Lydiola

Sarah Yahm

Her father used to call her Lydiola, which she hated as a teenager because it sounded like a grandmotherly house plant. As in, “Did you remember to water the Lydiolas while I was in Boca?” But now, lying awake at night, she found it comforting to call herself by the familiar, detested nickname. The seizures—she assumed that’s what they were—had started a few weeks before. They were nothing dramatic or deserving of a French name. Frankly they were unimpressive—her upper body rocking back and forth against the sheets for just a few seconds. They were classy, tasteful even, the little black dress of seizures. They only happened in the privacy of her own bedroom and considerately never began until after her boyfriend Paul had already fallen asleep. In fact no one had ever witnessed them. If a seizure happens in the woods and nobody’s around to see it, did the brain really misfire? 

These were the things she pondered at night, but only at night, because in the bright light of day she concluded that they hadn’t really happened at all, and so she didn’t have to tell anyone—not her father, who would freak out, or her boyfriend, whom she suspected wouldn’t freak out enough. Besides, the word seizure was so overwrought, even misleading. She wasn’t frothing at the mouth or in danger of swallowing her tongue. And some nights they didn’t even happen at all. She went for a whole week in late February without a single seizure, not one stray electrical jolt. 

But for the past week they’d been happening every night, lasting an hour or so before her exhausted body, running a marathon in bed, finally dropped off to sleep. It started with a feeling of tension pooling inside her belly. She pictured her abdomen as a cave filling up slowly with a mysterious brackish substance. And when it was filled almost to bursting with this dark, velvety liquid, her arms would begin to move like windmills, and she’d windmill, windmill, windmill with increasing speed until finally the dark water would recede. Then for a few moments she would just be a normal girl, lying in bed in a university town with too much reading to do and an indifferent boyfriend, and then the tide would come in again and it would start all over. When the pressure began to build in her stomach she liked to think of herself not as Lydia but as a Lydiola, because plants don’t twitch or have spells or fits. Plants don’t beat up the bedsheets with their wayward limbs.

“I’m not a windmill,” she’d think to herself. “I’m a Lydiola.” 

But inevitably windmill she would. 

One night in early March she woke Paul up by accident when a particularly vigorous spell shook the bed, disturbing his nearly-impossible-to-disrupt slumber. 

“What are you doing?” he whispered. 

“I think I’m having seizures,” she answered honestly, a little bit relieved to say it out loud, knowing that he was still mostly asleep and wouldn’t remember this interaction in the morning.

“Well can you do it more quietly?” he hissed, clearly not registering what she’d just said. This was her favorite thing about Paul, his total inability to remember conversations in the middle of the night. It was also the reason they were still together, a magic loophole which enabled her to be completely honest with absolutely no consequences. She waited until his breathing was long and even.

“Your dissertation sucks, and I think I’m dying,” she whispered in his ear. 

He didn’t answer and she wondered for the thousandth time if his unconscious brain registered these terrible things she whispered to him at night. To compensate she kissed the back of his head sweetly. She felt the pressure building again in her abdomen and lay back on the pillow. “I’m not a windmill,” she recited. “I’m a Lydiola.”

True to form, Paul remembered nothing in the morning, so over breakfast they chatted as usual about their days with no mention of her seizures or spells or 19th century fits. And she preferred it that way, except when she didn’t, except when she let herself think about a man who would hold her windmilling arms against his body at night, stilling her disobedient limbs. 

Then she started dropping things. At first it was nothing noticeable or irreplaceable— one of their garage sale plates, a nearly indestructible metal bowl with a dent that could be hidden. But then one morning over breakfast her hand suddenly palsied and she dropped Paul’s favorite mug.

“What the fuck, Lydia,” he said, as the mug broke open on the linoleum and coffee splashed all over the kitchen floor and onto his new pair of pants. 

“Sorry,” she said, wincing. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’ve got it,” he said, his out-of-character anger dissipating quickly. He put down his color-coded book. “I know you’re late for class. It’s okay. I’ll clean it up.” 

And then she couldn’t hide it anymore. There were twitches while they cuddled up on the couch watching Buffy reruns, and once she even hit him in the face by accident, nearly knocking his glasses onto the floor. 

“What’s going on with you?” he asked, pulling away and looking at her with concern. 

Lydia shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s been happening for a little while, these twitches. It’s probably nothing. Overworked, underslept, underpaid. You know, the life of a grad student.”

“Maybe they’ll stop in eight years when you get tenure,” Paul said, dryly.

“Either that or I’ll be a forty-year-old adjunct with no control of my bodily functions.”

Paul laughed. “Well, this got dark fast.”

“No one ever fell in love with me because of my sunny disposition,” Lydia replied. 

Paul pulled her back into the crook of his arm and they watched the rest of the episode with no incidents although she could feel the dark water rising. She told Paul she was going to stay up late to work so she could postpone her windmilling until he was deeply asleep.

