Asylum--Chapter Seventeen Take These Tears

Chapter Seventeen
Take These Tears

My regular psychiatrist said she wouldn’t let me go home to Pullman for Christmas. Weekly appointments with her were critical, she said, so that she could monitor me and adjust my medication if necessary. Jill agreed. “I’m keeping close tabs on you. I don’t want you to kill yourself on my watch.” I wasn’t up to going anywhere, anyway. Emlyn called to say that he thought it would be wonderful if the family could gather in San Jose for the holidays. I jumped at the idea. My boys, both of them sweet and caring sons, were very concerned about me. I would have loved to see them. I was standing in the parking lot of a Taco Bell across the street from my psychiatrist’s office, waiting for the bus, talking to Thomas on my cell phone.

“Doesn’t having all of us together for Christmas mean anything to you?”

“Not especially. If you’re not going to Pullman then I’m not going to go either.” 

“But what about the boys? Don’t they deserve to have a Christmas?”

“I’ll send them some money. They’d rather have money than a plane ticket to go visit their mom, anyway.”

I was sure that wasn’t true. What wouldn’t I give to have my family around me right then? Maybe they could bring me back to normality. My voice sunk to a whisper.

“Talk louder. I can’t hear you.”

I wasn’t crying, but almost. A man in rumpled clothes approached me.
“I think you need to take a taxi,” he said.

“I’m talking to my husband. I’m waiting for the bus,” I said, somewhat irritated at the interruption.

Thomas said, “I hate this whole thing—that you’re down there, that you’re sick, that you want us to come all the fucking way to California. I think you get a charge out of it. Fuck you.” He hung up.

A minute later, he called back. “Apologize,” he demanded.

“No.”

He hung up and immediately called again. “I’m not coming. Bye.”

The ragged old man had been waited for me to get off the phone, and then he came up to me again, this time holding out a twenty-dollar bill.

“Here, take a taxi,” he said, the words slurred but the meaning clear.

The man had a shock of uncombed gray hair and the bulbous, heavily veined nose of an alcoholic. He appeared to be in his sixties, but a lifetime of drink may have meant he was much younger. 

“I have bus money. I don’t need a taxi.”

“Yes, you do. I have five daughters. Take the money. What’s twenty bucks? Call yourself a cab.”

My father had five daughters. I didn’t have to ask the man where his daughters were or when was the last time he’d heard from them. I knew the answer would be far away and a long time ago. I took the money. 

While we waited for the cab, we stood under a pair of huge oak trees, two of the oldest trees left standing in San Jose, according to the plaque. Each was so big it would take three people holding hands to go around it, with bark was so thick I could have poked my whole thumb into one of the many fissures. The few dry leaves left hanging on the tree framed the crescent moon to the east. I thought of the spindly spruce trees in Eagle, stunted by permafrost and harsh weather. By this time I was crying. Suddenly the man held up his hands and looked to the sky.

“Jesus Christ said to take care of our sisters and our brothers. Oh Lord, help me in this hour of her need. Lord, take these tears from her.” He turned to me and said, “Do you know how beautiful those tears are?” Cupping his hand over my eyes, he shouted, “Take this pain away. Take it now!”

He fell silent then, but stayed with me until the taxi I had called arrived. Then he leaned into the cab and told the driver to take good care of me. I waved goodbye before he headed across the street to a gravel parking lot where a Dodge Caravan sat with two flat tires. He’d told me he lived in his van. What’s twenty bucks?

I was relieved I didn’t have to ride the bus. The last time I’d taken the bus home from the psychiatrist’s, a young man had strode up and down the aisle shouting that he was God and people were stealing his ideas right out of his head. He had one hand in the pocket of his leather jacket the whole time and people recoiled from him as he passed, looking down, out the window, anywhere but at him. I was sitting behind the driver and I could see him looking nervously in the rearview mirror, one hand poised over the panic button on the dashboard. Another time a quadriplegic in a wheelchair had sat by the front door, looking out at the Christmas lights on the mall.

