Prozac Nation (21 page)

My birthday fell on a Friday, and my boss decided that my whole department would go out for drinks after work to celebrate. It had been a miserable day. Around the office, very few people even knew it was my birthday, which wouldn't have been alarming except that I spent so much time telling so many people brutal, minute details of my life that I felt like everyone knew me better than they really did. Because, of course, what I was giving all my coworkers was just schtick, false intimacy at best. They'd have gotten to know me better if I'd sat quietly by myself and never said a word. I got birthday calls from people in Cambridge and Berkeley and New York (my ex-boyfriend Stone forgot it was my birthday but phoned to let me know he'd slept with Ruby while he was on acid and he hoped I'd forgive him), but the only person in Dallas who bothered to check in with me that day was my mother. Why did it always seem as if the fates had conspired to make me feel like she was the only one on earth who loved me?

I sat at my desk depressed all day, and it amazed me that even though I burst into tears no one asked what was wrong. I guess they all felt that it was somehow none of their business.

At the end of the day; when the other people in my department came to gather me so that we could go to Louie's for drinks, I was relieved. I spent a couple of hours at the bar drinking beer with bourbon and gin with tonic, chasing tequila-lime-salt shots with Cinzano and lemonade, and time just slipped through the pouring drinks. By the time I finally realized that I had to get to my cousins' house for my party that I was already late, no one much felt like driving that far out.

Car problems again, I thought. But instead of getting up and calling a taxi, I ordered another drink. I asked for a Glenlivet straight up, told the waiter to make it a double and save himself a trip. I didn't realize that I'd already had a few too many until I stood up and felt myself stumble as if I were walking on a very unstable rowboat that was starting to rock. I grabbed onto the nearest wall, collected myself, headed for the pay phone, and tried to convince my cousin Bruce that I was trapped, had no way of getting to the house, couldn't he come and pick me up. He was my age, after all. Surely he'd understand about getting too fucked up before you have to face your family, surely he'd want to help me out of a bind. But instead of answering, he just started yelling “Where the fuck are you? Your mother has been slaving in the kitchen all day so she could throw a party just for you. and where are you?”

“Oh, Bruce,” I answered. “Oh, Bruce, I'm stuck. I can't stand straight I'm so drunk. I feel so bad. She never should have done this. Bruce, please come get me. Please.”

“No way. You got yourself into this, you can get yourself out of it. Call a cab and get your ass up here now. I offered to pick you up earlier, but it's late now, so hit the road.”

“Bruce, I don't think I have enough money—”

“Get someone to lend it to you, then, but just get here before your mother is really upset.”

When I stumbled into my cousins' house at 9:30, I was three hours late for my own party, and the first thing I did was run to the bathroom and throw up. All of my mother's friends and business associates who lived in North Dallas were in attendance, and my mother was mortified.

There were chicken cutlets and birthday cake and blowing out the candles and presents and a toast to the birthday girl and all that other stuff, but we had to do it all fast because it was so late. I kept wishing I could leave or wishing I'd gotten there much earlier or something. My mother looked so sad and sorry the whole night. I kept walking up to her and trying to hug her, to thank her, to explain that I was just depressed and I'd been drinking, and given that combination I couldn't control my own behavior, but it was useless. She kept pushing me away, telling me she'd had it with me, telling me that she couldn't believe what a rotten child I was.

And I kept saying, Mommy, Mommy, I'm so depressed, I'm losing my mind, please don't push me away from you. And she would say, I can't help it,
you've
pushed me away from you.

And half of me thought, I've really fucked up this time, and the other half was a little angry at my mother for going through all this trouble for me when I hadn't asked her to and yet again putting me in a position where I could only be the ungrateful child. When all the guests finally left, my mother cried on the deck by the pool, and I cried on the living room sofa, and my cousin Bruce sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulder, and I said, “We're quite a pair, my mother and I, aren't we?”

“Look, the only reason I'm being halfway nice to you is that it's your birthday, and that I do think that she shouldn't have done all this for you, but you really are a shithead.”

“I know.”

