Prozac Nation (12 page)

Pamela and I seemed to spend a lot of our time driving to Taco Villa or Jack in the Box for lunch, but sometimes I'd go watch her play baseball with her friends, and sometimes she'd take me to one of those late-night back yard keg parties where people do mescaline and peyote and get sick and throw up and slip on each other's vomit and listen to Black Sabbath (which they call just plain Sabbath) and Motley Crue (which they call just plain Crue) and do all sorts of things that sophisticated New York City children would think uncouth. I kind of liked that part of suburbia: I haven't ever been as consistently stoned as I was that summer. Sometimes Pamela and I swam in the pool or sat in the sun—mostly she did the former and I did the latter. Sometimes some of her friends from high school would drop by. All of them were going to community college and majoring in secretarial science, just like Pamela. It was hard for me not to seem like a superior snothead in that environment, so to keep from repelling everyone around me, I tried not to talk too much.

Where on earth would I ever fit in? I kept wondering. At camp everyone is so Jappy, and here in Matawan they're not Jappy enough. Would it be too much to ask to be in an environment where I had
something
in common with the people whose lot I shared? Nothing big: They didn't have to be Springsteen fans. Even Bob Seger or John Cougar would have done the trick. I mean, I was kind of weird as thirteen-year-olds go, but it's not like I needed to be relocated to another planet in order to fit in. Or maybe I did. I was starting to feel that way.

If only I had known the truth about Pamela, if only I'd known we really did have some things in common. It was years later when I found out that Pamela had repeated episodes of depression, of falling into an almost catatonic blankness that made my aunt and uncle so frustrated and clumsy in her presence that they would just scream and prod in their efforts to get her to respond to them. She'd effectively been driven to silence by all the noise, and had an adolescence marked by suicidal behavior. But, of course, we never talked about any of that stuff because who on earth would have thought to bring it up? I didn't know about her, she didn't know about me, and in the cabal of silence and shame that seems so integral to depression, no one had bothered to tell us. So we spent several weeks together bound in this stifled, inarticulate anomie that revolved around
General Hospital
and what was up with Luke and Laura and where to find more weed.

Then, one night on the phone from Trixie's house, my father said, I hope you're not playing your music too loud and driving everyone else crazy. He also said, I hope you're not falling asleep with the TV on like Aunt Trixie tells me you are, because electricity is expensive.

Suddenly, all I could think was that for more than ten fucking years there was this vacuum in my life where a paternal figure should have been, and now he was telling me how to act. It seemed to me that the clock stopped when I was three, and like some latter-day Miss Havisham I was still waiting for my perfect daddy to emerge and rescue me, as cobwebs grew between my molars, as the lacy white cake before me petrified into stone. There was this space filled with nothing but longing for a daddy just like everyone else's. I'd learned to live with this awful sense of lack, and now after all the years he was telling me to behave properly as if he really were my father, and all I could think was, Who the hell is he to tell me what's wrong or right? What the fuck does he know about being a father?

And for the first time, I really understood just how much it must have killed my mother to have him interfere with her parenting. I understood what a violation it is to have someone who has simply not been there all along decide suddenly that he is not just moving in, but taking over. Taking over with words, not with deeds. His love, if I ever cashed it in, couldn't even buy me a morning paper, it was so much about the intangibles that have nothing to do with the workaday requirements of being a parent.

Never in the five summers I had been at camp, not once in those lonely, homesick days, did I ever want my mommy so badly as I did at that moment.

And I felt so stuck: She was the person closest to me, the only one I trusted, and we were in the most distorted, dependent relationship. I was completely wrapped up in a person who didn't know me at all, like a claustrophobe who chose to live in a small dark cave, trying to whip the fear.

