The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (2 page)

There was always a lot of music around the house. My dad in
particular was a jazz fan, explaining to us that when he was young,
claiming a fondness for jazz had been considered fairly rebellious. My
record collection overlapped with Warren's—The Beatles, Crosby,
Stills & Nash, Janis Joplin. We drew the line at the Monkees (I liked
them, he absolutely didn't), and he teased me mercilessly about the
poster of Peter Noone from Herman's Hermits up on my bedroom
wall.

And there were movies, which my parents attempted to supervise
by appropriateness:
Mary Poppins
and
The Sound of Music
were OK
for me, but one James Bond movie (I don't remember which one now,
except it was Sean Connery) caused a battle royal with my dad: I
wasn't yet seventeen, and Bond, with his martinis and his bikini-clad
girlfriends, was out of bounds.

For a while in high school, I worked at a candy counter at a local
movie house—"Would you also like a Coke with that?"—which meant I
saw every movie I wanted to see, and many of them more than once; I
think I saw
Billy Jack
more than a couple dozen times. It didn't take
long, though, to decide that I didn't like movies that were scary or
tension-filled—horror movies were out, and Clint Eastwood's
Play
Misty for Me
, with its crazy woman stalker, freaked me out for weeks.
When the theater manager was robbed after closing one night, my
parents made me quit the job.

I confess to an energetic sibling rivalry with Warren. As the oldest,
I did my best to stay ahead of him, working to excel at things a
younger brother couldn't yet do. I learned to ride my bike first. Once
he was riding one, too, I simply rode mine faster and farther. I
water-skied first, and then more furiously than he did. I got good
grades and made sure he knew it; he worked just as hard and made
the grades, too. Dad was not a praiser (he thought it would invite the
evil eye), so he never complimented anyone. But Mom did, and
Warren and I competed for her attention.

As for Kevin, there were enough years between us that for a long
time I thought of him as
my
child. One of my earliest, clearest
memories is when he began to crawl, and how thrilled I was about
that, to see him learn to make his way from one place to the other. Not
only was he younger than Warren and I, he was intrinsically more
sociable, too—easier to get along with and more interested in just
hanging around with us rather than competing with us.

As somewhat observant Jews, we went to Temple and observed the
High Holy Days. We kids were sent to Hebrew school, and we also
made our Bat and Bar Mitzvahs. Although it was never spoken in so
many words, I was somehow given to understand that in many places
and circumstances, Jewish people were not very popular, and one
needed to be both discreet and respectable in order to make one's way
in life. We didn't keep kosher (although my father's parents did);
another part of the mom-and-dad myth was that in order to impress
her future in-laws with how observant she was, my mother—whose
family had never kept kosher and didn't really know the rules—had
misguidedly ordered lobster on the evening my father introduced his
parents to her.

On the face of it, then, our family life was congenial—a Norman
Rockwell magazine cover or a gentle fifties sitcom. Indeed, my mother
was what today would be called a stay-at-home mom. She was there
when we came home from school and always made sure we had a
snack—to this day, cold cereal is my comfort food of choice. Our
family ate its meals together, and although my mother didn't cook
much (a housekeeper did, and in time, my father took it up, and
excelled at it), there was always cake in the pantry (albeit
store-bought), fresh fruit in the fridge, and clean laundry in our
closets.

Under that pleasant surface, however, things were more complex,
as family matters inevitably are. Like all parents, mine had their
strengths and their weaknesses. They were profoundly close to each
other; in fact, they've always enjoyed being with each other more than
they like being with anyone else, including, sometimes, their children.
In the style of many 1950s couples, they seemed not to exist in any way
independent of each other. My mother was always very physically
affectionate with my dad in public; he was less so with her, but never
dismissive or rude. It was just always clear that he was the boss. For
my mother, it was always "Anything you want, dear," just as it had
been for her mother. If she'd had any particular professional ambition
when she went off to college, I've never known what it was, although
she was a central part of a successful antiques business she and my
father started together. Still, nothing's changed much in their dynamic
in the intervening years. Recently, my mother announced that she'd
given up her own political opinions in order to share my father's.

For his part, in spite of a sense of humor that often verged on the
bawdy, my father could be quite absolute in his opinions and
reactions. There was also a touch of suspiciousness in his interactions
with others, particularly when the subject at hand was money. In this,
he was just as his own father had been.

My parents were both outspoken in their disgust for religious or
racial bigotry. For example, we could swear all we wanted, but the use
of racial or ethnic slurs was utterly and always forbidden. As
provincial as Miami seemed back in those days (my father often said
that it had all the disadvantages of a big city and none of the
advantages), the tension between the city's African-Americans and
Cuban immigrants, and the riots in 1970 (during which our
African-American housekeeper was harassed by the police), taught us
that even a familiar landscape could turn violent and unpredictable in
the fog of prejudice.

Whatever their faults (or ours), there was no shortage of "I love
you's" from my parents when I was a child, nor is there one now; to
this day, they're openly affectionate with all of us, and even my friends
are greeted with a hug and a kiss. My parents were never cruel or
punitive, and never physical in the ways they disciplined us; they
simply made it known from our earliest days that they had high
expectations for our behavior, and when we missed the bar, they
brought us up short.

Nor did we ever want for anything material. My family was solidly
in the middle class, and as time went on, our means increased. My
father's law practice dealt primarily with real estate, land deals, and
some personal/estate planning, all of which expanded as Miami itself
did. When I was thirteen, my parents opened a small antiques and
collectibles shop a five-minute trip from our house. It, too, thrived,
and they began to collect and sell items from Europe, which in time
meant two or three trips to France each year and a lot of time spent in
New York City as well.

