I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (9 page)

I keep this noise in my head a secret from others. During the hours of my life away from home—when I’m at work, the grocery store, the bank, a party—there is no noise. I look and act and appear normal. I go about my day and take care of the tasks at hand. I smile. I nod. I wait my turn. I say
Yes, please!
and
Why, thank you!
and
You have a great day, too!
No one would ever know it to look at me that as soon as I’m alone I am busy busy busy in the head.

Chasing thoughts will eventually tucker a girl out. It’s exhausting, and it always leads to crying. Crying because the girl thinks she’s crazy, wacko, a real nutcase. Because she thinks she’s alone. Because she forgot to turn on the Crock-Pot, she forgot to turn down the thermostat, she forgot to turn off the oven, so it stayed at 350 degrees all night long. She’ll cry because it’ll occur to her that nobody has ever loved her, nobody ever did, and nobody ever will. She’ll cry because when she hugged her beloved, he tolerated her embrace, then unhooked her to ask is there any Swiss cheese in the fridge. All she wants is something that will let her hug it for as long as she wants. But she doesn’t have that. So she’ll cry. She’ll also drink too much, smoke too much, eat too much, weigh too much, want too much. She’ll worry that she’s boring. She’s stupid. She’s needy. Instead of hiding under the dining room table to shred twenties, she’ll spend them. Instead of shredding sweaters, she’ll buy them. Instead of sleeping, she’ll spend the night on
WebMD.com
, researching rare diseases she’s certain will strike the people she loves. She’ll cry because there’s a gray hair at her temple and a weird brown spot on her big toe.

She’ll also cry because, let’s face it, she’s a fucking mess.

When I brought home a prescription for Xanax, the people who love me cheered. “Bitch-Be-Gone pills,” they said. Some of them told me to be careful because that stuff’s habit-forming, while others showed up at my door, hands outstretched, saying gimme, gimme, gimme. “It’s not like you had dental work done,” they said. “Then you’d have Vicodin. But Xanax is good. Xanax’ll do the trick. You wanna know what goes good with Xanax?” they said. “Bourbon.”

Xanax does go good with bourbon, and also with Scotch. And vodka. Gin. Wine is okay, but whiskey is better. A couple Xanax, a couple shots of Maker’s Mark, a few hours on the computer playing Spider Solitaire: heaven. I can gobble up a one-month supply in about a week. I had to tell my doctor you cannot give me these ever again.

 

 

 

 

 

I thought obedience school would do the puppy some good. I also thought the idea of it was cute. Tie a Harley-Davidson bandana around his neck. A wide orange and black Harley collar with a matching leash. A leather vest. The puppy was bad, but he was also badass.

Wanda, the dog trainer at the obedience school, said under no circumstances should one ever, ever hit a puppy. She said it’s unnecessary, and there is no reason to, ever.

Instead, according to Wanda, one needs to get inside the puppy’s mind. One needs to think as puppies think. One needs to psychoanalyze the puppy.

I myself had given psychoanalysis a try—twice—and I had been kicked out of psychoanalysis—twice—so I was resistant to trying it again, though my family doctor kept enumerating the ways I might find it useful. The idea of psychoanalyzing the puppy sounded wacky to me.

Wanda was a trim, fit woman who wore her hair in a tidy gray bob. She wore high-waisted jeans and a tucked-in T-shirt that said
If only there was a man as smart as my dog!
When I told her about the yellow dinosaur and the puppy’s habitual humping of it—“Like he’s got a sex addiction!” I joked. “He needs a Twelve Step Program!” —she didn’t laugh or even smile.

Instead, she explained some things to me. Dogs are pack animals, she said. They establish hierarchies, and if they’re wired to believe they should be at the top of the hierarchy, you have to show them the error of their thinking, but you must do so in a way that’s gentle and patient and loving. A neutered dog who humps is expressing his dominance, Wanda gravely informed me. Humping him expresses yours.

“So to clarify, what you’re saying is that I should dry hump my dog?” I said. “I mean, I’m not misunderstanding you here, am I? I don’t want to misunderstand or misinterpret or misconstrue.”

Wanda was wearing sensible shoes, she had liver spots on her hands and clear blue eyes in a tanned face. She looked like a divorced high school English teacher or somebody’s spinster aunt. “What you’re saying is,” I asked her, “if I want my dog to stop humping—which I do want, I want that very much—the only way I can make that happen is by me dry humping him. My dog.”