“Look at that,” he said, “Doesn’t that make you glad to be alive?”

I could hardly understand him, his speech was so garbled. His head wobbled as he struggled to get the words out. When he got off the bus, he said to the driver and those around him, “I’ll be praying for you.”

I didn’t know which sight had made me sadder—the deranged, perhaps drug-ridden youth or the man in the wheelchair. But riding the bus was always like that.

The taxi driver was from Ethiopia. I told him everything.

“I just got out of the mental hospital.”

“Yes?”

“I was going to kill myself.’

“Yes?”

“I’ve been married for twenty-five years but I’m having an affair with a guy in Alaska.”

“Yes?”

“My husband is in Alaska, too.”

“Yes?”

I had no idea if he even understood what I was saying, but he was nodding sympathetically and I continued.

“I’m supposed to be writing a book but I can’t write. I’m broke. We’re broke. We’re supporting four households in three states and we might lose our house because of debt.”

  He said suddenly, “Why is your husband not here?”

“He wouldn’t come down.”

“You were sick. You were in the hospital and he did not come?”

Now it was my turn to say “yes.”

“Fuggeddabout that. You can change your life. You are young.”

“I just turned forty-seven.”

“You look younger, and you are pretty. Do you know you are pretty?”

“I haven’t felt pretty in a long time.”

“You don’t have reason to kill yourself. Your problems are common. Lots of people have these problems. So you have this guy that you love—so you ask for forgiveness. If you kill yourself—you go to hell.”

I leaned back in the seat and watched the Christmas lights go by and listened to him talk.

“You just need a little to eat. The beggar and the rich man—the same. He has money to put in the bank, but it isn’t much difference between them. Money problems—you can get a job. You call my boss—she give you a job. They need dispatchers. The cab drivers are friendly. You are smart and educated. It is near the airport. This is good location. Everything you need is here. You can find companions, work, go to bars or whatever. Have fun! That husband—fuggeddabout him. This guy you love—if he loves you, he come down here.”

When I got out of the cab at my apartment, the driver wrote his name, Hakim, and the name of his boss on the back of his card and gave it to me.

“Call my boss. She give you a job!” he called out the window.

I went to the support group for victims of domestic violence. They were mostly Latina and black women from gang-ridden neighborhoods not far from while I lived. Listening to their stories, I wondered why I was there. My husband had never threatened to stab me in the middle of the night while I slept or to have his gang buddies kill me. He had never doused me with gasoline and run after me, flinging lit matches.

I was supposed to come out of these meetings feeling like I was not alone, that these other women and I were all in the same boat. But I did not want to be in the same position as these other women. These boat people, these refugees with no place to go, sat there for two hours a week and listened to each other’s appalling stories and murmured their sympathies and expressed their shared outrage. Curiously, being around these women who were so desperate to escape—or had escaped—their husbands made me want to hang onto mine more. 

The subject of the meetings was not always our husbands. One black woman spoke with anguish about her thirteen-year-old daughter going off for three days with a stranger she’d called at random on her cell phone. A beautiful Mexican woman talked about her fifteen-year-old son’s stabbing death ten days earlier, about kissing him goodbye in the morning and then coming home from work to find a business card from a sergeant in the San Jose Police Department’s homicide division stuck in the ironwork grill over her front door. “Call me,” was scrawled on the back. As she talked, a woman across the room kept nodding vigorously and making understanding noises. What does she know about it, I thought, how could anyone know what it is like to lose a child so early?

 Then she said, “I never told anyone. Thirty years, I never told anyone. My son was killed, too. Four years old and he got hit by a car right in front of my other kids. They ran home and got me and I picked him up off the street. I picked him up off the street. He had fluffy white hair that stood out all around his head. He looked just like an angel.” 

