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Keeper of the Keys

Ruth Z. Deming

    I yawned and sat up in bed. Six a.m. already. Sarah and Dan were downstairs in the kitchen talking softly over breakfast. In my blue summer nightgown, I went over to the drapes and peeked outside. Yes, the world was still there. It looked like my sexy red poppies, swaying back and forth by the lamp post, would soon burst into bloom.
    Pulling on a pair of slacks and a striped silk blouse for work, I walked downstairs.
     “Hey, Mom,” said Sarah, who was in her first year of high school. “Don’t forget you promised me we’d go shopping for earrings this weekend at the mall.”
    “Sure, sweetie,” I said. She had gotten the part of Annie Sullivan in “The Miracle Worker” at her Quaker school. She’d gotten a scholarship to attend because she hated regular school, unlike her little brother, Dan, who loved his public school.
    Dan hung out with a colorful crowd - Tracey with the purple hair, Mark with the dreadlocks. One day when I came home from my job as a psychotherapist, he ushered me into his blue bedroom.
    Underneath the window was a huge black casket standing on one end. My blue-eyed, handsome young son had brought it home after finishing a school project.
    My kids were very independent. I wasn’t one of those parents who helped their children with their homework. After all – and this was the truth – my kids were smarter than I was. They took after their dad, who had remarried and was living in Texas. Sarah couldn’t stand him, calling him a “misogynist,” which I agreed with, while Dan was fond of him.
    Back in the kitchen, I went over to the brown breadbox on the counter, took out my medication, and swallowed it with a glass of orange juice. The pink pillow-shaped lithium pills made me gain weight but it controlled my manic-depression, later known as the droll-sounding bipolar disorder.
    After I kissed the kids goodbye, I brewed some drip coffee in my yellow Stangl pot, then poured it into a clear glass mug - a Flintstones one we’d gotten at the Burger-King. I had my usual breakfast of hot oatmeal and raisins and then took my place at the computer in the large living room-dining room.
    The window looked onto our neighbor’s grey house, horrible people who yelled at their kids and called them “idiots and retards.”
    “Enrico the Man” I typed at the top of the page. Enrico was not his real name. Frederick was. In my work as a psychotherapist I met the most fascinating clients and when they stung my heart I would write a poem about them.
    Closing my eyes, I thought about this new client at Bristol-Bensalem Human Services, an amazing, indomitable man whose life was thoroughly ruined by schizophrenia. Although I’ve never felt sure there was a God, I hoped, for his sake, there was. He could take his place at the right arm of God without Haldol coursing through his veins and the tremors it gave him.

    He would become whole again. He was a handsome man with a beard. And told me, in confidence, he had fathered a child when he worked in Los Angeles as an actor. And rode a motorcycle.
    He had never seen his daughter who lived three-thousand miles away, while he and his mother, a true saint, lived in poverty in Bristol, Pennsylvania. I can still visualize them sitting stoically next to one another in the waiting room. Of course he would never meet his daughter. And who knows if the mother would tell the child the truth about Frederick.
    As I sat gazing out my living room window, I noticed my mind began going faster and faster, like I’d drunk a hundred cups of coffee.
    “Oh no!” I said, standing up from the desk. “It can’t be happening again!”
    I walked across the beige living room carpet stained from the three of us spilling food and drink on it, and began assessing the state of my mind. I needed to leave for work in forty-five minutes.
    Looking out the front window of our yellow house I saw an unfamiliar blue Buick parked across the street. “Who was that?” I wondered.
    “Oh no,” I quickly realized. “They had come for me. They were spying on me.”
    Paranoia.

    Back into the kitchen I went and looked out the window into the back yard. A shapely maple tree spread its green leaves toward the sky. My eyes traced its lovely outlines, as a few squirrels scampered up and down.
    Suddenly, their shapes began to change.
    They metamorphosed into monkeys.
    Damn!
    Tugging on my green earring, I went back to my desk and looked in the stack of business cards. There it was on the top.
    “Laurence M. Schwartz, MD” read the card. “Psychiatrist, Abington Memorial Hospital.”
    I dialed his number and began counting the rings. One-two-three.
    “Answering service,” said the bored-sounding woman on the other end.
     “Yeah,” I said. “Can you have Dr. Schwartz call me? Tell him I’m getting psychotic. Do you know how to spell that?”
    She did. Her voice quickened. I paced around the kitchen, putting away the dishes, and staring at the two-door white refrigerator that the Travis Family had left us when we moved in five years earlier.
    The phone rang.
    “Roooth... Larry” he said in his kindly but slightly whiny voice. “What’s going on?”
    I told him the symptoms and admitted I had slept poorly the night before, another symptom of mania-paranoia.
    “You have your Navane,” he said.

