Don't Go Crazy Without Me. Deborah A. Lott
about before last night?”
“Weird things keep happening, and they all seem connected. I can’t stop seeing the connections and they scare me because I don’t know what they mean.”
He kept taking notes, pulling his body farther away from me, erect in his black leather chair. He was arrogant. Just like my father said, psychiatrists were arrogant, self-righteous, moralizing, bourgeois pricks.
“What exactly scares you?”
Everything?
The whoosh of the air ventilation system made a dissonant song play in my head. The metallic odor of ozone filled the air, like the scent that precedes a thunderstorm. Or was it more organic? Maybe the smell was coming from him? More likely me. I pressed my legs together. Whenever something smelled rank, I assumed the odor was coming from between my legs.
I had to get out—of the room, of the place, of my head, of my body. If only there were some way other than death to get out. The idea of dying terrified me but so did feeling trapped by my body.
“What’s been going on at home with Mom and Dad? What about with your friends at school?” Frames from one of our tenth grade health education films flashed before me: wholesome teenagers cheerfully eating lunch together on a school bench, singing hymns at church with mom and dad, playing baseball in the park. How could I bridge the distance between those scenes and my life?
You see, doctor, when my grandmother Rebecca died, my father got depressed, and every night he’d stare out the window and speak to her in her grave. Then he started believing that Mom and my Uncle Nathan were trying to kill him. I spied on them for him. Now my mother’s committed him and some friendly doctors like you are running bolts of electricity through his brain.
When my grandmother died, I couldn’t stop imagining her in her coffin. Then a girl at school died and I got textbooks with her name in them, and these strange coincidences kept happening, and now I’m afraid she wants something from me, that she and my grandmother want something from me. The dead miss the living; they envy us. My father told me.
I felt a compulsion to confess and an equally powerful prohibition against it. I wasn’t allowed to say the dead girl’s name out loud, though I had to repeat it in my head a million times a day to make amends for living.
“I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on,” the doctor coaxed. “Have you been taking drugs? Smoking grass?” He elongated the last word’s single syllable and smiled as if congratulating himself for his hipness. I was more naïve than he realized; I didn’t even know any kids in La Crescenta who took drugs, only a poet with a bottle of whiskey in his glove box.
I saw myself in a long tunnel, exiting my body from the back of my head. No, I shouldn’t have asked to leave my body. Please God, just let me get back into my body, let me get back into my body, and be a normal high school girl.
“There’s something going on at the very back of my head,” I said, “like my brain is too big for my body. I feel it stretching behind me.”
My voice sounded remote, even to me. The psychiatrist would say my affect did not match my words. It was the same erudite tone my father employed when cajoling doctors into giving him the drugs he loved—Butisol Sodium, Seconal, Percodan, and his favorite, Tuinol. He sang out their names as if even forming the words with his mouth delighted him.
“I have an unusually high tolerance,” he’d say. “I don’t react like an ordinary man.”
My father and I were not ordinary; oh no, we had formed an alliance around being extraordinary.
“You can trust me,” the doctor said and that small gesture towards empathy released me. I told him everything.
After our session, the doctor ushered my mother into his consulting room. He showed her my diagnosis written on the top of an intake sheet, Paranoid Schizophrenic.
After my first brief appointment with a psychiatrist, I carried a more dire diagnosis than my father, whose doctors couldn’t agree on what to call what was wrong with him. Schizophrenia, with its onset in adolescence, was likely to progress. Treatments were limited.
My mother came back and sat down in the waiting room next to me, her hazel eyes wet. After all her years of living with my father, my mother still seemed so innocent, so taken off guard by what was happening in our family.
“What did you tell him?” she said. “What kind of crazy mishegoss did you tell him? Nobody understands how suggestible you are.”
My mother was right; the doctor had misdiagnosed me. The clarity of her gaze snapped me back into reality. The dissonance stopped. I re-entered my body. All I wanted at that moment was to be normal. Well, not ordinary-normal, of course, but special-normal.
“You’re too smart a girl for this. You’ve got to get a hold of yourself.”
I flinched. That was my mother’s usual advice—get a hold, shut down, don’t feel. I could never get the grip on myself she thought I needed. I’d never figured out how to be more like her.
“Do you want to wind up in the mental hospital in a bed next to your father’s? They can give you a matching straitjacket too.”
CHAPTER ONE
Gotchernose
Isang in my four-year-old voice: “Carrots grow from carrot seeds, I planted them, I grew them, I watered them, I pulled the weeds, carrots grow from carrot seeds.” My father’s sudden entrance interrupted my music. He limped in, barefoot, fat stomach preceding him, one hand twirling his thick black curls. Tummel, my mother called the psychic commotion that attended him. The Yiddish word for turbulence, energy, chaos, excitement. Noise and hilarity, noise and calamity. My mother trailed in his wake, a head taller, broad-shouldered, long-necked, dignified, her light brown hair pinned back from her pale and tender face. Underneath her modest shirtwaist dress, the boned girdle that kept her, she said, from “falling apart.”
“You remember Roy?” my father’s black eyes flashed and bore into me.
“Ira, zug gornisht,” my mother said. “Shah. You never know when to leave well enough alone.” She was worn out from years of serving as my father’s missing censor.
My ears pricked up like a dog’s; my heart began to race with agitated excitement. I was a tuning fork resonating to my father’s pitch.
Roy was the counter man at the La Crescenta post office that played a crucial twice-daily role in the running of The Business, the insurance agency my parents operated out of the third bedroom of our house. At the beginning and end of each workday, my mother took me with her on her runs.
I’d hang on her slippery, stockinged leg until she’d pick me up and seat me on the worn wooden counter, where a panorama of sights would open before me: men in bluish-gray uniforms wheeling massive bins of mail. A medley of scents: Vitalis, sweat, and tobacco; ink, glue, paper, and paper dust. Then Roy—bald but for a few strands of hair, his face craggy but sweet. He looked like Jimmy Durante to me. They seemed the same person, or rather iterations of some common breed, in the same way the cocker spaniels in our neighborhood looked mostly alike.
“You’re just going to upset her, and who’ll be the one trying to calm her down when she’s running around the house tonight hysterical? Let her be a child,” my mother said.
“Eva, she’s no ordinary child. She’s very precocious—”
“—and has an overactive imagination you feed. Shah! Zug gornisht.”
“What?” I said. “Daddy, tell me. Tell me!” My mother was always trying to keep my father’s special secrets from me. I wanted to be in on everything.
“You