The Fallback Plan (7 page)

I hardly remember anything that happened before I was eight or nine: a carousel ride near a one-room school-house, cutting my lip on the sidewalk, my old Strawberry Shortcake lunch box with my name on the inside in black permanent marker. My mom had let me write my first name and she had written my last. The letters in “Esther” overlapped and twisted like morning glory vines beside a “KOHLER” in all caps, in the clean hand of a biologist, the name of my species.

I’ve heard that only children remember less than children with siblings do, because we have no one with whom to corroborate our memories. I’ve had to appropriate my parents’ memories of my childhood, their stories, true or not, because sometimes when I see old photos of myself I don’t quite believe that’s who I was. What appear to be the happiest years of my life in photo albums are the years most missing in my memory. That girl could be anyone. She could be the girl that came with the picture frame. She could be anyone’s daughter running along the beach.

Remember this
, I wanted to tell May, as I watched her short fingers twist clover stems. Now she was an only child, too.
Try to stay this age forever, but if you can’t, at least remember everything
.

I lay on my back and closed my eyes against the sun and moved my arms through the grass like wings, imagining the blades were feathers. May joined me. “Whooooo,” she whispered.

“Does that feel good?”

“Whooooo,” she said again.

“Whooooo,” I said.

I looked over, and her eyes were still closed.

“Whooooo is the sound of the snow,”
she said.

• • •

On the other side of her dream, the Littlest Panda finds herself standing on snowy ground beneath the warm glow of a gas-lit lamppost. She is surrounded by tall pines. In the near distance, she can see a solitary building, some sort of house, with a balcony. There are two lawn chairs on the balcony, but she does not see a use for them, as it’s so cold, and the seats are blanketed with snow.

The young panda is beginning to realize how alone she is in this unfamiliar wood. She knows that sometimes her brother will agree to play-hide-and-seek but instead of looking for her, he’ll make himself a sandwich, practice
playing his mbira, and later claim that he forgot she was hiding.

Maybe there are better brothers inside the house with the balcony
, she thinks to herself.

“Hello?” she calls out, bravely. The sound of her voice frightens a chipmunk, who scampers deeper into a thick patch of trees.

“Don’t be afraid,” she whispers, wishing it would return so she wouldn’t be so alone, but it’s gone.

The Littlest Panda walks closer to the house. Her Mary Janes crunch through the snow with each tentative step. “Is anybody in there?” Forget her stupid brother, she thinks, with his stupid African percussive instrument. Forget her stupid parents who sent her to live with her stupid uncle in the stupid countryside. This is where she will live from now on. In this place, she may do whatever she likes, and no one will ever know that she’s done it.

And then suddenly, the most beautiful faun she’s ever seen appears on the balcony and announces to the still wood that the little panda has arrived. But before the little panda can ask
where
, exactly, that is, he throws some keys in the air and she holds out her hands to catch them before they get lost in the deep snow.

• • •

My mom let me borrow the Saturn so that after I left the
Browns’ I could go to a doctor’s appointment. I knew I was depressed, but my hope was that maybe there was a brain tumor at the root of all this, something that would show up on a map of my cerebrum, something excisable. And then I came across the word
Weltschmerz
.

It was one of the incorrectly spelled National Spelling Bee Championship words, mentioned in an old
Tribune
article about the Bee. Little Emily Ehrlich from Providence put a “t” before the final “z.” Her parents probably fired her German tutor. I cut the definition from the paper and pinned it to my bulletin board.
Weltschmerz
is defined as “mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state; a mood of sentimental sadness.” I doubted the U.S. government recognized sentimental sadness as a form of disability, but at least I knew my diagnosis.

I decided to go to the doctor’s appointment anyway. Maybe I could get a note that I could submit to the disability benefits office.

In the car, my cell phone rang. It was Pickle.

“Hey,” I said.

“It’s me,” he said.

“I know it’s you.”

“What’s up?”

“I’m driving,” I said. “How’s it going?”

I passed the park district. All the little summer campers were returning to the rec center from the playground, each
child tied to the next with a rope. In their yellow t-shirts they looked like a baby duck chain gang.