Silent tears streamed down her face and she looked at her lap as she spoke. “Later, when my husband was in prison, another guy bragged that him and his friend did it. They were high on PCP and they saw my son’s white hair and they thought he was ‘that fuckin’ little white dog’ that lived on the corner and they hit him on purpose. They hit him on purpose.”

Never mind what their husbands had done to these women—it was what life had done to them, what the city, the neighborhood, strangers and gang members and even their own hard teenage girls had done to them. Was there no safe place, no sanctuary but this small, windowless room for two hours a week? Next to them, my problems were nothing. Yet they listened with compassion to my story.

“He yelled at me,” I said, lamely. It sounded like a paltry complaint. But when the women heard I had endured twenty-five years of belittling remarks, name-calling, blaming, fault-finding, and public humiliation, they shook their heads and groaned in understanding. But, I felt, they didn’t understand at all. I still, stubbornly, had faith in my husband’s capacity to transform himself. He had reinvented himself many times before: from street musician to university lecturer; from classical violinist to jazz pianist; from experimental rock musician to church choir director. Maybe he could invent a persona of a kind, patient, considerate husband.

“He can change,” I said.

“He won’t,” everyone in the group agreed. “They never do.”

“Face it,” said a woman whose abusive husband had killed himself after she left him, “You were in the hospital and he didn’t come. You could have died. What more proof do you need?”

I’d had two quick and relatively easy childbirths aided throughout by Thomas, who was at my side, staring into my eyes the entire time. Whenever he looked away, I took him by his beard and yanked his face toward mine again. I looked at one of his pupils and saw it dilating with emotion and it was my cervix opening, opening, expanding with love until it could accommodate a small head, a shoulder, a whole human being. My husband had been there for me then. Why was he not here for me now? I could not comprehend it. In this time of crisis, when I needed him most, he had denied me three times—once, when he would not come for our anniversary, twice when he would not come when I was in the hospital, and thrice when he would not come for Christmas. I lay in bed at night staring at the ceiling. I felt the cock crow.

Away from the order and safety of the hospital where my feelings had been deadened, I was back in the fearful disorder of my life, overwhelmed again with emotions. I clung to Billy even more than I had before. He told me to call him at any hour of the day or night, and I did. At the end of every conversation, I always asked him to tell me a story. In the long pause as he considered which tale to tell, I heard the silence of the sub-Arctic winter just outside his window. I heard the dog curling its tail over its nose and going to sleep despite the bitter cold. I heard the smoke trailing from the chimney into the still midnight air. He told me about the woman who was left alone in a trap line cabin on the Seventymile River for two weeks just before Christmas when her husband went to Eagle for supplies. They were down to dried beans and pancake mix. In the stillness of his sudden absence, the eight-by-eight foot cabin seemed empty, and the voles took over. At first the mice-like creatures stayed on the floor. But without two people coming and going, dancing around each other just to get from the bunk to the door, the voles became bolder. They started running over the bed at night, scampering across her as she shrank farther down into the sleeping bag. They scrabbled around in the beans. They scritched and scratched and chewed and gnawed.

Her husband was over a week late. She lay awake at night, hating the voles, unable to sleep for fear her husband lay dead along the trail. Then they got into the pancake mix. Their feet, white with flour, left little tracks across the table. That was the last straw. She took to sitting up at night clutching a big hickory knife. By the light of a candle, she struck. Chop. A vole lay in two on the table. It was simple. “Steal from me and you die,” she said. Hack. A vole lay in three. It was a grisly tableau. The woman huddled, sitting up, in a sleeping bag at the foot of the bed, on the table in front of her a scattering of vole parts. She kept it up night after night until she was winning the battle. The voles were fewer and farther between. She would have continued, still, but one night she caught sight of her shadow against the wall, a crazed woman with a large carving knife poised over her head, lunging forward to strike. “That’s it, she said. “I’ve gone over the edge.” The next day her husband returned and they had dry milk and sugar, cheese and butter, raisins and rice and even a couple of oranges, and the voles had gone into hiding again. It was Christmas.

