic urge most human beings experience three times a day. He swerves off the street in front of a small red car and cuts into the drive-through line.
“What do you want?”
“A plain hamburger,” I say.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Five minutes later I’m asking Jimmy to pull over.
“I need to throw up.”
Eleven that night. Jimmy and his dad are together on the brown corduroy couch watching a film, which I could tell from a quick glance on my way out of the room involved men riding on horses, saying goodbye to women who love them but are agreed on by all to be replaceable, getting shot at, shooting at others, and wearing hats not required by the weather.
I am in the spare bedroom of the condo seated cross-legged on the top part of the trundle bed. I am reading three books at the same time: Consciousness Speaks, by Wayne Liquorman’s guru, Ramesh Balsekar, which understands the self as complete illusion; Opening the Hand of Thought, by Kosho Uchiyama, which conceives of the self as a mirror; and Jack Kornfeld’s Wise Heart, which describes the self as compassionate wisdom. My project is to figure out a way to describe what is going on in my brain, and since the idea that “I” am inflicting the looping and all its attendant anxiety—and scalp tingling and loss of appetite and midnight sweats—on myself is just really too horrible to accept, I’m hunting for a better understanding of what it means to have a self, or be a self, or what a self might be.
I’m switching from book to book, reading brief passages, comparing the different frames for consciousness, and taking notes in the books themselves when Jimmy pokes his head through the door. “My dad’s asleep. I’m gonna go outside and smoke some pot.”
“One second. I want to join.”
This may seem an odd decision, given my delicate neurochemical state, but marijuana has never seemed to affect me as much as it does others. Mainly it just feels like a sedative, and I think, Who knows? Maybe it will help.
Jim and I pad past his dad’s bedroom, silently take our boots and winter coats from the front closet, and wrap ourselves against the New Jersey winter. A blast of frigid air smacks me as I step out after Jimmy. “Yikes!” I say, wincing and tensing all my muscles against the assault, my mind for a moment wiped clean. It occurs to me that if I had more outer problems, my inner life might not seem so distressing. If I had to battle the elements, for instance, and hunt for food, or vigilantly avoid becoming food myself, these little squiggles in my head might not matter to me at all.
Jim sits down on a white bench in front of the condo, a bench he purchased for his dad after seeing it on sale at the Cracker Barrel Old Country Store the last time we visited New Jersey. We’d gone out to Cracker Barrel for a reason I can’t remember, with some friends of Jim or his dad I don’t recall, and eaten a meal that has slipped from my mind, but what does stand out clearly is the moment my husband saw this bench. The man had been struck. It was as if a light from heaven had illuminated the faux-weathered, shabby-chic arms and backrest and a voice from above had proclaimed its excellence. Never has a creature been so enthralled by the sight of a bench.
“Great bench, right?” Jimmy says now, gesturing for me to join him and opening the Tupperware container in which he keeps his green glass pipe and a small bag of ground marijuana.
“Spectacular,” I say as I sit, wrapping my arms around myself and burrowing my head into my jacket. “Sublime. Best bench on the Cracker Barrel menu.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” Jimmy says, smiling, as he loads and hands me the pipe.
“I do though, I think,” I say, inhaling carefully and then exhaling on a vocal fry. “Cracker Barrel, the best farm-fried steak and country-style benches between here and the Rio Grande.”
At the street corner about twenty feet away, I notice a stop sign the size of a billboard. Each letter, S-T-O-P, is the size of a toddler.
“Whoa,” I say to Jim, beginning to feel an easy buzz. “That is the biggest stop sign I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, it’s crafted for a community of people who have to start guessing after the first line on the eyechart.”
I hand the pipe to Jimmy and find my thoughts swirling through all the versions of self spread out on the top mattress of the trundle bed. No self, big self, wise self, and small self stream in rainbow spirals as I try—truly, urgently try—to locate a genuine self in me, out here on the Cracker Barrel bench in the freezing night with Jimmy blowing ashes out of his green glass pipe.
