Madness (33 page)

I gaze out the window. "But if you're not trying to be perfect, then how do you know if you're doing things right?"

"There is no
right,"
she says. "There's the best you can do. And that's fine. That's normal."

"The best I can do is sometimes completely fail," I say.

She shrugs. "Fine," she says. "The rest of us do it all the time."

Bewildered, I wander out to my car.

I'm wearing a pair of pants four sizes too big and there are nine half-full coffee cups on my desk. Some of the cups also hold cigarette butts, some have mold, and one has an apple core. I've been in my office since, I think, last Tuesday; it is either Friday or Saturday today, maybe. I just went into the kitchen to get something to eat and found we have only condiments. I will be eating frozen spinach, pesto, and caper berries for dinner.

Megan shows up. She wants to go to lunch. But I'm certain it is only seven o'clock in the morning.

"It's noon," she says, standing in my doorway. "Can I come in?"

"It isn't noon," I answer, opening the door wider and going down the hall. She closes the door and follows me to the kitchen. I stand there staring at the clock on the stove.

"It's noon," I tell her. "How is it noon?"

"Happens every day," she says.

"What in the hell have I been doing? Did I just get up?" I ask.

"I don't think so," she says. "You're dressed."

I look down. I
am
dressed, more or less. "I don't know what I've been doing," I say, baffled.

"Working," she says. "I called you at nine. You were working."

"What was I working on?"

"The book," she says.

I stare at her blankly.

Megan has her own weirdnesses. She has some issues with disorder and dirt, and occasionally has her rabid fixations. So, just as a special treat for some unsuspecting waitress, Megan and I sit down at a table in a new restaurant we're giving a try. We have been having lunch at the same restaurant every week for the past five years; we thought we'd venture a change.

"I would like a cup of coffee with skim milk," Megan says to the waitress, smoothing her napkin.

"We only have two-percent," the waitress says.

Megan stares at me without expression for a good long while in silence.

"Okay," she says finally, and picks up her spoon and squints at it.

The waitress goes away. Then I remember I want coffee too, so when she comes back with a plate of bread, I order a cup, and we order lunch. She leaves.

"Is it Friday or Saturday?" I ask Megan, scooting myself into the far corner of the booth, where I can keep an eye on the room.

"Thursday," she says. "The day we always have lunch."

"Right," I say, nodding.

"When was the last time you left the house?"

"Last week sometime." I crane my neck around the high-backed booth.

"There's nobody there," she says mildly. I turn back around, fold my legs up under me, tuck my hands between my thighs, and
cross my feet so that I am pretty much in a knot, my back pressed against the wall. I like to feel compact.

Megan goes to the bathroom. When she comes out, she walks over to our table and stands there. I have switched to her side of the booth. I look up at her.

"What was wrong with that side?" she asks.

"It made me anxious."

"Okay," she says, and sits down. "Can I wash my hands at your house?"

"Of course," I say.

"I forgot my wet wipes," she explains.

The waitress comes back with my coffee and then leaves again. I spread my napkin out on the table, take a piece of bread, tear it into three pieces, lay them out on the napkin, and butter them with exactly one-third of a pat of butter apiece. It makes me calm to do this. Megan watches me. "I need a little plate," she says, and flags down the waitress.

"Yes?" the waitress says.

"I would like a little plate and an extra napkin. Please."

"We're lots of fun," I remark.

"I tip well," Megan says, lining up the pepper with the salt.

We discuss the new series of paintings she is working on, work she's doing on the Iraq war, the sources of light and color so saturated they seem to bleed. We talk about the chapter that's driving me bananas, and my very weird writing process. We discuss the war, and our husbands, and how very odd it must be to be married to us, for we are, as Shakespeare said, passing strange.

Our lunch arrives.

Megan takes the top piece of bread off her sandwich, reorganizes the lox with her fork, cuts her cornichon into four pieces, takes a spoonful of soup, and says severely, "They should have put these beans through a food mill. They're disgusting this way. They have those things."

"What things?"

"Those
skins."
Megan proceeds to spoon every bean out of her white-bean soup.

