Chapter 34

CHAPTER 34

Maddy sips peppermint tea, her hands hugging the warm glazed body of a ceramic BEST DAY EVER mug, while staring vaguely out the living room window. The world outside is a sunlit, lush-lawned, ripe-with-birdsong summer afternoon. It’s the kind of day normal people spring out of bed early to greet, perfect for a flip-flopped stroll with iced coffee and a friend to nowhere in particular or a drive to the beach, “Cruel Summer” loud on the car radio with all the windows down.

But not for Maddy. She wakes exhausted and resentful of the sun at ten when her mother whips the curtains open, she has no friends, and Taylor Swift isn’t allowed at any volume. The world outside is a prom, but she doesn’t have a date or a dress. It’s a concert everyone else is going to, but she doesn’t have a ticket.

Summers past always flew by, each week a blur like trees along a highway seen from the back seat of a car side window. But this one is a swamp slog. She goes to therapy and is forced to endure several dinners a week at Pine Meadows, but other than that, each eternal day is spent mostly on the couch, doing nothing. She tries to read, but her attention drifts before she can finish a page. She’d love to get back to writing comedy, but her mother won’t allow it.

Her hand suddenly shakes with the violence of an earthquake, sloshing tea down the front of her white pajama shirt. If her mother were home, she’d make Maddy change her clothes. But she’s at Pine Meadows, left before noon for cardio tennis and lunch with the ladies. Emily is in New York, and Jack is, too, back from Australia and interning at Phil’s company for the summer. Between working in the city and playing golf at Pine Meadows, Jack and Phil are almost always together and hardly ever home. Maddy would be alone in the house, but like Taylor Swift and comedy, that is forbidden as well.

Her mother arranged for Gramma to be here while she’s living her best life at Pine Meadows. Maddy’s a toddler who needs a babysitter, or more accurate, a prisoner who needs a warden. They keep her medications in a locked box. The wooden knife block on the kitchen counter is still an empty stump. All car keys are kept in a secret location. No one trusts her. To be fair, she’s given them all the reasons not to.

Gramma’s been in the kitchen for a while. Maddy inhales through her nose, detecting the buttery vanilla smell of cookies baking in the oven. She’s betting on chocolate chip, their old favorite.

She’s a little nervous about spending time with Gramma. After Maddy took her heaping handful of pills, her mother texted and then called, and when Maddy didn’t answer either, her mother called Gramma. She told Gramma that she was in the city with Emily, and Maddy was home and not feeling well and asked if Gramma would go over to the house and check on her. It was Gramma who found Maddy covered in vomit on this very spot on the couch, trying to die.

So Gramma now knows. And Maddy assumed that every relative and family friend who attended Emily’s wedding would also now know about her diagnosis, but it seems her cat is still very much in the bag. Forced to come up with some excuse when Maddy didn’t attend Emily’s rehearsal dinner or wedding, her mother admitted to anyone who asked that Maddy was at Garrison, but she kept the details vague, prompting everyone to assume that Maddy was drying out in rehab, a conclusion her mother didn’t take any measures to correct.

Drug addiction, especially among young people, is so rampant and familiar these days, even in their sleepy, affluent suburb. They hear the heartbreaking stories all the time. It typically starts innocently enough, with a bottle of prescription pain meds taken as directed for knee surgery or wisdom teeth extraction, but soon transmutes into a monstrous, insatiable dependency and a life derailed. Everyone seems to know someone who has a daughter or son struggling with it. And so, in the hierarchy of brain afflictions and social stigmas, her mother decided that it was much more palatable for her daughter to be an addict than mentally ill. She’s not wrong.

Maddy’s glad Gramma finally knows the real truth. It’s a relief that she doesn’t have to hide herself in her own home like all the kitchen knives. But beyond Gramma and her immediate family, Dr. Weaver, her therapist, the staff at Garrison, and some health care professionals in Atlanta, no one really knows. Even Adam doesn’t. He’s aware that she had some sort of breakdown over Thanksgiving, but he doesn’t know her diagnosis. For all he knows, whatever happened was a one-time thing and she’s totally fine now. She hasn’t heard from him since December, since he left her alone with a bagful of stupid marbles.

She hasn’t told Sofia, Simone, Max, or any of the other comedians. Simone sent a bunch of worried texts while Maddy was at Garrison, asking where she was. Maddy responded when she returned home.

MB

MADDY BANKS

Had some issues and needed to go back to CT

I’m okay

Will tell you more soon

XO

Simone replied immediately.

S

SIMONE

Relieved ur ok!!

