Dog Medicine (4 page)

A
PRIL
17, 1996

My mom stood in my doorway, and the sight of her was the only thing that made sense: her light-blue eyes, her small, industrious hands, her smell so familiar, like coffee, bed sheets, and perfume. She hugged me, squeezed tight, but I was too weak to return the gesture.

“How are you?” she said, holding me at the small of my back. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I need to lie down,” I said, turning away. I limped down the stairs to the bed. She put her purse on the floor and followed me.

“Can you tell me what happened?” she said, sitting on the edge of my mattress.

“Not really.” I got under the covers, still wearing only a towel. The overhead lights hurt my eyes so I kept them closed. “I'm just so, so tired.”

I was tired, but also terrified. I knew that something had happened, but all I could think about was that I did not know what I was going to do with my life. I'd be back in Ohio, in my parents' house, with no job, no boyfriend, no prospects, no friends, no future.

“Okay, honey,” she said. “You sleep.”

“Okay,” I said, noting a whisper of relief that I wasn't alone before falling into the fainting sleep.

When I awoke, my apartment smelled like coffee, something I didn't drink. I squinted and saw my mom trying to sponge-clean my bathroom as quietly as possible. When I shifted, she put down
the coffee and cleaning supplies and came to me. She sat on the mattress's edge, like she had so many times when I was a child, and she pushed the hair away from my face, behind my ear. With that small gesture, my chin quivered and tears came.

“You've been asleep for three hours,” she said. “I've already started packing your things. You need to go tell your boss you're leaving.” She gave me a smile and then turned back to work on the bathroom.

My mom is
always
smiling. She's only five feet, four inches tall but truly capable of pretty much any physical task. I've seen her rip out entire bushes with four-foot deep roots using only her pink-garden-gloved hands. I've seen her hack a snake in half with a hoe. I've watched her, for years, mow her own multi-acre lawn with a John Deere tractor mower—her long hair pushed inside a baseball cap. She's not afraid to get dirt under her fingernails, but she also likes to put on a dress and go to a party. Her brown hair has always been long, at least a few inches past her shoulders. She's got periwinkle-blue eyes and was the college homecoming queen at the football game at which my father caught the winning touchdown. She wears perfume almost daily, Estée Lauder's Knowing. That smell, to me, is unconditional love. And even though things were moving fast, I knew that if I followed her simple directions, she would take care of me. Things might even be okay.

The thing was, this was 1996. Mental illness wasn't much talked about then. My parents had no idea what major clinical depression was, nor did I. Bad days? Sure. In a rough patch? Of course. But something medically wrong? We were going to have to find our way to that diagnosis by letting the blackness come way, way too close to our doorstep.

With my mother's help, I managed to get up and get dressed. I took a cab to SoHo to tell my boss I was quitting. I felt like I was walking on rubber bands, but I made it. It was 3 p.m. when I wandered quietly into the office after missing a day and a half of work.
My boss greeted me with a glance that read “Where on earth have you been?” I tried to calmly explain that I was quitting, but instead I burst into hysterical sobs saying, “Something's happened. I need to leave. I have to go. I'm leaving New York.”

He had no idea what to say except, “Okay. Calm down.” I left ten minutes later after a cursory explanation of my desk and files, apologizing through tears.

I rode the subway back uptown. I took the train because hailing a cab seemed too difficult a task. Again, I imagined that every subway passenger found my flaws repulsive: my pimples, my damaged hair and tear-streaked cheeks. Except this time, I decided to look up. I took an inventory of these people, knowing that I would not ride the subway again for a very long time. Everyone was frowning. Connection, that thing I was longing for so desperately, was forbidden in Manhattan's underground. It was as if we were all different ions bouncing around, too negatively charged to connect in any way. Long ago, my mind had turned the anonymity and disconnection of the subway inward. The thoughts chimed in:
Why would anyone want to look at you anyway? You're awful and stupid and your face is hideous.

The train screeched to a stop at 86th Street and I slid sideways through the barely opened doors. I kept my head down and walked back to my apartment wishing I could fall into the concrete and melt away. My thoughts veered dark again:
Just step
out into the street into the path of that yellow cab. It'll be so easy. You'll be knocked out and won't feel anything.
But I knew my mom was waiting for me.

