Playing House (5 page)

We sought couple’s counseling, but now, years later, I recall few of the specifics. There was a square office done in pleasing neutrals, abstract art on the walls. What I most recall was the counselor’s foot. It always had on it a very high heel that dangled halfway off, so her heel was in the raw, except for the nylons that netted it. She used all the standard phrases—
baggage
,
communication
,
childhood
,
repetition compulsion
. In her own way, I suppose, she was healing, as our joint dislike of both her and the process gave Benjamin and me something to bitch about together.

Given the givens, the fact that the rough ride of my marriage was not at all unusual, that many, if not most couples, could tell a story with the same general spine, even if the specifics of the structure were different—one would think that marriage counseling would have evolved into a state at least as high tech as your average PC. The numbers themselves suggest a national emergency. If, according to the latest census, about half of all American couples have children, and of those more than half divorce, then, well,
why get married at all?
It’s not a question asked with tongue in cheek. Everywhere one looks, in the animal world, that is, are ample examples of why marriage, the product of culture, is doomed in the nest of nature, where culture has no choice but to reside. Even the much-touted prairie vole, feted for its fierce lifelong monogamy, has recently been discovered to have illicit affairs, like so many other animal species probably in search of the dopamine high that comes with a fresh mate newly bedded.

It has been definitively established that monogamy, while good for safe sex, babies, and probably income, is not really the way of the naked natural world. Take, for instance, the phenomenon researchers call “the Coolidge effect.” Discovered in the 1950s, the Coolidge effect has had ample time to demonstrate its impressive reliability and validity, which is that when you drop a male rat into a cage with a receptive female rat, you see an initial frenzy of copulation. Then, progressively, the male tires of that particular female. Even without an apparent change in her receptivity, the male rat reaches a point where he has little libido left, and, eventually, he simply ignores the female. However, if you replace the original female with a new one, the male immediately revives and begins copulating again. You can repeat this process with fresh females until the rat nearly dies of exhaustion.

The rat’s renewed vigor does not reflect an increase in his well-being—although it will look (and perhaps temporarily feel to him) that way. The rat’s vigor comes from surges of a neurochemical called dopamine, which floods the reward circuitry of his primitive brain so that he gets the job done.

That seven-years-ago seven-year itch. The first bland stretch in my marriage. The itch that was not an itch, or even an ache; just numbness. Staring at my husband and seeing him as stone, or salt, the flattening out severe. Words dwindled down between us, and when I touched him, his skin felt less like flesh than wax.

We made it through that winter of winds and endless snow. Eventually spring came, an anemic tentative thing, the first crocuses a yellow so pale they seemed somehow vitamin deficient, but over time, the warm air found its way through. And then came a balmy night in late May, the sort of night when the windows are open and fresh air pours in by the jugful, and you would be happy if you weren’t so sad, because June, the month of roses, is right around the corner. I was in the kitchen washing a pot, moving the sponge round and round the pot’s curved contours, watching the bubbles froth up and wash away with the water running over my hands, mesmerized by the sight of these bubbles bubbling and then dissolving, over and over again, until, all of a sudden, in a second that changed my life forever, I heard a scream the likes of which I had never, ever heard before.

This was before we had children, so I knew the scream, clearly coming from the basement of the house, where my husband had his study, belonged to him. The scream was strangled in its sound but also blood curdling and continuous, the scream of a man in the grip of total terror, the scream making the man at once larger than life while stripping him to his primitive once-was essence, the scream for the mother even as it was the mother of all screams. I put down the pot and took the steps down to the cellar three at a time, but even so, I was going so slowly I could not get to the bottom fast enough, there were so many steps, not ten, like I’d thought, there were suddenly thousands upon thousands of steps unfolding accordion-like in front of me. The scream continued, as did the steps, on and on, for seconds, moments, months, years, yes,
years
went by before I finally hit the concrete ground and began making my way across the ocean of floor, towards the scream, towards the story behind the scream, another endless trip, crossing that expanse of dusty floor, like traveling to China on the slowest of slow boats, as the blood-curdling screams (for they were plural now, not a single desperate sound but a series of separate sounds, each one more terrible than the next) continued on for all those years and universes.

And then I reached my husband’s study door and flung it open. I had already decided in my mind what I would find, and this fixed decision only increased my shock at finding something so different than my vision. Prior to opening the study door, I’d assumed my husband was being murdered, for what else could cause such sounds of total terror? I’d assumed a murderer had snuck in through the basement window and was slowly, very slowly, slitting my husband’s throat so he died in terrible torture. I expected to find the murderer there and the wet red of blood, but as is often the case, my mind did not meet the moment at any point. I saw my husband standing there, screaming, a smashed test tube on the floor. The smoke was as creamy as it was noxious, but who cared? His entire body was on fire. Have you ever seen a person burn? A log burns from its inner heart, but a person burns from his outer edges. My husband was rimmed by flames dancing down his periphery, outlining him in leaping light, from head to toe, except his hair, which was engulfed, like he was wearing a top hat of swarming fire, a semitransparent Cat-in-the-Hat hat that showed his singular strands of hair as they were being incinerated. He had long hair at that time, long, fine, beautiful strawberry-blond locks that usually fell straight as rain to his shoulders but that were now all standing up like porcupine quills, offering themselves erect to the moving mouth of the fire.