Six days before Christmas Day, I left the support group meeting and set out on foot for my appointment with Jill. I found it so upsetting to ride the bus that I had been taking the taxi everywhere I needed to go, but my money was running out. My sense of time and distance was still distorted, and it was only after walking for thirty minutes that I realized there was no way I could get to Jill’s office quickly enough to see her. It was still several miles away and I was supposed to be there in ten minutes. I called her voicemail repeatedly, leaving increasingly hysterical and incoherent messages, sobbing into the phone. I must have been at least four miles from my apartment, with no money for a cab or a bus even if I could find one. The street I walked along was six lanes wide, and trucks roared past me. Grit swirled up into my eyes and plastic bags and fast food trash blew around my feet. I couldn’t stand the noise another minute, but I was afraid to get onto a side street for fear of getting lost. Standing there crying, not knowing what to do, I noticed a police car parked nearby and walked up to it.

“Can you help me?” I asked the man inside.

The driver was dressed in a mechanic’s jumpsuit instead of a police uniform, yet this didn’t seem strange to me. His appearance fit the unreality of the afternoon.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m lost.”

“I’m just a mechanic for the police department,” he said kindly, “but I’d be happy to give you a ride to the station, if you want.”

I climbed in next to him. Once at the station, I didn’t have any idea what to do. If I went inside, what would I tell them? What kind of assistance would I be asking for? Who could help me, at this point? The psychiatrist obviously couldn’t. Jill was always able to comfort me, with her warmth and obvious concern, but she couldn’t fix me. My brain was still broken. I wasn’t hallucinating anymore, but I couldn’t think. I couldn’t get around by myself. I couldn’t function in the real world. I was afraid of being alone.

Going around the back of the building, I sat down against the wall, put my head on my knees and cried uncontrollably.

A police officer coming out of the rear entrance took notice of me.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I need a ride to my therapist’s.” At this point, I had no idea where I was in relation to either Jill’s office or my apartment.

“I’ll take you. I’m just getting off shift. If you don’t mind riding in my RV.”

I didn’t care if he transported me in a tank, I just wanted to get there. I told the cop the intersection where Jill’s office was located.

On the way, I blurted out my story about the hospital, my affair, my despair, just the way I had told the Ethiopian taxi driver. This man was like a taxi driver in uniform. No, he was better than a cab driver. I felt safe in his hands. He was a muscular Mexican-American, easily six feet tall, with close-cropped hair and a military bearing. The inside of the RV was spotless, with little to indicate it served as his home during the week. His wife and family lived two hours away and he saw them only on weekends, he explained. 

When he dropped me off at Jill’s office, he asked if he could help in any other way, and I told him I could use a ride to my psychiatrist’s appointment the next day. He agreed. No problem. He could take an early lunch. 

Jill was in a session, but I sat and waited. When the other client left, she stepped out of her office, looking surprised at my wild-eyed appearance. I marveled at her shiny, smooth hair, so different from my own unwashed hair, which I didn’t bother to brush anymore. She wore silver hoop earrings that swayed as she talked. With her usual soothing voice, she told me it was all right that I had missed my appointment but she couldn’t see me right then. She gave me taxi fare to get home and scheduled me for the following week.

On the way to the psychiatrist’s office the next day, I told the cop I felt scared and alone all the time and had trouble sleeping. He said he’d call me at night to help me get to sleep. He moonlighted as a security guard at a warehouse and would phone me while on his rounds.

That night I flicked on the light in my bedroom and gazed at my reflection in the window, dreading another night without sleep. Most of the time, I didn’t even bother to get into bed, but stayed up, sitting on the loveseat in the living room or the upholstered chaise longue in my office, or pacing around the apartment. I’d decorated the bedroom as if it belonged to an eight-year-old girl—the type of room I’d like to have had as a child. Framed illustrations from Babar and Dr. Doolittle hung on the walls. On the white enamel daybed sat a stuffed grizzly bear and a bisque-faced doll with a calico bonnet. In the corner dangled a wooden Pinocchio marionette. The antique bedside stand was covered with a length of lace, topped by a small white lamp with a frosted glass shade. I closed the blinds and climbed into bed, pulling my great-aunt’s marriage-ring quilt over my shoulders and putting an arm around the grizzly bear. I lay there with my cell phone in hand, the hatchet still under the bed. 

