Madness (21 page)

Next, I wander around the house, touching the furniture and walls. I have become so brave that I get the mail. When there are bills, I write the checks, feeling wild and a little dizzy. This way the lights will stay on, and the water, and the phone. I understand that if I complete my tasks, nothing will go wrong. The world is an orderly system of cause and effect. This is a wonder and an enormous relief.

The real things matter. They are the bones on which one hangs a life. I've never understood this before. Back then, I couldn't be bothered with dishes or meals or bills. When the madness had me in its teeth and thrashed me back and forth, I didn't even know what the real things were, or how to do them, or what they were for. Now I know: they keep the madness at bay. It sleeps quietly under the house, only occasionally grumbling in its sleep.

I only think about the here and now. When the memory of madness slides in by mistake, I empty my head of everything until it passes. Sometimes, a fly buzzes by. Sometimes, I see a neighbor. When he waves, I am stunned at having been seen. It takes me a minute, but I wave back. Then I go inside. That's enough of the world for today.

I cook an elaborate dinner, delighted with the organization of recipes, their one-step-at-a-time. The bewildering man comes home and pours himself a drink. He will drink all evening, because that is all he does. I am terrified of the drinking, of the bottle itself.

When he isn't there, I sit with my hands folded in my lap, holding completely still. If I hold still, I will not get up and get the bottle and start drinking, because if I start drinking I will not stop. And the madness will come roaring up through the floor.

I understand this because the people at treatment explained it,
and Dr. Lentz explained it further. It, too, is cause and effect:
if
I have a drink,
then
I will keep drinking. I know this to be true. I have plenty of evidence. And furthermore,
if
I am drinking,
then
my meds won't work.
Marya, if you want to make this work, you just can't drink. You need your medication to be effective. You need to get your life under control. If you keep drinking, neither of those things can happen. I can't help you if you won't help yourself.

My meds are helping. I have evidence of this as well. I have a house, toothpaste, food, a porch, and a porch swing. It is finally quiet, almost silent, in my mind. Dr. Lentz has explained that the madness is there, and will always be there. But it will keep sleeping, as long as I don't wake it up. I live in quiet terror, and try to put it from my mind.

I've called an uneasy truce: I've acknowledged that I have bipolar. I think I have accepted it. But really, what I've accepted is the medication. I tell myself that if I don't drink anymore, the illness will clear up, but as long as I'm at it, I might as well take the pills all the time, just to cover all my bases.

I have a strikingly simplistic understanding of what having bipolar means. I go by the just-like-diabetes theory—a mental illness is just like diabetes; it's something you have to take medication for, and
that's okay.
I never use the word
bipolar
outside of Dr. Lentz's office or the confines of my parents' homes. I'm not eager to mention a
mental illness,
either. It implies all the things I don't want to believe—that I'm hopeless, completely dysfunctional, totally divorced from reality, possibly dangerous. I know that's what a lot of people think when they hear the words
mentally ill.
Depression, that's one thing—lots of people have depression, and they're not crazy. Bipolar, schizophrenia—
that's
crazy.
That's
mental illness—the psychos, the nut cases, the incurably insane, the muttering bag ladies and bums, the freaks. So I take my meds, and don't accept the name for what I have.

I refuse to believe that I'm beyond help—and that's how I see mental illness. In truth, I'm not beyond help. But there also isn't a cure. And I don't want to believe that. I want to believe that if I do it right, if I do what they say, if I take the medication and don't drink, the madness will never bother me again. It will get tired of waiting around for an opportunity. It will go away.

When I wake up in the night drenched in sweat, dreaming of the old place, the reeling sun and neon lights, the leering people, the parties, the cop cars, the disappearing friends, and I fear that I've gone mad again, I get out of bed and move through the house like a thief, touching things, tapping the walls, until I am certain that I am here, that it's now, that I'm safe.

It's the end of the summer, and the world has come into focus. The blurred edges of things have sharpened. I take on solidity. I go down to the crawlspace under the house. Madness has vacated the premises. I know, now, that I am well. Lentz is wrong. The madness will never come again. I know it as surely as I know I am real.

