Course Correction (11 page)

“Ginny, is that you?” asked Gramps. My father's parents lived three short blocks away, on 79th and Lexington, and we kids were regulars at their place. In fact, Peggy and I had run away there once when we were seven and five. Oh, thank goodness, someone I knew and trusted! “I'm just calling to check in, see how everything's going.”

I replied in a rush, “Mom just drank a bunch and took I don't know how many pills. I'm not sure what they are. Baby blue, small, maybe Valium. I think that's what Peggy said.”

“I'll be right over.” He didn't even say goodbye, but just hung up. I stood in the doorway of the library with the phone in my hand, frozen. I didn't want to see Mom die.

She stopped struggling with Peggy and put her head down on the table. Peggy propped her up so she wouldn't slide off her chair.

Mom revived slightly when the paramedics came flying through the front door, summoned by my grandfather, who appeared shortly thereafter. Suddenly, she was fighting again, but in her groggy state, her grip was weak and she could only wave her arms around in their faces. They put her in a straitjacket to strap her onto the gurney.

Dad showed up shortly after Mom left in an ambulance. Gramps must have called him, because I sure didn't think to, and Peggy was preoccupied first with Mom and then with trying to calm down the Littles. Dad didn't say much to any of us, other than to confirm he would return home and stay with us so we wouldn't be alone.

That's when Peggy slammed her fist through a pane of glass in one of the French doors in Dad's dressing room. He cleaned her bloody cuts, bandaged her hand, and sent us to our own rooms to calm down by ourselves. His presence comforted nobody; he offered no solace.

Instead of using Mom's suicide attempt to reach out to us over the next several days, Dad fended off all questions with the same unperturbed response: “Your mother's going to be fine.” As if by sweeping away discussion, he could banish our confusion and fear. He offered
no explanation for what had happened, nor any concern for Mom or our reactions. We did squeeze some information from him: Mom hadn't died, although she could have. She had fallen unconscious by the time the ambulance had arrived at the hospital, but the doctors pumped her stomach. Beyond that: silence. If we asked questions, he became irritated. I could only draw one conclusion: keep your troubles to yourself, young lady. Silence is golden.

Mom returned after a couple of weeks with a pair of nurses who provided 24/7 care. Only then did I learn she'd spent those days committed to a psychiatric hospital. I felt betrayed all over again. Why hadn't Dad told us?

From the moment she returned home, Mom was different, more like a real-life zombie, tired and defeated, than a thinking, feeling person. She even had new hair, a wig that sat at an odd angle, covering her own dirty-blonde wisps.

Dad moved out the morning of her release from the hospital and left us in the hands of a recovering mental patient. Sure, she had nurses, but not even twelve hours after she arrived back, Mom left one of her stalwart Lucky Strike cancer sticks burning down in an ashtray next to the couch and started a fire. Miss Muffet, all of eight years old, woke to the smell of acrid smoke and roused the rest of us, including the night nurse, going from room to room and shaking us out of deep slumber.

Mom refused to get out of bed when Muffet came to wake her up. Instead, she pulled the covers over her head and ignored her daughter's pleas for help and comfort. The nurse called the fire department and herded us into the kitchen when the firefighters arrived. We cowered there while they extinguished the blaze in the library and stomped through the adjacent rooms to make sure the fire hadn't spread elsewhere. When they finally released us to return to our beds, I was afraid to fall asleep, sure that I could smell smoke.

In the morning, Mom got mad because the firefighters had left dirty boot marks on her precious Oriental rug. I never thought about the imprint of her recent behavior on me. Like my parents, I shoved everything that threatened the surface story under the rug. Forget about the longing for protection or rescue; don't mention the grief and shame, or the birth of my unquenchable longing for escape. Follow
their expert footsteps; bury the unmentionable under the glitzy façade of our Park Avenue address, my private school education, and all the things my father's fat wallet could buy.

