Prozac Nation (16 page)

 

The thing is, there was never any pleasure, no element of partying in any of the drug use and abuse I was involved with. It was all so pathetic, so sad, so psychotic. I was loading myself with whatever available medication I could find, doing whatever I could to get my head to shut off for a while. Maybe for Noah, who was pretty much a happy-go-lucky child of a happy home, coke and Ecstasy were all about being party-hardy (I can remember his silly delight as he taught me how to do a bong hit, how to snort a line of cocaine without blowing it off the mirror like Woody Allen does in
Annie Hall),
but for me it was all desperation. It wasn't just recreational drug use. I would find myself, whenever I was in anyone's home, going through the medicine cabinets, stealing whatever Xanax or Ativan I could find, hoping to score the prescription narcotics like Percodan and codeine, usually prescribed following wisdom tooth extraction or so mo other form of surgery On Percodan which is nothing less than an industrial-strength painkiller I almost felt no pain I would hoard those little tablets save them up for a
big
pain emergency and take them until nothing much mattered anymore.

But I never had enough money or adequate street smarts to actively pursue any kind of drug habit. I relied on happenstance, on other people's provisions, for whatever drugs I was taking. But it was mostly to no avail: Whatever relief a brief drug trip gave me was never enough. And I was not a very good user: I often had the kind of freak-outs that led me to the emergency room and left everyone else I was hanging out with swearing that they'd never get fucked up with me again, I wasn't worth the trouble I often caused. Only two days after Noah took me to U.H.S. for my post-Ecstasy panic attack, I was back at the E.R. in the middle of the night looking for some Thorazine because I'd smoked so much pot that I became convinced that my foot had a life of its own, kind of like one of those people with multiple personality disorder whose hand writes things that her head doesn't know about. And then I thought the walls were closing in on. me and when I lay in my bed I was certain the sword of Damocles was hanging over me and I was sure that if I went to sleep I would wake up dead.

Basically, drugs were no solution to any of my problems. I was a klutz with a joint in my hand, so inept at chemical self-destruction that I often was reminded of the story about Spinoza trying to kill himself by drowning, but failing because his foot got stuck in the dock. My God, how much I wanted to be sane and calm on my own! I would have loved nothing better than to see my grandparents, to take them around Cambridge, to show them Harvard Yard, Widener Library, the entryway to Adams House with the beautiful gold-flecked mosaic ceiling. I would have loved to take them to Pamplona or Algiers or Paradiso or one of the other cafés where I would spend long, lazy hours reading and gossiping and drinking double espressos to stay awake. I would have loved to show them that I was all right after all, that their lonesome little grandchild who always seemed so bookish and morose had really turned out okay.

During my senior year of high school, my first cousin (one of their other grandchildren) had married a Wall Street tycoon, had celebrated with a huge wedding at Windows on the World, and had made the whole family so damn proud by making such a good match. I knew I would never do anything like that, I knew I was attracted mostly to hopeless hippies and other lost souls like me, but I wanted my grandparents to be impressed with the things I could do: I could write, I could study, I could get into Harvard. I looked forward to their visit with about the same amount of glee that a former fat girl who has slimmed into a glamorous woman looks forward to her tenth-year high school reunion. Noah could have come to brunch with us—at least, in my fantasy he would have—and even though he wasn't Jewish, he was a charming Pennsylvania Yankee, his sisters had made their society debuts all over the Northeast, and my grandparents would have headed back home to Long Island thinking of me as a stunning collegiate success.

Instead, they were just worried, scared stiff, wondering what the hell had happened to their youngest grandchild, the one who used to come to their house every weekend and on every vacation when she was little because her mother worked and her father slept and there was no one to take care of her. They had practically raised me, and now they would wonder what had gone wrong. There was no way I could possibly explain to them that I was suffering from an acute depression, that it was so intense that even when I wanted to get out of my own head and attend to other people's needs—as I had so much wanted to do that day—I just couldn't. I was consumed by depression, and by the drugs I took to combat it, so that there was nothing left of me, no remainder of the self that could please them even for a few hours. I was useless.

