Jeff sits in his office. I sit in mine. The fraying rope of our marriage stretches down the hall. Each of us stares out the window, looking in different directions, gazing at nothing, the early autumn evening slipping down. The leaves are just beginning to turn; the ivy that crawls up the side of our house is always first to go, and its tangled red and magenta covers the windows of our bedroom, where we sleep with our backs to each other, balancing at opposite edges of the bed. We lie there breathing, trying to pretend we're asleep, listening to the other one for sounds of life. We slip out of bed, moving carefully, trying not to wake the other one up, and creep back down the hall to our offices, where we sit motionless for hours, waiting for light.
I am getting better every day. I have reentered the world, come running back into my life full of hope. I am ready to be myself again, a wife, a daughter, a friend, someone who is strong enough to let other people lean on her rather than always leaning on them. I want to listen. I want to give. I want warmth and heat and light. I am profoundly grateful. I am overflowing with love for Jeff, amazed at the kindness he has shown me over these past two years. And so I come running into the house, looking for him. I call and call his name.
But he's gone.
He stares into the middle distance when we are together. I talk; he is silent. He turns his face away. He pulls out of my arms and turns his back. His voice carries no life, no emotion; he answers me in short syllables, expending as few words as possible, cutting our interactions short, disappearing upstairs. I try to do it right again. I try to get back to the person I was before I went away. I make the dinners. I do the laundry. I clean the house.
But he's gone.
For two years, his life was a cycle of nonstop caretaking—hundreds of meals prepared for me and brought to the hospital night after night, months of returning to an empty house after those visits, lonely, emotionally drained, exhausted from a long day at work and yet another long night propping me up, comforting me. Then home to face all the tasks of running a house: bills, laundry, cleaning, meals, dozens and dozens of phone calls and messages coordinating visits from friends and family, and, when I was home, setting up the rotation of people coming to the house to be with me.
I was gone too long. He let me go. All that remains is this overwhelming, nearly tactile cloud of resentment. Too much was required of him, and he has nothing left.
He doesn't know how to relate to me. He has grown used to my being sick. He gave up on getting me back and got used to playing savior. Now he is tired of the role; but at the same time, he has forgotten everything else.
In some ways it is simpler to be married to someone who is all need and no give. It's an enormous drain. But there is the benefit too: you become the hero, the center of someone else's existence. You are the saint. You have, in this sense, a great deal of power. You tell this person what to do, and she does it. You feed her. You hold her. You are her mother, her father, her husband, her priest. And you are never required to relate to her on an adult level. There is never anything wrong with you; any problem is caused by her, her illness, her meds not working, her malfunctioning mind. You don't have to grow. You can settle into your role, running the show, always right.
You relish your role and resent it enormously at the same time. And when your role is upset—when the patient climbs out of bed and walks on her own, makes her own food, drives her own car, has coffee with friends, starts working, does all the things you used to do for her—you see that she now does everything wrong. She screws up the coffeemaker. She shrinks your favorite sweater. She makes the bed funny. She talks too much. And—who does she think she is?—she doesn't always agree with you. She doesn't see that you are always right. She criticizes you. You had a system, and she's creating disorder with her sudden presence. She doesn't need you anymore. This isn't acceptable. This won't work.
And so it doesn't work.
We fight. The spilled coffee, the shrunken sweater, the oddly made bed, the wrong word, don't criticize me, don't blame me, you resent me, you're doing it wrong, I can't stand this; we fight and fight. Nothing is too small for us. Anything will do, any tiny trigger sets off a shouting match of blame and accusation. We wind up in my office in the dark, crying, sorry, trying to understand how it started. We never can.
He withdraws. He won't talk. We try therapy; he sits there on the couch, clenching his jaw, able to discuss only the things I'm doing wrong, how I'm disrupting his life. He doesn't speak about what he gave up for me. He doesn't mention that he doesn't know who I am, how to talk to me, what to do with me, what a marriage is supposed to be like. And I don't know how to do this any better than he does.
