3
WHEN DAD LEFT, I SCANNED THE REFRIGERATOR, THE REGULAR spot where the schedule was posted, underneath the same dirty magnet we couldn’t bear to part with (a faded image of Wonder Woman that Mom had picked up years earlier), and I took it in:
1. Call woman for interview!
Of course he included an exclamation mark, and of course it was first on the list, because it was the last thing I wanted to do.
Maybe later. Maybe after I did some research on that talk-show host. I wanted to read that article he had left for me. It would be interesting to see if she really had a brain injury, or if it was only a concussion. I could watch her show and see if I could make a diagnosis. That seemed like the right thing to do. At least then I could give Dad a more detailed evaluation of her performance.
If I was going to watch TV, though, I would have to see what else was on, which meant I wouldn’t be able to turn away—no matter how ridiculous the talk-show topic, or how poorly animated the daytime cartoon, and it was already getting late.
Maybe if I was going to watch, I could stick to educational programming, like Animal Planet, to learn more about animals’ natural movements and impulses, to better understand their bone and muscle structure.
This would help me practice some of my animal whispering and sketching skills on Harry, or Nugget, who was still waiting for me to play outside. But before I could play, I’d have to shower. What number was that on the list? Four? I wasn’t there yet.
2. Take pills.
Done. Obviously.
There was the Imitrex and Inderal for my massive migraines, and the Effexor to address my depression. I’d tried all of the SSRIs at different times, in different doses, until I found a cocktail that worked. Severe depression didn’t necessarily run in the family, but it did tend to run in brain-injury groups. So not only was my head dented, but it was also chemically imbalanced, which presented a whole new set of issues—moodiness, irritability, lack of motivation, feelings of helplessness, extreme fatigue, lack of focus—issues that sometimes overlapped with symptoms of the injury, and had, in the past, warranted separate trips to the hospital, including a couple of stints in psychiatric wards (the last time was a full decade ago), and a general dependency on drugs.
The pills had helped stabilize my moods, even if each one had a side effect that thinned my hair and slowed my metabolism, which meant more drugs to combat those issues, which meant more dizziness, and nausea and headaches from missed doses, which meant more coffee to combat the headaches and sluggishness. Sometimes it seemed the side effects were indistinguishable from the injury.
Still, the pills offered me some consistency, which was preferable to clinical despair, and better than the hospital or too much time on therapists’ couches, so I didn’t have much trouble swallowing them. I had been steady long enough for my doctor to phone in the refills with a quick physical check-in a couple of times a year, and I only had to see a talk therapist on an as-needed basis.
But in the end there was no prescription drug, or behavioral therapist, or cognitive psychologist, or support group that could transform me into someone else. Because each brain is variable, and mysterious, and there are no quick fixes. At least that’s what the doctors said.
3. Feed Harry.
Already done.
By all accounts Harry looked about average, as far as orange tabbies go, not too old or young, though he had to be at least ten now, not too overweight or too slight. He wasn’t one of those adorable cats who somehow remained kittenlike into adulthood, but he wasn’t unattractive. Some cats were plagued with disproportionate eyes or ears, or tails. Harry was just fine the way he was, with his worn coat and mild arrogance. I appreciated that he never pretended to be anything else.
Feeding him was the first thing I did most days. He’d sometimes mew, if he was starving, but mostly he just ate when he felt like it, which made things easy. I refilled his water bowl.
Clearly. Later.
Luckily, I never had any problem with these basic skills, which is why I never needed a home nurse or any real kind of help, why I was perfectly capable of being alone for long stretches of time.
So of course I needed to shower, but maybe I could go back to sleep first, just for a little while. I was beginning to feel sluggish. Or maybe another cup of coffee could do it, since I had held off for this long. . . . That would give me time to finish that comic book I’d found in the basement the other day, or the rest of the newspaper Dad left out. And actually, it was time for lunch, almost. Soon enough.
So I’d come back to number 4.
5. Find clothes for potential interview in the future.
Fine. I could play along with the charade as well as he could.
I went to my room and examined the mess. Clothes were everywhere—spilling from the closet; exploding out of the chests of drawers; on the floor, mingled with cat hair and dust; on the bed, where I would sometimes put them after I picked them up from the floor. There were a few things that were hanging, but they were smooshed and musty and moth-eaten and probably needed to be cleaned.
I tried to fold a few shirts, a pair of pants, attempted to begin to organize my closet. But folding well required fine motor skills, and I didn’t have them. My hands were weak. I wasn’t able to make a tight fist or maneuver my fingers in precise movements (except sometimes with a charcoal pencil or paintbrush), so I did the best I could with broad, sweeping motions. Mostly what happened was my folds became clumps. Again, and again. This made me want to rip the clothes apart, to throw them at the ground and at the bed, to leave them everywhere, which made them especially hard to find when I needed them.
There was a black skirt in the back of my closet I could probably use. And there was a blue shirt hanging next to it. It was only slightly stained on the sleeve, just a splash of coffee I could cover up—there were no light colors in my wardrobe; I knew better—but this shirt was too wrinkled for an interview.
The iron was in the linen closet, but we didn’t have an ironing board, or a lot of other household items since Mom had died—the losses seemed to accumulate without our knowledge somehow, a new item disappearing whenever we needed it—so I figured I could just put it on the floor and work from there. It would only take a minute. But the iron got so hot so fast that it left a mark on the carpet, and when I moved the iron to the shirt, it singed a spot, and when I tried to move it away, I hit the edge of the metal with my palm, leaving yet another mark.
Now it was basically afternoon, and I still didn’t have any clothes to wear or any idea of what I would say to this woman if and when I called. I could review my résumé if I could find it. I’d have to make sure I had a clean copy. That would take a while.
