Total Constant Order (10 page)

D
r. Calaban was late. I sat in her plant-infested office, watching the second hand spin around. I hadn't seen Thayer in days. Maybe he had been kidnapped by Martians. As a kid, he used to sit on the roof and “summon” them with his mind. He said UFOs are attracted to Florida because it's so flat.

The more I listened to his crazy rambling, the quieter my thoughts became. I couldn't've cared less about counting, as long as he kept talking to me. Without him, I staged imaginary conversations in my mind. He would laugh at my lame jokes. He would call me pretty.

I couldn't figure out if we were officially dating. Nobody in Miami went on “dates.” They spent every waking minute at the mall. Sometimes they
patrolled the Falls, a chain of outdoor stores equipped with palm trees and fluorescent tide pools. Or else Sunset Place, where skaters skulked around in doglike packs. Or the arcade, where they got drunk because nobody checked their IDs.

At school, Sharon Lubbitz was spreading rumors that Thayer had written a Trenchcoat Mafia–style letter, detailing his plans to blow up the school. Yeah, right. Thayer would've written it in Klingon.

Still, his disappearance was shady. I was mulling it over when Dr. Calaban finally materialized.

Maybe six minutes wasn't worth losing my cool, but I let her have it.

“I don't need Paxil anymore,” I announced, checking out another African violet on her desk. Their dull green leaves were dusted with hairs. I reached out and stroked them.

She raised an eyebrow. “Really? So now you're the doctor.”

“It's like you don't listen to me,” I said, still stroking the furry plant. “When I complain, you just up my prescription. I quit taking it because it made me sick.”

“When did you stop taking your medication?”

“A few days ago.”

“And how do you feel?”

“Dizzy. And I'd get these electric shock sensations. Sometimes I was so sick, I just laid in bed, waiting for the dizziness to go away.”

Her dark eyes flashed. “Frances, you should never go off medication without supervision. SSRIs, such as Paxil, work by adjusting the amount of serotonin in your brain. Paxil washes out very quickly, which can jolt your nervous system.”

I couldn't absorb all this doctor talk.

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“I'd like you to try taking Paxil in smaller doses, tapering off for a week.”

“You want me to go on meds again so I can get off them? That doesn't make any sense.”

“It's your choice,” she said.

“Then I choose to quit.”

“Either way, I would like to continue meeting with you and discussing your progress. You might want to revisit this issue down the road. Medication won't cure OCD or any other anxiety disorder. At
least we have no evidence of this. I want you to believe that you can cope with your anxiety on your own. You possess that inner strength.”

I watched her blinking at me. Then she asked a game show question.

“Can you come up with an example of someone who you would call courageous?”

All this New Agey garbage was getting on my nerves. So I gave her a smartass answer. “The lion in
The Wizard of Oz
.”

Her mouth twitched, holding back a smile. “You are joking with me, no?”

Dr. Calaban faded away. I tried to focus on her bone bracelet. I wondered if she ever went to funerals, what her life was like outside the loony bin, her shrink's office.

“I think this is the best decision,” she said. “If you can go to school and do what you need to do, I won't push you into continuing your medication.”

Dr. Calaban didn't know me. As far as she knew, I was just another wacko.

“There's this boy,” I heard myself say. “He takes Ritalin off and on. The medicine makes him feel
worse instead of better. It changes him inside.”

“Frances, are you afraid that taking antidepressants will change you?”

“It's like, I see things a certain way and I don't want to lose that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like the way I draw.”

“Would you consider yourself visually oriented? Can you focus on images and patterns pretty easily?”

“Sure. I do it all the time. Especially when I play my violin.”

Dr. Calaban brightened. “So you draw and play music?”

“Not at the same time,” I said.

She laughed so hard, I saw metal glinting in her molars. “Frances, I would like to give you one more test.”

I groaned. “Not again.”

“You might enjoy this one. It's a quiz for artists,” she said, handing me another stupid number two pencil.

The test took five minutes to finish. It asked a
lot of questions that seemed to have nothing in common: When I drew a picture, did I work on several at once? Or one at a time? (I couldn't start another picture until the first was perfect.) Did time pass unnoticed while drawing? Or did it tick by slowly? (That's why I liked to draw. Time would slip away.) Did I like to have music playing while I drew? (Of course. Music was everything to me.)

When I finished, Dr. Calaban added up my score, whatever that meant. She said, “Ahhh!” with an exclamation point on the end.

“So this finally proves that I'm crazy,” I told her.

“No, Frances. It means that the left and right side of your brain are divided almost equally. It's like your hands when you play the violin. They're doing two separate things at the same time.”

This made absolutely no sense. “My brain is divided,” I said.