It gets too awful. I can't stand the throbbing rage, the thrum of resentment that is always there, the fights. I spend the nights sitting at my desk, trying to think how I could do it alone. I have become horribly dependent on him, and I hate myself this way. And so I try to imagine what it would be like living in my own place, paying my own bills, running my own life. I feel like a child. I am furious with myself for becoming what I am.
I can't stand it here. So I leave.
I set out to remake my life. I'm starting from scratch. I've never been sane without Jeff. I've got something to prove. I want to show everyone—and I want to know myself—that I can live a sane life alone.
I'm terrified. But I'm also still a little crazy—crazy enough that I go on a spree, buy a condo, get all new pots and pans, go tromping up the stairs with the dozens of boxes of books, carefully unpack the china, paint my new rooms, hang the pictures, furnish the entire place in a day.
I look around. Everything is mine. Everything is exactly where it should be. I am ready to begin.
It starts simply enough: I'm working a lot. I sit at my desk for long days, doing the research and writing this book. I write fast, then faster. I begin to talk to myself. I begin to talk all the time. I am elated at being on my own, getting everything right, working, doing the laundry, paying the bills as soon as they come, buying the groceries, going to the gym—everything is perfect, until I have to go to bed. When I go to bed, I lie there curled up in a ball, pillow over my head, trying to block out the thoughts of Jeff. Now, with a little distance, all the things about him that I loved become painfully clear, and I miss the person he was before I got sick. I vacillate between overpowering guilt that I forced him to become this stranger, and rage at the fact that he fell into the role so easily. I hate myself for having been sick so long. When I see him, he's a wreck. He vacillates between giddy joy at seeing me, and horrible, angry tirades, slamming out of my house.
I'm trying to be perfect, and the smallest failure—say I don't wash a dish—becomes cause for rage at myself for being such a fucking waste of space. I work too much, sleep too little, shop compulsively, and I'm dizzy with grief. I swing from elation at my new life to despair at what I've lost and hatred of who I was. So I race away from all of that, convince myself everything is wonderful, block the world with obsessions, manic activity, long days of work, and shopping. I fixate on things. And one of the things I fixate on is food.
I suppose it had to happen sometime. Recovery from an eating disorder is usually provisional—most of us who do recover still have it lurking somewhere in the back of our minds. It lives there quietly for years. But if the pressure is enough, it comes out. We fall back on it. It is as old and familiar as a longtime lover. We aren't afraid of it. It stills our thoughts. We know it. When we are at points in our lives where we know little else, the eating disorder is our long-lost oldest friend.
Here's the hell of it: madness doesn't announce itself. There isn't time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay; it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge.
But even that implies some sort of lag time between the arrival of madness and the actual experience of it. In the early years, it's like a switch flips on, and though only a moment before y
ou were totally sane, suddenly you have gone mad. But as you learn to manage madness, you begin to notice sooner that it's on its way. I lick my finger and hold it up to test the direction of the wind: madness is in the air. I can smell it like I can smell snow. It's in the vicinity, though I don't know where or how long it will be until it comes. The trick is to shut the gate, throw sheets over the roses, go inside, lock all the windows and doors, and go down to the basement and sit on a chair to wait.
Sometimes these preparations are enough. The locks on the windows and doors are tight. You've taken the medication faithfully. You've exercised to induce a sense of dopamine calm. You've put every lamp in the house in your office and flipped on the light box—it mimics sunlight for people who get depressed in winter—and the room is lit up as if with floodlights, and you're so hot you're working in your bra. You've stayed off the coffee, you've taken the supplements, you've worked starting at the same time and for the same length every day. You've interacted with human beings at least a few times this week. You've gotten yourself to the point where you can sleep in the normal time frame, from night until morning, and your mornings are not a horrible struggle to stay out of bed, and you make the bed so you aren't tempted to get back in it. You check off the entries on the list that runs your life.
