An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (4 page)

Although fascinated, I was primarily frightened by the strangeness of the patients, as well as by the perceptible level of terror in the room; even stronger than the terror, however, were the expressions of pain in the eyes of the women. Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.

T
hroughout my adolescence, I was fortunate in being actively encouraged to pursue my medical and scientific interests, not just by my parents and the physicians at Andrews, but by many of my parents’ friends as well. Families in the Air Weather Service tended to be posted to the same military bases, and one family in particular overlapped with ours in assignments and was especially close to us. We went on picnics together, took vacations together, shared babysitters, and went as a herd of ten to movies, dinners, and parties at the Officers’ Club. As young children, my brother, sister, and I played hide-and-seek with their three sons; as we grew older, we went on to softball, dancing lessons, staid parties, slightly wilder parties, and then inevitably we grew up and went our separate ways. But we were almost inseparable as children in Washington and Tokyo, and then back together again in Washington. Their mother—a warm, funny, fiery, independent, practical, red-haired Irish Catholic—created a second home for me, and I would wander in and out of their house as I would our own, staying long enough to
inhale pie and cookies and warmth and laughter and hours of talk. She and my mother were, and indeed still are, best friends, and I always was made to feel a part of her extended brood. She was a nurse, and she listened carefully to me as I went on at great length about my grand plans for medical school, writing, and research. Now and again she would break in with “Yes, yes, that’s very interesting,” “Of course you can,” or “Had you thought of …?” Never, but never, was there an “I don’t think that’s very practical” or “Why don’t you just wait and see how it goes?”

Her husband, a mathematician and meteorologist, was very much the same way. He was always careful to ask me what my latest project was, what I was reading, or what kind of animal I was dissecting and why. He talked very seriously with me about science and medicine and encouraged me to go as far as I could with my plans and dreams. He, like my father, had a deep love for natural science, and he would discuss at length how physics, philosophy, and mathematics were, each in their own ways, jealous mistresses who required absolute passion and attention. It is only now, in looking back—after deflating experiences later in life when I was told either to lower my sights or to rein in my enthusiasms—that I fully appreciate the seriousness with which my ideas were taken by my parents and their friends; and it is only now that I really begin to understand how desperately important it was to both my intellectual and emotional life to have had my thoughts and enthusiasms given not only respect but active encouragement. An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers, and I was more lucky than I knew in having been brought up around enthusiasts, and lovers of enthusiasts.

So I was almost totally content: I had great friends, a full and active life of swimming, riding, softball, parties, boyfriends, summers on the Chesapeake, and all of the other beginnings of life. But there was, in the midst of all of this, a gradual awakening to the reality of what it meant to be an intense, somewhat mercurial girl in an extremely traditional and military world. Independence, temperament, and girlhood met very uneasily in the strange land of cotillion. Navy Cotillion was where officers’ children were supposed to learn the fine points of manners, dancing, white gloves, and other unrealities of life. It also was where children were supposed to learn, as if the preceding fourteen or fifteen years hadn’t already made it painfully clear, that generals outrank colonels who, in turn, outrank majors and captains and lieutenants, and everyone, but everyone, outranks children. Within the ranks of children, boys always outrank girls.

One way of grinding this particularly irritating pecking order into the young girls was to teach them the old and ridiculous art of curtsying. It is hard to imagine that anyone in her right mind would find curtsying an even vaguely tolerable thing to do. But having been given the benefits of a liberal education by a father with strongly nonconforming views and behaviors, it was beyond belief to me that I would seriously be expected to do this. I saw the line of crisply crinolined girls in front of me and watched each of them curtsying neatly. Sheep, I thought, Sheep. Then it was my turn. Something inside of me came to a complete boil. It was one too many times watching one too many girls being expected to acquiesce; far more infuriating, it was one too many times watching girls willingly go along with the rites of submission. I refused. A slight matter, perhaps,
in any other world, but within the world of military custom and protocol—where symbols and obedience were everything, and where a child’s misbehavior could jeopardize a father’s chance of promotion—it was a declaration of war. Refusing to obey an adult, however absurd the request, simply wasn’t done. Miss Courtnay, our dancing teacher, glared. I refused again. She was, she said, very sure that Colonel Jamison would be terribly upset by this. I was, I said, very sure that Colonel Jamison couldn’t care less. I was wrong. As it turns out, Colonel Jamison did care. However ridiculous he thought it was to teach girls to curtsy to officers and their wives, he cared very much more that I had been rude to someone. I apologized, and then he and I worked on a compromise curtsy, one that involved the slightest possible bending of knees and lowering of the body. It was finely honed, and one of my father’s typically ingenious solutions to an intrinsically awkward situation.

I resented the bowings, but I loved the elegance of the dress uniforms, the music and dancing, and the beauty of the cotillion evenings. However much I needed my independence, I was learning that I would always be drawn to the world of tradition as well. There was a wonderful sense of security living within this walled-off military world. Expectations were clear and excuses were few; it was a society that genuinely believed in fair play, honor, physical courage, and a willingness to die for one’s country. True, it demanded a certain blind loyalty as a condition of membership, but it tolerated, because it had to, many intense and quixotic young men who were willing to take staggering risks with their lives. And it tolerated, because it had
to, an even less socially disciplined group of scientists, many of whom were meteorologists, and most of whom loved the skies almost as much as the pilots did. It was a society built around a tension between romance and discipline: a complicated world of excitement, stultification, fast life, and sudden death, and it afforded a window back in time to what nineteenth-century living, at its best, and at its worst, must have been: civilized, gracious, elitist, and singularly intolerant of personal weakness. A willingness to sacrifice one’s own desires was a given; self-control and restraint were assumed.

