Playing House (23 page)

Charlie, beware. I was mad. I am woman, hear me roar. But the roar was not about gender or rights. It was a roar into the darkness, the cheapness, and the fire. I went to my closet and got all dressed up in my very best suit. I had a plan that I had not really planned. It had just come to me, roaring, an insane inspiration. I would dress up like a lawyer and go down to Charlie’s slumped shack, disguised, and do something threatening. But what? I buttoned my whalebone jacket. I zipped up the silk-lined skirt. My heels were high and sharp and sounded like scalpels on the glossy wood floor of my kitchen. This was noontime, the husband at work, the kids in school, no one to witness this insanity. It was insanity, because no matter how much makeup I put on my face, I still looked like Lauren, not a lawyer. There is a great gulf between Lauren and a lawyer, I realized, frantically dabbing foundation on my face, that even Clinique could not bridge.

Eventually I stopped this madness. But I was not calm. My fingers still smelled like soot from the burnt car. A few hours later, towards the end of the day, still dressed as a lawyer but only halfway hidden, I went to the phone and called Charlie.

“Hello,” he said.

“This is attorney Frances Bacon from the law firm Cabot, Cabot, and Lowell calling on behalf of my client Lauren Slater.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Lauren Slater,” I said, and saying it made me real. “Her name is Lauren Slater and she bought a used car from you that caught fire and thus violates statute 345 and 822bca regarding the condition and safety of used vehicles in the state of Massachusetts.”

Charlie didn’t say anything. I had him, hooked. My hook.

“My client is here with me now and planning to sue for damages on several counts,” I said.

“I told her,” Charlie said, “I told her, I told her I would take back the car, give her a new one.”

“My client reports a very different story,” I said.

“I have a nice red station wagon,” he said.

“My client demands her money back and five thousand dollars restitution or she will proceed with a lawsuit,” I said. I sounded so unlike myself. I sounded so official, so lawyerly, so multivoiced and tonally complex. It was like learning a new way of speaking, new kinds of consonants, knowing all the while the knowledge was friable. I became a lawyer and the lawyer brought me Lauren, with her laws and limits and humor.

The next day, I took my two children, Clara and Lucas, with me to Charlie’s to collect my refund plus “bonus.” I wanted Charlie to see that he could have killed my kids. Looking back on it now, I see the gesture as melodramatic and insulting, not to any one person so much as to motherhood itself. My kids are beautiful, and they are not symbols but skin. Motherhood, like life itself, is never clearly drawn, while melodrama always is. I had suffered, but so had Charlie, of course. I was a good mother, but I also was not, of course. My kids, in any case, did not cooperate with this ploy. They were obnoxious in the slumped shack. Lucas, my two-year-old, kept trying to honk all the horns. Clara, my six-year-old, kept saying, “Let’s get a four-wheel drive!” Lucas found the water dispenser and, unbeknownst to us, turned on the tap and caused a small flood. I left, check in hand, apologizing for my mess. This is as it should be. Strong and sorry both.

I have not yet bought a new car. I am now, thanks to Charlie, five thousand dollars richer than I was. And I don’t think I’m going to get a new car after all. I think I’ll save my profit and instead use it to get a gown or a motorbike, or take a trip to Osaka, where my sister is living, and dying, eating seaweed, learning a new language that for a short time anyway will not replace the old one; she will have two languages. Two ways of talking. Two different words for grief and gladness, old and young, beginnings and endings. Hello and good-bye.

I have an idea. It’s not a new idea, as people from time immemorial have been suggesting that your inner state—happiness, serenity, and so on—depends at least in part on how you look. But I’ve always disregarded any advice that has to do with sprucing up, preferring to rely, instead, on chemical concoctions to tamp down or even transform my depression, which has been with me for so long now I know it like a friend. My depression, for instance, inhabits my heart and takes the shape of a small speckled stone worn smooth by my body’s currents, its contours changing over time while its weight remains precisely the same. My depression does magic. Poof! It always, reliably, disappears around four or four thirty in the afternoon and then slam! Bam! It returns each day at dawn, settling in all morning and for much of the afternoon, sapping my energy, stealing colors from trees and leaves and socks and spoons, so even my miniature teacup, a relic from centuries past and painted the most delicate resonant yellow, even that falls flat while I watch my world drain down and out until, in the end, everything looks like a carbon copy of what it once was, still and silent, as if under some spell.

