Mouthing the Words (15 page)

I was sorry for saying it. I felt really embarrassed. I never know what to say when someone says something
nice
to me. When I noticed her sitting by the door again today, I put my lipstick on again before I went out. She didn’t say anything to me this time, and I was secretly disappointed. I waited a moment and then turned around in the hallway and came back and said, “Marjorie, I’m going to get myself a cup of tea. Can I bring you one?”

“No thanks, Thelma,” she said, but then she hesitated. “Well, all right then,” and held out her cup. I held her cup between my hands. I held it hard, grateful for the feel of it, for the tangible evidence of a world outside myself.

But the Greatest of These is Love

CRISPIN STUCK, MY
moral tutor, was surprisingly kind to me. He visited twice and brought me a bag of plums and told me that when he was an undergraduate they used to refer to this place as Warneford College. He generously widened the scope of the University to include the local psychiatric hospital and made me feel as if I was simply on loan to one of the other colleges for the rest of the term: Oxford’s forty-fifth college, with a better pool table than any of the other junior common rooms. Crispin played pool with me there and confided, when I won the game, that he’d fallen in love with an undergraduate to whom he’d offered a plum at Parson’s Pleasure the summer before and his nerves had been shot since. I let him win the next game.

Naomi came to visit me every day. At first she had her worried face, but increasingly she became the amusing and not altogether politically-correct self I
knew
and loved. She moved from: “You know you could have told us if you felt anyone was pressuring you—me, Patrick, the school” to:

“That Poppy, now she’s interminably doolally.”

Patrick came every afternoon but never stayed long. He was a little bit of everything—sad, disappointed, hurt, angry. I felt guilty for having wolfed down his six-months’ supply of Prozac, and told him I would pay to replace it.

“That’s not the point, Thelma,” he said. “I promised myself this would never happen,” he said sadly.

“But that was never your job,” I told him.

—

“I think you need a break, Thelma,” he says the next day.

“From what?”

“From me. From this place. Take the pressure off. Take some time off.”

“To do what?” I ask helplessly.

“Exorcise those demons. Find a decent therapist.”

“But I’m fine now,” I plead. “I’ve got my course to finish.”

“Your course can wait,” he says. “You can take a term off. Two terms. A leave of absence. It’s not uncommon. I checked it out with Dr. Stuck,” he states.

“You what?”

“I secured you a leave of absence.”

“You what?” I repeat helplessly, feeling everything slipping away from me. “But what about my work?”

“It’s just a leave of absence. You can come back when you’re ready and pick up where you left off.”

“Come back from where?” I plead. “Don’t do this,” I beg. “Don’t get rid of me, Patrick. Please.”

“Your mother thinks you’d be better off at home.”

“My mother?” I stammer. “You’ve been talking to my mother?”

“I’m not getting rid of you, Thelma, I just want what’s best for you.”

“My mother?” I ask, panicked now.

“I didn’t know what to do. I felt helpless. There’s nothing I can do,” says Patrick. “I thought your mother might know. I thought maybe you had done this before and she’d know what to do.”

“She knows nothing,” I say spitefully through my tears, but my voice and the world around me are fading.

“She knows nothing,” I repeat in a whisper.

Dreamy Spacecake

I AM APPARENTLY
going to a place called home. Home. Home? I thought this was home. I thought this was supposed to be my home. There is no home, but here I am rattling with drugs, getting off a plane at Pearson Airport, hugging a bag full of case studies.

“Thelma,” I hear my mother’s voice call out.

I paste on a stony smile that smacks of trying to look perfectly all right and say, “Corinna. You didn’t have to meet me. I could have taken a taxi.”

“Don’t be stupid, Thelma. You’re not well,” she says.

“I am perfectly fine,” I protest, tight-lipped.

“You’re fat!” she exclaims. “I expected to see you wasted away to nothing, but you’re fat.”

“I’m not fat, mother!” I scream. “It’s just this fucking lithium!” I yell out so that mothers hugging daughters smelling like airplanes, and lovers kissing lovers once
separated
by miles, are looking over their shoulders in curiosity.

“Thelma, keep your voice down,” she says, embarrassed. “Have you lost your mind?” she chides.