In my family's most desolate moments, in scene after Technicolor scene, I had learned that disappointment could crush people, even those who seemed uncrushable. Disappointment was dangerous, to be avoided at all costs. Now, here was my tough-as-nails captain, Chris Ernst, crying in front of me. She was angry, yes, but worse, much worse, deeply disappointed. Mom, Chris, Mom, Chris … who was devastated? For a moment I couldn't tell the difference between them.

That's when I decided I couldn't lose again; that would be deadly.

No wonder racing lost some of its lighthearted fun after this interaction, as somehow the present became confused with the past.

As Chris ranted, a swirl of tension gathered at the back of my head and spread quickly through my body like a spiral staircase winding from a knot of tightness at the base of my skull. The tension found its way into all my nooks and crannies until I felt crowded inside, my muscles and limbs swollen, constrained by my skeleton and skin. I felt as if I'd fallen into a pressure cooker.

And then I exploded. “What do you mean?! I pulled the whole way down the course. I did everything I could. How do you know it wasn't you? We've never lost before; you have. Maybe it was you,” I said.

Chris said, “Bullshit! What do you know about pulling? You're a novice. You just didn't want it enough.”

I was shaking. “You're wrong! You don't know anything.” I felt like throwing up. I had to get away from her. She had ruined everything. I didn't understand why she had to go crazy and get so mad. I couldn't help it. I did my best. It wasn't fair that she blamed me. “Bitch,” I whispered as I walked away.

Maybe I fooled Chris, maybe I sounded angry, but I was afraid again.

My captain was gone. Things would never be the same. Just like old times. Something that started with so much promise contorted into disaster in the blink of an eye.

I had no idea that I had just been hijacked. My unrelated past had
risen from its own hiding place, lunged into control, and wedged itself between me and Chris, between me and racing. That's both the nature and power of fear. It comes unbidden and when it does, it packs a wallop.

Fear isn't something you have to think about to feel. It's an independent agent, operating without the aid or assent of your cerebral cortex, jumping in to assume your controls without giving you a moment to decide if that's necessary. Fundamental to survival of the human race, fear is rooted in a primal response to change, designed to ferret out potentially dangerous circumstances and react to them literally in the blink of an eye.

The human body is sensitized to detect and process the slightest shift in the external world to keep itself safe. When you step on a stick of just the right slender proportions during a walk in the woods, your body will register the possibility that it's a poisonous snake before your thinking brain can reassure you that, no, it's really just a twig. In that unthinking instant, your body is off to the races. Your heart rate increases, heat flashes up your spine, your palms get sweaty. Blood rushes to your critical organs, causing that feeling of butterflies in your gut. Your respiration rate amps up, your blood pressure rises, and a wildly effective combination of hormones shoots into your bloodstream to prepare you to fight, flee, or freeze.

External sensory information flows simultaneously along two neural highways in your brain, transmitting both to your amygdala and your cerebral cortex for processing. The route to your amygdala is short and sweet, upping the odds of your physical survival, as that's the part of your brain that jumpstarts your body's physiological response to the external stimuli. The same information travels a more leisurely route to your cerebral cortex—all of a millisecond longer—to give your cognitive processes a shot to interpret the same stimuli, engaging your critical thinking faculties. Just as in sports, when it comes to survival, speed—not cognition—matters. A flicker of an instant can be the margin between winning and losing, champion and chump, alive and dead.

Thank goodness for fear. Without its control-freak mechanisms and autocratic interference, we would have been dead as a species tens of thousands of years ago.

When fear loses its perspective, when fear is wrong, it's no big deal. You gear up for a snake and then realize it's a stick: breathe deeply, wait for your galloping heart to slow to its normal crawl, and revel in the relief that you were mistaken. But when your fear mechanism gets hair-trigger sensitive and you find yourself reacting to much of life as if it's a snake, then you're in trouble. By the time you figure that out, you're too far down the road to reverse direction. You've done irretrievable damage. Your life has changed course.

