Playing House by Lauren Slater Read Free Book Online

here again; no, don’t give me a match. I don’t want a conflagration just so I can know I love him, but what about, tonight, a controlled campfire, after the children are asleep, in the cold November air? I can picture it, the forked flames, the delicious smell of lit logs, our voices, when we speak, very visible. I see silver smoke—a sign of safety—and also a time for us to talk. If I can see it, then does this mean we might do it? We’d have to bundle up and find the wood. We’d have to strike a match and touch its tip to what was once a tree. Who knows, maybe we’d even lie back on the frosted grass and watch the smoke spin up. On and on, up and up, the sky would turn us tiny, together, two imperfect people so imperfectly paired, these facts ashes in the face—in the space—of vastness. The fire would crackle; the heat would seep; we’d press together and tilt our faces skyward, smoke rising, this couple called
us
watching their ghosts go.

5
Uncurling
    Every house has its finest piece of furniture: the heirloom bed your Aunt Bonnie gave you, the Chippendale table; in mine, it’s my medicine cabinet. My medicine cabinet is huge, handsome, with painted angels and delicate scrollwork rimming a mirror of finest glass. Open it up. Inside this antique are bottles filled with all manner of modern pills—Prozac in sleek, bicolored bullets; shining orange Klonopins; little lithiums in a dazzle of white. I take these pills every day, to keep my mind intact.
    I have mental illness. That’s an unfortunate phrase,
mental illness
, as old fashioned as the cabinet that houses my cures. I wish for a different descriptor, something both mythic and modern, like
chemical craziness
, like
brain bruise
. My particular form of illness is called obsessive-compulsive disorder, with a dash of depression thrown in. Years have gone by when my whole head was hot, when hospitals have been a haven. I had my first hospitalization when I was fourteen, because I could not stop cutting myself. I no longer cut. Now I count, in increments of three. I count to keep planes from falling out of the sky, to keep the moon in orbit. I count for luck and safety.
    My red-headed husband and I did what married people do: we got pregnant. I will never forget the test I took. Six in the morning, standing in the half-dark bathroom, watching a blue cross swim up on the white test wand,
yes
. The cross was a warning and a wish. I closed my eyes and said, “Go.”
    I did not want to have a child. Before she came to me, and before I came to love her, I dreaded the thought of motherhood, all those hours spent on the playground or in Chuck E. Cheese’s. I had heard women talk about “baby lust” and knew I possessed not a drip, not a drop, the drive towards procreation almost absolutely absent in me. My husband wanted our first. Motherhood went against my nature, which is brooding and acerbic and self-consumed. Plus there was my wayward mind, an issue. “And what about your illness?” friends said to me. “How will you mother when you struggle so much with anxieties and depression?” These are good questions. I’d spent my adolescence and young adulthood in mental hospitals, and then one day I swore I’d never go back. And I did not. I have not. I found my place and people. But still, the symptoms come, no matter what my will or situation. So here’s my question: Should a woman who is mentally ill become a mother? Are mental illness and motherhood by nature mutually exclusive? Was this a mistake, and a selfish one to boot?
    My doctor, the one who has treated me for more than a decade, was definitive. “It is dangerous for you to have a baby,” he pronounced. “You have too many periods of instability.” Still, something in me said
go
.
    Months went by. My belly bulged. Sometimes people asked me whether I was worried I might pass my bad genes on to my child. I didn’t mind that question even though, when I think about it now, it seems crude and