The Valedictorian of Being Dead Page 3

  In ten out of ten treatments I never got the date right. Not once. When I woke up from the anesthesia and they asked me my name, I aced the test all ten times. But each time they asked what year it was, I answered 1979 or 2012. One of these two specific years, and I’d be insistent about it. Every time. If my mother is ever in the room when I’m writing a check, she now has every right to say, “You do know that a bank is not going to cash anything written in the seventies.”

  TWO

  I ONLY HAVE TWO HANDS

  WHEN MY MOTHER AND stepfather woke me up before my alarm on the morning of my first treatment, we immediately tried to figure out the logistics of the next two hours of our lives. I suggested that my stepfather accompany me in my car, drop me off, and then go back to the house so that he and my mother could get the girls ready for school. This all seems way too complicated when I try to explain it, and it was complicated. The timing of my first treatment completely disrupted my morning routine with my girls, a routine as regimented as any program in the armed forces. It had to be.

  “I only have two hands!” I had sobbed this to my mother on the phone almost every night for over eighteen months. Sometimes I’d be in my closet so that my hanging clothes would absorb the sound of my agonizing crying and the girls wouldn’t hear. Sometimes I would escape to the other side of the house and find a dark corner where I could call her and hold the phone with one hand, my other hand wrapped around my thigh so that it wouldn’t clench itself into a fist I’d be unable to release.

  “Where are you? Where are the girls?” she’d ask, always trying to hide the sound of dread in her voice.

  “They’re asleep. They can’t hear me. I can’t do this, Mom. I only have two hands! I only have two hands!” Then she’d let me cry. She would sit on the other end of the phone and let me pour the misery out of my body in howling electric waves. I cried a lot by myself, too—I cried every day. I cried every time I took a shower and hoped the warm water on my face might calm the swelling underneath my eyes—that is, on the rare occasion that I took a shower. I often couldn’t find the energy to shower, change my clothes, or brush my hair.

  “But you will feel so much better if you take a shower,” people often told me. I wanted to tell them that this is not something you say to a person who wants to be dead, even if you mean well. I’ve taken showers—hundreds if not thousands of showers—in my life. I know what a shower is like. Showers did not ever wash away this feeling. In fact, I would have to stand there and brace for the jolt of the first splash of water against my skin. That piercing change of state—going from dry to wet in less than a second—felt like jumper cables had been attached to every nerve in my body. Not only was I alive, I was alive and wet. I understood why cats sometimes maul their owners during a bath.

  That same change in state, but now reversed when I stepped out of the shower—from hot to unbearably cold—was so overpowering that I’d have to steady myself against the sink to keep myself from collapsing to the floor. The air around me was heavy enough on its own, and suddenly I was carrying the weight of the water in my hair. When I dried my face, I’d see that the temperature of the water had been no match for the inflammation under my eyes, and I would think of the excuses I would give to everyone who would see me that day and ask, “What happened? Are you okay?”

  The answers varied depending on the person.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I just had a long night.”

  “It’s been a really long week is all.”

  “Kids, you know. I was up all night.”

  “I’m okay. I just need to get some sleep.”

  I also hated any confrontation with my naked body, so I often wore the same clothes three days in a row. I lived in yoga pants, sports bras, and T-shirts. When I spilled coffee or food on my shirt I’d use a baby wipe to dab the stain and clean myself. If crumbs fell out of my mouth, I’d wipe them straight to the floor. That’s why I had a dog.

  I didn’t understand what had happened to my body in such a short period of time, why I would look down at my stomach and legs and see a strange, unfamiliar figure. I hated seeing myself naked. I am tall and thin, but every inch of my body was bloated and deformed. The water in the shower intensified the curves of these foreign bulges, and as a form of self-torture I would grab a wad of flesh between my fingers and shake it up and down, like I was jolting it awake, telling it to go home.

  My belly made me the most uncomfortable, and it’s why I couldn’t wear most of my normal clothes anymore. Nothing fit. Every pair of jeans throttled the tops of my hips like it was choking a neck it had once kissed, once draped with a loving arm. The bloating was so pronounced that I could slouch at a certain angle while standing up and make myself look pregnant.

  I didn’t share this part of my depression with everyone, because I didn’t want to hear the yammering body image lecture. The response would be “But, Heather, you could stand to gain ten pounds.” Or: “But, Heather, if you gained ten pounds, no one would even be able to tell!”

  I could tell.

  People would tell me to embrace my body and all of its imperfections. I would have to, there in the depths of the worst depression of my life, tell them to shut up on behalf of every other person, big and small, who doesn’t want to take a shower and see their own naked body. I would reconsider body image and what it means to have a healthy sense of my physical self when I no longer wanted to be dead, if that ever happened.

  My body did not feel like my body, and every movement I made reminded me of this. Every time I reached for the handle of the refrigerator to grab the milk for the kids’ cereal in the morning, I could feel the inside of my arm graze my side. And it did not feel like my arm. It did not feel like my side. These were not my shapes and lines and curves, and every time I reached for the milk, I thought about it.