“Yes.”

That night, as my son and I were eating dinner, the puppy crawled out from under the dining room table. He had with him his friend, the yellow dinosaur. He humped it and humped it, his mouth slightly open, while the boy and I ate dinner, and we tried not to giggle, we tried not to watch, we tried to act like everyone is this crazy. This is how life is at everyone’s house.

 

 

 

 

 

When I brought home a prescription for Paxil, the people who love me weren’t surprised. “Welcome aboard!” they said. “We’ve been waiting for you!”

Some of them were on Paxil. Some of them took Prozac. Others took Sepram. Or Sarafem. There’s Lexapro, Luvox, Lustral. There’s Zoloft. It was like being in a club, it was like being in with the in crowd.

We talked about our doses. We chatted about serotonin levels. We sympathized with one another about our various side effects: nausea, drowsiness, headaches, fluctuations in weight. Those who lost weight said,
All right!
Those who gained weight said,
What the hell.
A lot of us said,
Get me to a convent, I am about as horny as a nun, alas, my private parts are of no use to me anymore.

Paxil worked for me in that it stopped all that chaos in my head. It made my mental hiccups go away, and while I appreciated the strange silence it brought and the rest it granted, I didn’t care for how Paxil pressed flat all of my feelings. It was like my mind was a chalkboard, and Paxil wiped it clean with a sponge instead of an eraser—perfectly empty, perfectly blank. It was like Paxil snipped off the tip of my tongue and all my words were blunted, no edges. When September 11 happened, I understood, intellectually, that it was sad, horrible, tragic, but I didn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything anymore. And I knew that wasn’t good.

Not long after, I didn’t go to the drugstore to pick up my prescription. The drugstore called to tell me it was in, and I said I’ll pick it up tomorrow. But I didn’t. I didn’t go to that drugstore ever again, I went off Paxil cold turkey, I haven’t seen a doctor about my OCD since.

The severity of it comes and goes. It got bad when I quit smoking, it got bad when I changed jobs, it gets bad when I watch too much news. Exercise helps, though there’ve been a few times when it’s taken three or four hours of walking to quiet my thoughts. Cutting refined sugar and processed foods out of my diet helps, and getting eight hours of sleep helps, and avoiding stress. But I don’t think it’s ever going to completely go away. I’m not sure I want it to. Because then who would I be? What would I think about? How would I spend my time?

 

 

 

 

 

I’d been napping on the couch, one of those late-afternoon naps I always regret because I wake up crabby and still tired. Even though I was groggy, even before I opened my eyes, I knew the puppy was standing there. I sensed him. He was staring at me.

He locked his gaze on mine. I saw there was a yellow dinosaur pinched between his teeth. He kept his eyes on me as he drew that thing up between his legs and humped it.

I’m the baby, I’m the baby, I’m the baby,
the yellow dinosaur squeaked, and as the puppy humped it, he maintained eye contact with me. I felt like he knew my shyest secrets.

I leapt off the couch, and in a fury, I yanked it from him, and I beat him with it, and I’m embarrassed to admit what else I did.

It’s not like afterward the puppy took a nap while I smoked a cigarette, though that is indeed what happened. The puppy snuck off to his hiding spot under the dining room table while I flipped through the yellow pages, chain smoking and calling strange veterinarians. I couldn’t call my own. Not after what I’d done.

I finally got one on the phone who didn’t act like I should be reported to the SPCA or PETA. His name was Dr. Kronkite. He said he’d talk to me for as long as I needed. He wanted to know where is the yellow dinosaur right now. He said, “Why don’t I wait right here on the line while you go get it and throw it away?”

As I chatted with Dr. Kronkite, describing for him some of the puppy’s behaviors, offering up my theories—separation anxiety, fear-aggression, low serotonin levels—the puppy came out from under the table. He gave me a sly look, then trotted off in the direction of the boy’s bedroom.

Dr. Kronkite was saying something about doggie Prozac, its effectiveness, when I heard the puppy yelp. He came crashing out of the boy’s room and went flying back under the table.

I got off the phone to get the story: The boy had caught the puppy rubbing his stinky, musky body all over the bedsheets again. But this time, the boy was prepared. He sprayed the puppy with perfume. Lots of it.

