Blood Sugar(20)

One afternoon, exhausted from yet another night of barely sleeping, I shuffled into my dorm room. I was shocked to see Ellie sitting on my bed. She took one look at me and leapt up, concerned.

“Oh, Ruby. What happened to you?”

I turned to look at Ameena, who was grabbing her bag to head out and give us sisters some privacy. She said, unapologetically, “I called her.” And she left.

Ellie held me by the shoulders, to show how serious she was. And she said, “Just tell me. Are you anorexic? Bulimic? Back on drugs?”

“No!”

“Are you in a cult?”

“What?”

“It happens. Are you in one?”

“No. Ellie, I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine. I expected greasy unwashed collegiate hair. And dry skin since it’s cold as fuck here. But you look like death. The dark circles under your eyes. And your posture. You’re all slumped. Like you’ve given up or something. This is not like you.”

I meekly tried to straighten my shoulders, but they were too shrouded in a heavy blanket of exhaustion to perk up. Ellie stayed rooted, and stared at me until I confessed the truth. Since I had not expected this confrontation, I had no plan about what to say.

I blurted out, “I haven’t slept in weeks. I’m having horrible nightmares. Okay? Like every single night. About salt! About salt being shoved into my mouth. Over and over. And I can’t make them stop.”

She looked at me with compassion and understanding. And let go of my shoulders.

“It must be about the slugs.”

“What? What are you talking about? What slugs?”

“You don’t remember?”

Apparently I didn’t. So Ellie told me. “When you were really little, like four, you saw Mom in the garden dumping salt on a bunch of slugs. You had a total meltdown, crying and screaming. I’d never seen you so upset and nothing would calm you down. You watched in horror as the slugs dissolved into nothing.” As Ellie recounted this traumatic event, it sort of started to come back to me.

“Oh my God. I was positive I could hear their silent screams of disintegration.”

Ellie continued to fill in the blanks for me. “You started pleading with Mom to stop it, but she wouldn’t. You asked her why she was killing the slugs and Mom told you it was because they were killing her plants. And you asked her, why did she pick caring about the plants over caring about the slugs? Why were the plants more important? Why were the plants more lovable?”

And then I remembered the scene. I didn’t have the words for it at the time, but I couldn’t understand how my own mother could make such a callous decision, choosing one life-form over another. As my mind raced back, Ellie kept talking.

“Well, Mom realized it was all too disturbing for you, so after that day she only killed slugs when you weren’t home. But I knew you still knew. ’Cause sometimes you would stare at a little streak of slime that led to nowhere on our patio and you would get really sad.”

I was so relieved to have a reason for my dreams, a reason I could openly discuss, that I grabbed Ellie in a bear hug and danced around while cheering, “Of course! The slugs! Thank you!” As I put her down, it occurred to me that, only one year after I was disturbed by my mother’s choice of the plants over the slugs, I would choose Ellie over Duncan. I understood then that when you love something, there is really no dilemma at all. With age comes the wisdom that choices must be made. It’s not callous; it’s just life. I then wondered aloud why the dreams had started now, after all this time. Ellie thought it was pretty obvious.

She said, “You don’t do well when you feel abandoned. And I think all the Roman stuff is affecting you more than you realize.”

Once Ellie hopped on her return train to New York City, I called Alisha for an emergency appointment. She already knew about the Roman stuff. But for the first time I spoke about the recurring dreams and my mother and the slugs. With a series of questions that all amounted to “And how did that make you feel?” I uncovered that I felt scared. Scared that I was more the slug than the plant. Scared that my mother would one day choose another life-form over me. Scared that maybe I too was so disposable and powerless that something as harmless and common as salt could wipe my existence off the face of the earth.

By the end of the session I was sobbing. I tried to catch all my snot and tears into tissues, made readily available in a wooden box on a side table, but a few drips made their way into my mouth. The nasty salty taste made me sob even more. I produced guttural heaves and a pile of balled-up, drenched Kleenex. My display of keening made me embarrassed. I thought, especially since I was a psychology major, here to observe more than to emote, that I could handle everything in a more clinical manner. But Dr. Alisha Goldman said the crying was good. It was needed and cathartic. And that I was having what she would describe as “a breakthrough.”

She was right. I slept soundly that night, my eyes heavy and swollen from all the tears. I woke up the next morning with no memory of my dreams at all.

It was a chilly December morning. No snow, but frost clung to every archway and bare tree limb. I put on my favorite tight jeans and a thin kelly green sweater that made the red in my eyes and hair pop. I wrapped my bare neck in a long gray wool scarf and pulled on gray ankle boots. I knew I was going to be freezing during my eleven-minute walk through campus, but I thought the cold might solidify my resolve. I was going to conquer my last fear with immersion therapy.