The WordSpider

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.

Tags: depression, facebook, libraries, my mother, mysteries, Nabokov, reading, sorrow, Tony Hillerman

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2012 at 6:31 pm by Alison Jean Ash and is filed under my mother, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.