Whatever Works 4686words
Chapter Two
© 2003 by Lisa Dietz
I was in Spain with my father. I was 22-years-old and my eight-week-old infant slept soundly in the next room.
I was asleep when a sharp slap to my face, then another, harder one, the second bruising my left eye into a bloody swell and I in a fit of trembling fear and confusion, forced myself to come fully awake only to cringe from the next blow, my hands coming up defensively to protect my face.
“I told you to get up!” yelled my father, who had become my companion and my tormentor.
I sat straight up, beginning my day, like many others, with a racing pulse, adrenalin pumping, alert to the fight or flight mode of existence.
“I was asleep,” I said.
“You were faking,” he accused.
“Why would I do that?”
“Because you’re lazy.”
Hurt and indignant, I looked at him. Either he hadn’t been up long or he’d been fitful all night. His receding gray-brown hair was wild and knotted. The circles under his eyes were a deep purple. The expression on his face commanded attention – piercing, animal-like eyes, a sharp nose and square jaw, muscles pulled so tightly together his lips were a thin peel of pale orange. I knew that look. It was the one that told me the violence had only just begun.
“Do you know where you are?”
“What?” I said confused.
“Lisa,” the voice was soft, almost female, “do you know where you are?”
“I’m sorry, Dad,” I told him. “I’m awake. What do you want me to do?”
“You’re in a hospital,” his face faded and softened.
I sat, paralyzed, uncertain. What kind of trick was this?
“Do you know what year it is?” the voice persisted.
A stabbing pain hits my right temple and I am suddenly blinded by bright lights. I squint my eyes shut and when I open them again, I find that I’m scrunched into a fetal position on the floor beside my hospital bed, except that my arm is extended and someone is tightly squeezing my hand. The night nurse looks into my eyes, yet somehow she’s not looking at me. Behind her is a security guard, standing legs apart, ready for action. Behind him is Lora, my roommate, sobbing into the arms of Jen, the therapist condemned to work the night shift. Other patients are at the door, staring, whispering to each other, pointing. The room is stark and sterile with the overhead fluorescent lights on. From this vantage point Lora’s black metal bed frame looks oppressive, attached to the wall with heavy screws.
Heat flushes my face. I lower my eyes, cringe farther into myself, wishing to disappear. Hot flames of shame and deep despair sear through my body.
“I think she’s back.” The nurse announces, letting my hand drop to the floor.
The nurse ushers me back to bed and I am pretending I will go there so that the spectators will leave. Lora is apologizing for the twentieth time when everyone leaves. The nurse switches off the light and I say, “Wait.”
She turns back in and though her mouth says nothing, her body language tells me, “What is it now? I’m busy.”
“I can’t sleep here,” I tell her. “I have to go to the meeting room.”
“Are you sure?” She is exasperated.
If she could, she would tell me “no,” but my psychiatrist has left a standing order that I am allowed to drag my mattress into the small, locked meeting room at the end of the hall if I can’t sleep. There I place the mattress in the darkest corner of the room next to a built-in bookcase on the same wall as the door. In that way, I can hide my head from view of the door and sleep in near blackness. I know this seems an odd solution to insomnia.
The meeting room has become a substitute for the closet. It goes back to my earliest memory. It is a visceral memory, charged with the restless energy of a toddler shrinking away from hostility. Then I had been exiled to the closet as a punishment although I never knew what I’d done. I was supposed to be afraid, but I was not. The darkness pushed in around me like a breathable pillow, soft and comfortable. Fear only came when the door opened and the harsh, deep edges of the world smacked my face with stark light and huge voices.
In the closet, I was wrapped in a cocoon of plush density that held me in place, stable and cozy. The voices from outside were muted. I couldn’t hear what they were saying and I wasn’t required to understand. Rather, I was comforted by the rise and fall of deep sounds and those that were shrill, because in the closet they were like music -- the soft harmony of a muffled heart beat, rising, responding, occasionally silent -- the verbal ballet of interplay and relationship whose very distance made them harmless.
In the closet, I liked the musty odor left behind by my father’s feet in his soft sheepskin slippers. I couldn’t see his black leather boots, the ones he shined before wearing, but I knew exactly where they lie, exuding a sharp, too-tight odor mixed with the oily scent of shoe polish. Even the acrid, uneasy odor of my mother’s cast-off high heels was soothing, allowing me to cling to the little I knew of her, a woman whose distance was engulfed in a sea of uncertainty.
