Adeleine received her diagnosis, after a period of five days’ virtually uninterrupted sleep, from a sweatered psychiatrist in a small corner office at the college health center. She accepted it without surprise. She agreed to try the pills, to consider depression as a disease. She opted to keep all this from her parents. She assented to the distraction of a double major in music and literature, to the praise from professors who were quick to label her essays “multilayered” and “blooming.” She began to drink an awful lot, despite this course of action coming not exactly recommended as company to the orange bottles she got filled and refilled under fluorescent lights.
Why was she so sad? The unspoken question had dangled over the beige couch and the framed degrees and the economy Kleenex. He commanded a cache of Ohs and I sees in varying grades of volume and texture, knew when to prod and when to sink with her. Why was she so sad?
Adeleine was sad because she was sad because she was sad. She experienced extreme difficulty in reaching past the tautological. Sick of being asked, after six weeks of treatment, she slipped a brief and incomplete laundry list under her psychiatrist’s door. It read:
Because how are you supposed to draw a map for the future and believe it will apply at all
Because my father corrects my mother’s speech until she stops speaking
Because there are lives more or less completely forgotten with every minute
Because I’m supposed to think it’s normal and comfortable to learn, through a lit-up screen and a cheery blue website, how every person I ever knew is failing or fulfilling their potential
Because we value things we can touch less and less every day
Because it gets dark every single night
After that, she never went to the little office anymore and avoided passing it, though she could always sense it from across the trimmed lawn, the concrete staircase that descended from the bright world of couples splayed on the grassy grounds to the subterranean entrance.
EDITH SAW IT EARLY ON, the way her children curved out to such opposite ends, far from most and still further from each other. Even when Jenny was a child, her imagination, the point from which she saw the world, seemed too remote. She once gathered up a basket of flowers in Fort Greene Park and, while Edith wasn’t looking, ingested all of them. Edith turned and saw the last of the stems peeking out the sides of her eight-year-old’s mouth, the peach-soft skin already turning drab with nausea. Jenny had vomited for hours, and Declan, leaning on the bathroom door, shifting between worried and amused, repeated to himself, “Loved the flowers so much she had to eat ’em!” But Edith saw nothing funny about it. You weren’t supposed to swallow up beauty whole, weren’t supposed to rip it from its nest and insist it was yours alone.
Owen, on the other hand, was sovereign from the first. When he was a baby, Edith would sometimes rock him and get the feeling it was more for her peace of mind than his. He had learned to use the telephone in a single afternoon—Edith watched as his fingers spun the rotary with efficacy—and had called the bank and asked about opening an account. Edith, listening from the kitchen, could tell that the person on the line had asked his age from his answer. “Six,” he said. “But I have twice as many dollars as years.” Since asking for and receiving them for Christmas that year, he had carried a wallet and a comb, had taken to sweeping his room and whistling.
These were the stories she had told her friends, though she framed them as entertainments and withheld the starved feeling they gave her. Of course she loved her children—this was never in doubt—but when they became, more and more, the people they were, Edith felt as though nothing she could have done would have made any difference. She prayed for them in ways she knew were ridiculous: Dear God in Heaven, it’s fine if they both have to be alone, she bargained, but could they at least be alone together? Could you send down some shared interest? Once she whispered to Declan, “I could hang a thousand Christmas ornaments from the ceiling and these kids still wouldn’t look up.”