Asylum--Chapter Fourteen Living Without

Chapter Fourteen
Living Without

When I got back to San Jose, I called Billy to tell him of the accident. He reacted with alarm until I said I had emerged relatively unscathed, although the whiplash was causing me headaches.

“The Taylor Highway can be pretty treacherous. Did I ever tell you about what happened to Allen, the customs agent?”

“No.”

“Two years ago, he was driving up to the border in a rainstorm. The Taylor Highway is slicker than snot when it rains, and his truck went off the road and all the way down into O’Brien Creek. They searched for weeks and couldn’t find his body. A month later, someone found him drifting around in the eddy below Eagle Bluff. He was still in uniform.”

“What? How could that be?”

“His body must have washed down O’Brien Creek, then into the Fortymile River and then into the Yukon.”

“That’s crazy!” I’d been to the beach where the creek met the river. It was the place I’d been aiming for when I got stuck on the icy bank the previous spring.

“I know. It’s fifty-seven miles just from the mouth of the Fortymile to Eagle. People say he came home. Came home to Eagle.”

I thought of the customs agent—apparently not the same one—who I’d seen the previous May hanging out with the men at the millionare’s bench. He was dressed in Carhartts and had a beer in his hand.

“Hey, where’s your badge and uniform and your gun?” someone asked.

“What do I need a gun for? Everybody else in town is packing.”

The men guffawed and slapped him on the back.

I said hi to him and he said, “New, are you? I say there’s no place like Eagle, Alaska. You take your rule book and throw it away.”

The city hall next to my apartment was even taller when I returned from my trip. Week by week, story by story, it grew. Eighteen stories, I discovered, would be the final height of the tower. The construction was so loud the walls shook, and I half expected to see plaster start falling off the walls. I could feel the pounding in my solar plexus. The beeping of backing trucks went on all day and I started hearing it even when it wasn’t there, a cruel tinnitus that kept the construction going in my head through the rare quiet hours of the night.

I had come to a complete standstill on my book. I had learned so much about my grandmother over the past few years that the mass of material was daunting. The hope chest in the corner overflowed with files, notes, photos, and transcribed interviews. But it was more than that. I was having trouble separating myself from Smokey enough to write about her. Cascading through my mind was a constant tumbling, a random shuffling of images from my grandmother’s life, interleafed with images from mine. More and more, those pictures were blurring, one into another. Me, wearing one of Billy’s camo shirts, shooting an arrow into a hay bale with Billy crowing triumphantly as I hit the center of the paper plate target. Scotty crowing triumphantly as Smokey shot a high-up branch where a bald eagle sat, successfully scaring away the unwelcome bird. My grandmother at age twenty, in long skirts and walking boots, striding along the streets of Redondo Beach late into the night. Me, in jeans and peasant blouse, walking those same streets in the 1970s, long after curfew. Smokey lying in bed in the cabin on Thimbleberry Island, listening to the wavelets washing against the rocky shore. And me, lying in Billy’s bed listening to the sound of the wind in the birch trees outside the window. Smokey, with a cigarette in the polar bear cigarette holder as she painted a cabin beneath the northern lights. Me, sitting helpless on my loveseat, unable to work. 

With my thoughts becoming more and more scattered, organized thinking was impossible. I was still getting no sleep. In the past couple of months, when I did not have the sustained concentration to work on my book, I had still managed write bits and pieces of the article about life in Eagle after Coming into the Country, but I couldn’t even do that anymore. The deadline had come and gone. It was unlike me to miss a deadline but that was the least of my worries just then. Obviously, the fellowship wasn’t going well, and yet I was still determined to make it work. I couldn’t leave San Jose anyway, because where would I go? To Taiga? I could not imagine living with my husband and secretly pining for Billy less than four hundred miles away as the crow flies. Back to Pullman? Ambrose now had a roommate and the house was full of their friends around the clock. It seemed to me they would not welcome a mother in their midst. Emlyn appeared to be doing well in college on the other side of the state. He certainly didn’t need me there either. 