What am I? I ask myself with complete sincerity and a hard agenda.
I asked the same thing while looking into the bathroom mirror that day in grad school, after walking in the sculpture garden on campus. Who is this person that is looking back at me with that birthmark one inch below her right eye and a quarter of a centimeter to the left?
I squeeze myself more tightly to keep the swirling cloud from blowing me apart. The puffs of philosophy abruptly vanish and all I can clearly see, as transparent as the air, is that I have no idea. If you asked me what “I” means, I’d have no answer. I can’t even form the question. At once, a certainty pierces through me that having no answer is not okay.
It’s not okay at all! I shout in my head as terror flushes through my body and hell tingles on my scalp turn into painful stabs. I feel loosed into dizzying free fall and desperately cast about for a thought to seize on to, a solid concept to arrest my descent. What if, I reflect in horror, I’ve pulled apart my entire ego? What if I can never get it back? What if I’m like one of those partygoers in the desert whose bad trips permanently destroy their ability to experience happiness or simple cognitive integrity ever again?
Images of Pink Floyd album covers kaleidoscope around the face of Syd Barrett, whom I heard went crazy on stage one night from acid while playing the guitar. He stopped playing the notes of songs that night the way they’d been rehearsed—stopped playing, in fact, all the notes on his guitar except for one, an E flat on the first fret of his lowest string. He plucked that same E flat over and over. E flat, E flat, E flat that single solitary “E,” until an ambulance arrived to take him to a place in Cambridge with lovely lawns and very nice nurses, where he remained under caring surveillance for the rest of his life.
“There’s something wrong with the pot,” somebody says in a whispery voice.
“What, Mags?” Jim asks.
I’m rocking back and forth and my heart is beating loud and insistent and frantic in my chest, like a panicked neighbor banging at the door. “There’s something wrong with the pot!”
“It’s working great for me,” Jim says, interlacing his fingers behind his head and leaning back.
Frosted tree branches outline against the lights along the street. I feel myself floating up toward them, my limbs about to be mangled in theirs. “No, Jim,” I manage to pronounce, every syllable a challenge. “I. Am. Do. Ing. Bad. Ly.”
“Oh shit,” Jimmy says, catching my distress and popping to attention.
“I don’t know how I’m coming up with the words I’m saying right now,” a voice that seems to have borrowed my mouth meticulously articulates. “I don’t know how I’m doing it. I don’t know how I’m making the words I’m saying. I don’t know who is talking right now.”
“You’re just having a reaction to the pot. You’re just really high right now. In a little it’ll pass.”
I sway forward and backward on the bench, forward and backward over and over until I realize, with horror, I’m rocking! I’m rocking just like her, just like my grandmother. It’s happening! It’s happening! It’s happening to me!
“Maggie?”
I have to stop rocking, but I don’t want to stop.
“Maggie?”
The rocking is keeping me together.
“Maggie?”
It’s the only thing left.
Jim is now squatting in front of me with a hand on the bench on each side of my knees, but I can barely see him. I feel myself rocking in my grandmother’s chair, that exact chair, that black leather chair, the one with the crack in the middle of the seat. I feel the edges of the leather poking against my thighs as if I were wearing shorts.
But then a thought stops me.
How could I know there was a crack in the middle of the seat, a crack with yellowed stuffing showing through the split? How could I know that? When could I have seen it? My grandmother never got up from that chair. Am I making it up?
Except she did get up to go to the bathroom. She would have had to, and I could have seen the crack in the black leather seat cover and the stuffing underneath when she did. That makes sense. But how would I know that the leather feels jagged and scrapes against your thighs if you sit in the chair wearing shorts?
I must have sat in the chair. But when?
When my grandmother went to the bathroom, I posit. But that would be weird. Would I just run to the chair as soon as I saw my grandmother walk down the hall to urinate, just for a few back-and-forths?