“I know what I’m gonna do now!” Pickle said, picking up a previous conversation we had never begun.

“I’m gonna be a fireman!”

“You don’t mean a man who puts out fires, do you?”

“Yeah!”

Pickle, with his baseball hats, his pierced ear, his Chuck Taylors, his Chinese dragon tattoo, his ’98 Honda civic with the bumper sticker that said,
NEVER DO ANYTHING YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO EXPLAIN TO THE PARAMEDICS
.

“Pick, that’s been your dream since you were six! Are they going to let you wear your red plastic fireman’s hat?”

“I’m serious!”

“I didn’t say you weren’t serious!”

“Whatever. Maybe I’ll invite you to my graduation from Fire Academy. Maybe I won’t.”

“Are you mad at me?” I said, but he had already hung up.

I ran a yellow light and got on 355 South. I didn’t have an I-PASS, but I didn’t want to stop and pay the toll, so I drove through the I-PASS lane and fiddled with my parents’ garage door opener, making a confused facial expression for the highway cameras, so they would think I had a malfunctioning device. When I turned on the radio I caught the last few bars of my favorite song and then for the next five minutes the station played commercials.
After what had happened during the last semester of school, I should have still been in therapy, but once I graduated, I started skipping appointments. It was a long drive back up to the north shore, and when I’d told Dr. Libman I thought I was getting better, she’d looked at me with steel-colored eyes, frozen by Botox, and told me she didn’t think I was qualified to make that decision.

“What decisions
am
I qualified to make? Should I be operating heavy machinery? Do you think my outfit looks okay?”

I was still taking the antidepressant cornucopia she’d prescribed, but my anxiety was escalating, and the idea of seeing her again only made me more anxious. I had a days-of-the-week pill case just like my grandfather in Boca Raton, which organized my pink and blue tablets like characters from the board game LIFE. Every morning, I swallowed a bride and a groom with a glass of milk.

But they didn’t seem to be working like they used to, or maybe it was just that I was getting worse, so I wanted an MRI. I wanted to see a map of my brain and an arrow pointing to what was wrong with it.

I had ended up calling my mom’s doctor’s office and telling them I’d take an appointment with whoever had availability, which was probably not the best way to set up a mental health consultation, but I couldn’t imagine anyone worse than Dr. Libman. Unless I had an appointment with a flesh-eating zombie, or Neil Patrick Harris.

“Ms. Kohler? Esther Kohler?”

A very tall nurse in scrubs printed with scenes from Dr. Seuss books took my blood pressure and left. Before even introducing himself, the doctor looked at the readings, and when he saw that my blood pressure was 84 over 58 he told me that I was almost alive, which confirmed what I suspected: I had an inoperable brain tumor, and he wasn’t going to waste time with formalities because I wasn’t long for this earth.

“Would you say my blood pressure’s indicative of a fatal illness?”

“Young, thin women typically have low blood pressure,” he said. There was a compliment in there somewhere and I took it, and stored it somewhere I’d be able to access later.

“You can lie back on the table.”

I did as he said. Maybe my life could be saved with a lobotomy.
Do they perform lobotomies anymore?
I wondered. The doctor was putting on gloves. I was staring at the ceiling, where a picture of a deserted beach had been torn from a calendar and pinned with a thumbtack.
Wasn’t there a Tennessee Williams play about lobotomies and cannibalism? And wasn’t it set on an island?

“When did you say your last pap smear was?”

“That’s not why I’m here,” I said, and sat back up. “I don’t need one. I get them, like, all the time.”

“If you’ve had one within the last year, we don’t have
to do one today,” he said, clearly not a fan of jokes, laughter, or hyperbole. “What can I help you with?”

“I can’t sleep,” I said. “Or when I do sleep, I wake up throughout the night, feeling panicked. And I forget the right words.”

“Such as?”

“The word I want. The right name for something. The other day I couldn’t remember what Pop Tarts were called and I like kept thinking,
Toaster pastry. Toaster pastry
, but it never came. It’s like I have a brain tumor.”

I was wearing shorts. The white paper on the table stuck to my thighs.

