Madness (30 page)

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 spitting 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, "Hil
ar
ious!" 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.

Having freed the bedspread at last, I lug its considerable wet weight over to the dryer, where I spend five minutes trying to shove it in before I succeed and turn it on. As I head back up the stairs, I hear the dryer make a sound of great mechanical distress,
nnnnnnneeeeeeeeeee,
and I pause for only a moment before I decide that if I leave, I will no longer intimidate the machine, and it will then do its job very well without me.

I go upstairs, let myself in with the spare key, and get into bed, after first raising the blinds to make sure I do not get depressed because I am sitting in bed in the dark on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon in fall, because I am a
fucking wack job.
I tuck myself in neatly and survey the situation. I get out of bed and go get an apple and get back in bed. I munch on my apple, chattering like Johnny Carson's dummy,
A-yah yah yah yah yah.
I put the apple core in the ashtray and light a cigarette. My sheets are covered with burn holes. "I really ought to stop smoking in bed," I note briskly, and open my 938-page clinical tome
Manic-Depressive Illness,
from which I am learning many interesting things about brain chemistry, and which surely, somewhere, somehow, will explain to me precisely why the
fuck
I am like this.

I imagine what an outside observer would see if he stood at the foot of my bed: a woman with wild red hair and a pair of crooked glasses, an enormous book propped up on her lap titled, in gigantic letters,
M
A
N
I
C
-
D
E
P
R
E
S
S
I
V
E
I
L
L
N
E
S
S
.

"Well." I sigh. I pop an Ativan and turn a page. "So it goes."

From the bowels of the building, the dryer screams in pain, makes a disturbing
chunk
sort of sound, and goes silent.

Soon the hypomania morphs into something darker. The eating disorder has taken hold for real. It's no longer just a few symptoms I was using to try to control the moods. It's taken on a life of its own. I am eating next to nothing, spending hours
every day at the gym, standing on the scale four, five times a day, consumed with the fear of gaining weight, with fear that the writing is going badly, with fear that Jeff and I aren't going to make it, with fear that I will always be alone, or go crazy again, or spend my life in an institution. So I channel all the vague, amorphous, all-encompassing fears that have come to rule my days and nights into a fierce desire to lose weight. And more weight. All bones, I clatter around my house, aimlessly, running this way and that, calling people and hanging up, starting projects and abandoning them, getting into bed in the middle of the day and then getting out. My brain is electric, no longer the beautiful network of perfectly connecting thoughts and ideas, but now the manic fritzing and spitting, so loud it feels like it's going to shatter my eardrums. I smoke three packs a day. Jeff and I get together and devolve into the same fight we've been having for months, and we walk away from each other, torn up a little more each time. I am intensely lonely, and the nights are endless.

The fleeting feeling of confidence I got from moving into my own place and doing everything right has been replaced with the familiar, violent self-hatred I know. I had everything, and I lost it. Instead of hating the illness, I hate myself.

Soon I am throwing up even the little I eat. I eat an apple, then throw it up. A few grapes, then throw them up. When I go out to lunch with Megan, I eat a salad, then disappear into the bathroom to throw it up. Megan is pleading with me to go to the hospital. She and all my friends and family are crazy with worry. I'm skeletal, jumpy, scared all the time. Jeff's petrified—he's never seen my eating disorder before, and he's not in any position to help me deal with it, so he just tries not to look at how ugly I've become. I see him less and less. I begin to hide out in my house. I begin abusing laxatives. I spend my days running from my kitchen to the bathroom. Some days I am brave enough to venture out of the house
and spend hours at the gym; sometimes I am afraid I am being watched.

And for the life of me, I can't figure out why my meds aren't working.

Ruth gets me out of the house for coffee. I sit staring at the red Gerbera daisy in its little white vase on the table. It absorbs me completely. Ruth is talking. She sounds far away, as if my head is wrapped in cotton batting and the sound waves can't quite make it through. I watch her lips. I hear myself explain to her that my thoughts are getting weird, and while I know that, I can't seem to do anything to stop them.

"It feels like I am physically trying to hold my head on. It feels like it's about to fly off. I don't want to go to the hospital. I don't want to hurt myself. I don't want to do any of it, but I feel like I have no way to keep myself together. What happens if I really can't?" I start to cry.

Ruth puts her hands over mine on the table. I have twisted and shredded a number of napkins, and it looks as if the table is covered with snow. "Oh, honey," she says. "I'm sorry."

I pick up a shred of napkin and blot at the mascara running down my cheeks. "It's okay," I say. "I hate crying. It's not a big deal, anyway. It's just a little bit harder than seems really necessary."

"It is," she says. "Are you cutting yet?"