Suzanne Scanlon: Then You Will Never Be Happy

THEN YOU WILL NEVER BE HAPPY (A STEP STORY)

By Suzanne Scanlon

Does anyone ever get over anything? I remember driving around with my stepmom, looking for an apartment, when she asked me about my brother. Why hadn’t he finished his PhD? What’s his problem? she asked. Maybe he’s like me, I said. Maybe he’s grief-struck, failing to thrive.

Sure our mom had been dead almost twenty years by then, but it wasn’t until I was a grown-up that I actually felt it, felt the loss of her. I still feel it.

My stepmom did not like this idea. She said, “You kids! You know, for years you were crying to your dad. Someone was always sad about it.”

I did know. In the middle of the night, one or the other of us would wake, call out in tears for our dad. “I miss Mom!” we would wail, as if she’d just died, which is what it felt like. Meanwhile Dad remarried, had a new baby. My stepmom wanted to move on. She’d been divorced, this marriage was her do-over. She didn’t necessarily want the four traumatized kids who came along with her new husband, but there we were. She didn’t want children who would uneasily transition to adult life, dependent on their father for years, well beyond college graduation. She didn’t want a stepdaughter who moved to New York City and then collapsed, emotionally speaking—unable to live, to proceed, to “get on her own two feet.” She did not want this daughter to occupy her husband’s energy and worry and stress and concern.

“You know,” she told me, back in the car. “Sometimes you just have to move on. There is a time to move on.”

Because I couldn’t move on, and because our newly chaotic, overfull house was nothing if not an exercise in denial, it took me some time to really fall apart—years later, after I’d left home and was in New York City living on my own. After a suicide attempt, I was hospitalized. It was a short stint over spring break that turned into a years-long descent into madness.

That sounds dramatic, but that’s what it was. I was a mental patient. Certifiable. For a very long time. And because it was a medical institution, I received treatment then considered scientifically valid.

Maybe that’s how I became a writer. Maybe writing is what you do when you can’t move on.

Part of the treatment involved monthly family therapy sessions, led by a woman named Karen Goldberg. It was 1992. Bill Clinton was elected President of the United States. In December, Prince Charles and Princess Diana separate. A royal separation, it is called. The first time my stepmom came to the institution for family therapy, my stepmom wears blue chiffon: shoulder pads, a cinched waist, and an A-line skirt that reminds me of Princess Diana. My littlest sister, C, the baby, is dragged along to these sessions, made to sit in the waiting area. C admires Karen Goldberg’s style; this is Manhattan, after all.

Back in Aurora, Illinois, C and a friend play a game they call “Family Therapy”: “I’m Karen,” she tells her playmate, who is instructed to be the mental patient.

Later I’ll read that Princess Diana was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. What this means, I won’t be sure, but I know it has something to do with her bulimia, manifest around the time of her marriage to Charles. Before the marriage, there was public discussion of Diana’s virginity—a requirement for marriage to a prince; Diana’s uncle assures the public of his niece’s purity. I was thinking of getting over it when I saw highlights from the latest royal wedding of Prince Harry, who, not long ago, revealed that he never got over his own mother’s sudden death.

Not long after my mom’s death, and just before my dad’s second marriage, we went to Alaska. It isn’t like now; Dad couldn’t text or email his girlfriend, our future stepmom; maybe they spoke by phone, once or twice. Our trip to Juneau, just the five of us now—Mom’s ghost, too—was pilgrimage or preservation. If you keep walking, keep moving, everything will be okay. My future stepmom packed a stack of letters for Dad inside his suitcase; she instructed him to open one each day. I see one or another of the cards, displays of romantic love I hadn’t seen before, not in real life.

Dad’s girlfriend set her alarm not to miss the royal wedding of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, Dad tells me. She loves weddings. I examine a card, not meant for me: girlish curlicue cursive, doodles and smiley faces, embarrassing references to Neil Diamond songs. Her handwriting is the sort I associate with being grown-up; later I see, it’s the handwriting of a teenage girl. Later still, a young woman dreaming of love and passion and my own happily-ever-afters, I recognize the same yearning in my own letters; I marvel at the way desire might be transmuted through hand to pen to paper.

Last summer, staying in Harlem, I decide to walk uptown, to see if I could get the records of those years I spent inpatient. It’s not as easy as you’d expect; the building is no longer the building where I lived; the psych units are in a beautiful new building facing the Hudson more completely and grandly; my program has been cut altogether.

“There is no such thing as long-term therapy now,” the woman who works in records at the New York Psychiatric Institute tells me.

