Lying (3 page)

When I woke up my father was bending over me and then a doctor came, a guest of the hotel. He did not seem impressed. “Seizure,” he pronounced. “Rather common in young ones,” and then he left.

I can dimly recall seeing my father’s face in the background of the hotel room, pale and shocked. My mother, as it turns out, missed that first seizure. She had fallen into one of her restless sleeps, a sleep so fractured and tentative she always had a veil of exhaustion in her glittery eyes. Sometime during the night my father must have told her; he must have woken her and said, “She’s had a seizure,” and so I waited, but she never appeared to nurse me that night, and this is a grudge I still hold.

We flew back to Boston the next day. How did I feel? Shrinks have been asking me that question for decades now, as though the origin of whatever mental miseries I might have are linked to that first fall down. How did I feel, the shrinks ask, and offer me some Dilantin; you must be depressed, the shrinks say, and proffer me some Prozac. How did I feel? I’ll tell you. We were in a plane, going backward. Before, I had watched the tawny sun lionize the sky, and now, through the Boeing’s bubble windows, I watched it set; I watched it soil the sky and burn up a bird and take every cloud and taint it. We zoomed through the air, held up by nothing but hope, and at any moment, I knew, we could crash.

Also, my head throbbed. Someone was playing the piano in my head, and the wooden notes kept bonging my brain.

I puked in a bag and that gave me some relief.

My mother must have heard me puking, and said, from the seat in front of me, “Just give the waste to the stewardess, Lauren.”

We landed in the dark. We took a taxi home in the dark.
That night, finally, she came to me. She stood over me in my bed for a while, and she seemed entranced. Or maybe it was I who was entranced. No, I think it was her, actually. She stood over me, her eyes roving me from head to foot—this daughter of hers, this grand mal, this big badness—and then, finally, she touched my head like it was hot.

•  •  •

In Beth Israel Hospital, where my mother took me the next day, I sat in a small room and drew clocks, and houses, and put together red cubes to make red-and-white patterns. “What happened?” my pediatrician, Dr. Patterson, asked.

“I smelled something funny,” I said. “I remember, before I fell, I smelled a funny thing.”

“What was it?” he said.

I searched for the words. Now I know that, prior to seizures, in states called auras, people frequently smell strange things. I’ve been in seizure support groups and heard the wackiest olfactory tales, the woman who was hounded by the smell of charred steak, another by the odor of a past lover’s shampoo. The smells live, and though doctors claim they are purely physiological phenomena, without mental meaning, I cannot help but think the smells have significance; we smell what we want, or cannot allow ourselves to want; we smell our own stink, we smell our sin, we smell the tang of an unspoken hope.

“Lobster,” I said.

“You smelled lobster,” the doctor repeated, writing it down.

“Lobster?” my mother said. She raised an eyebrow. She was holding her square purse to her chest.

“Yes,” I said. “I smelled the lobster. I smelled salty lobster and butter.”

“Lobster and butter, what a meal that would’ve been,” my mother said.

The doctor looked up, confused. “Excuse me?” he said.

I giggled.

“And the green gunk too, I smelled that.”

“That’s enough, Lauren,” my mother said. “You’re losing your credibility.”

But she had a small smile on her face, and, well, just for the sake of the story let’s say she even licked her lips a little bit, and that was the first time I realized how, through illness, I might be able to give her good food.

•  •  •

There were a lot of tests—the Wada Test, the Ray Figure Drawing Test, the Wechsler Memory Scales Test, the Digit Span Test. I took an IQ test, where, according to my mother, I scored in the genius range, but we all know she never told the truth. I had an electroencephalogram, little suckers hooked up to my head and my brain waves rolling out of a machine like a receipt from a cash register. Ribbons and ribbons of brain waves, and later, when the doctor showed them to us, we could see, my mother and I, how in some places the waves were smooth, but in others, spiky as stiletto heels, and in still others, a series of rapid round
u
’s, like this—
UUUUUUUUUU
—a language gone awry.

“She has epilepsy,” I heard her whisper to someone on the phone, Nance, maybe, or Emma. “She has epilepsy, but so did van Gogh, you know.”

