The Opposite of Music (2 page)

Dad's regular doctor said he has to make an appointment with a psychiatrist. Apparently the psychiatrist will perform the necessary repairs on Dad and he will be normal again.

Although Dad has been worrying, pacing, and not eating, nothing showed up in his physical but weight loss and what you would expect from not getting much sleep. So apparently there is some problem with his head. Or mind. Whatever you would call it.

Mom and Dad had an argument about this. “I don't need a headshrinker,” Dad said, “I just need some rest!” But the doctor said he has to go.

Mom will take the morning off to drive Dad to the psychiatrist because he's too sleep deprived to get behind the wheel.

We don't know many people who've been to psychiatrists, and when they did it didn't turn out well.

U
NCLE
J
ACK

Grandpa Eddie's brother Jack came home nutty from World War II and had to go right into a veterans' hospital, where he stayed until his death, never getting married or having a family. During the war a lot of people visited him, but afterward he was all but forgotten. The only people who continued to visit were Grandpa Eddie and Grandma Pearl, and they said it made them very uncomfortable. “Jack didn't look well,” Grandma would reminisce. “God knows what they were doing to that poor boy.”

E
DIE
S
ARNOFF

My father's brother Marty, before he got married, was dating a woman who went to a psychiatrist. Edie was on medication for extreme mood changes. Sometimes she felt so down that she didn't answer the phone when Marty wanted to check on her, and he would go and bang on her door or throw rocks at the window to get her to let him in. Another time she cleaned out her bank account and dragged Marty on a white-water expedition in the Grand Canyon. There she threw herself off the raft and tried to swim, and Marty and the guide pulled her back in. That night she proposed to Marty at the edge of the canyon. (She had already bought diamond rings for both of them.) The one time she came over for dinner she talked so much no one else could say anything. Marty stopped seeing her when he met Aunt Stephanie. Mom and Dad both felt that Edie was a knockout but more trouble than she was worth.

O
THERS

You hear around school that someone is seeing a psychiatrist or on medication. This often occurs at the time of a mysterious absence. Sometimes people behave differently when they get back. Mostly it's been new kids. They never confide in me.

Two nights after the psychiatrist visit, Mom has finished all her work business, and Dad is trying to nap. I'm at my desk staring at my homework. The house is too quiet. Dad used to blast arias all the time, but now no music is allowed because it irritates Dad's mind. Mom comes to my room.

“Make some space. We need to talk.”

I move my bike so Mom and Linda can step inside. Mom sits on my bed. Linda sits in my beanbag chair. I'm in an old office chair, although with the three of us here, it's too crowded for me to spin.

I'd have more space if I moved my bike to the shed, but the shed is leaky and the bike will rust. Instead, I carry the bike morning and night across the off-white carpet in the living room. I can't roll it because it would make tracks. These are the constraints under which I live.

“Don't you look nice, Linda,” Mom says.

“Do I?” Linda responds. Linda is almost thirteen. Mom chastised her once for leaving the house in an outfit that was too tight. Now Linda wears the most voluminous things she can find, just to guilt Mom into taking it back. She would go to school looking like a member of a religious farming sect rather than make things easy for Mom. “It's a matter of principle,” she says. She and her friend Jodie find old clothes in the attic crawlspace. Today's look is a ponytail on top of her head and a mechanic's coverall of Grandpa's that says “Eddie” on the pocket. Mom never lets Linda know how annoying this is. They're alike in that way.

Mom is assistant director of our local museum, which is all about the leather industry. There's more to leather history than you would think, she tells people. Often these are people who, she says, are trying to decide her social status. So: Indian techniques for tanning leather. The astonishing range of animal hides used to make leather. The barter value of leather in the colonial period. Mom beats people with this information until they soften up from boredom.

But knowledge is not the whole job. She keeps up the collections and the bookshop. Manages the paid staff and the volunteer docents. Oversees maintenance of “the physical plant.” The trickiest part is managing her boss, Pudge. He likes to phone after dinner about museum business while Mom contorts her face into a mask of agony. “Was that the mercurial Pudge?” Dad will usually ask when Mom hangs up the phone. “Was that the irascible Pudge?”

Mom not only works in a museum, she kind of is a museum. She has stick-straight black hair and wears red lipstick. She wears bizarre necklaces, each of which has a story. This one she bought in Mexico when she lived there for a year in college. This one was designed for her by an artist who photographed her wearing it. She stands taller than most men. She is like a museum because she never wants to be forgotten.