When I rounded the corner onto 82nd Street, I saw that she had packed my entire apartment and somehow managed to drag my crappy furniture out to the sidewalk for passersby to take. Leave it to my small but formidable mother to figure out a way to pack an entire apartment, including a bunny in a cage, into a car in one short afternoon. I walked inside and there was nothing
left, just a few dust balls, wires, and the burnt pot in the kitchen. I wanted to sit down on that floor and weep. But my mom grabbed my hand, twisted the doorknob so it would lock, tossed the keys on the floor, and heaved the door shut.

We walked down the steps to her car, double-parked and already running. “Hop in,” she said, holding me by my waist. “We'll be home soon.”

I climbed into her car in slow motion. She reclined the passenger seat of the SUV and buckled me in as I cried. She didn't ask what was wrong. She just pushed my hair behind my ear in the way that made me feel like a child again, safe in bed with the trees and deer and moon outside my room to protect me. Tears dripped into my ears and down my neck as we drove out of Manhattan. I was asleep before we left the city.

Here's part of why my road to despair is confusing: most of the time, my parents showed up. If I had a crisis at school, my dad would drop his papers, leave work, and race to find me. That happened once in high school after I failed a French exam. After I called him in tears, my dad sped to my school, picked me up, and took me out for doughnuts and chocolate milk, reminding me that my grade on a dumb French test would not dictate my future. And when I was seventeen, after I lost my virginity and was convinced I was pregnant, my mom took me to the drugstore to buy the right kind of test after the cheaper test I'd bought yielded a positive result. Throughout the whole ordeal, she was calm, kind, and understanding. I remember her holding my hand.

These were, by many measures, phenomenal parents. So why hadn't they helped when it came to the violent fights between their children? I still don't know the answer to this question. I have many theories, but the fact is that even the most wonderful, caring, kind, well-meaning parents can make mistakes. Theirs was a mistake of inattention. It was a crime of omission. I guess they just didn't know how.

 • • • 

At four days old, a puppy is still in complete darkness. His eyes haven't opened, his range of movement is small, his only goal warmth and food. He fights his siblings to get to his mother's belly and then follows his nose to an unoccupied teat. When he finds it, he pulls with all his might, yanking and clawing in an effort to stimulate milk. His mama's nipples are reddened, stretched to ten times their normal size, swollen, and full. But she knows that her puppies need her. They need endless love and care from their mother, and they bark and bite and scratch her until they exhaust themselves. Of course the mother tolerates almost all of it. She'll lie with her eyes closed, her vulnerable abdomen exposed, breathing fast and hard but keeping perfectly still so her fragile little babies can get what they need to grow up and survive in the world. Much of it is instinct; the rest is pure love.

1984

As a child, I talked to trees. I had a best-friend tree, a century-old beech that I'd named “Alice.” If you'd asked me when I was eight, I would've told you that Alice was like my great-grandma. She loved me most of all. She wanted me to visit every day. She talked to me kindly. She left me presents: five happy ladybugs, a monarch circling her trunk. She told me not to worry, that everything would be okay.

I spent whole days wandering alone through the farmland near our house. I'd pack a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a paper bag, then cut through the Killians' yard across the street and slip under the stretched-out barbed-wire fence. Once I got under that fence, there was nothing but cornfields, forests, farmland, and safety.

Just past the first cornfield to the right, tucked away as if forgotten, sat Lehman's Pond, a tiny body of water brimming with wildlife: frogs, fish, snakes, birds, snails, bugs. There was an old abandoned barn there, or maybe it was a field worker's house. It sat nearly over the pond, stood two stories tall, though one whole wall had fallen off exposing the rotting stairway and flimsy construction. Parts of the wood were still painted red and white. I could sit in the barn with my feet dangling off the rotting floor and my toes would touch the pond's water. For hours I would read, nap, skip rocks, or catch frogs.

Next to Lehman's Pond lived a grove of tall pine trees planted in four rows. Those trees, at least fifty years old, created this magical
outdoor room with branches for a ceiling and a pine needle carpet that muted all the sounds of the forest. If I sat there long enough, quiet enough, I could hear nothing—and everything. I could hear a bird landing on a branch. I could hear a leaf fall to the ground. A hummingbird passing through sounded like the turn of a speeding bicycle wheel.

