“No, no ropes. There are no ropes here,” Grandma said. Helen didn’t notice Grandma’s voice wavering. She didn’t notice Grandpa’s exhausted, shattered expression.
I did. I held Grandpa’s hand.
The way I understood it later is that Helen had had to be held down sometimes in a chair. They didn’t want to tie her to a bed because she clearly already had nightmares about beds. But she also kept trying to hurt the baby with her fists. Helen had told the doctors the bees were “ready to come out and knocking on their door.”
“I am not going to sit in a chair with ropes or octopus tentacles again. Are there octopus tentacles on this red chair?”
“No, sweetie. Not at all,” Grandpa said.
“Where are the tentacles?”
“They’re not here. We don’t have tentacles on the farm. We only have chickens and goats and pigs and horses. That’s it. Remember?”
Helen nodded. “All right. I remember. We don’t have octopus here. I can sit in this red heart chair if you check it each day for tentacles and ropes.”
“I’ll do it now, sweetie,” Grandpa said.
I watched him examine that chair. He even turned it upside down. “I’m checking…still checking…almost done checking, Helen. Okay, sweetie. It’s safe.”
Helen nodded. “Are you sure?”
Grandpa checked the chair one more time, every inch of it, his hands running over the whole thing. Do you see how family members in the house can get caught up in someone else’s mental illness? How you start talking the language of a schizophrenic? Try doing that at seven years old. I am living proof: It knocks something sane right out of you.
“Yes. We’re safe.”
“Okay. I have to get the devil’s water out of me now. Come and watch,” she told my grandpa. “I don’t want Barry to come in.”
So Grandpa watched his daughter pee, never taking his eyes from hers, so Barry wouldn’t come and get her, and then we had dinner. He moved the red chair to the kitchen table. That seat wasn’t as high as the others, so Helen’s face was only a little bit above the table, but she sat down at each breakfast and dinner with us, after Grandpa checked the chair.
The other chairs in our house did not fare well. Periodically, and without warning, she would throw the kitchen chairs, the chair by Grandpa’s desk, a small stool that Grandma used for gardening, the Adirondack chairs on the deck, and the two antique chairs by the small table near the front door. The throwing was unpredictable.
“This one has to die,” she would say, lifting it up. Helen was not a big person at all, but in her demented rages she seemed to become stronger.
“This one is trying to hold me down.”
“This one won’t shut up. Shut up, chair! I’m not going to let you hit me with your wood. Quit screaming at me.”
She broke a couple chairs, scratched a bunch up, and chipped wood off others.
She was distracted only by her pastel crayons or paints.
“Draw a picture of that chair, Helen,” Grandma told her one time as she spun my wooden kid’s chair above her head. “Then I’ll be able to see what you see.”
“No! I’m not going to draw today because of the kicking of the bees.”
“I’d love a picture by you.”
“No!”
“You can get back at the chair by drawing it,” Grandma cajoled. “You can show it who’s boss, that Helen’s in charge.”
“I’m only going to draw a bad picture,” Helen replied, slamming the chair down. “A bad chair. A chair with arms and handcuffs and chains and some snakes and not you, Command Center.”
“Well, that will be very creative. Not boring at all. I always love your pictures.”
“Everybody does, because then they can see the mess.” Helen kicked the chair, then pushed her black top hat back on her head. She had wrapped foil around her neck and tied it in a big bow. “They can see the mess in my brain.”
“You draw the mess well. You’re an artist.”
“I’m telling the truth about chairs, so the truth isn’t invisible anymore.” She stuck her lower lip out, then scratched her arms. “Shut up, Punk! I’m not drawing for you!”
“It’s good we have you to tell the truth, honey.”
Helen grunted, but she took the pastels and the big canvas Grandma had been holding.
“You sit here, girl kid.” She pointed to a chair. I sat down. She nodded at me, then adjusted the tin foil tie.
Out of the swirls and curls and tiny, twisting, spiraling crayon marks came a chair. It was my wooden chair, although it had morphed into a chair in three different colors of red, a chain wrapped around the back, handcuffs lying on the seat, and two detached arms on the floor. I thought of the blood flower upstairs in that room when I saw those arms and had to run outside and sit in the corn by myself for a while.
Helen morphed, twisted, elongated, shortened, stretched, and zigzagged each chair she drew. The background was one of two things: She drew weather, thunder and lightning, rolling clouds, or a sunny day that somehow, in some sneaky way, foretold something ominous. Or her backgrounds were full of squiggles. Long, short, fat, thin, all mixed together forming a moving, fluid, disturbing background.
The background of those pictures was a hint of what was going on in Helen’s mind. The hint was enough to scare us all to pieces.
Helen was relatively calm for a few weeks. We even talked about the baby.
“There’s something in there,” she whispered to me while we walked around the farm one morning, feeding the horses, petting the cats, and watching the corn sway. She pointed at her stomach.
“I know,” I whispered. “It’s a baby.”
She nodded at me, quite serious. “Someone tried to take it out before it was baked. It’s not baked yet. When it is, it’s coming out.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s a baby. It’s crying right now.”
“Why is it crying?”
