The History of Great Things (19 page)

W
hen I call home from college as scheduled one Sunday afternoon, Victor answers and tells me that you took a last-minute job covering for someone in Santa Fe who got pneumonia, that you'll be gone for six weeks. In fact, you're in a psych ward on the other side of town.

—Hm.

—No? Never happened? I didn't really think it did, I just wondered if maybe it should have.

—Well, let's leave it there then.

Unbeknownst to me, and anyone else, you've had what you're calling
a spell
and Victor and your best friend are calling one week of crying followed by three weeks of staying in bed. Somehow he gets you to agree to check yourself in. He's tried everything he can to help you, and he is still no fan of psychiatry of any kind, but he's worried enough now to force you to do something. He tries to help you throw stuff in a suitcase, but he has no idea how to pack.
I won't go at all if you don't let me do it myself, Victor.
You're not going to the Ritz-Carlton
, he says; you say
Just go away!
and neatly fold three cashmere turtlenecks
from the outlet mall, a couple of nice pairs of slacks, a pair of jeans, plenty of undies and warm socks, nightgowns, perfume, a Robert Ludlum paperback, jewelry, scents, toiletries, meds, an afghan you're half finished with, and a petit point of a pastoral scene that Grandma had given you to finish because the stitches were too small for her to see anymore.

When you get there, you're barely inside the automatic doors when they take your suitcase away. Later, it gets returned minus your meds, your dental floss, your hot rollers, your crochet hook, your yarn, your stork-handle mini-scissors, your tweezers, your Rive Gauche and your Paris, and the notepaper you took from the Broadmoor in 1975.
Christ
, you tell Victor when he calls,
what do they think I'm going to do with any of that stuff? I'm going to look like the Wicked Witch of the West in a few days if they don't give me my hot rollers back. I can't burn myself to death with a hot roller.
He laughs and says you couldn't look like a witch if you had a pointy hat and six moles on your nose.

The next morning, a nurse comes by to return your notepaper. You ask why they took it in the first place; the nurse says something snarky along the lines of
The staff knows what they're doing and maybe you're here because you don't.

You have never been one to take kindly to sass, but you're still dopey from whatever it was they made you take before lights-out last night.
I have rights
is all you can get out of your mouth, which feels like it's full of flour, which is too bad, because you're sure that if you could add “Missy” to the end of the sentence she'd know who she was dealing with. You point to your head, to indicate that you've got a wicked headache; you've got just the right thing in your bag of meds for that but you're done with words right now. You scribble on the paper
she just handed you, capital letters,
HEADACHE
, show it to her. She shakes her head and walks out.

After breakfast, your head is still pounding, but at least you can get a few words out. The people at your table include one quiet old lady (hard to imagine what she could have done wrong besides get old), a young girl with bandages on her wrists, and a woman, a bit younger than you, attractive, early twenties, so of course you can't begin to guess why she's there.

You're so pretty. What are you doing here?

Young woman laughs at this, says she wishes that were her ticket to anything good. You don't understand. She says she'd been having hallucinations and got violent with her boyfriend because she thought he was a feral pig. She laughs saying it; you do too.

That's a very specific hallucination
, you tell her.

Well, he is cuter than some of the other pigs
, she says.
My name's Annie
.

Lois
.

You're now best friends.

After breakfast you meet with your assigned psychiatrist. You can't quite get a bead on her; she's expressionless, asks some of the routine questions you've been asked before. You've been to all kinds of shrinks by this point, had various diagnoses—chronic depression, atypical depression, generalized anxiety disorder, borderline disorder (what a load of bullshit that was, you've known borderlines, that is
not
your problem)—but none of the shrinks or their bullshit diagnoses made any difference. Why should it be any different this time? A significant part of the problem is that you don't tell them everything. You don't mention that, like Annie, you've seen some weird things, too; you tell yourself that you just shouldn't have had that glass of
wine with the pill you took that time, or that you were just tired. You don't tell them thing one about the rages, although they all get glimpses of your anger, but you don't tell them what it's like inside your body, like hot lava, like an actual substance in you that has got to come out when it gets in there or it will melt you from the inside out. You don't tell them this, because what causes them always seems justified, the rages, the unfairnesses of life perpetrated entirely upon you, you are sure, by evil guiding forces; starving children in Africa have nothing on you. If these things were different you'd be just fine.