Once, after sitting for some time, I heard the hoof-fall crackle of a mama deer wandering through with her fawn. When she noticed me, she froze, a dark black eye sparkling. She led her fawn around me, not ten feet from my scabby knees, toward the pond for a sip of water. Her fawn's legs were impossibly thin, the white spots on his back still prominent. His little tail flitted to attention. His hooves were barely the size of a tube of Chapstick. He watched me warily as he crossed the pine grove. Then, in the clearing, he stopped. We locked eyes for what seemed like an eternity. Something passed between us. Something that I decided was magical. I believed then that I could talk to him. He understood me. Animals understood me. The thought was enormously comforting. I had an ally. The fawn turned and caught up with his mama, and they jumped into the rows of corn and out of sight.

I wasn't yet ten years old, and I felt so connected to the land, to the trees, to the animals passing by. I considered myself one of them—part of nature's tribe, the people of the woods, the birds, the frogs, the moon, the deer, the owls, our family dog. They were my companions, my reliable source of solace.

In the winter, there was no one to play with on quiet weekends but Alice. When it was too cold to go out and be with her, I worried. One particularly frigid winter afternoon, I watched Alice swaying in the icy blast of a snowstorm. I imagined what it would be like to have my fingers exposed, fifty feet high, all winter long. Such an existence would be too awful; I needed to do something.

I pulled two of my baby blankets out of my closet and went to the garage and pulled on my snow boots. Outside I had to blink
to keep my eyelashes from sticking with freeze. I struggled with the blankets but managed to snag the fabric on her bark and walk around her trunk. I tied two corners of the blankets together then safety-pinned the other side. She looked like she was wearing a too-small apron, but I wrapped my arms around her anyway. “I hope this helps, Alice,” I whispered. “Spring will come soon.” I patted her and ran back inside.

For days, I paused in the dining room, watching her from inside the house, her blankets soon crusted with ice. While I huddled under several layers of blankets at night, I feared that the sound of the wind or the crackling of branches was the beginning of Alice's demise. If she fell, she wouldn't crush our house, but the tips of her branches might graze the windows, as if to try to grasp us, to ask us to save her, even though she knew there was nothing we could do as she fell to her death.

W
INTERS
1994
AND
1995

If my conflicted relationship with my brother cracked the foundation of my self-worth, my New York boyfriend, Will, was the final invasion of termites that left the whole structure condemned. I met him at an apartment party when I was a junior in college. He was a senior with a goatee and a long brown ponytail: not my type at all. I was into extra-handsome bad boys, rugged-looking men who didn't talk much and would take me home and have their way with me. Aloof men were good. Men who blew off their girlfriends for fraternity brothers were no problem for me. Men who wanted sex and lots of it but then ignored me in the cafeteria were fine. Men were men; I expected desertion and mistreatment.

At this party, Will sat next to me as a group of about six of us played poker. His voice was sexy, deep, and resounding, but I wasn't into the sensitive ponytail look. Which is why it was odd when I leaned my elbow on his leg to grab a card from the table and felt an electric connection. We looked at each other; we'd both felt the jolt.

A few days later I ran into Will at the bookstore. I didn't recognize him in the sobering light of day. He was skinny, six feet tall, and probably weighed less than me. His pants practically fell off when he stood up to say hello.

“Hey, Julie. I've been looking for you. Want to go to the Philander's Phling with me?”

I laughed, sure he was joking. Who invites a girl to a dance in college? The look on his face told me this was no joke, and I was an asshole.

“Oh!” I said. “Uh, okay.”

“Great,” he said. “I'll meet you outside of Peirce Hall at 9 p.m. sharp. Saturday. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, walking away. I waved, cursing myself for not thinking of a quick excuse.

Philander Chase was the founder of Kenyon College. His namesake party was an annual dance held in an effort to beat the February (Phebruary) blahs. Dorks and dweebs made plans to go to Philander's Phling. Cool kids showed up half wasted and underdressed. I wanted to identify in the latter camp, but I couldn't be rude. So I put on an old strapless black dress with a ruffle around the knee that I'd worn to countless dances in high school and showed up at 9 p.m., shivering in high heels and panty hose in the dark of an Ohio winter night.

