THERE WAS DOG SHIT IN the six-by-eight-foot garden in front of 1299 Weston Avenue.
Old dog shit.
My eyes landed on the matted cylinders of desiccated feces and trailed up the brick façade of the row house. Most of its blue shutters were hanging on by the grace of God, but one of them—weathered, louvered, Federal—lay sluttishly on the sidewalk before us.
Nate and I stepped over it gingerly on the way up to the steps to the front door, against which Marcia lunged. A heap of circulars was caught under the threshold, barricading us out, but the good woman heaved and ho’d against the door once more, and we slipped inside.
The five-story house faced west, where nothing begins and everything ends. The afternoon sun rushed in the parlor windows, and the broad yellow stripes of the wallpaper shimmered in the heat. It looked like hell and was hot like it, too.
Someone had experienced mental deterioration here. Heathcliff-on-the-moors style.
Everything was tasteful, expensive, and in varying degrees of ruination. In the middle of the room at a nonsensical angle, as if landing there after hitching a ride in a Victorian Dust Bowl tornado, sat a chartreuse davenport. Sunlight hit a cherry upright too close to the window. Expensive Phaidons, stacks of faded Baltimore Suns, and unopened Baltimore Gas and Electric bills littered the floor. Wooden slats bubbled up under a crater in the ceiling, and rotting beams tore through plaster. A fossilized bagel peeked out of a toaster sitting in the cold hull of the fireplace. Inside the gilded mirror that hung beautiful and intact above the mantel shone my face, which read shock.
Marcia was the first to break the silence. “Well, how interesting,” she forced out.
I looked at Nate, who stepped over a headless china figurine and appeared to be imploding.
This was a Miss Havisham house. Crazy people had lived here.
I wanted it.
Nate seemed agnostic about the terrifying house; I think he just wanted me to be happy in Baltimore. The former inhabitants of this squalid residence had once maintained it well, and now that I had something to visualize about my new life, I was unleashed.
For several months, we undertook the renovation work ourselves, lugging trash to the city dump in a Bondo’d-out truck we bought for the purpose, demolishing areas of the house, attempting to install plumbing, whacking up the tree roots invading the hundreds-of-years-old foundation. A year in, when Nate reached his breaking point, I brought in a contractor.
When I wasn’t overseeing the work, I drove to my studio downtown. But once I got there, I sat in a chair and did nothing, gazing out the window onto the roofs of Fells Point. One week, I traveled to New York to deliver new paintings to the gallery. The owner took only one of the pieces I’d managed to complete. “I’m confused,” she said. “This doesn’t look like your work at all.”
When I got back home, I unpacked my paintings. One was of a small face behind a window of a Baltimore row house. The painting didn’t feel sumptuous or aspirational at all. In fact, it felt sad, and I wondered whose face was trapped in the window.
The top floor of the house was converted into an art studio with ceilings open to the rafters. The bathroom had a pedestal sink, clawfoot tub, and parquet floor. We’d been roughing it for so long, I thought parquet was happiness. Nate and I moved my easels and supplies from the downtown studio, and soon I was really painting again.
During these Baltimore years, the primary image seared into my memory was not of a beautiful house whose every inch bore my mark and decision, nor the paintings I made, some of which were self-portraits with males turning away or talking over me. Rather, it was the back of Nate’s head, his body turned away in silent rejection while we lay in bed before sleep. The light from the streetlamps fell over our bodies, making it easy for me to find his. I reached out to Nate for connection, flattening my palm against his back, and instead felt his psychic trembling, the emotional implosion in his soul. Since our move to Baltimore, his hunch had grown more pronounced. My husband, bowed like a branch in the wind. “I’m tired, Hyeseung,” he said, not turning around. I pulled my hand away.
Nate was struggling at home because he was struggling at work. Being a professor was harder than expected. We’d both thought since he was brilliant, he would be a brilliant professor. But being a professor wasn’t only engaging in the science: it was writing grants, teaching courses, advising students, managing collaborations, carrying out departmental and university administrative duties, and budgeting for the lab. Nate’s strength was the depth of his focus, not multitasking. When I proofread a grant application, I saw how he self-consciously minimized his credit and responsibility.
“A grant is a marketing pitch in which you say, ‘I did this. I am doing that. I plan to do this next thing.’
