Alligators May Be Present: A Novel

The Defender of Weak and Victimized Pooches

The Defender of Weak and Victimized Pooches S evere episodes of depression, Glassman had read, could be triggered by specific events; or one could occur out of the blue without any precipitating event at all. The chemical imbalances in the brain could wreak their own, unassisted havoc. He had always taken comfort in the knowledge that, at least since the shock treatments at Saint Vincent, he could trace his especially depressed periods to traumatic events. He took this to mean that he was less sick than those who suffered episodes for no apparent reason. In graduate school, just after he had started dating Rebecca, it had been the combination of bronchitis and the antibiotics that had wiped him out. He didn’t care what the nurse said, or the thick pharmaceutical handbook he had checked out of Pattee after he had recovered. Erythromycin was largely responsible for sending him into a tailspin . More recently, it was the violent blow to his head at Patch Corral that had rocked him. The fog had only lifted after Rebecca shared her happy news with him. So of course the fog rolled back in after her miscarriage. Could there be a more appropriate time to be disconsolate? How could anyone gauge the appropriateness of an emotional response? 200 201 Who, if anyone, should be granted the authority to proffer such judgments? Sometimes, Glassman tried to convince himself, it was good and right to be depressed. Suffering had gotten a bad rap in America. With all the latest medications and therapies, one needn’t suffer through manic or depressed episodes any longer. Drugs couldn’t make your problems go away, but they would help you sail along even-keeled through the storm. Why screw with depression in the 1990s for God’s sake? Rebecca had challenged him. This seemed to be the prevailing wisdom of the day. And there was definitely something to be said for it. Perhaps all his rationalizing about the virtues of suffering was what was truly pathological. A Jewish thing. Like the old joke went: Why don’t Jews drink? It interferes with their suffering. But jokes aside, he wondered whether one could ever experience exuberant, boundless joy on an even keel. Could he experience the euphoria that had characterized his spirits during the weeks just after Rebecca had told him she was pregnant? Was he willing to give this feeling up? Plus, would his medicated mind be nearly so agile, so productive, so damn entertaining to himself, if to no one else, during his nondepressed weeks and months (at least 75 percent of the time after all)? Could a medicated mind ever do more than just “show?” These were the thoughts that now consumed Glassman, consumed him while he waited for Shuman to return. He desperately needed the old man now, needed to confide in the one person who intimately knew his pain. Who else would truly understand? He wouldn’t burden Rebecca with his own suffering. It wouldn’t be fair. She had withdrawn into her own shell for a solid week after the miscarriage , called in sick to school, had someone cover her classes. She had moped about the house in a dingy white T-shirt and gray sweatpants from her grad school days that Glassman hadn’t realized she still owned. In short, she frighteningly reminded Glassman of himself for those seven days. But after the week was up—as if she had consciously allotted herself exactly one mournful week—she showered , brushed her teeth and hair, even applied a light coat of lipstick to her lovely mouth, and returned to work, returned to the world of the living. Glassman was disinclined to drag her back down to his gloomier realm through selfishly venting his pain. This was the type of crisis during which children, Glassman knew, relied upon the experience, the kindness, the empathy, of their parents . And their grandparents if they were lucky enough to have any. He knew, however, that he wouldn’t confide in his mother or in Teenie . They would be angry with him if they knew that he had spared them such vital knowledge. Yet his mother had suffered (perhaps continued to suffer, despite her protestations to the contrary) her own interior demons. And both is mother and grandmother had already suffered the untimely disappearance of a loved one. However tough they outwardly appeared...