My friends thought it was good that I was branching out. They were tired of me pining for my ex-boyfriend, Brian, the boy I'd dated from the first month of my freshman year on and off through my junior year. I loved him in that first-love kind of way, the desperate, once-in-a-lifetime bliss of falling for someone for the very first time. But as far as my friends were concerned, Brian had treated me with such disrespect that they could not make sense of why I would pine for him. Our relationship was passionate and dysfunctional. We exchanged handwritten letters with tearstains blurring the words. He was a beautiful boy: green eyes with straight dark hair, a state champion runner, six feet tall with shoulders twice as wide as mine. His legs were long and lean, and his attention to me was inconsistent and intoxicating. There were cheating scandals both during our relationship and after we'd broken up. We'd see each other at a party and fall into bed again, just for a night. I'd pray that in the morning he would confess his undying love, say our breakup was the biggest regret of his life. But in the harsh light of day, he'd say, “You should probably just go.”

I couldn't get enough of Brian's bad-love adrenaline, and at
the time I didn't question why. Not only did I not question unhealthy love, I sought it out. I wasn't about to turn around and start dating Will, the sensitive, guitar-playing ponytail guy.

I still have a picture of Will and me that night at Philander's Phling. There was a photographer walking around the dance taking pictures of each couple. In ours, Will is standing behind me, his arms around my waist. We look as if we're mid-step, leaning into the camera. My first thought when I saw the picture was that my face looked fat. But my second reaction was that I looked happy—genuinely, no fuss, happy.

After the dance we went back to my dorm room. I turned on my Tori Amos CD and on came that song that goes, “God, sometimes you just don't come through. Do you need a woman to look after you?” He held my waist firmly, pressing his hips into mine, then he slowly leaned into me. Something happened when our lips touched. It was like white light. A thunderclap. I remember thinking that this must be what they mean when they say a first kiss can be like fireworks
.
That was it. I was a goner.

We started spending every spare moment together. We'd make out and talk, and do everything but have sex. I told myself that I would not embark upon another dysfunctional sex-driven relationship. As if I were protecting something sacred, and finally trying to treat myself well, I decided to send him home just about every night at 2 or 3 a.m. I liked having him in my room, but I also liked when he was gone. This kind of romance felt healthy.

He played guitar and would come over to my dorm room plucking melodies while we talked about our families and childhoods. He told me he'd never met anyone like me. He said he felt safe around me. It had never occurred to me that men could feel unsafe. The men in my life never seemed to be in need of protection. His vulnerability struck me as enlightened and beautiful and rare.

Will was also the first man to make an effort to understand me sexually. He identified the massive mental hurdles between me
and orgasm. He worked and worked until he could satisfy me. I told my girlfriends about him, said that I'd never had more orgasms with a man. They listened, mouths agape as I told them that he whispered crazy things to me in my dorm room late at night. “You are beautiful. I love you. I want you to come for me. Now I want you to come again.” It was an epic, best-sex-ever love affair that I wanted to continue in Manhattan. We were two wounded birds who would take flight together. Our romance quickly became us against the world. We decided that just about everyone else was stupid and mean and unenlightened. The only way for us to survive would be to stick together.

When he graduated one year before me, I bought a special dress for his graduation and posed in all the pictures with him in his cap and gown. We stayed up half the night before he left for Manhattan and talked about how, while I completed my senior year, he would spend the time preparing the city for us, getting ready for our lives together there. I imagined us going to concerts: Wilco and Paul Weller and all the unsigned singer-songwriters down at the Ludlow Street Bar & Grill. I wanted to help his band book gigs, move equipment, gather fans. I would be the one in front starting the mosh pit and then stepping aside as the crowd got wild. I imagined going out drinking with our friends and sneaking away to make out with Will in dark corners before racing home to one of our apartments for loud, urgent, wildly satisfying sex. I imagined us meandering tree-lined streets in the morning, lounging on a blanket in Central Park, eating hot bagels, rehydrating with enormous bottles of water, our limbs intertwined, getting each other off under makeshift picnic blankets because the worst fate ever would be for us to be forced to keep our hands off of each other.