There is no such thing as long-term therapy now. I can’t help but wonder how my life might have been otherwise, had there been no such thing way back in 1992. Not that it makes a difference—and I feel not a little bit ridiculous reflecting with ambivalence on the psychiatric care I received for many years, paid for by the State of New York, at a public, taxpayer-funded hospital. Since that time, New York, one of the most generous states in terms of public mental health care aid, has lost clinics and beds. This year in Chicago, where I live, five public mental health clinics will close. Over the past decade, the number of available beds in psychiatric hospitals has declined by 25 percent; a for-profit company is building a new psychiatric center in the suburbs, hoping to make up for the limited public funding for mental health care outside of prison. “America’s Largest Mental Hospital is a Jail” reads a headline in The Atlantic not long ago, a study of Chicago’s Cook County Jail.

For a while it was just Dad visiting the psych ward. My stepmom objected, complaining to relatives that Dad had relinquished his family in Aurora for his dramatic, impossible daughter in New York City.

Sometimes we went to the theater, Dad and I: Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, John Guare’s latest at the Vivian Beaumont, titled after an Egyptian sculpture, a critical flop, starring Stockard Channing. Four Baboons was a play about the failures of what in seventies parlance was termed blended families.

“Yours, mine, and ours!” my stepmom would say to strangers, explaining our overly large family, a lilt to her voice, a public performance—something she turned on or off. Before I could say so, I saw something desperate or hysterical in her gushing: this need to believe in happily-ever-afters. The thought that saying it would make it true.

And in a way, it did. As Flaubert wrote of Madame Bovary, in her obsessive need to perform the role of lover and beloved: Language is a machine that continually amplifies the emotions. But I grew to despise my stepmom’s effusions. I wondered if she, unlike me, contained what might be an authentic self. I knew how to gush, to perform. I liked the theater. Beneath it all, I longed for something solid. In that way, M and I were more kindred than I’d prefer to admit.

Years later she would tell me that, though she had a mother, she too had never felt seen. The third child, the middle child: she always seemed to be longing for another life. It is the greatest gift we can give each other, to listen to each other. It is a way of saying, You are real. However unhappy she was to be our stepmother, however clashing our personalities and conflict-filled our lives (the fitting name of the street where we lived)—it would be funny but not fair to call my stepmom “just a cunt.” After all, who was it two years ago here at my apartment helping me move and unpack and set up my new place after my divorce. It would be easier to say I had a good (dead) mother and a bad (step) mother but life is never so simple, so easily divided.

It must have been the very end of my stay in the ward when my doctor told me something that was meant to help me move on. She didn’t say, like Fleabag, “She’s not an evil stepmother, she’s just a cunt.” But she did say this much: She has never wanted the best for you. Sometimes that’s all we need to know—you’re not crazy, you’re not Cinderella, but you’ve grown up with someone who resented you, who envied you, even. Or worse: didn’t want the best for you.

It’s May 1993 and I’ve been living in a mental hospital for over a year. Dad visits, takes me out on pass to attend Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York City. Maybe one way to measure a parent’s love is the extent to which he renounces his own interests. I doubt my father would have voluntarily entered a theater, Broadway or not, were I not performing or attending. And yet he did and had, over and over again. There we were in the second row at a performance of Tony Kushner’s masterpiece; there we were watching something I’d never seen or even really knew existed in life, let alone on stage: casual strangers meeting and violently, aggressively fucking in Central Park. Sex as self-destruction. Desire linked to annihilation. In the play, the character Louis seeks out a stranger in an act of self-debasing punishment, his aim to ignore the fact of his partner’s illness, a partner, dying of AIDS, whom he will abandon, betray. It wasn’t real, of course, but it was—in that way of the best theater moments, it was more than real. Surely the most transgressive moment I’d ever witnessed on a stage. Sitting there next to my dad. We don’t talk about it, the scene, or the play very much. But he did that for me. He took me to the theater. To that play. In August 1996, Diana and Charles officially divorced. A year later, August 31, 1997, Diana, 36 years old, died at PitiéSalpêtrière Hospital in Paris, France, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. Her children, the Princes William and Harry, were 15 and 12 years old.

Or maybe what I mean is this: when a parent offers a child the arts, the gift of theater or literature or music, I wonder how often the parent acknowledges that he is offering her, too, a way out—a way beyond, through, over the world they inhabit. I wonder, too, how often the parent hopes—I think he must— that the child will become an acceptable artist (as if there were such a thing)—neither transgressive nor transcendent.

Perhaps this was what Susan Sontag had in mind when she wrote of Simone Weil, of our attraction to the writer and yet our certainty that we would not wish the fate for our own child? We look to Weil for an undeniable truth, she wrote. Within Weil’s abdication, there is something vital—a madness with validity—and, though she would not choose that truth, though no one would choose such a life for her child, we do recognize it as Truth; we need her voice.