 

Winter break, all I do is hide in my room at home. I think I might actually be going through some kind of withdrawal. The semester has been too tumultuous. I know it's normal to endure some kind of adjustment period when you first go off to school, but this sure doesn't feel normal to me. I can't even pretend that everybody else has the same problems that I've had because I'm still the only person I know whose best friend chased her through Harvard Yard with a knife, and I'm still the only person I know (though I'm sure there must be others) who moved from a suite in Matthews Hall to a single in Hurlbut, citing mental instability as the main reason that I could not bear to live with other people. It's true, fair enough, that everyone at school has troubles aplenty, but they all seem to have settled into their situations and forged whatever imperfect form of peace, whatever entente of convenience, makes life bearable. But not me. Oh no. I will always be a runner. I will always be looking over my shoulder, or, if someone is trying to talk to me, over
his
shoulder, at the next available opportunity, the next brass ring I might grab onto. It is only now, here at home, that I can come to a safe stop.

One night my mother walks into the apartment after work and comes into the dark recesses of my room, where I have been lying, in the same red flannel nightshirt, since the day I got back from school. I have mostly been doing my reading for Justice class, amazed by how engrossing it can be, how much I can learn from Kant's
Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals
or Mill's
On Liberty
or John Rawls's
A Theory of Justice.
Maybe if I had just spent more time with my books, first semester would have been less destabilizing. Maybe if I can keep reminding myself that Harvard is, contrary to common myth, just a school—and not, say, some group home for misguided youth—I might actually get something worthwhile out of the place. Hadn't I always retreated to the splendid isolation of my studies?

My mother sits down on the spare bed in my room, still wrapped in her insular fur-lined coat as if the chill from outside were in here too. She starts turning on lights, flicking the switch for the overhead lamp, the darkness of winter at 6:00
P.M.
is too much for her, and I don't know if she'll understand that the little reading lamp that I have been using gives about as much brightness as I can stand right now. I don't know if she sees that I am in hiding.

“This place is filthy,” she says. “Elizabeth, you're either going to have to clean up in here or leave the house. I can't live with this mess.”

Well, I can't move, I want to say, but don't. “Mom, can't you see I'm too depressed to do much of anything, including cleaning. Anyway, it's my room. What's it to you if it's messy?”

“It's my house, and I will not live this way!”

She starts fussing with her hair, pulling at the curls and twirling them on her fingers. She can't stand to see me this way, can't quite come to terms with the fact that the mess of my room is the least of it.

“Listen, Elizabeth, your term bill from Harvard for next semester just arrived, and even with your grants and loans, it's still a lot of money.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Do you really know? Because I've always paid the bills for you, always made sure you had what you needed even if I didn't have enough for myself, so I'm sure you don't know the value of money. It's my own fault for spoiling you the way I did.” She shakes her head, and I can see she's starting to cry, and I think, Oh no. “If you knew the value of money I'm sure you wouldn't be wasting your education away like you are, partying and doing whatever else it is you do,” she continues, all tears. I begin to interrupt her, to say something about how it isn't as fun as it looks, that higher education ain't what it's cracked up to be, but she waves her hand at me to shut up. “Look, I don't know what it is you do up there and I have a feeling I don't want to know. But it makes me sick that you're just having a good time while I slave away every day, while I work so hard and have to count every penny so that you can go to Harvard. And now I see that I send you off there, and you come back a complete mess, and I want to know what's going on! I want to know, or else I won't pay your term bill.”

“You just said you didn't want to know.”

“I don't.” She starts to really cry. “It's just that I feel like I worked so hard to raise you well, and I did it all by myself, I never had anyone else to turn to, and I've tried so hard to be a good mother, and then you go off to Harvard and it seems like all the good things I brought you up to believe don't matter anymore. You don't care whether the boys you date are Jewish and—” She starts to wail, her face contorting strangely like she's about to have a seizure. “And you do all these . . . all these . . . all these—”

“All these what? What, Mom?” I run over to hold her so she will stop crying. Whatever problems I have, hers always seem worse.

