In Which We Think It Is Great That You Tried It

Transparent Frames

by JEAN HANNAH EDELSTEIN

Field hockey was something that occurred to me as a good idea in the final months before I fell ill, with what felt like madness. With what several doctors agreed was severe clinical depression. The field hockey season began just a few days before being alive became a Sisyphean task, before my first thought in the morning was that I should kill myself and my last thought at night was that I had failed.

When my mother would pick me up from a game and drive me to my psychiatric appointments, still wearing my uniform, depression and hockey seemed separate. But now the connection seems clear to me, that I was immersing myself in something that was so unlikely, in an attempt to swerve and escape the blackness.

As well as a rebellion against my self, field hockey was a rebellion against my family. We were cerebral, not sporting. Our athletic narratives were hued with failure, and that's how we liked it.

On summer trips back to her hometown on the west coast of Scotland, my mother would drive us — me and my older brother and younger sister — past the field where she was made to play field hockey in her own teenage years.

We had to march two miles there and two miles back in the course of a school day, my mother would say, Just for gym class. It was at the end of the day and one of my friends lived right by the field but they still made her walk all the way home.

That this marching and playing happened in the rain was moot. Everything in Scotland happened in the rain.

My father was on his high school tennis team in one of Chicago’s tony North Shore suburbs. He was the second-worst seed, something he cited with the special pride of someone who wasn’t the worst player, but who would not have wanted to have been any better. The tennis accomplishment of which my father was most proud (the only tennis accomplishment that my father ever mentioned) was the time that he convinced all his teammates to hold their rackets left-handed in the yearbook photo.  He took us to the local public library to show us. There he was, with the other boys, all smiling with their smoothed, side-parted hair and white shorts. The joke was somewhat lost on me because I had never held a tennis racket. 

Twenty-five years after he graduated, when my father was inducted into his high school’s hall of fame, he was introduced at the awards ceremony by the tennis coach, the only person still working at the school who knew him.

He was not good at tennis, the coach said, So it is a good thing he is good at physics.

Everyone laughed.

‘Organized sports’, as he and maybe no one else called them, were things that my father had strong opinions about; unpopular opinions. My father’s view was that organized sports weren’t good for kids. Coaches were bullies. Adolescent sporting rivalries were unhealthy. Fathers put too much pressure on their children to succeed. Mothers shouldn’t be spending their lives shuttling their offspring from field to field in minivans. My father believed that kids should play disorganized sports, good old-fashioned pick-up games in parks and vacant lots. My father believed this as if good old-fashioned pick-up games existed, as if vacant lots were still a thing.

My father’s prejudices were confirmed when my brother, at seven or eight, played in the community soccer league. My brother was on a team of kids whose fathers were not that interested in organized sports. My brother’s team played against teams of kids whose fathers were very interested in organized sports. These very interested fathers were the coaches; they wore whistles and ran up and down the field, shouting. Some of them wore cleats. These fathers didn’t stand on the sidelines drinking coffee out of styrofoam cups and doing fond chuckles when their children kicked the ball in the wrong direction. During the course of the season, my brother’s team scored zero goals, a fact that my father cited for years to come every time someone suggested that perhaps my brother or I or our younger sister should participate in something athletic.

Zero goals, said my father, This is the problem with organized sports.

My brother’s interest in soccer waned. He moved on to math competitions, which he had a chance of winning. My father approved of organized maths.

And thus my announcement that I was going to play field hockey was received by my parents with the kind of sympathy and swallowed mirth with which they had responded to my request, two years earlier, to attend a Christian summer camp with my best friends. My friends had given me the brochure, a shiny trifold with photos of kids hiking and swimming and praising. I’d hidden it under my mattress, like pornography, for a couple of days, before I mustered the courage to show it to my mother, persuaded myself that she could be persuaded.

You can’t go to church camp, she said, immediately. It’s for Christians.

I’ll ignore the religious parts, I said. I was desperate to go canoeing and make things with macrame; to return to seventh grade in possession of a camp boyfriend who I’d never see again but always talk about.

