Ordinary Lives: Excerpt from 1st Chapter Taboo Nation

Ordinary Lives

Chapter 1

The day I decided to kill myself was an ordinary day, though I’m not sure what ordinary is anymore. It was probably ordinary that swayed my decision to move forward with a plan I’d been formulating since my early youth. The hollow tunnel of routine had become a bleak vision leading nowhere. It was no longer bearable, and was somehow maddening for a woman like me. The day I chose to enter the tub filled with scalding water and submerge underneath its vise grip happened to fall on my daughter, Kayle’s, fourteenth birthday. It was pure coincidence. It was also ironic, considering I had failed to successfully take my life around the same time during my tender adolescent years.

My mother’s howl had ripped through the room as she entered that day, seeing the spurts of blood on her white silk sheets. “Oh, my God, Carole! What have you done?”

She had added the “e” to the end of my name for the sake of her French heritage, though we’d never seen our French aunts nor visited the country. She spoke of the lush plains, the sway of romance in the city of Paris, and the quaint accent of its citizens. She acted as though she’d lived there forever though she’d only been once. To the American tongue, the pronunciation still sounded like a course, flat, Carol without a skip in the sound like my mother had intended. Beside her, my sister Tara was in-tow, staring at the beauty of the rich red against the white background. Her eyes were filled with fear as my mother ran to the bathroom to bind my wrists with thick white bandages, meanwhile calling 911. She was a woman of action who believed both her daughter’s wills were inchoate with room to sprout like intricate vines. I seemed to dispel her notion.

I thought I hadn’t done anything that afternoon, and I was irked that she’d interrupted the beautiful sonnet in my head. Sometimes, I wonder whether she was angrier that I’d chosen her bedroom suite for my execution and ruining those damn sheets rather than for the suicide itself.

“There’s something wrong with Carole,” my mother had hissed to my father earlier that week.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” he’d gruffly remarked. “She’s just introverted.” He seemed the closest to understanding me without the pretense of a false exchange of words, often courteously listening to my poetry. For better or worse, he left me alone to swim in my own thoughts, each of us engaged in a private ceremony of enlightenment.

“There is a difference between introverted and strange, Kyle,” my mother said, repulsed by his ability to summarily dismiss such a problem.

“Ava, there isn’t anything abnormal about a girl who lives in her own world from time to time. Everyone is allowed another private life,” he said, calmly implying much more. Somehow he understood the dimension of two worlds.

“I don’t mind a temporary escape. It’s that she may not be able to emerge when she’s despondent like this,” my mother said. Her words carried more weight than I’d imagined. She herself was a victim of living a life of solitude in a world and marriage that she was obliged to see through the final chapters.

They failed to notice or didn’t care that evening that the paper-thin walls of the kitchen carried their conversation through the crevices straight to my room in our small, rectangular rambler. It was in those cracks of the wall, settling year after year, that I hid my pain. My younger sister, Tara, heard those whispers and came slowly to my room, tiptoeing, afraid the plush carpet might leave imprints of her frail feet, betraying that she was not in bed. She came over, pensively starting at me. She was frightened of what she saw in my eyes: Fiery internal dialogue behind a glazed, passive look of abandonment. I hugged her, then ushered her to her own room, rocking her back and forth until she lay still. She was only two years younger, but she understood me more than the professionals and adults that in later years tried to make sense of what they deemed “unstable.”

After I was sure Tara had drifted off to the land of dreams where people experience a better ending than when they are awake, I marched towards the kitchen. The whispers were now carrying through from the living room where the two of them were arguing. It was only after a few minutes that they felt my presence. The anger emanating from my petite figure engulfed the room, calling for their attention.

“Stop talking about me!” I yelled. My pinched voice echoed through the room.

My parents stood up, collecting their composure as my father approached me. “We aren’t talking about you, Angel.”

I loved it when he referred to me as an angel because I saw myself as anything but: I was a destructive force of energy, ready to combust. But his sigh did not reassure me. “I heard you. You are always talking about me. There is nothing wrong with me. I can be unhappy if I choose to be. I can hate if I choose to hate. And you can’t stop me.”

My childish tantrum sounded ridiculous even to me, but I meant those words. I hated their sudden silence whenever I came near them; I cringed to leave my bedroom for fear that today might be the day they would decode my intentions; and more than anything, I despised myself for making my parents suffer.

My mother took a few frightened steps forward, hiding behind my father’s large frame. “Carole, we care about you. We’re just worried.”

