Marianne
When I was six years old, my mother woke me at dawn and drove us to a motel in Morristown, New Jersey. I slept in the car and woke up in a dimly lit room that smelled of bleach and oranges. We stayed there almost two weeks, sleeping in the same bed, watching movies, and swimming in the pool, despite the thin layer of dead bugs and leaves that floated on the water.
At the time, my mother was going through a divorce, not from my father, but from a man named Dylan Novak. I don’t remember being afraid of him, though maybe I should have been. My mom did a good job of making our time at the motel seem like a vacation, though she must have been out of her mind with fear.
Where Dylan is now, I don’t know. Prison, maybe. Or dead, hopefully. Or scaring the shit out of some other woman. My father died when I was a baby. Sometimes I’m sure people know this just by looking at me, like they can sense that specific vulnerability. Even though I was too young to mourn him, fatherlessness shapes you.
In college I got into the occult—The Golden Dawn, Madame Blavatsky, conducting little séances in my dorm room. It’s lucky that a cult never found me, because I would have been easy to recruit. My attempts to speak with ghosts disappointed me, probably because I was never really a believer. All the séances did was give me bad dreams. My father never appeared in those dreams, but Dylan did, laughing, rolling his eyes.
Shortly after I turned thirty, I began to have what my psychiatrists referred to as episodes. I hated that word, which made me think of sitcoms. Still, no one ever offered me a better one. It was hard to stand or to talk while they happened, and sometimes they lasted for hours. I didn’t cry—crying would probably have been a relief. If I was in public, I dug my nails into my palms, leaving crescent moons in the flesh. Alone, I contorted my body into positions so strange I could never show them to anyone else, wrapping my limbs back around each other, like I was trying to become my own straitjacket.
At first it was just nausea. Then came images, as clear as if I were watching them on television. They were so violent. I saw myself stretched out on a piece of wood. Then the wood snapped in half, and so did I, large splinters impaling me. I saw razor blades buried into my stomach so that only their silver handles were visible from the skin. I saw my skull crack open like an egg. They were not hallucinations, because I knew they were not real. Nor were they memories, or dreams, or things I’d seen in scary movies. It was like someone had gone inside my brain and left them there, like shards of glass across the floor. Needles.
These episodes are what drove us to move out of New York City, in the fall of 1997. At that point I had seen three therapists, two psychiatrists, an acupuncturist, a neurologist, a hypnotherapist, and a Reiki healer. Nothing and no one was helping. Also, it was getting harder to hide what was happening to me. My co-workers noticed that I left my desk to use the bathroom for hours at a time. My friends were uncertain about inviting me to dinners or parties because I might ruin it for everyone. My husband, whose kindness and generosity were superhuman, was almost as exhausted as I was.
So we moved upstate. It was my husband’s idea. It was easy for him to find a job at a small bank in Rhinebeck. Though it was a step down from the one he had in the city, he said that because the cost of living was so much lower, it didn’t matter.
He was sure that the fresh air and open space would be good for me. I agreed. We found a big yellow Victorian on the edge of a college town, with a backyard that extended into the woods, and beyond that, the river.
I had lots of ideas. I would get a dog, a big sweet one that would rest its head in my lap when I had an episode. I would grow vegetables in our backyard and cook with them. I would volunteer at the home for disabled children that was around the corner from us. I would learn about plant medicine. And at least I wouldn’t have to grab on to a pillar when the train came by and I felt an overwhelming desire to jump in front of it.
“It’s not good for humans to live in cities, Marianne,” my husband told me. “We’re not evolved for it. Today I saw a homeless man half-naked on the train, singing the national anthem. Staying here is taking years off our lives.”
He was trying to make it seem like the move was for his benefit, as well, as if he weren’t making an enormous sacrifice. This type of kindness was typical of him.
The drive up was so beautiful and peaceful. It was a clear day, just warm enough to drive with the windows down. First we listened to Winterreise, and then my husband turned the music off so we could enjoy the view properly, in half-reverent silence. All those enormous trees, the wide blue river—it was like we had wandered into a painting.
There were problems almost right away. The big one was that, having grown up in the city, I couldn’t drive. I scheduled lessons, but I found it so difficult. It was amazing to me that so many people knew how to do it, as easily as walking, when it took up all my brainpower and then some. After each lesson I was exhausted and terrified. My face hurt from how tightly I clenched my jaw. And as the instructor helpfully reminded me, it would only get harder once there was ice on the road.
The second problem was the dog. We picked one out from a shelter, which made us feel virtuous. She was a tall, skinny animal that we thought might have been used for racing. I named her Shelley. She was very lazy, the shelter assured us, and affectionate, and would be happy to spend her days cuddling with me around the house. Shelley was nervous for the first few weeks we had her, which we knew was normal. I bought her a big soft bed and plenty of toys, and cooked her food myself—after all, I had time.
I really liked her. She had enormous dark eyes that absolutely melted me. When I took her for walks, the college students who lived near us fawned over her, telling me how much they missed their dogs at home, and she returned their affection with licks and wags.
But she hated my husband. The shelter had warned us that she was sometimes anxious around men, perhaps due to past abuse. Just give her lots of time and space, they instructed us, and that’s what we did. The more Shelley liked me, the less she liked him. At first, she would hide under a chair when he entered a room. Then she started growling and baring her teeth when he came near me. One day she bit his hand so severely it required three stitches and a tetanus shot. He would have let me keep her, even after that, if I had asked, but I felt too guilty. We decided to wait a little while and try again.
The house was not what we had expected, either. It was beautiful and intricate on the outside, like a dollhouse. But inside, the floors were uneven, the staircases absurdly steep, the plumbing unreliable at best. My husband assured me that this was just what big old houses were like, and I believed him. I scrubbed all the bathrooms with enough bleach to kill a person, but they still stank of mildew, which I realized was due to the old pipes. I got used to that.
I also got used to the way the doors opened and closed on their own if you left even one window open. The house had a big, beautiful backyard. I would look at it and think what a waste it was. For children or dogs, that backyard would have been heaven, but for us, it was just one more thing to maintain.
The episodes were not as frequent. They were happening only once or twice a week, instead of four or five times when we lived in the city. When they did occur, they were not quite as intense as before.
Also, I found a therapist I liked, in downtown Rhinebeck. I thought she might be a little kooky, because there were so many plants and crystals in her office, but I hoped they were just for decoration. I took a taxi to see her twice a week. Sometimes, if he could, my husband drove me. Sometimes we met for lunch after my appointments. I was even working a little, at a thrift store, not because we needed money, but to give my life a little structure. So we felt we had made the right choice, moving there.