“Karen, stop! What are you doing?”
I was in a literal life-or-death tug-of-war with my sister’s right arm. Without warning, she’d tried to lunge into the middle of a busy West Berlin street at rush hour. When I yanked her to safety on the sidewalk, Karen gave me a reproachful look.
“Karen, even if you don’t care about your own life, think of the poor driver who runs you over. He’s going to be devastated.”
For a moment I didn’t realize the shrieking voice competing with the cars honking at my sister was mine. It was February 1985, and I was once again trying to keep someone I loved from being pulled under. As I felt my sister’s numbness wash over me, I turned away, wanting no part of her latest mood swing. The idea that Karen was in no state to think of anyone or anything else, that her desire to put an end to her blackness blotted out all other considerations, was terrifying precisely because a part of me could understand how she felt. It wasn’t my father’s recent melancholia that it called to mind, but the women in our family. It killed me to look into my sister’s face and see the shadows of my mother’s suffering. 1966. 1976. Wasn’t I supposed to have another ten months before the family crazy cycle repeated itself?
“It’s your turn, son,” Dad had announced in that inimitable way of his. “Your sister’s very, very sick. Larry just returned from three weeks in Berlin. Your mother and I were there for almost a month before that. Now it’s time for you to step up and be strong for Karen.”
If God’s voice had thundered out of the clouds to issue some awful, irrevocable command, I thought, he would have sounded like Dad—only less aggravating.
Larry had thoroughly prepped me for my Berlin trip, writing out a list of questions for Karen’s psychiatrist, along with choice trigger terms to drop on the hospital bureaucracy if she needed to be committed again, quickly.
In addition to our concern for Karen, Larry and I were worried about the domino effect: the harder Karen fell the more likely that Mom would be dragged down with her. We’d witnessed a variation of this in 1981, immediately following a suicide attempt by Mom’s twin sister, Dottie. Although both Mom and Dottie recovered, the memory of Mom, incoherent and unreachable, still rubbed raw, as though it had happened just the week before and could happen again at any time.
As Larry and I discussed Karen’s situation we caught ourselves sneaking glances at each other in that critical, appraising way. Was Larry talking too fast? Was I interrupting too much? Which one of us would be the next to go? Despite fundamentally different personalities, there were times when Larry reminded me so much of myself that it was almost impossible to be around him. His intensity, his inability to relax, his unrelenting drive, all the more pronounced by his outright dismissal of his accomplishments, smacked so much of my self-denigrating style that sometimes I’d hear him seemingly steal my yackety-yack phrases seconds before they tumbled out of my mouth. Nevertheless, Larry wasn’t manic. Just brainy and high-strung. Like me. But I’d stumbled across my technique for emotional survival a long time ago. The same was true for Larry. He’d recently finished a successful stint as a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press, where they’d honoured his stellar writing with a huge poster that read “Dan Hill’s smarter brother.” Dad, finding the poster as hilarious as I found it most unfunny, had taped it across our Christmas tree.
But it wasn’t Christmas in snow-white Don Mills any more. It was West Berlin in February, and the sky was dark and polluted with a mixture of low clouds and the thick belching smoke of coal heating. Karen lived in the northeast part of the city, in a working-class area called, ironically, Wedding. The buildings, grey and tall and as close to the road as they were to each other, stretched so high that it was impossible to see the sky unless you craned your neck to the breaking point. The same Karen who, just moments ago, had come close to flattening herself underneath a speeding Mercedes was now bounding up the steepest stairs I’d ever climbed. “Cycling,” her shrink called it when her moods plunged down, then flipped up as though her brain were hitched to a roller coaster. By the time I caught up with Karen she was in her hut of a kitchen, her back to me, fumbling with something. Stiffening at the sound of my footsteps, she turned around to face me.
“Karen, don’t eat the fucking salt.”
Karen squinted at me as though I were overreacting and it were a perfectly acceptable dietary regimen to scoop up a fistful of salt that had hardened in the bowels of some neglected pantry container and then cram it into her mouth like some tightly balled-up snow cone. It’s the meds, I told myself. All the anti-psychotics mixed with lithium mixed with thyroid pills—next thing she’s gonna be biting off her arm.
Karen giggled as I continued to mouth silent, soothing messages to my brain. Then she narrowed her eyes, like I was the real nutcase, and, as if to humour me, let the leftover salt that had been squeezed in her fist sprinkle soundlessly to the floor. To make sure she didn’t get any more bright ideas, I primly picked up the container, still heavy with salt, and walked back to what I considered—why I don’t know—my side of the kitchen.
Karen started opening and closing all her cupboard doors as if to protect the rest of her foodstuffs from my thieving ways. Task accomplished, she looked back at me and licked her salty fingers clean, one digit at a time. How did she get this way, so freakin’ out there, so suddenly?
