Love Sick (26 page)

There is no schedule for senile dementia, however, and no straight, predictable path for how the disease expresses itself. In Lily’s case, it is with paranoia whenever Kevin speaks on the phone. As her ability to do simple tasks or be alone erodes, he is pretty much tied to her for all but three six-hour stints a week when a caregiver takes over. He uses the time for AA meetings and step work, haircuts and running errands for Grace and Sarah.

We speak less and less often. His mood is angry and rebellious that winter; mine ping-pongs between depression and extreme anxiety. It’s easy to see why Kevin is in such a foul place: He fights insomnia only to wake to the sound of footsteps when Lily gets up to wander the night. He’s in charge 150 out of 168 hours a week.

My own depression is unfocused but one night, I gather my medications before bed and find myself holding the bottle of Klonopin and looking at it consideringly. I had not, that night, felt as terrible as usual, which is, perhaps, why I could contemplate the bottle with such cold neutrality. I am as transfixed as a kid seeing fireworks for the first time and when I snap to with it in hand, I quickly put it back on the shelf, take my pills, turn out the light and leap into bed with the Black Dog of despair on my chest.

I despair because I can’t die. Daisy would be bereft, at least for a while. I would be leaving too much debt and too much stuff for my family to sort out. My father is ninetyfive. I couldn’t do that to him. I want out but am tied down. I can’t imagine my future, want and wish for nothing. The Bat Cave feels like a tomb.

But there are things I can do, I realize a few days later. My VHS player doesn’t work and I can get rid of all those movies. If I were ever a size 8 or 18 again, those clothes belong to a different Frances—a more successful one, maybe, or perhaps one who defined herself by the clothes she owned. My nieces are thrilled to get streams of emails with photos of the smallest sizes and once a week I haul boxes to UPS or to Housing Works for donation. Salvation Army comes and takes five enormous bags away. I partner up with one of my Friends of Daisy, Jane, and start posting both our clothes on eBay. I luck into an ongoing freelance editing gig that allows me to start really paying credit cards down.

I am obsessed with stripping down my life, crumbling my debt. Dad and Daisy can have all the time they need because I want to be free.

The farmette hasn’t disappeared from my future but Kevin has largely disappeared from my present. The game of collecting dishes from a year ago is over. I have no more jam to sell.

“I was suicidal a couple of weeks ago,” I tell him in one of our few phone calls. He is in his car with fifteen minutes on Lily’s caregiver’s clock.

“I saw your blog,” he says. “I didn’t know what to say.”

I brush his response out of the conversation immediately, asking about Lily, his roster of haircuts, Sarah and Grace’s travel plans. It takes a couple of days for me to grow angry that he read the Klonopin story and didn’t call me, even if he had to wait for Lily to go to bed and it was one in the morning in New York.

Did he care?

I don’t know. I still don’t know. A former drinking buddy of his dies in the spring and his response is that he’s so sorry he hadn’t had time to make his amends. He tells me more of the story later and sighs. “He died and I didn’t. It’s so weird, Frances. If he’d gotten sober, maybe . . . You know,” his voices changes from sad to final, “this program really works. The more thorough I am about my shortcomings, the more peace I have. I’m more patient with Sarah and Grace, more grateful that they can afford to go out and have such good times. I have to stay upbeat and positive for Lily and I can do that. I don’t want to have regrets about my attitude when she doesn’t know me anymore.”

I murmur appropriate things but I am in no sympathy with contentment, largesse, gratitude, love.

After the call, I text Will that I think I should come visit him. He writes back that he’s on his way to Hong Kong for a conference. After he returns, I tell him I’m free in July but he never does set a date. When does life happen? Do we have to wait until Step Nine? Do we wait until Lily is babbling in diapers? Would ECT shake me out of my clenching agoraphobia, my chains to Debt, Dad and Daisy? Is one night in Chicago an infringement?

My psychiatrist increases my antidepressant dosage but only after making an appointment with her has been a note on my desk for two weeks.

I tell Jane some of this as we photograph our barely worn Eileen Fishers and Dana Buchmans.

“I think you should cut Kevin a break,” she says.

“Why? Is it so hard to pick up the phone and say, ‘Boy, you sound like you’re in a really painful place. I feel for you’? He could have emailed that and it would have been a glimmer of hope for me.”

“Men aren’t good at this sort of thing.” She holds up her hand to stop me. “Even gay men. I’m pretty good at it, though. Come to me. Go to Jean. Call your therapist—I’m sure she’d rather talk to you when you’re in a hole than find out you were in it later.”

“I thought he was my best friend,” I say as I fold a pair of trousers over a hanger.

“He’s been drunk more than he’s been sober. He has to learn how to be a friend and it’s harder to be a friend to someone in pain than it is to someone you just laugh with.”

I think about that as we continue to measure inseams and sleeves. I’ve abandoned friends when it got too hard to help them. I abandon them when it’s too hard to help myself.

I tell Jean about these conversations with Kevin after he repeats his peace-patience-gratitude-attitude litany to me a month or more after he’d said it the first time. In the sunniest patches of my routes with the dogs, the roses are frowsy and the hollyhocks are beginning to bloom. I’ve moved from clothes to books now and have brought over a pile of Tudor history for Ben.

“And just who else is he going to say this to?” Jean asks sharply.

I look up from the table and rearrange their Labrador puppy’s face, smooshing her forehead down over her nose and pulling her lips up into a ferocious snarl that still makes her look like the happiest creature on earth. Is Jean taking Jane’s side? Bridget grins and clamps her teeth on my arm.

“I’m tired of hearing the same old thing,” I say. “I’m tired of not being probed a little for how I’m doing.”