“Oh, that’s really helpful, Mum. Nice,” I snip. “What the fuck am I doing here?” I say aloud to myself.

“I’m glad you’re fat,” says Corinna, leading me by the arm toward the doors that go whoosh, a big blast of cold air, and the cigarette smoke of those banished outdoors sweeping in.

“I’m not fat,” I say with clenched teeth. “And I’m not a fucking invalid,” I say, wrenching my arm out of her grip. “You’re fat,” I say in a feeble attempt at revenge.

“Thelma!” she says looking hurt. “I will forgive you only because I know you’re not in your right mind.”

“So I’m in my left mind? Or the wrong mind? Or someone else’s mind?”

“You’re not making any sense, Thelma,” she says, exasperated.

—

“But we don’t live here,” I protest. “We don’t live in the suburbs.”

I am incredulous. This is not our house. These are not trees.

“We do now,” says my mother quietly. “I’ve moved in with Warren,” she starts to explain.

“Warren the dentist?” I ask. “Mum, you’re taking this North American thing way too far. That’s not a house,”
I
say, pointing at the bungalow sprawling horizontally across perfect grass.

“Well, I like it, Thelma,” she defends.

“But it’s Warren’s,” I exclaim.

“And I’m very happy here,” she says. “And Warren wants you to feel it’s your home, too.”

“I’ll find a hotel,” I say quite seriously.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Thelma. You’re not well.”

“Would you stop saying that!” I yell. “I am perfectly fine. And if I wasn’t, this sure wouldn’t help.”

“Still as ungrateful as ever,” my mother sighs.

“Oh fuck off.”

“I’m ignoring that,” says my mother, getting out of the car.

—

Warren is making lentil soup, which he knows is my favourite. He’s not English but he might as well be, since he is only capable of expressing affection through food. He must be thinking soup is what you feed a sick person. He’s a scientist, for Christ’s sake, and he’s feeding lentil soup to a mentally ill person in hope of a cure.

I have to admit, though, he has been remarkably nice to me. What is even more remarkable perhaps is that I have let him. He has driven me to the psychiatrist’s office and taken me to Just Desserts for coffee afterwards. We have sat together in the smoky, booming space and he has told me that he knows what it feels like. In fact, the first time he brings it up I am
not
sure I’ve even heard him correctly. He raises his voice so I can hear him over the music and he yells out, “Until Prozac,” just as the music stops. Everybody turns around. Warren is embarrassed but I’m sure they’re all nodding, “you too, huh.”

I don’t like my psychiatrist. He says things like, “I would probably diagnose you as having a borderline personality disorder,” and I have done enough reading to know that he regards me as a manipulative incurable piece of trash for the psychiatric waste bin.

I shout at him. “Look. I don’t find that very helpful! I don’t need another label stamped across my forehead.”

Which leads him to say, “What’s wrong with your face anyway—your skin?” which is another thing I don’t need to hear, and I burst into tears. I thought the scars were virtually invisible after all the vitamin E.

“That’s so sexist,” I say. “What about my face? I thought you were supposed to be analyzing my mind.”

He tells me that my anger is transference and I want to tell him to fuck the hell off. I’ll be the first to admit I have a problem with men, but this guy is an authentic sexist bastard in his own right. Fuck transference.

“I think I need to see a woman,” I say.

“Suit yourself,” he says, flipping through his rolodex until he finds Dr. Ruth Novak—clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst.

—

I am in the waiting room. Beige. No bean bag chairs or orange baseball bats here. I guess you can give up the
props
when you’re charging a million dollars an hour. I do not shake her hand. Remembering Lydia Hutchinson’s outstretched arms, I want to make it clear from the start that I am not one for touching. We are very civilized, sitting across from one another in square beige leather chairs. She is all red. Red lips and red hair and red nails and a red jacket. A short black skirt and pointy patent leather shoes. She is tiny and perfectly manicured. I feel large and slovenly by comparison. This will never work, I think immediately. You are too little and I am afraid I will break you. You are too perfect. I am too damaged.

She is silent and I am silent. She is perched on the edge of her chair, looking very eager and attentive, and she is intimidating me. What am I supposed to say? Normally people like this say, “How are you feeling and are you eating and are you sleeping or not sleeping and are you taking your medication and here’s your prescription and I’ll see you in two weeks.” But she is saying nothing.