    “Yes, a white bottle of Navane.”
     “Take a capsule right now and one at bedtime. And the Cogentin with it.”
    I asked him to hold on while I fetched the drugs from the brown breadbox and then ran the faucet for some cold water.
    In my hand I held the blue and yellow Navane capsule and the tiny white side-effect pill, Cogentin. With my wandering mind I tried to make meaning from the capsule.
    Yes, I thought. When I was a kid, we’d had a blue powder room downstairs and a yellow one on the second floor. I was so pleased with myself and felt my “brilliance” ballooning through my mind.
    “Keep that to yourself,” I thought. “It’s a sign of mania that I think I’m a genius. Even though it’s true.”
    “Okay, Larry,” I said. “The pills are melting in my stomach.”
    I always liked to please him.
    “Fine,” he said. “Call me tomorrow. And stay home from work today,” he added. He was very conservative. Didn’t want me to get in trouble at work and get fired. This is one of the terrible consequences of having bipolar disorder: misbehavior.
    “Larry, I’ll be damned if I’m gonna waste a perfectly good day and stay home! We nipped it in the bud.”
    Or had we? A little of the mania and psychosis slipped out like water oozing from the faucet.

    This was my life. Up and down. Up and down. Once you got used to it, it wasn’t so bad. I absolutely loved my job as a therapist and was soon making a left turn into the driveway of The Atrium, where I had a full day of seeing clients, whether I was manic or not.
    When I moved to the agency, they didn’t know what to do with me, so they gave me the huge conference room. Glorious windows all around. I decorated the walls with calendars – Audubon, wildlife, flowers – anything I could get my hands on to prettify the space. Without spending a penny. I was superstitious and believed that the moment I decorated my office, I’d be fired.
    Fellow therapist Judy Alvarez told me, “It looks crazy, Ruthie!” Everyone else thought it was unique, plus atop the calendars I wrote in Magic Marker the diagnostic codes of the patients, since one of my jobs was to offer a preliminary diagnosis before the psychiatrist saw them.
    296.01 Bipolar Disorder – 309.00 Alcohol Abuse – 295.30 Paranoid Schizophrenia.
    Mostly, when you’re psychotic or out of reality, you simply listen to your clients and nod your head. My mind was whirling like a pinwheel, simply unstoppable. I could barely hear what Lisa was saying.
    “Where’s your Diet Dr Pepper?” she asked me when she sat down at the round table.
    “Not in the mood today,” I said. Not exactly. More caffeine would only exacerbate my galloping mind.

    On my table I kept doodads for the clients to look at or play with. Seashells, small pine cones, buckeyes, all from my travels at nature centers. I taught the kids to love nature and we drove to far-off Lake Nockamixon where we rented a canoe and paddled across the still waters, and hiked at nearby Pennypack Watershed where the kids loved to chase the black wild turkeys they never did catch.
    Lisa’s problems were not that severe. When she started to bite her nails, I slid a paper clip over to her.
    “Fiddle with this, instead,” I said.
    Lisa was a talented artist and I encouraged her to enter an art contest at Norristown State Hospital. She did and won a cash prize. She had no idea her august psychotherapist had been involuntarily locked up for mania there almost twenty years earlier.
    I was at the mercy of jingling keys and there was no way to escape and go home to my lost children.
    When our session was over, I opened the door and watched her walk down the long hallway. I rubbed my forehead and my cheeks. I felt so confused. Then I wrote my “progress notes” in black ink, chewing the inside of my cheeks as I tried to concentrate. I looked out the window to see if anyone was peeking inside, trying to spy on me, but no one was there. Not yet anyway.
    I often felt lonely in my huge room. Not exactly lonely, but carrying the steep burden of caring for my beloved people with schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder and even my sociopaths, many of whom were good-hearted underneath.
    Between clients I would turn on my stereo to the classical music station. Soft soothing music would fill the air and I could look out the window at the sunbeams and yellow forsythia in spring.
    Sometimes, when the lithium exhausted me, I would lock my door, lie down on the floor and nap.
    Three days earlier, I had installed a display case at the largest library in our area, the Abington Public Library. This was part of the “awareness” campaign that the support group I founded, New Directions, embarked on. The topic was “teenage suicide.”
    There were four glass shelves at the library. Kremp Florist donated artificial flowers to spruce up the case.
    With my friend Nadine, we artfully arranged the shelves. On large index cards, I’d printed out “signs” that a teenager was thinking about suicide. “Giving away of possessions, trouble sleeping, use of alcohol.”
    My coup de grace was a pretend letter I wrote – a suicide note. I used italics from my computer and signed it in ink – Love, Beth.
    As I always do, I showed the display case to the library director, Nancy Marshall, and asked some patrons entering the library to take a look at it.
    “Very convincing,” everyone said.
    I was so proud. Another way of using my bipolar creativity.
    Back in my office, I finished up Lisa’s progress notes.
    The phone rang.