I’m not complaining, or if I am I don’t mean to be. Thanks to antidepressants I now have seven hours more or less of good, clear time, and I try to use it well, ticking off items on my to-do list, trying to tie up my business, so when disability comes at least my things will be in order. Still, seven waking hours is not a lot, a mere fraction of the fifteen or so most “normal” people have in a day. Last year I spent eighty dollars on a huge silver-rimmed clock from Pottery Barn, the kind of clock they once had in old- fashioned train stations, with big black hands and ticks so loud it’s as if each one comes with its very own exclamation point. My family complains about my clock, which I have hung in the hub of our house, the library, the place for play and reading, but I need it there, right where I can hear it best, a constant reminder of my dilemma and its demands.

Given my very tight timeline, it should come as no surprise that many things in my life fall to the wayside. My taxes, for instance, are always, always late. I cannot indulge in frippery and frills, in long soaks in a tub full of beads or bubbles, or spritzes of perfume pumped from a crystal bottle, the mist landing lightly on the pulse in the nook of the neck. I do not adorn myself, no necklaces or bracelets, no earrings, despite the fact that each lobe is perfectly pierced. I shop for my children’s clothes, flying through Target as fast as I can, ripping from the racks the pants and shirts and skirts that society demands they wear. As for myself and what I wear? I’m embarrassed to say. Right now I’m dressed in a pair of pajama-like pants, the hems frayed, the elastic gone loose at the waist so the pants slump down and sit on my very abundant hips. On top I’m wearing a floppy gray shirt stained here and there with various seepages and spills. My hair is two-toned; the bottom, an anemic yellow—think faded paper, think sepia. The “roots” are now halfway down my head, wiry grays, the occasional silky dogwood-white. On the windowsill in the bathroom sits an unopened box of colorant, “pure brown” the box reads, while pictured above the words is a woman with hair seal-smooth and swinging. I keep meaning to dye my strands, but I never have the time unless, of course, I could somehow make use of those stone-still hours of grief that daily descend on me, sending me straight to my bed, a quilt over my head.

The truth of the matter is I’m a schlump, a frump, my clothes second-hand and utterly without style, dirt in my otherwise nacreous nails, like a line of toner at the base of the beds, the nails themselves without shape, their excess hacked off every few months, making my already stubby fingers look still more so. Once, what seems like many moons ago, a publicist insisted I purchase an Ann Taylor suit for a CNN interview about a book I’d recently written. I remember the mall, empty that Sunday morning, and in the store how the tiny suit fit my then-tiny form just so, making me look more like a lawyer than the frumpy writer I was. For a while I loved that suit and even wore it around the house, but, like most transformations, it all went up in dust after the novelty wore off, and the suit was retired to the back of my paint-peeled closet, where it hangs today covered in a plastic pouch.

When I look at the suit now, I can’t quite believe I once loved it, so distant does it seem from the reality of my life, my body, my shape, radically altered by meds that have packed on fat, the fat abetting me in my utter disregard for personal appearance; why even try? It seems so hopeless. This is why I have never had a pedicure and can’t see why I ever would, what with only seven productive hours to my day. My shoes, clogs of some sort that I bought in the bargain bin at CVS, are made of rubber, the insides padded with fake fur grown dirty over time. My heels are exposed, the skin there deeply creased and dead to boot, so that even in the cold of winter I can wear my bargain-bin clogs because my heels are numb to the wind. I once bought a device called “The Egg,” shaped like a dome with a raspy underside, its purpose to sand down the hardened parts of a woman’s body, the corned feet, the whitened, wizened elbows. I did not buy The Egg out of some desire to preen—not me, no never—but rather because I was curious as to how much dead skin I actually had on my heels, the looks of which I could no longer recall, completely covered with callous. I sat on the edge of my bed, tore The Egg from its packaging, and began to sand myself, watching with amazement as my skin snowed and snowed, and when I pressed down harder on my heel, whole whitened rinds of dead flesh came curling off—utterly painless, and curious too. That skin was so old it could have been from a prior decade, time encased, preserved, the body literally retaining its past. I kept sanding my heels, determined to find the pink part, the snow heaping up at the edge of the bed, and yet no matter how long, how hard I worked, I couldn’t get down to fresh flesh. I put The Egg in my bedside drawer. I got a broom and dustpan and swept myself up and into the waste bin.

