* * *
My Father Tries to Stop the Pee from Coming out of Me but Scares the Shit out of Me Instead
* * *
The thing about depression is that, if you're not the one who's actually suffering from it, there's very little you can do to be proactive. If someone in your family is depressed, all you can really do is send them to the shrink, get them their meds, be gentle, and wait. A persistent bedwetting problem, however, is a call to action. Surely there must be a way to stop a small amount of liquid from moving a short distance during a certain time of day. It's a very tangible, physical problem. A science project, really. Combating my depression was a job for an army of geniuses--the ones at Pfizer pharmaceutical company. But the solution to my bedwetting problem, Dad still believed, was within his grasp.
It really killed Dad that I couldn't stop wetting the bed. He was a bedwetter as a kid, too. And, his father, too. Dad was walking me to the bathroom in the middle of the night, but he--understandably--felt it didn't get to the root of the problem. After all, I was still peeing while sleeping--I was just being escorted to the bathroom to do it. So he started splashing water in my face when he would take me to the bathroom--that way I would be awake and conscious of the motion of getting up to go. Though well meaning, this method was both unfruitful and unpleasant.
For a while I had to wear diapers to bed. That way there was no messy changing of the sheets. It was humiliating, but I got used to it. Plus, it was convenient. But it was just a Band-Aid, and Dad wasn't about to give up on me.
He put an electric pad under my sheet, designed to set off an alarm when moistened. Though "alarm" doesn't really do it justice, I'd call it more of a shocking, heart-attack-causing, 'Elizabeth, I'm coming to join you' scream.
That first night of the screaming aluminum sheet was the last night I slept at my dad's house. I mean, I still spent the night as the joint-custody schedule dictated, but I didn't sleep. The horror of waking up to that stunning alarm kept me up most of the night, or until my body couldn't fight it any longer--and you know what happens then--total submission--and all it entails.
* * *
More Celebrities Come to My Aid
* * *
I stayed up late. I had a TV in my room and I would spend my nights with Johnny Carson and David Letterman. I loved them. Mom loved Johnny--she said, "He's interesting because he's interested." Also because, she said, "He knows the price of eggs."
One night in 1985, Johnny had an actress on named Jane Badler. Mom perked up, "Ooo ooo! This woman is from New Hampshire! She was Miss New Hampshire 1972!" We were both so excited to see this pretty lady from New Hampshire on The Tonight Show. She was promoting a miniseries she was in, called V, in which she played some kind of sexy evil reptile. She was beautiful, and she had black hair like me, which was not common in LL Bean New Hampshire. And then something impossible happened. On Johnny Carson, for everyone in the world to hear, Jane Badler said that when she was a kid she was a bedwetter. This secret that I knew for a FACT would be the most painful secret of my life was a trivial fun fact for this elegant, confident beauty queen-actress. Until now, I could not imagine ever getting over the embarrassment of being me, and here she was, giggling about it on The Tonight Show. The motherfucking Tonight Show.
* * *
I Attempt to Make a Career out of Cleaning People's Filthy Sheets but Am Too Depressed to Appreciate the Irony
* * *
My father switched me to a different school just before my sophomore year. It was a small college-preparatory school that I got into on the merit of my grades. But by then I had already decided I was going to quit school altogether. Mr. James was heroic and temporarily successful in his efforts to lure me back into school, but it was not enough to conquer my depression or the fear of being alone among a whole new sea of kids.
I secured an interview with the local Sheraton to work there as a maid. The morning before my interview my father pulled up to my mom's house, marched inside, threw me over his shoulder, stuffed me in his car, and drove me to my new school. I screamed and sobbed and tried to jump out of the moving car, but Dad was one step ahead of me, securing the child-safety lock. We pulled into the parking lot of the Derryfield School. Dad got out of the car, came around to the passenger side, and yanked me out as well. Out in the open I was too embarrassed to make a scene. Instead, I used all my will to be tough and choke back tears. I was led into my history class, which was already in progress. The door opened and everyone looked at me. I sat down, concentrating hard on keeping my shit together. I was able for the first time to get out of my own self and focus on my teacher. He was cool and charming and beloved by all students. And he was Jewish! Specifically Russian and Polish, just like me--I couldn't believe it. But most of all he was funny. I never missed another day of school.
There were only about forty kids in my entire grade, and as it turned out, Jim and Sara Riley--the children Dr. Riley was survived by--were students at my new school. Jim was in my grade and Sara was a grade below ours. Though I became good friends with both of them, I never mentioned that I knew their dad, or that I'd seen him a week before his suicide. I wasn't consciously hiding the fact, it just never occurred to me.