We agree that we like this lunch place, the Bakery on Grand. We agree that it is safe, and that we will come here again, and this will be our new place, and the decaf's pretty good. We are immensely relieved.

Megan comes over after lunch, decides she can't wash her hands in my bathroom because there's a cat box in it, washes her hands in my kitchen sink, reaches her arms around me to give me a hug, keeping her hands in fists so as not to touch me, bangs me on the back, and goes.

A fine time was had by all.

When she leaves, I phone Medicare. For two hours—that's how long the call lasts—I try to make myself focus on and understand at least some small part of what they are saying, becoming increasingly convinced that they are making it harder on purpose. There is some snafu in my insurance coverage, and for the moment, no one will cover anything. So I have to enroll in a new plan. I have been staring at the booklets all week, these booklets that surely someone must be able to translate for me, because I can't make heads or tails of what they say
at all,
and every time I look at them I get overwhelmed and want to weep, and I flip pages frantically and make obscure notations in the margins, which confuse me even more, so I am doing what the doctors tell me—I am
asking for help!
I am on the phone with Medicare in the hopes that they'll help me figure out what the hell I am doing, and I listen intently while the person on the phone speaks some other language at me in a steady drone.

"I have to say," I cut in.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"It seems a little silly to me that the whole reason I have Medicare is because my brain doesn't work, which means I can't understand a word you're saying, let alone what's printed in these massive manuals you send me, where one page refers to another page, which refers to some other booklet, which tells me to call you, whereupon I get an automated answering service that confuses me more, and now that I've got you, you tell me to call back on the fifteenth, which I will forget and will not therefore get myself enrolled in whatever program I am supposed to enroll in, which is supposed to cover my drugs, but apparently does not cover Pap smears because they are not 'medically necessary,' and now my other insurance won't pay for anything because they figured out I have a mental illness, and you won't pay for anything because you think the other insurance is supposed to be paying, and I am pretty sure someone is in fact supposed to be covering my medical expenses, which are in excess of five thousand dollars a
month,
so I am pretty well just shit out of luck, is that what you're saying?"

There is a little pause. Cautiously, the voice says, "Noooo..." And we start again.

Eventually I give up and hang up the phone. I have done this every day for a week. I will keep doing it until one day, suddenly, it all makes sense. Surely, someday, it will.

The phone rings.
"What!"
I shout into it. I pace in circles in my office.

"Hey, sweetie!" It's Jeff, with his interminable cheeriness. Son of a bitch. I hate him. I wish he were here so I could work. I wish he would go away so I could work. "How's the writing going?"

"Horrible." I plunk down in my desk chair and spin around in circles.

"I'm sure it's fine. I'm sure it's
great."

"It isn't. It's crap. I spent three hours writing and then I read it and it was crap."

"So what are you doing now?"

I look at my computer screen. I am in a bidding war on eBay, attempting to acquire a purple silk smoking jacket with black
satin lapels. I intend to wear it as a robe. I am also bidding on a gold ball gown that I have realized I cannot live without. "Research," I say.

"Well, that's great! You've been avoiding research for days!"

"Shut up. I have not."

"Oh. My mistake."

I have been avoiding research. He is only humoring me in my delusions of competence.

"I'm never going to write again." I heave a sigh.

"Yes you will."

"No I won't! I haven't written all week! I might as well just sit around eating truffles."

"Maybe so. But I think you're stewing something. You're just about to write."

"About to write! Always about to write! Never writing! I am a waste of human space," I say glumly and slump in my chair. I raise my bid on a standing ashtray without which my life will be completely incomplete. "I think I'm depressed," I say. "But maybe I'm just sick." I can never tell if I'm depressed or just sick. I don't believe in being sick. I drive myself crazy trying to work when I can't because I'm sick. "Do you think I'm sick?" I ask, feeling my forehead.

"No."

"You see? I'm just being lazy!" I crow, triumphant, and pound the desk with my fist. "And I'm never going to write again! Do you want a new set of golf clubs?"

