Prozac Nation (17 page)

“Mommy,” I say, and I start to cry in spite of myself. “Mommy, you don't know how hard it was for me to know how hard it was for you. I hated being the only child, I hated being so dependent on you because Daddy was out of it, and I hated the way you were so dependent on me. I never got to be a little kid. I never got to just have fun. And you never got to just enjoy motherhood. It was always so much pressure. You were always trying to please me, and I was always trying to please you. I always wanted to be better than everyone else in your family, better than all my cousins my age because I always felt like I wasn't good enough to them because I didn't have a father like everyone else.” More crying on my part and hers. “But, see, I was good enough. I really was. I was the best little girl in the whole wide world to begin with. Don't you remember that? Don't you remember me? You see, I remember me, even if no one else can. I remember trying so hard, and I remember that
no one ever told me I was good enough!
All I ever wanted to do was be a happy kid, but I was always this little adult, and no one ever told me
I was a good kid!
”

I am starting to ramble, and I am embarrassed to see that I have overshot my goal: I wanted to say something that could illuminate the nature of my sorrow for my mother's benefit, but instead I am getting taken in by the pathos myself. What I am saying sounds like a speech in one of those movies that might star Tom Cruise, a film that explores any of a roster of major tragedies—the Cultural Revolution in China, the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, an I.R.A. bombing in London—and still in the face of all this genuine, world-rocking sorrow, all of the protagonist's troubles will be portrayed as nothing more than a lack of self-esteem. Films like this suggest that international disasters can be caused or curtailed by mothers who love too much or not enough, by fathers who disappear, or appear only as abusive alcoholics. I am all too aware that as I sit talking to my mother, I am beginning to sound like a Hollywood cliché, and yet I know that a lot of stock characters are built on some real truths. I know that sometimes the personal is political, that people who could make the world a better place end up adding to its destruction because they are fucked up, they're from bad homes. So I just continue with my babbling.

“I thought getting into Harvard would prove to you and everyone else that I was good enough,” I say. “I thought if I could get into Harvard, everyone would finally say she's okay, she's a good kid. But now you're yelling at me, and soon your sister will probably call and yell at me because of what I did to Grandma and Papa, and your whole family is going to say that I'm an awful kid, but in the meantime I'm trying so hard. I'm trying so hard. Trying so hard. Trying . . .”

By now, my mother is hysterical, I'm hysterical, we are wrapped in each other's arms, my mother still in her heavy coat, me still in this flannel nightshirt that is like a second skin. “All I ever wanted was for you and everybody to love me just the way I am,” I whisper into her fur collar, not caring if she doesn't hear, I don't know why I'm talking anymore anyway. “But now I just hate everybody. I don't care about anyone else because I'm so hateful.”

“Oh, Ellie, I know,” my mother says. “I know. And I'm so sorry.”

6

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

 

ALBERT EINSTEIN

 

Harvard, in its infinite wisdom, followed two weeks of vacation with one week of reading time and three weeks of finals, which meant that there was no reason to do any work at all during the semester proper. All of it could be saved for those six accumulated weeks of rope from which to hang what was left of your mind after all that nothing, all those meandering Cambridge days that were occasionally interrupted by classes. Of course, after a vacation that amounted to my own version of house arrest, I was back in school, same as ever. Even in my lowest moments of lolling about my bedroom, I knew that in the end I'd return to school, take finals, get good grades, and get through second semester. At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdown. But in the end I'd be able to get up and on with it, could always do what little must be done to scratch by.

One night during my first exam period at Harvard, after dinner I was sitting in my room trying very hard to concentrate on
The Odyssey
and having no luck. I know it was supposed to be a fun read, a trippy epic full of Sirens and Lotus-Eaters, island romance with Calypso, and poor Penelope weaving and unraveling at her loom, warding off her suitors, waiting, waiting, waiting, the avatar of feminine virtue, for her dear, wayward Odysseus to come back home.
The Odyssey
was one of those books that people loved, thought was way better than
The Iliad,
which was all just soldiers and battlefields and macho jockeying for position, but I just couldn't muster up the slightest bit of interest in all the ancient globetrotting. My thoughts kept roaming elsewhere. It was amazing to me the way I could go home and peacefully read for a couple of weeks—even manage to escape from the moody blues and ugly blacks through the deep concentration of books—but now, back at school, I got shaky again. My whole body would vibrate, my head would start to hurt, and my mind would wander to the world outside my room where I was sure that all my friends were having a good time and feeling completely relieved not to have me around to deal with.

And it wasn't just because every time I got stoned I ended up in the emergency room, usually dragging a helpless, addled entourage along with me. Even when I was okay, I was still a nuisance: My presence created a tension that would disturb the mellow vibe that was central to preppy party rituals. It was never enough for me just to go to a party and enjoy the company, it was never enough to play quarters or other dumb drinking games. There had to be more, some point, some grandiloquent promise of redemption, and it didn't matter who I bopped on the head in the process of trying to find it. It seems my behavior was so disruptive that finally Noah had to say that he loved me dearly, really he did, but I could hang out in his room only if I promised to sit quietly and listen to music and not do drugs. But Noah's room was nothing less than an opium den. There was no reason to be there sober.

