I stayed anyway. She made us hum, just as I thought she would. We stood up and let our shoulders go and bent over and started shaking. ‘Loosen up,’ she demanded. We spacewalked around the room and gathered in a circle and held hands. We sculpted one another into feelings; when a woman made me ‘angry’, she jackknifed me at my waist and curled one of my arms over my head.
And then we did an exercise called ‘Find Your Mother Like a Little Baby Penguin’. People on the left side were designated the mother penguins; people on the right were the baby penguins. Meredith Heller matched mothers and babies together, and the mother was to come up with a unique sound that only her baby knew. I was on the right, a baby, paired with an older lady who hadn’t stopped smiling. She whispered her sound to me-it was like a dove, cooo. She said it a few times so I would remember it. Coo, coo, coo. Her breath smelled like violet candies.
Meredith Heller pulled us baby penguins to another part of the room. ‘Pantomime your feelings as a lost baby penguin,’ Meredith Heller instructed. I shut my eyes, trying to feel feathery and small, but the only thing I saw was that basketball court, those angry players. I held a brick over my head, and slammed it against the basketball player’s skull again and again, cracking it like an egg. Someone to my right whispered, ‘What is she doing?’
‘Mother penguins, make your sound so your babies can find you!’ Meredith Heller cried. And I heard it from across the room-coo, coo, coo. I fumbled my way toward it, the basketball player lying dead and bloody on the ground, my eyes spotted with tears. I imagined other things, too-my mother, alive and beautiful and interested, my father, strong and healthy and smiling. I reached the mother penguin and she kept cooing, flapping her penguin wings and jumping up and down. I nestled my head into her, just as all the other little penguins were doing. And then, filled with glee and purpose, I broke away from her-from all of them-and made a circle into the wide expanse of the room. I fluttered around the row of chairs and the projector screen. I squawked past Meredith Heller. I skipped past the door and the windows with the heavy blue curtains and the ladies’ discarded old-lady purses. I danced next to the man in his wheelchair, feeling free and wonderful. The class just let me do this. It was as if they understood without me having to say it. It was as if they knew, somehow, that it was something I had to do.
17
A month and a half after his last appointment, I was walking up the stairs to the apartment from my Driver’s Ed class. I took Driver’s Ed that summer because, basically, I didn’t have anything better to do. Accelerating and braking through the streets and trying to merge into one lane of bridge construction traffic seemed as productive a way to spend my time as anything else.
My father was sitting on the couch, his hands folded in his lap. We met eyes, and then he looked at the coffee table. There was a pamphlet there, next to a full glass of water. It was for something called the Klein-Stochbauer Psychiatric and Wellness Center of Connecticut.
He’d already paid the deposit, he told me. They were expecting him there the following day. There were two women on the pamphlet’s cover, both wearing flowing white skirts, both drinking tea. It reminded me of the What Is ECT? pamphlet we had received before he started treatment. What the hell was it about mental health products and people drinking tea? And the place’s nickname was simply ‘the Center’. The center of what?
We took a cab up instead of the train. The pamphlet described the place as a hospital, but it looked more like an old manor, with turrets and limestone masonry. There was a winding stream in the front yard and a labyrinth garden on the side. I saw a badminton court set up in the backyard, a wishing well next to it. My father told me about a few of the Center’s high points on the drive up: everyone got their own room, appointed with the ‘highest-quality’ sheets, carpeting and light fixtures. Everyone was given their own personal therapist, tailored exactly to their needs. And they didn’t make you do group, one of the things my father hated most at New York Presbyterian.
My father refused to let me carry his bags into the lobby. A round, cheerful woman in bright red lipstick wheeled out a cart and he piled them on it himself. Since the ECT, he’d aged even more. His back was stooped. His shoulders slumped. His legs no longer seemed sturdy-the thirty pounds he’d gained from past medication had fallen off him once he’d begun ECT. After he had completed all eight treatments, he worked for exactly three days, trying to organize his files and catch up on the developments, medications, and scientific findings he’d missed. There was so much. On the last day, he came home and went back to the couch. He said, bravely, that he needed a day off. ‘Take all the time you need,’ I told him.
He looked at me with scared eyes. I could see how desperately he wanted to be better. And then he said to me: ‘Summer, you should go.’
And I said, ‘Go where?’
‘Ireland.’