Group therapy is a joke. You know enough about psychology, having been to therapy before and read any number of books by Carl Jung, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl, that you can tell putting this bunch of loonies together will not help a one of them. You can't randomly toss together a pile of barely functioning people and expect anything productive to come out of it. In your group alone, there's a young mother with severe postpartum depression; a full-blown narcissist (no help to anyone); a lady who spits every five minutes (you don't know what her problem is, but you have asked repeatedly to have her removed or fucking muzzled, because that is disgusting and unsanitary); a woman who claims to have the voice of Art Fleming in her head; a couple of alcoholics; and a junkie. The narcissist accuses you of being a narcissist, which is hilarious; the junkie and one of the alcoholics think you're an addict, though you've noticed that they say that about everyone. You have a bit of compassion for the postpartum mom, but she alternates between crying and staring blankly into the middle distance, and not once in all the weeks you spend here does anyone besides Annie say anything insightful. You walk out together and sit down for coffee with her in the atrium by the lunch room.
What bugs me is just how
inexact it all seems
, Annie says.
Like, with all of the advancements they've made in modern medicine, they still have to try sixteen things in case maybe one will work. Plus, their other genius idea is to throw a bunch of whack-jobs in a room together? Ha! Well said. You're how old? Twenty-four.
Annie tells you she's been arrested three times on domestic violence charges.
I only ever punched him, but still. I don't know how not to, when I get to that place. He probably deserved it
, you say. Your own rage is nonviolent, but it's not unimaginable to you.
He really didn't
, she says. Something about her reminds you of your daughter, though it's not anything she's saying, and not the way she's saying it. She doesn't even look like Betsy—in fact, she's tiny, and her voice makes her sound like a sexy Muppet—but you feel something deep for Annie, though you're not sure what it is. Holy crap, you feel something.

The staff continues to go through your drawers every day, no matter how many times you tell them you're all out of crochet hooks to murder anyone with. (This is not amusing to them, and it only prolongs your supervised probationary period with the one crochet hook they'll allow.) They give you meds that make you slightly too drowsy to argue with anyone, but otherwise do nothing to turn you into a regular person, whatever that is. Someone who thinks only nice things, maybe.

A million years later, on the return of your petit point (during supervised free time only) you suppress a joke about how they must have figured out how many times you'd have to stab someone with a petit point needle before any real damage was done.

In one of your last appointments with the shrink, you learn the one thing from your entire stay that is of any little use: that sometimes there's a cross-diagnosis—that a patient has a little bit of this, a little bit of that—and that when that's the case, it's difficult to treat with success.
Well then what the fuck am I supposed to
do?
you ask, and she screws up her mouth in an
I'm sorry for what I'm about to say
kind of fashion, and says
You take the meds we give you and you stay vigilant and you come back here whenever you need to.
But you're not coming back here if you can help it. Which you can. You can always help it.

Y
ou join a Unitarian church in the neighborhood. Your belief in a higher power (if not your faith) has been restored by all of your recent research (that is, your growing library of spiritual and self-help books), and though you've always placed a percentage of the blame for your problems on having been forced to go to church as a child, you hear about this church and its more open-minded beliefs, and in no short time you make friends and become actively involved, serving soup on Sundays, passing the basket, even singing in the choir. (Although everyone else is almost insufferably off key, you singing at full voice doesn't help, but church choir isn't the place for that, though once in a while you can't help yourself.) But you could always do more to help. When you're helping, you feel just a little more purposeful in the world; your mind is redirected away from you and toward others, and even though you still come home with all kinds of judgments about those others you've been helping—over dinner you tell Victor you don't know why the poor people can't all just go work at McDonald's (a part of you truly does not see that there might be a larger picture, though you vaguely want to) and he for sure doesn't either, though he is sure that their race, whatever race it
might be that isn't his own, has something to do with it, that all their race wants is handouts, and you wonder how you married your father, when you were so sure that the sexy, cosmopolitan, jovial big-city man you took vows with was his natural opposite. Victor has clients of all races, religions, genders, and sexual orientations, your home is open to all races, as you had vowed it would be when you grew up (though you never did find out what became of Ginny), and Victor always welcomes everyone to his home happily, with genuine warmth. So it's just confusing. You don't openly disagree with him; you aren't even really sure if what he's saying makes sense. It still feels like you should do more to make up for the conflict about it in your brain, and in talking to Audrey she asks if you might be interested in social work, and suggests the program at NYU, and the fall you turn fifty you're enrolled.

When your mind is active, it's always a good thing. Your plan is to take two years off from opera to devote to your studies, though you'll still practice an hour or two a day, for when you go back to it. For those two years, you study diligently—you were always an A student, but the kind who worked hard for it. Victor and I help quiz you when there are tests, but mostly it's papers, so many papers and so much thinking and so much studying, some of which even helps illuminate some of the larger social causes and conditions you wondered about, going at least a small way toward explaining why “they” can't all solve their problems with minimum-wage jobs. At no time, though, do you connect any dots between what you are learning and your own personal story; your father caused your problems, sometimes Victor causes your problems, and what obviously needs fixing is them.