“Why don’t you ask me something?” I prompt.

“Why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” she says.

“Because a few years ago I ended up in hospital because I had stopped eating, and then a couple of years later I ended up in hospital again because I had tried to scratch my eyes out and then recently I ended up in hospital again because I took a drug overdose.”

“Why?”

“Because first they thought I had anorexia, and then
they
told me I had manic depression and now they think I have a borderline personality disorder.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think I’m fucked up.”

“Does the medication help you?”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “I still want to die.”

“Well, why don’t you stop taking it,” she suggests.

I feel my heart begin to beat faster. This is something very very different, but I do not know what it is. Finally I say:

“Because maybe I’ll kill myself.”

“But you said the medication doesn’t take away the feeling of wanting to die.”

“No,” I say. “But maybe it stops me from actually doing it. I don’t know.” I shrug.

“Well, you could hold on to me instead,” she says plainly.

My heart skips a beat. “What do you mean?” I ask, suspicious.

“I mean if you feel like killing yourself, you can tell me. We’ll get through it together.”

“You can’t do that,” I stammer.

“Why not?”

“You can’t take responsibility for someone’s life like that.”

“But I’m prepared to,” she says

“How can you say that?” I question. “You don’t even know me.”

“But I want to,” she says.

This is all too much for me.
You what
? I think.
How dare you? You can’t touch me. How dare you go straight for the jugular. Get away from me. I will not feel or yield to you
. And she is asking me to promise her that I will not try to kill myself, but I cannot make that promise—I feel like it is the only option I have left, and if it is taken away from me then I will have no control at all.

—

I am becoming a dreamy spacecake. I take the subway home to the bungalow in the suburbs, close my door and stare at the ceiling. Act like a teenager, mouthing the words to Sarah McLachlan and Shawn Colvin. Falling in love. Being treated like a teenager.

Corinna asks, “Thelma, what is it with you now? Are you taking drugs?”

I answer snidely, “Uh, yeah. As a matter of fact, I am. Lithium, valproic acid, fluoxetine and paroxetine, nefazodone when I feel paranoid and trazodone when I can’t sleep. All of them, I do believe, covered under Warren’s drug plan.”

“I mean illegal drugs, Thelma,” she snips.

“Well, I’ve never known you to have a problem with illegal drugs before,” I quip, referring to the days with Suresh, now conveniently erased from her memory.

“Keep your voice down, Thelma,” she says.

Oops—history gets rewritten with a new relationship and there are things Warren doesn’t know.

—

I am staring into a bowl of lentil soup. “It’s just as good
as
it always is, Warren,” I reassure him. “I’m just not all that hungry.”

“A new love, perhaps?” He smiles at me.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother scoffs.

Behind closed doors I am swooning again. Writing poetry, tearing up paper for collages. I am covered in glue-stick and brimming with words. As a matter of fact, I’m not taking drugs, I say to myself, and dump out the contents of my sock drawer into a garbage bag. Enough drugs here for a Jonestown massacre and although I am resigning myself not to take them, I am not yet willing to let them out of my sight. I put the first package in an envelope and address it to Dr. Novak.

Cave Dwellers

I HAVE DECIDED
that if I have to exist on earth then I will do so as a rock inhabiting the same cave as Dr. N. We can whisper and write messages to each other with matches in the dark. I have found a rock in the ravine that I think quite resembles me and I have given it to Dr. N. for safekeeping. We are weeks into this and still she says very little and I say even less. But my whole world is nevertheless about her. I am interested in nothing but sleeping in the interstices, daydreaming my way through subway rides and instant tellers and Corinna’s blahdy blahdy blah.

“
An Item
”

PATRICK HAS COME
to visit. My mother is outrageously flirtatious and Warren doesn’t seem the least bit threatened and they all seem to be enjoying it, only I wish to be left alone to daydream and sleep with the rock that I have borrowed back from Dr. N. for the duration of Patrick’s visit. He thinks the rock is funny. “Therapist stoned to death by flying transitional object,” is his favourite joke now, and although I know he is not being malicious, I regret having told him.