You can’t go to church camp, said my mother. We’re going to Scotland for the summer, to see your grandmother.

That is so unfair, I said. It’s just going to rain.

My desire to play field hockey was rooted in a similar motivation. I wanted to be normal. To be well-rounded. I wanted to have the kind of American youth I’d learned about in movies: a jacket with a letter sewn on the sleeve; swishy blonde hair; at least a fair shake at being Homecoming Queen. Field hockey was a gateway: a preppy, cute uniform (a red plaid miniskirt; white knee socks for home games, red for away); the fact that it was only played by girls.

While much like Christian summer camp, field hockey was not really for the likes of me, it was hard for my parents to prevent it. The freshman team was a no-cut affair, so I didn’t need to have any athletic ability.  All I needed was a will and a way. The way was simply to spend the last week of summer before high school began doing shuttle runs and drilling dribbles. Plus spending just as many hours trying to style my frizzy hair into a smooth ponytail that would bob back and forth like a pendulum while I ran after the ball, so that from the back I could be mistaken for someone named Brittany.

I was willing.

OK, said my father, Field hockey. Fine. I’ll take you to the sporting goods store for your mouthguard and cleats. But you need to wear eye protection, too.

Eye protection? I said.

You could lose an eye with one of those sticks in your face, my father said.

No one wears eye protection when they play field hockey, I said. It’s not on the equipment list.

They’re making a mistake, said my father. They’ll be sorry when they go blind. Anyway, it’s no problem. I’ll just get you some safety glasses from the lab.

The lab was where my father worked: a large multinational corporation’s global center for research and development, headquartered in the suburb where we lived. Lots of my classmate’s fathers worked in the lab. Probably some of the fathers of the girls on my field hockey team. But no one else’s father made her play field hockey in laboratory safety glasses.

The laboratory safety glasses my father gave me were massive things with thick, transparent plastic frames. They were not the laboratory safety glasses of a Brittany. They were the laboratory safety glasses of the daughter of a Scottish immigrant and and Ashkenazi Jew, of someone who’d never gotten a tan by the pool at a country club, drunk a wine cooler, loved a soccer player named Bryce. They were laboratory safety glasses that didn’t say In a couple of years I will be an unbeatable candidate for Homecoming Queen. My laboratory safety glasses said I am the kind of person who once tried to impress the boy I had a crush on by showily turning the pages of my unabridged edition of Anna Karenina.

They’ll fall off when I run, I said.

Ah, said my father. I’ll fix that.

He pulled a beige rubber band out of a junk drawer and cut the loop with a pair of scissors. He knotted the ends of the rubber band to the arms of the laboratory safety glasses, so that the rubber would wrap around my head, leaving a dent in my straight-ironed hair.

Hockey season started in earnest on the first day of high school. Depression arrived in the second week, when I woke with my alarm and found that the sense of self-loathing that had been slowly rising was now suffocating me. It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to go to math class. It was that I never wanted to wake up.

At first the diagnosis was ‘school refusal’. At first I just cried. Then I screamed until I could not breathe. My parents, exasperated, turned on the light and pulled the blankets off. I lay face down and tried to cry out enough tears to drown in. I screamed that I hated them, which was also a way of saying that I hated myself, and I screamed that I wanted to die, which was also a way of saying that I hated my parents.

Eventually, my parents would get tired. We’d all get tired. One of them would stay at home with me and then the next morning, maybe, after an hour or so, I’d gather the strength to go in to school. My father would drive me there, on his way to the lab. I’d be crying as we left the house and still crying when we pulled up to the school. Some mornings he’d stop in the parking lot of the grocery store next door to the school; I’d cry and he’d try to comfort me and he’d have a look on his face that I’d never seen before. My father looked helpless.

Some mornings when my shoulders stopped heaving and I caught my breath, I’d make it in to catch half of my second-period English class.

Some mornings my father had to drive me home again.