But within mere hours of my arrival in New York, I sensed a distance. I planned to stay with Will and his roommate in their tiny Hell's Kitchen apartment for a few weeks while Leah and I
looked for our own place. I envisioned Will, me, and his roommate, Jeff, having pizza on the floor of their barely furnished apartment, Jeff thankful for a female touch. Instead Jeff asked me, “You're going to be here how long?” before ignoring me in protest, sighing heavily when he was forced to maneuver through the narrow hallway past my stuff. Will apologized to him, said, “Wasn't my idea. Fucking sucks.” I felt a betrayal that was softened by my general understanding of men—that men don't like women unless women do things for them.

So one day while Will was at work, I trudged a few blocks carrying two enormous bags of his dirty laundry and, like a new and dutiful wife, laundered all of his clothes. It wasn't until I hauled the bags back to his apartment that I realized some of the clothes were still mildly damp. I folded them anyway, and when he came home from work to several neat piles of clean clothes on his bed, he didn't smile. He asked me why I'd done it. And he flatly told me that he didn't think of me as the kind of woman who would do chores for her man. I wasn't, of course, that kind of woman. I was worse: weak and terrified, a suburban girl dropped in the big city, not an ounce of self-confidence to her name. I apologized, saying something like, “Sorry. Just trying to help. Make up for crashing at your guys' place.”

“Whatever,” he replied, kissing the top of my head. “No big deal.” When he went to his bed, he touched one of the piles and looked at me, eyes tight. “You know these are still kind of wet, right?”

“Shit,” I said. I did know. I just didn't want him to notice. I don't know what I wanted. I wanted him to be gentle with me, the way he was in Ohio. New York seemed to have hardened him and weakened me. I wanted to cry and apologize and ask for his forgiveness, even though I had no idea what I needed forgiveness for. I felt adrift without his approval, his love.

A few weeks and many arguments later, I found out through a woman named Jane that Will had been cheating on me. Jane worked as the receptionist for my roommate Leah's publishing
house. She was a pretty, perky brunette who always wore bright-red lipstick. We started chatting one afternoon before she knew I was Will's girlfriend. Turns out she was dating the lead singer in Will's band. Will had excluded me from all band activities, so we hadn't met yet. Jane was laughing about how all the guys in her boyfriend's band were sluts.

“Oh, yeah?” I asked. “Those guys mess around a lot?”

“Oh, my gawd,” she said, her Staten Island accent curling the end of every word. “You have no idea.”

“Really?”

“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “The guitar player? Will? Won't leave me and my friends alone. He asks me all the time, ‘Hook me up with a hot blonde.' Once,” she paused and put her hand up in a way that suggested I needed to prepare myself, “I walked into Jon's apartment and saw Will
naked
, running back into Jon's bedroom where some skank was laughing and waiting for him. By the way, he apparently has a girlfriend who lives in like Idaho or something.
And
he has a nonexistent flat ass.”

She was right. He had no ass.

I wandered away mid-conversation. I only remember my stomach doing that awful acidic drop. I took the elevator down and walked out into the street, headed up to Tower Records and it was there that I began to cry. I leaned on the window, my clammy forehead resting on a ten-foot-tall poster of Tupac. How could I be such a fool? How could Will do this? It was supposed to be us against the world.

I confronted Will. Initially, he weakly denied any infidelity. Then he defended himself fiercely, calling me crazy and overly sensitive, calling Jane a liar. Soon, we were fighting terribly about the truth of these rumors, about the truth of everything that had ever gone on between us. We would break up, then reunite, and break up again. Sometimes when I was with him, I found myself clearly thinking, “I don't want to be with this man.” This should've meant
that I could walk away. But nothing surpassed my need for Will's approval. Nothing. It was a desperate grab, something I did not know how to control.

I remember several dramatic, sob-strewn scenes in restaurants, on sidewalks, and in our respective apartments. Once, a bartender asked us to go outside because we were fighting so loudly that we were disturbing other patrons. I pined for months, unable to think of much else. I looked for him everywhere, and the fact that I pretty much never had a chance of accidentally running into him in Manhattan left me feeling stranded, alone on an island of millions.

Then he would show up at my doorstep at 3 a.m., like a miracle, several beers in, and we'd fall into each other's arms. We'd have sex, wonder aloud why we were not together, and pledge our undying love. Then in the morning the flaws would re-emerge, the hurts resurface, the arguments rewind, and we'd call it all off again. I'd be crushed. Devastated. Imagining suicide off the roof of my building. Too torn apart, I knew, for my sorrow to be just about the demise of our romance.