“Deep breath in, please.”

He put the stethoscope above my heart.

“And another.”

My pulse always raced at the doctor’s. I tried to slow my breathing, but I didn’t even know if that would help anything. As I breathed, I wondered if any measure of my physical health could be considered accurate if recorded under circumstances that actually disrupted my health.

The observer effect. The act of observing changes the phenomenon being observed
. Where I had learned that? I could see the textbook page in my mind.

“Any vision problems?”

“I wear contacts.”

“Any blurred vision, double vision, loss of peripheral vision?”

“Not usually.”

“Occasionally?”

“I guess not,” I said.

“Any pins and needles sensations? Loss of feeling in your arms or legs?”

“No.” To compete with his cool skepticism, I was tempted to lie, to answer
yes
. I had been on the Internet and I knew what I needed to say in order to convince him I was dying.

The doctor removed the earpieces of his stethoscope and felt the glands in my neck.

“History of depression or anxiety?”

“I’m on Wellbutrin and Zoloft.”

I didn’t tell him that my parents had sent me to a therapist for the first time at my fourth grade teacher’s request because of what happened after we learned the definition of the word “utopia.” Mrs. Taylor told our class that we were each to build a clay model of our own idyllic land and write an essay describing its inhabitants and code of laws. Mine was a lush tropical island full of orphans and small, furry animals, such as guinea pigs and chinchillas, which were kept as pets and never eaten. The animals could speak, in a language the children understood, and they said things like,
Eepity bip bip! Shimminy pop! Slithery twility coo!
In retrospect, the language sounded a lot like a combination of doo-wop and the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky.”

The orphans on my island were egalitarian. They recycled and rode tandem bicycles and looked like Precious Moments dolls. I knew I had to explain what had happened to their parents, to explain the missing adults, so at the very end of the essay, after all my cutesy
bips
and
coos
, I described a horrific plague that had swept the island in the 1980s and killed everyone over the age of twelve by cooking their bodies from the inside out. In my utopia, all the adults were dead and the children survived upon their parents’ roasted flesh.

“More than two depressive episodes in your life so far?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “A few. I just had one before graduation.”

“Where’d you go to school?”

“Northwestern.”

“Good school. My eldest daughter is applying there this fall.”

“Small world,” I said, even though it wasn’t.

Dr. Humorless told me to follow his pen with my eyes without moving my head. I pretended I was a cat, stalking a bird.

“As far as mental illness goes you’re what we call a
lifer
,” he decided, and wrote something in my file that was too illegible to read from where I sat.
A lifer
. He made it sound like I was an alcoholic. Part of me resented that he could
say something like that after knowing me for approximately six minutes; part of me worried that he was right: I would always be like this. The therapist I’d seen when I was ten worked in a cozy office with stain-resistant carpeting and an actual sandbox filled with G.I. Joes and plastic palm trees. There was a Newton’s Cradle on his desk. The metal balls hit each other hypnotically, incessantly, for no other reason other than that they could.

This one thought I suffered from hypochondria. He thought my brain tumor was psychosomatic. I was going to have to be direct.

“I need something for my anxiety. You know my mom. You know I’m legit.”

The doctor didn’t show any indication that he’d heard what I’d just said. He was busy writing. Attached to the front of my folder was a form with every possible diagnosis and a little space to put a check. It seemed overwhelming, the great number of things that could be wrong with me: “chronic indecision,” I imagined as one. “Hypochondria precipitated by general apathy towards life; crippling deficit in goal-setting.” I waited to see how many I’d have (
Tell her what she’s won, Doc!
), but he didn’t do anything with the form.

“Who is prescribing the medication you’re on now?”

“Her name is Dr. Libman. I was seeing her when I was in school, but it’s hard to make the drive up there now.”

“I’d like to run some blood work to rule out a thyroid
condition,” the doctor said, a propos of
rien
, “but I’ll write you a prescription for a small quantity of Ativan. For the anxiety. Come back in about a week for the lab results, and we can discuss your medication management then. I also think you should find someone to talk to. Sometimes we just need someone who will listen. Any other questions?”