Prozac Nation (15 page)

I could not bear the thought that I was going to be denied this escape fantasy because Ruby had convinced Sam to come back to her. I could not bear the deep freeze settling in around my bones at the thought that yet another attempt to get out of my life alive would end in disappointment. Time became palpable and viscous. Every minute, every second, every nanosecond, wrapped around my spine so that my nerves tightened and ached. I faded into abstraction. A self-generated narcosis created a painful blank where my mind used to be. It only when Ruby saw the look on my face that she stopped yelling, saw that I was more of a threat to myself than to her or anyone else's happiness.

She said, What's wrong with you? Say something! Tell me how you can do this to me!

And all I could say, to no one in particular, was, Please don't leave me, don't leave me here to die, don't leave, don't go.

What's wrong with you, Elizabeth? Why don't you talk to me? Why don't you say something? Why don't you defend yourself?

I wanted to say, I can't, I've receded, I'm lost. I wanted to say so much but I just couldn't.

You're crazy, Ruby said. You should seek counseling.

And I wanted to say to her, You know, you're right.

Instead I walked away from Ruby lost in vertigo. The Yard seemed like a phantom. I moved through it in the plastic bubble that separated my fogworld from everything around me. It was dark and gray, and dead leaves crunched under my penny loafers, reminding me of that old sensation of my head cracking open. I passed friends who said hello. But I could barely see or hear them. Their voices seemed to be coming from somewhere else, like a movie whose soundtrack was not in sync with the visuals. Or maybe it was more like home movies, everything flashing by me in clipped, grainy frames, with the click-click-click of the projector buzzing in my ears. So I just kept walking quick and straight, an automaton following a program.

 

I walk toward the University Health Services building. Through the glass doors. Through revolving doors inside. Still breathing. In one door of the elevator. Out the other door at the third floor. Follow the arrows to
MENTAL HEALTH.
Into the west wing. Ask to see a psychiatrist. The receptionist says that only a psychologist is available. Minutes later, walk into Dr. King's office. Tell him I need help. Really badly. Tell him I am scared. Tell him that it feels as if the floor beneath my feet is crumbling, that the ceiling is about to land on my head. Tell him I feel like an art deco skyscraper, like the Chrysler Building, but my foundation is crumbling and shattered glass is falling all over the sidewalks, all over my feet. I am walking barefoot on broken glass in dark night. I am collapsing and I am collapsing on myself. I am shards of glass and I am the person being wounded by the glass. I am killing myself. I am remembering when my father disappeared. I am remembering
when Zachary and I broke up in ninth grade. I am remembering being a little child and crying when my
mother left me at nursery school. I am crying so hard, gasping for breath, I am incoherent and know it.

 

Dr. King checked me into Stillman Infirmary for a couple of days, where they let me rest, where they let me chill out for a little while so that I would be able to go back out into Harvard Yard and do all the same stupid things all over again. Well, actually, that's not what they thought. They thought that this break from activity would give me perspective. But sadly, I knew better: This break is nothing but time-out, take five, recess. Lying in bed for a few days wouldn't help enact the kind of personality overhaul it would take to pull me away from my well-established pattern of mapping out escape routes, clinging to them like vines and then watching as these lifeless forces suddenly pushed me away, though I continued to hold on for dear life. I knew I would find another Sam, I knew I would find another way to pretend, even just for a little while, that I didn't feel so lousy. I always did. In the meantime the people at Stillman fortified me for my next round of mishaps, feeding me simple meals of boiled chicken on Styrofoam plates, bringing me Dalmane at bedtime to be certain that I got plenty of sleep. When they were satisfied that I wasn't going to do myself in, they let me leave, but insisted that I must be in therapy, I couldn't be trusted without it. And I didn't know how to tell them the extent of my insurance problems, and how much trouble I had talking about money with my parents, and that the hassle it would take to get someone to pay for therapy might do more damage than just trying to get on with life. Amazingly, Dr. King agreed to call my father and make arrangements, so that my bills would be paid through IBM's employee benefits office without my involvement.