“Would you like me to get you a wet cloth for your hands, Karen?”
“No thank you, Danny.”
How oddly formal.
I took in the round loveliness of her face. For the first time I could see Aunt Margaret in Karen’s high cheekbones, Margaret’s dimples curling around the edges of Karen’s full mouth. Even Karen’s intelligent, quick-moving brown eyes, at odds with the excruciating slowness of her physical movement, recalled the lonely, sad Margaret who taught me, as an eight-year old, the meaning of “suicide attempt.” Hard to believe that Margaret was then just a few years older than Karen was now.
It would be better to compare Karen’s situation to Mom’s. After all, since Dad had become ombudsman, Mom had remained emotionally solid, even unflappable. And if Mom (by Dad’s reckoning) consistently bounced back because she was married to the world’s most wonderful husband, then the same reasoning might be applied to Karen. Because Karen had married a Caucasian German who loved her as ferociously and protectively as Dad loved Mom.
“Hey Karen, when’s Thomas getting back?”
Karen had padded to the living room to tend to her coal oven, the apartment’s heat source. As the stove came to life, spewing noxious sparks of orange dust everywhere, her tiny apartment started to get that rotten-egg smell. Karen listlessly poked at the oven with a fire tong for a few more minutes before curling up on the living-room floor and instanty falling asleep. I grabbed a pillow, pounded some of the dust out of it and tucked it under my head as I lay down beside my sister on the grimy—what was that sticky stuff?—floor.
Try as I might to slow down my thoughts, I couldn’t get Dad’s latest command—Get your sister home, fast—out of my head. Or Larry’s: Danny, make sure you never ask Karen to come home, it’ll turn you into the enemy.
But Karen is home, I thought, as I did a quick survey of the photos on her living-room wall. Thomas with his parents, the wedding picture of Dad kissing Mom, a blurry snapshot of the seven kittens that had briefly turned our house into delightful mayhem. So much love on those walls, among the sadness and the filthy floors and the stink of the coal heater. Sleep when she sleeps, try to stay on Karen’s schedule. That’s what Thomas has to do, when he doesn’t have our help. Trying to absorb Mom’s advice, I found myself doing that open, shut, flutter thing with my eyes. Maybe Karen will just sleep for the next seventy-two hours, I thought, too exhausted to relax, too lazy to drag my jet-lagged ass off the floor. As I drifted in and out of consciousness, I fantasized about my sister waking up in the middle of next week to find that she’d slept the whole bipolar thing off.
Karen had moved to Germany five years earlier, in 1980, at twenty-two. The official reason was that she’d fallen in love with Thomas while travelling. Karen had taken off to Europe within forty-eight hours of graduating from the University of Ottawa. But it would take more than crossing the Atlantic Ocean to escape what Karen later termed “the ghost of Dad.”
Thomas, according to Dad, was a “permanent student” (code for “underachiever”), even though Dad could have been accused of the same thing at Thomas’s age. Originally from Frankfurt, Thomas had been studying in Berlin for a good half-dozen years, stacking up degrees the way a short-order cook piles up pancakes.
“That Thomas is a lazy so-and-so,” Dad had complained, hours before I flew off to Europe. “I think Karen’s supporting him. And he’s paying her back by putting crazy ideas in her head.”
Even if that were true, what did Dad expect me to do about it? Enact some kind of gallant Don Mills–style intervention, as if I were rescuing Karen from a deranged German cult?
“Thomas is against everything. He’s a radical. An anarchist,” Dad said. “And disorder is the last thing someone like your sister needs. Your mother and I agree: Thomas is the reason why your sister’s so sick!”
Thomas was unlike any anarchist I’d come across. (Then again, the streets of Don Mills weren’t exactly paved with revolutionaries.) Thomas didn’t like socializing, preferring books to people. In fact, beyond reading and listening to obscure blues records, Thomas didn’t appear to like very much of anything. He was one of those rare people who take delight in hating things, whose purpose in life springs from the three Cs: criticizing, complaining and, most of all, correcting. So why did I like Thomas? Because Dad wanted me to hate him? Partly. But despite himself, Thomas was entertaining. One of the reasons it was so easy to get a reaction out of him, to piss him off, was that he cared, deeply, about everything—most of all, my sister. An intellectual snob nonpareil, he reminded me of another dominating, know-it-all husband.
Slam! The sound of the door startled me out of my sleep.
“Look at the two of you! Huh!”
Thomas, pointing disparagingly to Karen and me spread out like a couple of drunks across the living-room floor, had said hello in his mocking fashion. He had arrived home from an afternoon researching medical illustrations (his part-time job) in the library, dressed in black, looking considerably older than twenty-eight. When I rose to shake Thomas’s hand, he strong-armed me into the kitchen.