My parents started taking me to see some experts. The experts asked questions, looked for reasonss. The experts picked through all of my fourteen years of experience, searching for some probable cause. There wasn’t one.  Just an all-encompassing sense of horror at being alive.

Are you having a difficult time in school? the experts said, How are your grades?

No, I said, I wasn’t. I am now, because I don’t really go to school. I can’t.

Do you have many friends? the experts said.

Yes, I said.

Do you get along with your parents? the experts said.

Yes, I said. For all that I said that I hated them, the truth was that I loved my parents. The truth was that making me wear laboratory safety glasses while I played field hockey was maybe the worst thing that my parents had ever done to me.

The experts were stumped. They gave way to new, escalating experts.

My guidance counselor ceded to the school psychologist. The school psychologist suggested we consult my pediatrician. The pediatrician sent me to an adolescent psychologist. The adolescent psychologist suggested I should see a psychiatrist.

I lay with the family dog on the kitchen floor while my mother was on hold with the insurance company, with various doctors, her jaw set and determined. I watched her dial and take notes and through the fog I knew that it was a sign of how much she loved me. But when one of the psychiatrists at last agreed to see me, when my mother heaved that sigh of relief and called my father to come home at once, I refused to walk to the car. And when between them my parents strong-armed me into it I hurled my shoes out the window, and when my parents hurled my shoes back in and drove me to the psychiatrist’s office, I lay across the back seat of the car and I cried, and I cried.

The psychiatrist was a kind middle-aged man with a voice like a children’s television host. Not an obvious kind of person to understand a fourteen-year-old girl, but he listened to me tell him the things that I had told the other experts and he told me that he was going to prescribe anti-depressants. And then I cried some more. Still with self-hatred, but also with something like relief: relief that this wasn’t just how I was. Relief to be told, to just begin to believe, that hating myself was not just the way that I was supposed to be, but an illness.

If you have never suffered from clinical depression you might be surprised that I stayed on the field hockey team. On the days when I did make it to school, which were about half of the days, I attended the practices, I got on the bus to be driven to the games, I played my ten minutes before the coach put me back on the bench because I was terrible at field hockey. But if you have been depressed, then you might not be surprised that I stayed on the field hockey team: my brain felt like hell  but my public face remained, for the most part, intact. Quitting the team would mean admitting what was wrong with me: I had a mental illness. I was mentally ill. I was crazy. The thought of anyone knowing this made me want to die in a different way from how I generally wanted to die.

My fear of humiliation may have been a sign that a small bit of me did still want to live.

Expending all of my aggression on myself meant that in hockey, I was a natural at defense. I played fullback, so that I could stand by the goal and defer to my more strident teammates, their swinging hooked wooden sticks and their substantial, immovable calves.

That’s my ball! my teammates would shout, and I’d shrug step out of their way, dainty and compliant, because the truth was that I didn’t really want to hit the ball at all. What I really did want was a crippling sports injury: one that would require some kind of lavish bandaging, or even a cast. Crutches, a wheelchair, an inpatient hospital stay. I wanted to sit on the sidelines at our games with my visible injury, a vision of martyrdom, and I wanted people to feel sorry for me.

Look at Jean, they would say. Isn’t she brave? Taking one for the team, and now sitting on the bench, a vision of martyrdom! We feel sorry for her.

I wanted this because when you are fourteen years old and you have severe clinical depression, no one outside of your family tells you that you that you are brave. No one tells you that they are sorry that you’re not well. No one congratulates you for staying alive every day that you do it. No one tells you that they hope you will feel better soon. None of these things happen because no one knows that you are very ill, because you don’t tell anyone, because you don’t want anyone to know that you are crazy. 

On the day when the girl who played left forward took a stick to the face, breaking her nose, I gathered around her with the other girls as she wept. We screamed sympathetic screams while the coach applied first aid and flagged down a parent to drive her to the emergency room. I watched the hot red blood gush out of my teammate’s face and stain her white jersey. I wished it was mine.

She should have been wearing safety glasses, my father said, when I told him what happened. She’s lucky she didn’t lose an eye.