It was always this way though: I spent most of my life trying to please my mother, and instead I just disappointed her.

Bruce drove me back to my house in Oak Lawn. We rode together in his father's Porsche in silence. It wasn't until I walked in the door that he screamed out his window,
Hey cousin, are y'all gonna be all right?
As I reassured him with some vigorous nods, I went into the vestibule and checked my mailbox. And there, along with an L. L. Bean catalogue and a bill from Lone Star Gas, were three birthday cards, all from my father. My father whom I hadn't spoken to in at least a year.

How the hell, I wanted to know, had he gotten my address? How did he know that I was in Texas at all? And why did he have to disturb me on my already disturbing birthday?

I opened the cards when I got upstairs. The envelopes were numbered so I could read them in order, and all of them were about how his love for me stayed strong and steady even though we were apart. All of them were Hallmark cards with Rod McKuen-type poems on them that you would send to your long lost lover, not your daughter.

And I thought: This is twisted.

Maybe it's not that unusual anymore for entire families to be estranged from each other, maybe the way my father disappeared without a trace for so long is just how it goes, and maybe it makes perfect sense that he would somehow find me here in Texas so he could send me sentimental, romantic cards on my birthday, addressing me as his “Little One.” But if this is the way things are going to have to be, then I reject this life. And even if every family on earth were like mine, if divorce were mandatory, if custody battles were routine, if everyone's mother was suing everyone's father and vice versa, it wouldn't make mine any less twisted. And it wouldn't make me feel any better to be sitting in my apartment in Dallas watching a three-inch palmetto crawl down a wall, so big and ugly I don't want to get close enough to kill it, just hoping it'll have its space and let me have mine because, I think, I'm going to crash.

But I was too upset to rest, too drunk to drink anymore, too unhappy not to, so instead I walked out of my apartment and out of my house, and headed down Oak Lawn Avenue, fast and solid, strutting in my blue jeans and pointy cowboy boots like a woman with a mission. Of course, I had nowhere to go. I was a pedestrian in a city where only the indigent and insane walk anywhere at all, but I kept on going because the idea of movement, the idea that I could walk wherever I wanted to, that I was free within my own body, was liberating enough to take the edge off how shitty I felt.

And without knowing why, I found myself walking toward the
Morning News
music critic's house, which was right near mine. I kind of had a crush on Rusty, and at any rate he was good to talk to, so I figured that visiting him was a good idea. But when I arrived at his cute little saltbox house, which was right next door to a gas station and opposite a Sound Warehouse, the lights were out and his Suzuki jeep was gone. But I rang the bell and banged on the door anyway. I pounded and pounded and pounded as if the power of my fist knocking on wood could conjure Rusty back from wherever he was. It was my birthday, after all, or at least it had been until about an hour ago. It was my birthday, and Rusty ought to have been around for me if I wanted him to be, goddamnit.

I just kept pounding for at least ten minutes, unaware or indifferent to the noise my banging was making, until the gas station attendant finally walked over to see what was wrong. And I looked up at his face, his simple face that was questioning mine, wondering what a girl like me was doing throwing herself at this door, and all I could do was cry.

And something about him seemed so nice. Oh God! Oh God! I screamed. Everything is wrong, everything is so wrong.

He didn't really know what to do. He drove me home, and all the while I cried and told him that I thought I was having a breakdown. He was silent, and for a moment I worried that he was maybe going to want to come upstairs with me, that maybe he would rape me, that I didn't know who he was, what his name was, but I was crying to him which might have suggested a familiarity that I had no desire to achieve at that moment. And then I realized how silly I was being: Women weeping mournfully for the dead or happily at a wedding can be quite attractive, but a hysterical girl, a girl writhing in your car with her face bloated and red from crying, her hair springing out of her head from the humidity—no guy wants to get into this girl's pants.

And indeed I arrived home safely, drank another bottle of Chardonnay, and fell restlessly to sleep.