“No wonder your sister’s borderline catatonic,” Thomas began. “She’s overawed by your family. Talking to her you’d think your dad is Martin Luther King Jr., your brother is Langston Hughes and you’re fucking Bob Dylan.”
“Well, you know Karen, always downplaying her family’s achievements,” I said. “And nice to see you too, Thomas.” It appeared as though everyone thought they knew the reason for Karen’s out-of-the-blue undoing, while remaining a little less certain of the cure. Oh well, if this was how a husband stood up for his wife, by castigating her family, I was willing to absorb some abuse.
“Your dad is so ashamed that Karen works as a foreign language secretary at the Max Planck Institute that he lies and tells everyone she works as an international translator. And he comes over here asking me why she’s so sick.”
“Thomas, you show me a parent, and I’ll show you someone who exaggerates their children’s accomplishments.”
“Do you even know what put Karen in this hole?”
As Thomas explained that he’d repeatedly told her not to go away on that union retreat with her co-workers, I could feel his anger melting into hopelessness. Without interrupting, I gestured towards the living room, thinking that the sounds of Karen waking might slow down his play-byplay. Instead, Thomas continued: “I knew that your sister was getting in way over her head when she went to that conference. But she wanted to take on more responsibility …” Thomas let his unfinished sentence hang in the air, all the better for me to infer the obvious: because Karen needed to send a message to her Canadian family that she was willing to better herself at work, she had “bettered herself” into a breakdown.
“Hi guys,” Karen said, now en route to the bathroom. She had the look on her face that she used to get whenever she overheard Mom and Dad fighting: pleased at hearing something off-limits while at the same time unnerved.
“Listen, Thomas, I know Karen was talking gibberish when she got back home, that despite her doctor getting her on haloperidol, you had to watch her every second for weeks before she could be committed—”
Karen walked out of the bathroom, smiling as though life were a perfect fuzzy peach.
“Hey, you two. Let’s go for a walk. All these pills have me gummed up and exercise always helps.”
Things were going from weird to weirder. Was it me or had the new Karen—the manic woman who’d been trying to body-block speeding cars but a few hours ago—been inexplicably replaced by the Karen of old?
“Your sister’s depression always lifts in the evening. I had to explain the same thing to your brother. Her body chemistry undergoes a change at night—”
“Woo-hoo! Here I am, Thomas!” Karen said. “You don’t have to talk about me as if I’m not around.”
As my weeks in Berlin unfolded, it became clear that the dynamic of Karen and Thomas’s interactions shifted in tandem with Karen’s moods. Morning until suppertime passed with Thomas ordering and hovering over Karen like a teacher at a girl’s finishing school: “Stop staring at strangers, Germans don’t like that,” “Look at your brother, he’s just as bad, what other bad habits of his have you picked up?”
During the day, Karen took in all this carping without offering much in the way of defence. She’d hang her head, affect a look of guilt and offer the occasional, “Okay, Thomas, I’m trying. Really.” But at night, Karen, shaking off her depressed stupor, would rebel: “Fuck off, Thomas, if you don’t like me clipping my fingernails in the subway then look the other way.” Bop! Karen would cap her defiance by smacking a rolled-up newspaper over Thomas’s head.
“Ow!” he’d whimper, then back off.
“Don’t tell me what I can and cannot eat!” and Thomas, chagrined, would return Karen’s bread roll. He may have talked like Che Guevara, but when you stood up to him he curled up like a kitten.
Anxious to have someone else to order around, Thomas would start in on me: “What do you put coffee in the fridge for? That’s stupid,” “You’re not supposed to use the thumb of your left hand for bar chords. That’s what lazy guitar players do,” “Why are you reading Ralph Ellison? He’s a one-hit wonder, like you. Here: read Pushkin. I’ll bet you didn’t know that he was Black.”
Karen had fled to Europe to escape Dad, only to replace him with a pastier, more didactic and—hard as it was to believe—bossier version. Thomas was also attentive like Dad: keeping track of Karen’s medications, making sure she made all her doctor’s appointments, cooking and cleaning, ensuring she had clean clothes to wear. He was her sense of structure and stability, something Karen needed as much as she loathed.
And most importantly, I suspected that Thomas was in it for the long haul. As for his perpetual crankiness, who wouldn’t be a little frayed around the edges by living with a woman who, before being committed the previous October (why on earth had they released her?), was convinced that the curtains tied into neat knots hanging out the window of her Vietnamese neighbour’s apartment were a sign from God that she was pregnant. After all, everyone knew that knots symbolize embryos.