In the closet, the low-hanging wool coat would brush against my cheek and I would grab onto it, holding it against my face as if it would save me from something harsh that lived on the outside. I could reach up and stroke the lingering fabrics of dresses and trousers, testing the cottons, muslin, and silks on my tender face. I sought the soft nap of the lining in the winter coat, like a fleecy pet that kept me safe and warm. Tugging it down from its hanger high above, it would tumble onto my tiny body, scooping me up into it’s protective embrace. I could hug the coat and it would nestle with me, a sensation that sent tingles down my spine with unwarranted satisfaction.
In the closet, I could sleep deeply, curled around the bumpy shoes padded by my woolen companion, hugging me from my toes to my fine locks of hair. The closet was rich and inviting, so different from my crib with its bars and open top that permitted rough hands to be lowered onto me. There, I jumped when touched. There, I had to sleep with my arm around my head to keep it defended. But not in the closet.
There are no comforting fabrics in the meeting room. There are windows along one wall, exposing it to the facility and along another, exposing it to the outdoors. It is bigger than a closet, but the meager proportions avail a slight semblance of what once brought comfort and safety. I am accompanied by overstuffed canvas chairs, a wooden end table and a rather tenuously placed glass lamp in a cramped environment. Instead of rich, familiar odors to comfort me, I make due with the unrecognized musty smells that linger near the floor.
The reason my psychiatrist gives me permission to sleep here is because it is an “intermediate” coping skill. Although reminiscent of punishment, the closet is comforting enough to prevent me from the kind of distress that leads to self-harm and it enables me to rest. The doctor does not usually condone such extreme behavior, but as a tranquilizer, it is relatively harmless. I am grateful for her understanding.
This particular closet-like room has its own character. If I sit in the middle of the room and look around, there is a ghostly emptiness, along with a sense of loss, resonant of the room’s primary purpose – private meetings between professionals and family members, leading to the disclosure of psychiatric diagnosis. Oftentimes parents grieve to hear it because they know it will not be easy.
If I let the sadness envelop me, I remember my last days with my brother Dean, who is two years older than me. The first time I lost him I was four-years-old. My mother tells me he was mean to me, encouraged by my father’s general hatred toward anything female. But that is not what I recall.
I remember sitting at the yellow-flecked metal and linoleum kitchen table. Both Dean and I still had peas and mashed potatoes on our plates. My father had retreated to another room, but my mother was still in the kitchen, cleaning up. The sound of a blasting TV and running water served as background ambiance. The food remnants we were required to eat were cold and my stomach lurched when I entertained the idea of digesting them. Dean was making antics for me, stabbing the peas with his fork and rolling a single green ball onto his upper lip, which he then rolled toward his nose to keep the pea in place.
I was enthralled. Anything he did enthralled me. At that moment as I watched him, my heart ached with the kind of adoration that could only be compared to my first real crush, years later, on my tenth grade anthropology teacher.
I giggled at Dean and he quickly let the pea fall, placing his finger over his lips and hissing “shhhh,” as he looked over his shoulder to see if mom was watching.
I hushed immediately, excited to witness his next entertainment. A sly smile crept over his face. After looking back to make sure the coast was clear, to my utter amazement, he pushed all the peas on his plate into one hand and then spilled them into his pocket. I gasped. My brother was not only funny and clever, but brave as well! My admiration leapt for his risk-taking demonstration of sheer courage.
I wish that was my final childhood memory of him, but stamped clearest in my mind is his face when I stared at it from the back window of a clunky Oldsmobile sedan. His features became engraved on my memory -- mischievous eyes, chiseled and dimpled jaw, and pure toe-head white hair. He faded into the distance as my mother drove me away from him, away from my father, away from a life of perpetual violence. My father said he’d hunt her down and kill her if she took Dean away. So I watched him go, as he shrank into the landscape and I waved, but I don’t think he saw me because he never waved back.
The second time I said goodbye to Dean was when I was three-months pregnant. Seventeen years had passed since I’d waved to him from the back seat of the car. With my mother’s second marriage in ruins, my stepfather’s family turned against me, jobless and no place to live, I had finally gone looking for him. I traveled with my boyfriend, James, a free-spirited man unencumbered by commitment and full of belief in the good of the cosmos. He was the perfect escape from my troubles. Whatever money we could pool together, we did so and recklessly made our way from Minnesota to Long Beach, California, the state of my birth and the city in which I’d last seen Dean.
