A Love Story All the Same
Claire A. Berman
As he works in my kitchen, Mike tells me about the extraordinary ways mice survive. “You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen,” he says with a hint of incredulity. He tells me of mice scaling smooth walls sideways, of licking oil bottles for sustenance, of taking up residence inside the arms of couches. Mike’s easy laugh booms through his cloth mask, which his crinkling brown eyes pull high on his face. He adjusts it often. I ask questions about his work, desperate to prolong this rare human contact.
It’s a July day, early in an already endless quarantine. Mike can’t see, but I’m panting under my mask. It’s been months since I got sick with Covid in the panicky first wave of the pandemic, and my body is still recovering. Stony cobwebs weigh down my lungs; chaotic darts of pain shoot through my heart.
There are mousetraps everywhere in my apartment, but the mice seem wholly unbothered by them. They lick the traps clean and scamper into my wall, down to the bowels of the basement. It feels as though the traps are laid for me instead. As I pace my lonely apartment, I’ll occasionally brush up against one and it snaps into the empty air, making my pulse race in my ears.
“Almost a shame to kill mice as smart as these,” Mike quips in a thick and familiar Boston accent. I watch the top of his head as he kneels and plugs a hole behind my stove. His weathered forehead softens into curvy waves of jet-black hair. He uses a thin rod to stuff bundles of steel wool into my wall and then grimaces, pulling himself up and stretching his broad shoulders.
“Are you okay?” I ask.
“Bad back,” he says. “And a migraine.”
“I’m sorry. I get those, too.”
“The worst,” he says, bending again over a mousetrap. “Had ’em since I was a kid.” He glances over his shoulder at me. “You?”
“Mine started when I was twenty. I had one almost every day my senior year in college.” Out of breath from so many words, I pause, arch my neck, and use my shoulders to breathe. “I’m writing a character who gets them.”
“No kidding. I write, too,” he says, suddenly shy. “I mean, nothing real yet. I mostly write a lot of notes on my phone.”
“What do you write about?”
He thinks for a moment, the mousetrap suspended in his hand and ready to snap. “I guess the crux of it is, how do you go on living when there’s no hope for a cure for what you have?”
That same summer of the mice, when I am well acquainted with my bed and couch but not much else, a friend recommends a romance novel about a woman with a chronic illness. By this time, the energy for any activity—even reading—is something I must carefully budget. Slowly, pausing often to rest, I begin. The heroine is Chloe, a young woman with fibromyalgia and medication patches hidden under her clothes. She rarely leaves the house, and the messiness in her home corresponds directly with her level of pain. Her apartment is her comfortable retreat, but also the place she struggles to escape. The title of the book, Get a Life, Chloe Brown, speaks to her goal—as someone with a chronic illness, she wants to learn how to live her young adult life, and thrive with the body she’s got. When a handsome repairman appears at her door, it sets off an enemies-to-lovers arc. A major part of Chloe’s story is her struggle to be forthright about her pain, and to trust him with the truth.
As I turn the pages, Mike’s question echoes in my brain. How do you go on living without hope for a cure? I sometimes pause to observe the sun’s slow plunge down the faded lavender wall of my living room. I imagine that same sun bathing the trees outside, and all of the people who are blissfully, ignorantly healthy. On some level, I still find it unbelievable that such bodies even exist, able to do whatever they want without worry or consequence.
Before developing long Covid, I was already used to the ebb and flow of unexplained pain, exhaustion, and fogginess. My thoughts often wander back in time to when I turned twenty-one, when my bizarre collection of symptoms worsened. Just as my body was beginning to feel foreign to me, my first serious boyfriend told me that it—my body—was not attractive. Some men might take pity on me, he clarified, or even see me as an easy target—but that wasn’t the same as finding me beautiful. His confident declaration led me to internalize that beauty and illness were mutually exclusive.
The shame and mortification from his words followed me well into my adulthood, continuing years after I understood that he’d been expressing his own insecurities, not mine. I entered new relationships full of trepidation. Symptoms and appearance were inextricably bound together in my mind, necessitating constant body vigilance to control them. And when I couldn’t control my migraines, joint pains, bloating, constipation, and diarrhea, I didn’t even have to look at my body to feel certain it wasn’t beautiful.