Every evening, I go to my twelve-step meeting and mumble my name as we go around in a circle. While I sit in my little group, I rack my brain for something to say, but nothing comes. I think I will shatter if I speak. There will be pieces of me everywhere. I sit with my arms wrapped around my knees. I do this for three months. Then, one day, I say something, and everyone stares at me in shock, as if they hadn't been sure I could actually talk.

Fall comes. I brace myself for the blues, but the days pass and
they don't come. The meds are working. I'm sober. I'm going to be fine.

One evening, I watch a man from my meeting lie on the ground, staring up at the red and yellow leaves on the trees.

"I'm in a world of hurt," he says to the sky.

I fall in love with him with a thud. Not because he's in a world of hurt, but because he's lifted his face from the ground and caught me looking at him, and smiled. Because his face is kind. I look away, and look back. He's still looking at me. He sits up. "But I'm all right," he says "This will pass."

I'm in no shape to be in love. It's a terrible idea. I'm already engaged, for God's sake, and less than six months sober—the usual suggestion is that you stay out of relationships for a year. But for some reason, in whatever haphazard fashion, it works.

I break off the absurd engagement to the bar guy and move into an apartment by myself. It's not lost on me that the one-room studio is half the size of my one-time living room back in California. Gone are my silk curtains and my velvet couch and four-poster bed. Gone are the fancy job and the limitless credit cards. My room contains a mattress, a desk, and a chair. I eat with my plate on my knees, sitting on the edge of the bed. I write, the novel now starting to take shape as I finally have the discipline and clarity to work on it every day and the focus to write well. And I start seeing this man.

His name is Jeff. His wife just left him and his mother just died. He's been diagnosed with depression, and his meds aren't working yet. He's a complete disaster area. I walk around his house in wonder. There is a dining room table, but no chairs. Dust covers every surface, an inch thick. There is no food in the refrigerator. Every room in his house is painted a different, hideous color, the doing of his ex-wife, who apparently liked to paint. The basement is packed full of dozens of boxes of useless things, jars and shot glasses with obscure logos and coffee cups and crock pots and
ugly vases, the shelves on which the boxes sit sagging and covered with mold. It's the house of someone who hasn't been out of bed for months. In fits of energy, he has bought himself two midlife-crisis cars, three deluxe mattresses, and a set of copper pots and pans. He's trying to buy enough things to stave off the stifling depression he's under. It isn't working.

I stand in the doorway to his bedroom. He's in his suit, all the way under the covers, including his head. His dress shoes peek out. It's three o'clock in the afternoon.

"Hi," I say. The room is painted insane asylum green.

"Hi," comes a muffled voice.

"How was your day?"

"Not good," he says.

"Sorry to hear it." I lean against the door frame and jingle my keys. "Do you want to come out of there?"

"I'm being a walnut," he says. He sticks his nose out of the covers. "You could come get in."

"No thanks. I think you should get up and at least change your clothes. If you're going to be depressed, you shouldn't be wearing a suit. You should be in your pajamas."

This gets a muffled half laugh.

"Do you want me to go away?" I ask.

"No!"

"Then I'm going to make something to eat. And then you're getting out of bed and eating it. And then you can get back in bed if you want, but I'm going home."

"Don't go home!"

"If you don't get out of bed when I make dinner, I'm going home." I turn around and pick my way through the rubble and go into the kitchen and unpack the groceries I've brought.

A minute later he's standing in the doorway, his hair standing on end and his tie askew. He's taken off the shoes. "I'm out of bed," he says.

"Good. Chop carrots," I say.

"Now will you stay?" He sounds so small I want to fold him up and put him in a little box and keep him in my pocket.

"Sure," I say, and hand him a cutting board and a knife. Bewildered, he looks at them. "Carrots," I repeat.

"Oh," he says. "Right."