Miss you XO

Okay was, of course, a lie. The mental zip code where she’s currently residing is a thousand miles away from okay . But she doesn’t yet have the words to talk with specificity about anything outside of okay .

The language of this illness is a curious thing. Some people will say she has bipolar, while others will say she is bipolar. It’s a subtle distinction in wording, a linguistic sleight of hand, but the difference in meaning feels significant. She has yet to say either version aloud but has tried both on like a new pair of jeans inside the private dressing room of her head many times, scrutinizing their fit. They’re both too tight and unflattering in her opinion, but if she has to go with one, she’d pick has bipolar over is bipolar.

People with cancer don’t say I am cancer . When she had a urinary tract infection two summers ago, she never said I am a urinary tract infection . She has brown hair and a new pair of white sneakers, but she would never say she is brown hair and a new pair of sneakers.

Plus she could always dye her hair blonde. She could lose her sneakers. People can beat cancer. Her UTI cleared up after a course of antibiotics and a few glasses of cranberry juice.

But people with depression, addiction, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder all bear the special burden of becoming their diagnoses—depressed, an addict, schizophrenic, bipolar. She has bipolar. Subtract two letters, h and a , add an apostrophe, and something she has becomes something she is. Ha indeed.

So it’s not just that her diagnosis is scary and unacceptable. If she not only has bipolar but also is bipolar, then she herself is scary and unacceptable. And she can’t bear being scary and unacceptable to the people she loves.

Gramma enters the living room carrying a plate of chocolate chip cookies in one hand and an envelope in the other. She’s put together in flowy sand-colored linen pants, a matching collared shirt, and flat white sandals, her toenails painted red.

“This was in the mailbox,” says Gramma, presenting the envelope to Maddy as she sits on the leather cushion next to her, plate resting in her lap.

Maddy’s name is handwritten in large lettering on the face of the envelope, no address or stamp. She opens it and pulls out a card with a single daisy on the cover. Inside it reads:

Maddy, I talked with Emily and she told me what’s really

going on. When you’re ready, I’m here for you. Love, Sofia.

Noticing the weight of something still left inside the envelope, Maddy tips it over, and a friendship bracelet falls into her cupped hand. Composed of pink and navy-blue clay beads, just like her favorite from another lifetime ago, and a stretch of white alphabet beads that reads U 4EVA . Maddy worms it onto her wrist.

“Who’s that from?” asks Gramma.

“Sofia.”

Gramma reads the letter beads. “She’s a good friend.”

She is a good friend. And this gift, this beautiful gesture of enduring friendship, should make Maddy feel happy, relieved, grateful. Loved. But all she feels is unworthy. She slides the bracelet off her wrist and tucks it, along with the card, back into the envelope.

Gramma lifts the plate off her lap and extends it toward Maddy. She hesitates, then chooses a cookie from the pile. Gramma also takes one and then places the plate on the coffee table.

“Mom would want us to use napkins and plates.”

“It’ll be fine,” says Gramma, taking a bite. “How are you today?”

“Good.”

She’s not depressed like she was a month ago, but good wouldn’t pass for truth on anyone’s lie detector test. Dr. Weaver fiddled with her meds again, and while they’ve lifted her to a plateau at a higher altitude, the weather here wouldn’t attract any tourists looking for a vacation. She went from shitting rivers to looking six months pregnant, her colon a painfully backed-up conga line of poop. Her disposition is a cottage in the forest inhabited by pharmaceutical dwarfs. She’s sleepy, shaky, thirsty, cranky, unworthy, full-o-shitty, and meh.

“How about another word? I’m your grandmother, not a friend of your mom’s at the country club.”

Gramma’s droopy eyes are gentle but steady, locked on her granddaughter. Maddy swallows her bite of cookie and takes a breath.

“I’m embarrassed about what happened.”

Gramma nods. “I’m going to tell you something you don’t know,” she says, but then pauses for so long, Maddy’s not sure if she forgot what she was going to say. “Your grandfather cheated on me with a woman who lived three blocks away for two years that I knew about, probably longer. And there were probably others, but this is the one I caught.”

“That’s awful, Gramma. I’m so sorry.”

For the first time, Maddy imagines Gramma as a young woman with chestnut-brown hair, long and full of body like she’s seen in photographs, married when she was Maddy’s age, facing the struggles of her own life, a woman not just in relation to children and grandchildren, not always old.

“I was so embarrassed that he was unfaithful and even more embarrassed that I stayed with him for years after finding out about it. I should’ve kicked him out that day. But instead, I completely absorbed his betrayal as my shame. I felt so lonely and trapped in a situation I didn’t want or ask for. I thought about killing myself many times.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“How did you imagine doing it?”

