By Deborah S. Greenhut
September 4, 1998, Dr. Friedman’s office
“And your relationship with Luddy—how’s that going?”
Dr. Friedman and I have spent much of the summer unpacking the trauma of the last few years following my parents’ deaths. He’s let me find my own way, listening patiently to my anguish.
Today he’s asking about my marriage, saying I haven’t mentioned Luddy once. It’s possible he tried to bring up Luddy in an earlier session, but I probably ignored him, choosing to perseverate about my grief.
“It’s going okay,” I tell him. “Luddy tried to help me during all of this, but he’s not very good at cleaning up or organizing finances, and those were the major tasks at hand. And that first attorney I hired was—”
“Anything unusual going on between you?”
I start to say “No,” because I want this to be about me and not Luddy, but I decide to tell him about something that happened a few weeks ago.
At first I had passed it off as nothing unusual, because it was Luddy, but later I had the same awkward feeling I’d experienced that day in the ER—as if we were being observed—and I couldn’t shake the thought that we were sending out loud signals about some abnormality to the world, even though we couldn’t recognize them ourselves.
“Well, something happened last month. I don’t know if I’d say it’s ‘unusual.’”
“Tell me about it,” Dr. Friedman says, assuming his listening position, balancing his chin on his hand.
“I came home from my class late one evening to find a policeman at our front door, peering through the screen at Luddy. He was sitting, slumped, in his usual position on the couch, and the television was blaring, also as usual. When the officer saw my car pull in, he approached me very carefully.
“He introduced himself as Detective Robert Brinkman, and said he was investigating the report of an intruder attempting to enter the house next door. He’d found no one there, so he had begun interviewing neighbors to see if anyone had seen anything unusual. He had already been standing at our door for twenty minutes, trying to get Luddy’s attention. He was seriously concerned that something was wrong, because Luddy wasn’t responding. He asked if I would let him come inside to check on him.
“I tried to reassure him, saying that Luddy had proven long ago that he could sleep through a war zone, but the detective wasn’t convinced. He said he really wanted to come inside, just to make sure Luddy was okay, and he didn’t want me to go in alone, in case he wasn’t.
“I hesitated. I knew we had something to hide. I didn’t want him to see inside the house. I told the detective it wasn’t necessary and called Luddy’s name. The detective gestured toward the door.
“‘Well, funny thing,’ I said, laughing. ‘I don’t have a key for the screen door because we don’t usually use it. I keep it inside, so we’ll have to go around the other way.’
“‘I’ll come with you,’ Brinkman offered with concern.
“I really didn’t want the detective to come in. The mess in the house was beginning to descend into what I’d call a health hazard, and I didn’t want to deal with that issue on top of Luddy’s apparently severe episode of narcolepsy. I was running out of excuses for our strangeness. Even if we could walk past the garbage on the floor, I would still have to deal with my husband’s confused and sometimes dramatic way of waking up. He was sure to be disoriented and angry, and then the detective might become concerned about something worse than just his lack of consciousness.
“Brinkman persisted, so we walked to the side door of the house and stepped carefully around all the newspapers and mail thrown haphazardly on the floor to make our way past the debris in the living room, where I would have to wake up Luddy, who hadn’t heard a thing. I saw the detective look with alert interest at our surroundings as we made our way toward Luddy, and my fear of how this was going to end intensified.
“When I got to the couch, I sat down with Luddy, and I gently pressed his arm until I felt some movement. I said, ‘Luddy, there’s someone here to see you. Can you wake up?’ His eyes fluttered and widened into a familiar confused and annoyed expression, and I dreaded what might happen next.
“Luckily, the officer spoke in a reassuring way, saving the situation. ‘Sir, you had us all worried!’ he said. I could have kissed him! Luddy looked around to see who was speaking. When he perceived it was safe, he laughed, saying ‘I must have dropped off!’ as if he were at the beach or something.”
Dr. Friedman smiles.
“The officer told Luddy he’d been trying to get his attention for twenty minutes, and was concerned that something might be wrong. ‘When your wife came home, I asked her to let me in, and here we are.’
“Luddy laughed a little sheepishly. ‘Sometimes it’s like that. Narcolepsy!’
“The detective explained about the intruder complaint and asked us to be watchful. I felt like he was the watchful one, eyeing us both carefully throughout and making some mental notes, but he didn’t say anything more and politely left our house.
“After my sense of danger had passed, I realized that the detective was one of Simon’s old football teammates. ‘That was Bobby. Bobby Brinkman!’ I said to Luddy.
“Luddy shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ and I noticed a slight tremor in his body. Experience told me not to mention it to Luddy, but it worried me.
“‘He was ahead of Simon in school. Football?’ I added, giving Luddy a clue. His shoulders rose and fell once more. I dropped it.