“We have a diagnosis,” Mom says. “According to the psychiatrist, Dr. Gupta, your father is depressed. Everything he's experiencing—insomnia, anxiety, loss of appetite, tiredness—supports this diagnosis.”

Linda wraps her arms around her middle, clutching the extra cloth of Grandpa's overalls.

“I'm not surprised,” Mom continues. “Something kept telling me depression, but I refused to accept it. I accept it now. Your father is depressed.”

Linda snuffles and pushes her knuckles into her mouth.

“What's wrong, Linda?”

“I know what happens to people who are depressed. They kill themselves!”

“Now where did you get that from?” Mom asks. She reaches down and clasps Linda's ankle.

“We saw a video about it at school. They kill themselves. Sometimes alone, and sometimes in groups, in a suicide pact. One kid even shot himself right in the cafeteria during lunch period!”

“Oh, no,” Mom says. “No, Linda, this isn't anything like that. Nothing in that video is going to happen to Dad.”

“I saw the movie too,” I say. “One teenager intentionally drove into a brick wall with a car full of passengers.” The video said not “teenager,” but “teen.” This was like calling a middle-aged person a “middle.” It showed footage from the accident scene—sirens blazing, parents wailing as bodies were removed. I covered my eyes for part of the video, but it was the talk of school that week. The video also discussed copycat suicides, in which a musician or other celebrity kills himself and adolescents duplicate the act, choosing the same date and same method of death, or when one student in a town kills himself and others decide to do the same. While the video played I wondered,
If copycat suicide is such a problem, aren't they worried about giving us ideas?
But everyone was so excited afterward, talking about this scene or that, that the teachers decided to dismiss us without a question-and-answer period. Among the student body it was universally agreed that the soundtrack was excellent.

“None of that will happen to Dad,” Mom says again. Linda climbs on the bed beside Mom, and Mom strokes her hair. “Those kids in the movie, most likely no one cared about them. No one noticed that they were sick. No one tried to help them. In our case, Linda, we have the support we need, and we haven't missed our opportunity. Dad's being treated in plenty of time. And I honestly believe Dr. Gupta knows what she's doing.

“Dr. Gupta says that this kind of illness can come from a change in brain chemistry or from a loss or from a change in living situation that the patient has trouble adjusting to. It's like they're going through a crisis. So Dad will be taking medicine to help his brain, and he's also going to get talk therapy to find out what's going on.”

“I have one question.”

“What is that, Billy?”

“When will he be better?”

“The medicine should start working in about two weeks.”

Linda has curled up under Mom's hand, until she's practically in the fetal position.

“What I need from you right now is input about any problems or difficulties that could be causing stress in Dad's life. Any possibility, Dr. Gupta says, even if it appears unrelated. Let your minds run free. Brainstorm. Think outside the box. Don't censor yourselves.”

I turn to a fresh page in my history notebook.

Linda snuffles again. “You're not gonna like what I have to say, Mom.”

“That's okay, honey, just go ahead. This is the time to speak freely.”

“Maybe he feels
trapped
,” Linda says. “Maybe he
never really wanted
a wife and kids. Maybe he'd rather have a totally different life—like be an actor or a race car driver or something.”

It's typical that, right after a weepy outburst, Linda is becoming critical again. But Mom's accustomed to Linda's moods. Mom slides the wooden beads along the cord of her necklace, and they make a sound like bones clacking. “Let me reassure you of something, Linda: Your father loves this family more than anything on earth. You should have seen him the day you were born. He said, ‘A boy and a girl. Now I have everything I could ever have wanted from life.'”

I look sideways at Mom. “I thought you said not to censor ourselves.”

“Well, censor a
tad
. Use your judgment. Linda, I know you wouldn't say something like that unless you were worried and upset. But maybe we can pursue the possibility that he's dissatisfied with
some area
of his life.”

I write “dissatisfied,” followed by a question mark.

“You know,” I point out, “maybe Linda's onto something. What about the fact that Dad never finished art school? Perhaps he thinks of himself as a failure. It isn't anything like those people in the video, but just, you know, a little unhappy, like something is missing. Like things could be better.”