In the morning I woke up to my mother standing over my bed—I must have left the front door open—with a piece of paper she wanted me to sign. It said something to the effect that she would pay for my college tuition, because that was her obligation to me, but nothing more. The only reason I knew what this piece of paper said was that she read it to me. I was too passed out to see, but when I heard what she was saying, all I could do was stumble to the bathroom and throw up. I was so nauseated and hung over. When I wobbled back into my bedroom and flopped back into my bed, all I could say was, “Excuse me.”

I looked at her and I figured that I'd better just sign this paper, that she would probably forget about it by next week anyway. “Listen, Elizabeth,” she said sternly. “You have pushed me over the edge here. All I've ever done was love you, the only reason I threw you a birthday party was to make you happy, and you treat me so shabbily.” She started to cry. “How can you treat me this way? What have I ever done to you?”

“Oh, Mom.” I stood up and tried to hug her, but she pushed me away.

“No,” she said. “I'm not going to be swayed by you. I'm just going to give you a piece of advice because I love you and you're still my child. I think you're an extremely troubled person and have been for a long time, and you resent me for whatever reasons. And I think that if I were you, I would just stay here in Dallas, don't go back to school, earn your own living, and spend your money on therapy. You like your job and people here seem to like you, so why don't you just stay, take time off from Harvard. Because”—she got all choked up—“I can't afford to send you to Harvard and put you in therapy, and I can see that all the years that you haven't been in therapy have really taken a toll. I look at you now, and I see a person really in trouble.”

She headed for the door, and I wanted to stop her, but I felt too weak, and this was all too much first thing in the morning. The last thing she said before she left was, “I just want you to know that if you decide to leave Dallas at the end of the summer, that's fine. But you're paying for your ticket home and there will be a strict code of behavior observed once you get back.”

 

Later that week, a producer for
Oprah!
called to ask if I would appear on a show they were doing about fathers who abandon their children. She had dug up the article I'd written for
Seventeen
by looking in
The Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature,
under “Divorce.” The piece was mildly optimistic, suggesting that my father and I had in fact renewed our relationship. Since then, the preponderance of evidence had shown that my father and I were doomed never to have a relationship again. Why go on TV and talk about this instance of ugliness in the world? But the producer asked me if I would be willing to anyway, and it sounded like it could be fun, so I suspended my better judgment, and said, Sure, why not?

Mostly I was thinking it would be fun to go to Chicago and get the hell out of Dallas for a couple of days. My boss thought it was a great idea, said she'd give me the day off, told me that everyone would watch the show together when it was aired, and everyone around the newspaper seemed to think it was a good thing to do. My friend Tom, a city desk reporter, thought that maybe somebody would even see me on TV and find my story compelling and want to turn it into a movie or something.

That clinched it for me: I thought if I could become a movie, if I could disappear into celluloid, I could stop being me for a while.
I would do anything not to be Elizabeth.
Of course, nothing had worked so far. Going to Harvard, writing articles, working at the newspaper—I'd done all these things and still, somehow, I kept being me. Which is why I started to think that maybe I didn't want to be on
Oprah!
after all. It was too much the sort of thing I would do: Take a sad private matter, give the facts in technicolor detail to perfect strangers, and thus relieve myself of my life. And then later, I would feel cheap and empty, deeply dissatisfied, like a verbal slut, the girl who'd give it all away to just any old anybody. So maybe I wanted to reclaim my life, make it private, make it mine. Maybe, just maybe, if I lost the urge to tell all to all, maybe that would be behavior befitting a happy person and maybe then I could be happy.

The key to happiness, I decided, was
not
to appear on
Oprah!

After all, I was the girl who lost her virginity and then gave consent when my friends decided to throw a party celebrating the occasion. It seemed like a funny idea, and heaven knows I'd waited plenty long enough. The Macintosh-printed invitations read, “Please come to a seminal and groundbreaking party in honor of Elizabeth Wurtzel,” and inside was a picture of a flower that had dropped from its stem. Although the idea was supposed to be subtle, everyone who came to the party knew the occasion. A lot of girls walked up to me to tell me it was wild—totally wild—that I did something like this, that they'd wished they'd had a party when they'd first done it, but many more people thought I was very weird.