Lying Read Free Page B

How did I feel? I’ll tell you. We were in a plane, going backward. Before, I had watched the tawny sun lionize the sky, and now, through the Boeing’s bubble windows, I watched it set; I watched it soil the sky and burn up a bird and take every cloud and taint it. We zoomed through the air, held up by nothing but hope, and at any moment, I knew, we could crash.
    Also, my head throbbed. Someone was playing the piano in my head, and the wooden notes kept bonging my brain.
    I puked in a bag and that gave me some relief.
    My mother must have heard me puking, and said, from the seat in front of me, “Just give the waste to the stewardess, Lauren.”
    We landed in the dark. We took a taxi home in the dark.That night, finally, she came to me. She stood over me in my bed for a while, and she seemed entranced. Or maybe it was I who was entranced. No, I think it was her, actually. She stood over me, her eyes roving me from head to foot—this daughter of hers, this grand mal, this big badness—and then, finally, she touched my head like it was hot.
    •  •  •
    In Beth Israel Hospital, where my mother took me the next day, I sat in a small room and drew clocks, and houses, and put together red cubes to make red-and-white patterns. “What happened?” my pediatrician, Dr. Patterson, asked.
    “I smelled something funny,” I said. “I remember, before I fell, I smelled a funny thing.”
    “What was it?” he said.
    I searched for the words. Now I know that, prior to seizures, in states called auras, people frequently smell strange things. I’ve been in seizure support groups and heard the wackiest olfactory tales, the woman who was hounded by the smell of charred steak, another by the odor of a past lover’s shampoo. The smells live, and though doctors claim they are purely physiological phenomena, without mental meaning, I cannot help but think the smells have significance; we smell what we want, or cannot allow ourselves to want; we smell our own stink, we smell our sin, we smell the tang of an unspoken hope.
    “Lobster,” I said.
    “You smelled lobster,” the doctor repeated, writing it down.
    “Lobster?” my mother said. She raised an eyebrow. She was holding her square purse to her chest.
    “Yes,” I said. “I smelled the lobster. I smelled salty lobster and butter.”
    “Lobster and butter, what a meal that would’ve been,” my mother said.
    The doctor looked up, confused. “Excuse me?” he said.
    I giggled.
    “And the green gunk too, I smelled that.”
    “That’s enough, Lauren,” my mother said. “You’re losing your credibility.”
    But she had a small smile on her face, and, well, just for the sake of the story let’s say she even licked her lips a little bit, and that was the first time I realized how, through illness, I might be able to give her good food.
    •  •  •
    There were a lot of tests—the Wada Test, the Ray Figure Drawing Test, the Wechsler Memory Scales Test, the Digit Span Test. I took an IQ test, where, according to my mother, I scored in the genius range, but we all know she never told the truth. I had an electroencephalogram, little suckers hooked up to my head and my brain waves rolling out of a machine like a receipt from a cash register. Ribbons and ribbons of brain waves, and later, when the doctor showed them to us, we could see, my mother and I, how in some places the waves were smooth, but in others, spiky as stiletto heels, and in still others, a series of rapid round
u
’s, like this—
UUUUUUUUUU
—a language gone awry.
    “She has epilepsy,” I heard her whisper to someone on the phone, Nance, maybe, or Emma. “She has epilepsy, but so did van Gogh, you know.”
    She asked for a clipping of my brain waves and took them home, and a change came over her. She seemed to almost like the illness. She seemed disgusted, which I would have expected, but then a moment later, I saw her looking at me with wishes in her eyes, as though she, too, might like to