This is a confession, a way of cleansing myself symbolically, to make up for the fact, perhaps, that in real life I rarely shower. I sometimes smell, and then I shower. I wash my hair with whatever’s in the shower stall, most often some fruity concoction for kids. A few months ago I developed an abscess at the base of my spine. At first I thought I’d bruised the coccyx, but weeks went by, the pain only increased, and when I reached my hand around I felt a hot, hard lump weeping fluid clear and odorless. My primary-care physician told me I had what is called a pilonidal cyst, an infection of sorts and a bad one to boot. The next day, lying on my belly on the surgeon’s steel table, I had the cyst emptied, a procedure so painful it lies beyond language, the surgeon, with no Novocain, no anesthetic at all (“We just don’t use anesthetics for pilonidal cysts”), slicing into the boil and then squeezing its contents so hard I heard the spurt and saw, smeared on a large white cloth, blood and pus and a lot of green goo, the smell fetid and wrong. The surgeon stuffed gauze and a wick into the wound and told me to shower every day, to keep myself as clean as I could, and to come back in two weeks to have the wick removed. On the way out he handed me a prescription for Oxycontin, which I immediately filled and took four of, though the label limited the dosage to two. I lay back on my bed and watched the air swirl and eddy by my head.

I realized, even in my stoned state, that my self-neglect had gone past the point of acceptable. I was now literally getting infected. The surgeon had explained to me that the cyst is caused when a stray piece of dirt works its way under the skin, inflaming it. I realized that, depression or no, I needed to change my ways. I realized I’d have to start devoting some time to grooming, as they say, like a normal person, stepping into the shower in the mornings and coming out with dripping hair and wrapping myself in a soft, floppy towel, depression or no; it didn’t matter. I thought of a study I’d read a long, long time ago, so long ago I could no longer recall the paper or book from which this study derived, but the gist of it had stayed with me. This study found that mood is influenced by one’s outward appearance, which had seemed odd to me and still seemed odd to me. Mood, so deep and internal, so unrelenting and unyielding: how could a skirt or some flowing fabric possibly shift that behemoth? And yet the study found that when “ADL skills”—activities of daily living, such as showering, combing your hair, attending to your skirt and shirt—improved, so too did the symptoms of depression in the subjects under scrutiny. Of course, it could have very well been the other way around, that when symptoms of depression improved, the subjects in the study were more motivated to care for their appearance. I thought of a lake I’d seen last winter, its surface completely capped with ice through which a lone fisherman had drilled a single hole and was hauling up huge trout that flapped and flopped on the frozen surface. The blood, the slick fish, the skidding sunlight—it made an impression on me because it suggested that surface and the interior that surface covered were intimately linked, and that one could not exist without the other.

A psychologist by training and degree, I decided, in my stoned state, my cyst draining into the packed gauze, that I’d construct my own experiment on the relationship between surface—how you look, how you appear—and mood, which the surface either enhances or hides. I was a schlump, a frump, due to the remnants of depression that both robbed me of the time to spruce up and the motivation to do so. Was it possible, though, that, once spruced, my mood would follow suit? What would happen if during my “down time” I put on makeup, a swoosh of rouge or thick and black mascara that separated and extended each individual lash, lending my eyes a depth they didn’t really have? What would happen if I got some sass, some style? Beauty, after all, is not some trifle; rather, it’s a sought-after state in every culture we know of, this in itself proof of its power. I’ve seen photos of African women who adorned their necks with heavy metal rings that, over time, push down their collar bones and compress their ribs, all this for a lengthened neck. And despite the fact that the practice was banned in 1912, some, maybe just a few, wealthy Chinese families still bind their daughters’ tender feet. The Maori of New Zealand believe beauty is obtained by the intricate scrolls and swirls of tattoos that they pierce into their skin, while in Mexico and other dark-skinned nations, skin-whitening products are all the rage, whereas, in our predominately light-skinned nation, tanning products line the shelves and tanning salons are everywhere, all this zig and zag proving that there’s nowhere in the world where the concept of beauty does not exist, nowhere that people fail to pay homage to its power.