    “Damn!” I thought. “My next client must be early.” How I needed a break. I needed to rest my pressured mind, which felt as if it were a melon about to explode.
    But it was not the receptionist telling me Brian was there. It was Nancy Marshall, the director of the Abington library. With her authoritative voice, she told me the news.
    “Ruth,” she said. “We’ve gotten some complaints about your display case?”
    “What?”
     “People think the suicide letter is real.”
     “Oh no!” I said. “Well, then, just take it out of the case.”
    “That’s all I wanted to know,” she said. “Just needed to check with you.”
    “Thanks, Nancy,” I said and hung up.
    I sat with my head in my hands.
    What had I done?
    I needed a break.
    Although I’d brought a sandwich and banana for lunch, I thought I’d drive over to Nino’s Pizzeria.
    As I walked down the stairs of our building, the fresh spring air smelled delicious, like flowers with a hint of gasoline from all the cars driving by The Atrium.

    I drove over to Nino’s and ordered a small salad and poured ranch dressing over it. While I was digging in, I saw a man in the next booth looking my way.
    I smiled at him. Not exactly a smile. More like a smirk.
    “Don’t see no ring on your finger,” he said.
    “I’m not married,” I said. “No one will have me,” I laughed.
    “You work around here?”
     “Yes,” I said. “I’m a psychotherapist over at Bristol-Bensalem.”
     “A therapist!” he cooed. “Neat! I need to get my head examined.”
    I gave another one of my smile smirks.
    He pointed at his red truck parked outside. Told me he was a contractor who had more work than he knew what to do with.
    “Can I take you out?” he asked.
    “You bet!” I said. “Pick me up at six?”
    As I drove back to work, my mind was flying, simply flying. I couldn’t remember if we exchanged names. He was cute, with a tiny little chin beard, like Bruce Springsteen and best of all, he worked with his hands. Nothing better than the combination of a blue collar worker and a lady.
    My ex-husband, whom I had no use for, had been a city planner.
    Mania confers a certain aura around the manic individual. This is not my imagination. We are hypersexual and give out vibes, a halo, like a rainbow encircling our bodies.
    We thrum.

    I hadn’t been with a guy in a couple of months and was terribly excited.
    My next client Brian was a mess. His girlfriend had just broken up with him and he was distraught. A regular person can get over these mini-tragedies with difficulty, certainly, but any patient who came to Bristol-Bensalem would feel their heart was broken in two, like a branch snapped off a tree.
    What could I say to comfort Brian? The usual tripe. Go for a walk. Stay at your mother’s house instead of your lonely apartment. Take more Klonopin.
    Brian was a very vulnerable young man. He would not take his own life, I knew – “Any thoughts of harming yourself?” – but his life would be obsessed with this woman for months.
    I walked Brian down the long linoleum corridor to the door. And stayed with him while he pushed open the door and walked down the concrete steps and out to his car.
    The apple trees were beginning to bloom out front, as well as the pink dogwood I remembered from last year.
    My home away from home.
    After finishing my progress notes, I looked at my watch. Five forty-five. Only fifteen more minutes. I put on my lightweight spring jacket and grabbed my brown leather pocketbook and walked out front where he would meet me.

    The agency had closed for the day. It was up to me to lock up. Imagine that! A woman who had been locked up at Norristown State Hospital for three days for manic-depression and now she is keeper of the keys. Maybe there was a God after all.
    I stepped outside the two double glass doors and turned the key in the lock with a satisfying click.
    Shading my eyes from the lowering sun, I looked down the driveway for his red truck.
    “Good,” I thought, “I need the exercise.” Round and round the circular drive I walked, hearing the whooshing of traffic on busy Bensalem Avenue.
    Six o’clock turned into six-fifteen, which turned into six-thirty.
    “Damn!” I thought. “He’s standing me up.”
    Finally, at the end of the driveway, I saw his red truck pulling in and getting closer and closer.
    By now I was fuming.
    “Where have you been?” I shrieked. “You kept me waiting! That’s no way to treat a lady.”
    I refused to listen to his protests and walked the other way to my car.
    I drove home listening to loud rock music on the radio, hoping to comfort myself.
    At the nearest Wawa, I ran in and bought a huge Cadbury milk chocolate bar. It tasted delicious, assuring myself it was better than sex.

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