“Hal says maybe I have PTSD” Jordan announces as she slides into the booth beside Mouse at our favorite mid-town diner.
“You have an STD?” Mouse cringes against the wall in mock horror “And who is Hal?”
“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” Jordan smacks her brother with the plastic-sleeved menu.
“I thought you were Bipolar.”
“Just wait 'till they get a hold of YOU.” She shoots him a withering glance.
“I think your PTSD has given me PTSD.” Jay says dryly. There is more truth than humor in what he says. On the heels of the sock-drawer drugs incident and subsequent hospitalization, we have entered a phase where our entire family life seems to be focused on managing or fixing Jordan and we're not exactly doing a bang-up job of it.
While the doctor's initial recommendation was that Jory remain at the facility for two weeks while she adjusted to her new meds, the insurance company didn't agree and so his treatment plan was abruptly altered, approving her release just 24-hours after the mandated 72-hour hold ran out. She left Fremont hospital with a tentative diagnosis, a 3-month prescription for Depakote and a referral to a therapist a few blocks from our condo in Capitola. Earlier this afternoon, Jay and I accompanied Jordan to a family session with Hal. Afterward, we gathered Mouse and stopped off to grab dinner before heading home.
“I can't decide between French fries or potatoes.” Mouse says.
“Mashed or baked?” Jordan smirks.
“Not at dinner! What do I look like, a Philistine?”
“Where do you learn words like that?” I ask.
“What word? Masturbate?” They're both grinning now.
“No, Philistine.”
“You just picked me up from church, mom.”
“That's right.” I sigh.
“We're dining with Beavis and Butthead, Honey.” Jay pats my hand. I feign disapproval but deep-down I'm relieved that for the moment, things are relatively calm. Peaceful family moments have become increasingly rare.
Mouse does his best to stay out of the way, which more often than not means out of the house. Most nights, Jay stays late at work, dreading coming home for fear that some new crisis has transpired. It seems that a week doesn't pass without a school administrator on the phone or a police officer on the doorstep. I am hanging on by my fingernails, but when the waitress approaches our table and asks “How are we doing tonight?” I answer with a cheerful “just fine” and my best pasted-on smile.
She's not one of those toothsome college girls who populate the restaurants downtown, with the obligatory facial piercings and full-sleeve tattoos. Rather, she is the kind of waitress who's been doing this since before the scruffy-faced busboy was born. The kids and I order without incident. Then it's Jay's turn.
“Id like the strip steak with potatoes.”
“Mashed or baked?” the waitress asks, oblivious to the flurry of elbows and silly faces on the other side of the table.
“Baked”
“And soup or salad?”
“Actually if I get a super salad, I probably won't have room for the steak.” Jay replies casually without looking up from the menu, “Just a small house salad will be fine. But no beets.”
The kids giggle and I can't help but roll my eyes.
“Beets?” Her pencil pauses mid-air.
“Yes, those slimy red things?”
“You want beets on your salad?” She tries to follow, but is rightfully skeptical.
“No. I definitely do NOT want beets on my salad.” Jay looks horrified at the thought.
“Oh, well we don't put beets on our salads here. I don't even think we have beets at all.” She assures him.
“Oh good.” Jay grins, first at the waitress and then for just a second at Mouse and Jordan.
Once the waitress walks away, I punch him in the bicep.
“With the beets again? Nobody puts beets in regular salads.”
“Gilda's on the wharf does.” he says.
“So you're going to punish every waitress in every restaurant from here on out with the beets routine simply because Gilda's once served you a beet-ridden salad?”
“Yes, yes I am.”
“Sweet Jesus, I'm dining with Beavis, Butthead and their Dad.”
If we could just figure out how to stay in this moment, in this antiquated diner with its decent food and capable staff, perhaps we'd be ok, a well-fed, perversely-humored, tight-knit little family. Jay, Mouse and Jordan pick up where they left off last on their great comic-book debate while I mentally rewrite a film review that's due in the morning. We dive into our plates when the food comes and as the sun sinks, I see our reflection in the window behind us. We look like any other family, a cohesive unit of utter normalcy. But eventually the food is gone, the bill is on the table and we have no choice but to go out into the night and back to our lives.
When we get home, Jordan grabs the phone and tears up the stairs. Jay gets a beer from the fridge and flicks the switch to turn on his computer. Mouse and I leash up the dogs and head back out the front door. Our Italian Greyhound Iggy takes care of his business immediately, watering the shrubs just off the porch. The old beagle bitch Fat Lola isn't going to give it up so easy though. She knows that if she holds out, she'll get a nice long walk so I leave Mouse and Iggy on the grass in the common yard and set out with Lola towards the cliffs.