“Well don’t be! And stop rolling the r as if that makes my name more authentic!”

Though it had nothing to do with our current argument, I’d always wanted to tell my mother how silly my name sounded when she gave it a twist lined with a French accent. No one ever pronounced it the way she intended, and pretending I liked it was no longer acceptable. I turned around abruptly, having nothing more to say, and fled from the recent outburst to tangle myself under the confines of my crumpled comforter.
That night when they both entered, I feigned sleep. I ached for them, these two individuals who took the onslaught of a twisted daughter.

Today, this late afternoon after Kayle’s birthday, was different. It was not planned. I’m not saying this doesn’t make the act less severe or brutal. Though I chose to swallow the prescribed color-coated pills of sleep medication with remnants of whiskey left from last year’s Christmas party as a silent adieu, just then I thought Leaving the “others” behind is brutal. The “others” were a handful of people in my personal circle: Tara, who was now married with two bustling boys, lived miles away in Maryland; my ex-husband, Mark, who had exhausted his rationale to maintain a healthy marriage; Lila, my best friend since high school; and my precious daughter, Kayle. But weighing my options, I reassured myself that they would understand.

I chose to ascend the stairs one purposeful step at a time, walking through the narrow halls leading to my bedroom right after Kayle’s birthday party dispersed, making sure she was gone. I stood by stoically earlier that day, caressing her thick mane of hair as she blew out the candles. Her back tensed as I stroked her hair, and I thought perhaps she was sensing that today was the last day I would touch her. She was always like that. My child with the wild aqua eyes framed by the same auburn hair as mine had inherited the gift of intuition. I was sure she would be fine because, like my sister, my daughter understood me like no one else did. I believed she was an indigo child: a warrior of spiritual knowing. Maybe I wanted her to be that way to lessen the wounds inflicted on her by a mother who sought out an escape from this world.

I did not want her to witness my submission to the other side. What would be the point? She would blame herself, and that too had prolonged my ultimate decision. But now, I had to worry about myself. I rationalized that she would one day come to terms with the knowledge that her mother was a withering soul who had made an irredeemable decision.

Chapter 2

I always looked like a difficult child—arms crossed defensively across my chest, hair tousled from the winter morning’s gush of wind, eyes wildly searching for an escape route—but I refused to explain myself to the stranger assigned to be my psychiatrist. While I waited for him to enter, I hoped that the doors would fling open and my father would rush in to embrace me and take me away from the hush of the empty room. Maybe my mother would offer me the comforting warmth of her embrace and say, “Oh Carole, we understand. You are not the one with issues; it’s the rest of the world.”

Of course, that is the sort of fantasy I weave to detract from the reality and the consequences of my actions. Neither my mother nor my father came in; I felt betrayed by them for leaving me in the confines of a dark office to speak of things this man could not understand but would surely be quick to label. I learned early on that labeling things and people, especially when those people did inappropriate or unexplainable things, helps pacify adults. It was better to have a label for a person’s behavior than not. This man who did not know me and my intricate fibers would be forced to cloak me with a label simply to appease my family.

I had been “invited” to visit with Dr. Laraby two weeks after my “incident.” That’s what my mother calls it: an “incident.” I was on suicide watch at our local hospital for two weeks shortly after being sent to the emergency room, the shrill of the siren still bouncing in the fine curved walls of my ears, deafening my own cries. I was able to miss school, though fastidious get-well cards came pouring in from my classmates. Surely they were spared the truth of the matter for fear of making them aware of the option of an exit.

During my stay I had plenty of time to contemplate. It was an agonizing two weeks of entrapment during which I was unable to move without the notice of a nurse or doctor. The scrutiny of strangers and their false, plastered-on smiles unnerved me, and I felt more disturbed than I ever had in my life. That was when I realized that if I were to ever succeed in taking my life, it would have to be a more concrete plan.

The days flew by in the white halls reeking of Clorox and death only when I imagined all the ways I could do it, all the impossible, romantic ways of conducting my own death. That made the days less tense, though the sour vegetables and the soup with the consistency of vomit should have poisoned me. I was sure that Nurse Kim, who was the least patient with my condition, was capable of such an act. I would have thanked her for killing me, but I didn’t die in the hospital.

Tara visited me religiously, taking the bus when my parents couldn’t muster the energy or take off anymore time from work. I knew I cost them more than heartache. In her tiny arms, folded over her chest as though carrying a sacred gift, she proudly carried my collection of poems by Rumi and other notable poets. Sitting in the far corner away from me, as though she were afraid my ideas concerning death might be contagious, she would recite to me Rumi’s love affair with searching for meaning in life.

