My mother in her sixties took medications for high blood
pressure and hormone replacement; she took anti-depressants, and
for panic attacks she took alprazolam, better known by its brand
name Xanax. Two friends, Sylvia and Brett, also suffered from
panic disorder and had prescriptions for Xanax, and of that bond
was born an informal but staunch alliance, a mutual aid society I
thought of as the Xanax Club.
Mom, Anne her name was, had battled chronic anxiety all her
life. One of her strategies for handling it was playing card
games, the old fashioned way with actual cards: bridge,
casino, even Crazy Eights, depending on her company, or solitaire
if no one would join her. Rainy afternoons in her dining
room; sunny mornings at her back yard picnic table; at a campsite
in the mountains; in a cabin at the beach: the steady
slap-slap of the cards, punctuated by the whir of her flawless
shuffle, held panic at bay. I and my sibs started young; my
little sister was forced to play whist at the age of seven—badly,
but at least it wasn’t bridge, and Mom simply could
not wait any longer for a fourth.
My mother was particular about her playing cards, preferring the
sturdy plastic-coated kind that took years to wear out but only
weeks to become freckled with dots of cigarette smoke and dust
mixed with the oil from our hands. Whenever I played with her
I found myself compulsively scraping off bits of grime with a
fingernail as I waited for my turn.
She read, of course, compulsively but with discrimination:
highbrow stuff, English and American literary novels, history, and
the better-written detective stories. She adored Nabokov, and
Tony Hillerman, whom she often said she wished she could
marry. Another bulwark against the dark tide of worry was her
legal-size pad of lined yellow paper. On it she wrote
letters, and the beginnings of dozens, maybe hundreds of short
stories she never finished. Above all she wrote lists:
lists of chores and errands for herself—and later, for me; lists of
books she wanted from the library; lists of questions for her
doctor; and on the day she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer,
plans for her funeral: lists of speakers, lists of hymns,
lists of poems she wanted read. (All was done as she desired,
when the day came, to the last detail; we danced in a circle at the
reception, singing the Shaker hymn Lord of the Dance.)
Tobacco was another line of defense, the one that killed her in
the end—although, to be honest, I never thought she minded all that
much.
Her lifelong panic had deep roots. As a child, she once
told me, she heard voices in her head. I’ve read somewhere
that neuroscientists believe that all humans once experienced
their verbalized thoughts as coming from outside themselves, the
utterances of ancestors, gods or demons. But hearing voices
is no longer normal, and as a child—a very odd and fey-looking
child in her old photos—my mother lived in terror, convinced that
she was crazy and that if anyone discovered her secret she would be
locked away in an institution forever. In time I believe that
particular fear lost its force, but she never lost the habit of
fear itself.
Panic disorder consists of sudden, unexpected attacks
of extreme fear and also of worry about these attacks; the very
fear of experiencing a panic attack can bring one on. Xanax
is effective against panic but also highly addictive, so it
is mostly used as a back-up to anti-depressants or milder
anti-anxiety drugs, to be taken only in emergencies. Doctors
usually prescribe only six doses at a time, and require their
permission for each refill. In these restrictions lay the
genesis of the Xanax Club.
Brett when I knew him was forty-odd, tall, dark, suave and
skeletally thin, with a clever mournful face. Gay only in the
sense of sexual orientation, he defended himself against unpleasant
surprises by firmly expecting the worst at all times.
Whatever life dealt him of good or ill, he met with a raised
eyebrow and a sardonic remark.
Twice-divorced Sylvia, a little younger than Brett, looked
older. She had dull eyes, a wry twist to her mouth, the
prematurely lined face of a heavy-smoking blonde, and an air of
having seen too much and been favorably impressed by very little of
it. Her dry subversive wit, though, could sneak up on you and
ambush you, make you laugh before you even understood the joke.
Sylvia was witty and Brett was clever, but Mom was flat out
funny, outrageous, a born entertainer who could make you double up
in fits of helpless snorts and giggles just by crossing her
eyes. Who but my mother would derail a dull conversation by
asking, “Want to see me look like a Boeing 707?” No one could
refuse her. No one, no matter how familiar with her comic
repertoire, could keep a straight face if she chose to make them
laugh. She was the Queen of the Xanax Club.
All three of them worked as craft sales agents at the Pike Place
Market in Seattle, setting out their employers’ wares on tables in
the open air daystalls and then, for six or eight hours a day,
alternately breasting the recurrent waves of tourists or lying
becalmed in boredom alleviated only by gossiping with their
neighbors.
The daystallers form a community of sorts, with all the factions
and feuds of any village, and when my mother went to work there two
or three days a week, she began immediately to make herself known,
collecting friends with the speed we now see only on
Facebook. At the end of her first day she said she’d made six
new friends; after a week it was twenty-two, and at the end of the
first month she claimed seventy-nine. She knew many more
names and faces than that, of course; the seventy-nine were just
the people she liked.
She and Brett and Sylvia soon discovered their commonality of
panic. There was no subject she recognized as off
limits, and by confessing her own weakness she elicited her
friends’ confessions too.
I don’t think the other two had been more than barely acquainted
before the advent of Mom, but they soon became inseparable as a
trio. They were all night-owls, and exchanged phone numbers
so they could chat with each other at one or two or four in the
morning. One Friday night my mother told Sylvia she was
terrified: she had just two tablets of Xanax left, and was
afraid she might have a panic attack that night and need to take
one. That would leave her only one tablet to get through the
weekend until she could get hold of her doctor, and the state of
possessing only one Xanax was enough in itself to bring on the
panic.
Sylvia rose gallantly to the occasion, responding that she had
five doses left of her new refill, and if necessary she would loan
one to Mom that weekend. Mom, of course, declared that she
would do the same for Sylvia when she was down to two
tablets, and the next day at the Market they invited Brett to join
their pact. The odds were excellent that at any given time at
least one of them would have four or five doses on hand.
In fact none of them ever did need to borrow a Xanax; it
was enough to know that they could.
Several years later Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer, to the
surprise of no one, least of all herself. By then she hadn’t
been at the Market for three years but she still talked to Sylvia
and Brett on the phone from time to time.
When she died, Brett and Sylvia among many others were invited
to her funeral, but neither of them came. Brett had fallen in
love with a young Russian man of such reckless volatility that his
wealthy father was willing to pay the impecunious Brett to travel
with him and keep him out of mischief. Sylvia stayed away, I
believe, because she couldn’t bear to say goodbye. The
fountains of her tears had dried up long ago.
Do Sylvia and Brett still work at the Market? I don’t
know; I almost never go there myself these days. But if I
strolled through the half-empty daystalls on a bleak day in
February, and I heard gales of laughter off to one side and I
turned to look and saw no one there… Some people say that
what we call ghosts are really long-lasting imprints of memorable
events or personalities that once occupied the place. Brett
and Sylvia are probably still alive, both being younger than me,
but if I ever heard disembodied laughter in the daystalls I’d be
pretty sure I was hearing the collective ghost of the Xanax
Club.
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