“It’s crying because it’s lonely and scared and its head is filled with mean people fighting and telling it what to do. Bad things.”
“That’s sad.” I wanted to cry for the baby.
“Yes, it is. It’s a baby and a few bees.” She sighed, then squished her yellow floppy hat down on her head. She was wearing two bathing suits over a ski outfit. It was warm out.
I did what Grandma did then. I changed the subject. “I’m glad you’re home, Momma. I like your hair.”
She raised her eyebrows, confused. “You do?”
“Yes, it’s pretty.” It was pretty. Helen was pretty. If she wasn’t wearing a confused, angry, demented, drugged-out, or fizzy expression, and if you could ignore whatever weird outfit she was wearing, you would say that Helen was gorgeous. She had high cheekbones and full lips and a small nose.
“Hmmm…” She stopped and stared at me. “You’re a girl kid that’s mine, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. I’m your daughter.” My voice caught. I knew she had a sickness in her head, I got it. Grandma and Grandpa always answered all my questions about that, but it still hurt. I was only seven, and I played hopscotch and four-square.
“You like my hair?”
I nodded again. “It reminds me of gold.”
“Your hair is black and you have a dent in your cheek.” She touched it, then stroked my hair. “Pretty.”
That night Helen cut off her hair and gave it to me in a Baggie. “I have a present for you,” she said. Then she kicked a chair and said, “Command Center says you’re an octopus in disguise!”
I burst into tears.
20
Portland, Oregon
Saturday morning I was a totally hungover chicken from my previous night’s work. Saturday evening Mr. Pingle greeted me with tremendous excitement, his high-pitched exuberance cutting right through the fog of my chicken hangover like a sumo wrestler grabbing onto my cranium. I held my head tightly.
“Cluckers!” he declared. “You’re already in chicken mode, I
can tell! Already thinking as a chicken!” He clucked at me, louder and louder, and I pressed my hands to my head tighter and tighter. “You, I think,” he told me proudly, quietly, so as not to offend any other employee there, “are the best chicken we’ve had. There’s something so authentic about you! So authentic!”
He pushed his glasses up on his nose and grinned at me.
“Thank you, Mr. Pingle. I appreciate that.” I stomped my chicken feet.
“Here ya go, Stevie.” He held out the chicken outfit. I closed my eyes. “I love it, your concentration! I’ll be quiet so you can situate yourself, grow into your role, think as a chicken thinks.”
He helped me into the chicken outfit, the big red feet, the feathered body, the chicken head, and, to his credit, he didn’t speak.
When I was all chickened out I grabbed the sign he held out to me—CHICKEN DINNERS ONLY $8.99!—and headed out to the street. I danced, I jived, I waved, people honked. I jumped off the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a swerving pickup, ran away from a group of drunk teenagers who tried to take off my head, and tripped over a stroller. The mother hit me with her purse.
At the end of my shift, I went home and flopped into bed, visions of chicken feet and mommies with feathers hitting me with purses dancing through my head.
The Atherton case dragged on, as did the depositions of anyone having anything remotely to do with Danny’s operation, the protocol for these operations, safety guidelines, oversight, the doctor in charge of the unit, president of the hospital, and so on.
We learned later that Mrs. Atherton was being sent to a clinic for a week for exhaustion. She had been hospitalized two nights before when she’d collapsed. I pictured her life, caring for Danny round the clock, not sleeping, desperate in those dark night hours, praying for a miracle, the miracle unresponsive. I thought of the medicines she had to administer, the IV that needed changing, and the constant threat that her dear son, the one who loved dragon stories and baseball and music, would die in their dining room, in his hospital bed, and on the other end of the spectrum, her horrified fear that this would be his life forever. Her grief and her anger and the stress that this entire lawsuit must be taking on both of them had me glued to my chair, staring into space and hurting for her.
I thought of the father, working his plumber job. He had recently been hired to work at a hardware store, so he was doing that, too.
I thought of the three other young boys and how their lives had been affected by this tragedy, and again I wondered how a country that could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on wars and war machinery to kill others can’t figure out a way for a young boy to get all the medical care he needs, and deserves, without the entire family collapsing financially.
And I thought of that paper. The Dornshire letter.
I knew what to do.
I so knew what to do.
After work I changed into blue jean shorts and a purple T-shirt. Zena had invited me to watch her roller derby competition, and I was going to eat a salad before scooting off to watch women try to kill each other.
For a minute I paused in front of the mirrors on my closet doors.
I still could not believe I could fit into shorts.
The body staring back at me, slender, with legs that had curves instead of globules of fat and dimples and wrinkles, still shocked me. Part of me would always believe that the mirror was an illusion. To go from being 320 pounds to 150 pounds was nothing short of a mind-blowing miracle.
Or a few cuts here and there and a stomach band during my first surgery, and another surgery, more risky, that whacked off many pounds of sagging skin that used to be puffed out with fat.
My weight after the operation slipped off like water on a water slide. I could drink only liquids at first, then pureed food, soft and moist foods, and not much of it or I would get dumping syndrome and vomit. I lost 40 pounds in three months. I lost more than 100 pounds the first year, and my face emerged from my fat.