But Chloe’s beau loves her body just as it is—and he finds her beautiful. An ending like this feels impossible to me. Chloe also struggles with profound doubt about whether he will stick around. Of course, as a character, she is unaware of the genre she’s existing in, but as readers, we know that a happy ending is precisely the promise of a romance novel. Perhaps that is why I need Chloe so desperately in this moment, when I am quarantined in my apartment and trapped in my struggling body. And perhaps it is why I need Mike, and the mice that brought him there. Against all odds, in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, I am in my own real-life romance trope: a handsome repairman has shown up at my doorstep. And Chloe has appeared, too—my secret spring of hope, her story a luminous foil to the one I have believed about my body for so long.
After Mike’s first visit, I am still so short of breath that walking to the kitchen can wind me. Even sitting still requires corralling my whole upper body to get enough air. My doctor orders a chest MRI, and after the procedure, I walk through eerily quiet hospital corridors back to my car, huffing under a double layer of masks.
I climb into my car and rip the masks off, gulping air as I rub hand sanitizer into my palms. I take two puffs of my inhaler and muse on the MRI machine that cocooned me like the cold embrace of an aloof lover. I desperately want this machine to provide an answer. The results come back two days later from someone in a white coat who has never met me: Normal. No clear explanation for patient’s symptoms.
I’m not surprised. Since before my memories began, my body has always presented doctors with symptoms they couldn’t make sense of. For me, the experience of medical care is like a battered prayer, a ritual I practice the way one might step over a sidewalk crack for good luck. It has rarely felt like a matter of science.
A few weeks later, I see my doctor to discuss the results. I tell her that my breathing still feels labored, and that I constantly feel deprived of oxygen. “But your oxygen is at 99 percent,” she rebuts, as if we are in a courtroom rather than discussing the body I live in daily. Finally, she sighs and agrees to order additional testing.
The mice have ascended once again from their underworld. All my food has been quarantined by now, stored in the fridge or locked in plastic tubs, and I obsessively wipe every crumb from my counters and table with disinfectant. But my vexing guests have not relented. Frayed steel wool lies in a mound in the middle of my kitchen floor, evidently punted across the room by the mice, a bold counteroffensive that has restored the hole behind my stove as their throughway. The traps are licked clean, with nary a mouse in sight, and I need another exterminator consultation. “Well, hello again,” Mike says when I open my front door, his laugh echoing down the stairwell.
Mike is the only human I’ve seen in person for five months, aside from health care providers swathed in PPE, with eyes ghoulishly magnified behind face shields. Like Chloe, I rarely leave my apartment, even for socially distanced walks, so I linger in the kitchen again, thrilled to see him. Thrilled to see anyone! We are both wearing masks, of course, and I study him, wondering what his face looks like underneath.
“So, what’s the mouse scene been like in Boston during quarantine?” I ask, making conversation while Mike works.
“Actually, the rats are much worse,” he says, kneeling down in cargo pants, one knee up. “After the restaurants closed, they were driven into homes looking for food.” Mike stuffs more steel wool into the holes, then covers them with sticky pads. He tells me that my mice are giving him a run for his money. “I think we’ll try beef jerky in the traps next,” he muses. “They’ll have to yank on it, and then”— he claps his hands together loudly—”SNAP!”
His eyes crinkle above his mask as he gathers his tools and steel wool. “You should be good now.”
I am referred to a pulmonologist. She prescribes a third inhaler along with a pill for allergic asthma, then sends me for an air flow test. I struggle through the breathing test, huffing to get air into the tube. A week later, it comes back. Normal. Next is a cardiopulmonary stress test. I pant on a bicycle with electrodes strapped to my chest and a tube in my mouth to measure my breath. Again I pass. Normal.
“We don’t know what’s wrong with you,” the pulmonologist says. “Let’s schedule a follow up in two months.”
The follow-up appointments feel ceremonial at this point, my doctor like a partner grown perfunctory in a long-term relationship. She says she still doesn’t know what to do with me. Several visits later, she suggests a speech pathologist, because my voice has become strained; she suspects something structural in my upper airways.
The speech pathologist surprises me by pulling up the results of my air flow test from the previous summer. “Your exhale is normal,” he says, “but your inhale has a classic plateau.” He points to the bottom of my breath cycle graph. “This is textbook vocal cord dysfunction; your vocal cords close at the wrong time and block the air coming in. We’ll get you in for voice therapy.”
“Why didn’t they tell me that last summer?”
“They only look at the top half of the chart,” he says matter-of-factly. “Our office looks at the bottom half.”