Thomas talked to me from his school office a couple of times a week. He refused to get a phone at home, saying he couldn’t afford it. I thought of all the things he had said, over the years, that we couldn’t afford. During the three years we lived in Illinois, we had slept on a pallet on the floor made up of a pile of blankets. We couldn’t buy even something as basic as a bed, he insisted. And yet he had always found money to buy another piece of music equipment, justifying it by saying he needed it to make a living.

Whenever I called him, Thomas hounded me about how my writing was going.

“Are you fucking up this fellowship?” he yelled. “If you do, you’ll never get another one again. This could lead to something good, maybe a teaching job.”

I suspected he was right; this opportunity that was supposed to further my career might end up derailing it. I didn’t bother mentioning I had done enough teaching to know I didn’t enjoy it.

 “Don’t talk to me anymore about this,” Thomas said. “It’s too upsetting. You think you have it hard down there? I have my own problems, you know. Teaching full-time and taking online classes is no piece of cake. And I’m constantly being hassled by the principal, my supervising teacher at the university, the parents—you name it.”

Thomas had informed the hiring committee about his autism before he was hired, but the school administrators were having difficulty dealing with the challenges of having a new teacher with absolutely no social skills and no clue how to interact with the principal, the teachers, or the students’ parents. Oddly, teaching had always brought out the best in him, though he did not hesitate to yell at his students when he thought it necessary. He spoke to children no differently than adults and held them to just as high standards, drawing out depths of creativity and a degree of discipline the kids themselves didn’t know they possessed. I had faith in Thomas’s talent as a teacher but still harbored doubts about his ability to adapt to his new environment. I was hesitant to make an investment in living in Taiga until I knew whether he was able to make a go of it there.

One day in mid-October, Billy called me from the phone booth and we talked for over an hour. I could hear his teeth starting to chatter.

“How cold is it there?”
“Not very—about twenty degrees.”

It was in the seventies in San Jose. I was sitting next to a fountain in a city park, watching children in shorts playing in the spray. 

“Aren’t you wearing a coat?”

“No, just my field jacket.”

“Billy, go home,” I told him, and he hung up and started walking the five miles. His truck had quit running. 

After that I started lobbying for him to get a phone. It would be a huge concession for him—he’d be officially “on the grid.” He’d have a bill to pay every month. The ringing of the telephone would intrude upon the quiet of his cabin. And he wouldn’t know who would be on the other end of the line—anyone in town could be calling him! I reminded Billy he could leave himself off the one-page Eagle phone list. He finally stopped by the office of the local power and phone company but found a note on the door: “Gone trapping.” A few days later, he tried again and arranged for them to come out and string a phone line through the trees from the road.

Billy agreed to get a phone, in part, he said, because he was worried about me. Like many Alaskans, he had an exaggerated sense of how dangerous cities were in the Lower 48. He wanted to send me a gun, which I vetoed, so he sent me a hatchet, instead. I kept it under my bed. He wanted to send me bear spray—the wilderness equivalent of mace—to protect me on the street but I told him no.

I didn’t need mace. I knew to walk fast and avoid eye contact with anyone, which was easy for me at this point. I was feeling more and more withdrawn and had difficulty holding a conversation with anyone. I talked less and less and walked more. I hurried past the steel frame of the new city hall and headed to the adobe walls of the oldest building in San Jose, built more than two hundred years ago, and to the farmer’s market where I smoothed my hand over the red globes of pomegranates and breathed in the winey smell of concord grapes. I went to the pet shop and watched the lovebirds flying around in a large cage, seriously considering buying a couple and letting them fly freely around the apartment. I visited  the Italian deli where I bought gourmet treats to send to Billy, who, it turned out, didn’t have any idea what to do with sun-dried tomatoes or Chinese horseradish. I took a quick look through the ninety-nine-cent stores run by Asian women, which smelled of vinyl, moth balls, and cheap candles. I returned often to the Vietnamese restaurant where I bought a Styrofoam container of pho. I lived on this nourishing soup and on not-so-nourishing orange Hostess cupcakes, which I bought by the boxful and kept in the freezer.

