Prozac Nation (24 page)

“Maybe you have your period.”

“Maybe I'm dying, and if you don't come here and take me to the hospital it will be all your fault when I'm dead.”

Stone was not one to argue with that kind of skewed logic. It was October 19, 1987. I rode to the infirmary in a taxi wearing only my nightgown with a sweater over it. The blood was everywhere, I was throwing up all over the floor. Other people in the waiting room must have thought of taking their emergencies elsewhere, I was so gross to look at. Meanwhile, the stock market was busy plunging 508 points. I would later note that the market and I both crashed at the same time.

 

I was lying on the examining table in one of the rooms in the walk-in clinic screaming, “I'm dying! I'm dying!” My stomach felt dreadful sharp pains like ice picks poking at my insides, and finally the nurse said, “Why, sweetheart, you're not dying. If anything, your
baby
is dying.”

“My
baby?
” I started to cry. I cried and cried. I thought maybe I would cry an entire nine months. Stone was long gone, so here I was in an antiseptic room full of fluorescent lights with strangers telling me that I'd been pregnant, probably for a couple of months. I hadn't even known I was carrying a baby inside me, and I found out by losing it.

I lose everything.

How on earth could I possibly have been pregnant? Jack, I guessed. There wasn't anyone else. Well, Stone the other night—he thought sex would make me feel more
grounded
—but otherwise nobody. Even Jack, I couldn't remember when or where it happened, or even
that
it happened. But it must have. There was only one Virgin Mary in history, and she didn't have a miscarriage.

“She's a very lucky girl,” I heard the doctor saying in the other room as she prepped some equipment to perform a D and C. “Now she won't have to have an abortion.”

An abortion?! I couldn't believe the doctor just assumed that's what I'd have done. Maybe I would have, but maybe I would have given the kid up for adoption. Maybe I'd even have been an earthy single mother, carting my baby to day care as I ran off to classes, breast-feeding in the park, making sure that the men I dated liked children. And maybe I
would
have had an abortion. But how could anyone with as little love in her life kill the love growing inside her? I'd sooner kill myself. I'd have sooner killed the doctor standing over me smiling knowingly when she didn't know a thing. In fact, I'd have liked to kill us both. I wanted to burst into tears from all the killing.

Which is what I did. I cried so much that they finally gave me Xanax to calm me down. When that didn't work, two hours later they gave me Valium. When I was still crying late that night, they gave me something like Thorazine and told me I would spend the next few days in the infirmary.

 

No one would tell her what was wrong with her. She would just lie in her bed, staring at pink walls, taking pink pills that the nurse in white would give her. Between the green pills and the yellow ones. And all these blues.

 

Actually, I was only in the infirmary overnight. It seemed like days, or ages, because I was doped and disoriented and didn't know where I was or what was happening most of the time, which I guess is the best thing when the alternative is hysteria. The psychologist on duty came in to speak to me, some blood was taken from my arms, a thermometer was stuck in my mouth, and a couple of meals were dispensed, but otherwise my interaction with humans was minimal. At one point, my roommate Samantha came to visit and asked what they were doing for me, and all I could say was, “Giving me pills and letting me sleep.”

“This is medieval!” Samantha exclaimed. She went into a rage about how I needed counseling, not drugs. I was too knocked out to explain to her that I was probably too knocked out for anything
but
drugs. It amazed me that Samantha and I hadn't known each other very long—only since we had become roommates through a mutual friend some time in September—and already we had developed this big sister-little sister rapport. Samantha was two years older than I, and had just gotten back from taking a year off from school, during which she lived in London and worked as a bond trader at an investment bank. She was now employed part-time by the same company in Boston, in addition to writing position papers for the Dukakis presidential campaign, promoting the causes of a Colombian dissident named Brooklyn Rivera, flying off to Minnesota on weekends to date one of Walter Mondale's sons, and taking a full load of courses. She even managed to go running a few times a week.