I coaxed the puppy out from under the table. “Come here, you,” I said, and I held out my arms.

He sniffed my hands, whimpered, licked my fingers. The puppy army-crawled himself out from under the table and turned around twice in my lap before settling down. He smelled like decaying roses or a French whorehouse. He smelled like me. He’d eat a pound of rotten hamburger, a stick of butter, and a tampon. He’d bark at a Rottweiler, but avert his gaze from a poodle. He’d tug a pair of my dirty panties from the hamper and trot them out during a dinner party. He’d gloat about having a bone, a stick, a piece of rope, an empty Diet Dr Pepper bottle he found in the street. I’d have a doctor remove that brown spot from my big toe, I’d ask for a biopsy, I’d ask for a second opinion. I’d count to seventy-seven seven times in a row, I’d touch that spot on the back of my head where my brain is attached, I’d come home from the doctor’s, the chiropractor’s, the bar, and hug my dog. I was obsessed with this puppy. I still am.

A
t age fourteen, what I wanted to be most of all was applauded, and if that wasn’t possible, I wanted to be a girl in a Bruce Springsteen song. A Jersey girl. A girl named Sandy or Wendy or Candy or Cindy or Sherry, Rosalita or Crazy Janie or Mary, Queen of Arkansas. A girl idolized by an intense and poetic man who had curly dark hair and brooding dark eyes and who wore a clean white T-shirt every day. I spent hours in my bedroom, kneeling as if in supplication before my Emerson stereo fully equipped with AM/FM radio, cassette player, and turntable. I played the warped and scratchy Springsteen albums I bought at a garage sale.

Since the albums most likely to be found at a garage sale are
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir Sings Christmas Carols
;
Midnight, Moonlight & Magic: The Very Best of Henry Mancini
; and
Bagpipes of Scotland, Volume 4
, Springsteen albums are a major score even if they are, as these were, in rough shape. But I didn’t care because, to me, that made them seem more real, more true, more authentic. More like the kind of records Springsteen himself would own. These records were naked. They weren’t in sleeves, and they didn’t have covers, and the name
Jack
was written in black marker on the red Columbia label. Jack left his albums behind because he’d moved out in a hurry, but such haste was necessary because Jack had been caught cheating. His wife, a woman I’d never seen before and would never see again, told me about it. The consequence of Jack’s adultery was that his wife wrote
10 cents
on jagged pieces of masking tape, then sold for dimes the things Jack loved best.

As I flipped through Jack’s record collection, Jack’s wife, a pudgy brunette who was setting up their baby’s playpen in the driveway, called out that her soon-to-be ex just loved Springsteen, but since she hated Springsteen almost as much as she once loved her cheater-for-a-husband, she would let me have all five records for a quarter.

Jack’s wife was gabby. She asked me how old I was, and what grade was I in, and where did I go to school, and did I have a boyfriend. She told me to guess how old she was. When I guessed thirty, an answer that never failed to flatter any adult who was being coy about age, she said not for three more weeks.

The albums included
Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
;
The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
;
Darkness on the Edge of Town
;
Born to Run
; and
Born in the U.S.A.

Jack’s wife was also selling the contents of her junk drawer, but she hadn’t bothered to dump the odds and ends in a box; she’d just brought the junk drawer itself outside and put it on the ground next to the mailbox and beside a wooden coat hanger. A geezer and a blue-hair, obviously married for a hundred years or more, were rummaging through that drawer. Otherwise, it was just me and Jack’s wife.

“You’re still young, so you don’t know anything,” Jack’s wife said, plopping her fat bald baby in the playpen. “So I’m going to give you some advice. You want my advice?”

I said okay. I was sure there was nothing this lady could say that would ever have anything to do with me. Jack’s wife and I had nothing in common, and I didn’t see how we ever could. Love had let her down, and she’d let herself go. She had a droopy chin and a lot of black eyeliner around her eyes and she was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers T-shirt that was much too big for her. It hung past her shorts, like a little girl wearing a nightgown except she looked too tired in the face to be a little girl. When her bald-headed baby spit out its pacifier, and the pacifier landed on the driveway, Jack’s wife picked it up, popped it in her own mouth, then plugged it back in her baby’s.