When the cop called, his voice was hushed, as if he expected to round a corner and come upon an intruder. I felt watched over and calmed. The phone rang every night just after I took my sleeping pills at nine o’clock. He mostly listened, but guided the conversation by asking questions in his strangely hypnotic voice. He’d keep me talking until I started slurring my words, as if he were an anesthetist asking me to count backwards from one hundred.

“Okay,” he’d say. “Hang up the phone now. Sleep tight.”

A couple of times, the cop came over in the evening to check on me. I served him coffee on my Swedish tray with the cut-out hearts. I sat on the floor with a cup of tea. 

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking that I want somebody strong to lean on, somebody who is actually here, not in Alaska.”

He patted the seat next to him.

I curled up on the loveseat and put my head on his beefed-up shoulder. He smelled of aftershave and his breath like licorice. He put his arm around me and it was like leaning up against Superman, the good guy in a kids’ coloring book, the friendly officer who rescues a cat in a tree, returns a lost child safely home. 

And so it was that one of San Jose Police Department’s finest fucked me on my living room floor without removing so much as his shoes. 

Afterwards I asked, “Do you even like me?” aware my voice sounded plaintive and pathetic.

“If I didn’t like you, I wouldn’t have helped you get to your therapist that first day.” He told me about the other women he had “helped.” The woman with the Mexican take-out truck who didn’t have the proper business license. The panhandler who’d just lost her apartment and was grateful for the chance to spend the night in his RV. There had been many others over the fifteen years he’d been in the department.

I had sunk to a new low. I thought I’d hit bottom when I entered the hospital, but this was worse. And now look what I’d done. Late that night, after the cop had driven off, I called Billy and told him. “Oh, Louise,” was all he said. “Oh, Louise.” I felt it was Billy I’d betrayed, not Thomas. It was no longer my husband I owed allegiance to, but the man who had saved me when I could have died.

Desperate for distraction, absolution I didn’t know what, I attended a service at a nearby Episcopal church. I had gone there a few times that fall, mostly so I could sit and admire the old building, built in 1863, with its blue stained glass windows and beams made of redwood from the nearby Santa Cruz Mountains. I sat through the service with tears streaming down my face. Afterwards, one of the lay readers approached me with a look of concern and asked if I’d like to speak to the priest. I nodded.

Once the church had emptied out, the priest sat with me on a bench against the wall and asked me what the problem was. His vestments were clean and white, and I stared at the complicated knot at his waist. I wondered if knot-tying was part of his seminary training. Again, I spilled my story. Only this time I had to add the debased episode with the cop. The priest listened attentively. Indeed, a little too attentively, his head cocked and his gaze apparently focused on my shoes. He queried me again, and then again, “Is that all? Has this ever happened before? Are you sure?” he said, leaning toward me conspiratorially. Together we would get to the root of this, he seemed to be saying. 

No, just the fur trapper and the cop. Apparently, I was unable to satisfy his prurient interest, because he seemed disappointed.

“Just the two?” 

“Yes.” Yes, for God’s sake, isn’t that bad enough? I wanted to say. Can’t you save me from myself? The way I wanted the psychiatrist to save me. The way I wanted someone or something to lay a hand on me and say “Enough. Yes, you have had enough.” The priest said a prayer for me, touched my forehead and matter-of-factly told me to come back next week, as if telling me to take two aspirin and call him in the morning.