  Every time I moved my body, I thought about it. Every time I breathed, I thought about it. When your body doesn’t feel like your body, you’re allowed to have an emotion about it. You can’t help but experience an emotion about it. And no emotion is right or wrong, especially if it is visceral. My emotion tangled itself inside every joint of my body so that each time I bent a leg or scratched an itch, I could feel it shrieking.

  I had not had these thoughts plague me for over twenty years. Back then, instead of just walking around in the same clothes for three or four or six straight days to deal with it, I would starve myself. And when the starvation became unbearable, I’d finally give in, eat 3,000 calories in less than ten minutes, and immediately make myself puke.

  My sister has a completely different body type from me, and yet. We heard the same words come out of our father’s mouth time and time and time and time and time again when we were kids: “This is what a beautiful woman looks like.” He’d be pointing to a voluptuous blond actress on the television or a petite yet busty model on the cover of a magazine. A beautiful woman was round in all the right places and tiny everywhere else. We both looked at ourselves and did not see what he was describing at all. We were not beautiful. My sister was curvy but not thin and wanted to look like me. I was thin but not curvy and wanted to look like her. I at least got to experience a twenty-year reprieve from the constant thinking about it, but my sister? I don’t think she’s ever been free of it for a full second of her life. And I can hear people now if they were to see my stunningly gorgeous sister, if they knew she had those thoughts, the “Oh my God, what is she thinking? But she’s so beautiful! She should own her curves!” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

  On her behalf and that of every other woman who cannot stop thinking about it, I will get on with this story, but not before asking you to please stop. Just stop it. We will get there in our own time, and if we never do, we never do.

  * * *

  The morning routine was the easiest routine we had, my two daughters and I, even though it was the one I dreaded the most. Because it began with waking up and realizing I was alive. Again! Jesus Christ, it just kept happening.

  T
he moment my alarm would go off I would shoot straight up and gasp for breath as my anxiety set fire to every molecule in my body. I tried so many times to explain this sensation to people: what an instantaneous rush of anxiety feels like first thing in the morning. It’s very different from its more jovial counterpart, the panic attack. My mother would often ask me if it had happened again, and I always answered yes, that I woke up soaking in a vat of acid, that my flesh was covered in flames. The thought of what I needed to get done and what I hadn’t gotten done and every potential thing that would ever need to be done screamed in my ears, voices all talking over each other in angry, disappointed tones, all echoing and thundering and crashing into cymbals.

  I’d hit SNOOZE so that I could compose myself for All the Things Needing to Get Done and lie back on my pillow, my hands curling into fists and making their way up under my chin. I would be able to feel my heartbeat throbbing in my neck, set to whatever accelerated rhythm my anxiety had chosen that morning. Often I tried to swallow over and over again to force myself to calm my breathing.

  After lying there for three snoozes—twenty-seven minutes—I would turn off my alarm, pull my body up, and drape my legs over the side of the bed. When I turned on the lamp beside me, I would look down at my black yoga pants, which were wet from sweat. I slept in my yoga pants because I didn’t want to feel sheets or blankets against my flesh. I didn’t want to look at my bare skin in the morning. I didn’t want to have to change my pants and see my alien body. People often joked with me that they would love to work from home all day like me, since they wouldn’t have to put on any pants. But guess what? We have it so easy that we don’t even have to take them off in the first place. We can sleep in what we wore yesterday and wake up really upset that we’re still alive.

  I would then drag myself out of bed and head downstairs to feed and let out Coco, my miniature Australian shepherd, who was nine years old at the time. I love her, but she barks and howls and is so fiercely protective of my children that she has several times slipped through a brief opening in the front door to chase and scare the literal shit out of someone who just happens to be out for a jog. She sleeps in a crate for her own safety—so that I don’t murder her.

  Every morning, without fail, she would howl as she ran upstairs to get her breakfast. She’d howl and spin like a whirling dervish while I screamed, “STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!” I would go straight from soaking in a sweat bath to trying to wrangle a Tasmanian devil flipping over herself to get to her bowl of food, the sound reverberating through the house like shattering glass.

  I then headed into Leta’s room to wake her, and even in the weeks and months when my anxiety and depression were at their worst I still cherished the delicate silence. It was dark in there, and because she sleeps spread out like a windmill I never knew which body part was where. I never once sat down on her mattress as intended because a limb would be wherever I tried to put my body. I’d learned to sit gently, slowly, and brush my hand over her forehead if I could find it. If I couldn’t, which was often, I would just rub my hand back and forth over the blanket wrapped four times around her body. She’d eventually rouse, and neither of us said good morning, and I liked that. I liked that she said, “I’ll meet you in the kitchen?” with a question mark. She knew she had a few more delicious minutes to sleep, since I had to wake Marlo.

  I’d leave Leta’s not-question question and walk into Marlo’s room, and because my eyes were now more adjusted to the darkness, I could see where to place my body on her bed. She is a fellow windmill sleeper, and since her bed was so close to the ground, I often found her splayed like a starfish facedown on the floor.

