After a week of lying awake with the sentence, I finally confessed to my mother: “Mrs. Y. said we have to love God more than our parents.” My mother looked at me and spoke a single word: “Nonsense.” She was sitting at the kitchen table when she said it, and I was standing very close to her. I can still feel the relief in my chest and a lightness coursing through my body. I turned around, and suddenly weightless, I felt as if I were floating down the stairs to my room.
When my daughter was three years old, she looked up at me and said, “Mom, when I grow up, will I still be Sophie?” I said yes because it’s true that a name follows a body over time, but the three-year-old who asked the question bears little resemblance to the grown-up young woman I know today. We need to think of the self as a continuum, a steady story over time. The mind is always searching for similarities, associations, repetitions, because they create meaning. When recognizable repetitions are disrupted, people say, “He wasn’t himself,” or, “I don’t know what came over me. I’m not myself today.” A few years ago, I listened to a woman who was both a doctor and a manic-depressive speak in public about a memoir she had written. She described the end of her manic episodes by saying, “I returned to myself.” But strictly speaking, that logic is false. Whether people are besieged by a chemical imbalance or thrown into a panic or depression by a wrenching loss, their inconsistencies also belong to the self. It’s the feeling or impression of foreignness that makes us want to cast off the interruptions, explosions, lapses, and inconsistencies — all the material in ourselves that we refuse to integrate into a narrative.
I didn’t know what to do with what I saw in my mind those nights I lay thinking over the sentence — Abraham’s hand clutching the knife and raising it in the air as he prepares to murder his son, to cut open his body. For me, whatever the theological explanation, it was an image of vengeance, rage, and impending mutilation. Many years after that fateful Sunday school class, I sought help from a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, where I was a graduate student. I felt very calm when I walked into Dr. R.’s office, ready to explicate my various troubles and anxieties. I sat down in a chair opposite him, looked him in the eyes, and all at once, without the slightest inner forewarning, burst into tears. He didn’t say a word, but I watched his hand move toward a box of Kleenex, conveniently placed within arm’s reach, which he then handed over to me. It was a practiced, knowing gesture. Even at the time, I found a touch of comedy in the scene and wondered how many other distraught graduate students had shed unexpected tears in this doctor’s office. It’s a sorry little fact that we are often as mysterious to ourselves as we are to others.
I visited Dr. R. for several weeks, but I no longer recall how many. I talked a lot about life and love and my nerves, but there is one comment he made that stands out with the sublime distinctness that only recognition can bring. He said that he thought I was terribly afraid of violence in myself. He then pointed out that he was absolutely convinced that I was incapable of violence either against myself or against anyone else. As soon as the statement was out of his mouth, I felt huge relief. It was as if someone had come along and unloosened a long fat rope that had bound me from neck to toe.
Only in the act of writing this have I understood that Dr. R.’s words echoed the single word my mother had spoken years earlier: “Nonsense.”
A field trip to the state hospital in Faribault: The room is large and rectangular, with tall windows that line one of its blank walls. I walk down the aisle between rows of beds. The windows are on my left. A gray light streams through them from outside. I walk slowly and say nothing. Someone, probably the guide, a man or a woman, I don’t remember, says that this room is for the “profoundly retarded.” In one bed there is a boy, a big child, perhaps ten or eleven, dressed only in diapers wrapped around his slender hips. His hair is dark and silky, and he lies on his back with one cheek turned onto the pillow. The flesh of his thin but flaccid body looks like an infant’s — beautiful, white and un-marred. His eyes have no focus. He drools. And then there’s aview. I see the parking lot from a distance — three orange school buses in weak sunlight and, behind them, tall and mostly bare trees. I can’t say with any certainty whether the view is from inside or outside the asylum, but because I seem to be looking down at the buses, I suspect that I saw it from inside, perhaps from a second-story window. Why that child is fixed inside me is a question I can’t fully answer, but I think the sight of him mirrors some speechless fear and sorrow in myself. In him I saw an image of abandonment and isolation greater than anything 1 have ever seen before or since. And why has the image of the buses stayed with me? Perhaps they were the promise of going home.
One may wonder why the school authorities imagined that trooping ten- and eleven-year-olds through the grim wards of a state hospital would be a beneficial outing. We weren’t studying anything that even distantly touched on the subjects of retardation, madness, or state asylums. Our fifth-grade teacher, Mr. L., had certainly not initiated the excursion. (It was probably an annual duty organized by invisible authorities. The following year, we toured a museum dedicated entirely to farm accidents, in which we were treated to life-size models of arms severed by threshing machines and tegs mashed in combines.) Mr. L. was young and soft-spoken and respectful. Although I wasn’t at all aware of it at the time, I suspect his kindness gave me energy. His classroom was more like my own home, and in that environment I thrived. I wrote, directed, and (selfishly) starred in a play mounted in the school theater; gathered signatures from every pupil in the fifth and sixth grades to petition the principal for the right to talk during lunch {an action that failed miserably); threw myself into writing and illustrating a novel for English called Carrie at Baxter Manor; and discovered a passion for the abolitionists. I found new heroes in Harriet Tubman and Booker T. Washington and struggled through the Victorian language of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, all the while riding high on a wave of what children call “popularity.”
The following year, my old wound reopened. It began in February and lasted until the school year ended. For reasons that were obscure to me, I precipitously fell from favor with the girls who had once liked me. I turned into a despised outcast — the butt of cruel jokes and torments. I was jostled, pinched, and pushed. Every remark I made was met with snickering and whispers from the girls who by some stroke of magic had become omnipotent in that tiny world of sixth-grade pubescent girlhood. I lived in a state of bewildered anguish for months. Like most stories of female bullying, mine began with a single girl. I am sure she had detected my bruised inner sanctum and took aim. Had I been tougher, I might have resisted her machinations. She came from a family in which the sibling rivalry was ferocious. Her desire to hurt me was no doubt homegrown, but I had few tools at the time for analysis of her psyche, and even if I had, they probably wouldn’t have done me much good. Open hostility — making sure I was kept out of games and conversations — mingled with surreptitious cruelty, false acts of kindness to trick me into believing that I had been accepted once again. These deceits were worse. The duplicity sickened me. I drooped and dragged my sorry self around like a kicked dog. My only defense would have been genuine indifference. I had seen it in others and would have loved it for myself, but this quality evaded me. I wanted to be liked and admired and couldn’t fathom what had decided my abject fate. One day, however, I returned to my desk and found that a drawing of mine had been marked up and torn. My enemies had made a strategic error. A small breeze of comprehension blew through me. I was the best artist in my class, and I knew it. My pictures were universally praised, and I was proud of my gift. Desecrating a drawing was a sign of envy.