There was no picture, but her name glowed like an isotope. Of course she had dropped ‘Davis’ and returned to just ‘Heller’. And yes, she was from Pennsylvania. But how likely was it that she had become an actress? If a computer randomly came up with a possible fate, it wouldn’t have hit upon this.
After my father wrote my mother back, permitting their divorce, he attempted to hold it together. But eventually, something inside him just gave up. He stopped going to work entirely. He made the couch his permanent residence. And then he couldn’t do much of anything. He wanted to die, he said over and over again. Time felt painful. Every second felt painful. Like needles, like a branding iron singeing his skin. He was sick of things hurting.
I brought him cold washcloths and tried to listen. I filled out the medical disability leave paperwork and submitted it to his office. I knew the people at his NYU lab personally. Leon Kimball. Bethany the lab assistant. They smiled and patted my shoulder and all signed an oversized Get Well Soon card of a cartoon cat with a plaster cast on its leg.
I stared at the Acting For Beginners flyer for a long time. People passed by. Some of them bumped into me. I was standing in the middle of the street in the East Village, near a bus stop. I tried to imagine the people that would go to an Acting For Beginners Learning Annex seminar: gray-haired, jowl-faced East Village types, the kinds who lived in rentcontrolled apartments but still solicited for roommates. They would come and take off their shoes at the door and sit in a circle on the linoleum and get into the guttural humming exercises and the role-playing. And where would my father and I sit? In chairs? On the floor? We might stand at the back of the room, in the shadows. We would hide and make small noises and not participate.
I came home and didn’t tell him. We made spaghetti and I was the only one who ate it and I didn’t tell him. We watched television and my father moaned softly and I didn’t tell him. The secret beat in me like a second heart. Meredith Heller, Meredith Heller. Perhaps she did climb up on a stage and change completely. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? To change?
The next day, I met my father at his psychiatrist’s office at New York Presbyterian, the whole way up on Sixty-eighth Street-I was going to take him out to a quiet dinner afterwards. Dr North popped his head into the waiting room, a weary smile on his face. ‘You want to come into my office for a sec, Summer?’
My father sat on a leather couch, and Dr North settled at his desk. When I sank down into a leather chair adjacent to the big picture window that looked out onto York Avenue, Dr North said, ‘So. We’re thinking of treating your father with electroconvulsive therapy.’
I looked searchingly at my father. ‘Are you serious?’
My father shrugged, then looked at Dr North. ‘Are we?’
‘Now, we talked about this,’ Dr North encouraged him. He turned back to me. ‘Medication isn’t working. We need to try something else.’
‘I don’t want to feel this way anymore,’ my father volunteered.
So don’t, I wanted to say. Just turn it off.
‘ECT has come a long way. It’s very humane,’ the doctor said.
Dr North proceeded to explain how it would work: they put a patient on muscle relaxants and administered a shock that produced a seizure in the brain. The only way the doctors could see the seizure was through a tiny twitch in the patient’s foot and by a computer recording of the patient’s brainwaves. Once the brainwaves settled down, the seizure was over.
It was like rebooting a computer, Dr North said. Afterwards, many patients felt better.
‘How?’ I asked.
‘How what?’
‘How do patients feel better? How does it happen?’
Dr North scratched his head. ‘Well, it’s not definitive. We think that the shock releases neurotransmitters in the brain, which helps to lift the depression.’
‘I’ve heard it’s because it causes brain damage,’ I said.
My father shifted on the chair, making the leather crinkle.
‘It doesn’t.’ Dr North slid his platinum Rolex around his wrist.
‘Will he feel it?’ I asked. ‘What happens when he’s done? Are there…scars?’
‘He won’t feel anything. When he’s done, he might feel sleepy, or calm, or sometimes anxious…it can vary. And no, there aren’t scars.’ He chuckled. ‘The major side effect is memory loss, especially right after. Just bits and pieces, though. Little things. Nothing important.’
My father said he had to use the bathroom before we left, so I had a few moments alone with Dr North. ‘Is this really necessary?’ I whispered to him. ‘I mean, he’s gone to the hospital a lot, yes. But isn’t there some other medication he could try? Something…else?’
The doctor fiddled with his burgundy tie. ‘Nothing else is working.’
‘But he’s not even that sick,’ I protested. ‘Not always, anyway.’
The doctor looked at me very evenly. ‘If you’re worried about how it might affect his mind, it won’t. And believe me, it’s safe. It’s not cruel. He won’t even feel it. And as for memory, he might forget simple things, like names. But not permanently.’