Читать книгу Madness: A Bipolar Life - Marya Hornbacher - Страница 21

1996

Suddenly, I’m writing a book about my years with eating disorders. I don’t really know how that happened—a writer I know talked me into it, insisted I should—but I sit at my desk all day, pounding it out. The sun crosses the floor of my one-room apartment in Oakland as I race through the pages, barely aware of the world, trying to forget the crazies, the razor, the cut.

Now I’m drinking in earnest. At the end of the day, each day, I head down the street to the liquor store to buy the night’s supply of vodka. I go home, add a splash of orange juice to an eight-ounce tumbler, fill the rest of the glass with the vodka, and spend the evening at my desk writing poetry, then stay up all night reading every secondhand book I can afford. I stagger around my apartment, completely unaware that I am quickly crossing the line from binge drinker to alcoholic. It happens overnight.

And here’s the kicker. On impulse—it just occurs to me—I stop by Julian’s house. Julian is a friend from my adolescent California days, the only semi-sane friend I had. He is a nice guy, kind, a port-in-a-storm kind of fellow. And he is also a little boy, aimless, easy to sweep away. He has no life—now he can have mine.

I pull up to his house, my hair in a crewcut, wearing a tank top, old jeans, and a beat-up pair of boots. He opens the door. His jaw drops. I grin.

We spend a year in a particleboard apartment, drinking constantly, playing grownups. My new life is complete. I’ve abandoned the crazy years, the crazy self, and here I am with a book deal, a future, and a fiancé. We spend the nights in Melendy’s Bar, pool balls cracking, Patsy Cline on the jukebox, swimming in smoke. We talk nonstop, laugh our heads off, plan an extravagant wedding, an extravagant life.

Our families and friends are alarmed, wondering where the hell we got this idea, urging us to wait, but we ignore them—it’s perfectly reasonable that two twenty-two-year-olds who knew each other as kids and have now been living together for all of a year are completely prepared to begin a life together.

Idiots.

WE MARRY in July, and the next day, because this is perfectly obvious, we get in a moving van and head back to Minneapolis. I want to be near my family, my friends, my cousin Brian, who’s been my closest friend since we were kids, the one sane point in the whirlwind of my chaos, the voice on the phone long-distance, the writing on the letters, the hand that held my string as I bobbed and wove in the breeze.

So Julian and I go sailing forward at a breakneck pace. We’re grownups now. I am spending money as fast as I make it, and we jet around the country to lavish hotels in cities, anywhere, everywhere, eating fabulous meals, blowing thousands of dollars, making drunken fools of ourselves, collapsing on endless king-size beds. At home, I careen from parties at friends’ houses to Brian’s downtown apartment, where I talk a mile a minute and we cackle with laughter. He’s the dearest person to me in the world, a person of substance, solidity, sanity, and a deep and abiding gentleness, and he is what I rely on, even if I’m not entirely aware of it, to give my life some semblance of sense. As much as we laugh, he gets me to sit still for a minute, tries to tell me I’m going too fast, that I’m going to crash, but I ignore him, that’s the old me, I’m a different person now. I go racing through the mall, buying everything in sight, staggering under bags and bags of things I’ve bought, who cares what they are? I want it, I have to have it, it’s perfect! It’s gorgeous! I can’t stop shopping, our house fills up with china, crystal, expensive sheets, mountains of books, gourmet cookware, every kind of booze you can think of, paintings, clothes and more clothes and more clothes. We’re like little kids. We are little kids, but don’t tell us that—we’re having a fantastic time. We have our little house, and live our little life. We are the perfect young husband and wife. We have nonstop dinner parties—the glorious food, the fabulous friends, the gallons of wine.

I sometimes feel as if I’ve raced off a cliff and am spinning my legs in midair, like Wile E. Coyote. But I’m fine. It’s fine. It’s all going to be fine. Crazy people don’t have dinner parties, do they? No.

We go to concerts and plays, and never once do I let on that sometimes the music turns colors in my mind, veering toward me, making me flinch. I laugh at the funny parts and clap when everyone claps, even if I’m confused, disoriented, scared.

When I get lost as I drive through the streets of my city, I tell no one. Every night, after a day of writing, I open the bottle of wine, and Julian and I settle in for an evening of drunken glee. I make the fancy meals and wash the wedding dishes and write the thank-you notes for all the million wedding gifts on stationery stamped with my married name.

Crazy people don’t have stationery, do they?

The wineglasses will stave off the madness, surely, or the breakfast nook will, or the husband himself. I’m not going crazy.

Not again.