Observing his young daughter, a friend confides, “She has already learned how to manipulate people, to get them to like her, to be pleasing, to get attention.” I have never heard it phrased this way before, from the view of a psychologically astute, loving father—one so aware of this complicated asset of femininity. Because of my years spent in the care of the mental health system, I’m sensitive to the ways young women are taught to garner power through flirtation, pleasing moments, and yet, how they are pathologized for using that power to any advantage. I have only ever heard a woman or girl called manipulative as insult, or notation of damage. I recall that within the construction of diagnosis and mental health treatment, manipulative is a key indicator of damage. We were told that many doctors didn’t want to work with us for this very reason: we were difficult. A year after my discharge, I saw a doctor on the Upper West Side. One day, he told me how his office mate remarked upon the steady stream of pretty, difficult women he saw as patients: “Yes,” I asked, “so what?” “He told me that he feels sorry for me.” Dr. Y explained, with a guilty smile.

Before Princess Diana dies there, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital was most famous for its treatment of hysteria among mostly disenfranchised Parisian women of the 1700s. Under Louis XIV, the former gunpowder factory was turned into an asylum that operated more like a prison, where female outcasts could be shut away from existence. With no promises of recovery or freedom, the unfortunate “patients” usually finished out their natural lives there, “for their own good.” game. He was so impressed by my stepmom’s imagination, her confidently judgmental worldview. I guess that for someone so confounded by his own interiority, her assurance was comforting. It’s nice to be with someone who knows everything, a friend said not long ago, about someone we’d just met. Even if that person is entirely misguided? I wondered. My stepmom’s judgments masked a deep unhappiness. Her playfulness charmed me, too; but only in those first months. By the time they married and we lived together—nine of us under one roof—these moments came to unnerve me, as they were juxtaposed with moments of darkness and despair—moments when life seemed withdrawn from her; the buoyant air released like helium. In those regular but unpredictable moments, no one could do a thing to engage her. It was here that she became terrifying to me, a girl looking for a model of who I might become. I could not speak to her—I was too afraid—and so I learned to speak through my siblings—my stepsister (her daughter) most of all. If this was manipulation, it was the primary dynamic of our particular familial dysfunction.

“There’s no such thing as a sick person,” Dr. Lyle, the head psychiatrist of the ward would assure us, “It’s always a sick family.” This comforted me and my fellow inmates, but only to a point: we were the ones locked up, after all. We were the ones unable to live.

Perhaps all that separates the mentally ill from the sane is this: the ability to adapt, to adjust, to move forward with Fitzgerald’s notion in mind, able to put it, “hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

When they were first dating, my stepmom taught my father a game. Sometimes we were allowed to join. I call it a game but it was more of an activity when out to dinner, for example. It involved selecting a person in the restaurant— any random diner or couple or group would do—and then, quietly, imaginatively, making up a story about the couple. It was often unkind, the biography she’d project onto the couple: “Oh, it’s a first date! She’s looking for a sugar daddy! Look how she’s done up!” My father loved the The second time my stepmom comes to the ward for family therapy, we meet without my dad. In front of our therapist, she asks me,

“Don’t you know that I love you?” What could I say? Was it possible to be loved and totally unknown? Someone could love you, and you could know, too, that a part of her did not love you—a part she herself couldn’t acknowledge. That language allowed for this distance, this lack—encouraged it, even. Language is a machine that continually amplifies the emotions. Or disguised the emotions.

The third time we meet in therapy, Karen asks if I felt that my dad had neglected me since his marriage. I do not remember what I said in reply, but I do remember my stepmom interrupting this conversation to challenge the therapist,

“He may be married to me, but she has his heart!” Twenty years later, a mother myself and nearly the age of my stepmom in that moment, I cringe at the memory: this language of possession, of competition, used in reference to the relationship between a girl and her father. At the time, my stepmom’s performance in family therapy marked my life’s bathetic resemblance to a Lifetime movie—now, it strikes me as a clear indication that, at the very least, my stepmom, who I have come to appreciate and even love—my stepmom, who is a generous and loving grandparent to my son—should not have been my caretaker during these most formative years.

I nurtured two projects in those years of institutionalization: first, the project of understanding myself, of mourning my losses and becoming an artist; second, the project of becoming ill, sick, a mental patient. While the former still fills me with gratitude and strength, the pervasive, insidious, and unarticulated nature of the latter is marked by shame.

But were there other ways to heal? To become who I was meant to be? I didn’t know any. Even then I knew that if I could write, if I could become a writer, I would be free. That was true asylum.

One Christmas, my family visits New York City and we all go out to dinner to Tavern on the Green. I get a day pass to leave hospital grounds. As an adult, I see the restaurant as tacky; it seems fitting that, with the cluelessness of Midwesterners, we dine there.

