Dirty Secret (31 page)

“But why do it little by little? I promise you, this sulfur is working.”

“We'll see.”

Meanwhile, my dad, Sandy, and I are ecstatic. And each day my dad seems to have more energy. He begins taking one nap a day instead of two, and suddenly he's eating more. One afternoon when I ask my dad how he's feeling, he says, “I actually forgot about my chest pain for a while, which is pretty good, for me.”

We're going to do the lotion for seven nights, but decide to continue covering the furniture and changing bedding and towels every day until I leave, just to be sure. It doesn't feel as burdensome now that I know the bugs are on their way out.

I've already told David all about it over email, but when he calls and I say that for the first time in four months I am 100 percent certain that there are no parasitic mites living under my skin, I actually start crying.

“I can't wait until you come back so I can be finished with these things, too!” he says and I haven't heard him sound this cheerful in months.

“But I have to warn you,” I say, “the sulfur smells a little strong.”

“I don't even care. I'll just stay inside the apartment and get reading done that week.”

I need to find a way to get more lotion so I can bring it back to Italy. I could ask my dad to call his doctor for a refill, but I need to call my mom anyway. I have to convince her to give up her “experiment” and try the lotion. I'm sure she can get her doctor to prescribe it for her since he seems willing to give her anything she wants.

Again, she balks.

“But we already know what you're doing isn't working. You're still itching and getting bites. Right?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then for fuck's sake, why won't you try the sulfur lotion?”

She doesn't say anything.

“Sorry,” I say. “I'm just really frustrated with you.”

“I know.”

“You know, but you're still not going to change your mind, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay, fine. Listen, Mom. Maybe you don't want to try the lotion, but I need more of it to bring back to Italy. Could you get Dr. Paulsen to prescribe you some?”

“Of course, honey. I'll go today. In fact, I'll go right now.”

“Thank you. Could you get a lot? I want a big supply.”

“Sure,” she says. “It's the least I can do. And when I get the prescription, I'll bring it to the Target pharmacy—they know me there, and I won't leave until it's filled.”

“The only place you can get it is this compound pharmacy in Richfield.”

“We'll see about that!” she says.

By dinnertime, she's dropped off four big bottles. I can't depend on her, I can't get her to clean her house, I can't even always trust that she's telling me the truth. But once in a while, my mother has the ability to make me really happy.

MAYBE IT'S JUST
chance, maybe it's a combination of time passing and the bugs vanishing; but for whatever reason, at the end of my two weeks in Minneapolis, my dad is doing much better. He can even drive himself to and from his appointments now. He still can't carry full laundry baskets down to the basement, but Sandy can handle the back-to-normal amounts of laundry they'll have now that we're free—finally, finally, finally, free—of the bugs.

There's just one more thing I need to take care of. The day before I fly back to Italy, I meet my mom in the park to say good-bye.

“You know I'm going to ask you again to try the lotion, right?” I say, sitting down next to her. Like last time, she was already here when I arrived.

She laughs. “Yes, honey, I know you are. But I'm determined to continue my experiment.”

“You know what? I almost,
almost,
admire your stubbornness. But where is that tenacity when it comes to cleaning your house?”

“The house still looks marvelous from the last time you cleaned,” she says. “Do you want to come see it?” She points in the house's direction.

“No,” I say quickly. It's a visceral reaction. “I'm cured of the bugs now”—I can't say or even think those words without a
wave of euphoria washing over me, and that feeling will last for months—“and until I know that you're cured, too, and that your house is bug free, I can't go in there.”

She looks confused, as if she's trying to work out a complex equation. “So you're saying you won't go into the house unless I do the sulfur?”

That's not what I meant. I hadn't thought of using the sulfur lotion as leverage. I consider it. And then I consider something else: all the hell that house has put me through. The nightmares—yes, I've had nightmares in which I'm trapped there with all the windows and doors bolted shut, and others where I'm trapped under piles of junk; the actual hours spent and muscles used cleaning and cleaning and organizing; all of the stress and the arguments and the mini breakdowns; the sheer weight of the responsibility; the sheer weight of the secret. Maybe it's time for me to walk away.