Head-down, ears flapping she strains at the end of her leash. It's quiet enough to hear the water slapping the rocks a few blocks away. There are lights on inside most of the Jewel Box cottages but no one out on the street just now. I let Lola's nose lead the way. She pauses now and then to smell a fence post or pee on a patch of ground-cover. Slowly, we make our way out to the benches perched on the cliff overlooking Capitola Village and the sprawl of beach sloping into the bay.
Flopping onto one of the benches, I light a cigarette and let Fat Lola unwind the full length of her retractable leash. Not for the first time, I imagine myself walking down to the water and wading in like Virginia Woolf or the heroine in that Kate Chopin novel. This was not what I imagined when I fled my hometown for the coast. I envisioned sun-kissed and well-rounded children, dogs who enjoyed frolicking in the surf, and long sunset strolls with my sweetheart but here we are, too broken to manage much more than survival.
I think back to the initial wave of hope I felt just weeks ago when the doctor at Fremont Psychiatric laid out his recommendations and treatment plan. There is great relief in that initial diagnosis. You have this idea that the professionals are going to swoop in and solve the problem. I remember feeling that way the first time I was called into one of those serious school meetings where they put you in the tiny chair and lay out all your child's deficiencies on the whiteboard. As humiliating as the process is, you are somehow convinced that it's going somewhere, that the wealth of knowledge in the room, packed as it is with these educated educators, will result in some manner of grand and glorious answer to the problems … they will fix whatever is wrong with Jory.
Yes, there is relief in naming the thing, but only in so much as you believe in it, which I did until today when the therapist Hal said that after his first couple of sessions with Jordan he was more inclined to go with a PTSD diagnosis than Bipolar Disorder. I don't even know how to unpack that. If it's PTSD, fine. But from what? And when? And how the hell did something worthy of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder escape notice until now? I am failing and we are disintegrating.
Across the bay, out at its Southwestern tip, the lights of Monterrey twinkle and on this cliff in this moment, the isolation is pure and peaceful. But just three blocks away what awaits me is a war zone. The quietest moment within those four walls is an eerie calm, the kind you've learned not to trust.
Lola hops up onto the bench beside me and shoves her snout into the crook of my arm. Having smelled everything there was to smell and done what she needed to do, she's ready to go. I nuzzle her fat head and whisper sweet nothings into her big soft ears. Then we turn towards home and I let her drag me homeward, not quite kicking and screaming, but in no particular hurry to get where we're going.
When we come through the door, Mouse is on the couch, mashing buttons on his GameBoy.
“Homework?” I ask.
“Done” He answers.
Jay has withdrawn into his computer. I kiss the top of his head after unleashing Lola.
“There was yelling and slamming.” he says without looking away from the screen, “ It's quiet now.”
Upstairs in the hall, I knock hesitantly on Mouse and Jordan's bedroom door.
“Jory, you ok?”
“Fine” her tone says it's anything but.
“Homework?”
“None”
My hand is on the knob but I can't quite will myself to open the door. Like a Cold War standoff, each army has withdrawn for the moment to agreed-upon borders and I leave it at that out of sheer exhaustion. Instead, I run the water for a bath, hot as I can stand it, and then submerge myself thinking again of The Awakening and how Edna Pontellier simply wades into the water. What a casual final exit from it all. Later, I'll tiptoe back downstairs and pour a generous drink, drowning out the day at the bottom of a bottle instead of the bay.
Tomorrow the most I can wish for for is that Jordan won't skip class or get kicked out of it, that she won't shoplift another bottle of whiskey for the cute girls in the park, launch firecrackers onto the neighbors roof, get caught brandishing a butterfly knife or down an entire bottle of Robitussin. Tomorrow the best I can hope for is that Jay will resist the urge once more to drive his car into the retaining wall on his way home and I will walk back from the edge of the cliff with my fat beagle bitch instead of over it. Somehow we'll make it through because well … we have to.
There is a knock at the bathroom door.
“Yes?”
“Steve has a buyer for the condo.” Jay says, through the door, “If escrow goes smoothly, we've got just shy of six weeks.”
And then there's that.
[This and other stories about the life of my daughter Alice/Jordan are cross-posted at Laurustina.com.]