“The human brain has two hemispheres,” she explained. “The left is the center of logic. This side takes over when you're working out a math problem or playing music. The right side of the brain is more intuitive. It processes things like dreams. This side
takes over when you're drawing. Most of us tend to favor one or the other. You are lucky to have a brain that jumps between both hemispheres easily.”

I stared at her for a minute. “You mean there's nothing wrong with my head?”

“Nothing. This is your normal way of seeing the world.”

Normal? There wasn't anything normal about me.

“It's almost as if you have two heads,” said Dr. Calaban. “And you are balancing them without a problem.”

I couldn't get over it. Here I was, trying to square everything away, when I was already balanced on the inside.

“For example, are you good at math?” she asked.

“Not really. Doing math takes, like, forever.”

“Why is that?”

“Because some numbers are lucky or unlucky.”

Dr. Calaban mulled this over. “Do you have a special number that brings you luck?”

I clamped my mouth shut, prepared to sit there in silence. But ever since I'd been talking to Thayer, it didn't seem so weird sharing with Dr. Calaban.

“Yeah, I have a special number,” I admitted. “It changes all the time. I used to switch the lights on and off three times or something bad would happen to my family. If I messed up, I thought they would die.”

“But they didn't.”

“No,” I said. “And something bad happened anyway.”

“The divorce?”

“Yeah.”

Dr. Calaban leaned forward. “Frances, how is tapping a light switch going to keep your family safe? Think about it. Does this make any sense?”

No, it didn't.

“If you think that's bad, you should see my mom.” I rolled my eyes. “She checks the locks, like, fifteen times a day.”

Dr. Calaban was quiet for a moment. “How do you feel about this?”

“I'm used to it. After the move, she's been worse.”

“What do you mean ‘worse'?”

“She doesn't want me going anywhere on my
own, but she won't drive me, either. She doesn't even want me to get a learner's permit. Before we leave the house, she checks to make sure the stove is off, as if we're going to burn down the house or something.”

“And what sort of rituals did you have after the move?”

“Lots of things. Like when I do my homework, everything has to be in order. I have to count and sharpen all my pencils, whether they need it or not. Sometimes it takes hours just to do one assignment.”

“Is this any different from your mother's rituals?”

I blinked. “You mean, it's possible that my mom has OCD too?” I asked. My mind raced back to all her cleaning routines: the paper garbage bags in the kitchen, her purse crammed with Ziploc bags, everything squared away. I always found it strange, but I wouldn't have called it a “ritual,” not like my number-counting obsession.

It made sense. All this time, I had been trying to fit my imaginary rules into some kind of order, a system to chase away the crazy feelings. And here,
Dr. Calaban was giving me a logical explanation, not only for my rituals, but for Mama's as well.

“Yes, it's possible,” said Dr. Calaban. “What do you believe?”

I believed she was right.

I
t was a year after we moved to Miami. Numbers didn't mean much to me yet. They were marks on my flash cards, Morse code. Then my parents walked into my brand-new bedroom with their mouths stretched as tight as minus signs.

We need to talk, they said.

I was sitting on my bed, reading. “What's going on?” I asked.

Dad opened his mouth. Out came the words. This is what I heard:

“Your mother and I have decided not to stay together. We are separating from each other, but this doesn't mean that we're abandoning you or that we don't love you anymore.”

In my book, the pictures faded, as if Dad had
turned down the tint in my head.

Dad said: “Be good to your mother.” The softness in his voice pricked my eyes. It was getting hard to breathe. Dad sat next to me. He was wearing his 9-to-5 threads: suspenders and a suit ironed so sharply I could open mail with the creases. Up close, I could see his pasty scalp.

I tried to focus on my astronomy book. I dragged my finger over Saturn's rings like the grooves on a record and started counting the silence. I flopped on the floor, heaving great, phlegmy sobs. Mama hauled me into an embrace. She was saying something, but I couldn't make out the words. All I heard were the numbers banging inside me. I looked at Dad and saw him with another wife. She would scowl at my bottle-cap collection, the overdue library books under my bed. She would try to scold me and I wouldn't listen.

 

The next day, Mama dragged me to the mall. At the cosmetics counter, a lady let me try expensive perfume that she said was so grown up. I sprayed some on my wrist and couldn't stop spraying. I had to
keep spraying until it felt like the right number of times. I ducked into the restroom and tried to wash it off. The ugly smell didn't go away. For the rest of the afternoon, I tried to ignore it, but it stuck like a splinter in my mind.

When I got home, I ran upstairs and turned on the bath. I filled the tub until it overflowed. I dunked my head. I wanted to stay underwater until all the air trickled out of me. I held my breath, counting seconds of quiet.