I have never been the sane one before. It is so nice I don't mind that he's in his own kind of madness. I know mad. I can handle mad. It's just a matter of feeding the mad thing, and getting it out of bed, and opening the curtains and letting in the light, and you do it over and over until the madness fades into the background and the person emerges again.

And since I seem so sane compared with how I've been all my life, I begin to believe I am. I do tell him I have bipolar, and jokingly say that he might want to think twice about getting involved with me. In fact, I give him a list of a hundred and one reasons not to date me, and
bipolar
is at the top of the list. I feel like I'm poisonous. So I give him my disclaimer, and hope for the best. But I also tell him it's all in the past.

He takes a leave of absence from work, and we fly to Florida for a month. We've been dating only a few months, and everyone thinks we're completely nuts. Lentz worries that it's yet another of my impulsive acts, a debacle waiting to happen. But it isn't.

In Florida, Jeff lies on the couch most of the time. I cook and write until he staggers up and needs to be fed. When he starts feeling better, we start going for drives. Soon, he's laughing, and I begin to find out who he is.

He's the kind of man who wouldn't have come near me with a ten-foot pole even a year ago. He has no time for flashy scenes. He wears green wool sweaters and sensible brown boots. There is no other word for him than
kind.
He's exactly who he says he is. He fascinates me. I watch him while he sleeps, wanting to take him apart and see how he's made. He snores like a freight train. He is
tangible, solid. He holds down the bed. With him here, the roof isn't always flying off. With him here, needing my presence, I understand for the first time what it means to be good to someone. It's the first time I have ever been unselfish in my life. He needs something I have, so I give it to him.

Falling in love happens so suddenly that it seems, all at once, that you have always been in love. We tumble into a life together just like that. We go from starry-eyed to angry to companionable in the space of a few weeks. In February, we go back to Minneapolis. His depression has lifted. In April, we buy an old Victorian near one of the city lakes. One Sunday, we're sitting at breakfast and decide to get married. So we do.

It's been a year since I got sober, more than a year since the madness. I have taken on shape and weight. I am visible. When I walk, my feet make a sound. I am twenty-eight years old and married. The man I have married is real, and he laughs easily and often, and he is so big that at night he makes a dent in the center of the bed and I roll into it and get squashed under him. I no longer float up and hover by the ceiling. I will stay. I whisper to myself,
Stay, stay, stay.

I open my eyes. I look through the window at the whitewashed, pale blue sky of early morning. The kind of light, like dusk, where you can hardly see another person. It is only a dark figure, its face obscured, shadowy and ethereal. The figure ties his tie. He thinks I am asleep. I watch him, an inky blot against the pale, thin dawn light. It's like spying. I am secret, here in my bed, the dogs curled and warm at my belly, snoozing. They have no interest in morning. Jeff turns, and I close my eyes. I breathe slowly, pretending to sleep. He bends over me and kisses my cheek lightly, so he won't wake me. He opens the bedroom door and closes it carefully. It clicks shut. Then silence pours into the empty room, like water filling a vase. The vase holds roses, their heads bent, dying a little. They, too, are only a dark stain on the light. The silence pours in like the tide filling in a tide pool. It pours in like blood, seeping thick and heavy—

Oh, for God's sake, knock it off.

But it's lovely, says the madness, protesting—

No. This morning is perfect. The white light, coming up now, is perfect. This morning I am well. Wait—I double-check. I feel around me in the bed. The dogs, under the covers, stir, then settle in again. One of them snores a quilt-muffled snore. I smile. The leaves outside the window are thick and green, and the dark, delicate branches touch and tap, like fingers, against the glass, against the light. The early light is so lovely I almost hold my breath. This morning is perfect. I am sane.

I kick back in the chair in Dr. Lentz's office, telling him how wonderful everything is.

"My life is perfect," I say. "It's incredible. Everything's different now. The writing's going well, Jeff is good, my friends are good, my family's great. I feel incredible. I'm totally alive. I'm crazy busy. We have people over all the time. The summer is wonderful. I'm happier than I've ever been."

"You're not doing too much?" he asks.