But sometimes the system fails. Maybe it's a chemical shift in the brain that the medications don't block. Maybe it's a stressor in your life that you didn't expect. Maybe there is no reason, and you're just going mad for the hell of it, but you try not to think about that because that would imply that no matter what you do, no matter how tightly you batten the hatches, madness can get in.
You wake up one morning and there it is, sitting in an old plaid bathrobe in your kitchen, unpleasant and unshaved. You look at it, heart sinking. Madness is a rotten guest. You can tell it to leave till you're blue in the face. You follow it around the house, explaining that it's come at a bad time, and could it come another day. Eventually you give up and go back to bed, shutting the door.
But of course it barges in and demands to be entertained. Before you know it, it has strewn its stuff all over the house, and there are sticky plates in its bed, and it refuses to change its sheets. Madness lounges all day in front of the TV, watching Oprah and munching on a bag of chips, drinking milk from the carton, getting crumbs between the cushions of the couch.
Soon, your life revolves around it. You do everything you can to keep it comfortable, because you don't want to upset it. You tiptoe around the house and wait for it to leave. In most cases, you wake up one morning and it's gone. There's minimal damage. You pick up its mess and get on with your day.
But sometimes it settles in to stay. Immediately, it is all demands. It starts bossing you around, interrupting your conversations, refusing to let you out of the house. The phone stops ringing. Soon it's just you and madness. You circle each other like boxers, throwing punches to the jaw. But sometimes it takes round after round, and you lie on the living room floor, unable to get up. It refuses to let you sleep. You run out of food. It draws all the blinds and stands peering through the slats. It convinces you you're in danger. It says that people are coming, and they will hurt you if you let them in.
Soon madness has worn you down. It's easier to do what it says than argue. In this way, it takes over your mind. You no longer know where it ends and you begin. You believe anything it says. You do what it tells you, no matter how extreme or absurd. If it says you're worthless, you agree. You plead for it to stop. You promise to behave. You are on your knees before it, and it laughs.
I am allowed to obsess only after work, and for no more than three hours a day, like some people have a martini and read the paper when they come home. I make myself this allowance because it gives time a border. If I don't do this, I wind up sitting in one place thinking the same seventeen thoughts for hours, sometimes days. Usually I can fix my mind on something I consider sort of worthwhile; for example, I know a great deal about the surrealist period, chaos theory, poker, chess, and rabbits, and now can expound for days, if anyone asks, on the finer points of the history of foot-binding and the San Francisco strippers' union—a pretty neat party trick, if you ask me.
Today I'm obsessing about the better castles of the world, to which I will be traveling in, oh, the next two days or so, or that's what I've decided, having realized that I desperately need to go on a trip, a profound realization that comes to me every couple of months and consumes me completely, the end result being that, owing to my extensive research, I could become a travel agent specializing in the hotels, restaurants, and cultures of England; Dubai; any American or European spa; the southwestern deserts; a variety of African big-game hunting lodges; Indonesia and much of the South Pacific; and Florence, Greece, and Provence. The only downside to my obsession with trips is that I occasionally actually take them, which sometimes leads to the unfortunate situation of no one having any idea where I am. Anyway, today I get up from my desk to get yet another cup of coffee, but on my way back down the hall, I notice that the dining room table is covered with the remains of last night's dinner party, ashtrays, empty wineglasses, a vase of red-orange tulips, the color of which is so acute, so pure, so vital and alive that in a wave of despair I suddenly realize that everything is futile after all. I become disillusioned with obsessing and realize that I have been obsessing for far more than the allotted three hours, in fact have been obsessing for days, and all my education is wasted on me. I have no purpose in life. I remember that by now I was supposed to have a PhD. Cheered, I sit down and note Get PhD! on my calendar for March 23. I clear my schedule for the following year, as I will be a fellow at Yale; and then I crack up, realizing that indeed I have been a fellow at Yale, last year, between hospitalizations; which fact is totally absurd in light of my current state of mind, which is clearly mad; and which, I now note with a sigh, is not dignified in the least.