I listened to her small voice although I turned my head to stare out through the window, pretending not to listen. A Paloma dove in the branches was staring back at me as I listened to the words of a man intoxicated with finding a higher source of being. Though I had once admired his poetry, I felt that Rumi had fooled me. He had wandered far and alone to find what I had already surmised without the twirling of a Sufi master or the sway of hallucinogens. I hated him then, and by the end of her reading I pitied him. It took all his life to come up with phrases that had naturally danced within my head from being perfectly still in my room.

Tara stammered and sometimes hesitated in the hostile room, pausing at times to absorb some of the mystery behind the words. It might have meant nothing to her, but for my sake she kept reading. I appreciated her attempt to give me hope, but I didn’t dare tell her that I now believed Rumi was a phony.

Dr. Laraby’ office smelled of musk and old cigars. His tweed suit hung disheveled against his thin frame, and his shoes creaked along the hardwood floors as he paced back and forth, before speaking directly to me. It was as though he were rehearsing a speech. Ushered into the office, I had been waiting half an hour while my parents briefed him outside on my attempted suicide. I was only eleven.

I had learned much earlier never to speak the truth of my thoughts to adults. In third grade, I had been sent to my counselor after I’d written a poem entitled “The Others” that concerned my teacher, Ms. Kuzak. She was an elderly, rotund woman with silver mesh hair who encouraged her students to bring treats from home in addition to our science projects. She graded our work based on our feasts rather than the content of the work itself.

The school counselor read back to me the five-line poem I had submitted as I stared blankly at her, unsure what was so damaging about it.

“They seem far away

speaking a language I don’t understand.

People around me are different.

I am not afraid of being alone.

The others will go on.”

What’s the big deal? I had thought. Other than possibly the rhyming is not in sync. I entrusted my counselor then with the brim of my thoughts: I wanted to prance among the vivid colors of leaves, then to simply lie back in the thick piles raked from the morning landscapers and stare at the pale sky. I told Ms. Kingsley how lovely it was to arch my back, allowing my head to toss around, seeping the energy from the roots of the willow tree located in the center of the playground. I shared with her that I would rather do all those things than play silly chasing games and make friends who talked about inane videos and movies. Instead of understanding the poetry of my words, she brought in my parents to discuss the danger signs she read in the poem. The only danger was that I was not being heard, understood or given an opportunity to share my ideas.

Once a week for the rest of the year I was to go to her office while we played games and acted out scenarios of how to make friends. I watched her intensity as she hugged me and showed me how to laugh even if I didn’t feel like it. I thought she was probably more lonely than I to have dedicated her life to others with little regard for her own feelings. When I abandoned my hostility towards her I was able to see the halo that hung over her well-meaning advances. If I had been more vulnerable, I might have absorbed the warmth she offered to the child without a glimmer in her eyes. Instead, I kept our relationship at bay and marveled at how ridiculous she was to preach optimism.

I knew she was certifiable when during one of our sessions she played Stevie Wonder’s song, “I Just Called to Say I Love you,” as though that were what was missing from my life. Often I think the caress of his words were meant to envelope her.

So in Mr. Laraby’s office that morning I watched the streaks of the snowflake’s shadows flaying downwards, yawning and stretching across the lawn as he cleared his throat to get my attention. In a monotonous tone he began a series of questions that I answered with a flat “yes” or “no.”

“Do you realize you are a lucky girl?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to hurt your family?”

“No.”

“Do you hear voices?”

“No.”

“Do you see yourself doing this again?”

“No.”

And so on.

The only voices I heard were of my own, in sync and harmony, humming tunes of despair. But if I told him or any other adult that, surely I would become a slave to constant monitoring and suffocated by their need to eradicate the thoughts. Thoughts from within are healthy and natural. It’s when they cease to exist that we turn into robots. If it weren’t for those thoughts, I could have never understood the beauty of life and death: equivalent with only one breath difference.

I’d once believed in fairy tales, taking it upon myself to absorb the pain of the fair princess and aligning myself with the damsel in distress. Nowadays I don’t allow my imagination to flow openly; instead I sit guarded afraid of being judged when revealing my true feelings. This approach helped put Mr. Laraby at ease and instead of committing me, he concluded that my problems were of a depressed nature: a chemical imbalance beyond my control.