  And it could have been due to Marlo’s age—no, I don’t believe that for a second; I do believe it has everything to do with Marlo’s personality—that I had no idea what I was gonna get. Sometimes she’d be a totally gentle snuggle bunny and immediately wrap her arms around my neck so that I could pull her up from the mattress and carry her from her room to the kitchen. She was growing into the long limbs we’d given to her as lanky parents, and whenever I got to hold her like this, I’d nestle my head into her neck underneath a braid of her hair and think, Remember this. Remember this. Remember this. Remember when she used to call her morning waffle “bref-disk” through her chipped front tooth.

  Remember baby hobo-bobo Marlo, who may or may not have gotten ringworm on her face from sucking on the dog’s ears—hold on to that Marlo—because many times she woke up with a directive from the universe: Burn it to the ground. She never woke up in an instant fit of rage. No, the rage would build slowly, in waves.

  Leta would hear us heading toward the kitchen and stumble out of her bedroom, sometimes awake enough to look at me like “Which Marlo did we get today?” I would always nod, no matter which card we happened to pull, just to acknowledge that I was bracing for it, too. The rumbling would begin when she pulled the stool out from underneath the countertop and angrily set down the blanket she’d brought with her to bref-disk across the seat. Like This again! This whole sitting here having to eat food prepared by my loving mother again? Burn it to the ground!

  Sometimes she’d climb up into the seat, pull the blanket around her, and just stare into space. Sometimes she would put her head down on the countertop and cover her ears as if the conversation I was having with Leta about spoons was just too stupid. Sometimes she’d answer me when I asked if she wanted a waffle or a bowl of cereal, and this was when we really knew just how violent her rage would be. Either she’d eat her meal in absolute silence or she’d eat her meal while telling Leta in great detail how everything she was doing now and the night before was totally and completely wrong. And then they’d begin to argue.

  Leta is five years older than her sister and should know better than to defend herself. Marlo wanted Leta to defend herself so that she could say, “Oh, look. You’re wrong there, too.” This bickering noise was a trigger for me, especially in the morning when I was trying to make sure we got everyone out of the door on time, and to quell it I would set down the knife I was using to spread chocolate across a piece of white bread with crusts cut off. (This “sandwich” was the only thing I ever packed in Marlo’s lunch that I knew for certain would not return home uneaten.) I’d tell Leta in front of Marlo, “You do realize she’s baiting you. You are a little fish looking for a worm and she just reeled you in.”

  “But she just told me that I’m chewing with my mouth open, and I’m not! I’M NOT!” And I understood. I know what it’s like to be deliberately misinterpreted, to have someone say that I am doing one thing when in reality I am doing just the opposite.

  “We both know you are not. You know that you are not. That’s all that matters.” And then I’d tell them both to hurry up as I finished stuffing Goldfish crackers, flavored cartoon fruit snacks, and a small container of seedless grapes into Marlo’s lunch.

  One of my biggest accomplishments as a parent—I will brag about this long before I ever bring up stellar report cards—was getting my kids to put their dirty dishes where they were supposed to go. It was not easy, but now, not two hundred years after I first started nagging them, my children will finish a meal and ask, “Sink or dishwasher, Mom?”

  If the dishwasher is full of clean dishes, it’s the sink. If I haven’t run the dishwasher, it’s the dishwasher. Simple, sure. But I did that. My kids are polite and say hello and goodbye and thank you and please. They stand up for the misunderstood kids in their classes. They go to bed when it’s time to go to bed. And they put their dishes where they are supposed to go. There is not a nature-versus-nurture argument to be made here, because I did that.

  This all may not sound like a chaotic routine, and that’s because it isn’t by design. I did this by myself morning after morning after morning, and I made it this way. I braid both of my girls’ hair the night before so that they don’t wake up with tumbleweeds on the tops of their heads. Both girls are able to dress themselves, and I don’t care if Marlo looks like she has chos
en her wardrobe while tripping balls. If she will be warm when she needs to be warm or cool when she needs to be cool, I do not give one whit what she wears. This is a battle I chose not to fight because for far too long I had to fight Marlo to put on any clothes. And any clothes are better than Naked Seven-Year-Old Shows Up for Second-Grade Math.

  And that’s the thing: I have never sent my kids to school naked. I never have! They show up on time if not early. They have their supplies, their lunch boxes, the homework I had to sign. Their hair is brushed; their teeth are clean. They wear coats when it’s freezing outside. They’ve recently had showers and baths, and the one who should be wearing deodorant is doing so. Leta says she loves me at least five times as she’s walking out the door to catch her carpool; she loves me, she thanks me for everything, she can’t wait to see me this afternoon. And Marlo and I walk hand in hand to the long hallway at the front of her school to wait for the morning bell. I rub her tiny knuckles with my giant fingers when we head toward her class—Remember this—and I wait next to her doorway as she puts her things into her locker across the hall. She looks over her shoulder at least three times to make sure I’m still standing there—I always am—and when she’s finished she comes to me, wraps her arms around my waist, and squeezes as hard as her little limbs can. I squeeze her back, careful not to crush her, and then she holds out her hand so that I can put a kiss in her palm—a kiss she will hold in her fist and press against her face whenever she’s feeling lonely or frustrated.