Her: A Memoir (24 page)

My students centered the bridge in their pictures, put its wooden plank road directly in the middle of their frames. They set their cameras low, which caused a tunneling effect. It’s an amateur’s mistake to overlook the left and right sides of an image. All four corners are important, more important than the middle square. But in every bridge picture light glowed from the end of the tunnel; the saving grace of every bridge image was this quarter-size ethereal spot, an orb that eased the failure of bad technique.

My students’ projects were endless and I encouraged each one. I inspired them to snap their shutters, to expand and contract the diaphragms of their lenses. They brought their lives into the classroom through their picture making: eight-by-ten-inch, double weight, and printed on fiber glossy paper. The pictures my students made were personal and often missed the mark and, at other times, didn’t miss it at all.

During a late October group critique, I stood at the front of the classroom and studied a collection of images that a female student had tacked to the wall. All of her pictures were of young women posed in positions that suggested suffering or malaise. I pointed at a picture of a blond woman who sat on a linoleum floor. The girl in the picture appeared to be reading a handwritten letter. She shielded her eyes from the sun with one hand; her elegant fingers, her visor. She clutched her willowy neck with the other hand, a sign of difficult news. The cursive script of the letter she read was legible in the photographer’s print.

I congratulated the student on her darkroom technique, and then went in for my composition kill. “If it looks like a Paxil ad it’s not working,” I said. “The woman in this photograph is too aware of the camera and of the photographer to properly articulate the kind of anguish over love or loss that the photographer is trying to convey. It’s contrived. Your self-conscious approach to the camera creates an uncomfortable feeling for the viewer.” The student eagerly took notes and set her pen dolefully on her desk. “You’ll have to try harder to be invisible next time,” I said, “to make your model comfortable enough to be herself.”

I moved on to the next image. “This photograph
is
working.” It was a picture of a young woman with black hair, styled in a Louise Brooks bob that sharply framed her face. Thick straight bangs cut across her forehead, made a harsh line just above her eyebrows. The woman was too thin. Her shoulders looked like weak, bent hangers that could barely hold her clothes. She wore a dark dress and a tightly fitted, cropped black vest. She sat on a table with her legs crossed, looking down at a thick, open book on her lap. She had drawn one hand up to her forehead, touching the place right above her nose. “The woman is looking at the book but she isn’t reading it,” I said. “You can tell by the way she’s averted her eyes from the page. She’s looking at the book but she’s somewhere far away from it. The photographer was able to capture this woman in a telling moment of reflection. Her thinness and her gesture tell us something true about her possible life situation. Is this woman going through something wrenching?” I asked, proudly.

I’d been looking at pictures long enough to know I was right on the money with my reading of the picture. The woman in the frame was fucked up; it was obvious from her body cues. The photographer had done an excellent job of being invisible. She’d found a subject who was comfortable enough to show herself—or who was so entirely strung out on pain that she’d been unaware that her image was being taken. “Am I right?” I asked. I received no response. I’d hoped I’d been able to intuit what the young photographer had asked me to see in her photograph, but nobody in the class made a sound or moved an inch. I turned back to the picture of the frail woman and studied it. The woman in the photograph was me.

Chapter 26

The bearded lady and
I watched romance movies in the television room.

It was just the two of us most of the time. The other patients on the fourth-floor personality disorder wing were usually too agitated or sedated for movie privileges. The personality disorder wing at the Payne Whitney Clinic housed patients who fell into categories ranging from dissociative identity disorder to psychosis; major depression could land you in there, too, if you’d lost an identical twin and had bouts of turning into her. I spent a week with a handful of the seriously disturbed. I did the
New York Times
daily crossword puzzle, made origami swans, and painted ceramic reindeer in craft group, and I’d go into my room and write poetry in my small clothbound red notebook.

I’d checked myself into the Payne Whitney campus in White Plains several days before Thanksgiving the year after we lost Cara, after I’d flipped open a bottle of Zyprexa and swallowed all of them. My doctor had told me to take two a day to relieve anxiety; swatting an elephant with a newspaper, that’s what my dose was. I’d talked her into giving me a sixty-day supply so I wouldn’t have to get refills, but I hadn’t taken a single one of the medium-size, smooth-coated, baby blue pills, not until my impromptu end night. Each of the pills was imprinted with a stamp that read: Lily 4415. I was visiting my boyfriend, D, in Brooklyn, when I Googled “How to overdose on Zyprexa” on his computer; I followed the directions carefully. D was out at a business dinner and I knew he wouldn’t be home until nearly midnight. I’d have time to spare if I decided to die.

