Repeat After Me (12 page)

“Me, too,” I said. “That’s why I’m not married.”

My mom looked up from her food, worried that this wouldn’t go over well, but Jack Jr. was laughing big choking laughs, with his mouth open. I saw pieces of bread and some of his fillings, but was grateful for the laugh. Emily laughed too. And my mom, seeing that it was possible for things to go well, glowed with relief and happiness. It was already hard to say why, but Da Ge was the best secret I’d ever kept.

Before I reveal the details of the secret I’ve always liked less, I should say I know the shocking truth: lunacy is boring. Hollywood loves the nut trope, features the split-personality girl writing violent and fascinating lines on an ancient typewriter, skinny cigarettes and white-walled asylums as glamorous as she is. The bipolar father amuses his family by jumping naked on a trampoline. But anyone who’s actually seen or experienced a breakdown up close (and recovered) knows that actual insanity is a slow,
narcissistic slog of redundant monologues. I’ll try to avoid those here.

It’s best put like this: things went dark quick. The spring before I met Da Ge, I was halfway through the second semester of my senior year in college. I had stopped seeing Dr. Holderstein, rejected the drugs he suggested, and begun painting my dorm room with teeny, evenly spaced, silver acrylic bubbles. Then I failed some midterms, and within weeks of that, I was staying awake for four, five, sometimes six nights straight, outrageously happy. I had powers that no one else had or could possibly understand. I waited until it was totally irresistible and then broke the news to Adam.

“You have what?” he asked, looking at the silver bubbles.

“I know it sounds weird,” I said, “wings.”

“Wings,” he repeated. He shook his head.

“It’s not obvious from the outside,” I said, “but I could fly if I wanted to. I mean, so far I haven’t wanted to and that’s okay—it’s okay not to want to, but if I did want to, I could. I can go anywhere!” I said. “I can do anything I want to! I know everyone’s mom tells her that when she’s young, but for me, it’s actually the case—I can—”

He stared at me. I gathered he didn’t have the surge I did, and couldn’t really understand. I was writing twenty-page papers when I had been assigned to write ten. I had started a novel about a teenaged dwarf who gets involved in a sex scandal and written 280 pages. I was busy all night every night; I was emaciated and in love with my hunger.

“It feels fantastic to be hungry,” I explained to Adam. “I’m like a polished poem, revised down to the most essential version of myself! I mean, when you’re like me, your body doesn’t need as much food as other people’s. My mind feeds me.”

“That’s terrifying,” he said, pushing sandwiches at me.

But I trampled him on a race through days, powered by a force that can only be described as chemical. My mind filled the whole page in a chorus of horrible non sequiturs. There was no punctuation anywhere. My body was deprived and exhausted, but I thought I was a superhero. There were white lights everywhere, the city orbited me.

I was baking but not eating complicated cookies that involved coconut, running eight miles a day, reading the dwarf novel out loud to Adam, and handwriting letters to long-lost high school friends when I went blank. Maybe the cumulative exhaustion caught up, because everything stopped; my world blacked out.

My roommates didn’t know how to rescue me. Julia had known me since our Bank Street primary school days, so for her the changes were gradual enough to seem subtle. She never believed I was sick the way Adam did. He was the one who called University Health Services, after respectfully warning me first.

“I’m calling someone, Aysha. I think you need some help, and as long as you’re enrolled in school here, the university is responsible for you,” he said.

I was furious. “I’m responsible for myself,” I said.

“It’s okay to need some help. Why deny yourself even that?”

I remember thinking—
even
? What else did Adam believe I was denying myself? He, in the final moments of a Ph.D., was older and wiser; I was a patronized, babyish undergrad. So he called the school. And they called my mom.

I woke up and spring was gone. It was sometime in June, and I was in a tall white room at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt. I thought I could hear the ocean, but it was an echo of medical equipment. Adam was a sad shadow in the corner. My
mother perched on the edge of my bed, so small and hurt she looked like she might snap in half.

“Where are we?” I asked her.

“You’re in the hospital, sweetie,” she said.

I never forgot that she said “you’re” instead of “we’re.”

“In a city?” I asked.

“Of course, darling. We’re at Fifty-Ninth and Tenth. In New York. Home.”

Her voice had a fragile edge—lace doily, paper-cut snowflake.

“Are you okay? Is everything okay?” I asked. Adam was looking at the floor. People often look at the floor when they can’t find answers in their minds.

“Yes,” my mother finally said, “I’m here to take care of you.” She looked over at Adam. “
We’re
here to take care of you,” she added, politely. She was not originally in favor of my dating my poetry instructor. But when Adam called health services on my behalf, my mother came to appreciate him. In both cases, she was sensible, actually. He was a wreck of a boyfriend, and yet it was right of him to intervene when he did.

The hospital lights were especially bright, spectacular over the bed. I looked down at my red-and-white-striped flannel pajamas.

“Who put these on me?” I asked my mom.

“I did,” she said. “I brought them.”

It all made sense. She had seen my room, read the novel, picked up my pajamas.

“What did you think of it? Did you like that she was under four feet tall? Did you see my silver collage? Did Adam tell you about the wings? Is that what this is about?” My mother stared. I knew right then that she knew nothing about me.

“You’re on the outside, Mom,” I told her.

I could hardly hear her voice, “The outside of what, Aysh?”