Walk away.

It's not my house. It's not my problem.

“I'm emancipating myself from your house,” I say.

“Emancipating yourself? So you think you're a slave to the house?”

“Or think of it as a divorce,” I say. “Whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm done. I'm never setting foot in your house again.”

“That's fine, you won't need to,” she says. “I plan to keep it looking marvelous.”

“I hope you do, Mom. I really hope you do.”

And the next day I fly back to Italy, armed with the proper poisons to finally break what I think is the last link in the chain between me and my mother's hoarding.

LIFE BACK IN ITALY SEEMS PRETTY MUCH IDEAL AT FIRST. David is cured of the bugs within a week and we toss out the remaining bottles of tea tree oil, hoping to never smell it again. The marble benches on the square soak up the sun all day and stay warm long after dark; we linger there late into the night, chatting with our new Italian friends. David and I even host a dinner party, making nachos with strips of
piadina
bread because we can't find tortilla chips. A youngish mother named Daniela wants to practice her English, and she and I begin doing a twice-weekly language exchange. One hour we speak only Italian, and the next hour we speak only English.

I begin the intensive Italian class, and for the last three weeks of September and the first week of October I take the
bus, then a train to Rome each weekday for three hours of instruction. If David has to go to Rome for research he'll meet me when my class is finished, always taking Abraham Lincoln in his shoulder bag, and we'll go out to lunch or to a museum, or if it's late enough, a wine bar.

I keep in touch with my dad and Sandy through email, and with my mom through weekly calls from the pay phone. My dad's health continues to improve. He and Sandy even install a makeshift gym in their basement, with a treadmill and a stationary bike, so my dad can get a cardio workout each day.

After I've been back in Italy about a month, my mother tells me that she's finally cured of the bugs, too. She went to the emergency room because the itching was driving her insane. After he heard all the medicines she'd used, the doctor there told her she was cured a long time ago, and the itching she was experiencing now was from overtreating herself. As soon as he told her that, the itching stopped.

My mother is excited because she has a new friend, Tina, a former coworker who “is just wonderful.” My mom can't wait for David and me to meet Tina the next time we visit. I'm happy to hear that my mom has someone to make plans with and I hope the friendship lasts.

I should be ecstatic: My parents are both healthy, we're all bug free, and David and I are living in a stunning Italian village.

But something's wrong. As October passes and the warm weather fades and the days get shorter and colder, melancholy comes for me. The stone of the square—and of the apartments, everything in the village is made of stone—that once held the warmth from the sun, now holds cold. I'm freezing all the time, and it's a damp chill that settles into my bones and stays. It's the same weather as San Francisco's, which I hated. It's not just the weather, though. I feel as if someone has snuck up behind
me and draped me with one of those protective lead aprons you have to wear at the dentist during x-rays. I'm weighted down, each step heavier than the last.

I start staying in our apartment more, even though the only heat source is the fireplace that neither David nor I can keep going for more than twenty minutes. I don't want to be around people. I stop meeting Daniela for our language exchange. I'm cranky, snappish. I'm tired all the time, yet I can't sleep at night.

One evening David convinces me to go to a dinner party at a local artist's apartment. He thinks it would be good for me to get out and socialize, practice my Italian. So I go. The apartment is right at the edge of the cliff, directly overlooking the valley below. I feel a little vertiginous as I walk in. There's a huge spread of food on a long table: three pasta dishes, salad, broccoli rabe, bread, tangerines for dessert, and lots of wine. The walls are covered with the artist's paintings: jewel-toned women and girls. At one point I'm talking to another guest, struggling in my still-not-great Italian to explain that in the United States, it's normal not to live with, or even near, your parents. For some reason the whole room of fifteen or so people decides to stop speaking right then and listen as I fight my way through this foreign language, backing myself into a verbal corner as I attempt to make my now pointless-seeming point. Finally I reach the end of my sentence, exhale, and take a sip of wine.