My father only came to watch one of my field hockey games; he and my mother had both missed many days of work to look after me. They would not leave me home alone when I was at my worst, for a reason that neither of them ever stated, but which we all knew.

But he left the laboratory early one afternoon and drove to the field to watch me in the final game of the season. It was one of those sunny, crisp days made for apple-cheeked girls named Brittany, and as I laced up my cleats and put on my shinguards I felt for a moment as if I liked myself. I ran after the ball and I hit it a couple of times, good noisy thwacks, and my father cheered, took photos, did fond chuckles.

Afterwards, my father hugged me, and it was like we hadn’t spent three mornings the previous week screaming at each other; like he and my mother hadn’t had to beg me the night before to take my medication; like they weren’t trying every day to save my life. It was like I was a normal American teenage girl, playing field hockey in a kicky little miniskirt, the light of a late-October afternoon glinting golden in the lenses of her laboratory safety glasses.

We got into the car for the drive home.

So, said my father, that’s field hockey.

Yes, I said.

It’s kind of like golf while running, he said.

It is, I said. It’s kind of ridiculous.

It’s great that you tried it! my father said.

Thanks, Dad, I said.

I took antidepressants for 14 years. I never played field hockey again.

Jean Hannah Edelstein is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Berlin. You can find her website here.

Paintings by Morris Louis.

"Laughlines" - The Everywheres (mp3)

"Little Stone" - The Everywheres (mp3)

In Which We Dress In Layers

by alan bray

Snow Line

by JEAN HANNAH EDELSTEIN

It was already too late when I realized that some 18-year-olds had the wisdom to choose to study at universities where the sun shone most of the year, in places where winter meant a hoodie and 15 positive degrees. It was too late because I was already embedded in Montreal, in possession of three pairs of longjohns and a puffa jacket that I bought at the GAP (‘It looks great with your jeans!’ said the salesman, and I believed him, hungry for validation because at the time I had a boyfriend who told me that my face wasn’t pretty, but had grown on him). 

I wore tights under the longjohns, and a hat that I knitted myself and which looked like an industrial-sized tea cozy. I wore mittens on a string, the kind you have when you are five, because I couldn’t seem to hang on to both halves of a pair for more than three weeks. It was already too late when I realized that I could have been somewhere warmer, but I learned to appreciate winter in Montreal, to savor the way the cold gave me a sense of purpose. As I assembled my layers and set out down the hill I felt intrepid, as if every icy gust I faced rendered the things I was leaving my apartment to do — eat brunch, go to a lecture on Tristram Shandy, sell cigarettes in the campus tabagie — extra-important.

It was already too late, three years later, in my final Montreal winter, when I realized that I was a little bit in love with Daniel, and that Daniel was a little bit in love with me. It was too late because I had already spent my life savings ($400) on a flight to Ireland for Reading Week, chasing a boy from Dublin who I’d met on vacation the previous summer (as if I knew what I was doing, he’d become my boyfriend for the following two years; I really did love him, more than a little bit.) But the Irish boy was only available on e-mail, whereas Daniel was present in my political science courses.

by alan bray

I was very shy, but I was strategic. I found out Daniel’s last name. Signed up for the same tutorial as him. Noticed that he was left-handed and so got to class early and chose the seat next to the only left-handed desk in the room. We started talking. We started sitting in lectures together, going to the library together, eating muffins and drinking coffee in a grimy campus cafe together. Daniel was quite short, blonde, with a fascinating gap in his front teeth that signaled an adolescence too edgy for orthodontics. Daniel was sophisticated: two years older than me because he’d dropped out of university on his first go-round to find himself somewhere in the southern hemisphere. Daniel did not wear his mittens on a string. Daniel’s mittens were discrete. Daniel was clever and studied a lot, which was very attractive, but he also had an air of alluring danger. Daniel was inclined to say things like: I have taken every drug there is except heroin because I am afraid of needles. Does Daniel like me? I’d wonder, and we’d sit side-by-side in class taking notes and whispering remarks that seemed pretentious and witty, paying attention to each other instead of our professor, a former child actor who’d starred in a canonical French-Canadian film about a snowball fight.

