My lie gave me an idea. I needed to draw again. I couldn’t read, and I couldn’t paint, but there hadn’t been a time in my life when I couldn’t depend on that most elementary of connections between my eyes and the paper. I went up to the attic to look for the old box of drawing pencils and a half-filled sketch pad I knew were there from high school. The place was a mess: boxes brimming with schoolbooks, crates of Nai-nai’s Limoges, which my mother thought was too good to use, packed in straw, ancient black fans with wicked-looking blades, bulging garment bags on hooks, moving cartons containing Daddy’s old Chinese newspapers. Everything I touched brought up a puff of dust, making me sneeze.
And then I saw it, behind an old black trunk from China: the green plastic laundry basket filled with stuffed animals. They were battered almost beyond recognition, but I remembered them all: Buzzy the bear, Charlie the giraffe, Wilbur the donkey. I reached into the pile and pulled out the most raggedy one of all: Piggy. His fur, what was left of it, had been worn to a kind of sickly flesh color, the plastic snout with its two indentations still a garish orange. When his dark beady eyes caught the light from the overhead bulb, I felt a repulsion so great I almost dropped him.
In the next instant he looked benign, dirty and scarred, an old warrior.
I brushed him off and took him downstairs with me. For a while it would give me a jolt to see him sitting there on my pillow, plain and alone, but then I got used to it.
I had completely forgotten about my plan to go out by the reservoir and draw. By the time I remembered, it didn’t seem worth it.
I began staying in bed all day. Every afternoon at one exactly Ma would come home from teaching, roaring up the driveway, clanging in the kitchen, and then rapping at my door. Without waiting for an answer, she’d push it open.
“You want cottage cheese? I make a nice salad, put fruit cocktail on it.”
“No, Ma, I had something.”
She knew I was lying and I knew she knew it, but we had to go through this ritual every day.
“Where all your grade school friends?” she asked me. “Maybe you call them, have party here.”
“There’s no one left,” I said vaguely, and then I realized I had made it sound as if they were all dead.
I ventured out of my room only when I heard the door between the master bedroom and bathroom open as Ma went to bed and I could smell the soap from her bath in the hall.
Night was when I felt most comfortable. The house looked different then, the stark furnishings and Tudor arches friendlier in chiaroscuro. I wandered down to the kitchen and found food laid out on the counter: Chinese plum candies in blue and red wax papers, sesame crackers shaped like chickens, swollen-bellied pears in browns, greens, and yellows, tucked into the Rembrandt shadows of an earthenware bowl. Ma’s own still life, to tempt me. The refrigerator was stocked with cottage cheese and plain yogurt, things that my mother herself never ate, but she must have remembered my vegetarian phase in boarding school. I sat down at the kitchen table and like an animal devoured what I had picked out, not knowing or remembering what I was cramming into my mouth, staring out at the black beyond the tiny window over the sink. Sometimes I’d take the food into the living room and consume it sitting on the floor with the TV on, sound off, even though I had no idea what was going on, watching simply in order to concentrate on something besides the static in my own head.
When even silent TV became unbearable, I went down into the basement and sat there in a dream until the sun came up.
My one-month visit had spilled into two. Ma made me an appointment with her doctor, who ordered a bunch of tests. The tests turned up nothing. I was underweight, but not seriously so. The doctor suggested that I see a psychotherapist.
My mother thought this was nonsense. “All you need is career. That takes your mind off personal problems. You seen my sewing scissors?”
“No,” I said.
One afternoon Ma came to my room and announced that she had invited Lally Escobar to tea. “She especially wants to see you.”
“I don’t want to see her.” I was lying in bed as usual, still in my pajamas.
“But she knows you’re home. What am I suppose to say when she ask for you?”
“Tell her I’m asleep.”
My mother said firmly, “You come down,” and shut the door.
The only place I could think of to hide was the basement. I made it down to the first floor without Ma hearing. The teakettle began to whistle at the exact moment I opened the basement door and shut it behind me in a single motion. At the bottom of the stairs I held my breath. The kitchen floorboards creaked as my mother moved about above me. Then I heard the chimes of the doorbell and short quick creaks as she went to answer it.
I didn’t dare turn on the light. When my eyes got used to the dark I edged my way deeper in through the maze of boxes and old furniture, the oil furnace growling in the middle, and finally reached the corner where I’d made a kind of nest for myself out of an old stadium blanket on top of several rolled-up rugs. I drew my bare feet up and tucked the bottom of the blanket around them.
Lally and my mother were talking. There was a package of Pepperidge Farm lemon nut cookies on the table between them. Because they were having Western tea, Ma was using her tulip tea set that had cups with handles. There was a bizarre rasping noise that I recognized as Lally’s laugh. I pictured her in her gardening outfit—a pink-and-green-striped turtleneck and overalls—although she probably wouldn’t be wearing that today.
I waited, growing colder. The dark pressed against my ears, so that I could hear my blood pounding. I covered the sides of my head and tried to slow down my breathing. The furnace rumbled. Lally wasn’t laughing anymore. In fact, it was perfectly silent above. I imagined slowing down my breathing more, suppressing my heartbeat, like the yogis in India. Only I’d will it past suspended animation. I’d make myself die.
I reached down between the rolled-up rugs and felt for Ma’s sewing shears. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do in the dark, but I knew where there was virgin skin, up near the crook of my elbow. The feeling came, not as sharp as it would have been if it hadn’t been so cold, and it didn’t last nearly long enough.
There was one window high up in a corner that let in a bit of daylight, and I made myself concentrate on that. My cut began to throb. I pressed a corner of the blanket against it.
PIECE OF MEAT.
The window had gone completely dark by the time I finally decided it was safe. I unfolded myself from the rugs, stamped around a bit to get the circulation back in my legs, and then went up the basement stairs, slowly and deliberately this time. When I opened the door there was my mother sitting alone at the kitchen table, looking directly at me. The tea things had been cleared away, and the dishwasher was humming. I blinked hard, getting used to the light, and saw that my arm looked much worse than I’d imagined. I hadn’t been so neat this time.
For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to say anything at all. I turned to go on upstairs to my room.
“Lally gave me the name of someone. A woman doctor.” I must have looked blank, for she added: “A doctor for your brain.”
“A psychiatrist?”
“She has a medical degree from Yale. Good reputation.”
So this was it. If my mother admitted it, I really was crazy.
I knew in my bones that no matter how brilliant this person was, she’d never be able to cure me.