Calling Barbara

An unfamiliar voice answered the camp phone. Barbara was no longer there, it told me. Best call her parents.

She’s not here, her parents said. We won’t tell you more.

What? Wait! What?

Called back.

We won’t tell, they said. Don’t call back.

Stop it, they said. Stop calling.

We’re sorry, they said. Go to hell.

Did I keep calling her parents? Track down her college friends, scattered for summer? Dial numbers at random? Camp beside the phone with sleeping bag and pillow, soiled tissues, carpet littered with the fine powder of Cheerios, picked out of the box one by one, crushed one by one between thumb and forefinger?

I cannot remember.

I suspect I kept calling her home until I caught one of her sisters, the one who hated the parents or the one who idolized me. I suspect we talked in soft tones, and I passed her my number. This seems vaguely familiar. I cannot imagine behaving this way.

One day I got a call, was told: Call this number.

A nutjob answered the phone. Someone took it away from her, spoke nonsense to me.

You can’t speak to Barbara, she said. If she wants to speak to you, she’ll call. Leave your number.

In dead silence I waited. Now I could hear the kudzu growing, killing everything in its path. And the pigs and the child-bearing mothers and the chickens and the creaking, groaning lava and the shout as it entered the sea.

When Barbara called, her voice was clear, like water. Dribbling.

The short version: The seizures that had been here-and-there for years had fully bloomed. Grand mal, petit mal, and the weird kind that look like being zoned out. Weakness afterward and disorientation. The camp called her parents. Can’t keep her here. Not safe for her, not good for the kids.

Her parents drove out to the camp, gathered her up like a Molokai leper, shipped her to the Salvation Army’s homeless shelter in downtown Detroit, left her there.

(I do not judge them in this; Barbara may have refused to go home. Her family was like that. No, I do judge them. There were safer places, if not in their suburb then in another, where they could have more easily dumped her. What did her parents want so badly to tell her that they could only say it by treating her so?)

Lying on a cot in a room full of cots. Seizures day and night. No one can sleep. She’s scaring the homicidal nutjobs.

Salvation Army can’t keep her. Next stop: state hospital.

According to a Harvard University physician, it takes a doctor 18 seconds to diagnose a patient. I bet the state set a record with Barbara.

Homeless? they said, must be schizophrenia. It runs in that crowd. Involuntary commitment. Electric shock therapy. Phenobarb. Cigarettes. Sex with orderlies who promise to help her.

* * *

Here’s a nice bit of irony: It was Michigan who’d cut off our idyll to go searching for his lost companion.

I hate irony. Also melodrama and pop psychology. Let’s spare one another all that and consent to look at the evidence with the detachment of scientists, observe dispassionately once, aloud, for the record: Had I not been distracted, had I not veered away …

Oh, don’t flutter. I don’t blame myself. But I don’t shy away, either.

Had I been less absorbed in my own present moment …

I would have ended the idyll to go searching for my lost companion, and I would have found her. Taken her home to my no-nonsense, brook-no-resistance, bull-headed loving mother; my gentle, listening father; my sweet little brother, his clueless dog. And me.

My mother would have ridden the doctor until he got it right. My father would have sat up with her nights. My brother would have played silly games with her, his dog would have cuddled her after the seizures. I would have been her safe harbor, a place to rest her whipsawed heart.

She would have been for us a changeling rescued from the forest. We would have nursed her and petted her until, restored to her whole, fey-wild self, she bit our hands and ran off, as the fey always do.

Stupid fantasy. Here’s what’s real: I was distracted, self-absorbed, trusting the divine gift, trusting to intertwined fate. Here’s what’s real:

A Tale of Two Idylls

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

The hard shell cracks. The charm breaks. Only by your awareness does the world cohere. Stay awake.

Stand trust on its head. Sing to your children: When the bough breaks...

Never turn your back.

Dammit, I knew that, I knew that!

* * *

I do not blame myself. I am not the one who betrayed us.