Her: A Memoir (25 page)

Would this worst thing ever end?

On my dash out of D’s apartment to the emergency room, I’d forgotten to close the computer, exposing my search for Zyprexa overdose instructions. D came home late that night to find the empty pill bottle tipped over on the floor next to the computer. He sat down calmly and called all of the hospitals in Brooklyn and New England until he located me, at 2 a.m. I woke in the early morning from my Zyprexa hangover, D standing at my bedside rightfully glowering down at me. He stood, hands in his pockets, next to the guard they’d assigned to my cubicle to make sure I didn’t try to run. D was still wearing his early-winter navy wool overcoat with the smooth wood buttons. He’d wrapped his favorite yellow cashmere scarf around his neck and it hung in a blazing drape over his collar and down onto his chest. He was tall and handsome. I was certain he hated me. He didn’t. He went on loving me in his own way for years. He loved me until I was no longer sick, neither of us knowing what to do with a sane me.

“I love you,” I said, and lifted my hand to my mouth and wiped. Charcoal smudged the back of it. My light blue paper hospital gown was specked with vomit and tears. I was drowsy and not in complete control of my speech. My unsteady heart was unforgivably on the sleeve of my flimsy hospital dressings. D and I hadn’t even weathered a flu yet. I was certain this health emergency would be our end.

“I love you too, C.” He brushed the side of my face with his fingertips, tenderly, paying no mind to my absolute filth. “But,” he conceded, “you’re not coming back into my apartment like this.” He’d spent months making his home into a place where I’d be safe from my own ideation. I’d just defiled that. “I can’t have you at home anymore, not without help,” D worried. “You need to be someplace with professionals, doctors who know what they’re doing. I’m a writer, for Christ’s sake.”

“I don’t want to be locked up.” I pouted. “I have nowhere to go, D. Please?”

“I can’t risk another episode like this.” He pulled the thin hospital blanket up over my shoulders, tucking me in. “You might not make it next time. Losing you would be maddening. I can’t risk it.”

“Fine, then. I’ll figure it out.” I turned away from him and stared at the hospital equipment on the wall. D hadn’t slept all night and was near tears. I pushed him further. “If I can’t stay with you, would you mind moving my car? I’m parked in a tow zone. I don’t want to get a ticket. The keys are in my purse.”

*   *   *

I was discharged from the emergency room late in the morning and though D kindly escorted me to my committal, I’d made the choice to be hospitalized. I had ideas about a particular hospital this time. Marilyn Monroe and Robert Lowell had gone there for treatment, for exhaustion and for clinical depression. Payne Whitney is a sprawling, idyllic campus scattered with mortared stone buildings that look like castles. I imagined therapists wearing herringbone suits with elbow patches, rushing in and out of the residences, holding patients’ charts. I pictured the interior of the hospital as highly and regally decorated with floral wallpaper and gilt wood settees. I was right about the look of the campus, for the most part. But the offices are staffed by workers slumped over desks piled high with paperwork. The decor is Victorian and the furniture is a mix of richly colored wine and paisley fabrics. Romantic landscape paintings and realist portraits of the founding doctors of the hospital hang in the foyer. The ward, in contrast, is stark. The floors are linoleum tiled for easy body-fluid cleanup; the place is lit entirely with fluorescent track lights with flickering, dim bulbs.

With D alongside me, the doctors and nurses kept asking if I’d like my father to be informed of my treatment plan. I corrected them at first but grew tired of explaining to new staff members, who observed D weeping like a frightened parent in the waiting room. “I don’t think my dad needs any more information.” The admitting doctor pressed a stethoscope onto my bare chest. “I think he’s had enough.”

*   *   *

There were enough of us at Payne Whitney then that I don’t remember the bearded lady’s name. She wore a knit brown hat and cargo jeans. I looked at her cap and thought about the rebellious brain beneath it. She sprouted opposing personalities. Her beard grew in black wooly wisps; she didn’t fuss over it, but stroked it in group therapy the same way my male colleagues had stroked their beards in our art department faculty meetings.

The common room at Payne Whitney was also the group therapy room, the arts and crafts room, and the room used for containing us whenever they hauled a new, resisting patient into the unit by force. They’d signal us in by blowing a whistle and usher us inside single file. We’d wait in a confused mass of medication-induced twitching, nervous chatter, and, in the case of the youngest patient on the ward, uncontrollable skin picking.