She asked for a clipping of my brain waves and took them home, and a change came over her. She seemed to almost like the illness. She seemed disgusted, which I would have expected, but then a moment later, I saw her looking at me with wishes in her eyes, as though she, too, might like to drop and thrash, to break the brittle caul of cleanliness and artifice.

“Will, Lauren,” she said to me, “use your will to get you out of this.” She practiced the piano and, even with my seizures, took me skating so I could be a skating star. One morning, though, before we dressed to go out to the pond, I saw her tracing my brain’s undulations, those sleepy dips, those troughs filled with earth and snooze, sex and spasm, and I’d say she smiled then.

“You,” she said to me, all sternness, “need to learn to pull yourself together.”

But she touched my head gently now, like it was hot, like it was cold, like it was warm, like it was whatever she was not, a wild and totally true world in there, a place she had forsaken for artifice, etiquette, marriage, mediocre love, and which I had returned to her; here, Mom; have my head.

•  •  •

She was right. A lot of famous people have had epilepsy. Take Dostoevski, for instance. He had a serious case of it. Saint Paul probably had epilepsy, and from its craziness he crafted a world religion. Van Gogh, of course, had epilepsy,
which may be why he is the van Gogh we know, a painter of tilted stars, low-hanging moons, fields full of flowers and blue vortexes that take all sensible shape away. If you look at a van Gogh painting, you might get a sense of what the world looks like as you go down. In the weeks that followed, it kept happening to me. I was a wrong girl, I flamencoed on the floor, feathers came out of my ears, and my body made music, made thunder and sleep, made Mozart, my hands curled into lobster claws.

Epilepsy shoots your memory to hell, so take what I say, or don’t. This I think I recall. One week after Barbados, after her failed music, the vodka, her empty eyes in the hotel room, I woke from a long seizure on the floor. Every muscle ached. There was blood in my mouth. I opened my eyes and saw her standing above me, staring at me, probably, for a long long time, as just a few days earlier, in the Basien dawn, I had stared at her. I had looked into that hotel room and seen how all her energy was really deadness; not me. I was a girl in motion. I was wrong and dark and full of smells. When a seizure rolled through me, it didn’t feel like mine; it felt like hers—her ramrod body sweetening into spasm. She gave it all to me, and I returned it all to her, this wild, rollicking, hopeful life, this Chuck Berry blast, all striving sunk to the bottom of the brain’s deep sea; crack a claw, Mom.

Rest with me when it’s over.

This, the gift I gave you.

How we held each other.

My mother believed that will, not love, was what made the world go round, and I agreed. I was a wrong girl but I had always worked hard at what I did. I owned a pair of skates, nubby tights, and a white muff made from real rabbit fur. I had gotten my ears pierced when I was only eight years old, and all dressed up in my skating outfit, I looked like a holiday.

Before and at first even after my seizures started, I skated at a pond. For years my mother had been buying me books about champions, the biographies of Dorothy Hamill and Estelle Drier. At home my shelves were stocked full of fame, and when it came to the ice, my mother thought I had potential.

Skating is a sport of bones and grace, a sport where you fly on water like a prophet but fall, sphincter first, on the solidest surface. It hurts and you have
to push yourself. You have to push yourself first to go out in the cold, and then to walk over a place where, right beneath, sharks and whales are waiting for you, and then to leap against your better judgment, when your whole self is longing just to nap. The place was called Dehaney’s Pond, and it was always beautiful in a winter way. Each December, January, February, reeds crackling like whiskers in the winter wind. “Spin,” she would shout, and I did it. The more it hurt, the better I was. “Leap now,” she would shout, “with your toe turned out,” and I did it, even when my lungs burned and my lips lost all their moisture; I did it until I went far away, far, far away to someplace silver, and beyond pain.

Will is what makes the world go round. If you want something, push, pull, shake and scrape until it forms. The same holds true for the soul. The soul is a pile of moist manure, and only by tilling and shoveling might you turn it into gold. The work was hard, hard! But the possibilities—limitless, a fairy-tale world where you could endlessly become.