What happened next is unclear. My husband says I tried to run away, but I know this is untrue. I know for sure there was this nanosecond moment of extreme existential distress when I was thinking a thought as long and complex as the Torah but that I could start and finish in a sliver of a second, and the thought went something like this:
Less than a moment ago I was a woman washing a pot, but now I am a woman watching her lover burn to death in a fire, and forever after this I will always be a woman who watched her lover burn to death in a fire. Of all the possible life narratives I could have, this, it turns out, will be mine, forever and ever, because the present, even as I am thinking this, is cementing into the past, and how odd, I never expected such a story to be mine, that I am a woman who once watched her husband burn to death in a fire, but it just goes to show, you never know what story, in the end, you’ll be stuck with
.

And then I recall dashing into the room, which was by now aflame in several spots, only one of those spots was the body of my husband. I remember grabbing him and trying to pull him out of his study, for there were very flammable chemicals stashed everywhere in this room and soon—at any moment—the whole house would surely explode into a fireball high in the warm night air; we would glow in our incineration, so
come now! Run now!
I recall trying to pull him out as he, with his bare hands, plunged them into the thicket of fire on his head and the fringes of fire on his body, squelching the flames with his bare hands, slamming his hands onto his body again and again, starving that fire of air, smashing the O out of it, and then, successful, racing back
into
the burning room and grabbing the fire extinguisher with his crisped hands, saying, “
Shit shit shit
,” as he fumbled for the plug you never think you’ll have to pull. He pulled it, and the extinguisher ejaculated hissing white foam that instantly quelled the impish, vicious, spreading fire, his entire study dusted down with a frozen smoking white. “Run now!” I screamed, and we ran; all the smoke detectors dancing and swiveling on the ceilings, shrieking their singular song over and over again, unable to calm down until I’d thrown open every window and we had watched the white ghosts of smoke take off into the night air, Caspers, each one, they lifted off and drifted up, up, at last out of reach, dispersing into particles of our past. My husband was alive.

I remember running to the freezer, then, and throwing all its contents at him: the frozen peas, pints of Ben and Jerry’s, bagels in a bag, cubes of ice squared in their plastic trays, throwing everything frozen straight at him while saying, over and over and over again, “I love you I love you I love you,” standing on tiptoes to kiss his crumbling lips, my own lips, later, dark with char, “I love you,” and then hurling at him as hard as I could a bag of frozen string beans—wack wack wack—he was so stunned, everything fell at his feet. At last, when the freezer was emptied, I picked up the packages and pressed the crystallized bags to his curling skin, already starting to ooze.

I love you.

The fact is, our seven-year itch ended then, ended high on the flames of his near death, ended in the stench of smoke and the rundown batteries of all our alarms. We both had enough adrenaline emptied into our bodies to last us another seven years, which is probably just what happened, because now it is seven years later and, well, perhaps I should torch him tonight?

Coda

It’s winter again; it’s dark in here again; no, don’t give me a match. I don’t want a conflagration just so I can know I love him, but what about, tonight, a controlled campfire, after the children are asleep, in the cold November air? I can picture it, the forked flames, the delicious smell of lit logs, our voices, when we speak, very visible. I see silver smoke—a sign of safety—and also a time for us to talk. If I can see it, then does this mean we might do it? We’d have to bundle up and find the wood. We’d have to strike a match and touch its tip to what was once a tree. Who knows, maybe we’d even lie back on the frosted grass and watch the smoke spin up. On and on, up and up, the sky would turn us tiny, together, two imperfect people so imperfectly paired, these facts ashes in the face—in the space—of vastness. The fire would crackle; the heat would seep; we’d press together and tilt our faces skyward, smoke rising, this couple called
us
watching their ghosts go.

Every house has its finest piece of furniture: the heirloom bed your Aunt Bonnie gave you, the Chippendale table; in mine, it’s my medicine cabinet. My medicine cabinet is huge, handsome, with painted angels and delicate scrollwork rimming a mirror of finest glass. Open it up. Inside this antique are bottles filled with all manner of modern pills—Prozac in sleek, bicolored bullets; shining orange Klonopins; little lithiums in a dazzle of white. I take these pills every day, to keep my mind intact.

I have mental illness. That’s an unfortunate phrase,
mental illness
, as old fashioned as the cabinet that houses my cures. I wish for a different descriptor, something both mythic and modern, like
chemical craziness
, like
brain bruise
. My particular form of illness is called obsessive-compulsive disorder, with a dash of depression thrown in. Years have gone by when my whole head was hot, when hospitals have been a haven. I had my first hospitalization when I was fourteen, because I could not stop cutting myself. I no longer cut. Now I count, in increments of three. I count to keep planes from falling out of the sky, to keep the moon in orbit. I count for luck and safety.

My red-headed husband and I did what married people do: we got pregnant. I will never forget the test I took. Six in the morning, standing in the half-dark bathroom, watching a blue cross swim up on the white test wand,
yes
. The cross was a warning and a wish. I closed my eyes and said, “Go.”

I did not want to have a child. Before she came to me, and before I came to love her, I dreaded the thought of motherhood, all those hours spent on the playground or in Chuck E. Cheese’s. I had heard women talk about “baby lust” and knew I possessed not a drip, not a drop, the drive towards procreation almost absolutely absent in me. My husband wanted our first. Motherhood went against my nature, which is brooding and acerbic and self-consumed. Plus there was my wayward mind, an issue. “And what about your illness?” friends said to me. “How will you mother when you struggle so much with anxieties and depression?” These are good questions. I’d spent my adolescence and young adulthood in mental hospitals, and then one day I swore I’d never go back. And I did not. I have not. I found my place and people. But still, the symptoms come, no matter what my will or situation. So here’s my question: Should a woman who is mentally ill become a mother? Are mental illness and motherhood by nature mutually exclusive? Was this a mistake, and a selfish one to boot?