It is the nicest thing, I think, that anyone has ever done for me.

 

If boys weren't confusing enough, drugs addled the situation even more. Ecstasy had not yet been scheduled by the D.E.A. in any of the agency's illicit categories, so the little white capsules that looked like a vitamin supplement and felt like a nitroglycerin love bomb going off in your cerebral cortex were still perfectly legal during my freshman year. I didn't like pot, I didn't like cocaine, I didn't like drinking (though I seemed to do all of them anyway), but Ecstasy was sweet relief for me. On an Ecs trip, I got to be away from myself for a little while. It was never long enough, I always wanted more, always wished the drug had a longer half-life than it did, but for a little while, when I was rushing on that Ecstatic run, all was quiet on the western front of my mind.

Until it got out of hand. We started to do so much of it so often that around campus people began to refer to Ruby, our other pal Jordana, and me as the Ecstasy Goddesses. At parties, we walked up to people who we didn't know and told them how much we loved them. On Ecstasy, we were best friends with everybody, we no longer felt the class distinctions that were all over Harvard, we no longer felt poor and ugly. We could escape the wide gulf of circumstance that separated the three of us, with our overworked, overtired single mothers, with our scholarships and student loans, from the boys we seemed to keep hooking up with, the ones with last names like Cabot and Lowell and Greenough and Nobles. All of them seemed to have gone to Andover and Hotchkiss and were at Harvard as legacies, as “development cases” (the code phrase the admissions office uses for the children of major money donors), all of them substandard students who the school insisted take a year off before entering. Why all of us, we smart urban Jewish girls who worked as waitresses and typists to earn tuition money, chose to take up with these guys for whom Cliffs Notes were invented is beyond me. But we did. It was pretty obvious that they hung with us because they wanted a break from all the blondes who played field hockey, the girls they'd known forever from summers in Maine or NOLS courses or prep school. But why we allowed ourselves to be swayed by their money and their cocaine is still a mystery. Maybe I thought it was part of the Harvard experience. Maybe I thought it was what I was supposed to do. Maybe it seemed the only logical conclusion to the disappointment of Harvard: I'd spent all my time in high school getting good grades, editing the newspaper and literary magazine, taking dance classes, doing whatever else, all because I wanted to go to a great college like Harvard and be transmogrified. But once I actually got there, once I discovered that the air in Cambridge didn't tingle, once I found out it was a place like any other only more so, once I realized that my classmates were not glamorous sophisticates but just a bunch of hormones on legs like teenagers throughout the country, I think I decided I might as well drug my way through.
Pass the pills and fancy plants / Give us this day our daily trance.
Whatever the reason, somehow I found myself, the girl who was scared of drugs because a mind is a terrible thing to waste, wanting to be wasted all the time.

Three days before winter break, I realize I have bottomed out when I wake up in Noah Biddle's room on a Sunday morning after an Ecstasy trip the night before. Noah is the heir to a banking fortune, an Andover boy from Philadelphia's Main Line who is such a brat that when Harvard told him he had to take time off before entering as a freshman, he actually hired a consultant to plan the year for him. He does so much coke that I have started to wonder how he will look with a third nostril. I don't really like him much, but for some reason I will do anything to get him to like me, an impossible task, because he just doesn't. I keep thinking that if I could only win Noah's love, I would finally feel as if I've actually arrived at Harvard, appended myself to someone so integral to the place, so at home here, so at home on this earth and in his own skin in a way that I will never be, that the minefields in my head would stop exploding at long last.

