The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides [178]
“I don’t know,” Madeleine said, tight-lipped with anger.
“Ally and Blake are coming here with Richard the Lionhearted. We’d love to have you and Leonard too. It won’t be a big do this year. Alice has the weekend off and I can’t seem to manage the oven the way she does. It’s really getting to be an antique. But of course your father thinks it works just fine. He who never cooks so much as oatmeal.”
“You don’t cook much either.”
“Well, I try. Or I did when you were young.”
“You never cooked,” Madeleine said, trying to be mean.
Phyllida remained unprovoked. “I think I can still manage a turkey,” she said. “So, if you and Leonard would like to come, we’d love to have you.”
“I don’t know,” Madeleine said.
“Don’t be angry with me, Maddy.”
“I’m not. I’ve got to go. Bye.”
She didn’t call her mother for a week. Whenever the phone rang at a Phyllida-like time, she didn’t answer. The following Monday, however, a letter from Phyllida arrived in the mail. Inside was an article titled “Married to Manic Depression.”
I met my husband, Bill, three years after graduating from college in Ohio. My first impression of him was that he was tall, good-looking, and a little bit shy.
Bill and I have been married for twenty years now. During that time, he has been committed to a psychiatric ward three times. That’s not to mention the many, many times he has voluntarily admitted himself.
When his illness is under control, Bill is the same confident, caring man I fell in love with and married. He is a wonderful dentist, very much beloved and respected by his patients. Of course, it has been difficult for him to maintain a steady practice, and even harder for him to join a practice with other dentists. For this reason, we have often had to move to new locations around the country, where Bill felt there was a need for dental services. Our children have gone to five different schools and this has been hard on them.
It hasn’t been easy for our boys, Terry and Mike, to grow up with a dad who might be cheering them from the sidelines at their baseball games one day, and the next, talking nonstop nonsense and acting inappropriately to strangers, or shutting himself up in our bedroom and refusing to come out for days.
I know that the divorce rate for people married to manic-depressives is very high. There have been many times when I thought I would become just another statistic. But my family and my faith in God always told me to hold on for a day longer, and then a day after that. I have to remember that Bill has a disease, and that the person who does these crazy things is not really him but his disease taking control.
Bill didn’t tell me about his condition before we were married. Previous relationships of his had broken up when his girlfriends (and in one case, his fiancée) learned about his illness. Bill says that he didn’t want to lose me the same way. No one in his family told me, either, even though I became quite close to Bill’s sister. But this was in 1959 and the subject of mental illness was pretty much taboo.
In all honesty, I’m not sure that it would have mattered. We were so young when we met and so in love that I think I may have looked the other way, even if Bill had told me about his manic depression on our first date (to the Ohio State Fair, if you’d like to know). Of course, I didn’t know then what I know now about this terrible disease, or the strain it can put on children and families. Still, I think I would have married Bill anyway, knowing everything—because he was “the one” for me.
But, as I joked with Bill at our wedding, “From now on, you better not keep any secrets from me!”
The article continued, but Madeleine read no further. In fact, she crumpled it into a ball. To ensure that Leonard wouldn’t find it, she stuffed the crumpled pages into an empty milk carton and buried the carton at the bottom of the trash can.
Part of her anger had to do with Phyllida’s closed-mindedness. Another part had to do with the fear that she