Spared Karen’s delusional ravings (thanks to her recently improved and newly prescribed pharmaceuticals), I was exposed, head on, to her long jags of morning sobbing. When these began, she was inconsolable. She just wanted to die, so all the pain would go away. All Thomas or I could do was take turns holding her and wait it out. The guttural sound of her crying seemed to me like the very definition of bone-racking despair. It made me sick. It made me hate her sometimes. And it made me hate myself for hating her. But most of all it left me very, very sad.
“Your sister needs solidarity, friends and family around her, keeping things calm.”
“How about increasing her haloperidol?” I asked, glancing suspiciously around the doctor’s office for signs of his credentials. He was dressed as sloppily as Thomas and me, and looked a good ten years younger. Fuck. When did I start to get this reactionary? I had to get home before I turned into Brian Mulroney.
“You Americans and your drugs,” the doctor said. “Anything to take the pressure off human responsibility.”
“America’s run by the drug companies,” Thomas added, helpful as always.
“Above all, your sister needs rest. No conflict. Give her lots of support. And lots of time to build her strength up. I hope you’re planning to stay with her for a while.”
“And if she tries to kill herself again?” I asked.
“Your sister is improving. Think of her crying sessions as her way of letting out the poison. She’s made it clear that she doesn’t want to go back into the hospital. So long as she’s slowly recovering, her wishes need to be respected. That’s part of the healing. We need to see the hospital as a last resort.”
“What about antidepressants?” I asked.
“Antidepressants are not advisable for manic-depressives, as they can trigger uncontrollable highs.”
“I’m talking about for me. I could use some uncontrollable highs.”
While I cackled uncontrollably at my advanced wit, the adolescent-looking doctor, sweeping the boyish flop of hair off his forehead, dismissed us.
“How much longer will you be away?”
“Bev, honestly, I wish I knew.”
“It’s already been more than two weeks.”
“Well, Larry was here even longer. And it was way worse for him. Karen’s getting better now. Finally.”
“So then why can’t you tell me when you’re coming home?”
“Because I don’t know.”
“You sound really down. Do you need me to fly over there? Are you depressed?”
“Not at all. Why? Are you depressed?”
“Look, for your own good, you’ve got to get home. Soon.”
Karen’s mood gradually started to lift earlier every day. Her crying jags took up less time, washing through her in a matter of minutes rather than a couple of hours. We’d frequently go swimming after dinner, then walk for miles, occasionally darting into cafés, where we’d gobble up thick cream doughnuts and wash them down with heart-thumping German coffee. Wedding, in February, was dark and rainy. The sidewalks were deserted except for old ladies who’d lost their husbands in the war. Karen, still mood-coasting, would break unhurriedly into a Bonnie Raitt song, her tone so pure and airy that I wished she’d never stop singing.
It was wonderful to feel my sister return, little by little, from the darkness. Now that she seemed more stable, I found myself worried about her future. About the possibility of her slipping back.
“Karen, have you ever considered moving back to Toronto?”
“Why would I ever want to leave here?” Karen asked. And in that moment, she really appeared to love her life, her husband and this distinctly un–Don Mills city with its coal-smudged skies, constant drizzle and mounds of poodle poop. I swallowed, not trusting myself to say the right thing.
“Danny, tell me the truth, did the family send you here to try to bring me home?”
I decided I’d wasted too much time sugar-coating my every thought. Maybe all this Hill male tiptoeing around the females had contributed to my sister’s “issues.”
“I don’t know, Karen, why would you want to leave West Berlin? I mean, other than the fact that you’re suffering from life-threatening mental illness, that Thomas is so judgmental and controlling that he makes Dad look happy-go-lucky, and that the people you work with are willing to make you some sacrificial lamb, leading the fight for some union cause you barely understand, even if it kills you.”
“Danny, you sound just like—”
“Don’t take the easy way out, Karen. Did it occur to you that on the subject of you living in Berlin I also happen to sound an awful lot like Mom? And Larry?”
“Easy to be judgmental when you’re rich. It wouldn’t matter to you that it costs nothing to live in this city. Nobody cares about money here. Not like Canada, where everyone lives to work.”
What I hadn’t understood was that Karen felt accepted in Europe; that there were pockets of culture, tucked away beneath the mainstream, that thrived in Berlin and that appreciated her vibrancy, welcoming her rainbow of racial origins, as well as sharing her distaste for all things status quo. The time had come for me to leave Berlin. Karen knew better than any of us where she belonged.
When Karen left Thomas, a year or so after recovering—”She finally decided to rebel against Thomas’s dominance as a way of rebelling against your dad,” was Mom’s interpretation—he was crushed. Though I didn’t blame Karen for fleeing Thomas and, ultimately, Europe (she returned to Canada for good in the late eighties), I found myself feeling sorry for him. In his overbearing way, he really, really loved my sister. That kind of love, regardless of all the attached, nettlesome baggage, was pretty damned hard to find.