Now, though, pictures sometimes scrolled around her even when her eyes were shut—a ribbon of color and random objects, usually beautiful but sometimes terrifying—and if she concentrated on a painting or photograph, she sometimes went inside of it, the way she had as a child. She saw the leaves in a van Gogh orchard and the graying wounded hands and feet of Holbein’s long strange Christ. When Vinnie, an amputee from a forest fire–fighting accident in college, tested a new, unclad prosthesis, Polly was as fascinated as the children by the titanium and the hinges. She felt as if her eyes could enter any surface: the ground, the river, closed curtains, flesh. Sam ripped a hole in his leg in late May, and Polly, remembering another little boy, could not stop seeing his interior after he was stitched closed again.
Ariel, lost, would have the run of Polly’s mind.
Few people seemed to believe her when she described this issue, certainly not her mimsy neuropsychiatrist, and so Polly was pleased when she was weirdly good at finding morels that spring in the river bottomland, the cream-colored honeycombs glowing up when you were right above them. Polly was the only one who found dozens, and the only one who didn’t trip over submerged branches. She wanted to stay for hours, getting sunburnt, getting lost. Josie and Harry, Vinnie and Nora, Ned and Ariel and Drake and the kids tagged after, everyone getting a little drunk. Only Graham hung back and sat by the river, resentful and embarrassed, stealing looks at Ariel, her red-gold hair flashing through the trees.
When Polly went in for her first full cognitive testing, six weeks after the accident, the woman who administered the test wore a tight black T-shirt with black jeans and black lace fingerless gloves. The Testgiver (capitalized and one word in the leaflet Polly was given) was young, but she had gray streaks in her hair and her arms were doughy and profoundly pale, the pale of no sun, ever. Polly watched her and tried to imagine the life behind all this—the gloves, no sunlight, the CBGB look coupled with a face that couldn’t love music, or drugs, or anything wayward on the planet.
The experience was innately hostile. When Polly made stupid, self-disparaging jokes, the woman took notes. When Polly misunderstood instructions, the woman said, “No need to be defensive.” Four hours of general knowledge, definitions, story problems, arranging blocks, repeating series of words and numbers, looking at an image for fifteen seconds before drawing it from memory. Polly’s reaction time was measured, and she was given a hundred-question yes-or-no psychological test: Do your parents like your siblings better than you? Do you use dirty talk sometimes? Are you afraid of the dark? Do you believe in evil?
Everything was cold: the woman, the lighting, the furniture, the pervasive flavor of humiliation in Polly’s dry mouth. The fucking gloves—what was that about? The Testgiver said, “Some people complain a lot. We’re used to it.”
We, the wall of authority. Keep the patient small. In a follow-up, Polly was told her tests showed that she was perfectly average. “Well,” said Polly. “Then why do I feel so odd?”
The youngish neuropsychologist, who said Polly and Ned should call him Dr. P (“for simplicity”), leaned back with his hands up, as if to say, What can you do? Polly scanned the sheaf of papers he’d handed her, passing them on to Ned one by one. She’d done honorably in language skills, not well at all in spatial skills and math. Ned asked about the comparison group, and the doctor beamed. Polly was stellar against sixty-year-old high school graduates, and a solid average compared to older college graduates.
As Polly watched Ned read, she began to bridle. How could the doctor be sure that her scores wouldn’t have been higher before the accident? For a fast vocabulary recall, Polly pretended that she was walking through a fancy New York grocery where she worked in her twenties—had he seen the words she’d written? Celeriac? Pancetta? Why on earth had a clock face been flipped backward, for a month? The thirtieth percentile for spatial and math—Polly laid no claims to anything beyond algebra II and geometry, but before the accident, she’d measured out every inch of the house when they’d renovated.
“You might be depressed,” he said. “Only natural, given your constant questioning of your state of mind. Or it could be a matter of stress. You said you have trouble sleeping. The aging brain, menopause.”
Polly had just turned forty-two. Dr. P was getting a jump, there. It could be a lot of things, but she thought the simplest explanation might be best: Her head had slammed down on pavement. The neuropsychologist—whose bill would be paid by the old man’s insurance company—was not endearing himself to his patient, or adept at luring her toward his chosen point of view. He had a sharp, tiny nose and the tic of pulling on his small, white fingers while he talked, as if he were taking off a ring or giving a tentative hand job.
Ned tapped her on the knee; Ned almost always knew where her mind was headed. When Polly snapped back into the here and now, the doctor was saying that everyone thought they were more intelligent than they were.
Ned, normally too composed for his own good, grew pink. “She edited. She cooked at high speed. She didn’t have to pause and think through every step.”
“It may be unfair of you to set such a high bar,” said Dr. P. “We would like to avoid a victim complex, fear of failure bringing failure, bringing on an even greater depression. She’s depressed and thinking she’s damaged or that someone was at fault will make her even more tentative.”
“She has changed,” said Ned. “This is not about grubbing money from insurance. This is about helping her to understand and be realistic and continue enjoying life.”
Polly was locking into we and she and succumbing to agitation. Ned obviously wanted to hit Dr. P, but Dr. P needed to be Polly’s victim.
“If you’re hoping for medication beyond an antidepressant, there’s no magic bullet. Nothing can make Mrs. Berrigan more innately intelligent. We are what we are. But I do recommend antidepressants, and counseling.” The doctor pulled a prescription pad out, signed his name with a curlicue, and handed it to Ned, rather than Polly.
They all allowed a moment of silence. Polly imagined one of the hardest things to learn, as a psychiatrist, was how not to patronize your patients. “I don’t want medication.”
“Are you sure you don’t already use something?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve told me you enjoy wine.”
“You’re a righteous little prick,” said Polly. “Go fuck yourself.”
You could take the girl out of New York, said Ned on the way home. He didn’t need to point out that she had been drinking too much.
Polly’s secret, which translated to a dozen small secrets a day: She was sure she was losing what was left of her mind. After the cognitive test, she abruptly saw the stakes and understood that admitting weakness was unthinkable. None of them needed another doomed, disintegrating woman. Polly started saying that she was fine, just fucking fine, better every day. She feigned calmness and deliberation, and those who knew her well, after briefly worrying this stance was some new manifestation of damage, went along with the whole thing. There was nothing wrong with pretending, Polly thought. People made it through cancer and jobs and whole marriages that way. And how different was she, really? If you couldn’t remember normal, how were you to tell?