“It’s more than that.” Kristen is insistent. “No one else understands me. You remind me of this girl I used to know. Laurel. That’s her name.”
Kristen told only one other person when she had had sex with her boyfriend, Billy. From Laurel she sought reassurance and advice. Laurel gave it in the form of a ten-page letter passed to Kristen between classes.
But one night, while Kristen was out with Billy, her mother, Nora, went into her room to straighten up. When Kristen got home she found her mother in the master bedroom, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts next to her on the bed.
“What’s going on, Mom?” Kristen was worried. “What happened? Did something happen?” Her mother smoked, but not this much. Kristen could not take her eyes off the ashtray. A couple of half-smoked cigarettes had not been fully extinguished and smoke was spiraling up. She knew, in the pit of her stomach, something was terribly wrong.
And that is when she noticed the letter lying on the bed in front of her cross-legged mother.
Suddenly her mouth was very dry.
“Tell me it’s not true.” Her mother looked intensely at Kristen. “Tell me you have not had sex with Billy. Tell me.”
“What?” Kristen was buying time. “What’re you talking about, Mom?”
“This!” Nora grabbed the letter in her fist and waved it angrily. “This letter is what I’m talking about! Tell me you were just trying to show off to a friend, this Laurel person. Tell me you made the whole thing up just to impress an older girl. Tell me, Kristen.”
Kristen knew she could tell her mother what she obviously wanted to hear and tiptoe to safety or she could tell her mother the truth. She took a deep breath and tried to swallow, but her mouth was so communion wafer-dry that her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she had to take another deep breath.
“It’s true,” Kristen whispered. She couldn’t look her mother in the eye.
Nora let out a guttural moan that seemed to go on forever. She was doubled over as if to get more vocal power. Kristen had never seen her mother like this. She felt alternately sick and scared.
“Mom, I’m sorry—” was all she could think to say.
“How long?” Her mother was talking in a different voice.
“Huh?”
“How long have you and Billy been having s-e-x?” Her mother didn’t actually spell the word sex, but said it as if it were poisonous.
“Um. Well.” Once again the truth prevailed. “Three months. Something like that. I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe less. Probably less. Less for sure. Two months. I don’t know.”
By now her mother was rocking back and forth on the bed while trying to light another cigarette. She was so mad, though, that her hands were shaking, making it nearly impossible to unite the tip of the cigarette with the Bic lighter.
Nora reached for the phone.
“Mom? Who’re you calling?” Kristen was panicked. She had no idea what to expect.
“Bob?” Her mother had called Kristen’s father, who had stayed in a company apartment in Manhattan for the night because he had an early breakfast meeting.
“Come home right away” was all Nora said into the phone.
“Mom? What’re you doing? Dad’s going to think someone died or something! Why does he need to come home now? It’s ten at night. He’s going to freak!”
“Too bad.” Her mother was completely still on the bed. She looked Kristen in the eye. When Kristen looked into her mother’s eyes she felt nauseous. Something in her mother’s stare was violently frightening.
Nora swung herself off the bed and stormed out of the room. Kristen followed, not saying anything, just watching in horror as her mother stood in front of the bathroom mirror and screamed. Not a high-pitched scream. A wail of such sad frustration and anger that Kristen moved in to try to hold her mother.
“Get away from me!” she shrieked, pushing Kristen out of the bathroom. “You make me sick! Get away from me!”
“Mom?” she called through the bathroom door. “Mom, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, Mom. Please come out. Let me explain…”
The door flew open and Nora was in Kristen’s face.
“I told you. Get out of here! I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear your voice. Get out of here!”
With a vise tightening in the pit in her stomach, Kristen crouched outside the now-closed bathroom door and waited, listening to her mother’s sobs.
After about a half an hour she heard her father’s key in the front door and two seconds later she saw his worried face as he ran up the stairs.
“What on earth is wrong?” He still had on his coat. “Kristen? What’s happened?”
Kristen flew into his arms and, for the first time since this incident began to unfold, cried.
“Dad, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “Please remember that. No matter what happens…I’m so sorry.”
Her father was apoplectic. “Where’s your mother? Nora? Nora!”
The bathroom door opened and standing in front of her frantic husband stood Nora, with clumps of her thick hair wadded up in her fists.
“Oh, my God,” her husband said. “What happened? Will someone please tell me what in the hell is going on here?”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on here,” her mother said as she pushed past father and daughter and made her way down the stairs into the living room. The two followed her as if sleepwalking.
“Your daughter fucked Billy.” Nora was rocking in the middle of the living room floor. Kristen stood at the entrance to the living room and stared at her disheveled mother.
“Is that what this is all about?” Her father was incredulous.
“Dad, I’m so sorry.” Kristen ran over to kneel at her father’s feet. “It’s my fault. I’m so sorry.”
He pulled her up alongside him on the couch and hugged her. And, before he released her, he whispered in her ear. “We’ll get through this,” he murmured.
Kristen looked back at her mother and addressed her, through her tears. “Mom, please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” her mother mimicked Kristen, putting an emphasis on a different word each time she repeated it. “You’re sorry. You’re sorry. You’re sorry!”