While I was settling into Derryfield, I was sent to another shrink, Dr. Santiago (a Mexican doctor in Manchester, New Hampshire--how that happened, I don't know). When I told him I was taking sixteen Xanax a day, he was horrified. He called my mother in and told us that this was fucked-up shit (I'm paraphrasing) and that his very own brother died going off Xanax cold turkey. The weirdest part is that he had been prescribed Xanax for acne. Seriously. He explained that I would go off the Xanax gradually, a half a pill less each week. It was eight months before I was completely off meds--and the day I took that very last swallow of half a Xanax was the happiest day of my life to that point. It was at the bubbler (water fountain) in the hippy dippy hallway of my new school. My shoebox was to see its last empty bottle.
* * *
Relieving Myself
* * *
I kept meticulous logs of my bedwetting. I wrote in a diary every night. Each day marked with a "wet" or "dry" in an upper corner. The contents were pretty trivial. "Had a double header against Goffstown. We won the first game 12-6 and lost the second game 7-nothing." Most entries ended the same way, "Bye," then a big swirling "Sarah Silverman."
I kept the "wet" and "dry" logs because I was a detective. (I was in love with Sherlock Holmes--I even had a fingerprinting kit that I used everywhere--proving my mother's use of Tampax or that my sister once held the candy bowl.) I figured keeping the log with my diary might reveal patterns that would help me get to the bottom of this thing. It didn't.
The first thing that actually worked was this kind of chant I made up and I would say to myself, just barely out loud, before bed. I'd kiss my mom or dad goodnight and then shut the door. There is a weird feeling at first, talking out loud when you're alone in a room. But you get used to it:
I will not wet the bed.
I will not wet the bed.
I will not wet the bed.
I will not wet the bed.
Do not wet the bed.
Do not wet the bed.
Do not wet the bed.
Do not wet the bed.
Please do not wet the bed.
Please do not wet the bed.
Please do not wet the bed.
Please do not wet the bed.
I realize now that what kept me dry through those nights weren't my preteen lyrics to this makeshift mantra, but the fact that this was a kind of meditation. Just the fact that I was focusing on one thing for more than a minute, helped. It was probably the intention of the hypnotism with Dr. Grimm, but this thing worked. It was different. It was a prayer.
I finally grew, bladder and all. Around the time that I got my driver's license, and the final traces of Xanax left my system, and the cloud of my depression lifted, my enuresis went away. Just as the doctor had predicted, more than a decade be
fore.
MY NANA WAS GREAT BUT NOW SHE'S DEAD
My Nana, Rose Silverman, was madly in love with my grandfather Max, which was both pathetic and romantic. Pathetic because she stood by him while he did stuff like belittle my father and punch him in the head, romantic because when she looked at him, all she saw was the man she fell in love with, even when he was cruel, even when he was out of control, even through his many late years of senility.
Nana, still elegant in her later years, and a monkey
Toward the end of his life, Papa would not speak much. When the family came together for dinner, he would look at us with vague recognition and smile. If he opened his mouth at all, it would be to sing one single line of a song--the only thing he seemed to remember from somewhere in the recesses of his mind, "And he'll be big and strong, the man I love..."
"That's a song for a woman to sing, Mac!" my Nana would yell, lovingly. To be fair to Papa, the lyrics were written by Ira Gershwin, who by all accounts was a man.
Even though I felt protective of my dad, who was mentally and physically abused--directly at the hands of Papa and indirectly by Nana's unconscionable passivity--I couldn't help but adore my Nana. She wasn't the same person with me as she had been with Dad so many years before. It seems to me that sometimes the worst parents make the best grandparents. I'm not sure why. Maybe because there is enough of a generational separation that they don't see their grandchildren as an extension of themselves, so their relationship isn't tainted by any self-loathing. And of course, just growing older seems to soften and relax people. Since so many people these days don't seem to start their families until around age forty, I predict there will be less child beating, but more slipped disks from lifting babies out of cribs. Even the father of advanced age who's not inclined to spare the rod is likely to suffer more than his victim: The first punch he throws might well be the last straw for his rotator cuff, reducing his disciplinary options to mere verbal abuse and napping. I'm excited about the next generation!
Nana was social but she wasn't quite a woman of the world. Her Catholic neighbor once invited her over for drinks, and on the wall Nana noticed a picture of a woman holding a baby.
"Is this you and your mother?" she asked.
She genuinely didn't know from the Madonna and Child, but then again, Jews don't tend to view biblical iconography as a foundation for home decor. In their houses, those spaces are reserved for flocked silver wallpaper and refrigerator magnet pictures of grandchildren.
When my sisters and I would walk into the room, Nana's face lit up like a kid on Christmas morning. (I couldn't think of the Jewish equivalent analogy other than "like a Jewish woman seeing her grandchildren...")
Rose and Max Silverman--Nana and Papa--walking down the aisle at my parents' wedding, during the very short-lived heyday of Jews in top hats
Nana was elegant and ladylike and fashionable. She was also hysterically funny. She knew all the dirtiest jokes and used them as bargaining chits with me--if I behaved well or did this chore or that, I would be rewarded with a joke. "Everyone was feeling Rosie, so Rosie went home. Then they all jumped for Joy!" Though she was stuck in old-time notions of right and wrong, she tried to be progressive around us. Anytime we would tell her about a new boy in our lives, she'd ask,
"Is he Jewish?"
