I began eating again just so I didn't have to suffer though any more family therapy sessions. During the last session, my therapist asked Mom and Dad to please go into the waiting room and give her a few minutes alone to talk to me. Neither of them said a word. They just turned and walked out the door.
I started to sweat a little even though my hands felt like I'd been soaking them in an Icee. What did she want to talk to me alone about? She got up and drew some stick figures on a chalkboard with arrows and circles surrounding them. She turned to me and smiled.
"How do you feel, Sydney?"
I smoothed my hands along the thighs of the size 3 jeans I was wearing. I had some cushion around my knees that wasn't there a few months ago when I began therapy weighing 79 pounds. After a few threats that I'd have to enter a rehab center and too many awkward couseling sessions with Mom and Dad, I decided to give in. I'll eat. Just leave me alone. It occured to me that as much of a thrill as it was for me to have lost my breasts and stopped menstruating - exhilarating freedom when you find out you can control how much of a grown up you want to be--I actually didn't like all the attention everyone was suddenly paying to my body, even in the baggiest sweats I could wear without them falling off me when I walk. I don't know if I just gave up or if I subconsciously thought, if I don't want people looking at my body I should let it get as big as it wants because I'd picked up from weight watchers and those three teasing boys who made fun of my breasts in fourth grade that boys definitely aren't interested in fat girls. Which only made the idea sound even better. I was sick of men staring at me. I decided to stop paying attention to my body and focus more on my mind.
"Ok." I was eleven and just learning what I now understand to be what the professionals call apparent competence. I knew better than to tell her what was going through my head.
My therapist pointed a stick to the various stick figures on the chalkboard which represented my family. I was in the center, which felt weird.
"I want you to know, Sydney, that often it's not the person brought in to get counseling who most needs it within a family. Do you know what I mean?" She sat down on the couch next to me and laid her hand a few inches from my leg.
I nodded even though I was fuzzy despite paying careful attention to her every word. I felt like she, like most people, treated me older than I was because I looked older than I actually was. I felt like this was a conversation she should have had with my mom. I smiled and thanked her and got up and left.
My parents and I ate at an all you can eat buffet immediately afterwards and then drove home in silence. I remember fastening my lap belt in the back seat of the Camaro my dad bought himself as a midlife crisis present a few years earlier. I peeked over his bald head and saw he was going 90. The last sign I saw said 55. I liked to keep track of these sorts of things to measure his mood. I knew speeding like this was not good. Mom never told him to slow down. She gripped the dashboard when he'd swerve to keep from sideswiping another car, but other than that, you could barely tell she was a passenger in the car.
We got home, watched TV and went to bed. Dad went to bed first. I sat on the couch where mom was reading a paperback with the TV on as background noise.
Neither of us said anything. I laid my head on her shoulder, she put her arm around me, and I fell asleep.
As a teenager, reading the works of Virginia Woolf and Gloria Steinem and Harriet Lerner, I shrugged off my mother as being an Edith Bunker to my dad's Archie. I think I was both Mike and Gloria. My siblings were the Jeffersons.
And I associated Mom's passive Edith-style with being a woman. A good, funny, smart, nice woman. I love my mom. She's one of my favorite people on earth. But it made me sad to see her always give in to what Dad demanded.
Until one day she didn't. She left him. Within a few months divorced. By nine months, Dad remarried one of his rich dance partners and by then Mom's mums had begun blooming on the porch of her tiny but neat apartment. I didn't understand why she didn't put up a fight. Ask for half the house. Bring the bed. But no, Mom loved him not as a husband or even a friend, but as a person. She couldn't leave him without a bed even though it meant she left him her grandmother's antique sleigh bed which he then sold to Hazel and her family for $200 so they could get it back in the family.
I was twenty-two and a bit annoyed she didn't do it when I was four when she first mentioned it. Or at least when I was twelve, after all my siblings had left me alone to witness their crumbling marriage. Not that it was their fault for getting out when they could. Mom later told me that she did indeed ask Dad for a divorce when I was twelve. He immediately developed the flu and got so sick he ended up in the hosptial where they discovered his coronary arteries were so blocked he could have had a heart attack at any moment. He was in the hospital for about a month. After the heart surgery, he developed pneumonia and was feeling withdrawal from forty-three years of smoking two cartons a week. The doctors told my mom at the time, in 1982, to expect him to live at most another five years. Mom figured she could stand him another five years. She felt it just wasn't right, leaving a dying man alone.
I wanted to be left alone. I spent a lot of time in my tiny bedroom listening to Duran Duran LPs while I fantasized in bed that I was touring with the band. I could write lyrics for them or something. Or maybe even something else.
It felt good to travel and have conversations with people all over the world inside my head without leaving my tiny space. I sat on my bed which was about sixty years old, one of those metal fold-up beds that had once belonged to my great-grandmother. The mattress was who knows how old. Could it possibly have been the original? You had to sleep on it just so or you'd get poked by one of the springs popping through one of the many holes in the mattress. I was totally used to it, as was Hazel who had a matching one. But when friends stayed the night they brought their sleeping bags and slept on the more comfortable green carpeted floor.
I sat in bed with the Brother word processor/electric typewriter my mom and dad had given me for Christmas. It was my favorite present ever, next to the dictionary and thesaurus they got me for my 13th birthday. I typed stories. I typed poems. If I hadn't cowardly thrown it all away when I was in my twenties and embarrassed by my childish emotions I'd share it with you today. I saw Harriet Lerner speak once and she read to the audience from her diary at age 13. It's so funny and sad and embarrassing. But it's so true. We've all felt that way sometimes. And it feels better knowing it's completely normal to feel awkward and stupid and unloveable. How else could you explain Morrissey's fanbase?
The thing I regret throwing away the most is a journal I wrote while I was madly in unrequited love with Noah Zilberschlag. It was covered with my heavily practiced signature: "Sydney Spencer Zilberschlag". Everything about Noah amazed me. I was smitten. We fooled around. Genitals were touched. Pink Floyd LPs were played. It was a beautiful night. The next day in junior year English class he said he thought we were getting too intense and maybe we should cool off for awhile. I was stunned. How could one of the best nights of my life be something he doesn't want repeated? I stopped talking to him. I forced myself to forget about him. When my friend went on a date with him I pretended I didn't care. I went back into my room and wrote and listened to music.
I am forty now. I am so over Noah Zilberschlag. I hope he's doing well. I have no hard feelings. I'm very happy with my romantic life. But I still have trouble with leaving the shelter of my room, writing about lives I can control and rationalize with words and ideas instead of facing the reality of our chaotic world.
I'm getting ready to see my doctor about the severe agoraphobia I experience somewhat regularly. Problem is I don't want to leave the house to go to the doctor's office.
I just want to write. Just like in high school. Avoiding the real world and making up my own.
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