“I don’t remember if Luddy and I said anything else to each other for the remainder of the night. I felt chilled by the fear I had experienced and the conflict within me that would have prevented me from doing the right thing, the sane thing, to save Luddy. It would have been nuts not to check on him with Bobby, but I had feared his hostility at being awakened almost as much as I felt the shame of exposing our living situation to an outsider. Fortunately, the detective wasn’t going to let me go down that path, but I felt the force of my worst dependent behaviors trying to prevent me from acting that night. I was at war with my lonely coping mechanisms, and I could not let them win. Thank goodness Bobby appealed to my better angel.”
“Wow,” Dr. Friedman says with characteristic calm. “What do you think is going on with you right now?”
“Stepping out again into the world has made me realize that a separation from Luddy is going to be necessary for my mental health. I don’t want to sleepwalk through the rest of my life. My former student Mimi, who’s teaching at a college in North Jersey, has contacted me about developing a salsa orchestra there, and I want to grab this unexpected chance to restore my life.”
“That’s a big leap,” Dr. Friedman says.
“Yes! It would be a full-time job, teaching and conducting. I was planning to tell Luddy that I’d like to take an apartment up north so I can avoid driving back and forth during the week. I thought that maybe this way we could experiment with living near New York City on the weekends, which has always seemed financially out of reach, but with my job, we could swing it.”
“I have another thought,” Dr. Friedman says. “It’s about something we didn’t know much about years ago, but I’m glad I can tell you about today. The signs are pretty clear to me. It sounds like Luddy has ADHD.”
“I thought that was a childhood condition.”
“It seems we were wrong about that. It’s showing up more often now in adults. And the interesting thing is, it often shows up in high-achieving people. Ask Luddy if he’ll come along to your next appointment with me, and we can talk about scheduling an evaluation. I know a good neuropsychiatrist at County General who can help you.”
I flinch a little, thinking about my last visit there, but it sounds like there might be an end to this crazy maze we’ve been navigating for so long. I agree to ask Luddy to come and hear more about Dr. Friedman’s theory.
October 1, 1998, County General Hospital, all day
“It isn’t the same for everyone,” says Dr. Waters, cautioning me about ADHD while Luddy completes some preliminaries with her graduate assistant.
It’s disheartening to hear that there are so many unknowns. Luddy has been so excited to learn that there might be an explanation for his behaviors; I hoped he wouldn’t be crushed to learn that the treatments and medications were experimental, requiring a lot of tweaking, and that there were side effects, with no guarantees.
During the neuropsychiatrist’s exam later, I mull over my concern that there is no actual test for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD—in Luddy’s case, diagnosed as adult ADHD. Other conditions need to be ruled out before it can be ruled in, but Dr. Waters has given me her gut response. Luddy seems more lethargic than hyperactive, so this leaves me feeling confused.
We had spoken with Luddy’s parents about this development, hoping to add some insight to the interviews we would have with Dr. Waters’ team. Lorelai had always described Luddy as lethargic as a child. According to Rudy, Luddy was a daydreamer who hyper-focused on the things other people ignored—the worm at your feet, the butterfly or snowflake floating by, the hairline crack in the glass. “Like Ferdinand the Bull in that story,” according to Rudy. Luddy’s extra focus has always been an asset to him as a student of subatomic structure, but it was also, always, a problem in social relationships that require other attentive skills.
Luddy’s annoying childhood habit of pointing out everyone else’s errors and imprecision had carried him through a competitive high school into adult life as a scientist—who also happens to be a pain in the ass. No one likes to be wrong, and Luddy himself has a thin skin when it comes to his own mistakes.
There is some discussion of “little professor disorder” as well, otherwise known then as Asperger’s syndrome. Dr. Waters acknowledges Luddy’s irritating behavior, but explains that Asperger’s may or not be another notch on the ADHD spectrum; the jury was still out. She’s pretty sure he has a “seriously inattentive” version of ADHD. She tells us the only way we could truly obtain an accurate diagnosis of disorders like these is to do a brain autopsy, so clearly it’s not possible to confirm the condition while a person is alive.
“If we hear hoofbeats,” she tells me, “we think ADHD.” Psychologists use questionnaires, personal narratives, and various concentration tasks to determine whether a patient has ADHD. When they tag it, they offer caveats about the lack of medical precision involved. Nonetheless, this team seems pretty certain about Luddy’s diagnosis. We’re only an hour into the daylong assessment when they give me this news.
Jake, who has taken a day off from classes to support us, is interviewed with me about our memories of Luddy’s behavior and triggering circumstances. The diagnosing doctor explains that one of the testing strategies is to create frustrating challenges for Luddy to experience so that they can try to model the difficulties he experiences in processing and solving problems. I learn that he expressed a great deal of frustration and anger during this episode, and they ask me not to discuss it with him when he comes out for a break.
When Luddy emerges from the testing suite, he is complaining bitterly about not being able to complete things his own way. He seems utterly disheartened, and doubtful about the process.
When he stops venting, I put my hand on his and I break the rule.
“What if they had to create some frustrating circumstances to see how you would respond?”
“That’s outrageous!” he exclaims, ready to go back in to protest.
I gently press him back into his seat with my hand.