"What? No." I bid on them anyway. They look sort of retro. I decide I'm into retro, and type in
retro.
"Are you on eBay?" he asks.

"No," I say. "Yes. I haven't bought anything yet."

"Try not to."

"What do you care? It's my money."

"What are you buying?"

"Ball gowns."

"Oh," he says.

"I'm not writing."

"You'll write tomorrow. I can tell."

"How can you tell? Yes!" I yell, having just won a bid for a child's antique desk. Next: find child's chairs.

"Maybe I'm manic. Maybe that's why I can't concentrate."

"Maybe you're a complete lunatic."

"I'm going to buy you a pair of plaid pants. What?" I ask, distracted.

"Nothing. Keep at it. Good job."

"Thank you. I will." I win the bid for a kilt.

I hang up and reach for my cigarettes. Remembering that I've quit, I go down the back stairs and fetch them out of the garbage can, hoping that no one is watching me dig through the trash while only very marginally dressed.

I don't write for a week. I'm driving both myself and everyone who knows me totally insane. Half the time I'm hysterical and pacing, half the time I'm in bed. I keep books there with me; it makes me feel more productive. I hate myself. I get horribly depressed. I lie in bed, trying to decide how I will kill myself. One thing is for sure—I can't hang myself because Jeff would find me and would be upset and I would feel terrible. I will drown myself instead.

I wake up in the middle of the seventh night.

I have it. There it is. The thing I've been trying to write. I creep down the hall to my office. I emerge three days later. The chapter is done.

And then it's evening, and Jeff's home, and we're sitting on the deck looking out over the wildly blooming world, and the sun is making its way lazily down the sky, not in any hurry to end the day. I go up to bed eventually, read, take my handfuls of pills, turn out the light, and sleep.

Well, sleep off and on. Lately the sleep has gotten a little messed up. I'm sure it means nothing. I don't have time for things like that. So I ignore it.

May flows into June and summer's arrived. I feel human again. A little superhuman, really. I can do anything. I'm unstoppable. All that craziness—it's over, and it's never coming again.

Except that it is. The rest of them see it before I do. My mood goes up and up, bobbing above me, and I dangle by its string, going higher every day.

Maybe, though, this time I can come down easy, like I did this winter. Maybe it won't be too bad. I've worked so hard. In the brief instants of insight when I feel this coming on, I feel so helpless and frustrated that I want to scream. I did what they said. I tried. I did my best. And it wasn't good enough.

But that's the way it goes.

When it comes, it comes quietly enough. One morning I am suddenly, acutely aware that I am
extremely
happy. It's a fine, bright day, and I'm feeling rather grand. I fling my arm out before me, which admittedly is a little odd, in a gesture intended to signify my magnanimous state of mind. Sally forth! I am overcome with a sense of possibility—which clearly means that I should go shopping.

Entirely possessed of my senses, and in a
very
good mood, I buy nine Coach purses, twelve Coach scarves, and six identical Coach hats, items I obviously need immediately,
urgently.
(Though of course one
can
overaccessorize, and in certain regrettable moments one has in fact
vastly
overaccessorized, wearing for example more than one hat, a winter scarf around the neck, a silk head scarf, Gibson Girl short pants, black bug-eyed sunglasses, earrings in only the
left
ear, and a totally inappropriate baby-doll T-shirt one has impulsively purchased which reads
Hot Buns.
) It is important not to look
cluttered.

However, now possessed of this fine, fine collection of hats, I make a trip to all the vintage and antique stores in the Twin Cities in search of a
hat rack,
which rack should be
pewter.
While at these stores I become distracted by and violently attached to: a curiously tiny writing desk, several large buffets, an entire set of
spectacular
crystal glasses (for white wine, red wine, martini, highball, lowball, cordial, brandy, and aquavit) (I haven't had a drink in years), a deeply significant dining room set, a somehow Dutch-looking and incredibly tacky tureen, a green velvet couch with broken springs and wear marks on the arms, several fake diamond rings, a horrid red paste choker I intend to wear "to the
theatre,"
and a number of florid lamps. I buy them all.