Fishbowl

My father was proud of himself: it was a stroke of relocation genius. The trick had been that it was already November when we'd driven into town, and the real estate agents were rolling their thumbs behind their desks at the start of the low season. One of them had sensed that my father was a good person to placate, and winked: “Let me make a phone call” and right there in front of us he'd convinced Madame Dupas to rent us her seafront studio for the winter months. “As long as they're out by May,” we heard her through the receiver, “it's fine by me.” A few days later we were carrying our suitcases out of the car and into a majestic white edifice at the foot of La Grande Plage.You might have seen La Grande Plage in a classic French film or on a vintage poster. Its long, graceful curve of sand is strewn by large rocks, which, at marée basse, gives a bit of a wild feel. The Atlantic comes in and out in ravening tides, and even in winter you can spot surfers bobbing about the waves, shivering giddy in their wetsuits. The tourists in their padded coats and wide sunglasses—making their way, against the backdrop of colonnades, to the casino or a plateau of oysters—have the relaxed self-assurance of extras on a movie set.Looking south, see the beach fade into cliffs, a lighthouse on a bed of deep green. Turn around and the sand ends against a bedrock over which sits a great white building with blue trims and a cylindrical edge: a castle overlooking the ocean. You might assume a fancy hotel, but Residence Bellevue is an apartment building and, during the winter of 2003 when my father and I moved in, it was empty as a phantom ship.“It's like we're already on the boat!” my father rejoiced. He'd been nurturing a dream that one day the two of us would embark on a sailboat and leave everything behind. Not that we had a lot to leave behind. Since my mother's drowning, our world had become smaller and smaller, closing down to the autarky of our companionship. Not because my mother had been the one widening our world—not at all—it was just our way to mourn, or rather to avoid mourning: an unyielding contraction onto the smallest possible iteration of our lives.The suicide had pushed us out of a realm of normalcy which we had never truly inhabited in the first place. We'd tiptoed around it, when my mother was alive, pantomimed through it—sometimes grotesquely, sometimes deftly—but now the pretense could be dropped: going to school, having friends over, my father working on his book . . . we gave it all up. I'd dropped out of high school. We'd become estranged from the rest of our family, who, according to my father, had betrayed us. Even our dog Lola had died in Barcelona six months ago, so we no longer needed to go outside to walk her. We were left alone together, staring at the Atlantic Ocean through the window, waiting to be shipped away, one fine day, into a world that wouldn't be this one.My father and I lived as an old retired couple: platonically, co-dependently, and like clockwork. We had our habits and our rituals—most of them revolving around food and TV: dinner on our laps with the eight o'clock news, Saturday night pizza in front of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Wednesday lunch at the brasserie down the street.Within the confines of this soft routine, I had become better than ever at attuning and attending to his moods—a subtle art that nobody, to my knowledge, had ever mastered until now. Proof was, I was here, by his side, when no one else was. This I took as a victory, a validation, and a privilege.Part of it was about rules—details to remember: how my father liked his tea, which newspaper he read on what day, never to address him before his second morning cigarette. There were people who shouldn't be mentioned, topics to stay clear from, storms to nip in the bud. But much of the work was more nuanced; it required skill, intuition: I learned to overinterpret sighs, intonations, body language. I say “overinterpret,” but I was interpreting the appropriate amount. Everyone else until now had underinterpreted my father. Still, sometimes I fell short. Mishaps still happened despite my most thorough care—something out of left field: I'd been distracted at lunch, and my response to an important point he made had been, in his opinion, dismissive. Or he'd picked up a book left out on the dinner table, leafed through it and judged it vulgar, below me, what is this shit, why aren't you reading Hemingway? I thought I raised a more worthy daughter.Sometimes that was as far as the punishment went—a lapidary assassination of my character, as if the jury was perpetually out on my worthiness and he was ready to receive a guilty verdict any minute. Sometimes it was a hotter, messier rage, a real storm—the remonstrances yelled, my apologies weeped, my body reduced, beggarly. But it was the silent treatment I feared most, because my father's will was unbreakable—he'd never lost one such battle, not in the army, not in the desert, not in prison—I wasn't going to be the first one to beat him at that game; I was good, but I was 16. Breaking the silent treatment was tricky: just any apology wouldn't work. I had to surveil him, hunt for the right moment—too early and he'd still be fuming, too late and he'd be fuming at having been ignored—I'd have to come up with the perfect display of contrivance, the right explanation. I wasn't acting as much as I was being crafty. My apologies, if tactical, were always true: When, in the heat of the storm, I ever felt a jolt of rebellion, a sense that my behavior had not been as bad as it was being judged—a reflexive sense of injustice—by the time he was done with me, I'd buried the mutinous, sacrilegious feelings to make room for genuine remorse; I would thank him for correcting me, for not letting me go