Secrets & Cigarettes: PART EIGHT
The story of smoking in my life.
Back at home, I languished. After my mom left my dad, I lived with him for a while, and then moved in with my mom and sister, who was two years younger than me. It was a tiny one bedroom condo on the second floor, and I slept on the couch in the living room while my mom and sister slept in the bedroom. While my sister had grown closer to mom after the divorce, I had fallen even further away. I was the strange, problematic, argumentative, angry one, the child who ran away at 15 for a week during the summer, living with a friend who took me everywhere on the back of his motorcycle. I lost my virginity in that week, to a different boy a few years older than me, also a friend who I decided was safe and harmless and perfect to lose my virginity to. I was tired of being called The Virgin Maggie by my friends, who had all been having sex for what, at the time, seemed like years, but looking back, I realize had only been in that last year. I wanted to just do it, to have the weight of it released. In his small bedroom on the upper floor of a beige suburban home, we had sex in his childhood bed, and then he asked me if I would ever bend over the chair “like the girls in Playboy do.”
When I broke up with him a few weeks later, I almost immediately began going out with his best friend. This was not a purposeful jab but it was unkind and he was devastated, coming by my house with roses and asking me tearfully to reconsider. I would not. I slept with my new boyfriend with no desire but with great safety, what I prized beyond all else. To be safe with a boy who was infatuated with me. I broke up with new boyfriend on Valentine’s Day and he had what became an infamous meltdown during lunch on the quad of our high school, crying and asking me why. How could I explain anything? I understood nothing but instinct. The longer we went out, the more he told me he loved me, the colder I felt. I loved our friendship but I did not love him. It was after this that I met Jon.
At home in our one bedroom condo, my mother was struggling with terrible neck and back pain, the terror of providing for my sister and I on her own, and the deepening depression of my sister. My behavior after Jon’s mom died became erratic; I veered between sobbing and smoking to silent and smoking. My mom became convinced I was using drugs again, or drinking at the least, and decided I needed real help, serious help, more than a therapist’s office could provide. My memory goes blank here, and I do not know what I said or how I felt or what I understood was happening, but I ended up at the doors of a local mental hospital with a bag full of my clothes and Jon’s shirts, crying hysterically as my mom signed me in. In the hallway, a large NO SMOKING sign hung over the receptionist’s desk.
That night was one interminable panic attack. I walked the hall of my floor in socks, sobbing, desperately asking the night shift nurses if they would please, let me go home. I was finally allowed to call my mom, who- not unkindly- told me she would not come get me, that I needed to be there. I feel asleep at some point on my small bed, wearing Jon’s shirt pulled up over my face. When I was able to get a message out, I asked Jon to bring his unwashed comforter when he visited. His smell was the singular element I had accessible to calm my nervous system. The nose bulb, the tiny biologic oddity, is a powerful messenger.
His bedding smelled like boy, and cigarettes, with a hint of laundry detergent. At the time, I assumed it was only Jon’s smell that calmed me. I didn’t have a clue about nicotine withdrawals or how they affected a person, and no one thought to tell me, so I just assumed my jittery, anxious, angry state was just me being me- feeling everything too much, all at once, all the time.
I went to group therapy, swung on the swings in the outdoor area, and met privately with a psychologist who told me he was going to do a full psychological evaluation of me. After days of testing, including the famous Rorschach images, we met for the big reveal. I remember two things: one, he told me I saw everything in big picture. “Your mind,” he said, “looks at everything from a wide lens, back and forward, past and future. It must be exhausting.” It was one of the kindest things anyone had ever said to me. Two, he told me my IQ ( which I am not shameless enough to put here). My insecurity was so embedded that I assumed it was a very low number, and I worried that I was profoundly stupid. “No,” said the kind psychologist, a man in a tie and button up shirt who was probably in his early thirties, “This is a very good number.” I hung onto that so fiercely that it is terrible to think of what the consequences would have been for my life if I had been told another number. I have never told my children their IQ’s when testing has been done, and I never would. Like writers who read their reviews, the good will blind you and the bad will, too.
Was I there for a week? Two weeks? I don’t remember. I remember walking the hallway and seeing a girl in a meltdown, screaming and kicking, being wrapped in what looked like a straitjacket and hustled by four nurses into The Room. The Room was white and empty except for one cot with a white pillowcase and white bedding. There was no window in The Room except for a small square on the door. The Room was locked from the outside. I spent my time doing everything possible to avoid being put into The Room.
To Be Continued