The moment we met, still idealistic young adults, we stared at one another. My mother’s genetics had favored Dean as he grew up. He was slight, but strong, only an inch taller than I. Her beautiful blue eyes and long lashes suited him well – even the upturned nose with a bump in the middle. Whereas I had the larger frame of my father’s German stock, tall for a woman, with an old-fashioned pair-shape, instead of the popular long and lean. We had the same hair type that didn’t look like either side of the family -- fine, dishwater blond and troublesome.
James had gone to take a nap while we got re-acquainted. Dean sat on the long, brown couch across from me, a coffee table between us, replacing eons of lost familiarity. What do you say to a dream-memory? How do you start uncovering lost years and recover a lifetime of connectedness?
“We both twist our hair,” he said, breaking the ice with a laugh. He looked down at his right hand winding a twirl into his mustache then pointed at me, unconsciously swirling a loose strand of hair.
“Do you think it could be genetic?” I laughed and that started hours and days of life telling.
It was the pregnancy that tore us apart this time. When I found out, James, being the father of an unwanted pregnancy sunk into despair and took a bus back to Minnesota. Dean and I stayed behind to argue, he dead-set on abortion, and I, unwilling to deny a chance at motherhood. I don’t blame him. Despite his love for his father, he had lived life in a dangerous world, where people hurt and violated children. His suffering at the hands of our father, a psychotic parent, then two stepmothers who had treated him with careless disregard had shaped his view of life as corrupt and brutal.
When it finally did come time for us to part, I was overwhelmed with sadness to be leaving again so soon.
“Don’t tell Dad,” I said, resistant to pursuing contact with him after the stories Dean told. “I don’t think I ever want to see him again.”
“I’ll try.” He lowered his eyes, “but he might already know. He finds out everything.”
“Oh, Dean,” I hugged him tightly, attentive to the feel of him, wanting to absorb every inch of his being. But it was as it had been when we were children. I was the younger, enchanted by a big brother, desperate to be taught, protected and entertained. I’d spent my whole life thinking about him, but he had not tarried over me. He remembered a troublesome sister who got into his things and after I was gone, he was too engaged in a constantly changing, chaotic lifestyle to give me much thought.
It’s not that he wasn’t glad that I found him. But the news of the child triggered something in him. Something that made him pull away as if he’d been the driver of my mother’s car so long ago. So when I hugged him goodbye, he was already gone, my arms fitting loosely around a shadow memory.
Those are the kind of shadows that haunt the meeting room at the treatment center. Phantoms of disappointment and injustice. Yet somehow, I am comforted by the familiarity of these shadows. Their spidery-thin half-representations reflect the illusive quality of my memories. It seems I’ve always lived a tenuous life, on the edge of do-or-die, a slight move of the hand, a twist of fate, and it could go either way.
That uncertainty showed up frequently during my life. When my mother remarried after leaving my father and Dean behind, it was to a man of creative visual genius. His drive to be unique resulted in a stream of peculiar circumstances that became the groundwork of my childhood.
Like the black widow spider that lived in our kitchen above a large silver aluminum kettle filled with water. My stepfather said it wouldn’t cross the water, so there was no need to be afraid. I was only 8-years-old, though and it’s not surprising that I forgot the spider was there. Partially blinded from sleep one morning, I stumbled into the kitchen, a little off-balance and reached for the silverware, my hand missing the drawer handle and sliding across the counter surface, making contact with metal and SPLASH!
I was wide awake, staring at the shiny black voluminous body with a single red spot, like a careless artist had passed by with brush extended. The water was swishing back and forth almost forming waves. The thin platform was sunk into the kettle and protruding above the surface was a black wire that extended about a foot above the water, then twisted into a circle. Holding my breath, I watched it teeter. Tipping one way then the other, then making small jittery jiggles until it settled back into its resting place and I exhaled.
Strands of the finest silvery thread crisscrossed the wire circle that was wide enough, I was told, to make a perfect backlit photograph. I measured the distance across the wire circumference, eyeballing it, then measured the distance from the platform to the shiny gold handles of the kitchen cupboards only a short distance further and hoped the bloated arachnid wouldn’t get any ideas.