The summer after you graduate, you schedule a face-lift (even though your husband begs you not to), because you can
see where in two years your jowls will be to your knees. You know looks matter—Victor implied as much on your first date—and in the fall you're offered a part-time job at a hospital in Yonkers, in part, you are certain, because you now look ten years younger.

You practice social work for several years, take only the best singing jobs that come along, turn down concerts with great orchestras but shitty conductors, or oratorios opposite that fat egotist P
. You decide it's time to exercise, as the doctors suggest; as with anything you do, there's no doing it halfway. You buy a half-dozen exercise tapes and work out for a couple hours each day, lose twenty-five pounds in six months, none of which needed losing. You've had some smaller weight fluctuations before, but because of your height and your carriage, until now it's been imperceptible to anyone but you. This weight loss is not imperceptible. People worry. Plus, you've always chewed your fingernails, but now you bite and pick at the skin on your heels and fingers relentlessly, unconsciously, until they bleed, like if you can just get down to the bone, something will be discovered, like if you could chew down to the bad core of you, you might finally dig it out. There's almost no thumbnail left at all on your left hand; you've had Band-Aids on it for a month. No one will see it, but you know, and it seems like it should be no big deal—a habit, everyone has them—but it's also a deep shame. Audrey and Victor and I all beg you to stop, stop exercising, stop chewing, stop worrying. Part of you has no idea what's wrong anymore; you still know that
you're
wrong, but it seems outside of you, or it's easier to think so, and so as sad as you are, you're also angry. Victor doesn't understand you. He never has. He loves you but he doesn't know you, not the way you want, anyway. If he really understood you, you wouldn't feel this way.
You fantasize about leaving. This ultimately sends you back to bed again, so you stay. You stay, you get a new therapist and a new wrong diagnosis and a new prescription that doesn't work.

And then Mother dies. Daddy had died ten years earlier; you hadn't been too set back by that. You remembered some of the good things about him, but mostly the less good, and you were busy with your career then. You cried, a little, at his funeral, though “grief” for someone you never felt close to is a funny word. It's more like
There goes the Daddy I never really had, so long, see you later, I'll think about something else now and keep wondering why I rage randomly when that time comes.
You felt worse for your mother's loss than for your own, but she's always been pretty stoic. She shed some tears when her husband died, a corner of a delicate cotton hanky's worth, but she knew how life worked, someone had to go first, and after Daddy died, Mother spent her last ten years traveling with her sister, visiting you and your own sister more often, and those years were good for her. You adored your mother. You'd never been close in the sense that you told her everything; in fact, you always gave her a carefully curated presentation of yourself and your life. She knew of no real problems, you believed. Even with your divorce, which to her was about the worst possible thing that could happen, in time you made her see that it was necessary, convinced her that I was just fine, bright and well adjusted, which you sort of seemed to believe, that your career was bringing you everything you wanted, and that when you met Victor (she was smitten with him from the first, blushing at his
colorful
stories and covering her mouth as if every last bit of her propriety would escape if she laughed too hard) you really did have it all.

But your mother dying is different. It's too much not to have her in the world, information-sharing or not. She was nothing
if not steady. Why didn't you get any of that? Your father may have been opinionated, but he was still generally imperturbable. And Marjorie's not like you either. There's no history of hysteria in your family; why you? Just knowing Mother was in the world helped a little—that such steady kindness existed, somewhere. Does your daughter have some of that quality? Maybe. But a mom's a mom. A daughter never stops needing a mom. That you are also someone's mom is not a thought that follows. This is about you.

A few days after the funeral, before heading back east, you go to her grave for one last good-bye. You sit down on the yet-unsettled soil, pull a couple weeds from the edge; time passes, you don't know how much, but at some point you find yourself ripping the grass from the earth, hoping to pull her out. Back home you cry for about a month straight, spend most of the following month in bed. Again.

—I think we should have more scenes together.

—I've written some short stories about us before. I also might write a memoir someday. I didn't want to overlap too much.

—Some people might think
this
is a memoir.

—It's so
not
a memoir.

—It's not
so
not a memoir, Betsy. It's
mostly
not a memoir.

—It is in no way a memoir, Mom.

—Okay, so especially if it's not a memoir, couldn't we just do our own thing here?

—I did just whale off into the sunset.

—Right. So we could do anything together, couldn't we?

—I took us on a houseboat ride a few chapters back.

—That was a bleak tale.

—Okay, well, what would you like us to do, Mom?

—I don't have any particular ideas.

—I've always wanted to time-travel. I'd like to go to 1961. I want to see what life was like when I got here.

—Uch. I don't think I want to go there again.

—I do.

—Why would you want to go to difficult times?

—I just want to go to interesting times.

—I want to go to times that don't hurt.