Thomas had mentioned that my old voice teacher, with whom I had studied for three years back in my twenties, was now a singer with the San Jose Opera. It was a surprise to discover she taught voice lessons just two blocks from my apartment. Hoping music would bring some joy into my life, as it had in my youth, I signed up immediately; but at the first lesson, I opened my mouth and nothing came out. Nothing resembling music, anyway: a strangled cry, yes.

I apologized profusely and rushed from the building. Hurrying past the storefront of the “Success Driving School,” with its grimy, ripped seat cushions on the waiting room chairs, I crossed the street to get away from a house painted flamingo pink and throbbing like a car with a too-loud bass, and continued past the “luxury apartments” built so close to the freeway that the parking lot was beneath the overpass. A few wildflowers struggled to grow in the wasteland alongside the freeway. A man taking a photograph of a poppy carefully removed a plastic bag in the background before snapping the picture. By the time I reached the area of weeds and wildflowers directly beneath the flight path of the airport, it had started to rain. I stood by the dry river and put my head back and cried in huge gulping gasps, wailing for Billy, stretching out my neck and drinking the sky like the goose that opened its mouth to the rain and drowned.

I decided to find a therapist. It was clear I was sinking into a major depression. But who wouldn’t be down at a time like this? I asked myself. With my marriage falling apart, my family separated by vast distances, and a lover who didn’t know if he loved me or not. And the city! Who could live here and not be crazy or depressed? Half the people on the street seemed to be one or the other, or both.

My therapist, Jill, practiced in Santa Clara, four miles away, and I took the bus there every week. A car was always parked out front with the bumper sticker, “Insanity is living without ________ day to day.” The middle word had been torn off and I couldn’t help wondering every time I saw it—living without what? Quiet? Serenity? Love? What was I living without that was pushing me over the edge? I hoped Jill, who seemed to be a kind-hearted person, could help me discover what it was.

Day by day, the city became less real to me—a scrim through which I saw Alaska. The tall buildings and curving freeway overpasses, I saw right through them to a peaceful scene of trees and a curving river and Billy going about his chores, soundlessly whistling. I walked through the streets as if down a forest trail, stepping obliviously out into traffic. Blaring horns hastened me home.

The dangers of the city, real or imagined, that Billy saw were not the only reason he was worried about me. He was alarmed at the growing number of very long, hastily scribbled letters he got from me and the tone of those letters.

 “You don’t sound good,” he said, concern in his voice. “The city doesn’t suit you.”

Billy did not write often, but when he did, I could tell by the faded ink and the holes where the periods had punched through the paper that the letter had been pounded out on his old manual typewriter. He sent me odd, sweet gifts, including a 1935 silver dollar he’d found and his tattered Bible with a hundred dollar bill tucked inside. He had earned the money—and found the silver dollar buried in the dirt—when an elderly Native woman had hired him to dig a new foundation for her cabin. As I lay in bed at night trying to sleep, I fingered the heavy coin, feeling the outline of the eagle again and again. I wondered what it would be like if we prepared for the journey of sleep like the people of ancient civilizations had prepared for the journey of death. What if I surrounded myself with food and drink for the trip, with tools and armor and weapons—would sleep come any easier? I thought of the hatchet beneath my bed and the Bible on my nightstand. I remembered my dad in his fading hours, when he was conscious but unable to speak. We talked to him quietly, urgently, in his ear, and he nodded, as if he were an athlete readying for a final contest, receiving his last instructions. 

Billy and I usually steered clear of topics we disagreed on, but when election time arrived, our differences came to a head. It took a lot to get a rise out of Billy, but on the eve of the election, we got into a debate that turned nasty. When he started ranting about the dangers of big government and how the Democrats were going to take away all our guns. I said, “It’s people like you who are ruining this country,” and hung up on him. 