Protruding hairy legs and bright tenacious eyes stared at me, stealing my appetite, transferred perhaps, to the deadly queen who might have preferred that my sliding hand had had just a little more force to it. Then she would be in my hair, stabbing my skin, ending my life.
It was all there in my kitchen, like all the things that frightened me—a giant misshapen bug to keep me company. The bug would change shape over the years, but its precarious gossamer threads of uncertainty would remain.
I became a child out of sync, something to which my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Brighton, would have eagerly testified. Lingering outside the door to her classroom, sitting with legs extended, a hint of creeping ache filled my limbs. Even at such an early age, fear, brought on by my already suppressed memories of the brutality of my father, manifested itself in leg pains. I don’t remember what frightened me that day, but I rubbed them furiously when the bell rang and all the other kids piled into the classroom.
The last boy pushed the children in front of him until he saw me sitting there, massaging my legs. I recognized that cruel look on his face, although I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it. Without a word he stepped on each leg, digging in hard with his heels.
I let out a howl that brought Mrs. Brighton to the door, who frowned when she saw it.
“Did you see what he did to me?” I sobbed.
“Oh,” she shook herself in frustration, “I’ve had just about enough of this!”
At first I thought she was mad at the boy, but when she grabbed my arm and jerked me upright, I knew differently. I swallowed tears of shame. I was always making her mad. First it was my math scores from changing schools, then special psychological testing because of past trauma, and now my legs. She led me by my shirt collar to the front of the class. As the others took their seats, she placed me in the front of the classroom.
“Can’t you get along with anyone?” she hissed in my ear.
Retreating to the back of the class, my teacher turned around to face me along with the other students. I hung my head, terrified by the judgment written across their faces.
“Let’s get to the bottom of this,” she announced. “Class, what’s wrong with Lisa?”
There must have been answers with that sudden permission of eight-year-old open taunting season, but I and my humiliation walked away from my small body, deciding it would no longer be mine. It was much safer to reject the shell that so often caused trouble.
It was not long afterwards that I wrote “I hate me,” using a piece of driftwood to carve the wet ocean shoreline like an SOS plea. But only the soft waves answered my entreaty, washing away the transient threads of my childish handiwork.
“What are you doing?” my mother called from the tide pools where she was helping my stepfather take pictures for his classes at the photography school.
“Writing in the sand,” I called back.
Later she said it was wonderful that I was learning my letters so well. She bought me an all-in-one desk with a seat of red plastic and a green chalkboard for the writing surface. The top lifted to reveal a cork board drawer, which was filled with paper, pencils, and crayons.
I was excited to get started, tearing the papers into little pieces, each carrying an “I hate me” note, safely tucked inside. Foggy memories and painful experiences served as my muse, driving my actions from behind the safety net of my subconscious.
Sometimes mother would pass by and see me writing, not thinking to read the words. “What are you writing about?” she would ask.
“Stuff,” I said.
“Well you keep it up. You could become a writer someday.”
I looked at her, weaving that thought through my mind, like pulling on a thread that untangles the knot. “Maybe I will,” I responded.
And so something good can come of anything. Being tossed in the closet as a baby created a lifelong means of comfort despite the intentions that put me there. A frustrated teacher in a moment of cruelty taught me that I was more than just my body. What began as an expression of self-hatred transformed into a writing discipline that inspired freedom from self-condemnation.
My sanity is upheld by gossamer threads, making unlikely connections. Crisscrossing my life like the roadways entwined on a map, I am always looking for the continuity.
I sensed meaning as a child in the winding trails of the railroad tracks near my home. When I heard the whistle of the passing locomotive, I had to run two blocks on the hot California pavement, then crossover to Matt and Mike’s house. There, I would open the fence and stop for Laddy, the black lab to recognize me. Then he would join me in my race to the back gate, barking and jumping and cheering me on past the fence, down the hill, one leap over the rock barrier and there I was.
The black steel surrounding the ties glowed with a vitality that shook from the distant rumbling. I rarely made it in time to see the boxcars sweep past, unless I was at the boys’ house when it happened. No matter. It was the secondary thrill I was after, that passionate relationship between the convoy and its girder, like the intimacy of a child being expelled from its mother’s womb.