Apparently, there is one specialist for the exhale, and another for the inhale.
Early in my twenties, just after the first boyfriend had informed me of my unattractive body, I began to lose my short-term memory. I couldn’t even recall conversations from moments before. I was also in pain every day. I looked at others through a haze, marveling at how alert they all were, how much they could accomplish in a day, how high their energy spiked after a meal. My mental and physical energy grew so limited that I became a person without hobbies or interests. This feeling of being erased from within was as terrifying as any of my physical injuries. I was sinking quietly, softly, into a pit of mud, without anyone noticing—up to my waist, then up to my shoulders and elbows, my fingers stretched out for help.
For years, I reported this to my doctor. She told me it was common for young women to manifest physical symptoms from stress and anxiety and refused to order testing. “You should try exercising,” she advised. I stared at her, dumbfounded. I could barely function, and she wanted me to exercise? It became a familiar rhythm: an onset of mysterious symptoms met with disbelief, sometimes derision. The dreaded label, hypochondriac, bounced around in my head. Hysterical. Finally, I sought and received a diagnosis of celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder that explained many of my systemic symptoms, including the chronic fatigue diagnosis I had received the year prior. After switching to a gluten-free diet and a new doctor, I slowly began to improve.
Chloe experiences this, too—disbelief and suspicion for experiences that are invisible and elusive. Like her, I am an expert at appearing normal, at hiding my periods of illness and pain from others. I am mortified to share the details of how my body misbehaves and rarely ask for help when I’m sick. These things are a confidence between my body and me. I could say it’s about privacy, or sparing others discomfort, but mostly, it’s my fear of being judged histrionic or hypochondriacal by the people and world around me.
One day, I lie on my couch scrolling through social media and see a post about chronic illness: “If we don’t say it hurts, it hurts. If we say it hurts, it really f***king hurts.” I relate deeply to this, always feeling the weight of that persistent myth about chronic pain: that if it were really that bad, you’d be able to see it. But illness is felt first in the body, a private experience before any words attempt to capture it. To express it honestly is to put myself on trial, like I will need to prove it somehow. And I’m not sure which outcome I fear more: will someone judge me, or will they try to take care of me?
It never occurs to me, though, that there might be another possibility. At one point in the novel, Chloe’s beau recognizes that she has been conditioned to pretend she is fine to minimize her pain for others. As he witnesses her illness more fully, he not only believes her, but also begins to understand that the beauty that initially attracted him exists effortlessly in the same body as her pain. He simply sees her—all of her. Slowly, she learns to trust him, and to trust herself as well. When I read these passages, I put the book down and cry. How is it possible, even if only in a romance novel, to look at a body like mine and see beauty?
In September, Mike returns for a fourth visit to inspect the traces of mice I’ve recently found in my kitchen. When he asks me to turn out all the lights, my breath catches and I cock my head curiously. This request seems more out of Chloe’s story than mine, but I oblige. He has stopped carrying a shoulder bag—“Bad back,” he reminds me—and instead, he’s rolled a small wheeled suitcase into my apartment. He pulls out a tiny flashlight and flicks it on, but rather than a blinding white light, a soft blue glow emerges. He directs it around the floor of my closet, and I watch in horror as it illuminates dozens of the tiniest footprints I’ve ever seen.
“Mike, no…” I say, gaping.
“Yeah, maybe don’t look at this part,” he says, chuckling. I take his advice and sit on my couch, averting my eyes as he shines the light on every surface. He returns to me. “Well, my friend,” he says. “I don’t have good news for you. They have launched a strong counter-attack…”
“—Stop,” I say, cutting him off with a groan. “They haven’t been able to get to any food for months! Why do they keep coming back?”
“What happens is this,” Mike says, kneeling to point at the baseboard. “See these patches of oil? That’s grease and urine worn into the surface. They’re like messages to other mice, and they’ll keep coming because they know it leads to a place where other mice found food. Once the path is there, it’s very hard to stop.” I gaze around the room and suddenly see grease spots everywhere. Something inside me wilts.
“I guarantee the great-great-great-grandfather of these mice was born and died in this building,” Mike says. “We need to seal off their entrance so they’re forced off the food highway.”
Up and down the interior of walls, generations of mice have risen and descended, invaded and retreated. I shudder, but am also somewhat in awe. “You have such encyclopedic knowledge of this stuff,” I say.