So here I am, lying nearly naked on the carpet in the common room of his suite, my head pillowed by a puddle of beer. Noah is next to me on the floor, we are wrapped in each other the way dried, harried flowers stick together after a week in a vase. In my parched exhaustion, I can just barely survey the debris of last night's mess: Since everyone smokes and chews gum with Ecstasy, there are ashes and little sticky pink blobs attached to the coffee table and the floor; because everyone feels so agile on Ecstasy when in fact they are extremely clumsy, there are spilled bottles and empty plastic cups. There are items of clothing everywhere, mostly mine. But I can't see a clock through the blur of my desiccated contact lenses that I should have taken out hours before, and I need to know what time it is because my grandparents are supposed to visit and I've got to meet them at my room sometime before noon. When I finally can see my watch, can see that it's past 4:00
P.M.
, that they have probably already come and gone, and that besides I've got a paper due tomorrow that I haven't even thought about yet, I feel a panic come over me that doesn't quite erupt because the residual effect of the Ecstasy preempts it. But somewhere deep down inside under all the anesthesia, I know I have really fucked up big time. I know that nothing is as it should be, nothing is even the way I wish it would be. I've slept through my grandparents' visit, I might as well sleep through the rest of my life, and I am so horrified that I let out the loudest scream I've ever made.

Noah pops up, frightened of how frightened I am, tries to silence me, says people will think I'm being raped or murdered, but I can't stop screaming. I try, but I just can't. He's petrified, he's wishing he never got mixed up with me, he's looking at me like I'm a tornado or a dust storm that's just outside his window, way beyond his control, and he's praying that the damage will be minimal. I keep screaming. Being a veteran preppy stoner, Noah is so used to acid freak-outs in the middle of Grateful Dead shows that he knows how to cope, knows how to get into an adrenaline-induced dealing mode. He puts on his clothes, manages to get me into mine, covers my mouth with his hand as he picks me up and walks me out the door and into the emergency room at University Health Services, me screaming all the way, all the way through the Yard and the snow and the freezing cold.

Noah leaves me there, leaves me with a nurse who shuffles me into an examining room. I am sure I will never see Noah again. I start to think that never seeing him again is even worse than how bad I feel about my grandparents. The nurse calls the psychiatrist on duty. She won't let me leave even though I keep saying, I've got to see my grandparents, they're waiting for me, we have to get brunch, they're eighty years old, they drove up here from New York this morning. The nurse explains that it's too late anyway, that it's five in the evening. But I just keep saying, I've got to find my grandparents. I might as well be Dorothy, clicking the heels of my ruby red slippers together, repeating the words
There's no place like home.
If only we were in Oz.

They ask me if I've done any drugs in the last twenty-four hours, and I say no. Then I say, I guess I smoked some pot and snorted some coke also, but that was just to make the Ecstasy last longer. I also admit to them that I had some beer, maybe a couple of sea breezes somewhere in there, too. And then the doctor asks if I have a substance abuse problem, and all I can do is laugh. I laugh really hard and really loud, a howling hyena laugh because what I'm thinking is how nice it would be if my problem were drugs, if my problem weren't my whole damn life and how little relief from it the drugs provide. I keep laughing, on and on, like a nut, until the doctor agrees to give me some Valium and keeps me, half prone, on the adjustable examining table until I calm down. Maybe an hour goes by. In its quiet, gentle way, the Valium flattens my hysteria into a mere lack of affect, and after many assurances that I will be just fine, really I will, the doctor sends me on my way, telling me to get some rest over winter vacation.

When I get back to my room, there are eight messages from my grandparents, calling from various points in Cambridge, the final one saying that they're going home. My hallmates, who say they tried to call me all morning at Noah's but there was no answer, look at me like I'm a really bad person. They look at me like I'm the kind of person who would sleep through her octogenarian grandparents' visit after they have driven five hundred miles in one day just to see her—and of course, that's exactly the kind of person I am. Brittany says,
Maybe you should take some time off.
Jennifer says,
What's wrong with you? Everyone goes crazy sometimes, but how can you do this to your grandparents,
they're these little people, they were so worried?
And all I can do is go into my room and crawl into bed.

When I wake up, after a Valium sleep that makes me think I'm turning into a creep like my dad, I call my political philosophy section leader (it seems fitting that the course is called Justice) and tell him that I can't hand my essay in tomorrow because I slipped on some ice and got a concussion. The girl who never once submitted a paper a day late, the girl who lived for the small amount of structure that deadlines provide for a mental state running rampant, seems to have decided that all that good stuff doesn't matter anymore. That girl is gone. She is going home for winter break and never coming back.