4

If you take someone's thoughts and feelings away, bit by bit, consistently, then they have nothing left, except some gritty, gnawing, shitty little instinct, down there, somewhere, worming round the gut, but so far down, so hidden, it's impossible to find. Imagine, if you will, a worldwide conspiracy to deny the existence of the colour yellow. And whenever you saw yellow, they told you, no, that isn't yellow, what the fuck's yellow? Eventually, whenever you saw yellow, you would say: that isn't yellow, course it isn't, blue or green or purple, or . . . You'd say it, yes it is, it's yellow, and become increasingly hysterical, and then go quite berserk.

 

DAVID EDGAR

Mary Barnes

 

You could think of 1980 as the year that a mandate for conservatism and getting the hostages the hell out of Iran got Ronald Reagan elected president, or as the year John Lennon was shot to death while signing an autograph as he walked into his apartment building just off Central Park West. The slaying took place close enough to where I was lying in bed at the time that I would later convince myself that I'd heard the shots, that the random noises of firecrackers, of looting teenagers and anonymous gunfire all over the place and of windows and bottles breaking in the projects next door, were actually specific and purposeful, aimed at rock and roll in general and John Lennon in particular. For me, it was all just so much tragedy. It was the year of broken glass and broken girls, of broken me. It was around that time that my father walked out for good.

It was then that the noise got to be as loud and frightening as it ever would be, that it went from pathetic to pathological. And it seemed that the only thing that could have possibly stopped the din was the peace, the silence, of my father's withdrawal from the situation, leaving me and my mother alone to muddle through. There was so much bad blood between them, mostly running through me, that one of them had to go, and since my father was the one who lived his life by default, who'd forfeited so much of it to the haze of Valium and the cold comfort of shutting down, it had to be he.

He didn't actually disappear until the end of my freshman year of high school (I was something like fourteen going on fifteen and feeling like I'm a big girl now, who didn't need a father anymore anyway), but the beginning of the end was long before that, maybe as long before as the day my mother first threw him out of the house when I was still a baby.

I remember my graduation from junior high school, the silky purple dress I wore and the Chinese meal of spring rolls and lemon chicken my mother cooked that night, inviting my Grandma and Papa, aunts, uncles, and cousins over to celebrate. My mom made it really clear that she wouldn't allow my dad to come to the ceremony at school, that he couldn't be there to see me receive my diploma because he hadn't helped pay for my education so who was he to suddenly show up now.

I remember trying to explain this to him, trying to tell him why he couldn't attend, telling him something about not wanting to upset Mommy, not being able to come out and say, If you cough up the cash, she'll probably say it's all right, wishing that I didn't have to deal with this. And I remember thinking, I wish one of them would just disappear, never imagining that the worst thing on earth is that sometimes wishes come true.

A lot had changed in the year before he left. He completely stopped paying for Dr. Isaac, and when Mommy ran out of money, my therapy was terminated indefinitely. My mother filed suit against my father because according to their divorce agreement, it was his responsibility to pay my doctor bills. Besides that, his alimony and child support payments had remained at a constant figure since 1969, and she wanted a cost-of-living increase. So they went to court.

Lawyers everywhere. Well, really there were only two, my mother's and my father's, but my dad kept switching firms because no one seemed to think he had a legitimate case. So they multiplied like chicken pox, and every day more and more packets accumulated from the return address of Mr. So and So, Esq., or Benton, Bowl, Beavis, Butthead, and Blah Blah Blah, Attorneys at Law. All of them saying, Elizabeth, there's no need for you to take sides, both of them are your parents, they both love you, and then everyone sneaking up to me and asking, Could you maybe write a letter to the judge about what a lousy father he was? Or else, Do you think you might want to come in and testify? And I'm mostly thinking, Could this possibly be any worse? And I feel a numbness come over me that is, I'm sure, worse than anything ever. It is more like a deep freeze, in which the ice threatens to crack at any moment, but underneath there won't be water, there won't be anything fluid at all, just more and more layers of ice and ice and ice—ice cubes and icebergs and ice floes and ice statues, where a girl used to be.