That was when she stopped answering her father’s phone calls because he would ask questions, and schedule doctor’s appointments, and drive up from New York. And because, most importantly, he would mention Her, and Lydia didn’t want to talk about her mother. Lydia didn’t want to think about her mother, any version of her mother. Not the woman who played “Simon Says” toothbrushing games with Lydia every night for a year after she had five cavities. Not the maddeningly single-minded cellist who practiced Philip Glass compulsively while Lydia tried to do her math homework. Not the embittered, palsied woman she became when Lydia was in high school, who spent all day hunched in front of their one TV in the basement. And certainly not the stranger they buried in the arid desert ground outside of the kibbutz where she’d retreated to hide and die, submitting to the care and ministrations of the Orthodox cousins. No, Lydia wanted to teach her Intro to Sociology sections and do her reading and pretend that she was planted deep, deep in the ground. 

And so she continued on through March and into April until one Thursday, the week after her birthday, her hand twitched during one of her lectures, skittered like a lizard across the podium. Skitter skitter thump thump went her hand, and then for one terrifying moment retracted into a claw shape, relaxing so quickly Lydia hoped she’d imagined it. Her students looked at her with surprise. Lydia looked at her own hand with surprise, and then continued talking as if nothing had happened. “If you pretend it’s normal, they’ll think it’s normal,” she told herself. Her traitorous hand behaved itself until later that afternoon in therapy when it trembled in her lap like a frightened bird. “If you pretend it’s normal, she’ll think it’s normal,” Lydia thought hopefully, but she knew Dr. Marchetti would not be as easily distracted as her students.

“And what is this?” Dr. Marchetti, asked, right on cue. 

Lydia shrugged like a recalcitrant adolescent, refusing to answer the question, but then she cracked like she always did after a few minutes of therapeutic silence. “It’s possible,” she said flatly, “that I may be experiencing a few teeny, tiny neurological symptoms.” 

Dr. Marchetti raised her carefully plucked eyebrows. 

“Maybe,” Lydia said hopefully, “I’m an old school hysteric. Seriously, I’ll tell you anything you want to know about my suburban childhood. Cure me.”

Her therapist shrugged her shoulders inside her expensive silk blouse. “He was a bit naive that guy, no?” She found Dr. Marchetti’s Argentinian accent infinitely adorable. “The idea that by saying something you can make it miraculously go away. What a mystical destructive baby that Freud was!” They were silent for another moment, while Lydia pictured Freud smoking his pipe and wearing a diaper. Skitter skitter thump thump went her hand.

“Lydia,” Dr. Marchetti interrupted her thoughts. “I think we need to talk about your symptoms, and your mother’s illness—”

“Well look at that, time’s up,” Lydia said brightly, even though there were still ten minutes left.

“Ah, it must be avoidance Tuesday again,” Dr. Marchetti said, not unkindly, and watched as Lydia wrote out her copay. 

She was driving home from her therapist’s office when her foot began to tingle in a way she couldn’t exactly describe to herself. “It’s as if I became aware of its outline,” she said out loud in the car, because she found if she narrated these episodes they became slightly less terrifying. She clarified her metaphor, “Like there’s a black line around it and the inside is filled with sand.”

“But no worries,” she said cheerfully, in a voice so filled with false reassurance she wanted to punch herself in the face. “Everything’s going to be fine.” As she drove past 7th Street the sand in her foot was suddenly populated by ants and it began to twitch against the gas pedal.

“Two more blocks,” she recited. “Two more blocks.” She swapped her left foot in for her right, managing to drive relatively successfully down her small residential street and turn into the driveway. “Good job, Lydia!” she said, with that same antiseptic, condescending cheer.

She removed the keys from the ignition in what she noted was an impressively un-palsied way. “Good job hand!” she said out loud, again in that Lysol-laden voice, and then she limped from the garage into the house, hoping Paul wasn’t home so she wouldn’t have to explain her newest symptom.

He was home, but he was writing and so she managed to say hello and then slide along the wooden floors in her socks like a kid, dragging her ill-behaved foot behind her. She couldn’t decide if her foot was an ant hill or a burlap sack filled with bees. Ants, she decided, but then she remembered the ant farms her mother used to buy her, and she didn’t want to think about her mother. 

Just as she reached the bedroom her phone buzzed again and “Dad” flashed across her screen. She didn’t want to think about her father, either, with his kind eyes and aggressively concerned eyebrows. She sat down heavily on the floor and closed her eyes waiting for the buzzing to stop. The voicemail was the same as all the others: “Kiddo, I haven’t heard from you in forever. Please, sweetie, give me a call back. I love you, Lydiola.”

She almost cracked and called him back but then she reminded herself that if she called him she would tell him everything, and it would all be real. The ants in her foot went back to work digging tunnels and palaces and palazzos. She willed them to leave but they lingered and malingered and trespassed. She decided it was time to use her women’s self-defense voice. “Mr. and Mrs. and Ms. Ants,” she declared, in a voice that brooked no argument. “Git! Go! You are not welcome here.” But they didn’t go, so she lay down on the floor, flat on her back, and began singing quietly to them instead, hoping they would fall asleep. “The ants go marching two by two, haroo, haroo. The ants go marching two by two, haroo, haroo.” But they seemed to have settled into an evening of work.