I would hang on, curling my fingers around the steel strut while planting my feet on the wooden tie, and lean back, the distant movement rattling my insides, making my teeth chatter. I was brimming with scalding energy, drinking it in by osmosis, then gradually falling off, calming down, becoming distant the way summer’s heat forgives the winter of its lingering chill.
I still want to drink in that energy, to tap its source of power, a lifeline that assures me “it all makes sense; there is a reason for being.” Yet my grasp seems so insubstantial. Has my life been nothing more than a menagerie of scattered events, random, disconnected, haphazard?
One day when I was at school, tucked tightly into my desk, something happened that seemed to perfectly represent my struggles. It was a special day because instead of workbook lessons we were watching a black and white TV sitting on a metal cart at the front of the classroom. As a group, I don’t think we had ever been so still and quiet. Anticipation breathed on our lips like drifting wraiths of fog gradually clearing away.
Stepping out from his spider-ship, Neil Armstrong leapt down the steps of a ladder in slow motion, planting himself at last on the moon’s dusty gray surface. “One step for man. . .” he began his declaration of triumph.
We watched it in silence, inhaling the new definition of possibility. A tingle ran down my spine.
A day would come when I could understand what it was that moved me. I was like the man on the moon, disconnected from the rest of the world and running in slow motion trying to assimilate that illusive ingredient I so lacked. Something vital had to be missing, I was sure. What else could explain my disconnected oddity?
The problem was, when I examine my memories I can recall events, but it’s the why that eludes me.
When I was in the sixth grade, the truth of my dysfunction slapped me in the face so hard that there was no way to deny it. Our class was waiting in the hallway just outside the closed doors of the gymnasium waiting for the previous class to exit. The teacher had instructed us to wait quietly while she went away to check on something. While the naturally restless eleven and twelve-year-olds became increasingly active, I stood next to my one friend, Nancy, who was extremely undemonstrative, especially at school. Our friendship was a sort of secret that was usually unharnessed only after the dinner hour or on weekends in the privacy of our respective homesteads.
One of the popular boys, with whom I was secretly in love (the way a girl coming of age acquires a crush on boys) pinched me in the arm. I yelled out, both mad at him and embarrassed by his attention. He had shoulder-length sandy blond hair, neatly styled and feathered back, bright blue eyes and a maturing muscular build. He reached behind me for the elastic strap barely visible beneath my shirt and ruthlessly snapped my bra. I colored as the rest of my classmates burst into laughter. It did not help that I was already horribly embarrassed about the growth on my chest that the other girls hadn’t yet experienced.
Tauntingly, he said, “Nobody likes you, you know. You don’t have any friends!”
He looked to the other children for acknowledgement. “Not me. No way,” they blurted as he went down the line.
I looked imploringly at Nancy as her turn approached.
“How about you?” he jibed at her. There was an implication in his voice that, should she disagree, there would be a price to pay.
“No, not me,” she said, then looked away to avoid my eyes.
I held back tears as the doors to the gymnasium opened and everyone rushed in. Except me. My legs were beginning to hurt again and I decided to go to the nurse’s office instead.
This proof of my perceived abominable nature hit me harder than anything previous. I turned inward, greeted by a new layer of self-loathing, strong enough to never again even speak to Nancy. I sealed up my internal channels of vulnerability and hardened myself to the world, determined to stop caring about what anyone else thought of me.
I did all this just in time to herald in my teenage years, consciously playing the part of the recalcitrant rebel -- a tough, careless, head-strong malcontent who smoked, drank alcohol whenever possible and stole candy from the local grocery store. Ironically, my decision to outcast myself attracted others to me and for the first time in my life, I acquired friends who were not ashamed of me.
But the persona was empty and unfulfilling. I couldn’t maintain it for more than year, during which time I lost the trust and goodwill of my parents. They no longer wanted to be around me and stopped taking me with them when they went on filming expeditions for their photography company.
I was home alone more and more, often frightened and confused, feeling I had no place to turn. Somehow my new friends couldn’t compensate for my restless spirit, even when intoxicated or high on marijuana or experimenting with our changing bodies.
I learned that I was a person who had a deep need for meaning. It wasn’t enough to just exist and do the things expected of other children my age. It had to have meaning, a bigger purpose. So the summer after seventh grade, when I stayed home by myself while my parents filmed sea lions on a remote island in Alaska, I fell into my first major depression.