“Pills, same as you. Or I’d sit in the car with it running in the garage.”

Maddy nods. “What stopped you?”

“I finally realized I could divorce his cheating ass.”

Maddy laughs.

“Divorce was a door that opened into a new life for me, a much better one. Walking through it set me free. Of course, it also came with its own can of shame worms. I was shunned by many of my married friends and my entire church group. According to them, I was going to hell. But I never bought into any of that. Those are man-made rules, not God’s.”

“I’m pretty sure Adam broke up with me because I have this.”

“Then he wasn’t worth your time.”

“I know, but Mom didn’t want you to know about it, and I’m afraid if people find out that I have this, they won’t want anything to do with me. Like who’s ever going to sign up for this?”

She started ugly crying before she reached the end of her question. Gramma pulls a tissue from her pant pocket and hands it to her granddaughter. Maddy mops up her face and blows her nose, but she can’t stop crying. Gramma gets up, fetches a box of tissues from the bathroom, and returns to the couch. Maddy wails with abandon. Gramma doesn’t once tell her to calm down or hush, which Maddy appreciates.

Wrung out and probably dehydrated, a ridiculous mountain of damp, crumpled tissues in her lap, Maddy finally stops crying.

“Maddy, you are a wonderful young woman. If someone rejects you because you have bipolar, then that person isn’t the right person for you. And having lived just a little bit longer than you, I can tell you this for sure. Everyone has something.”

“I wish I could divorce bipolar’s ass,” Maddy says.

Gramma chuckles. “I do, too, sweetie. I wish life didn’t deal you this hand.”

Maddy has performed Olympic-level mental gymnastics in an effort to believe that this has all been a big mistake. Maybe her first manic episode was caused by insomnia. Maybe her second was actually just a cocaine high. Maybe her depressions were all normal under the circumstances, a coming-of-age rite of passage for all Gen Zers.

But she can’t deny it anymore. She has bipolar. She is bipolar.

“But this is your hand, and you get to play it. You don’t have to feel embarrassed about what happened or whatever you’re going through. I didn’t ask for your grandfather to cheat on me, and you didn’t ask for bipolar disorder. You’re going to get through this. You’re going to find your door, sweetie, I promise.”

Maddy chews on this bit of wisdom. While she can’t deny or divorce her diagnosis, she’d like to believe there is a door for her, too. She needs to stay on her meds, monitor her moods and sleep, and continue seeing her therapist and Dr. Weaver, but those feel more like windows, letting light in so living with bipolar doesn’t have to be so dark and scary. Her door needs to open to something bigger, a life that isn’t defined or restricted by her relationship to this disorder. She wants a door to a life that thrives in spite of bipolar, or, if this is even possible, in collaboration with it.

She reaches for another cookie off the plate and takes a bite. Looking at the display of pictures on the credenza beneath the window, she sees the framed pictures of her sister in cap and gown, graduating with honors from Vanderbilt; Jack and Phil posing with their putters on the eighteenth green at Pine Meadows; Emily and Tim embracing in their first dance as bride and groom. There’s their family photo, taken Maddy’s sophomore year of high school, everyone at the beach, smiling in a matching palette of white and cornflower blue.

Objectively, it’s a pretty picture, and everyone looks happy, but they weren’t. Even though it was sunny and looked like summer, it was a frigid day in May, and every second on that beach without coats, shivering with frozen smiles plastered on their faces, felt ridiculous. Plus, Maddy had wanted to wear her favorite black hoodie, but her mother wouldn’t let her, said they all had to match, which Maddy thought was stupid at the time. So Maddy refused to change, and her mother threatened and screamed, and Maddy threatened and screamed back. There were tears. Five minutes before leaving the house, Maddy acquiesced, but she was angry and arms-folded bitter about it. Jack was also mad and mopey because he was going to be late for practice or something with his team. Emily had somewhere else to be, Maddy can’t remember where now, but she chose to be cooperative both as the most efficient path to getting where she wanted to go and as a way of highlighting her angelic, praiseworthy maturity in comparison to her infantile siblings, which added to Maddy’s irritation. So there was a whole world of ugly behind those pretty smiles that the camera didn’t capture.

Maddy lifts her gaze out the window and sees the white picket fence, the neatly trimmed hedges, their perfect suburban yard. Life isn’t always what it seems. She pops the last bite of cookie into her mouth and licks the crumbs off her fingers.

She doesn’t know what or where her door is, but she knows this—she won’t find it here.