So I tried staying in my room and reading like I was supposed to. But I couldn't make it through another page. The missing-father theme in
The Odyssey
must have had some subliminal effect on me because I picked up the receiver and dialed my dad's number in Florida. He'd settled into a cute little white hacienda house, the kind with tiled floors and throw rugs and wicker furniture and pillows in shades of peach and seafoam, and a kidney-shaped pool in the back yard that overlooked the Intracoastal. Life had not been bad for him since he'd gone away. In fact, it was impossible not to notice that life had been a lot better in the four years since he'd cleared his daily docket of any dealings with me and my mom. I resented the hell out of him for his ease, his luxury, his ability to live out the dream we all have that if we ignore our annoyances, they will go away. Despite his attempts to tell me at various points over the years after he'd left that there was a piece of his mind that was consumed with thoughts of me, that there was a part of me that never left his conscious life, I didn't believe him. I was so much easier for him to forget.

Ever since my father had left, he and I had these twice-a-year reconciliations, kind of the way department stores have semiannual sales: Crowds flock to them expectantly, only to find that what remains once they arrive is all just junk anyway. We'd get together with the best of intentions, I'd keep swearing to myself that I'd forgive him for abandoning me, while he'd promise himself that he wouldn't let his guilt overwhelm him. We'd have a few pleasant conversations, and then I wouldn't hear from him for another six months. And then we'd go through all the emotional trauma of
you're a terrible father / your mother made it impossible for me to stay
all over again.

A whole year had passed since my father's move to Florida before he called me. He had come up to New York for some reason, had run into my mother in, of all places, Bloomingdale's, and then phoned. I was thrilled to hear from him because no one, not even my grandmother, had told me where he'd gone, and I had convinced myself that he'd fled the country, had landed in the Cayman Islands or Argentina or some other place where bad people typically hide out. I had images of him playing poker with Josef Mengele. To find out that he was still on U.S. soil, still in a place that Delta and United fly to, still in an area code I could dial directly, made his misdeeds seem less sinister, less global, and more personal. I don't know why I made this rather trivial distinction, but I did, perhaps because it was convenient, perhaps because I wanted to forgive him.
Of course
I wanted to forgive him: He was my father, the only one I had, and it seemed to me that having two parents was some kind of inalienable right. So he showed up outside of my high school to take me out to dinner one evening, we made up, hugged and kissed a lot, talked a lot, and then he returned to his happy hacienda on the Intracoastal and disappeared all over again.

But a few weeks before I left for college, I finally did go visit my father down in Florida, spent a long weekend lounging in the sun around his pool, making trips to Coconut Grove and Calle Ocho, doing the things I thought fathers and daughters were supposed to do together. I even talked to my stepmother a lot, told her how much her refusal to talk to me when I was little hurt, told her that it was very painful to be six years old, sitting on the same couch as she was, watching the same
Star Trek
episode as she was, and having her talk only to my father, refusing to acknowledge me. And she admitted that she resented my existence, confessed all her sins, said she was sorry for confusing me with my mother, sorry for hating the fact that my dad had this whole family life before she came along, and I really believed that we'd made some serious strides toward reparation. We had a lot of fun. I even thought that my father and I had achieved a breakthrough of sorts, that it would be possible for us to be close again. I actually wrote an article about it for
Seventeen,
talking optimistically about how we had gotten back together after several years of misunderstandings and anger. I thought it was going to be great.

Then he and my stepmother, in some new attempt at a bilateral relationship, came to see me up at school in the fall. He brought his Nikon and took pictures of me with all my friends in front of Matthews Hall, in front of the John Harvard statue, in front of Widener Library. He came with me to Justice class and pretended to be interested in Professor Sandel's neo-Kantian argument about why a town in Minnesota that wanted to ban pornography should be allowed to supersede the First Amendment and do so. He had cappuccino and
medianoche
sandwiches with me at Pamplona, and let me introduce him to my various friends and acquaintances as they table-hopped and peddled gossip around the little café. He acted like a proud father visiting his lovely daughter at college. He behaved as if we were normal: Give us the right clothes and we could model for J. Crew.

But all I could think the whole time was, Who the fuck does this man think he is? He disappears from my life for four years—four fucking miserable years of insanity and depression—and now I'm at Harvard, and everything seems fine. He thinks he can just come around here and get some photos of his perfect little Ivy League daughter as if none of that bad stuff ever happened. Where the fuck was he when I needed him?

I swore I'd never speak to him again. I swore that the idea that I could ever forgive him, that we could ever be close again, was one of those dreams, just like the idea that I was going to get to Harvard and then everything would be perfect. This hatred overtook me, and I couldn't help myself. I wanted so much to forget the past, but it wouldn't go away, it hung around like an open wound that refused to scar over, an open window that no amount of muscle could shut. I remembered learning about the Doppler effect in high school science, about the paradoxical reaction between sound and space which causes a source of noise to get louder the farther away it moves from you And that's how all this felt to me right then: The din of the anger I had for my father was even worse now that the actual problems were supposed to be receding into the past.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother's bureau. I wasn't just the madwoman in the attic—I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

And what I thought, every time I thought about my father, every time his name came up, was quite simply:
I WANT TO KILL YOU
. I wanted to be more mature, more reasonable, I wanted to have a big, fat, forgiving heart that could contain all this rage and still find room for kind, beneficent love, but I didn't have it in me. I just didn't.

Still, I sat dialing his number that night during finals, punching the digits into the receiver, the way a boomerang always returns to the same old place. It was a strange habit that I usually reverted to every time I felt lonely and depressed and certain that I had completely exhausted my resources—that is, I couldn't find any new man to get obsessed with. I'd call my dad thinking it would make me feel better. As I sat on the cold hardwood floor, listening to the phone ring, I was completely agitated, pushed to the quaking brink, hating my whole life, hating my father, and wanting to tell him, once and for all, as I never had before, just how much I hated him.