“Is it?” Drawing on my own experience as a teacher, I suggest, “Since there’s no blood test for the condition they’re investigating, maybe they have to resort to good old-fashioned challenges to see what you do in response. I remember an IQ test where I couldn’t use a pencil to solve a math problem, and I was pretty upset about it. I found out later they were looking to see how I responded to obstacles. P.S. That pencil lowered my score.”
“That’s different!” he exclaims, but he is calming down. He makes a joke about my deficient math skills to make himself feel better, but I don’t take the bait.
“It’s just a thought . . . maybe I’m wrong. Only you can decide how you behave in these situations.”
He makes intense eye contact with me as a wave of comprehension battles with his adrenaline.
The doctor returns, and it’s time for Luddy to return to the other room for further testing.
I am heartsick to see him so humbled. I want to shake him and say Don’t you get it? But I have said too much already. Who knows; maybe it will help restore his pride for the rest of the test. I didn’t mean to derail him with a flood of contrary information, but he is my husband, after all, and I love him—pity him too. I can’t just stand by and watch him fail.
In front of Dr. Friedman, Luddy had promised that our marriage would come first from now on. I realized then that I wanted us to make it.
“Just pass!” I say to him as he gets up to leave, smiling at his half-comprehending face.
He smiles back, acknowledging my encouragement as a gift.
My mind flashes warmly to the birthday cards he used to make for me, from the children, patiently tracing their tiny hands and helping them write their names.
Dr. Waters suggests that we might try to forget the last twenty years. I don’t know how to do that. What would it mean, to start over from scratch?
At the end of the day, we are told that the test results point conclusively to ADHD as the headline. An alphabet soup of three-letter acronyms—possibly obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and others, such as prosopagnosia (face blindness)—are consequences of the primary disorder, although no one can truly distinguish between the chicken and the egg at this point. Even the narcolepsy can be a consequence of his intense focusing episodes. He needs to regroup by turning off all stimuli in order to get the deep sleep he needs to refresh him. Unfortunately, when he wakes up, he’ll work another marathon and then crash yet again. We are told this cycle is detrimental for good relationships and may aggravate some of the other disorders.
We emerge from the clinic with conditions, metaphors, and more confusion. The treatment must resemble an octopus to tame all these things at once. Somehow Luddy has a feeling of relief, all the same. For the first time, he has a name for what is wrong and, more importantly, a belief that he can fix it. Who knows? Maybe now he can become King Engineer in his own personal laboratory kingdom. Maybe this diagnosis explains why the Nobel Prize keeps moving just out of reach.
“I love you,” he says as we’re leaving, thanking me for bringing him to this place. He could be a four-year-old, thanking me for a new puppy.
As we step into this strange new realm, I am cautiously optimistic that his gigantic appetite for knowledge might carry him—and our marriage—through.
October 8, 1998, Dr. Friedman’s office
We are thankful that Dr. Friedman was perceptive about the possible cause of our conflicts, and that he recommended this testing clinic.
“We didn’t know about ADHD fifteen, twenty years ago,” he said ruefully to Luddy when we went back to discuss the possibilities. “Now, I’m seeing it more and more.”
We are confident that this is a challenge we can embrace and succeed at with our mad skills. Gaining new expertise is our shared thrill, we tell Dr. Friedman. We will surround ourselves with books—our favorite stimulants—and try to learn as much as possible about the impediments Luddy is facing. We believe our ability to learn new things will see us through.
As we leave the doctor’s office, I feel apprehensively intoxicated by what we’ve learned, and what lies ahead, though I’m not quite sure how to forget about the past two decades of knowing Luddy. I have managed to live with the quirks of ADHD without understanding it for so long. Now, armed with this new information, I know I’ll need to make some radical changes too.
We face each other at this huge moment of truth, which feels like a glacial Alaskan crevasse where feelings and history go to die. The roar of ice calving away from itself is the sound that haunts my waking hours.
It’s gonna take a miracle.
Excerpt (from ARC):
Pages 180 through 187 “September 4, 1998” thru “October 8, 1998”—Last line: “It’s gonna take a miracle.”
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At age eight, Deborah S. Greenhut announced her ambition to become an author. Her mother replied, “Become a teacher instead to make a living.” Crestfallen, ten-year-old Deborah perfected her skill with a spangled baton to twirl solo as her school’s mascot. A one-time concert-pianist-in-training, Deborah longed to trade up for a conductor’s baton, but that career path seemed closed to women in the 1960s. After earning her B.A. in English from Middlebury College then a PhD from Rutgers University, she pursued her original dream by becoming a writer, a teacher, and, later, a dean. Her poems and cultural reviews have appeared in print and online at www.oobr.com , medium.com , and Red Booth Review. Her way-off Broadway production of Difficult Subjects, was selected for the Best Plays of the Strawberry Festival, Volume 2. A multi-genre work, How I Live. With Terror, developed as an artist-in-residence at 92 Street Y/Makor, appeared in www.Zeek.net. In 2017, she received the Princemere Poetry Prize. The Hoarder’s Wife is her first novel. Deborah now lives in a clean house in New Jersey where she can focus on making art in a room of her own.