“What do you want to do about dinner?” Paul shouted from down the hall. “Thai? I’m craving red curry.”

“Whatever,” Lydia shouted back. She hoped Paul didn’t notice the slight tremble in her voice. “Order me pad thai.” She wondered what the ants were eating for dinner. She wondered what one of Freud’s hysterics would eat for dinner—Gefilte fish? Kneidlech? Goulash?

Goulash. Her phone buzzed again. Dad.

He was calling her now from the landline. She guessed that he was perched on the wooden stool in the center of the kitchen, twisting the cord around his fingers. He would be in his bathrobe by now, the same shabby one he’d had for as long as she could remember. She could feel the texture of the rubbery cord against her own fingers. She could smell the food cooking on the stove, and the spices open on the counter. “Oh shit,” she said, as her nose filled with the scent of paprika and broth. “Oh shit.” 

She felt the memory pressing up against her eyes. Lydia tried to keep them closed tightly but that just made the images even clearer, like they were projected against the inside of her skull. 

She saw her father talking on the phone but it wasn’t the sixty-year-old, gray-haired version. He still had a red beard, so he couldn’t have been older than forty. Her mother was cooking dinner, navigating around the phone cord. She was annoyed, late for her quartet rehearsal, banging plates intentionally, but her father remained oblivious, still stationed in the center of the kitchen, talking one more drug addict back from the brink of relapse. Lydia saw herself sitting on the floor reading, always reading. It was To Kill a Mockingbird she remembered suddenly, the whole scene becoming clear. They were eating goulash, Lydia could smell it, the windows steaming from the stew. 

“Done,” her mother announced, picking up the green Dutch oven with the potholders Lydia had made on her plastic loom in fourth grade. “Lydia, put your book down and set the table.”

Lydia stood up, a little reluctantly, and was trying to limbo under the phone cord when she heard the crash and felt the hot liquid splash the back of her jeans. 

“Ouch,” she screamed, outraged. “Mom!” 

Lydia pulled down her pants which were burning the back of her leg, and turned around to glare at her mother, hopping awkwardly with her pants half on and half off. There was a river of goulash all over the floor. The Dutch oven lay broken open, like a cracked egg. Her mother stood over the wreckage, staring at her right hand that had frozen into the shape of a claw.

“Sand,” her mother muttered, confused. “Ants?” 

Lydia opened her eyes and stared at her bedroom ceiling. Skitter skitter thump thump went her hand. “Sand,” she whispered to herself. “Ants.” She propped herself up slightly to reach her phone, and then dialed her father.

“Lydia, sweetie, I’ve been so worried about you,” he answered after one ring.

“Daddy,” she whispered. “Daddy. I dropped the goulash.”

He was silent for a moment. Lydia waited for the meaning to register.

“I’m on my way,” he answered, calmly, like he’d been expecting this, like he already had an overnight bag packed. “Lydiola, I’m on my way.”

They both knew what came next: the phone calls to the genetic counselor, the interminable tests at Mount Sinai, the army of physical therapists and neurologists, the teams of nurses with their squeaky shoes. But unlike her mother she wouldn’t run away. She wouldn’t die among strangers and shamans in the desert. Her father didn’t deserve that a second time. She would let him move the hospital bed into the sunroom and hold her hand while she slowly transformed into an underwater creature, all eyes and translucent skin.

Outside her bedroom she heard Paul ordering dinner. She pictured her father tossing his bags in the car and buckling himself into the driver’s seat. She could feel him driving towards her, his Subaru careening up the highway like the time she broke her arm and he got a speeding ticket racing toward her elementary school. He would come and hold her hands in his. He would repeat the same words he always did. “It’s me and you, kid,” he would say. “You’re not alone. It’s going to be okay.”

But Lydia was not so naive this time. Like all good parents, like all good husbands, he was a well-intentioned liar. The Dutch oven could not be glued back together. The goulash could not be placed back in the pot. And even though he would hold her while she windmilled, and patiently unfurl her clawed hands, and turn her like a Lydiola towards the sun, there was only so much he could do. As she felt her father driving towards her, his grief travelling up the highway even faster than his speeding car, she remembered those years before her mother left—the army of hands-on healers and herbalists and shamans her father dragged into the house until every surface smelled like burning sage and essential oils. All that oppressive optimism forcing her mother first into the basement and then across the ocean. 

But Lydia was not her mother. She would not run away to die. She was brave enough to face her father’s devastating hope. She owed him that much, at least, before he was left alone, because soon he would have no one to drive towards. She took a deep breath and located that kindness within herself. She could do it, she decided, she could give him that gift. Then she lay back down on the floor to wait.