“Honey.” Kristen’s father spoke gently to her mother, as if trying to soothe a child. Kristen had never seen her father talk to her mother this way. “Sweetheart, let’s go upstairs for a minute and talk. Okay? Let’s go up to our room.”
But before he could reach down to try to pull his wife up from the floor she moaned again, the way she had when Kristen first told her the truth. The moan was the spookiest of the entire display. It was full of such pain and suffering that Kristen vowed she would never again do anything to hurt or disappoint her mother.
And she kept that promise for many years. Kristen began to dance as fast as she possibly could.
Isabel looks away from Kristen, down the rambling driveway.
One step. That’s all it would take. One truck and one step.
Isabel’s eyes are fixed at the space between the two stone pillars.
One step.
“That’s when I first tried it,” Kristen is saying as she lights another cigarette.
“Tried what?” Isabel asks.
“Suicide.”
For a week following her mother’s discovery of Kristen’s sexual secret she was under what amounted to house arrest. The first night of what Kristen would come to think of as the Incident, Nora slept on the floor of her room. She demanded to know every detail of Kristen’s and Billy’s first encounter.
Kristen did her best to answer her mother, even though she was petrified to talk about such a personal, and apparently horrific, thing with her angry mother. She told her mother the truth: that she and Billy had decided together that they were going to make love. That Billy had not forced himself on her in any way. That Billy used a condom. Kristen was humiliated, recounting what she had presumed was a wonderful experience to her disg
usted mother. Kristen had no idea what she had done was so terrible, but now, seeing her mother react the way she had, she began to see sex as a shocking, dirty, humiliating act.
When her mother asked her where they were when they lost their virginity, Kristen lied. She knew she was forbidden to be alone at Billy’s house (she had also promised that the two would never be alone in Billy’s room) so she told her mother they had been in Billy’s car.
A few nights later, Kristen snuck into her room when her parents were distracted and called Billy. Whispering into the phone, Kristen sketched out the situation for him and told him that she had lied about where they had lost their virginity (“I just want to get our stories straight so if she asks you…”). Kristen heard a thump outside her door.
The vise that still had a grip on her stomach tightened and Kristen got off the phone within seconds.
She opened her bedroom door and there was her mother, crumpled up on the floor at the threshold of Kristen’s room.
“Mom?” Kristen was sick to her stomach. “Mom?”
Her mother pulled herself up off the floor and headed to the master bedroom with Kristen on her heels. Quietly, her mother faced the mirror in the bathroom and again started to pull clumps of her hair out. Kristen grabbed her wrists.
“Mom! Stop it.”
“Quiet!” her mother spat like a feral cat.
“Okay, okay.” Kristen didn’t know if she had any more strength left for her mother’s volatility.
“Go away!” her mother snarled, shoving Kristen out of the bathroom.
Kristen stared at the wood-grain patterns of the closed door. She turned and went into her own bathroom.
Once the door was shut and locked, Kristen opened the medicine cabinet. She scanned the shelves. There was a bottle of Tylenol, but Kristen knew there were more options in her parents bathroom. Options that could release her from the guilty hell she was living in as a result of her repulsive behavior.
She was caught between hope and dread. Between the allure of escape and the danger of deeper trouble.
She decided to wait until her mother came out of her bathroom.
Kristen shuffled back to her room to listen for her mother’s bathroom door opening. She would put an end to all the pain swirling around inside her. The decision made her feel calmer than she had in days.
When Kristen finally heard her mother emerge from her bathroom, she steadied her queasy stomach and opened her bedroom door. Silence. Her mother was nowhere to be seen.
“Mom?”
Kristen timidly walked downstairs to the kitchen, to find her mother who was busying herself by peeling back the tiny square of tin foil that covered the dessert section of the Swanson frozen dinner.
“Mom?” Kristen whispered.
Her mother carried on with the frozen-dinner preparation as if she hadn’t heard a sound.
“Mom?” Kristen’s whisper was slightly louder this time.
Again, no reaction from Nora.
Kristen left the kitchen and went back upstairs, this time to her parents’ bathroom.
She reached for a prescription bottle that had her father’s name on it. He had blinding headaches from time to time so Kristen reached for what she was sure was a painkiller. The bottle felt huge in her hand. She was mesmerized by the orange-tinted plastic.
She let the faucet run for a minute to get the water really cold.
Twenty-Five
“We need to discuss your medication.”
“What about it?”
“For one thing—” Dr. Seidler looks concerned “—it doesn’t seem to be working. You are trying to battle severe depression.”
Oh, God.
Isabel has been switching from pill to pill for most of her adult life and knows that changing medication is a traumatic event. “But,” she stammers, “I don’t think about killing myself as much as I did when I first got here. We talked about that, didn’t we? I don’t think I need to change.”
Side effects. Jesus, shaky hands. Upset stomach. Plus they won’t let me out while I’m still “adjusting to new medication.”
“I hear that this is scary for you but it doesn’t need to be. Recently we’ve discovered ways to work with older methods in order to reduce side effects. I want to talk with you about something that I think could be extremely effective for you.”