astray.These hiccups were the exception, however, not the norm, and our existence remained, under my constant vigilance, quite tranquil. In the morning, I walked to the grocery store and picked up familiar foods from my childhood—tomato ravioli, croque-monsieurs, my father's favorite cookies, the coffee pudding cups he liked—as much as I could carry back home in one journey. Sometimes I was too ambitious, and the bags pulled on my arms and reddened my fingers, but it felt a triumph, getting home with enough provisions to make it through the weekend without having to go out again. Sometimes I'd experiment, try a new recipe; it was a gamble: If it turned out to be a success, he'd ask me to make it again and again. To my immense delight, I had not just performed as expected, I had done a special trick, circus seal somersaulting through the flames. If it went badly, it was another story: I still remember the time I added crème fraiche to the peach sauce of the Magret de Canard—the quality of my father's disappointment had made clear that this was not a casual mistake but an error of judgment which put into question my intelligence, my ability to be in the world. What were you thinking? What could possibly be going through your head? To this day, if I make a mistake cooking for someone, even if it's my kindest, softest friend, even an American friend who has no expectations whatsoever about Magret de Canard, even if the mistake is honest and barely noticeable, the broth is underseasoned, the lasagna too dry, I feel in my body the dread, the crushing.They say the brain is infinitely plastic, that my neural pathways are dying to be rewired; how many mistakes do I have to be forgiven for to convince my body we have reached another country?We didn't talk about my mother's death except to hold it up as a scarecrow. “If not for having to care for you,” my father said, “I would have followed your mother into the river. I hope you know that.” It was meant as a compliment, I could see that, but I took it also as the great responsibility that it was.I too brandished her fate as a flag: “You promise you won't kill yourself like Maman?” I whispered through a door cracked open after an explosive incident about a piece of mail I wasn't supposed to have received, at the end of which he had slapped me and stormed out. I'd moved swiftly away from the personal shock—physical violence was rare enough, the result of only the most acute escalations—and onto the terror that he, eaten up by the guilt of his gesture, might be in danger. I had to go check on him, ensure his survival. This is how seriously I took my responsibilities. I was so good.In the seven months we spent at Residence Bellevue, not once did it occur to me—or my father—that I was depressed. It wasn't the diagnosis that I lacked; my father and I hadn't seen a medical professional since we last took my mother to one of hers. (And look how that turned out! my father would exclaim, vindicated in his lifelong suspicion of external expertise.) It was the sense that anything was wrong: This was a good life, a lucky life, all that was possible. The passions I felt despite myself—the dullness, the longing, the aching—I believed they were wrong, signs of my own inadequacy, my sinfulness.Every depression is different. Not just from person to person, but within one person, over time. It is both maddeningly independent from external factors, and completely molded by context. Depression is its own liquid, taking the shape of different vases, different underground tunnels, aquifers shaped by rock and time. Some depressions are violent, urgent, in your face. They stop your will, or require mobilization. Some depressions are quiet. A slow sinking. An extinguishment. You don't feel clobbered over the head as much as pulled down from below.The early afternoon was a danger zone, that moment right after I'd cleared up lunch and was left to contemplate a maddening array of hours until dinner. My father had retired to his room to nap and I'd find myself alone staring at the ocean through the window and the life force would drain out of me like a sudden elevator drop. To combat the vertigo, I'd lay down in my bed. The blinds drawn to protect myself from the harshness of daylight even through the lid of gray, wrapping myself in blankets to protect my skin from the aggression of the air, I played sad music on my computer, the same few songs, formations of low notes, minor keys, whimpering guitars, I let the noise envelop me, become an extra layer of defense. Bundled up, safe enough, I could finally cry. The pain swelled and I let myself be overtaken by it, a corporeal invasion of despair, twisting the nerves around my bones from my ankles to the top of my head. At the height of the wave I would whine, whimper, then wail, my voice muffled by the blankets, feeling myself becoming the wound, being nothing other for a moment than my screams, and then coming back to myself exsanguine, shipwrecked. Soon enough, it would be time to make dinner.I tried to build dams against the afternoon flood. “Now that you're no longer bogged down by school, you can let your creativity bloom!” my fathered had decreed, and I executed myself. So, on some afternoons, after clearing out lunch and as my father lay down for this nap, I would set up my acrylics on the green dining-room table, put on my headphones—the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Radiohead's OkComputer, the White Stripes’ White Blood Cells—and start painting. After a while, my mind would quiet, begin to discern a place less encumbered, where I could apprehend my feelings without being throttled by them as I followed the paintbrush with my heart, engaged in a slow dance. I painted strawberry fields forever, pink and red paisley under cotton ball clouds; mossy forests turning into