I weighed my options at 9 p.m. on the blustery, preholiday Sunday night. The prospect before me was an early rise and the long drive north to my afternoon class at Keene. Faded autumn leaves blew in hurried gusts through the Brooklyn below D’s apartment, scratching the sidewalk with their dry pointy lobes. I assessed: students, or a poisoning? I choose death over teaching undergraduate photography.

I lay down on D’s soft white carpet and waited for the pills to kick in. According to the Internet, it would take forty-five minutes to feel anything. It never occurred to me that D would find me lying dead in his living room when he arrived home. I couldn’t consider anyone, not even myself. D and I had been seeing each other on and off since Jedediah and I had separated. We’d even recently gotten serious enough that I had my own set of keys. But I wouldn’t allow myself to feel happiness over our new commitment. I was still wracked with guilt that I’d failed Jedediah. Although I couldn’t see it then, there was no way I’d make a decent partner living with those regrets. I think D knew that, too.

That night the thought of leaving D’s apartment and returning alone to Keene was like a vise grip twisting my heart. Pain radiated in waves that thumped with its beat. I couldn’t breathe. If I have a soul, it was floating just outside of my body, an inch or so above my shoulders, kept from traveling to the ceiling only because anxiety, rage, and panic had frozen me in place. Hours, days, and years had brought me to this: sisterless, divorced, and without a clear idea of where I’d escape to fix myself. I must die, I thought. Even if I had to do it by my own hand.

And then, in a stroke of luck, my cell phone rang, interrupting my suicide attempt. It was Jedediah. I’d called him earlier that day and begged him to take me back, to reconcile. He was resolutely opposed. It wasn’t the marriage I craved, but the solace of habit, the peace of our home. I’d found myself raging over the phone at him for not wanting me, raging in the exact way Cara had raged at me for my not wanting her. I’d wanted her though; just not the part of her that didn’t allow me any other life. Now I couldn’t access Cara or myself. With infidelity and pills and harsh words, I’d crushed down the good-enough person I’d once been. Why? I’ll never really know. But I
was
that raw and pained, like a naked woman in a winter whiteout.

Jedediah had called to apologize for his rejections. He said he hadn’t meant to be harsh and regretted that we’d had to part ways. There was no way to articulate my real worries in my poisoned state. I didn’t really want the marriage back. I wanted Cara. No man could be her or provide her return. And because of that, I punished them all.

“Whatever you say,” I slurred. “It’s not like you loved me anyway.”

Jedediah’s voice shook. “Please, don’t—don’t say that. I did everything I could. You were everything to me.”

The pills were working. “Soon you’ll be sorry.”

“Have you taken something? You don’t sound like yourself.”

“I took lots of something.”

“Where are you?” He was frantic. “You’ve got to tell me where you are.”

“That’s not your business anymore.” I couldn’t tell him I was at another man’s house. “It doesn’t matter where I am. You don’t need a pathetic ex-wife, a beggar. You don’t want me,” I said. “I get that now.”

“But I do. I need you alive. Maybe we can fix this.”

“Really?” I regretted the pills for the first time. “You’ll do that? You love me enough to come back?” I pulled my shoes on and walked out of the apartment, wobbling down the three flights of stairs to the street. “I don’t want to die.” I tripped and fell on the sidewalk, scraping my knee, blood trickling down my leg through the run in my tights.

Jedediah stayed on the phone. “Steady,” he said. “One foot in front of the other.”

“We can have a happy life,” I managed through my Zyprexa cloud. “I love you. I forgive you for leaving when it got hard.”

“We both did regrettable things.”

“We did?”

“Where are you now?”

“Outside of the emergency room.”

“Good, get in there.” He was calm. “Give your phone to the receptionist.”

“Thank you, Jeddy,” I whispered, thankful. “We’ll be okay.” I gave the nurse at the information desk my cell phone and she spoke with Jedediah for a minute. She finished and handed it back.