“Dad really isn't what you would call successful,” Linda agrees. “I mean, compared to some of the other dads, like Jodie's dad. Not that I'm criticizing him or anything.”

“Well, he chose his own path,” I offer. I heard this once and liked the sound of it.

“That raises some interesting questions,” Mom says. “What is success? Perhaps Jodie's dad did build a second garage for his collection of Italian sports cars, and he takes his family on expensive vacations every year, but does he feel successful inside? Is he truly happy with his life?”

“
I
think so,” Linda says.

“Well, you just don't know, do you? You can only discover the truth by probing beneath the surface.”

In fact, Dad
is
kind of unsuccessful compared to other adults. But he didn't seem to want to climb the ladder of success. He got a job as a draftsman in a company that manufactures store fixtures. He opposed overtime as a matter of principle, tore off his necktie when he stepped into the house, and preferred to spend his extra hours playing tennis, drawing cartoons, and listening to opera.

“Mom, are we poor?” Linda asks.

“No, Linda, not poor, just lower middle class. But we're well educated. I have a master's degree and your father attended one of the most prestigious art schools in the country. That's more important than money.”

I suggest a different angle. “Mom, the important point is: Does Dad
think of himself
as successful?”

“He is definitely more successful than Uncle Marty,” Linda points out. Marty keeps starting businesses with people, but it seems like either the businesses flop or he gets cheated.

“But possibly less successful than other people he knew in college,” I add.

“Well, what do you think they're all doing now?” Mom asks. “I met some of them about ten years back. They were in their late thirties and living in divey apartments with six roommates, eating Beefaroni out of the can. They couldn't even scrape up the money to visit the Museum of Modern Art, although any philistine with twenty bucks in his pocket can see the greatest collection of artwork in the United States or possibly the world. Paradoxical, isn't it? Anyway, success, as I've said, is a highly subjective judgment. How do you define it? Some people believe success just amounts to whether you're happy.”

“But Dad isn't happy,” I remind her. “That's the problem he's having right now, isn't it?”

I write the word “success.” Then I get another idea:
the past.

“What about Dad's parents? How do they fit into the picture?”

Mom cocks her head. “His parents?”

“What I mean is how he felt when they died. When we couldn't get there in time. Could that be considered a crisis?” Both of Dad's parents, who lived in New York, died when I was eleven. My grandfather went first, suddenly, of a heart attack in the hardware store parking lot while moving lumber into his van. Then my grandmother had a stroke, and we visited occasionally to help care for her. But she took a turn for the worse and the hospital called. Dad left work, and we jumped into the car and raced toward Long Island. The engine overheated on I-95. When we arrived at the hospital she was gone. Linda and I bawled for hours. Dad never shed a tear, but he traded in that car the day after the funeral.

Soon after that, for my twelfth birthday my father got me a three-speed from a used-bike shop. The bike was about fifty years old, painted black, with a two-tone treatment, black and white, on the seat and the back fender.

Dad threw himself into fixing up the bike. We replaced the cracked tires and the gummy chain, hammered bumps out of the rims, and dripped oil into the hub. We rubbed the rust spots from the chrome with steel wool, then waxed the chrome to prevent it from rusting again.

“What will you name your bike?” Dad had asked. “I named my favorite bike Pavarotti. You could call this one Seabiscuit or Rosinante.” We were brightening the cloudy paint with buffing compound and a coat of car wax.

“I think I'll just call it Triumph.”

“That's a good call.”

The brand name “Triumph” appeared five places on my bike: on the tube below the seat in colored squares like a kid's alphabet blocks, in gold letters on the chain cover, in small white letters on the lower tube, and on two coats of arms on the front stem and back fender. With encouragement from all over my bicycle, how could I not triumph?

Now Mom's eyes water. “I don't know, maybe I'm depressed. I haven't felt like myself, anyway, since…” She's remembering not only Dad's parents but her own. “The world is a poorer place for the loss of all of them. That whole World War II generation. So brave. You know what they're called now? The Greatest Generation. ‘Never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.' Winston Churchill.”

“God, now I'm getting depressed too,” Linda says, starting to cry again. “How are we going to help Dad if we can't even keep it together ourselves?”

Tears circle the room, contagious as yawning or nausea, but I'm determined not to give in. I write down the word “family.” “Mom, is this kind of thing hereditary? I mean, was there anyone else in Dad's family who had…you know, mental problems, that you know of?”