I leap up from my chair, suddenly on fire, and dash down the hall, delighted, and I laugh very loudly and shout at the cat, obscurely, Well, motherfuckers, it is indeed a wild ride! And I am off to dinner with my husband, with whom I do not live, for I am crazy and no one can live with me, not even me, and I wonder as I gallop into the night who the hell lets me out of the house.
I peel into the restaurant and fling myself into a booth. I stare at him wide eyed, my chin level with the table.
"I'm a little manic," I gasp.
"I see that," he says.
"It's pretty interesting in here," I say, grinning wildly.
"Yes, I'm sure it is," he says. The waiter arrives. I almost shout, Watch this! but restrain myself momentarily, my shout billowing up in my chest. I put my hand over my mouth to contain my incredible wit, not wishing to alarm.
"Can I get you anything besides water?" the waiter asks.
"No, we'll just have water tonight!" I shout at the top of my lungs, leaning forward and slapping the table, and then the incredible laugh explodes from my mouth and I tip over in the booth, roaring and holding my sides.
I right myself. I catch a look of horror on Jeff's face and see that the waiter did not get the joke. Gleefully, I put the menu over my head and slump down in the booth, racked with giggles.
"Water is fine," Jeff says, attempting to save the waiter from his own stupidity. The waiter goes away. I continue to cackle, tears streaming down my cheeks. I laugh and laugh while Jeff watches me.
"That was a funny joke, Jeff," I point out, gasping. "The waiter didn't get it, did he?"
"He wasn't very smart," Jeff says, looking a little grim.
"Just as I thought." I sigh. "You got it, didn't you?"
"Sure."
I gasp. "You totally didn't! It was fucking hilarious!"
"I did so get it."
"You're just saying that so I feel better. Am I being loud?" I whisper loudly.
"A little. What do you want to eat?"
I page through the menu, throw it on the table, pick it up again, page through, drink my water, nearly s
pitting it out as I remember my joke, and sigh. I stare at the menu. "This is totally overwhelming."
Jeff nods. "It's a long menu." He closes his and helps me decide. We eliminate everything on the menu except one thing, and I order the red curry with mock duck, which is what I order every time we come here; I have never ordered anything else.
"I'm exhausted," I say, and slump in my seat. "This is a totally weird day."
My condo is perfect. I am never leaving it. Everything is perfectly clean. I have placed each book in its exact right place, the place where I understand that God intended it to be. Everything is a little bit magical, just enough so that I feel the vibrations of it (everything) in the palms of my hands. I follow the cat around with a vacuum cleaner in case she sheds. I think I will just vacuum the cat, but she protests. I crouch to look under the couch for dust bunnies. I cannot see any but I vacuum under there anyway, just in case. The vacuum cleaner makes a very satisfying roaring sound. My parents used to run the vacuum cleaner by my head when I was a baby and refused to sleep. For some reason the vacuum cleaner knocked me out. I wonder now if it also would have been effective to put me in a box with a blanket and a ticking clock, like you do with a puppy, which is so stupid it thinks the clock is its mother's heartbeat. This strikes me as hilarious, and I note out loud, "Hilarious!" over the roar of the vacuum cleaner. I notice I am talking to myself, and turn off the vacuum cleaner so I can hear myself better.
"I'm talking to myself!" I remark to myself, as if I am my mother and remarking on a particularly endearing and/or cute thing I have done. "Is that odd?"
