“You know, your Aunt Edith was in a mental institution,” my mother told me as we drove home from Frances. I hadn’t known that, but now it made an awful kind of sense. Edith had died of cancer by then, a year or two earlier, and my mother told me about all the commitments — how Edith would go too far, go too nuts, my grandfather would say they had no choice, my grandmother would protest, but my grandfather would sign the papers and off Edith would go, to Unit 45 at Camarillo. Afterward she’d tell my mother about the electroshock treatments, how she hated and feared them.
“They shuddered her,” my mother said. This all happened in the late 1940s, when my mother was in her early teens. (And the same era as The Snake Pit, now suddenly far too close to home.) “But your grandfather said it helped. It calmed her down. She’d go home and everything would be fine for a while. She would just be. . normal depressed, not crazy. She wouldn’t be a problem for anybody. Then it started up again. And she’d beg your grandparents not to send her back there.” Pause. “But your grandfather said it was the right thing to do. It was for her own safety. And it was his decision. And she was never a problem after that.”
When Frances is wheeled off to her first round of electroshock, we see the ceiling from her point of view, the stained tiles running past overhead, and I tried to imagine my Aunt Edith being wheeled off in the blind dark; she wouldn’t have known where she was headed, the first time, she wouldn’t have seen the menacing black machine. But she would have felt the cold gel on her temples, gagged on the rubber forced in her mouth, suffered everyone holding her down. I wonder if she shrieked, the second time they came for her. Or the next time she found out my grandfather had signed those papers again and found herself on her way back to Camarillo, or the third, the fourth. I have this version of her in my mind now, shrieking, locked away with Frances and Catherine and Olivia and wondering what hideous thing she has done to deserve such a punishment as this.
Because this is the real terror of Frances, The Snake Pit, and Suddenly, Last Summer, the chilling thing beyond the electroshock and the ice pick and that conclusive, tender tap: That familial signature on the commitment form. There is a thin, shaky line between being crazy and being inconvenient, and this is the penetrating moral of these stories: Keep on being a good girl, don’t piss people off. Don’t go too crazy, don’t say the wrong thing, don’t become a problem, a mess, don’t start shrieking, don’t lose control. Be sweet to your mother; be nice to your father. Look what a caring family member is capable of.
I thought about all this again a few years later, when my grandfather, whom I adored and still do, and who was a man of impressively catalogued lifelong angers and resentments, had disowned my mother, who also adored him, ostensibly for a single wrong thing she’d said to him one night at dinner, a careless and inappropriately disrespectful remark that got blurted out and triggered an enragement. But I believe it was my aging, lonely grandfather’s last bid at a vindictive kind of control, his wielding of a bolstering power against the only vulnerable person he had left: It was a Ratched-esque, Aunt Violet — like, Lillian Farmer — style bid for authoritative command. He was unable to control my emotionally extravagant and exhausting mother, and at the same time he resented her childlike dependence on him — he couldn’t cut out part of her brain, but he could cut her out of his life. He refused to ever speak to her again, and he died that way. It was an agony for her, a shock to her system she never fully recovered from; it kept her in an emotional straightjacket, made her a little crazy and a little terrified of the people who loved her. And I’ll always believe he wanted to drive my mother a little crazy because he cared about her enormously; otherwise, that act of commitment would have been meaningless.
The story of my Aunt Edith is interwoven with the story of my mother and her father, a story of power, of control and self-control and the loss of those things, a story of the agonies a person who cares can inflict. But I’ll never know my aunt’s real story, or at least her version of the real story, because all those pages she wrote, what I think of now as a written shriek, a brave and futile attempt at going on record, have disappeared forever.
I had a grand mal seizure once. Just one, once. My own little electroshock. Some minor synaptic wackiness. I was twenty-two, in my last year at college, and in line with a friend to see Down and Out in Beverly Hills; we were seated on the ground eating M&M’s, waiting for the doors to open. I remember standing up to go in and closing my eyes — and when I opened my eyes again what to me was a second later but in real time was about forty-five minutes, I was flattened out on the ground, my head in my friend’s lap, disoriented and sort of pissy about missing the movie. I heard later I did convulse and jerk, I did foam at the mouth a little, and in the ER we made seizure jokes about Rex Harrison in Cleopatra, Laurence Olivier in Othello. But the actual experience of it, for me, was a big nothing. No electric chair, no burning cartoon thunderbolt. It was just being briefly blotted out, an anticlimax. After multiple misdiagnoses, the doctors never really found out what caused it, and it never happened again. After six months of observation and tests, they told me to just go on back to my regular life, to be happy and grateful and fine.
Prior to the arrival of the seizure, I’d been slipping back into the cryings again, the baffling kind of impotent and enraged sobs that would spring up in me out of nowhere and hang around to stymie and drain. I’d been trying to stay calm (dull, average, normal), go to school, hang with friends. But for a while the activity of being sick (Is it epilepsy? Brain tumor? Bizarre neurological quirk?) was a terrific focus, an external, tangible, blameless source of drama. There had been talk of brain surgery for a while, and I’d thought about that slender instrument rooting around in my mind, I could hear the tap, could hear with the cure comes a loss of affect, a kind of emotional flattening, with diminished creativity and imagination, and I wondered if that would happen, if they would indeed wind up snipping out the devil in my soul, leaving me diminished and flat. But when they decided I was perfectly fine, and took all that that away (Go back to your happy life, you’re fine!), I plunged.
The medication didn’t help matters. I was on Tegretol, which prevents seizures, sure, but there’s a reason it’s also used to treat bipolar and psychotic disorders — this is your brain coated in Pepto-Bismol, this is your brain wearing two condoms, this is your banana slice of a brain suspended in Jell-O. I couldn’t function; I couldn’t go to class. I also wasn’t allowed to drive, an infantilizing, demoralizing condition in Los Angeles, and I spent six months in a trapped and paralyzed splay on my couch, too numb, this time around, to even cry. Is it time for the big guns, a psychiatrist? That petrified me: First the pills, then comes the caring signature on a form, maybe, and a meat-thermometer syringe, the leather restraints. . I’d just been given a Second Chance at life, and I should be overjoyed, energized, buoyant. But if there is nothing empirically wrong, say, a tumor — well, that means something else is actually going on wrong inside your brain, doesn’t it? That means crazy. That means mental illness. It is in the family, after all. It is in my blood. Camarillo was just down the street. Waiting for me, like Olivia’s Juniper Hill, Catherine’s Lion’s View, Frances’s Meadowbrook. I couldn’t let that happen. “High-achieving” = “well-performing,” I reminded myself, = you know how to perform = you are a good actress, yes, are good at playing that role. Fake it till you make it. I threw away the pills; I got in my car and drove myself alone to the beach through treacherous, windy, and steep Topanga Canyon; I went back to college and studied and graduated, had dinners and movies with friends and said all the right things, kept busy, bootstrapped and faked it all just enough that everything circumstantial gradually took over to hold me up, distract, carry me along and aloft until faking it became the new normal, became real. No plummet into the snake pit, not for me.