Skin Game: A Memoir (18 page)

And I would have to confess, “I didn’t like my job.”

I put down the razor. The bus rolled on.

I could never get past the conviction that life had not entitled me to fall apart.

30

Under the influence of the seldom-seen boyfriend, who was a bicycle racer, I’d taken up competitive cycling. Well, to be entirely accurate, I had taken only a brief stab at actual competition, hating the nauseated pre-race jitters, hating the grim jockeying for position at twenty-five miles an hour that could lead in an instant to a sudden, disastrous conflation of wheels and limbs, and a broken collarbone as the upshot. Nevertheless, I continued training, under the self-perpetuated delusion of an imminent return to competition.

Cycling is like a time-share condo sales pitch; you’re lured in by the offer of some nice little freebie and before you know it you’ve signed away the next twenty years of your life. I started bicycling because it offered me the illusion of doing something meaningful and productive with my life, while burning calories in the bargain, and then I found that I couldn’t stop. I was in fact afraid to stop, afraid that thirty miles or more a day was the only thing standing between me and the sudden gain of enormous amounts of weight, afraid that riding myself to exhaustion every night was the only thing keeping the baying hounds of dread from overrunning my life entirely. Instead, of course, exercise overran my life, one obsession traded for another traded for another. When I wasn’t riding I was thinking about riding, I was preparing to ride or recovering from a ride or calculating and recalculating the number of carbohydrates and fat-free calories I’d consumed to be counterbalanced by a ride, I was standing in front of the mirror critically appraising the cut and delineation of quadriceps and gluteus, and finding myself wanting.

One evening then, in the dead of winter, I was racing along on my bicycle after dark, my way lit by the thin light of my headlamp, when a car turned suddenly in front of me. Headed downhill at the moment of impact, I hit my brakes but still slammed into the side of the car at maybe twenty miles an hour, just me and a few pounds of steel alloy and rubber. The impact spun me around, my head whipping like the tail end in a game of crack-the-whip to connect with the pavement with a dizzying SMACK! that split my helmet into a dozen pieces.

I lay there on the pavement in a strange bliss, utterly reduced to the stillness of Now. The cold air draped gently across my skin like a freshly laundered sheet. The taillights of the car that had hit me burned red like embers fifty feet away as the driver hesitated, then flickered and slunk off into the darkness.

Ah, hit and run,
I thought, delighted with the playful whimsy of the phrase. Hit and run. Hitandrun.

I should get up. I really should. I should get up out of the street.
Only it was so pleasant just to lie there, without worry or desire, without yesterday or tomorrow.

I have been waiting for years,
I thought,
to be hit by this car.

A couple walking their dog hurried up.

“We saw the whole thing,” said the woman.

“I can’t believe that car just drove away!” said the man.

“Hit and run,” I said.

Their presence broke the bliss of the moment; considerations and preoccupations began creeping in like water rising in a slowly sinking boat.

The helpful couple helped me, limping, to the curb. My bicycle lay twisted and mangled under the orange glow of the street lamp.

My ankle ached, and I thought rapidly, with some eagerness,
If it’s broken, I will not have to ride. If it’s broken, maybe I will be ordered to rest. If it’s broken, maybe I will be kept out of work.

*   *   *

It wasn’t broken. It wasn’t even sprained. The emergency room doctor didn’t even bother to wrap it, didn’t even bother with the perfunctory prescription painkiller. “Tylenol as needed for discomfort,” he scribbled almost illegibly on his orders pad, already walking out the door of the exam room. Out in the desolate hospital parking lot, I eased myself stiffly into the driver’s seat of my car.

“Is there anyone I can call for you?” the policeman had asked me earlier after giving me a ride home, my broken bicycle stuffed in the trunk of the cruiser.

No, there really wasn’t.

*   *   *

Three weeks later I stood in my kitchen, staring blankly at a can of soup in my hand. Its meaning completely eluded me. From instinct, I’d plucked it off the kitchen shelf—but what was it, and what did I mean to do with it?