I could tell her about how much my art meant to me, how much I enjoyed connecting with kids over crayons and cookies, especially one-on-one. Groups were intimidating. Could I say that? Probably not. And I probably shouldn’t mention that it would take me hours to get there, that the idea of doing that commute every day was exhausting. It was a bad idea to tell her how unpolished I appeared, no matter how much time I spent before a mirror, and that I couldn’t find an outfit for an interview anyway, and that it was silly to imagine getting up early enough to try when it was already whatever time it was and I was still wearing my pajamas.
6. Do some research for more jobs.
Seriously? See numbers 1 and 5.
7. Think about cleaning your room. Really!
He always underlined that part, and always included it on the list, and I always had the same response. I’d underline think.
I had been told many times, mostly by Dad, that my room was hazardous. I could see how cluttered it was, from an objective perspective; he even took pictures once to make sure I understood.
“Grey Gardens,” he said, waving photos in my face.
“How would you know?” I said. “You walked out after five minutes of that movie.”
“I saw enough,” he said.
He couldn’t see how I could forget to close a box of cereal, a bag of chips, to put the top back on a tub of peanut butter. How I could let the toothpaste in the bathroom sit as it crusted over in the sink, and spill over the tube. How I could leave that hair in the drain, and never bother to notice the grime in the shower, or the mildew and the residue between the tiles, the water on the floor.
Reams of papers were scattered everywhere. Used art supplies and plastic tchotchkes were crammed into corners of my room because I couldn’t bear to part with anything.
By the end of the day, the mess I made had spread from piles into masses, and by the end of the week, my room was a colossal accumulation of socks, magazine ads, broken pencils, action figures, and stuffed animals all collected to form my own private menagerie. No one else would be able to bear it, but this room belonged to me.
Every cleaning crew Dad had ever sent over refused to work unless I could first get my room into “manageable” shape, a concept I didn’t understand. So eventually Dad gave up, and I closed my door.
I did sometimes think of what a normal person’s list might have said, if I was another version of myself:
8. Pick up dry cleaning, or 9. Buy milk, but I couldn’t do errands because we didn’t live within walking distance of shops, and I couldn’t drive.
I had tried learning once, when I insisted it was important to have a license as a central rite of passage. But I didn’t have a sense of direction; I usually went the wrong way, and I couldn’t tell the difference between left and right. See my hand? Look what letter it’s forming. It was an L, but I didn’t see it.
Dad took me out driving once. We barely survived it.
So I didn’t know what side of the street I was supposed to be on, I said, once Dad had stopped yelling. So what?
I guess for most people a sense of direction was instinctive, but I had to think about where I was going, and then I still wasn’t sure, and you didn’t have time to think when you were on the road with other drivers. So I never got behind the wheel again. It bothered me when I was sixteen and still had to get a ride from my father, and again in my twenties when I had to depend on my teenage brother, Nate.
But I couldn’t help it. My brain was complicated. I couldn’t blame everything on the parietal lobe, for example, even though that was the part that supposedly had something to do with direction (along with the hippocampus), because the parietal lobe also played a role in reading, writing, and drawing objects, and those were some of my best skills. Those were the tasks that didn’t need to go on the list. And yet the parietal lobe also had something to do with math, which I couldn’t do either. Dad basically cheated me through high school until I could meet the minimum graduation requirements, which is why I needed to go to a college that didn’t count the math portion of the SAT, which is why there was never any math on the list.
Number 10 might have said Cook dinner. I tried cooking simple things like spaghetti or scrambled eggs or boxed brownies every once in a while, but Dad didn’t approve. I tended to forget details, like turning off the oven. There were a few incidents involving burns (I almost always forgot to use a mitt) and explosions (tinfoil in the microwave) and small fires (small towels and napkins too close to the burner). Luckily, none of them were very serious, unless you counted half a scorched cupboard (that was what fire extinguishers were for), or half a scorched hand (aloe was useful), but they were enough eventually to steer me away from the kitchen.
Dad stocked the snack cabinet with plenty of cereal, peanut butter, and snack packs. He kept the refrigerator full of string cheese, hummus, apples, and carrot sticks. There was no danger of ever going hungry.
In the evening, most of the time we ate something he could heat up quickly, like frozen dinners or instant rice dishes, or pizza that he could pick up from somewhere else.
THE REST OF THAT DAY went fast. After a shower, I watched a documentary on the growth of the ivory black market and the devastation of elephants in Africa, made more coffee, read the rest of the newspaper, and found a random string for Harry to play with. It probably originated in one of my shirts. He didn’t always go for the string, but this day he did, and that meant a little exercise for both of us.
Once we were sufficiently tired, we sat together by the windowsill and watched the outside. When I spotted a squirrel focused on an acorn, I grabbed my sketchbook. He was holding the nut in his tiny hands, gnawing on it piece by piece.
I’d originally discovered a penchant for drawing animals in seventh grade when I met Russell the pit bull, the dog who patrolled the house at the bottom of our street. Allegedly, he once bit a little girl’s hand when she was giving him a treat, but I never believed that. He was a victim of breed profiling. And besides, no one came close enough for him to bite, except for me, the day he posed.
Russell, a guard dog known for his rigid posture and guttural growling, was always on high alert, but for the twenty or so minutes I stayed with him, he let down his guard. He stopped howling when he saw I wasn’t going to break his electronic fence, and he even let his tongue hang out as I began to draw him. In my finished picture, I imagined him as the commander of an army, a leader torn by the honor of his obligation and a sympathetic will.
“Isn’t that something,” Dad said when he saw any of my drawings, but that time he added, “really.”
As I studied the squirrel, I started to get inside his head, imagining his determination pulsing though my pencil. But just as I began to find some rhythm on the page, Harry leapt up from a dream and startled me.
When I turned around, the squirrel was gone and Dad was home.