Sleeping through the night is difficult in a mental hospital. Fifteen minutes after lights-out, there is bed check. Nurses go from room to room to observe patients while they’re sleeping, to make certain they’ve not gotten up and tried to hang themselves, or stolen a spork from the cafeteria, fashioning it, while they should be dreaming, into a shiv. Doors are left open a crack, tapped lightly, and patients are viewed. Sometimes there is a small square window at the top of the doors covered with a thin curtain. The curtains on most of the doors at Payne Whitney were light blue and strung up with thin silver hooks that resembled fishing line. The nurses slid the curtains open and observed. My door was curtainless and cracked; it creaked open. I anticipated the noise; lying on my side, I stared through the semidarkness of the room at the opening door. The night nurse looked in. She closed one of her eyes, as if she were staring at a distant planet through a telescope or glimpsing me through a peephole. She took pity through her open eye.

“I’m awake,” I said to my peering nurse. “I need more meds.”

“It’s not time,” she said. “Meds are taken at seven a.m., you know that.” The door whined closed, as closed as was allowed.

The door opened, again. “I’m still awake,” I said.

The nurse came into my room and sat on my bed. I was lucky. I was one of the few patients who didn’t have a roommate. “See yourself on a beach listening to the waves break,” she said. “Rest. Feel the sand beneath you, holding the weight of your head.” I closed my eyes. I thought of Cara full of formaldehyde. My fluttering lids and medication-puffy face didn’t just resemble hers. They
were
hers. It’s like the adult moment when you understand that you’ve turned into your own mother or father, except it’s psychotic. “If that doesn’t work, take this.” The nurse handed me an orange pill.

“Why did she have to die?” I asked.

“God always takes the good ones,” she said blankly, as if she’d practiced it. “Now, try to sleep.”

I imagined again that I was Cara in my Payne Whitney bed. I took my hands and held them out in front of my face. My bitten-down fingernails were painted red and they were Cara’s hands, my twin hands. I tried to change the visual; I saw myself as a skinny tiger stalking through a jungle full of poachers. They’d need a blow dart to take me down.

Fifteen minutes passed.

The nurse peeked at me through the slit of the open door, careful.

“I’m awake,” I said.

“Still?”

“Please?” I sat up. “I need something more, another pill.” I was wearing the brand-new pajamas that my mother brought me during her day visit: black yoga pants and a red T-shirt, both soft from washing and perfumed with fabric softener.

“Let me make a call.” The nurse came back with a paper cup with a couple of Benadryls inside. “You can’t have anything more than this.” She shook the pills from the cup out into my hand.

“Thanks.” I took the pills without water. I started to cry, sorry for myself. “Will I ever get better?”

“I can’t say I know that,” she said. The nurse put her arms around my shoulders and rocked me.

*   *   *

On my third day on the ward I was alerted that Dr. Otto Kernberg had taken an interest in my case. He’d devoted his life’s work to defining and discovering borderline personality disorder, the illness Cara had been diagnosed with while at The Meadows. Kernberg wanted to meet with me to assess my condition.

A young medical student, a woman who wore a tight pencil skirt and matching pumps and wore her long black hair knotted into a bun at the base of her neck, delivered the news with a hushed voice. She told me of Kernberg in such a way that I was to know that what I’d just received was near an invitation from God himself and I must accept. She took great pains in explaining why I ought to meet with Kernberg and consider staying at the hospital indefinitely to remain in his care.

I asked if I’d be allowed to leave the hospital and go outdoors for the visit and was told that there was a short walk across campus to Kernberg’s office. I accepted immediately.

*   *   *

I was no longer the witty professor who sparred with students over composition and photo theory, or the artist full of fire and cutting compassionate vision. I wasn’t the loyal friend, loving daughter, or faithful wife I’d once thought myself. I was a fugitive and a schemer. I hadn’t been at Payne Whitney long enough to earn the privilege of walking the courtyard; meeting with Kernberg could help me make a break.

The young doctor and I walked the campus grounds to Kernberg’s office in a small stone building. I’d layered myself in two pairs of pants and wore three long-sleeved shirts—all I’d packed in my bag to Payne Whitney. I wore slip-on flats and my feet were bare inside of my shoes. I’d forgotten to take socks to the hospital, counting on tights to keep warm. My stockings were confiscated at check-in: they were too easy to fashion into a noose.