I did not expect my operation to solve everything in my life, but my diabetes poofed into thin air, my blood pressure is normal, I won’t need knee or hip replacement surgery, I can breathe when I walk, I don’t feel another heart attack is imminent, and I do not ache or puff when moving. All incredible. Each day I’m grateful. Breathing is sweet.
But there have been more than physical differences in my life. The difference in how people treat me is stunning…and hurtful and aggravating and frustrating. And nice, too, if I can disregard the fact that when I was heavy they probably would not have paid any attention to me at all.
When I weighed 320 pounds I was constantly waiting for attacks from strangers, Herbert, acquaintances, coworkers, you name it. People say the rudest things to heavy people. “Have you tried this diet? My cousin did this…. You’re going to die if you don’t do something…. You have such a pretty face; if you lost weight it would show…. God, you’re fat…. She’s gross…. Why is she eating a hamburger…. She’s taking up way too much space on this planet…. I cannot believe that fat butt…. tub o’ lard…. Oh, my God, I’ve never seen thighs that big…. She can barely walk…. Her arms are the size of my waist…. Eww!”
It’s devastating. You try to build your armor up, but all those comments bypass the armor, each and every one, like sharpened spears.
Now, at five foot seven and a hundred and fifty pounds, I suddenly count, as if I didn’t before when I was heavy. Strangers chat with me downtown, my neighbors call me in for lemonade, and the checkers at the grocery store or waiters in restaurants regard me with friendly smiles instead of disgust.
Eileen tells me all the time that I cheated in order to lose weight, but here’s how I see it: We have surgery and go under very sharp knives for all sorts of things: appendectomies, heart operations, brain operations. Many times the surgeries, health issues, and injuries that Americans have are caused by being overweight, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, or being involved in accidents caused by our own stupidity. They’re preventable problems we bring onto ourselves. We undergo procedures to live or to improve our health. I did it for both.
What was I supposed to do? Stay that size my whole life and, possibly, die decades earlier than I would normally have? Continue to live in pain, unable to breathe right because some people out there would think I had cheated to lose weight? Try another diet that didn’t work, would never work? Was it my fault I was addicted to food? Yes, I thought instantly. Yes, it was my fault.
And no.
You try going through what I went through and you might find yourself addicted to something, too. There was no way I could look inward until I looked outward and fixed what soon would have killed me: my weight.
I had done that.
Somebody doesn’t approve? Somebody thinks I took the easy way out by getting bariatric surgery?
Their problem.
Not mine.
It was Eileen’s problem, not mine.
I had scars, the scars would never disappear, but I figured that was life. I had scars on the inside, scars on the outside.
Doesn’t everyone? And, in some way, don’t the scars make us stronger? Even if the scars caused us near-mortal heartache? Don’t they?
I had to admit, I was still standing. Still upright.
And I was wearing a pair of blue jean shorts.
Wasn’t that something?
That night I cheered until my throat was raw.
Roller derby is not for wimps. The building was jammed with rabid fans. We watched Zena tackle another skater she was ticked off at. Tackled her to the ground. Then those two rolled—rolled—on the floor while their teammates cheered them on. Zena was penalized and threw a fit. We booed, then we laughed. We waved at Zena. She smiled and waved back, cheerful, happy.
Zena’s team didn’t mess around. The stay-at-home mothers obviously had a lot of aggression because they skated as if they were at war against the ravenous lions in a bloodthirsty Roman arena. The brain surgeon was no slouch. At the end of the night she might
well be operating on someone’s head that she herself bashed in.
It was so much fun.
I don’t even remember who won.
“You gotta try this, Stevie!” Zena yelled at me after she crashed into the side, face-first. She smiled her huge smile. It took up half her face. “You’d love it. You can kick some ass!”
Oh, I couldn’t.
I couldn’t!
Jake was coming home the next day. His bridge-building work had taken more time than expected. We’d been calling and e-mailing and texting. All these modern ways to communicate. “I want to take you up to Trillium Lake, Stevie. Have you been there?” I had not. “You’ll love it.”
But if Jake had said, “I want to take you out to a vacant lot and dig a hole to Germany and fill it back up,” I would have said yes to that, too, and loved it.
I could hardly dare to believe that I might, might, have met someone special.
But would he think I was special once he knew about my past? Would he think I was special if he ever saw a photograph of me at 320 pounds? How would he feel about the anchor scar on my body? How would he feel about someone bad in bed?
My doubts slid onto me like a landslide down a ski slope until the snow was choking me.
“Can you take a day off work when I get back?” he asked.
Could I? I never took a day off. I rarely took vacation days. Work was me; it made me feel safe. “Yes, I can,” I heard myself singing. “Yep.”
When he returned, we drove up to Trillium Lake at Mt. Hood. It sparkles, it’s blue, and it’s surrounded by trees with Mt. Hood rising in the background—a white, pointed gift for Oregon. There’s a trail around the lake, and we started off on that. Honestly, it’s so pretty you feel as if you’re part of a postcard.
“What are you hiding from me, Stevie?” he asked partway through, taking my hand. Oh, stop, my fluttering heart!
I automatically gripped his fingers tight.
“I know there’s something. I can tell.”