Isabel knew what was coming. Her therapist in Manhattan had told her about it. Three Breezes is known for successfully treating suicidal depression with a mix of antidepressants. Patients call it the “cocktail.” Individualized to meet different needs and bodies, it consists of combining the two or three most powerful antidepressants on the market in order to boost their effectiveness.
“I know all about the cocktail.” Isabel wants to beat her therapist to the punch.
“Ah, the cocktail.” The doctor laughs awkwardly and then clears her throat. “Well, no, actually. That’s not what we’ve discussed in reference to your case. We are considering what’s nicknamed ECT…electroshock therapy. It sounds like the Dark Ages, I know.” The doctor moves quickly to explain since Isabel’s face has fallen into a long look of horror. “But it’s not at all like you would imagine. In many cases it can be the single most effective way to combat severe depression. It has little to no side effects and we happen to specialize in it here.
“I can see from the look on your face that you are thinking about something. Why don’t you share what’s on your mind, Isabel.”
“Frances Farmer.” That is all she can say. All she sees is Jessica Lange portraying the old film star.
“Heh, heh.” Another throat clearing. “That movie did more damage to ECT than anything before or after. I get your point, though. The image of electroshock therapy is quite scary if you’re not familiar with it. Is that what you mean?”
I think she ended up having a lobotomy, a frontal lobotomy. Frances Farmer. That’s what did her in in the end. Wasn’t it a lobotomy?
“Oh, my God.” The implications of the doctor’s suggestion are starting to sink in. “Oh, my God, you think I need shock therapy?” Isabel starts taking in deep breaths.
“I think I’m going to pass out,” she says while she slips down farther into the club chair she always chooses for her private sessions.
“All right. Okay. We don’t have to talk about this anymore today.” The doctor is looking alarmed. “Take it easy. I’m sorry I upset you, Isabel. I didn’t mean to—”
“Do you ever get any takers for that? For E-C-T?” she asks in angry disgust. “I mean, does anyone actually say ‘Hey, yeah! Let’s stick some electrodes to my temples and then crank some electricity into them! Cool!’?”
“I hear that you’re upset.”
Isabel starts to cry.
Hold on. Just hold on until you get out of this office. Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
“Isabel? You can cry in here, you know. You don’t need to hide your tears.”
“I’m going now,” Isabel says sharply. “I want to take a shower and forget this conversation ever happened.”
Dr. Seidler looks at her watch, notes that they still have fifteen minutes to go in the session, pauses, and thinks better of urging her patient to stay. “Okay. That’s fine. I’ll see you tomorrow. If you want to talk before then you can ask the nurse to page me.”
“Fine.”
Before Isabel walks out of her doctor’s office she takes a deep breath and pulls her shoulders back, a posture meant to show determination. On her exhale, though, her shoulders fall forward and her body collapses into itself, deflating her defiance completely.
She retreats to her room, gathers up her shampoo and soap and heads to the nurses’ station.
“Yes, Isabel. What can we do for you?”
“I need to get into the sharps closet for a second.”
“Sure,” the nurse says while reaching for the big ring of keys attached to her white belt. Isabel follows her over to the closet. “What do you need?”
“Ah, well…I’
m needing to shave, actually. I’ll bring the razor right back when I’m done.”
The nurse had started shaking her head halfway through Isabel’s tentative request. “Has anyone talked to you about shaving?”
“No.”
“If you want to shave you need to be supervised. It’s not as bad as it sounds. One of us has to be there when you do it. Did you want to do it now?”
Isabel had known that there was probably a rule about shaving, but she hadn’t imagined a nurse would have to watch her do it. She tries to seem unfazed. “Um, sure. Okay. If that’s good for you?”
“Yep. Let’s get your razor first.”
The bathrooms at Three Breezes are large enough to accommodate a toilet, a sink and a long, narrow plastic shower stall. Inside the shower Isabel lets the water get hot before balancing her leg parallel to the floor to begin shaving.
“Okay, Isabel. Here’s your razor.” Before Isabel can reach around the mildewed vinyl shower curtain, the nurse pulls it back altogether and cheerfully hands the Lady Bic to a horrified Isabel. She tries to pull the curtain closed to maintain a semblance of dignity but the nurse catches her wet arm. “Nope. It’s got to stay open while you shave. I need to watch you.”
“Never mind! Just take the razor and go!” Isabel yells, her face already burning in shame and embarrassment, tears about to flow. The nurse looks bewildered for a moment, but then takes the razor gently from Isabel and leaves.
Twenty-Six
Maybe sleep will make this day go faster.
Several hours after falling into a restless sleep Isabel wakes with a jolt of the kind of nausea that signals something tremendously important has been forgotten.
“What time is it?” she asks the first person she runs into outside her bedroom door.
“Eleven o’clock,” the orderly answers.
“A.m. or p.m.?”
“P.m.” His tone is sympathetic, as if she has just come out of a coma.
“Oh, my God, Keisha!” Isabel rushes over to the nurses’ station.
“Well, hello, Sleeping Beauty.” Connie the night nurse is on.