Jimmy is saying something because I can see that his mouth is moving, and I want to listen, but a picture flashes through my head and grabs my attention: ten-year-old Maggie in shorts, rocking, holding the libretto from the 1970 cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar in front of her face. I see myself listening to the album, reading along with the libretto, sometimes singing and sometimes not, but always rocking, rocking and rocking. I see, too, my mother watching me with concern on her face.
“Why don’t you go outside to play?” she says. “You need to run with your friends and get some fresh air.”
“No,” I say. “I want to stay here. I want to listen to the music. I just want to rock in the chair.”
Am I remembering that right?
Yes, I am. That black leather rocking chair with the rip in the middle was in the living room at our old house, off to the side of the picture window that faced the street.
The family rocking chair. Except nobody rocked in it except me.
And then in the new house, that chair was in my grandmother’s room.
Suddenly, I realize. It was mine before it was hers.
“C’mon!” Jimmy suddenly shouts. “Maggie!”
“How far away is the nearest hospital?” I ask, holding my head, which now feels like someone is stepping on it.
“What?”
“I need to go to a hospital. I don’t know how I’ve been doing it all this time. I’m like that centipede—”
“We’re not going to a hospital. You’re going to be fine.”
“That centipede . . .” I repeat, trailing off while trying to manage my heart rate, which is accelerating like I’m driving a race car around a hairpin curve.
“What are you talking about?” Jimmy barks, his fear escaping as anger.
“That centipede that when someone asks how he keeps all those hundred separate legs working together like that says, ‘Oh no!’ and is never able to walk again.”
“That’s just a—”
“He’s never able to walk again,” I say, trying to relieve the pressure in my head by pressing the heels of my palms against my cheekbones, my fingertips resting on my eyebrows. “Like my grandmother. I told you she rocked in that chair for the rest of her life, but I didn’t tell you I rocked in that chair, too—just like her, but before she ever did. I rocked in the chair and listened to Jesus Christ Superstar and read the libretto and sang along with the cast and rocked and rocked until my mother said I should go outside. But I didn’t want to. I just wanted to rock and rock.”
“Let’s go inside,” Jimmy says, sliding next to me on the bench.
“I need to keep rocking.”
“That’s fine.”
He lifts my left arm over his shoulders, wraps his right arm around my back, and hoists me up, taking most of my weight as he guides me to the condo steps.
“Wait!” I say, thinking of his father waking up to find both us and the sky-blue Chevy Malibu gone. “What are we going to say to your dad?”
“Just give it a little time.”
“What did you tell him when you had to fly back to Los Angeles all of a sudden the last time you were here?” I ask, pushing Jimmy away and making an effort to take a couple of steps on my own. “What does he think is wrong with me?”
“He doesn’t think anything.”
“We have to give him a reason why you’re taking me to the hospital.”
All of my attention is now focused on Bill not discovering my secret and thinking his son made a terrible choice in marriage. “What are we going to say about it? We have to figure something out. What are we going to say?”
In the kitchen, Jimmy helps me into a chair before beginning to search through the cabinets. “There’s some chamomile tea in here somewhere,” he says. “I remember seeing it the last time I visited. You’re drinking tea now, right? You’re into tea, right? Because tea drinkers are happier, right? Isn’t that what you said?”
As I watch my husband hunting for the tea to ease the bolts of lightning arcing through my nervous system, a picture forms in my mind, so vivid and so detailed I’m convinced the mists of time have actually parted to permit me a glimpse into the future. I see Jim years from now, weary and joyless, worn to a nub by the invalid wife he’s had to move from institution to institution following the treatment programs covered by his Writers Guild insurance package, until eventually there’s no more talk of treatment and he’s resigned me, after much heartache, to a home, someplace with lovely lawns where docile patients dot the fields like dandelions.
The images are so specific I lose track of where I am, forgetting that I’m not, in fact, one of those dandelions on a lawn that spreads around me, nodding in my outdoor rocking chair, until Jimmy handing me a mug of tea jerks me back to Bill Vallely’s condo kitchen.