“Of me,” I said. I noticed how powerful my own words were, spearing out of me. “See how my words are sharp? I own the language. I’m like a language ballerina, spinning on a linguistic dime. See? The weather!” I stood on the bed, bouncing my mother as if we were on a seesaw. I pranced to the window. “Look!” I said to her.

“At what, Aysha?”

“It’s perfect outside,” I said, meaningfully. She was quiet.

“It’s a sign!” I told her.

“Of what, baby?”

“Of this contract I have—not with God, really, I mean it’s not a religious thing. But it’s a contract I have—where, if I guess things in advance, then I’ll be right.”

“About what?” she asked me. I was annoyed. How could I expect someone as unendowed as my mother to understand this epiphany? Adam had vanished.

“When you see my performance you’ll understand!” I told my mother. Tony, who came to be my favorite nurse at St. Luke’s, walked in. She wore a white skirt, white shirt, white shoes, held in her right hand a glass of water and in her left a pill. It was the “worse” medicine Dr. Holderstein had been trying to save me from, Haldol. It made me dull, made my hair fall out, and cured psychosis and delusions of grandeur. On occasion, I tried to cheek and spit it out, but there was no tricking Tony so when she said
here, honey
, I opened my mouth, put the pill on my tongue, and swallowed. Now they make those drugs dissolve in your mouth. My mother thanked Tony and watched me take the meds before turning away toward the window, but I could see parts of her face fighting one another for control. She never lets herself cry.

In the first years that followed it, my breakdown seemed blended up. Time was thick, ground with geography and relationships into a granular paste. Sometimes I could identify in it grains of what my life had been, but I couldn’t hold on to anything.

Now that memory is itself only a memory. It’s counterintuitive, but the more years between it and me, the clearer my breakdown looks. So that now, even though I’m as far away as I’ve ever been from that time, it’s easy to see the shape of it. It was just a season and a half: spring and part of the summer of 1989. My mother was a fixture in the corner, on the bed, on the phone, carrying food trays, organizing lilies on the windowsill. She brought lasagnas, baked brownies and wrapped them individually, even showed up one day with framed pictures from my high-school bedroom and hung them on the walls.

In my memory, she is all-powerful, rewiring the hospital with less fluorescent, more hopeful lights, painting, renovating, running the staff, and controlling the weather. In fact, she combed my hair every morning, brought fresh flannel pajamas, jeans, and panties printed with hearts and cherries. She fed everyone, including the other patients, and never showed up without something bright and good-smelling. The nurses kept a cot for her in my closet against the rules. Tony used to change the sheets, so there was always clean linen clinging to my mother’s propped-up cot. Once my mom made a cake with Tony’s name embossed in frosting.

Adam and Julia were there too, usually together. Prior to that, they hadn’t really gotten along, and since I believed there was a deep connection between all people, I was glad Julia and Adam could enjoy it, too, even if only in their mundane way. Julia brought Pixie Stix and Twizzlers, which I hid under the pillow and gave away to other patients.

“You like these, right?” she asked once, holding a half-sweet Charms lollipop.

“What does it mean?” I asked her.

“What do you mean, what does it mean?”

“The half-sweet, half-sour thing. Is there something to that?”

“It means I love you,” she said, but she never brought another one. Instead, she brought magazines and a battery-operated Scrabble game I should have loved but never played. Each time she came after she’d bought the game, she carried new batteries.

“The world is bigger than this game or its screen!” I told her. “I can’t focus on something that small.” I stood on the bed to illustrate my point.

Sometimes Adam came there at night, after visiting hours, and climbed in the bed with me, held on to me until I fell asleep. The drugs made me too dull for sex, and I wondered whether he was taking care of me or whether he was just terrified himself, and seeking comfort.

Then I got out one morning that June and left the hospital with my mom, Adam, Julia, a new shrink named Dr. Meyers, and a list of pills and strict instructions. My mother talked endlessly about stabilizing, normalizing, and “getting better,” an idea she measured in milligram reductions of this or that drug. She rented the apartment on 115th, in case moving back in with her might make me feel like I had failed at life. She set up the Embassy interview with the director, Pete Batwan, an acquaintance of hers. I wanted to appear normal, so I kept the conversation on books. When he asked the surreal, “What do you see yourself doing in five years?” I said, “Reading,” and he gave me the job. I was so unqualified that I had to wonder if he and my mother had ever had been lovers.

As soon as my mom went back to her life a little, I was
first overwhelmed with relief by her loosened grip, and then grief-stricken. I wondered how my father could have left without missing her. Because when my mother leaves a room, lightbulbs and heaters flash, pop, go black and cold.

“I’m like a fat old lady,” I told Adam one night, “sitting in this dark room without my mom.”

“You’re certainly not fat,” he said. Even he could hear that this had come out wrong, so he backpedaled, “It’s going to be okay. You’re already so much better.”

I flinched. The room looked numb and creamy. “I’m lobotomized,” I said. “I can’t even remember where or who I am, and I’m about to start a job I’m totally unqualified for. What if I never even finish school myself? How is that better? Better than what?”

Adam swallowed. When he looked up, his eyes were red around the edges.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Are you crying?”

“No.” He looked down. I had seen Adam cry before. Each time, his eyes turned red around the edges five minutes before he actually cried. I always said
oh my God, are you crying
, and he always said
no
. There was comfort for both of us in this pattern.