I worked. For my whole life, in sickness and in health, I had worked at being bad and good and strong. I was my mother’s girl. Before the epilepsy came on hard, I skated, and I had my own private sports as well. “The Jews,” my mother liked to say proudly, “marched forty miles in the snow without shoes.” When I was very little, maybe six or seven, I had taken to marching around our yard, barefoot in the snow, for no other reason than it was just the way to live. Either you did it or you died.

Once, when marching, I had seen a cardinal. He was Chinese
red, and he kept staring at me. “Three steps more,” the cardinal had said, and so I went three steps more. That bird got in my blood and ordered me around. “Three steps more,” he said, and the next day four steps, and sometimes I longed to let the cardinal go, to open my heart and have him soar out, but I couldn’t. Instead I went three steps, then four, then five, all for fear and maybe a little love.

But after the epilepsy began, and then got worse, the skating stopped. This is how it happened. I had my first seizure in Barbados, my second one in our kitchen back in Boston. And then, the winter of my tenth year, I started to seize a few times a week or even once a day. Still, I did my glides and my bends, until the January morning, just at dawn, when my mother took me to the pond for practice. I clumped out over the ice in my skates, pushed off, and started my moves. I remember the day was warmish, with a little slick of sweat over the ice, and the reeds had thawed so their boggy smell came out. “Pivot and turn,” my mother shouted, and as I did, as I entered the thawing air, a memory suddenly came to me, a memory so clear and absolute it must have been engraved in the back rooms of my brain for a long time, and I was finding it just now, perfect and whole. A memory that was moving slowly even while I spun fast, even while I felt my legs get big, get bloated, and my hands—huge now—filled with helium.
Help me
, I thought, and that was when I recalled that a boy had once drowned in this pond in the summer, and I’d heard about how they’d dragged for the body, his limbs all swollen and soft.
Help me
, I thought, and the smell came, bad, like a sewer when it’s
open, and at the same time an exquisite sense of pleasure, of trumpet, I couldn’t breathe. I came down out of the sky. I think I came down fast, and a little chicken was running around, Chicken Little! Chicken Little!—and then the sky was falling on me as I sank below the surface of the pond and I saw the boy down there in the murk. “Help me,” I wanted to say, but in water there is no voice; there is no speed; there is just a terribly slow suck.

When I woke up, I was in the hospital, but I didn’t know that right away because my head hurt so much. “Did I drown?” I asked.

“No,” the nurse said. “But you’ve had another seizure.”

Apparently, then, the ice hadn’t broken.

I lay there for a while in the monstrous bed. The sheets were made of meringue; they crackled whenever I moved. I stopped moving. I closed my eyes. I knew, even before the doctor told us, that this was the worst seizure I’d had so far. “I didn’t die; I didn’t die; I didn’t die,” I kept saying to myself.

The doctor came into the room. It was Dr. Patterson, my pediatrician. I liked him, even though his stethoscope was always cold.

“Am I going to die?” I said to Dr. Patterson.

He came over to my bed. He looked down at me. Then he smiled, took out his stethoscope, and put it on my nose. “I don’t think so,” he said, listening to my nose. “I think you’ll be just fine.”

How could I believe that, though, when Chicken Little, who was supposed to be a silly chicken all in a dither, was
really right? I was learning, now, that at any minute I could go in a dangerous way. I was not a girl at all, but a marionette, and some huge hand—my mother’s hand?—held me up, and for a reason I absolutely could not predict, that hand might let the strings go slack, oh, God.

My mother came into the room. Dr. Patterson said to her, “Just a little sprain in the wrist, a few bruises. But this seizure was more serious than the others. I can’t emphasize enough how important the phenobarbital is going to be. She needs a very high dose, six hundred milligrams.”

My mother nodded, but she didn’t like the idea of drugs at all.

“And,” Dr. Patterson said, “I think, as we discussed before, she should go to Saint Christopher’s for a stint.”

They had told me about Saint Christopher’s. It was a special school in Topeka, Kansas. The doctors wanted me to go to Topeka, Kansas, where Dorothy and her little dog had danced off the earth and fallen into a land of lemon drops and witches. They wanted me to go and board there at the special school funded by the Epilepsy Society, so I could get a physical education, and learn to fall the right way, and not break my bones, and it would all take only a month.