"No, Nana, he's not."
"Oh." Then, remembering herself, "Well...is he nice?"
She would say nonsensical things that not only made complete sense to her, but were vital and required immediate heeding. For example, as we were leaving her house after a visit, she'd often yell after us, "Don't get a perm!"
Only two liquids passed her lips: black coffee and Manhattans. I guess nothing was worth ingesting unless it carried some powerful psychoactive agent. Manhattans, of course, are just enormous helpings of pure whiskey. One of them should have easily toppled a woman of Nana's age and size, but she usually maintained pretty well. Although I do recall once, after dining out at a restaurant that served especially generous drinks, a vision of Nana singing "Give My Regaahhds to Broadway" through bouts of hysterical laughter, as she tripped out of the car and up the stone steps to her house.
She told stories that led seemingly nowhere:
"I was watching Rosie [O'Donnell's daytime talk show], and she had an actress on..."
And just when you think this was going somewhere, she'd put her hand on my arm and say (in her thick New Hampshire accent), simply,
"You-ah pretty-ah."
That was the peculiar thing about Nana's love--while most Jewish grandmothers have an astronomically inflated view of their grandchildren's wonderfulness, hers was uniquely realistic. She often said, "To me, you are so wonderful. To me, you are so beautiful." I suppose there's a number of ways to interpret that: (a) she was hedging, uncertain that, empirically, I was beautiful or wonderful, and wanted to speak with legal precision, should she someday be accused of misleading me; (b) she wanted to give me love, but didn't want me to get a fat head about it; (c) she wanted a little extra credit for being bold and brave and enough of a visionary to stand alone--the only one to perceive how beautiful and wonderful I was.
Peculiar rhetoric aside, Nana would always be hopelessly and blindly devoted to her granddaughters.
My father once got a call from Carlyle House, the nursing home where Nana eventually settled. They said she was being rushed to the hospital. He raced over there so he could ride in the ambulance with her, and when he ran through the hall to her room, she was already being rolled out on a gurney by two male EMTs. She looked up at the men, pointed to my dad, and said, "That's the fathah of the girls I was telling you about."
When it became clear that Nana was dying, my sisters and I came home to New Hampshire to be with her. She would wake up in between long periods of sleep and ask if she was still alive. When we told her she was, she would slap her hand on her head as if a waiter had just fucked up her cocktail order for the ninth time in a row. I always figured that when you die of old age, you just go when you're ready. Nana was ready to go but she wasn't...going. It was torture to watch her waiting so impatiently to get the fuck out of this world. But still she was funny. At the end, as Laura and I sat on either side of her, each holding one of her hands, Nana came to, briefly. She looked up at us, smiled, and whispered, "So beautiful."
Laura jumped right in saying, "She's talking to me!"
I said, "No way, she's talking to me!"
To which Nana, with what was literally one of her last dying breaths, replied, "Laura."
HYMEN, GOODBYEMEN
* * *
I Find That Sex Agrees with Me
* * *
I did some bad things.
Not "bad things" like murder or rob. But there was a period in which I couldn't see a guy without needing to know what his balls looked like. Between 1990 and '92, I tore through New York City like the Tasmanian Devil. I use the Tasmanian Devil metaphor with some hesitation because, though I like it for the visual image, it's imperfect. The Tasmanian Devil from the Warner Bros. cartoons was this explosion of frustrated energy that rampaged unstoppably, but one gets the sense that if he ever got laid, he would relax and turn into someone with whom you could conceivably get stoned. In the early '90s, sex didn't do that for me. It didn't especially calm me down or satisfy me, it was just something I did in between all the other times I was having sex. Additionally, the Tasmanian Devil is slightly hairier than I was then. Ever so slightly...
Anyway, my point is that I had some sex in my early twenties. In part, I was making up for lost time. I was a late bloomer all around. My period came late, my ability not to go off like a fucking lawn sprinkler every night came late, and sex came late. Essentially, everything having to do with the general flow of traffic in my vagina came late. Ironically, I was this girl in high school through whom everyone came to learn about sex, though I, myself, had never gone past kissing a boy.
My first real love was a girl named Kerry.
* * *
The Adventures of the Dirty Jew and the Nigerian Princess
* * *
I met Kerry in my sophomore year in high school. I was a scrub in blue-and-green-plaid flannel pajamas, which I wore to school every day and slept in every night. (But to be clear, I had pretty much stopped wetting the bed by then, plus I showered and changed my underwear daily. Not that I needed to, as I was still at a prepubescent stage in which I genuinely incurred no gaminess.) Kerry was my age, but she was a full-grown woman. She had long painted fingernails, she read fashion magazines, and she went to the gym--what high school kid goes to the fucking gym? She even used eye cream at night. "You can never start too early," she'd say.
She was my best friend and I worshipped her.