At last with a mental
ping!
I understood,
Ah, this is soup!
and the meaning of soup came through to me, as though my understanding had just now arrived after a lengthy detour through a distant and difficult terrain.

This wasn’t the first incident in which once-familiar objects were rendered incomprehensible. A few days before, I’d run a stop sign, getting halfway across the intersection before I understood what that red octagonal shape at the crossroads was meant to tell me. There were other moments, disconcerting and yet oddly fascinating, as though my thoughts had been transformed into some clanking Rube Goldberg device, the process between seeing and understanding laid bare before me.

The rage, however—that was only disconcerting. Never one with much use for anger, I’d found myself over these last few weeks apparently undertaking a precise cataloguing of anger’s every nuance and particular, from frustration’s brief flare to a blinding, seething, white-hot rage. With my first waking thought in the morning, anger roiled over me like an acid bath, and I’d imagine shooting myself in a welter of gore and viscera splattered across the muted gray of my comforter. In the morning commute I’d sit simmering in traffic, choked with loathing at poky drivers and ill-timed stoplights. At work I stabbed at my keyboard, spat out a good morning like a curse to every caller, and entertained the urge to grab up my letter opener and plunge it into my gut with a defiant shriek.

“You just don’t seem like yourself lately,” said my manager, in an unintended piece of irony. When had I ever seemed myself?

“Maybe you should see a doctor,” she suggested. “Maybe when you hit your head in that accident you did some kind of damage.”

*   *   *

Having digested a recounting of my symptoms, my doctor sent me for an MRI. I lay in the tube, lulled by the hypnotic, staccato racket of the machine. Afterward, I lingered in the radiologist’s booth watching gray-scale images of my brain clicking on and off the screen.

“Well, I guess that proves I actually have one,” I joked to the technician.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. When do you ever get to see your brain? It is the secret kept from you, the hand inside the puppet. Hemisphered and rippled, my brain looked just like … a brain. An organ, a lump of tissue, so textbook accurate it hardly seemed possible it could be
my
brain. I don’t know quite what I’d expected. Psychedelic colors, or swirls of gray stabbed by pulses of light, like a thunderstorm seen from above?

Here was the place where all that is self resides, in its casing of flesh and bone. My fears and fancies, the dreaming and the dread, the hectoring and the hope. In what magnetically sliced cross-section might I see the tangled knot of my thoughts, like last year’s Christmas lights boxed in the attic—the fretting and brooding and endlessly replicating worries? I stood there and waited for my precisely mapped and subdivided brain to reveal something, while frame after frame slipped silently across the screen.

*   *   *

“Doesn’t appear to be anything wrong,” said my doctor, consulting the manila folder he carried. Not, at least, anything you could spot with a machine.

I slouched on the edge of his examining table, my legs dangling in space, the paper cover crinkling beneath me each time I shifted position.

“I’d like to try a short course of antidepressants,” he said brightly, nonchalantly, tucking a pen into his lab coat pocket.

I was flabbergasted. Truly astonished by this wholly unanticipated tack in the conversation.

Depression?
I thought.

I’d taken those depression indicator tests:
I am less happy than I used to be.
Well, sure, if by “used to be” the test meant when I was ten. I couldn’t think of a time in the last decade, in the last fifteen years, when I could say I’d been happy. It’s not that I had been always
un
happy, just that chronic, insidious anxiousness robbed the color from things and left me a world dressed in muted, muddy tones. Simple, unqualified pleasure eluded me. But could I call that depression? No, my life was more like a flat Coke—flavor minus the fizz.

My doctor was offering me a definition, a diagnosis, something I could hang my hat on and name, after all these long years I’d spent coveting some stamp of authentication, and all I could think was that I didn’t qualify to be depressed.

Surely he’s going to figure this out in a minute,
I thought. What was the point in stepping up to the plate just to swing at a bad pitch?

