But I had my savior: Stephen. People called him the “Susannah whisperer,” because he seemed to sense what was unspoken. At the party, he stood by my side, never once letting me stray too far from his watchful gaze. When people who hadn’t been debriefed came up to chat with me, he took the reins in the conversation, not something that the normally laid-back, California-cool Stephen did, but something that was now necessary. When I couldn’t speak, he spoke for me. Like my plastic smile, Stephen became another layer in my protective armor.
At one point, an old friend, Colleen, who had heard about my hospital stay from Stephen’s sister Bridget, noticed that as I ate a piece of watermelon, the red juices dribbled down my chin and onto my dress. She felt conflicted: Tell me or let it be? She didn’t want to embarrass me, but she didn’t want to let me go on looking like a clueless child. Luckily, before she had to make the decision, Stephen wiped the watermelon juices from my chin.
After an hour at the party, I gave Stephen a look, and he nodded back knowingly. It was time to go.
My second organized social experiment occurred the last week of May at my stepbrother, David’s, wedding. I was initially supposed to be a bridesmaid and had purchased the dress just before I got sick, but after I got out of the hospital the bride gently suggested that it might be best if I no longer took part in the ceremony.
I realize now that she was acting out of concern, but it was proof to me then that I had become a burden. Normally I was someone people wanted to include—Stephen and I had even been voted “most fun couple” at one wedding we attended prior to my illness—but now I had become a source of shame. This stung and whittled away at my fragile self-worth, which had taken such a thrashing over the prior months.
Still, I was determined to prove to her and the rest of the wedding party that I still “had it.” I styled my hair with a straightening iron to cover up my biopsy scar and bought a bubble-gum-pink dress, while Stephen wore a mod-style suit with a skinny tie. A mere month after the reunion at Rachael’s house, going to the wedding represented a significant step forward in my recovery process. I was nearly past the period where I looked and acted noticeably awry, though my face was still puffy from the steroids and my words were still faltering and largely monosyllabic. If you didn’t look too closely, though, Stephen and I seemed like an ordinary hipster couple.
The ceremony took place in a manor in Hudson Valley, New York, where grapevines dangled along the gates and wildflowers bloomed as far as the eye could see. Stephen and I spent most of the party standing by the makeshift kitchen, where the caterers entered and exited carrying plates of hors d’oeuvres. I don’t know if it was the steroids, which can cause an increase in appetite, but I was ravenous.
At the beginning of the night, my mom made me promise that I would drink only one glass of wine. I all but rolled my eyes when I agreed and then went ahead and drank several flutes of champagne. If there’s one thing about me that has been confirmed by my illness, it’s my tenacity, or bullheadedness, or whatever else you want to call it. Even though my brain was still repairing itself and it’s undoubtedly dangerous to mix alcohol with antipsychotics, I insisted on drinking. I didn’t care how self-destructive it might be—this was something tangible that connected me to the “normal” Susannah. If the old Susannah had a glass of wine or two with dinner, so would this Susannah. I couldn’t read, could hardly make small talk, and couldn’t drive a car, but, dammit, I was going to have a few glasses of champagne at a wedding. My mother tried to stop me, but she knew she had no control over my vices: I was going to do what I pleased. Ultimately the wine represented independence, and everyone around me decided it was best not to stamp out what remained of my dignity.
When the song “Build Me Up Buttercup” came on, I even did the twist with Stephen. In my mind, I rocked the dance floor, ignoring the aches and pains in my shins and the fact that I was tiring much more quickly than ever before. (I would later learn from my stepfamily, however, that instead of moving like a pro, I just looked robotic and dazed.)
Despite my attempts at seeming blithe and careless, I was hyperattuned to the different ways people were treating me. Since this was a family event, the first question out of everybody’s mouth was, “How are you?” It was an unanswerable question at this stage. But that wasn’t the worst part. It was the falsely enthusiastic, carefully enunciated tone people used; they were talking down to me, as if I were a toddler or a very old person. It was demoralizing, but I couldn’t really blame them. No one had a clue about what was going on inside my mind.
My mother, however, was proud to see me enjoying myself—that is, until another wedding guest broke into her quiet admiration.
“I’m so sorry to hear what happened to Susannah,” the woman said, hugging her. My mother does not like to be touched by strangers.
“Thank you,” she said, trying to keep an eye on me.
“It’s so sad. She’s so different. She’s just completely lost her spark.” At that, my mom tore her eyes from the dance floor and shot the woman a look. There had been many moments of insensitivity, but this was among the worst. “I mean,” the woman continued, “do you think she’ll ever get back to her old self again?”
My mom smoothed out her dress, also pink, and shouldered past the woman, saying through clenched teeth, “She’s doing very well.”
CHAPTER 39
WITHIN NORMAL LIMITS
Although I had already made substantial leaps in my recuperation, nonetheless for many months to come my days would revolve around the candy-colored medications that I had to take six times daily. Each week, my mother spent an hour portioning out my pills into a dispenser that was the size of a shoebox top. Often it took her several tries to get the proportions right because the doses were complicated and always changing. The pillbox was divided into yellow, pink, blue, and green slots and had seven columns for each day of the week and four rows: morning, midafternoon, late afternoon, and bedtime. I was tethered to this pill dispenser.
My reliance on these pills meant I couldn’t be independent, and so I loathed them. Not only were they symbols of my infantile status in my mother’s home, but the pills also made me sleepy and slow. Sometimes I would just “forget” to take them (an incredibly dangerous thing to do). Because I wasn’t wily enough to throw out the medication, I often left the evidence in the dispenser, which tipped off my mother, prompting her to reprimand me as she would a child. In many ways, during that recovery period at my mother’s home, I associated the pills— and the fights they engendered—with her. In a practical sense, I needed her to portion out the pills because it was far too complicated a task for me at the time. In a more emotional sense, though, I began to feel that she, like the pills, embodied my contemptible dependence. I can admit now that I was sometimes cruel to her.
“How was your day?” she would ask me after she returned home from a long day at the district’s attorney’s office.
“Fine,” I would say coldly, without elaborating.
“What did you do all day?”
“Not much.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
I cringe when I recall these interactions, since my mom and I had always been inseparable, and I can only imagine how much it must have hurt her. I realize that I was still holding tightly on to an amorphous grudge against her for reasons that seem so meritless now. Though the hospital was a blur, residual anger from that time remained somewhere in my subconscious. Somehow I had convinced myself that she hadn’t spent enough time with me in the hospital, though this was neither fair nor true. On some level, her suffering, which she had buried so deeply, had begun to drain out of her unconsciously and onto me. The worst part was that the struggle didn’t end once the hospital stay was over; now she had to live with this hostile stranger, her own daughter, who had once been one of her closest friends. But instead of sympathizing with her pain, which certainly matched and may have even surpassed my own, I took her suffering as an affront—a sign that she could not handle how flawed the
