Madness (29 page)

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 you 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.