Myself and I continue to converse while I put the vacuum away in the hall closet. "You really should clean this closet," I say, wandering into the thicket of ball gowns and coats and suits as if I'm heading for Narnia. I pick my way over several suitcases and climb up a ladder and down the other side, having realized that it is important to find my bathing suit right now, but I trip on a broken television and land with a thud in a pile of boxes. "Oh, for God's sake, don't get me started," I shout, and crawl back out, finding my hiking boots on the way. I go down the hall to collect all my shoes. "The thing is, probably everyone talks to themselves now and then, don't they?" I sweep everything off the closet shelves and begin arranging my heels in order of color and height. "But perhaps they don't talk to themselves quite this much. Time to do the laundry!" Abandoning the shoes, I pull all the bedclothes off the bed, upending cats, and go out my back door and down the staircase of my condo, singing a little laundry song, and I trail through the basement with my quantities of linens, note that my laundry song has taken on a vaguely Baroque sort of air, and note further that, to my regret, I do not play harpsichord, though my first husband's mother did, but she was really fucking crazy, and once called me a shrew. "A shrew!" I cry. "Can you imagine! Who says shrew?" I laugh almost as hard as I did when she said it. I continue my efforts to stuff my very large, very heavy brocade bedspread into the relatively small washer. "Perhaps it won't fit," I murmur, concerned, but then realize that if I just leave the lid open, the washer will, in its eminent wisdom, suck in the bedspread in its chugging, "obviously," I say, rolling my eyes at my own stupidity. I pour half a bottle of laundry soap over the bedspread and turn the washer on. I stuff the sheets and attendant cases, pillows, etc. in the other washer and wander back upstairs. "I've locked myself out," I say grimly. "Fucking idiot." I lean my forehead against the door and become curious as to whether I can achieve perfect balance by tilting myself just right, "On the tips of my toes, with the forehead just so, and she does it!" I cry, balancing there. "People, she does it again! Will she never cease to amaze!" I shake my head in wonder, and laugh riotously. "Probably time to stop talking," I murmur. My neighbor comes out his back door with a bag of garbage. Real casually, I lean my cheek against the door and sort of right myself with a shove of my face. Hi! I wave dramatically, as if he is far away. He smiles nervously. I can't decide if he smiles nervously because I am acting weird, or because he is getting his PhD in philosophy, which would make anyone nervous. His girlfriend makes me nervous. He makes me nervous. The only person in that condo who doesn't make me nervous is their dog. I am quite nervous now, and wish for him to go away. We stand there, having run out of things to say. Why isn't he leaving? Leave! I think. Leave! Leave! Leave! His beard is somewhat devilish. He hems a minute more. "Are you—locked out?" he asks gently. "No!" I say gleefully, and immediately regret it. "I was putting out the recycling," I say, and haul off down the stairs, calling, "Have a nice day!" "You too," he calls after me, sounding a little weirded out, but I'm probably just feeling self-conscious and he didn't think anything of our exchange at all. I dash into the laundry room, leaping like a little lord, green pajamas flapping, and shout, "Just in time!" for I have flooded the basement. My bedspread is emerging out of the washer in an enormous coil, burbling over the edges like some kind of disgusting tongue, which I remind myself it is not, is not a tongue, "now don't start with that shit, missy," I snap, and tiptoe through the pool of soapy water that swirls all over the concrete floor. I grab the bedspread and try to wrestle it out of the washer, which takes this opportunity—"fuckers!"—to hemorrhage vast quantities of water; water is surging up and out of the washer and all over me, drenching me and twisting the coil of the bedspread ever higher so it looks like a cobra dancing out of the washer (though it does not "look" in the traditional sense like a cobra, i.e., I do not really see a cobra, or anything other than a bedspread, which causes me to meditate for a split second on the nature of simile and metaphor), "ah yes!" I bellow, "I have you now!" I climb up on the washer, barefoot, skidding a little, and seize the bedspread with all my strength and begin to drag it out of the "fucking bastard washing machine!," which, I will think later (as I am giving myself a "calming" bath), it does not occur to me to simply turn off, no, I hop down from the washer and, the soaking bedspread over my shoulder, lean forward with all my weight and begin a long, slow trudge across the basement, looking a little like Titian's Sisyphus, and I remind myself that this is merely laundry day, and not in any sense a Sisyphean journey.