So there were never any concerns about having a nice place to live,
or good food to eat, or missing our yearly family vacation. It was
expected that we would attend college; it was a given that our parents
would pay for it. They were loving, hardworking, comfortably
ambitious (for themselves and for their children), and more often than
not, kind. To borrow a phrase from the psychological literature, they
were "good enough"—and they raised three decent children, no easy
feat in that or any age. My brothers grew up into fine men; Warren is a
trader on Wall Street, and Kevin is a civil engineer in Miami. Both are
accomplished in their professions, with wives and children they love
and who love them in return. And my own penchant for hard work
and my drive to succeed is traceable directly, I know, to my parents.

In short, they gave me and taught me what I needed to make the
most of my talents and strengths. And (although I couldn't have
predicted or understood back then how vitally important this would
be to my life) they gave me what I needed to survive.

When I was about eight, I suddenly needed to do things a little
differently than my parents would have washed me to do them. I
developed, for loss of a better word, a few little quirks. For instance,
sometimes I couldn't leave my room unless my shoes were all lined up
in my closet. Or beside my bed. Some nights, I couldn't shut off my
bedroom light until the books on my shelves were organized just so.
Sometimes, when washing my hands, I had to wash them a second
time, then a third time. None of this got in the way of whatever it was I
was supposed to be doing—I made it to school, I made it to meals, I
went out to play. But it all required a certain preparation, a
certain...precaution. Because it was imperative that I do it. It simply
was.
And it taxed the patience of anybody who was standing outside
the bedroom door or the bathroom door waiting for me. "Elyn, come
on,
we're going to be late!" Or "You're going to miss the bus!" Or "You
were sent to bed forty minutes ago!"

"I know, I know," I replied, "but I just have to do this one more
thing and then everything will all be OK."

Not long after the little quirks became part of my life, they were
joined by nights filled with terror, which came in spite of all the
precautionary organizing and straightening. Not every night, but often
enough to make bedtime something I didn't welcome. The lights
would go out and suddenly it was darker in my room then I could
bear. It didn't matter (if I could just ignore the sound of my heart
thudding) that I could hear my parents' voices down the hallway; it
didn't help to remember that my dad was big and strong and brave
and fearless. I knew there was someone just outside the window, just
waiting for the right moment, when we were all sleeping, with no one
left on guard.
Will the man break in? What will he do? Will he kill us
all?

After the first three or four nights of this, I finally drummed up
whatever courage I had left and told my mother about it. "I think
somebody has been outside my window," I said in a very small and
shaky voice. "In the yard. Waiting for you and Daddy to go to sleep at
night, so he can come in and get us. Or hurt us. You have to find
somebody to make him go away. Do you think we should call a
policeman?"

The expression on her face was so kind that it made it hard for me
to look directly into her eyes. "Oh, buby"—her term of endearment for
me—"there's nobody out there, there's nobody in the bushes. There's
nobody who would hurt us. It's in your imagination. Hmmmm, maybe
we shouldn't have so many stories before bed. Or maybe we're eating
dinner too late, and it's your tummy playing tricks on your brain.
Don't be silly now." As far as she was concerned, that was the end of it.

I tried to believe her, I really did. And I fessed up to my fear to my
brother Warren when the two of us were at home alone, and we tried
our best to reassure each other—together, we'd muster up our courage
to go see if someone was indeed standing just outside the front door.
And of course, no one ever was. But my feelings didn't go away, and
for a long time, falling asleep felt like sliding into a place of
helplessness. I fought it every night, my head under the blankets, until
finally, sheer exhaustion and a tired growing body just took me under.

I am seven, or eight, standing in the cluttered living room of our
comfortable house, looking out at the sunny day.

"Dad, can we go out to the cabana for a swim?"

He snaps at me, "I told you I have work to do, Elyn, and anyway it
might rain. How many times do I have to tell you the same thing?
Don't you ever listen?"

My heart sinks at the tone of his voice: I've disappointed him.

And then something odd happens. My awareness (of myself, of
him, of the room, of the physical reality around and beyond us)
instantly grows fuzzy. Or wobbly. I think I am dissolving. I feel—my
mind feels—like a sand castle with all the sand sliding away in the
receding surf.
What's happening to me? This is scary, please let it be
over!
I think maybe if I stand very still and quiet, it will stop.

This experience is much harder, and weirder, to describe than
extreme fear or terror. Most people know what it is like to be seriously
afraid. If they haven't felt it themselves, they've at least seen a movie,
or read a book, or talked to a frightened friend—they can at least
imagine it. But explaining what I've come to call "disorganization" is a
different challenge altogether. Consciousness gradually loses its
coherence. One's center gives way. The center cannot hold. The "me"
becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences
reality breaks up like a bad radio signal. There is no longer a sturdy
vantage point from which to look out, take things in, assess what's
happening. No core holds things together, providing the lens through
which to see the world, to make judgments and comprehend risk.
Random moments of time follow one another. Sights, sounds,
thoughts, and feelings don't go together. No organizing principle takes
successive moments in time and puts them together in a coherent way
from which sense can be made. And it's all taking place in slow
motion.

Of course, my dad didn't notice what had happened, since it was
all happening inside me. And as frightened as I was at that moment, I
intuitively knew this was something I needed to hide from him, and
from anyone else as well. That intuition—that there was a secret I had
to keep—as well as the other masking skills that I learned to use to
manage my disease, came to be central components of my experience
of schizophrenia.

One early evening, when I was about ten, everyone else was out of the
house for a while, and for some reason I can't recall now, I was there
all alone, waiting for them to come home. One minute it was sunset;
the next, it was dark outside. Where
was
everybody? They said they'd
be back by now...Suddenly, I was absolutely sure I heard someone
breaking in. Actually, it wasn't so much a sound as a certainty, some
kind of awareness. A threat.