Losing True

After a drug-induced nap

I was sick for two days, a neat package of irony after my last post. Put your money where your mouth is, my body seemed to say. I finally got some antibiotics and started them this morning; this evening they began to work—or more accurately, the bone-deep exhaustion that had me barely able to brush my hair transformed without warning into a two-hour nap. I woke up (it is 11 pm) feeling as if life might actually be worth living, at least until tomorrow.

I fell asleep as the movie Notes On A Scandal ended. I had seen it when it came out in the theaters, but this time I found myself watching the husband's pain very closely. How well he handles it, and how honestly. As he waits for his shamed wife to leave the house, he paces. I noticed (of course) that the couple drinks a lot of wine in the movie, and I thought, as I watched on the edge of sleep: Drink. Now is the time to get blasted. But he wasn't drinking. He seemed to feel this would not be a good time for narcotics. Instead, as he sees his wife out the door, he is able to ask her why she didn't come to him, why she let the communication break down. I watched that—a scene in which a person facing enormous emotional pain just deals with it—like a scientist. I'm like a Vulcan now, watching the inexplicable but fascinating antics of humans.

The nap's fog lifted enough that I remembered I had promised to bring in the mail for a neighbor, and not any neighbor, but the man who is now the ex-husband to my ex-husband's wife. I walked to his mailbox, and then down his driveway.

The last time I walked down that driveway, it was a cold spring afternoon with a heavy drizzle falling. I was walking fast, with a grim determination. I had just uncovered an upsetting truth about my husband and his now wife and I was practically hyperventilating on adrenaline. On that day, my ex-husband's now wife was still my neighbor's wife, and she saw me coming; she was unloading a saddle from her trunk. I remain proud of myself for speaking to her in a calm tone of voice, for saying what I thought clearly and succinctly, and for leaving her to tell the news to her husband.

Of course, I then had to walk back through that drizzle to the newly dawning hell in my own house, which, for the sake of my children, I did not burn to the ground.

Junking it

When I was 13 I took care of two small children for a week. The parents were friends of my mother’s, and somehow—possibly due to the pot being smoked around my house at the time—had been fooled into thinking I was responsible enough to perform this duty. They put me in charge of their 5 and 3 year old, their beautiful three-bedroom condominium in a development with a pool and playground, and a wad of cash for housekeeping. Then they left for a week on their 50-foot Chinese junk. I guess the parents’ instincts were right to a certain extent, since no one drowned in the pool or got hit by a car during our twice-daily excursions across a highway for candy. In the end, they paid me $100, which seemed like a massive sum in 1972.

They also promised me that the moment the weather was right, they’d take me out on that junk for a weekend sail along the coasts of New England. I loved their boat; it had red billowing sails and a dragon’s head at the prow.

The right autumn weekend dawned clear. I packed for the trip the night before and everything would have been fine except for the fact that I was coming down with the flu. My head pounded, my throat throbbed, and I was shivering with a high fever. I didn’t tell my mother. I willed myself to ignore the feelings—I remember closing my eyes and clenching my fists and trying to force myself to repress the illness. I don’t remember who drove me to the harbor, but I remember the bright September light was blinding. I worked very hard on not puking. I never thought to myself: maybe if I tell someone, they’ll let me have another chance at sailing. That option never occurred to me. I slid out of the car and walked unsteadily onto the boat, hoping my secret would stay safe.

I adored these two adults. They were fun, and kind and loving with their children (despite their wild-assed choice of a sitter). The mother was pretty and blonde, and the father was tall and dark. I knew without having to think about it that my being sick was too much trouble. To be honest, at my version of 13, I didn’t even have that conscious thought. It just was the truth already in my head.

I don’t know what the couple thought about me that first night. I remember wishing I could run and laugh with the two little kids on the wide wooden deck. They grilled on a hibachi and everyone smiled sweetly at me, a little confused, probably, at my withdrawn stillness. I tried to smile back. I couldn’t swallow, but I forced down a few bites of food and attempted to answer when spoken to. I guess the thing that saved me was that I was too young to realize what I looked like.

All night the boat rocked slightly on the calm water and my fever spiked again and again. I put the pillow over my mouth to muffle the sound of my tears, furious at myself for giving in. I don’t know if the grown-ups heard me, or if they finally decided enough was enough, but when it was time to get up for breakfast, the mom came and sat down next to me where I sagged, probably looking like I had a terrible hangover.

“Honey? Don’t you feel well?”

Their reaction to my being too sick to continue the weekend stunned me. With absolute and gentle determination they bundled me in blankets, gave me aspirin, turned the boat around, somehow contacted my parents, and drove the whole family home. No one complained or criticized or blamed. The kids kept being kids and having fun and didn’t pout. The parents seemed to think it was normal to get sick at the wrong moment. “I’m so sorry,” I croaked at the father. He gave me a puzzled look and patted my head. “Just feel better,” he said.

Years later, in therapy, I stumbled on this memory and told it with pride. I could still feel the way the bright sunshine turned my stomach, and how hard it was to smile. At the time I was illustrating my ability to repress for my therapist in the same way I would flex a tricep for you now (that is, if I would get to the gym more than once a month). But my therapist sat looking at me with a dark, meaningful expression.

“What?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said. “That’s just a really sad story.”

I was confused. “What was sad about it?”

And even now there’s a part of me that watches the scene from the end of the boat, watches that 13 year old hunched against her fever, and thinks: Oh suck it up.

But my therapist and I decided to use the memory as shorthand for what I do when I think my feelings will be a problem. Which is pretty much any time I have a feeling that doesn’t align with what everyone else wants. I didn’t always junk it, as he and I came to call it. Six months after that summer, I learned to drink the feelings away, and that worked pretty well, too.

Floaty

I keep trying to compose a post, but I feel as if I’m zigzagging my way through a grand museum on a caffeine overdose—I’ve sucked down one cup too many, and it changed my fragile coffee buzz from I Just Remembered I Am Massively Talented And Will Probably Make A Boatload of Money into Jesus CHRIST My Heart Is Pounding So Hard You Can See It If You Look In My Ears. So when I pause in front of something I’d really like to focus on (I put a poster of The Winged Victory over my desk at work, and I’ve been trying to sketch a post about her, for instance) my mind floats away. I wonder what's for dinner. Or: I need a pedicure.

Perhaps this is a quality of the newly sober.

I want to be able to calmly contemplate all the huge issues that present themselves to me these days, exhibits in that museum. It’s huge that my life as I knew it is over and starting new, that in front of me lies an unwritten-on expanse with no horizon. Yet that seems equally important to me as the fact I need to paint my toenails (or find some nail polish remover and get the chipped crap off my toes that once was the shade Wife Got Back).