 

By then, I was a perfect weirdo by any standard. This was the year of the cheerleader-style miniskirts that Norma Kamali and Betsey Johnson had foisted upon the unfortunately fashion-conscious among us, and all the girls at my high school fell into that category. It seemed that everybody in school was on the cheerleading squad except me, I alone was stuck somewhere in Stevie Nicks-land, showing up every day in these long, diaphanous things that nearly reached the ankles of my leather riding boots, matched with romantic, loosely tied tops that showed off my collarbone. I was all belts and bows and ties and fabric, always weighted down by so much
stuff,
and this was in the beginning of the Reagan-era optimism of the early eighties, the time of light-heartedness and good tidings and bright colors. When all the other girls adorned themselves with plastic earrings and accessories in turquoise and yellow and chartreuse and hot pink, there I was in everything cold and dark, silver and lapis hanging from my ears like an old throwback to the sixties or the seventies, or maybe to an unhappy time and place that everyone who surrounded me didn't remember or had never even been to in the first place.

I tried to fit in a little bit. I even bought a Betsey Johnson velvet party dress with a tight, Lycra bodice and a flouncy little skirt, but I simply felt ridiculous in it, like a circus character who'd accidentally fallen into a Fellini movie when I really belonged in the Nordic desperation of, say, Bergman's
Seventh Seal.
I realized, rather painfully, that the girl I had once been, the one who bossed everyone around, the one who could hold sway over any situation, was simply not coming back. No matter if I ever got out of this depression alive, it made no difference because it had already fundamentally changed me. There had been permanent damage. My morose character would not ever go away because depression was everything about me. It colored every aspect of me so thoroughly, and I became resigned to that.

And in a strange way, this resignation allowed me to stabilize. Sure, I still ran into the girls' bathroom and had crying jags, I still curled into a corner by myself during free periods with the familiar ache, but it had begun to occur to me that all this pain was just a fact of life—or, at any rate, it was a fact of
my
life. I could stay in this state forever. I could do all kinds of things: I could do my homework, I could study for exams, I could write papers and use the standard style for bibliography and endnotes, I could maybe even start dating people who weren't twice my age or half my I.Q. I could actually live the life of a perfectly normal teenage girl—I could, by God, even join the cheerleading squad—but it still wouldn't change that something wasn't right. It still wouldn't change that
I
was all wrong.

I was like a recovered alcoholic who gives up drinking but still longs, daily if not hourly, for just another sip of Glenfiddich or Mogen David or Muscadet; I could be a depressive who wasn't actively depressed, an asymptomatic drone for the cause. But what exactly was the cause? Oh yes, I would remind myself: My goal is getting out of this life, of etching a new identity at some unspecified time in the future when that might be possible. Maybe I could shield myself, refuse to succumb to the symptoms (knowing all too well that one's too many and a thousand ain't enough) just long enough to get out of this rut of a rotten life and get real help, proper help, not Dr. Isaac help, not parental help. I could become the teen machine for a few years, stuck in a zombielike commitment to getting straight A's and appearing absolutely perfect and faultless, on paper.

Instead of thinking that there was
no
future, all I did was plan for the future, treating the present tense and all its tension like a lengthy, labored preamble to a real life that awaited me somewhere, anywhere else but here. I would still be the same girl who spent eight weeks preparing for nothing more than a two-hour ride home from summer camp, only now it would be my adult life that I would be waiting to escape to, believing as I started to believe at the time that if only I could get out of the house and away from the crossfire of my parents' persistent shooting range, maybe I stood a chance.

 

And then Zachary came along, and it wasn't like he was just some guy—he was this astonishingly handsome junior from one of those good families. He was the captain of the tennis team, and by all rights should have been going out with one of those leggy girls in a miniskirt. I know that it is not terribly unusual in the delightful flash of first love to wonder how on earth one has been so blessed, but in my case I was truly baffled. As a couple, we appeared as ridiculously mismatched as Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts.