Madness (7 page)

I wake up an hour, a few hours, half a day later. I wince at the light. I am a bat. I dangle in the corner of my room, my leathery wings folded over my face. I look at the clock. Did I call in sick to work? What day is it? Do I have class? Am I teaching? Oh, Christ. I let my head fall back on the pillow and stare at the ceiling. I am silent. I do not exist. I am merely a pair of eyes, looking around at the room. The rest of me is invisible. I won't be visible again until someone sees me. If a woman stands in a kitchen rubbing her eyes and pouring coffee with no one there to see her, does she exist? I will not register in the world until I speak.

I stumble out the door, hop the bus to the university, my head bobbling as we drive over ruts in the road, listening to the slow milling of arbitrary words around my head. The words displease me. They are not in order. Everyone is talking at once. I sit in silence, staring out the window, watching the city go by.

An hour later I find myself standing in front of a classroom with chalk in my hand. They will drop a nickel in me and I will begin to talk.

My body clock is completely screwed up. I'm drinking again. One minute I'm flat on my face in the living room, crying and deep
in despair, the next I'm tearing back up, moving so fast my head is spinning, trying to do a million things at once, trying to keep up with the rocketing, plummeting moods.

I can't so much as clean my apartment. My bills pile up, unpaid. The phone gets turned off. I'm so broke I'm feeding my cat cans of beans. The only things in my refrigerator are a bag of wilted carrots and beer. I guzzle coffee all day and vodka all night.

What's wrong with me? Nothing. I'm fine. I've just become a lazy slob. Get ahold of yourself. Now.

But I can't. And soon enough I snap.

The cutting helps. I'm cutting every day. I stand in the bathroom, slicing patterns in my arms. They'll scar. My arms will, for the rest of my life, be covered with scars. I clench my teeth. Cut more. Cut deeper. The thoughts stop.

The pain is perfect. It's precise. My mind, for one blessed moment, is aware only of the pain. The pain makes me feel alive. My heart beats steadily in my chest. I picture the blood pumping through me, reaching the cuts, spilling over, running down my arms.

Morning comes. I'm passed out on the floor. I try to lift my head. A thick and pressing sadness lies on me like a dead body. I roll over on my stomach, lay my face on the floor, close my eyes. I can't move.

By night, I feel like I'm on speed. The moods carry me up and down, up and down. I fly and fall, crashing and sailing and crashing again.

The therapist's office: she leans back in her chair. She's lovely,
and out of her depth. She keeps increasing my Prozac. It's making me insane.

"I don't know what's going on," I say, trying to sound calm but grappling with a desperation that clutches at my chest. "I don't think things are going very well."

"What makes you say that?" she asks kindly, tilting her head. Sometimes her kindness gets to me. It's excessive and saccharine, almost a parody of itself.

"I'm acting a little crazy," I say. "One minute I'm flying around and the next I'm, you know, lying on the floor."

"But don't you think that's progress? That you're really feeling your feelings? I think you've finally reached a special place in your life, a place of real balance, where you're able to fully
respond
to those feelings. You're not just locked up in your head all the time, intellectualizing, pushing those feelings
away."

"Maybe," I say, hesitant. "It just seems like maybe it's a little much. You know, like really
extreme.
It seems like the feelings are taking over my entire life."

"Well, consider this—how's the eating going?"

"Pretty well."

"Now, I want you to really
take that in.
Stop for a moment and really
appreciate
the significance of that. How different is that from ever before? You've never really been
in a space
where the eating disorder was under control. I feel like you're really using the
tools
we've been working on, the
mindful eating,
the
being in your body.
You should really bear
witness
to the progress you've made in that area. I think you've finally, really, truly made the decision to stay alive. That's just enormous. Can you see that? Can you be proud of yourself?"

"I'm cutting my arms up every night."

"Have you been journaling?"

"Yes."

"And what are you finding?"

"When I read it over, it's like two different people are writing it. One of them's a maniac and one of them's completely depressed."

"Do you think you're depressed?"

"Not when I'm flying around."

"I think, honestly, that you're in much better shape than you're giving yourself credit for. I think maybe that you are still just so
angry
at yourself for all the years of being sick, and so
unfairly judgmental
of yourself for finally breaking away from the past and finally
feeling your feelings,
being
true
to yourself, that you just aren't
allowing
yourself to appreciate how well you're really doing."

"I really would rather not be cutting. I'm getting scars all over my arms."

"Well, I think that's a matter of doing some
self-soothing.
Have you been trying out the self-soothing techniques I suggested? Take some real
time
for yourself. Just sit down at night, make yourself a cup of tea, and be quiet
in yourself.
Wrap yourself in a warm, fuzzy quilt. Put on lotion. Splurge on some perfume. Take yourself out to lunch. Turn on some soothing music and try self-massage. Take a warm, comforting bath. Light a candle and really
feel
the water surrounding your limbs. Do you think you could begin tonight? Do you think you could try taking a bath?"

I take a fucking bath.

Night comes. It finally happens. It's the scene in the bathroom of my apartment in Minneapolis. I'm twenty years old, drunk out of my mind. I am cutting patterns in my arm, a leaf and a snake. And then, without thinking, on blind, unstoppable impulse, I slash my left arm with a razor so hard I hit the bone.

Now I'm someone else. Now I'm someone who's tried to kill herself. I've opened my artery and not even felt it. Has it gotten that bad?

No problem. A blip on the screen of my usual nuttiness. I'll simply start over. No more of that. Out with the cutting. Out with the Prozac. Out with the old me, and in with the new.

Obviously, the next thing to do is to skip town.

I head off for California in my rattling car. I'm getting out of here. I'm going to go be a
real
writer. I take only some books, a ratty blue bandanna, a few clothes, and my cat.

And the five-inch purple scar on my forearm, which looks like a terrible worm.

Suddenly, I'm writing a book about my years with eating disorders. I don't really know how that happened—a writer I know talked me into it, insisted I should—but I sit at my desk all day, pounding it out. The sun crosses the floor of my one-room apartment in Oakland as I race through the pages, barely aware of the world, trying to forget the crazies, the razor, the cut.

Now I'm drinking in earnest. At the end of the day, each day, I head down the street to the liquor store to buy the night's supply of vodka. I go home, add a splash of orange juice to an eight-ounce tumbler, fill the rest of the glass with the vodka, and spend the evening at my desk writing poetry, then stay up all night reading every secondhand book I can afford. I stagger around my apartment, completely unaware that I am quickly crossing the line from binge drinker to alcoholic. It happens overnight.

And here's the kicker. On impulse—it just occurs to me—I stop by Julian's house. Julian is a friend from my adolescent California days, the only semi-sane friend I had. He is a nice guy, kind, a port-in-a-storm kind of fellow. And he is also a little boy,
aimless, easy to sweep away. He has no life—now he can have mine.

I pull up to his house, my hair in a crewcut, wearing a tank top, old jeans, and a beat-up pair of boots. He opens the door. His jaw drops. I grin.

We spend a year in a particleboard apartment, drinking constantly, playing grownups. My new life is complete. I've abandoned the crazy years, the crazy self, and here I am with a book deal, a future, and a fiancé. We spend the nights in Melendy's Bar, pool balls cracking, Patsy Cline on the jukebox, swimming in smoke. We talk nonstop, laugh our heads off, plan an extravagant wedding, an extravagant life.

Our families and friends are alarmed, wondering where the hell we got this idea, urging us to wait, but we ignore them—it's perfectly reasonable that two twenty-two-year-olds who knew each other as kids and have now been living together for all of a year are completely prepared to begin a life together.

Idiots.

We marry in July, and the next day, because this is perfectly obvious, we get in a moving van and head back to Minneapolis. I want to be near my family, my friends, my cousin Brian, who's been my closest friend since we were kids, the one sane point in the whirlwind of my chaos, the voice on the phone long-distance, the writing on the letters, the hand that held my string as I bobbed and wove in the breeze.

