Since You Ask
Louise Wareham
Akashic Books

In Louise Wareham’s first novel, Since You Ask, 24-year-old Betsy Scott, a British transplant to New York City’s wealthy Upper East Side, narrates the story of her life so far. She is a year out of college, deferring admission to her medical school of choice, and an inpatient at Fairley, the psychiatric hospital where she landed after a cocaine- and heroin-related breakdown. She speaks to us with the familiar cool of girls who have been in psychiatric wards and who go on to write books: “If I kill myself here,” she tells us, “I am going to walk into the pool with rocks in my pockets.” Betsy is smart and hard, quiet but ready to talk, as if she has turned a corner. “I got the impression,” a date tells her shortly before the breakdown, “that you were kind of normal, you know, that yours was this nice normal kind of family from the British colonies.” Betsy’s story corrects this impression.
     The first thing Betsy tells us about is her older brother Raymond’s homecoming the previous May, after six years away at various schools and ten months served in an Antiguan prison. “Usually, I was nervous around Ray,” she tells us, “but I wasn’t that day. Partly because I didn’t live at home anymore and partly because Ray didn’t bother me anymore.” Wareham sets the story in motion by introducing the Scott family, the prodigal son Raymond, and the fact that something about Raymond used to bother Betsy. This beginning has the naturalness of a complicated story told for the first time. Betsy starts with a recent important event, but soon into the telling realizes that she must go further back, to her childhood, to Antigua.
     We receive Betsy’s story in fragments. Wareham cuts liberally but deftly from the present tense of the novel—Betsy’s time at Fairley—to significant times and relationships of the past childhood memories of Antigua, her high school boyfriend Beck, a compulsive affair with 41-year-old Frank, drug binges with Raymond. Gradually, the story emerges from collaged bits, shards of revelation interspersed with longer runs of narrative storytelling and short dialogues with Dr. Keats. The chronological center of the story is when Betsy is fifteen and meets Beck. Beck is another species of urban teen: Betsy’s: best friend Sylvia sums it up, “He doesn’t go to private school.” With his New York accent, waitress mother, and crew of friends at the school-yard courts, Beck is a walk-on from Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries, which Betsy happens to be reading the day after she meets him. What seems to be developing as a story of class conflict veers unexpectedly when Beck brings Betsy to his bedroom and she recounts, “He started rubbing himself the way Raymond did .... It was the way it was with Raymond, the same exact way....”
     Beck is a minion in a criminal “freight” venture and introduces Betsy to his boss Frank. Despite his sophisticated Tribeca veneer, Frank is a repulsive man, cold and abusive; Betsy is compulsively drawn to him. Wareham’s portrayal of their sick liaison captures its psychological complexity:

“Something happened,” he said, draining his cup, putting it behind him in the sink. “Or you wouldn’t be with me.”

I smiled. That was why I liked him. I liked him the first moment, because he saw me for who I was, he saw I had been through something. And it was something that would serve him. He wanted me for that. I was so glad for this.

     We understand that with Frank, Betsy is somehow reliving the abuse by her brother Raymond. “I tried to accept the hurt,” she tells us, “to open up and not resist.” The sex she has with Frank is violent, as if they are ripping open a wound to disinfect it and sew it closed again. It is not palliative; rather, it allows Betsy to feel acutely a wound that will not disappear, as her family hopes it will, by pretending that it does not exist.
     Wareham shows how a family can conspire not to know about intramural abuses. She skillfully unveils revelatory scenes, moments in which Betsy’s parents or her younger brother Eric should have realized the incest.

It was so long ago: light of the moon streaking down the cockpit hatch, water slapping against the hull, nipping like fish. Ray smelled of toothpaste. He had the sheet in his hand.

“What are you doing?” Dad had asked, stepping from the shadows and the silence of the foredeck, from the silence of my mother sleeping.

“Nothing,” Ray said.

“Betsy?”

And there it was: complicity—beginning of the endless lie.

“Nothing.”

     Years later, sitting across a cafe table from his daughter, who is strung out on drugs, Edward Scott says, “You’re not the one we worry about, Betsy.... You’re a strong girl.” Though he is right—Betsy is strong—he should worry. Conspiring for years to protect wayward Raymond, the Scotts have sacrificed Betsy. The abuse has alienated her from her parents and from her own instinct for self-protection. She is strong, but in order to survive, she must tell her story.
     Wareham takes her title from the first line of Anne Sexton’s poem “Wanting to Die,” and, in both works, the narrative is a response to personal questions asked of the narrator. Since You Ask is Betsy’s answer to her psychiatrist’s questions. “I like it when he says Adult Psychiatric,” she tells us. “I have finally arrived, I think, at a place where I should be.” This narrative approach works (as it did in that other story told by an Upper East Side scion at the urging of his psychiatrist, The Catcher in the Rye). The reader’s experience is analogous to Betsy’s own awakening in psychotherapy. Her answers to Dr. Keats’s questions are difficult fragments, but, as we piece them together, Betsy’s story begins to make sense and we have a rather profound experience of coming to understand her emotional landscape.
     Again and again, Betsy represents that landscape with images of Antigua, and we feel in her associations the distant yearning of one adrift from the paradise of childhood:

I sat on the cool edge of Frank’s Jacuzzi turning. over his blue glass ashtray. It was the blue of a hazy morning in Antigua, a blue washed through with cloud, blue of my uniform and the flower at the edge of the road, of my mother’s eyes behind her sunglasses and Eric’s in the late afternoon as we dragged through the white dust after school, dirt in our brown leather sandals, eating hard candies from the general store: mint and vanilla and butterscotch.

     Telling her story, Betsy realizes that she lost her childhood too soon. She also realizes that she has lost her father. “He wasn’t the man who picked me up from the front porch of the house, beside the lemon tree in his creased cream white shirt. He wasn’t the man who turned the pages, sitting sleepy beside my bed.”
     At odd moments, Betsy quotes the T.S. Eliot verses that her father used to sing when she was a girl. The same rhymes that early in the novel show him as a playful, imaginative father, later reveal his deep flaw: ”Macavity, Macavity. There’s no one like Macavity. There never was a cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.”
     Since You Ask is a small, quiet novel that succeeds in focusing intently on one character’s account of abuse and recovery. Some pieces of the story are underdeveloped, but these lapses are secondary to what the novel achieves. Wareham draws beautiful sketches of Antigua, but the New York setting is blank. Raymond’s misdeeds are never fully disclosed, though perhaps this is due to a sister’s jealousy of a brother who has already stolen more than his share of the family’s attention. The speedy rush through Betsy’s college years leaves a significant gap, and, given Betsy’s compulsion for dangerous living, we wonder how she managed to do so well. Finally, in the last pages of the novel, despite the gathering allusions—to Woolf, Plath, and Sexton—we are never convinced that Betsy is suicidal.
     Wareham’s great achievement here is her plotting, her control, the deliberate order and pace with which she reveals Betsy’s story, her skillful withholding. True intimacy is eked out over long stretches. Betsy answers our questions, but not the first time we ask—maybe the second time.