IT SEEMS TO HAPPEN overnight: one day I am calm, and the next I am raging. It’s very simple. Happens like you’re flipping a switch. Julian and I are going along, having a perfectly lovely evening, and then it’s dark and I am screaming, standing in the middle of the room, turning over the glass-topped coffee table, ripping the bathroom sink out of the wall, picking up anything nearby and pitching it as hard as I can. The rages always come at night. They control my voice, my hands, I scream and throw myself against the walls. I feel like a Tasmanian devil. The room spins, I run up and down the stairs, I can’t stop. Julian tries to grab me, holding my arms until I scream myself out and collapse, exhausted, in tears—but there are nights I manage to squirm free and run out the door. Sometimes I just run as far and as hard as I can, until I can’t breathe, until my heart is about to explode, or until, stumbling drunk, I fall and hit my head on a tree stump or the curb and lie still.

Sometimes, though, I get in my car.

I peel out of the driveway, roaring up Thirty-sixth Street, away from my pretty house and sleepy neighborhood. Slow down! I am screaming at myself, Marya, slow down!

And the madness screams back, I won’t!

It slides under my skin, borrowing my body without asking: my hands are its hands, and its hands are filled with an otherworldly strength. Its hands feel the need to lash out, to hit something, so it tightens its white-knuckled fists on the wheel, its bare foot slamming the gas. My head jerks back. Half in abject terror, half in awe, I watch the lights streak across the sky, bending as I careen around corners, up Hennepin, down through the seething nightlife of Lake Street, past the spectrally brilliant movie theater marquee, the crowds a blur, stoplights are not for me! Streetlights smear behind me like neon streamers. I hurtle forward. The only thing that matters is motion, forward motion, propulsion, I veer onto the freeway, playing chicken with the cars. The road comes at me full speed, it looks as if it will hit me dead between the eyes, but then it swerves around me just in time. The other cars, the median, the guardrail flash around my face, and I in my roller coaster am clattering and screaming along. I wind up in some unknown neighborhood, over by the river or on the north side of town. I turn the car around and, my rage spent, find my way home.

Rage swings into a stuporous sleep, and sleep swings into the awful morning sun. My head slides off the edge of the bed, and my mood plummets from shrieking high to muffled low, my heart beating dully on the inside of my ribs. I fall out of bed and stumble down the stairs, heading for coffee, but get too tired on the way and lie down on the living room floor, a painful hole yawning open in my chest. This old, familiar ache does not feel so much like sadness as it does like death, if death is blunt and heavy and topples into you, knocking you flat.

Julian comes in, carrying a cup of coffee. He sees me there on the floor. “Do you want help up?”

I mean to shake my head no, but my face is pressed into the carpet, and it would be too hard to shake it anyway. He picks his way through the wreckage of the night before, clears a chair of debris, and sits down, crossing his legs, an action I find futile and absurd. Slowly, I lift myself up. I’m dizzy—I always am after a rage—and I try to focus my eyes. I look around me at the mess: there’s a jagged-edged half of a wine bottle, a pile of green glass shards nearby. There’s a circular stain of wine on the wall, streams running down as if it leaked blood, and a puddle-shaped stain on the carpet below. There are the remains of a couple of smashed glasses. The bookshelf is cockeyed, leaning precariously on the back of the couch. Books everywhere. The couch has moved across the room from where it’s supposed to be. I peer at what looks like a hole in the wall. I look at Julian.

“Lead crystal clock,” he explains.

I nod, still looking around the room. “This is bad,” I finally say.

“Not good,” he agrees.

“Sorry,” I say.

“It happens,” he says.

“It does,” I say, bewildered. “I don’t know why.”

He leaves—does he even understand what’s happening? I certainly don’t—and I stand barefoot, alone in the mess. I go over to the hole in the wall and stub my toe on the aforementioned lead crystal clock. I pick it up and turn it over in my hands. Wedding present. Ugly. I marvel that it didn’t break. I set it down on the table and look out the window. My shoulders slump.

I shake the fog out of my head. Get a grip, I think. I’m fine. It’s little-boy Julian who’s making me crazy. No one could cope with his dependency, his lack of drive. It’s stressing me out, this game the two of us play, his kicking back, jobless, using my money, embracing the identity of kept man.

No, I correct myself. He’s my savior, companion, the husband, the rock. Our life is normal, balanced. We’re just like everyone else.

I cling to the persona of the good wife, the disciplined writer, the hostess, hanging on with both hands. But even I wear down eventually: the constant fighting, the afternoons crashed out in bed, the sudden spells of ruthless energy—they’re just too much.

I give in. I call for help.