“All these drugs.” She gasps. “Oh God, Ellie, I can't take it. Not my baby. I can't watch this happen to you. I've been so upset. You're going to send me to an early grave.”

“Mom, what gives you the idea I'm doing drugs?”

“Because if you weren't on drugs, you wouldn't have missed your grandparents when they came to visit you. You're selfish as can be, and the only person you ever think about is you, but even you, even you wouldn't have just let your grandparents drive all the way up there to see you and just not be there.” More bawling.

“But, Mom, I already told you that I was in the infirmary because I fell over the night before and had a concussion.”

Did anyone really buy this?

“You just fell? Is that what you're telling me? You expect me to believe that?!”

I guess not.

“I slipped on ice. It's cold in Cambridge, much colder than New York.”

“Oh, Elizabeth. Stop lying. Even if you did fall it was because you were on drugs.” She pauses to catch her breath, and her face looks quizzical and obtuse, like she's trying to work on one of those long calculus problems that are so labyrinthine that by the time you find a way to figure it out, you can't even remember the question. “Actually, I have no idea what's going on up there. Probably it isn't drugs. I have no idea. No idea.”

I'm relieved that she's moving away from the dope hypothesis because there's no way I'll ever be able to explain it to her. Still, she's not abandoning it altogether. “Just look at you,” she says. “You look horrible. Everyone else goes away to college and gains weight, but you're skinnier than ever and it's probably from drugs. I even see you here at home. You barely eat.”

She has a point about my weight. I left for school at five five and at least 120 pounds; when I weighed myself just a week ago I was down to about 100, light enough, I reminded myself, to be in Balanchine's corps de ballet, where all the girls had to be skinny and swanlike, where so many of the girls were crazy from drugs and starvation. I never wanted to be crazy like a dancer. I never wanted to be crazy like me.

“Maybe I'm just depressed,” I suggest to her, hoping that the truth might set us free of this miserable conversation. “Why blame external things like drugs? You always say, It's Daddy's fault for leaving you, or It's because you grew up in the City. Now you're saying I'm such a mess because of Harvard. Why don't you consider the idea that I might just be, at the core, completely depressed? Maybe it's just the way I am Maybe I was born under a bad sign. Maybe I really do need drugs to make me feel better, the kind that doctors prescribe.”

“Maybe.” She sighs. I know what she's thinking: Why is this never easy? She's calmed down a bit, the loud, hysterical crying has mellowed into a resigned whimper. “The doctors always said there was nothing wrong with you chemically, that it was emotional. They said they could fix you.” Then the wailing starts again. “Look, Elizabeth, I know everyone goes through some trouble, but not everyone steals friends' boyfriends or moves out of their original room or parties all the time like you do. And nobody completely misses her grandparents when they come to visit.” She is screaming tears. “What were you thinking that day? They're old people, they're over eighty. They don't know what's going on. They don't understand where you were. They're simple people and maybe they're not perfect, and maybe you wish you had other people for grandparents, maybe you wish you had a family more like you, but they love you. They really love you. What's wrong with you? Tell me!”

What can I say? I am rotten, so rotten that I wish I were anyone but me. I wish I were dead. I try to think of some explanation for my depression that will make sense to her, but I can't imagine what will. I can't even explain it to myself. I can't even look her in the eye, and say, Well, I had a tough childhood, because it sounds like a line, an excuse, a boulder I've conveniently placed on my shoulder so that I can live with all my misery. It's not like I was beaten regularly, it's not like I was raised by wolves, it's not like I'm an exceptional case: I am just one of a whole generation of children of divorce whose parents didn't handle their personal affairs very well and who grew up damaged. Could family dynamics possibly account for all this trouble? Was my brain chemistry part of the problem too? Who the hell knows why I'd gone so far wrong, but the plain fact was that I had. I couldn't get out of bed, I couldn't eat, I couldn't change into different clothes, I couldn't even explain myself to my mother.