As I'm holding the glass to my lips, one of the other English speakers there says, “Wow, Jessie, who's your Italian teacher?”

At first I'm confused, but then the people in the room who understand English start laughing—not in a raucous or mean-spirited way, but still, it's clear that I'm the object of the laughter. And I don't like it.

After that, I let David go to dinner parties by himself. One of the villagers has lent us a television, and I huddle under blankets
on the couch watching it with Abraham Lincoln at my side. And while there's really nothing wrong with the village itself, I can't wait to get the fuck out.

In November I start counting the weeks until we leave. In December, I switch to days. I can't wait to get out because I know that the heaviness that has settled over me, the lack of energy, my loss of interest in anything pleasurable (except overeating and overdrinking enough to regain all the weight I'd lost and then some) is just temporary. I'll come back to life again once we return to New York.

WHEN WE DO
return, it's to a few hassles from the subletter. She couldn't figure out how to turn on the shower, so instead of emailing me to ask—which she didn't have a hard time doing when she needed to find the nearest bank—she called the building's super and had him replace the faucet. The new one is both more complicated and uglier than the last. But worse than that, she had the locks on the door changed, claiming that the keys I'd FedExed to her didn't work. Immediately upon our arrival home, she begins demanding that we reimburse her for the three-hundred dollar cost. At first we refuse (I tested those keys at least half a dozen times before I sent them to her), but her constant emails—
Do the right thing, Jessie, come on, I know you're an honorable person!
—wear me down. Eventually David and I decide that though it's unlikely, maybe somehow I'd sent her the wrong set. We give in and pay her.

Those small things aside, I should be happy to be back in New York; after all, it's what I'd desired for months. I try to act cheerful, but there's a cold and aching stone inside me, and I fear that's the real me, the pessimistic, sad, cranky core of me. I fake it. I meet friends for dinner or drinks or coffee, and I try to
listen to what they're saying and understand what they're talking about, but it's as if I'm swathed in cotton, mummified, and that extra layer keeps me from feeling connected to anyone.

February, March, and April pass and I keep waiting to feel happy, or even just not unhappy, but nothing changes. I know something is wrong with me, but I figure it will go away. And just like when I had the bugs and couldn't bring myself to tell anyone, I tell no one besides David how I feel.

ON MAY FIRST
, David leaves to go back to the village for a month to do more research. Without him, I feel myself sinking even more. I'm endlessly walking through wet concrete trying not to get sucked down, and it's not working.

When I finally comprehend that what I'm experiencing is depression—most likely clinical depression—I feel like an idiot for not realizing it sooner. And what's really embarrassing is that the only reason I do realize it is because of a television commercial for an antidepressant. It's one of those woman-walking-alone-and-moping-type commercials. Superimposed over the woman is a list of symptoms, beginning with the obvious ones: Lack of energy? Yes. Trouble sleeping? Yes. Chronic feelings of sadness? Yes. Then some symptoms I hadn't expected: Irritability? “Yes,” I say out loud to no one. A hard time making decisions? “God, yes.”

I had no idea that irritability or indecisiveness were aspects of depression. For the last six months, I've been so irritable it's as if I've had constant PMS. And though indecisiveness has always been a problem for me, since last fall, I've been even worse. Ordering in restaurants has become a nightmare: After taking five minutes to decide, as the waiter stands there tapping his pen on his pad, I'll likely hunt him down a few minutes later because
I've changed my mind for the gazillionth time.

I've always taken a perverted pride in the fact that I'm the one person in my immediate family who hasn't been medicated for depression. I've also always been skeptical of antidepressants' efficacy. But I need to do something. When David calls from Italy, I ask him what he thinks about me getting a prescription for one. “Do it,” he says.