“He wants to talk to you.”

“Christa, be safe,” he begged through labored breath, crying. “I won’t be able to come back to you like you want me to. I needed to say that to make sure you’d get help. I’m sorry.”

“I understand,” I said and hung up on him. I couldn’t expect him back; I’d done too much harm and ultimately it was my responsibility that our marriage was blown. I’d lost the two people in my life that I truly loved and, at that moment, I felt the losses were all my doing.

*   *   *

When Jedediah had finally moved out, eleven months after Cara died, I’d stood, defiant and physically frail, at our front door and handed him the last of his boxes.

“If I’d been sick with cancer, would you still have left?” I asked him.

“You don’t have cancer. You have a problem keeping your clothes on.”

“But I’m sick,” I pleaded. “I hate what I’ve done to our lives.” I tried to explain that my encounters had had nothing to do with sex. I was on my hands and knees. I was crippled and everyone was telling me to walk. But there was no remembering how. There was no getting up.

“It’s always about you,” he’d snapped. “I’ve thought of nothing else but you since we married. I must think of myself, cancer or not.”

In the emergency room, dizzy from Zyprexa, I repeated the word
cancer
to myself over and over again. It distracted me from the waiting room filled with patients who stared at me shamelessly—the young woman wearing four-inch wine-colored suede heels and ripped leopard-print tights streaked with blood. I gave in to the pills. My legs folded and I hit the floor. I was falling down into a well with no bottom, no water.

When I came to, in an emergency-room bed, having just vomited the last of the charcoal dispensed to rid my stomach of pills, I was thinking not of Jedediah but of Mike.

In 1988, our neighbor had adopted a kitten, a fuzzy black ball with white-booted feet named Sebastian. Cara had grown so fond of this kitten that she’d traded her only pair of designer jeans with a classmate for a larger litter box and a harness and leash for him. She carried him in a pouch she had fashioned from her book bag.

One whole afternoon, she had played with the kitten at the neighbor’s house, trying to convince him to lap some milk from her hand instead of from his bowl. Cara and the kitten sat together in the grass beneath a shady tree; it was a perfect Sunday spring afternoon. Cara was about to head home when the kitten caught sight of a squirrel, and chased after it just as our neighbor backed her car out of the driveway. Cara leapt after the kitten, but he was too fast. He was crushed beneath the car’s back tire. Yowling in pain and fear, he sprang from the car’s undercarriage to find Cara’s comfort. He died at her feet.

Mike heard the ruckus and ran like a good solider to survey the threat. He found his stepdaughter crying inconsolably over her lost friend’s twisted body.

“Why did this happen?” Cara sobbed to Mike, needing a father’s consoling answer.

“There’s no telling,” he said, and wrapped his arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. “I
will
tell you,” he added, “you’ll be lucky if this is the worst thing that ever happens to you.”

As years went by, Cara’s pain from losing Sebastian faded until, finally, her memory of the day was centered around how absolutely pitiless she’d found Mike’s advice. “Can you believe we were raised by that man?” she’d ask me rhetorically. “I mean, who says that?”

It is the job of the Marine to keep his men safe, to watch their backs when they’re “in the shit,” as Mike would say. We two girls were Mike’s men, like it or not. In winning my mother’s hand, he’d also taken ours: rambunctious, curious, dirt jammed beneath our fingernails from digging for worms in the herb garden; he’d hold our dirty hands as we crossed the street, pull us back at even the hint of a car—the low purr of an engine or a twinkle from headlights. He’d stand guard, manning the living-room window while we romped in the yard, watching from the safety of air-conditioning. He kept a good eye on his brood, ready to rock ’n’ roll, to pummel and destroy any invader: stray dog, storm, stranger. He was armed and ready: pepper spray, umbrella, or his fist, as solid as stone. It wasn’t only weaponry Mike deployed. He was chock-full of advice, and he didn’t care about a warm and cuddly delivery. As much as we’d troubled him, he must have loved us.

Nearly twenty years later, alone with beeping hospital machines and my frantic desire to die, I found myself thinking that Mike had been right. Cara and I had both been very lucky the day the neighbor’s kitten died.