I’d say, “Oh sure, hit me with them antidepressants, doc,” and then he’d pause, maybe do a double-take, then study me sorrowfully, as though I were a once-promising honors student found helping myself to the marching band’s candy sales fund.

“Antidepressants?” he’d say. “Oh no no no, young lady, not for the likes of you. And aren’t you a little old for these self-important histrionics? Now run along home, and stop taking up Doctor’s time when people who really need me are waiting.”

I changed the subject, and he let it slide, which only confirmed my suspicion that he hadn’t really meant it in the first place. It was one thing to fret and pace and think about killing yourself over your laundry, and it was another thing to be so self-indulgent as to believe that your whiny, narcissistic, middle-class preoccupations amounted to anything of substance.

31

This is the kind of story that wouldn’t be complete without the requisite round of therapy, so let me just go right ahead and cut to the chase: I went into therapy. Actually, to be precise, I went in and out of therapy over the next half-dozen years or so, like someone stuck in a revolving door.

My ex-husband convinced me to go the first time. He said I should go, and I said don’t be ridiculous, and he said it would do me a world of good, and I said how could I go into therapy when there wasn’t anything legitimately wrong with me, and he said how could I say there wasn’t anything wrong with me when I cut up my skin to make myself feel better, and I said yes but maybe I only cut myself because I thought it made me seem more like someone who could say there was something legitimately wrong with herself and you couldn’t discount my flair for melodrama just overdoing things a bit.

Anyway, he won, and I went, maybe all of four times, before claiming to this first counselor that I was going on vacation and then never calling back again.

Another year or so went by, and I dragged myself in to the next therapist in the series. With each new counselor, M.S.W. or M.Ed. or L.C.S.W. or Ph.D., I’d find myself waiting for the denunciation as one cringing in anticipation of a painful blow.

“Don’t waste my time,” I kept expecting them to say. “I’m here for people with
real
problems.”

Perhaps you’ll find it odd that never, in any of these successive rounds in the psychotherapeutic ring, did I go with the express intent of addressing the cutting. Instead, I went because—I don’t know exactly why I went. I went because there’s something fatally seductive about being granted license to talk about yourself virtually nonstop for an hour. I went because I wanted to see if I could learn to inhabit my own life, and not just watch it from the wings like a stage manager. I went because I kept holding out the hope that one of these high priests of sanguinity could consult the Talmudic authority of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
and pronounce my case the way an auto mechanic avers “bad shocks” or “loose struts,” and, armed with a pinpointed diagnosis, fix me up quick. I was looking for the cheap miracle, something as absolute as the instantaneous division between Before and After that could be wrought with a cut—but permanent. Some door I could step through, some new life I could put on like a new suit of clothes, leaving my former self forever and irrevocably behind.

I went through five therapists in as many years. I’d improve marginally, leave therapy, and backslide even further. Then eventually I’d start over again, until I got to feeling as if I should just type up a résumé of my dysfunctions and hand it over wordlessly to each new counselor, so we could skip the preliminaries and get down to business.

*   *   *

During the thick of this therapeutic back-and-forthing, I met the man with whom I would eventually take an improbably optimistic second shot at marriage. When we met—I standing on my front porch, he on the sidewalk at the far end of a sofa he was helping carry for his friend, my newly-acquired-via-the-want-ads roommate—what struck me almost immediately about him was his determined good cheer. He looked on life, I soon found, as great fun, a highly amusing adventure in which things were bound to turn out all right in the end, and in the meantime you could look forward to all sorts of unanticipated delights and pleasurable surprises. Whereas I’d been accustomed to regarding life as a rigged examination I was imminently likely to fail.

He was a believer in daydreams and long shots. He’d go with your idea, however farfetched. Things could be done. Anything might be accomplished. “Don’t let life get in the way” was his policy.

He was, in short, an extremely unlikely match for me, but from the start I found something infectious about his enthusiasm, when all my life I’d known mostly people inclined to take the grim view of things. He made it all look so easy. If his influence didn’t actually make me enthusiastic, it did at least make me consider enthusiasm possible.