Mama freaked out and made me clean up the tiles. I spent an hour mopping it with wet towels. But it wasn't good enough. Finally, Mama shooed me away and finished the job, though I think bleaching the floor was going a little overboard.

Then I developed a washing routine. This was something I always used to do as a little kid. But now it was getting out of control. If I messed up—shampooing my hair first—I'd have to start over. Unfortunately, the order kept changing and I couldn't remember how to do it right.

I started collecting all kinds of things—twigs, bottle caps, wire. My room grew piles in every
corner. I saved Coke cans and stacked them in the garage. I shoved a shoebox under my bed. I crammed it with my favorite things: a hunk of brain coral, a bag tinkling with silver dollars won at a snow-shoveling contest.

Mama told me to clean my room, but things had to be done in a certain order. She would remake my bed after I'd tucked in the corners. I looked down at my hands, rubbed raw from counting, and didn't know what to do with them.

M
ama pulled into the driveway and I hopped out. Within seconds, they were all over me—mosquitoes dotting my arms like thumbtacks. I smeared them off, but a new swarm took over like instant reincarnation. The city sent trucks to poison them. Fog would soak the yard and cloud the windowpane. They sent planes that soared so low, the house rattled. Still, the black spots bounced against the windowpane, bringing zombie movies to mind.

“Fin, would you like to wash the car for me?” Mama asked. She was already rattling around in the closet, pulling out a bucket.

No, I wouldn't like to wash the car while billions of bloodsucking insects made me their pincushion.
But Mama made it clear I had no choice.

Washing the car was a blast with Dad. He taught me the proper technique. Always start at the top. The side facing the sun came last since it dried the quickest.

Toweling off the car turned into a ritual—one that chilled me out. I stretched the rag—one of Dad's old T-shirts—and pulled it over the roof, squeezed out the water, rinsed the windows. I would dry the whole car in the same order. I doubted that anyone got such a thrill from washing a car.

Once, I asked Dad how to change a tire. Mama wouldn't let me try. “Too dangerous. One slip and she'll crush her foot,” she said.

“You've got to be kidding,” Dad said. Even he thought Mama was crazy.

I watched Dad demonstrate and that was my tire-changing lesson, standing at a distance.

After I finished rinsing, Mama came and inspected it. Of course, it wasn't clean enough.

“What's this smudge on the bumper?” she asked, scraping the white streak with her pointy fingernails.

“It's a scratch. It doesn't come off,” I said.

“You scratched the car?”

I counted to three and said, “No. It's been there since we moved. Probably some whack-ass Miami driver.”

“Don't use that kind of language around me, young lady.”

“What kind?”

She shot me a look. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“Why bother fixing it? You never drive anywhere except school and the grocery store.”

“Quit giving me static,” she said.

I rubbed three times and the scratch wouldn't vanish. Mama snatched the cloth away and tried. I left her there, rubbing circles into the bumper.

When I stepped inside the house, I smelled something burning. Mama had left a saucepan on the stove, scorching up butter. You'd think that she would've noticed, after checking and rechecking every plugged-in appliance. I dumped the pan in the sink, cranked the faucet until it sizzled. Then I turned up the air-conditioning.

The stink had crept into my jeans. No use washing them. I had an urge to stuff them in the trash. Instead, I shoved them under my bed, along with the bags of bottle caps. I needed new clothes. Nothing I wore made any sense here. My T-shirts were thermal. My prettiest tops were sweaters with pom-poms.

I could picture myself at fifty, bitching about the weather, wearing pearls and a skirt that dragged on the ground. Right now, the only nonembarrassing thing in my closet was a pair of too-white sneakers. Thayer and I had decorated them with Sharpie pens. This took place in class, when he drew a heart on both soles. I added wings so my feet could fly. We kept doodling, but only on the bottom. Otherwise Mama would notice. She would say that I had ruined the shoes and, therefore, wasted her hard-earned money.

Lying on my bed, I heard mosquitoes whine and hover. Ducking under the covers didn't help. They could smell me breathing. Their bites stung like a flu shot. I got used to carrying Kleenex and wiping off the blood. My blood.

Mama was a Kleenex freak. She tucked folded sheets into her waistband. Who took the time to fold Kleenex? I was forever finding trampled sheets on the bathroom floor. I figured that she draped the toilet seat with tissue to avoid contact with germs. The fact that this had crossed my mind was proof of my insanity. No doubt, it was genetic.