I called him the next day and apologized, and he said it was okay, he had something he thought would amuse me. The election results had already been stapled to the post office bulletin board, listing how many people had voted for each candidate. The fact that the majority of Eagle residents voted Republican was no surprise. (There were also a fair number of votes for the Libertarian candidate.) What did cause a stir was the large number of people who voted the Democratic ticket. Suddenly the town was rife with speculation. Only a handful of locals were known to be on the left, politically. So who were all these secret Democrats ? Names were thrown about, signs of liberal leanings were discussed. Billy was right—I did think it was amusing. 

Our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary was coming up, and I imagined going with Thomas to San Francisco, where we had spent our honeymoon. I was twenty-two years old and had felt magical and in love that night as I floated up the steps of the War Memorial Opera House wearing a long dress and one of my mother’s shawls. Now, I tried to convince myself that after two-and-a-half decades, maybe Thomas and I could rekindle our romance there, reaffirm our commitment to each other, or at least recapture the shared love of music that had brought us together. 

In the last ten years, I’d gotten more involved in writing, doing freelance work and writing a book about the ranch on the Snake River. I finally told Thomas that it was either music or writing; I didn’t have the time and energy to do both, what with homeschooling the boys and working part-time at the public library. I chose writing. It was a decision, I only later recognized, that had a profound effect on our marriage. Thomas and I had spoken to each other through music, and yet I had cut off that means of communication. Perhaps, I imagined, that avenue might be re-opened if I could sit close beside him again, both of us simultaneously almost lifted from our seats by a soprano hitting a high note in Cosi Fan Tutte.

“We could stay at the Palace Hotel again, go to an opera like we did on our honeymoon,” I told him.

“I hate the city,” Thomas said, ticking off the reasons. “I hate flying. It’s too far to come for just a few days. We can’t afford it. My credit cards are almost maxed out.” 

I understood how much pressure Thomas was under, trying not only to adjust to his new job in an unfamiliar environment but also to support our far-flung family. I protested anyway. “It’s our twenty-fifth anniversary!”

“That’s just a number. It doesn’t mean anything.”

Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day, all those days on the calendar were meaningless to him. I knew that. But he also knew special dates mattered to me. 

“You should come up here,” Thomas said. “You have more time and could stay longer. It would be less expensive. We wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel.” All these practical reasons meant nothing to me. I was looking for emotional reinforcement, some proof I mattered to him, that we mattered to him. I could see only that he was refusing to come to me, so I reluctantly agreed to go to him. I would spend our anniversary—and Thanksgiving—in Taiga.

Jill didn’t like the idea of me going to Alaska again. “What’s with all this traveling?” she wanted to know. “It’s not good for you. You need stability.” Over the weeks I had been seeing her, Jill had watched my restlessness grow and my concentration level plummet, and she had become increasingly concerned about my inability to sleep. She listened to me tell about my frantic professional activity in the past year, my clandestine trips to Eagle, my summer spending spree to furnish the apartment.

“These are clearly signs of mania,” she said.

“But I’ve been depressed,” I protested.

“Exactly,” she said, “You’ve been cycling between the two extremes. I think you have bipolar disorder.”

I frankly didn’t believe her. Me—manic-depressive? I’d lived with bouts of depression for so long that I considered it a mark of my personality, part of my genetic inheritance. 

 “I believe that a major part of your deep depression is the years of struggling in an abusive marriage,” Jill said. She referred me to a psychiatrist, who confirmed the diagnosis of bipolar disorder. I didn’t believe her either, but I didn’t care. If they could put me on some medication that would help me concentrate so I could write, it didn’t matter what they called me. And sleep—I might be able to get some rest at last.

In response to my diagnosis, Billy was puzzled but sympathetic. Thomas was taken aback, having seen only my depression over the years and not recognizing my manic behavior—if that’s what it was—when it manifested itself in coloring madly or staying up several nights in a row. He didn’t know about that weird night in the woods outside Sitka, which I had never told anyone about. Why would I? It made me sound crazy.

I had to be taken off antidepressants before I could start on mood stabilizers. What the psychiatrist didn’t tell me was how dangerous this transition time could be as the antidepressants were phased out and the mood stabilizers phased in and raised to a therapeutic level—a process that had to be done slowly and could take several weeks, sometimes a couple of months.