If you remember New York City of the early 1990s, you might believe that it wasn’t easy to be a vegetarian; I was served a plate of bland, steamed vegetables.

One of the few remarkable notes in the charts I proffered that day is a nurse’s note referring to “patient’s bizarre eating habits”; I realize that I didn’t merely feel judged by the hospital staff, doctors, and nurses, I was, in fact, being judged (seen). How historically situated our sense of disorder: in those years, being vegan was bizarre; now New York City, like most urban centers, is full of vegetarian restaurants.

O, my stepmom’s youngest daughter, was the other designated patient in our family. On this visit, she was in college studying to be a teacher. She was often involved with men who were lost, needy. Losers, according to our family’s gossip.

At Tavern on the Green that night, my stepsister happened to declare, with much confidence and some joy, “I know that I’m going to marry a teacher, I always date teachers.”

My stepmom, unable to repress her rage, looked at her daughter, shook her head, and declared, “Then you will NEVER be happy!” My dad laughed, embarrassed. My stepmom’s first husband was a high school teacher. Her second husband, my father, a doctor. She read her early life as a mistake; this second marriage, the new family, was meant to be her happily-ever-after, a do-over.

The moment, of course, revealed something of her regret, the lesson of her own lived trajectory. Her identification with her daughters. Also, stultifying assumptions, which I internalized even as I told myself she’d taught me nothing: namely, that one must be dependent on a husband; that valuable work would not bring happiness or satisfaction; that life was about making money and serving others. She had moved up in the world; she had achieved a certain dream, found what she wanted. My stepmother’s resentment or jealousy or inability to care for me, if unconscious, was structural in nature—in the way that a woman in her forties might reflexively despise a twenty-one-year-old woman. Which doesn’t mean it can’t be overcome; I know many women and men who are wonderful stepparents. Also structural and cultural and instinctive was my inability to trust her: the way a child must distrust a woman who is not her mother and yet one who has taken her mother’s place. Particularly when so little time has passed. Within three years, my mom died; my stepmom entered my life; we moved; my stepmom had a baby; we were a family of nine. Any contemporary book on remarriage and stepfamilies would advise against such a swift transition; yet, this was how it happened. It wasn’t done with our interests first. I recall the day my future stepmom came over with her guitar and blue eye shadow; how my sister and I met her, how she

hugged me, popping a blister that formed on my shoulder, the result of a sunburn. I let her hug me; I didn’t even cry. Or flinch. This was the template for the relationship; the more alienated, the more afraid I felt of my father’s wife, the further inward I turned. It became impossible to express my pain directly. I recall my older brothers that very same day walking into the family room; they’d been out with friends. They saw this person, this new mother figure, and they walked right by her. My dad said something, tried to make introductions; they refused. It was beautiful, I realize now. Powerful. A gesture I needed to make, but it would take years—and institutionalization—and near self-destruction—to find the gesture, the mode of refusal.

Not long ago, in an otherwise casual conversation, my stepmom bemoaned that ski trip, an activity she has never again attempted. In my presence, she complained to my dad that she was left on the mountain by her instructor. It is 35 years ago now. “Suzy was in the hospital!” my dad blurted out. It hadn’t occurred to me to expect her to remember that, to imagine my experience of that trip. But for a moment, hearing Dad react, I am reminded of those years, our triangulated dynamic, Faulkner’s line: The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.

I remember the ski trip, being in a cast, and after dinner one night, how a very kind man carried me back to our lodge, up the many stairs to our rented townhome. The next day, stuck in the rental apartment with my new stepmom and her new baby, she suggested I write the man a thank-you card. So I did. I wrote:

Dear Mr. Jimmy, Thanks a whole lot for helping me last night!

My stepmom looked at my card, which I’d left on the table. She made a face like she’d eaten something sour, familiar to me by then. She had a judgmental Catholic’s sense of propriety, an assurance that there was a way things should be done. She spent much of her time focused on how someone (one of us) was doing it wrong. “It’s so easy to disappoint her,” my once-husband made this apt assessment of her, after we’d all traveled together.

She picked up another, blank card. She explained, “Suzy, you don’t write Thanks a whole lot in a thank-you card.” She didn’t know how to tell me that my rhetoric was too casual for the formality she expected. I didn’t understand this early (and perhaps only) writing lesson she offered. Instead, she wrote her own version of my thank-you card, letting me sign it.

Thank you very much for helping me.

It’s odd what you remember, my beloved Aunt reflected not long ago, at the end of her life. I don’t know why this memory stayed with me, but I do imagine it had to do with my sensitivity, my sense of being criticized not only for my words but for my existence. Perhaps it was because I was a writer, even then, and trying to find my way out of a certain prison—language, discourse, words on the page would be my toolkit.

Thanks a whole lot.