So Julian and I go sailing forward at a breakneck pace. We're grownups now. I am spending money as fast as I make it, and we jet around the country to lavish hotels in cities, anywhere, everywhere, eating fabulous meals, blowing thousands of dollars, making drunken fools of ourselves, collapsing on endless king-size beds. At home, I careen from parties at friends' houses to Brian's downtown apartment, where I talk a mile a minute and we
cackle with laughter. He's the dearest person to me in the world, a person of substance, solidity, sanity, and a deep and abiding gentleness, and he is what I rely on, even if I'm not entirely aware of it, to give my life some semblance of sense. As much as we laugh, he gets me to sit still for a minute, tries to tell me I'm going too fast, that I'm going to crash, but I ignore him, that's the old me, I'm a different person now. I go racing through the mall, buying everything in sight, staggering under bags and bags of things I've bought, who cares what they are? I want it,
I have to have it,
it's perfect! It's gorgeous! I can't stop shopping, our house fills up with china, crystal, expensive sheets, mountains of books, gourmet cookware, every kind of booze you can think of, paintings, clothes and more clothes and more clothes. We're like little kids. We
are
little kids, but don't tell us that—we're having a
fantastic
time. We have our little house, and live our little life. We are the perfect young husband and wife. We have nonstop dinner parties—the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine.

I sometimes feel as if I've raced off a cliff and am spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I'm fine. It's fine. It's all going to be fine. Crazy people don't have dinner parties, do they? No.

We go to concerts and plays, and never once do I let on that sometimes the music turns colors in my mind, veering toward me, making me flinch. I laugh at the funny parts and clap when everyone claps, even if I'm confused, disoriented, scared.

When I get lost as I drive through the streets of my city, I tell no one. Every night, after a day of writing, I open the bottle of wine, and Julian and I settle in for an evening of drunken glee. I make the fancy meals and wash the wedding dishes and write the thank-you notes for all the million wedding gifts on stationery stamped with my married name.

Crazy people don't have stationery, do they?

The wineglasses will stave off the madness, surely, or the breakfast nook will, or the husband himself. I'm not going crazy.

Not again.

It seems to happen overnight: one day I am calm, and the next I am raging. It's very simple. Happens like you're flipping a switch. Julian and I are going along, having a perfectly lovely evening, and then it's dark and I am screaming, standing in the middle of the room, turning over the glass-topped coffee table, ripping the bathroom sink out of the wall, picking up anything nearby and pitching it as hard as I can. The rages always come at night. They control my voice, my hands, I scream and throw myself against the walls. I feel like a Tasmanian devil. The room spins, I run up and down the stairs, I can't stop. Julian tries to grab me, holding my arms until I scream myself out and collapse, exhausted, in tears—but there are nights I manage to squirm free and run out the door. Sometimes I just run as far and as hard as I can, until I can't breathe, until my heart is about to explode, or until, stumbling drunk, I fall and hit my head on a tree stump or the curb and lie still.

Sometimes, though, I get in my car.

I peel out of the driveway, roaring up Thirty-sixth Street, away from my pretty house and sleepy neighborhood.
Slow down!
I am screaming at myself,
Marya, slow down!

And the madness screams back,
I won't!

It slides under my skin, borrowing my body without asking: my hands are its hands, and its hands are filled with an otherworldly strength. Its hands feel the need to lash out, to hit something, so it tightens its white-knuckled fists on the wheel, its bare foot slamming the gas. My head jerks back. Half in abject terror, half in awe, I watch the lights streak across the sky, bending as I careen around corners, up Hennepin, down through the seething nightlife of Lake Street, past the spectrally brilliant movie theater marquee, the crowds a blur,
stoplights are not for me!
Streetlights
smear behind me like neon streamers. I hurtle forward. The only thing that matters is motion,
forward motion, propulsion,
I veer onto the freeway, playing chicken with the cars. The road comes at me full speed, it looks as if it will hit me dead between the eyes, but then it swerves around me just in time. The other cars, the median, the guardrail flash around my face, and I in my roller coaster am clattering and screaming along. I wind up in some unknown neighborhood, over by the river or on the north side of town. I turn the car around and, my rage spent, find my way home.