fiery abstractions; I painted waifs on the edge of cliffs, considering. I'd come out of the experience drained, dazed, as after a run I would never have taken. I'd take my work to my father like a dog returning the ball—“Woah!” he'd say, raising himself from the horizon of the couch to verticality in order to hang the canvas in a place of honor. His pride gave me glitches of hope that I was maybe something after all and this suspicion was a relief, but also a great sadness because who else would ever know?I longed to be known with all my heart, with all the atoms in my estranged body. I longed for an Other. Every soaring in me felt aimless if not shared. And I could feel my blood boiling with soarings. I, a bottomless cup overflowing, with all the thoughts that the changes of adolescence elicited in me going to waste—and I believed they were such good thoughts! Original, bold, tender, like nothing I'd heard or even read before, and no one to listen! Every grandiloquent feeling its own masterpiece without an audience. I wanted to find someone to write poems to, then wash their hair and pick flowers for them; fall asleep to the smell of their breath, caress the soft skin on the inside of their wrist. I wanted to share my I had too much of my and another body who would be to receive This I my father ever it, he'd put me back in my were of believed him, but I be I I believed there people who could know it because of I'd read and music I'd but I didn't know where to find To a I took myself on around I'd down the Grande the the beach in winter with its and its an place to in I had a of the beach from my window and I'd surveil it for a that might look like they were at the in a or Or maybe they would be against a rock a at at and I could down as I to be just by and the and no we'd walk to a to and talk about and what it how we could find the my no such ever on the beach to be going or being with someone I'd take my the to on which was green and as a as if I'd on I But I had no what to look I'd just reached the where I could no longer reading had no for the I'd in I was convinced had no to my It wasn't even a question of time it was that their to the realm of people who lived real in a world outside of I would always be here, inside in my dinner for my father, all of my all of my in my mind before I fell I of and had no where to didn't know much about My father had me that it was all could write one of if he'd just wanted to to he he had too much The he had all The only my father days were of the of the French and which he at the spent time in because I liked the feel of the the that to an My the but in a day, I on the new His had just been in I wasn't a of if I was being I liked as you the rest felt too for my I But I he'd and I was in people who My mother's suicide a had such care to avoid I the to the over a blue and no and a with the which I home under my like of went over my shape of his did not I into a as I read The to feel like taking me to a where I could hold in my and feel to its a where pain felt not a few days I an about and my a was onto a lot of said, but he was about about you had to you had to rage, you had to yourself into it and it all up. I was in I'd been to the since I'd them the and I thought we'd all that had to the of it all and that is the and you know that for what felt it felt to my rage, until had felt like external I had to had never to me that they could be I my father who was right and he he them felt like my most I my father, his I the people I'd just if they me any I the in the I I believed their gave me to their which I was to I was seriously to me felt not like a but a a longing, sometimes sometimes always was a or I fell in with someone new on the on not much more than a or a I fell in with an just because he'd My by the enough, I was that his and was a soft and which would no be by my my was on a I could let my go I would in bed at to Radiohead's my of the moment up one morning with the that we could not one more day a few in a and taking a of to my It would be by the time he'd My father would be and I'd be but not so without a he'd take my and we'd walk down to the Grande to the of the Atlantic was that this not people on the not up at my not away from not that I was their What I with genuine could possibly be going on in their with I as the and to My was a at that and what was with I took this for as a feeling of of the as and was a I would carry for a long but never was it as as as that winter in who only come to in the months the the the the the bedrock our like the low to the for the of the ocean at I didn't any time We would be by the morning, I make my way to the morning to pick one its from a of its staring out from the the all the way In the I it, through it with a in the of its and as only to them into another feeling it on a bed of open the to let out the out of of make their way back to the ocean. The the at my mother's let out a I if a of made it back to the as over all left is the of the on the white and blue my father and I back and with We on the couch and on the to the the world to the invasion of it, a with and hair by the pride more than We the first of the on the eight o'clock with and safe from any or to look of around the world with immense only been to one in my just a few months the made it through the first of the and of into the We happened to be through at the and I was to go my father in the long as his old friend, went to the of felt like my first I of felt the of the carry me up, out raised my to the my breath, I down the of my and for a few hours to the world. feeling my and tender, like after a I when I would ever be to experience this there are no against the in of the of tourists and with in the of I write on a piece of and it at my window, the of my to the world not just but in here, of