I looked for holes beneath the fence of the campus or a strait on the winding path where I could tear off. I could outrun my escort. I’d sized her up and determined that although I had asthma, she had been the kind of girl in high school who was still running the mile in gym class when the next period’s bell rang. I imagined she moved slowly so as not to ruin her hair. Her pumps stabbed like spikes into the wet ground.

And then it started to rain. A drizzle fell first and picked up quickly into hail. If I ran now, I thought, I’d freeze.

The resident pulled a collapsed umbrella from her shoulder bag and opened it over us. “Hurry in,” she insisted. “You’ll catch your death in this wet and cold. You’re too thin for pneumonia.”

I hadn’t the courage to flee. I realized as I stood in the rain sharing the resident’s umbrella that I had expected to die, as surely as I expected that Cara would die. Having to live, I realized then, my feet wet and teeth chattering—that was the most unexpected and terrifying and impossible thing about surviving.

I know what you are thinking: I’m on thinning ice. You are always one step behind me.

You could fall in, too, and we’d freeze before taking in mouthfuls of cold water. We agree drowning is the best way to die: the bitter cold euphoria of what it is to stop floating. To sink and float, sink and float, and press against the ice until a thaw. A man would find us on an early spring swim, our identical bodies preserved by the cold. What a story he would tell about being tangled in identical limbs as he tried to do the backstroke. “And there were two of them!” he’d say. He’d bend ears into old age. We could be a litany of death. We could go on and on. Death would laugh and say: those who are born together die together. The man, years after the backstroke, would irrevocably ask into his late years, “What were those dear girls thinking?”

*   *   *

The medical student and I met Kernberg in his office. I sat in a green leather studded chair pulled up to the far end of a rectangular table. Kernberg sat at the opposite post. Medical residents, scribbling notes on yellow writing pads, filled three chairs on both sides of the table. Kernberg nodded and our session commenced. He appeared small in his high-back chair, and elderly, but he commanded attention with his heavy German accent and few words. He wanted to talk with me about my sister. He asked me to recall a time before her death that we’d acted unknowingly in the same way and to recall whether I’d acted in that same way since she’d been gone. He asked me to keep it simple: tasks first, then feelings.

I told him about the sinks in Arlington Cemetery.

We were only nine years old and touring D.C. with Mike. He took us to the tomb of the unknown soldier and had us salute. We walked the cemetery hills dotted with endless white tombstones, tablets that read
BORN
and
DIED
and
SERVED
and were as alike as the rigid military uniforms the men had worn and fought and died in. Mike walked ahead of us. I remember the quiet imposed by what I imagined to be the drama of battle. The silent cries of men before they’d become casualties were not far off; they were coming from the ground. I could hear the choppers and artillery fire. I was a girl of nine with a fierce imagination and a Marine Corps elementary school education. I knew how to raise a flag and I knew how to mourn our heroes.

Cara and I were tired from walking so we knelt on the ground to rest. I rooted my hands through the grass and pulled it out in bunches, a child’s reflex. Mike stopped and turned; he had an animal’s sense for our wrongdoings. I’d not only shown weakness by resting on my laurels during our remembrance march, I’d also desecrated his good name and our family name, the name he shared with our mother while we kept our father’s.

Mike yanked me up from the ground by one arm and held me dangling in the air. He held Cara by the other. I dropped my fist full of earth, the ripped strands of grass falling down onto the lawn below. “You’re in a place of honor,” he barked and then released me. “Go wash your hands.” He pushed us off toward the public bathroom.

We shoved our hands in our pockets and did as we were told. Once we’d gotten out of earshot we giggled. “I have to pee anyway,” Cara told me. “Don’t feel bad. These guys are too dead to notice.”

I went into the restroom first, while Cara stood outside and took a long drink at a water fountain. Inside there were dozens of orange doors parallel to dozens of sinks. I went into a stall at the far end of the restroom and then found a sink and soaped my hands. It was late afternoon on a weekday and the restroom was empty of anyone but me. Cara was still outside. I dried my hands with a paper towel and skipped out to find her. She was waiting by the door.