One bitter-cold week in late January Daniel asked me if I’d like to go to a Howard Zinn lecture with him. This was incredible. It was incredible, somewhat, because Howard Zinn was a kind of person who I thought I should admire, in keeping with my political inclinations. But it was even more incredible because it would be the first time that Daniel and I had actually planned to meet each other anywhere at all: after two or three months of spending time together, we still pretended that our meetings were coincidence or serendipity. We had never seen each other after six o’clock.

by alan bray

On the Howard Zinn evening we met on Saint Denis, Daniel and I and a couple of his roommates and their friends. For some reason Daniel was standing in the street eating potatoes from a foil container, despite the fact that it was snowing a little bit, that the temperature was in the negative teens. Potatoes? Daniel said, brandishing a plastic fork, and I said No, thanks. And then in single file along the barely-cleared powdery sidewalk with the other young socialists, we trudged to UQAM.

Howard Zinn talked about the impending war, and its wrongness, and Daniel and I looked at each other after Howard Zinn’s most salient points and nodded, our foreheads pressed into serious lines and our forearms touching on the rest between our chairs. Howard Zinn said important things, but I recall less of what Howard Zinn said, and more of the intense excitement of sitting next to Daniel in a lecture theatre that wasn’t at our university. And the even more intense excitement when the Q&A began and Daniel leaned over and whispered, Let’s get out of here. Daniel had no need for Q&A. We climbed over his roommates and their friends and our subtle exit was ruined when the string from my mitten tangled around someone else’s leg and I had to spend a few moments trying to detach it, flailing, apologizing, cringing.  But I freed myself at last and Daniel and I headed back north through snow that was now falling thick, fast, sparkly in the street lights.

Daniel lived two or three blocks southeast of me in the Plateau, give or take, and when we reached the corner where we’d part, we paused, flakes swirling around us with the particular sound of a Montreal snowstorm, which is really a particular kind of a silence. Daniel looked at me and I looked at Daniel. I looked at his grey-blue eyes beneath his ski hat and his gap-toothed smile above his scarf and I thought, Maybe now would be a good time to kiss Daniel, maybe now Daniel will kiss me. But Daniel’s sophistication had limits, and I was strategic but very shy, and maybe after a moment it felt too cold to be standing there on the street corner, or maybe some snow blew in my face. So I said, Thank you for inviting me to see Howard Zinn! and then I went home. And I guess so did Daniel.

The next day the cold was still bitter, and Daniel and I met as usual at our lecture on post-colonial nationalism, in a hall where the desks were old-fashioned, looked like they’d come from a one-roomed prairie schoolhouse, with a bench for two and a desk that curved up from it like the front of a sleigh. Daniel sat on one side and I sat on the other and we piled our layers of clothing in the middle, and our child star professor talked about imagined communities. At the end of the class Daniel slid out of his seat and stood on one end of the bench and I slid out of my seat and stood on the other end of the bench and we looked at each other, in silence, and put our layers back on: second sweater. Cardigan. Scarf. Coat. Mittens. Hat. I thought: this feels exactly as if we are getting dressed after sleeping together. And that was the climax of my romance with Daniel.

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Berlin. She last wrote in these pages about taking his hand. You can find her website here.

"You Need Not Scream" - Bowerbirds (mp3)

"Winter's Fist" - Bowerbirds (mp3)

In Which We Stay Within Reason

The Commitment

by JEAN HANNAH EDELSTEIN

August was when it really started to go wrong. It was time for us to mark the milestone of a year together, but somehow we couldn’t find the time to celebrate; wouldn’t. We batted some ideas back and forth: a weekend away. A dinner. We didn’t. We let our anniversary drift past and instead we celebrated a wedding of one of his friends from high school, someone who I’d never met before.