My mother once told me about a tea she had gone to at the home of my father’s commanding officer. The commanding officer’s wife was, like the women she had invited to tea, married to a pilot. Part of her role was to talk to the young wives about everything from matters of etiquette, such as how to give a proper dinner party, to participation in community activities on the air base. After discussing these issues for a while, she turned to the real topic at hand. Pilots, she said, should never be angry or upset when they fly. Being angry could lead to a lapse in judgment or concentration: flying accidents might happen; pilots could be killed. Pilots’ wives, therefore, should never have any kind of argument with their husbands before the men leave to go flying. Composure and self-restraint were not only desirable characteristics in a woman, they were essential.

As my mother put it later, it was bad enough having to worry yourself sick every time your husband went up in an airplane; now, she was being told, she was also supposed to feel responsible if his plane crashed. Anger and discontent, lest they kill, were to be kept to oneself.
The military, even more so than the rest of society, clearly put a premium on well-behaved, genteel, and even-tempered women.

Had you told me, in those seemingly uncomplicated days of white gloves and broad-rimmed hats, that within two years I would be psychotic and want only to die, I would have laughed, wondered, and moved on. But mostly I would have laughed.

And then, in the midst of my getting used to these changes and paradoxes, and for the first time feeling firmly rooted in Washington, my father retired from the Air Force and took a job as a scientist at the Rand Corporation in California. It was 1961, I was fifteen years old, and everything in my world began to fall apart.

M
y first day at Pacific Palisades High School—which, par for the course for a military child, was months after the beginning of everyone else’s school year—provided me with my opening clues that life was going to be terribly different. It started with the usual changing-of-the-schools ritual chant—that is, standing up in front of a classroom full of complete strangers and summing up one’s life in an agonizing three minutes. This was hard enough to do in a school full of military children, but it was absolutely ridiculous in front of a group of wealthy and blasé southern Californians. As soon as I announced that my father had been an Air Force officer, I realized I could have just as easily have said he was a black-footed ferret or a Carolinian newt. There was dead silence. The only parental species recognized in Pacific Palisades were those in “the industry” (that is, in the film business),
rich people, corporate attorneys, businessmen, or highly successful physicians. My understanding of the phrase “civilian school” was sharpened by the peals of laughter that followed quick on the heels of my “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir” to the teachers.

For a long time I felt totally adrift. I missed Washington terribly. I had left behind a boyfriend, without whom I was desperately unhappy; he was blond, blue-eyed, funny, loved to dance, and we were seldom apart during the months before I left Washington. He was my introduction to independence from my family, and I believed, like most fifteen-year-olds, that our love would last forever. I also had left behind a life that had been filled with good friends, family closeness, great quantities of warmth and laughter, traditions I knew and loved, and a city that was home. More important, I had left behind a conservative military lifestyle that I had known for as long as I could remember. I had gone to nursery school, kindergarten, and most of elementary school on Air Force or Army bases; my junior and senior high schools in Maryland, while not actually on bases, were attended primarily by children from military, federal government, or diplomatic families. It was a small, warm, unthreatening, and cloistered world. California, or at least Pacific Palisades, seemed to me to be rather cold and flashy. I lost my moorings almost entirely, and despite ostensibly adjusting rapidly to a new school and acquiring new friends—both of which were made relatively easy by countless previous changes in schools that had, in turn, bred a hail-fellow-well-met sort of outgoingness—I was deeply unhappy. I spent much of my time in tears or writing letters to my boyfriend. I was furious with my father for having
taken a job in California instead of staying in Washington, and I waited anxiously for telephone calls and letters from my friends. In Washington, I had been a school leader and captain of all of my teams; there had been next to no serious academic competition, and schoolwork had been dull, rote, and effortless. Palisades High School was something else entirely: the sports were different, I knew no one, and it took a very long time to reestablish myself as an athlete. More disturbing, the level of academic competition was fierce. I was behind in every subject that I had been taking, and it took forever to catch up; in fact, I don’t think I ever did. On the one hand, it was exhilarating to be around so many smart and competitive students; on the other hand, it was new, humiliating, and very discouraging. It was not easy to have to acknowledge my very real limitations in background and ability. Slowly, though, I began to adjust to my new high school, narrowed the academic gap a bit, and made new friends.

However bizarre this new world seemed to me, and I to it, I actually grew to cotton to its ways. Once I got over the initial shocks, I found most of my remaining experiences in high school a remarkable sort of education. Some of it was even in the classroom. I found the highly explicit conversations of my new classmates spellbinding. Everyone seemed to have at least one, sometimes two or even three, stepparents, depending on the number of household divorces. My friends’ financial resources were of astonishing proportions, and many had a familiarity with sex that was extensive enough to provide me with a very interesting groundwork. My new boyfriend, who was in college, provided the rest. He was a student at UCLA, where I worked as a volunteer
on weekends in the pharmacology department. He was also everything I thought I wanted at the time: He was older, handsome, pre-med, crazy about me, had his own car, and, like my first boyfriend, loved to dance. Our relationship lasted throughout the time I was in high school, and, in looking back on it, I think it was as much a way of getting out of my house and away from the turmoil as it was any serious romantic involvement.

I also learned for the first time what a WASP was, that I was one, and that this was, on a good day, a mixed blessing. As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise—and inexplicably—to be envied. It was then, and remains, a very strange concept to me. In an immediate way all of this contributed to a certain social fragmentation within the school. One cluster, who went to the beach by day and partied by night, tended toward
WASP
dom; the other, slightly more casual and jaded, tended toward intellectual pursuits. I ended up drifting in and out of both worlds, for the most part comfortable in each, but for very different reasons. The WASP world provided a tenuous but important link with my past; the intellectual world, however, became the sustaining part of my existence and a strong foundation for my academic future.