“It’s the same old thing because you’re probably the only one he can say it to. Is he gonna sit down with his sister and say, ‘You know how pissed off I always was when you went away for weekends even though I never told you? Well, I’m happy for you now’?”

At the sound of my laugh, Bridget takes a standing leap into my lap and turns to laugh with me. Actually, Bridget is a year old now and is quite a lapful. She is the happiest dog I’ve ever met and sometimes I turn up here just to love her.

“Of course he repeats himself, Frances. What else is going on in his life?”

“What’s going on in mine?” I demand. “I’m depressed. I have to take Klonopin in order to walk dogs. I sleep a lot. I edit. Nothing new ever happens to me either.”

“If that’s the case, do you really need to say that to him? Say it to me. Say it to Ben. Say it to Jane. You have at least three times as many people to tell how depressed you are and he pretty much has you.”

“He has his sponsor.”

“Now you’re nitpicking. You have a sponsor, too.”

Bridget twists in my lap and washes my face and glasses. Damn. I’ll have to walk home in a dog spit fog. I hate dog spit fog. I gather her ears together and turn Bridget into Brigitta and sing a bit of “The Lonely Goatherd.”

Jane and Jean are right, of course. Maybe it’s time to see my sponsor. Maybe it’s time to think about the work
I
have to do before Lily moves on to her next stage. While preparing for my death, I’ve cleared my apartment of a lot of stuff and made room for more of my life. I’ve saved money to get through the lean days of my dogs going off to Martha’s Vineyard and Quogue and Shelter Island, and I’ve paid off a number of credit cards. I have a new book idea and have been asked for a short story.

I want to care again. I want to look forward to getting up in the morning and working and seeing people. I want to wear earrings and color my hair. I want to want something—Sondheim territory again—and I have a tin box of cash that could pay for a trip to Europe next year if I keep saving. It would be heaps cheaper to go to Amsterdam from New York than from Seattle.

I don’t want to move to Seattle in the kind of despair that comes with dependency on one friendship. I don’t want to move to Seattle thinking it is the cure for my boredom, writer’s block, weight, aloneness, indifference. I know it’s not, just as Dar wasn’t a cure, or Paul, Galean or Jeremy or any man I ever loved. All of my discomfort in life was there before they broke my heart and it was there after, with a soupçon more doubt and self-blame to add the general scratchiness.

Kevin tells me every third or fourth phone call—which is to say, every three or four months—that he wants to live on the farmette with me. I want to stop worrying that his plans have changed. I want to trust him, trust the silence. It’s a skill set to work on, day by day.

I want to trust myself so that if plans change—if I, for instance, decide the relationship is unsatisfying—I’ll have the hope and the investment in myself to change with them.

• • •

You probably picked up this book expecting a love story or a comedy. I think it is, in the end, a love story that hasn’t reached its ending yet.

Maybe it hasn’t even advanced very far.

Acknowledgments

The first person I have to thank is my brother Jim Kuffel. He drew a line in the sand about my writing and I did the opposite of his advice, making him responsible for this book and my improved financial ethic.

Bouquets of dahlias to Kenneth and Constance Wilkinson and to Kyra Becker. You are so much a part of my life that my toes would fall off if we were separated.

Bouquets of orchids to my agent, Fredrica Friedman, who kept me on track with this book. A pitcher of margaritas to my editor, Denise Silvestro. There are too many things I need to thank you for, Denise, in the limitations here.

Bouquets of moonflowers to Ann Marie Carley and Gerry Dempsey. You keep me sane.

No woman can live well without a female posse.
Love Sick
’s posse includes Ann Allen-Ryan, Kaylie Beierle, Jennifer Bruno, Marian Cole, Susan Dooha, Jeriyln Hassell Poole, Susan Seidel and Jan Tessier, who have given me the perfect chorus of advice, blunt humor and the needed eye rolls. Constance, Denise and Ann Marie are a part of that chorus as well, in a big way.

And always always always I thank my supporting cast, Daisy and Dad, Leonard Kuffel, my reasons for being alive.

*
eharmony.com. 2011. Web. May 29, 2011.

*
eHarmony defines these categories as “emotional temperament, social style, cognitive mode, physicality, relationship skills, values and beliefs, key experiences.”

*
It took the threat of a New Jersey anti-discrimination lawsuit in 2009 for eHarmony to open a sister site, Compatible Partners, that serves gay men and lesbians. queerty.com. 31 March 2009. Web. 31 May 2011.

*
Blade, Lina. Urbandictionary.com. 14 June 2004. Web. 31 May 2011.

*
http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/daniel.nettle/procroysoc.pdf. 10 May 2013.

*
Patzer, Gordon.
Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined
. New York: American Management Association. 2008. Kindle edition.

*
She drives everywhere, I remembered.

*
“Abstinence” is the phrase for the 12-step food plan I follow.

*
In French slang, a French kiss is a
patin
, an ice-skating boot. The verb for French kissing means to roll a skate. It kinda makes sense. I guess.

*
Fourteen months after writing that ad, I have to say “deeper into the beauty” is a damn good line.

*
“Mark,” of practicalpickup.com, writes of how thin men “give in” to fat women for one-night stands: “With the right combination of depression, desperation and alcohol, any man can succumb to any woman, even if she looks like the Michelin Man.” There is a new, inner ring of hell for Mark and his friends.

*
Short for poetry business. I began my writing life as a poet. That’s why, when I don’t know what to do in a paragraph, I describe the sky.

*
“Anyone Can Whistle” from
Anyone Can Whistle.

*
“Finishing the Hat” from
Sunday in the Park with George.

*
“Talent” from
Road Show
.