“You’re the lead. They understand you’re not doing this alone,” I reasoned with him. But for Nate, it felt dishonest to take credit for his own work, so the tale suffered. That was how others advanced ahead of him, winning grants, doing the science with the grants, receiving fellowships and awards for the science, then winning more grants, doing more science, and so on and so forth. Science, like so many things, was a sell.
2.
BACK WHEN NATE AND I had been confined to the third floor of the house during an intense phase of the renovations, my meds stopped working and I spent weeks in bed. Once again, Nate took time off from work. He gave me sponge baths, drove me to hospitals, found a therapist, and accompanied me to my appointments. In the mornings, he woke me by threading his arms underneath mine and lifting me out of bed.
“You need to eat,” he said. “Then you can go back to bed.”
I knew it must feel like my limbs were lead weights, but I didn’t try to make it easier on him, I just couldn’t. “Was it worth it?” I asked weakly. “Was it worth coming here?”
It wasn’t an accusation. My depression hadn’t been caused by our relocation to Baltimore and drugs weren’t magic, but while I lay in bed those days, what was on my mind was my life, the value of it, and I wondered whether everything had been worth it.
Nate held me and lifted me onto my feet. I was too sick to enjoy his touch.
“You need to eat,” he repeated.
3.
IN THE SPRING, EVE VISITED while Nate was out of the country on business. She enjoyed her guest quarters and read in the library. While she was there, the gust of something floated in, settled down, took up space: Depression. Once Eve left, I stayed in bed. Maybe it was one hour. Maybe it was days. From my bed, I looked out onto the beautiful master suite. The linen valances, Lucite lamps, quilts, and midcentury walnut furniture—on every object were my fingerprints, my attempt to hang meaning on my life. The more things, the more meaning. Isn’t that how it worked? A pane of glass rose up between the bed and the rest of the room. Surveying everything through the wall, I started to understand and scoffed at my earnestness: in fact, reality existed somewhere far beyond me, past this distorting sheet of glass.
I didn’t want to think about anything anymore, and let Depression, who sat on the edge of my bed, sing me to sleep.
By the time Nate returned, I couldn’t move or respond. The next evening, I went to the emergency room.
Dr. Coskun was Chekhovian. Very end-of-the-nineteenth-century, as if she could be sitting in a high-backed rush chair, legs covered in furs, out on the family dacha. It was her eyes. Heavy eyelids skimmed over swollen bulbs. Like two blinking suns, self-supporting and flicking flames of fire—only her eyes didn’t say “soulful” so much as “fear me.” I was out of the emergency room and in the psychiatric ward now, where I looked around and could not believe, yet again, that this had happened.
In the first meeting, she looked haggard. It was raining ice at sharp angles outside, a storm of daggers. Dr. Coskun was in a wheelchair. She wore no casts and showed no visible wounds, but something communicated that she’d been halted permanently midway in her life, her mind still bright and sparkling like a coupe glass of champagne. Sophisticated and exacting, Coskun was also intuitive.
“You’re not living for yourself,” she said, her jowls sagging and her eyes blinking in that intelligent, observant way of majestic animals. “It’s not going to work otherwise. We have to learn to live a little more like the Americans, Hyeseung.” She didn’t say “we” in a false gesture of camaraderie; she included herself because she was an immigrant, too, speaking with an Asiatic, Eastern European accent I couldn’t pinpoint. I liked it, both her accent and her way of lumping us together.
She went on. “I understand your culture. You get an A in school—where’s the plus? You are good at sports or an instrument—let’s see how long so.
“I’ve seen a lot of patients.”
Pause.
“And I know you’ll make it.”
Her right eye squinted for a second, just for effect, like we were shaking hands but with our eyes.
Coskun put me on different medications: no more Wellbutrin. Over our weeks together as she monitored their effect, she probed my family history. I explained how I’d spent my early years aligned with my mother and how much of my personality and psychology I’d derived from her. At the same time, my father could be obsessive and difficult, but he always had energy and never slept. When Coskun asked, “Is there any mental illness in your family?” I blinked, dumbfounded. I told her it never occurred to me. “We don’t even have a working concept of mental illness. If we can’t name it, then it can’t exist.” It had been Nate who had first informed me that Umma’s suicidal ideation and Appa’s risky behavior were abnormal.