“You know what?” He’s still kneeling, using the flashlight to gesticulate, and though he is smiling under his mask, his eyes have turned pensive. “The other day, I was knee deep in rat shit at a place on Newbury Street and I thought to myself, Mike, you really took a hard left turn somewhere along the way to end up here.”
My voice remains raspy and strained, and my lungs still feel stiff, but I start to have more good days. When I push myself too hard, however—walk too far, climb too many stairs, or read too much—I land back on the couch, staring once again at my lavender walls. I have tracked the seasons of this quarantine by where the sun hits the wall at four o’clock each day, exactly when I run out of energy.
The speech pathologist helps my voice, but not my breathing, and there is an eight-month wait to see a speech pathologist who specializes in breathing. When the appointment finally arrives, she observes me as I pull up my torso to fill my lungs.
“You have dysfunctional breathing,” she informs me. “After struggling to breathe while sick, your body holds on to that old, panicked way of breathing and is continually hyperventilating.”
“Does that mean it’s all in my mind?” The old alarm rises inside me, a familiar foreboding that I’m going to be told, once again, my symptoms aren’t real, that I’m merely anxious. It’s what I’ve been told by doctors so often, right up until the moment that a confirmed diagnosis proves them wrong. But this clinician is different.
“Not at all. It’s how your sickness taught your mind to help you. Your nervous system is still trying to protect you, even though it doesn’t need to anymore. It’s completely normal. We just need to retrain those neural pathways.”
I think of the grease spots in my apartment that I’ve scrubbed with bleach to retrain the neural pathways of the mice. The speech therapist retrains me with exercises that seem counterintuitive. Pinch your nose shut to get a shot of oxygen; breathe less to get more air. “Now, as you breathe in, try to smile,” she says, “Smile as if breathing were safe again. That smile will rewire your brain.”
I’m still awestruck that she believed me. Not only did she believe me, but she told me that this unwiring is normal. I’m normal, I repeat to myself. I pull my cheeks into a smile and widen my lips. I feel my nostrils making more space. I feel the air coming in.
Between Mike’s visits, while the mice are busy gnawing through my freshly sealed walls, I think of Chloe. It isn’t just her finding someone who loves her that is so powerful; it’s that nothing about her illness has to change for her to receive real love. I read the book curled on my couch, unable to walk further than my kitchen or even sit up some days. Clutter builds up around me until I have a bout of energy to clean—which, in turn, prompts the need to rest. I think about the many years I settled for anyone who would accommodate my body’s dysfunctions, anyone who would tolerate my physical shortcomings—even if there were no other signs of love. I was sure I needed a different body, a better body, to be loved.
It isn’t easy for Chloe, either. But when she and her beau finally get their happy ending, her pain patches are still there underneath her clothes, just like before. She is managing it, and she is living. She is the first character I’ve come across whose chronically ill body doesn’t need to change at all before she can be lovable. The only thing that needed changing was her acceptance. She is a revelation.
I stand naked in front of the only full-length mirror in my house one day in full daylight. I stare at my body: the bags under my eyes from poor sleep, the tired breasts, the pink scar on my chest that people always ask about (which I have no idea how I got). My muscles are deconditioned from lack of exercise, and my chest still heaves sometimes when I breathe. But there in front of me is my body, doing the best it can.
I’m suddenly filled with gratitude for all it has done for me, keeping me going, protecting me. What an amazing thing it is, my body. Look at all it has survived! I close my eyes and say thanks. And there, finally, I begin to find the beauty. I begin to feel beautiful.
Friends have teased me for months that my encounters with Mike sound very flirty for a simple exterminator visit. Maybe they’re right. Perhaps Mike didn’t need to spend hours at every visit to my apartment. It’s literally the most classic meet-cute, one of them says. Why aren’t you dating him?
But the mice have receded—to where, I don’t know. During Mike’s final visit, we linger for over an hour as he plugs one last mouse hole in my closet and inspects the rest of the apartment. Eyeing me, he tells me a new employee will soon be assigned to my building. He seems disappointed, and I am too. As we say goodbye, he gives me his email address, which I accept but doubt I will ever use.
Mike was my handsome repairman. A masked, affable one with thin, wavy black hair and a disarming friendliness. He accompanied me back into hope at a time when my body was hiding. He told me about the failings of his body and he listened to the failings of mine. We talked about rodents, and we talked about writing. I didn’t need to be rescued by him, though. Our story wasn’t a romance. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a love story all the same.