I lit a candle to cover up the stink of my jeans, put on a fresh pair, then headed back to the kitchen and poured a bowl of cereal. That was all my queasy stomach could tolerate. On top of the box was Dad's “copy,” his stupid paragraphs about healthy hearts and granola. Out of all the organic crap Mama could've bought, why did she pick Dad's brand? I pondered this unsolved mystery while dumping in a healthy splash of chocolate milk. Dad was the only human I knew (besides me) who ate cereal 24/7. I'd find him poking around the cupboard in the middle of the night, searching for a clean spoon or a cup. Once, I caught him eating cornflakes out of a wooden salad bowl at 2 a.m.

“Don't tell your mother,” he had whispered, making sure to rinse the bowl and put it back just
the way he'd found it. She always figured it out anyway. Unless Mama scrubbed a dish herself, it was never clean enough.

I carried the bowl back to my room—a major no-no, eating where a crumb might fall on the carpet and stain it for life. I put the bowl on my bed. I had the urge to leave and stand in the hallway, so I did. Of course, this made no sense. I counted to three and tapped the wall, feeling like a computer with a virus. Error. Please restart. I was back on my bed, slurping the last chocolaty drop, when Mama barged in.

“Something burning?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“Yeah. Our dinner,” I said.

Mama stood there, sniffing like a bloodhound. “It's freezing in here. Did you touch the air conditioner?”

“Yes, I touched it. And I also turned it on.”

“Don't get fresh with me,” she said. “The electric bill is going to be sky-high this month. I have the gauge set on seventy-two. It must stay on that number. Understand?”

I nodded. Seven and two were odd and even.
Definitely not friends.

She looked at the empty bowl. “Were you eating in here? You know that's not allowed. And why are you eating so close to dinner?”

Then she did something that sent me over the edge. She stepped out of the room, as if testing the air quality of the hallway, and came back and sat on my bed. This meant that she had entered my room twice. In a flash, I pictured her dying in the hospital, all because she hadn't obeyed my ritual of threes.

“Mama, please get out,” I blurted, much louder than I had intended.

“Excuse me?” Mama said. She didn't move.

I subtracted two from seven, super fast, inside my head. It didn't work. When I started whispering, Mama turned and gave me a look that said:
You've lost it.

“Can you leave for a second and come back?” I asked.

She glared. “Fin, what has gotten into you?”

The number two. That's what.

I needed three to keep her safe. My rituals had become so big, I was asking Mama to perform them too.

Mama ignored me. She rushed over to my candle—a twenty-three-ounce jar of Dreamsicle Bay—and blew it out. “I thought the house was on fire. Look at all that smoke,” she said. “That's a cheap wick. Did you know that candles leak dangerous levels of lead into the air?”

Here we go again.

I glanced up and saw a mosquito glued to her forehead. Mama wouldn't smack it, though she worried about West Nile all the time. She never killed bugs, not even moths, which she'd cup with her bare hands and fling outside. They'd probably die after losing the dust on their wings. Mama said I'd go blind if the dust got in my eyes. I didn't believe her, but their squishy bodies freaked me out.

She kept talking and I couldn't focus. All I could see was that bloodsucking bug on her face. So I reached over and shooed it off. I shooed two more times, although the bug had gone. I needed to make it even.

Mama snatched my wrist. “Stop touching me,” she said.

“There was something gross on your face,” I
said. That didn't come out right.

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“No,” I said.

“When was the last time you washed this sweater?” she asked, picking a speck of lint off my sleeve. If I had noticed, I would've beat her to it. When she did it again, I saw they were paint flakes, not lint. Let's talk about the dangerous levels of lead in paint.

Now I had to scrub the mosquito germs from my hands. I headed toward the door. She dodged in front of it, cornering me.

“Mama, I can't breathe,” I shouted. “I need space.”

“You have a bedroom all to yourself,” she said. “Most teenage girls would be grateful.”

“What teenage girls? I haven't met them.”

“Why don't you come outside and take a walk with me?” she asked. “It's a nice day.”

“It's hot. And the mosquitoes are wicked.”

Mama said, “Fine. You can stay in here.”

I didn't consider this a jail sentence.

At exactly six o'clock, she heated TV dinners in
a plastic tray: the kind that came with three different triangular compartments. Since triangles added up to good luck, I had no problem chowing down on Salisbury steak, lumpy potatoes, and frozen peas, as long as the stuff didn't touch.

If Dr. Calaban took notes on my eating habits, she'd think we lived in a trailer. Mama and I weren't exactly living the high life after the divorce, but we weren't surviving off food stamps, either. Mama just couldn't care less about cooking. She'd rather nuke a microwave dinner than plan a meal with the basic food groups. Was it four or five? I couldn't remember. Those weren't my numbers anyway.

My eyes darted around the room. I could still smell the burned saucepan, my cancerous candle, paint fumes, mosquito blood, and moth dust. There was lint in my lungs, knitting its way through my throat. Living here was a health hazard. Sooner or later, we were going to get sick.