When we met I had given up on love. Or at least the kind of love that I thought that I wanted, which was a kind of love that always seemed to end, and ruin me. I can never allow this to happen again, I’d said the last time I’d been ruined, whispered it in the dark to a girlfriend who had come to stay because it was too scary for me to sleep alone. With him it was never going to happen. He was very kind, and I hope I was kind to him. We enjoyed each other’s company, and when we were parted for longer than usual, we were happy to see each other again. But not hungry. We talked about books and films and work and friends. But not really about feelings.

At the wedding my boyfriend and I were on the invite B-list: when we arrived, along with the other high school friends, the ceremony and the wedding meal had already passed, the hem of the wedding gown stained green from wet grass, the eyes of the A-list guests a little misty, from alcohol and gravy and emotion. By coincidence, another of the high school friends had gotten married the night before, and so the conversations you have with your high school friends when you haven’t seen them for a while had already been had. Now they were recalled and recapped. I listened, I laughed.

My boyfriend and I didn’t like the same things, not particularly: I liked going out, seeing, being seen. He liked going home in the evenings, relaxing, watching old films. He was a writer, and I was a writer, but he was disciplined and careful, and I was chaotic and flip. Sometimes, we’d complain: that I needed to slow down, that he needed to speed up. But for the most part we accepted each other. We gave each other space. He stayed home without me and worked on his writing; he was happy. I went out without him, saw, was seen; I was happy.

At his high school friend’s wedding, my boyfriend and I stood in the grass in the hotel grounds and I leaned forward to stop my heels from sinking in the mud and to also look lively and interested. I asked the high school friends to tell me stories about what my boyfriend had been like in high school. The high school friends were friendly, and the wives and girlfriends of the high school friends were kind and welcoming. They suggested that my boyfriend and I come to their homes for dinners or that we all go out for drinks, and I smiled and said that would be nice. On the way to the wedding, we’d been short with each other; ratty. But now I looked at my boyfriend and I thought about how he was pleasant and handsome and a good man. In a way, I thought, he was exceptional. When it started to rain we took our drinks from the outdoor bar and continued the conversations in a hot corridor, packed elbow-to-elbow like seatless passengers on an overcrowded train.

This was the year when I was working as a travel journalist, and so my boyfriend and I took a lot of trips together. Me, the professional; he, the plus one. We took trains to the countryside, to the continent. And sometimes, somewhere in a posh hotel or an art gallery, or drinking coffee in a dirty tabagie, I felt I adored him: I’d scrutinise him as he scrutinised a map or a menu and I’d think yes, maybe one day you could ruin me. And then we’d go home, and sometimes on the way we’d talk about whether we should move in together as if that was something that we wanted to do, but we wouldn’t make any plans; didn’t.

Eventually it was time for dancing. There was a live band, led by an aged Essex boy, with Rod Stewart hair, wearing army fatigues suitable for desert climes. The music was northern soul. The floor was packed with satin dresses and hair gel and and beer-odored breath. I want to have a soul-singing Rod Stewart lookalike from Essex in desert army fatigues at my wedding, I shouted in my boyfriend’s ear, and I grinned at him, and he grinned back at me, but I felt sad, and I think he felt sad, because I knew, and I think he knew, that we loved each other in the particular way that two people who were brought together by their mutual fear of love do. With restraint. Within reason. With no risk of the kind of love that might one day culminate in a wedding disco with a soul-singing aged Rod Stewart lookalike from Essex in army fatigues suitable for desert climes.

The band played Mustang Sally. I took my boyfriend’s hand in mine and we danced some more. And we stuck it out until November, because when you love someone within reason you want to hold on to them as long as possible. Because as soon as they’re gone you might find someone to fall in love with for real.

Jean Hannah Edelstein is a contributor to This Recording. This is her first appearance in these pages. You can find her website here.

Images by Jonas Bendiksen.

"Amanita" - Animal Collective (mp3)

"Mercury Man" - Animal Collective (mp3)

The new album from Animal Collective is entitled Centipede Hz, and it will be released worldwide on September 4th.