Two days before Christmas, Ingrid finally told my other sisters and brothers that I’d been in the hospital. Within hours my sister Julie got on a bus from Los Angeles. She was less than a year older than me and, although we had not gotten along as kids, we had grown close as adults. 

When she arrived in San Jose, Julie and I rented a car to get around in, but I had to drive because she had not driven in years. My brain was fried. It was as if I’d had a stroke. Julie had to tell me when to stop and when to go, to look out for pedestrians in the crosswalks, what the speed limit was. We spent Christmas Day on the Santa Cruz pier, watching sea lions lounging on the pilings, just as Thomas and I used to do with the kids before we moved to Washington State.

Thomas, unlike his usual parsimonious self, had always gone all out at Christmastime, buying the boys lots of presents, which he delighted in setting out under the tree. They had been disappointed when Thomas had rejected Emlyn’s plan for them to come to San Jose for the holiday, but they knew that once their father made up his mind, he never changed it. I called Ambrose, who was having Christmas with Ingrid’s family. Emlyn was spending the day with his girlfriend’s family in Tacoma, and I talked to him, as well. When I called Thomas, I had nothing to say, so I just listened as he told me how well his students had performed at the Christmas concert, one shy boy being brave enough to sing a solo with the high school orchestra.

“It was so sweet. It reminded me of when Emlyn sang with my community orchestra.”

“When who sang?”

“Emlyn.”

“Emlyn sang with your orchestra when we lived in Pullman?”

“My God, you don’t remember that?” Thomas sounded like he was about to cry. “That’s so sad.”

“I must have been so proud,” I said, wondering how many other memories had gone missing, how many other holes had been burned into my brain in the last punishing month. Thomas hung up abruptly, saying he wanted to finish watching It’s a Wonderful Life, one of his favorite Christmas movies. 

I finally heard from Billy late in the day. He’d just gotten back from having Christmas dinner at Judd and Merry’s. They didn’t have a phone so he had waited to get home before he called. He groaned that he had eaten too much—three platefuls of food that ever-cheerful Merry had managed to prepare in her makeshift kitchen that didn’t even have a sink.

For days, Julie just sat with me in the living room watching me color, a habit I still succumbed to, but without my previous intensity. We didn’t talk much but I was glad to have someone in the room. Someone real, not a voice on the phone or a malevolent presence in the corner. Or a cop.

Since doing genealogy on my Scandinavian ancestry two years earlier—how long ago it seemed now—I’d become fascinated with Sweden. A child’s puzzle of the Nordic country sat on my kitchen table. Every day I tried to do the twenty-five-piece puzzle, but I could only find places for a few recognizable shapes—a fish, a bear, a crown.

After a week, Julie left and another of my sisters came up from Los Angeles. The eldest in the family, Lisa, an elementary school teacher, found my constant coloring disturbing and showed me how to make origami boxes instead. She demonstrated it over and over, speaking slowly as if to one of her five-year-old students. Once I mastered it, I made tiny boxes all day, cutting up my coloring book pages, folding and turning and folding them again in a repetitive motion that I found soothing. We went to the art store around the corner where I bought handmade paper covered with golden bees, and I made larger, sturdier boxes with it.

Every day I started over on the puzzle of Sweden. Every day, I was able to put a few more pieces in position, moving on to the more abstract shapes. Eventually, I got it about half done before I grew frustrated and quit. After Lisa left, Leslie arrived and cared for me. An urban planner and a supremely organized person, Leslie took charge of my overdue bills and insurance paperwork and took me to dinner to get me out of the apartment.

I worked on the puzzle every morning until I was finally able to complete the whole thing. Then I worked on doing it faster. My mind was starting to come back.

When I told him, Billy said hurray in his appealing, funny way, pronouncing it “Hoo-ray!” 

Thomas said, “I’m proud of you for getting through this by yourself. I’ve always said you were a strong person. Stronger than I am.”

“I didn’t get through it by myself. My sisters took care of me.”
“Yeah, I lucked out,” he said. “I didn’t have to come down.”