And you may not even realize you've been hijacked by fear. That recognition requires cognitive thinking, which is permanently condemned to lag behind fear. Thinking always bats cleanup, and that sequence becomes a problem when there is way too much to clean up; by then, fear is ahead, and you have all sorts of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol coursing through your bloodstream. Those hormones don't care if you behave rationally; they want you to survive. Run, fight, eliminate the threat. Short-term results at the expense of long-term consequences. Live to fight another day.

This entire business is just a mess. No wonder when fear takes over, bad shit happens. I'm not talking now about mistaking twigs for snakes: I can live with those errors. I'm talking about the wild conclusions that get lodged in our brains following a frightening experience, the fear-spawned ideas that we never voice out loud to another person, that operate under the deep cover of our unconscious darkness. We don't question them. We don't offer them up for scrutiny to others, who might give us a more rational perspective. We accept them as the pristine, absolute truth.

Especially when we're young: it takes over twenty-five years for the average human brain to finish growing, and the area that controls critical thinking is the last to fully develop. Without critical thinking, fear disposes us to blind acceptance of any whacked-out idea that might seem convincing at the time.

When an actual trauma occurs, it is as if part of the brain takes a picture of that experience and freezes it with the kind of blindingly bright flash bulb that makes you see stars and nothing else for a while. Maybe the brain science hasn't been sorted out yet, but here's the bottom line: when your brain interprets incoming external stimuli in a way that reminds you of a past trauma, everything goes haywire, and
you are screwed. When you're a terrified preadolescent in the midst of watching her entire world melt down, for example.

Or when your captain gets mad at you, blames you for losing the race, and you think the world is going to end. Somehow, you associate her with your mother, both blondes, both female, both prone to emotional outbursts. Honestly, the similarity ends there, at least to a thinking person, but you're not thinking particularly well because your captain is yelling at you, and your body has decided it's in some kind of danger, reminiscent of your mother's upsets. You remember what happens when your mother is feeling particularly devastated, at least what happened that one time. The world, seriously, did just about end back then.

PART II

Drive

6

Rowing has a way of hijacking what is normal to suit its purposes, words as well as expectations. The “drive” is another average word appropriated and rejiggered into a tidbit of technical terminology. It's another multitasker—a noun, a verb, an occasional adjective—but not as complicated as “catch.” Drive a car. Drive a stake into the ground or into her heart. Do you possess the drive to become a champion? Or will you wilt under the pressure, yield to the weak and wild thoughts running through your head, driving you crazy, driving you away from that which you crave most?

The drive starts at the end of the catch. The oar has entered the water and grabbed a blade full. With arms fully extended—loose like cables, not tight like sticks—the rower grasps the oar, fingers cupped around the wooden handle, which is cross-hatched to aid the grip. All the efforts of the large muscle groups—legs, back, and arms—have to channel through those narrow digits. Strong fingers don't white-knuckle the oar; they conduct the body's transfer of energy to the blade without a strangled grip. Better be loose enough to function as a transmitter; too much tension will staunch the flow. No holding on for dear life. Gotta keep it cool.

During the drive, you pull on the oar mightily and courageously. Your tightly compressed body is positioned at the catch, legs tucked up close to your chest, body angled forward to help your arms extend to their fullest reach. With your lats you feel the oar connect with the water.

The war begins. You against yourself. Body versus mind. Passion versus intellect. Dream versus reality. Your legs launch the effort, pushing your feet against the foot-stretchers, rolling the seat back toward the bow, shoving your knees into a prone position. Meanwhile, your back remains at its initial acute angle, leaning forward, and together with the still-straight arms, follows the legs into the bow. As your hands pass over your knees, your body angle starts to change. Supported by a cast of opposing abdominal muscles, your back moves from its closed, 45-degree angle to an open one of 135 degrees.

Your legs and back reach their full extensions simultaneously, their energy spent. Your seat has slid as far back as it will go. All that's left is to finish the stroke. Without changing your body angle, shrugging your shoulders, cocking your wrist, or jerking your oar, you pull your arms to your body in one continuous motion. As you pull your hands into your midsection, you maintain a loose grip on the oar to prepare for the next transition.