Samantha often told me about how depressed and despondent she'd once been, how she used to cry herself to sleep in her boyfriend's bed in London because she felt so lonely, even lying beside him, and how she'd stand up and walk out in the middle of dinner parties without excusing herself because she needed to burst into tears for no apparent reason. She would tell me these things to assure me that I, too, would get over whatever was ailing me. But it seemed pretty hard to believe I'd ever be as together as Samantha, Samantha who was planning to spend her winter break trekking through Nicaragua and El Salvador on a fact-finding mission for her thesis about postwar diplomacy between Central America and the British government. Samantha couldn't even speak Spanish, but was somehow unfazed by this impediment. Lying in that infirmary bed, the idea of going anywhere with only a thin knowledge of the native tongue, especially a region where dead bodies have been known to turn up in the bathrooms of bus stations, seemed like a task that would require more energy than I would have to expend for the rest of my life. Lying in that infirmary bed, the idea of going to Central America didn't seem impossible just there and then—it seemed impossible forever. I couldn't imagine
ever
getting better.

That's the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.

 

I was almost happy for a little while after I got out of the infirmary. My other roommate, Alden, brought me a bouquet of fuchsia flowers when she got home that day, and we sat around and laughed about how there I thought I was going crazy, when really it was just a miscarriage. We drank white wine and toasted to the happy future I would have now that I knew what was wrong.

As if I knew.

Suddenly my problems seemed to have a physical cause, and I was more satisfied with somatic explanations than the usual psychic ones. When I told close friends that I'd just had a miscarriage, that I hadn't even known I was pregnant until my body had ejected the fetus, they all seemed to have much more sympathy—even much more retroactive sympathy—for me than when it was all just depression and all so ineffable. As a result, I kept playing up the miscarriage issue, even long after my cramps, my
terrible
cramps, had subsided and I had all but forgotten about it. At first, I was hush-hush about having been pregnant, making the few friends who knew swear to keep it a secret. But after a while I couldn't help myself. I inspired such kindness and pity in people by just mentioning the word
pregnancy
. And when I went on to explain that I hadn't been aware of what had happened to me that after I'd been knocked up I'd become so alienated from my own body that I hadn't even noticed that I was missing periods until I actually woke up one day soaked in my own blood—when I added in that factor I could always arouse some feminist outrage.

I had become so good at saying, glibly,
Don't give me a hard time, I've just had a miscarriage,
that I almost forgot that it was the truth. I felt like hell. I was physically drained and emotionally empty, and according to my accounting, I didn't think I'd be able to get away with using the I-was-pregnant-and-didn't-know-it-until excuse for very much longer.

“You don't need an excuse to be depressed,” Dr. Sterling told me in one of our sessions. “You just are. You have to stop feeling guilty about it. Feeling guilty is just making you more depressed.”

“This is going to sound dumb,” I began, far too aware that everything I said was so trite, “but, the thing is, I really don't feel like I have a right to be so miserable. I know we can look back and say my father neglected me, my mother smothered me, I was perpetually in an environment that was incoherent to me, but—” But what? What other excuses do you need? I wasn't feeling gross enough to mention Bergen-Belsen, cancer, cystic fibrosis, and all the other
real
reasons to be sorrowful. “But a lot of people have hard childhoods,” I continued, “much harder than mine, and they grow up and get on with it.”

“A lot of them don't.”

“I don't care about the ones who don't. I think I should be among those who do. I've been so lucky in so many ways, had so many compensations—” It made me sick listening to myself. How many times and to how many therapists had I made this speech? When would I stop wondering what right—what
nerve
—I had to be depressed? Enough with this going on about all my blessings. I was starting to sound like a character in a TV movie with a title like
The Best Little Girl in the World
or
Most Likely to Succeed.
“I don't know. The only good thing about this miscarriage is it's given me a reason to feel lousy.”

“So you like tangible reasons?”

“Yes, of course. Doesn't everybody?”

“Well, no, not necessarily.”

“That's the reason a suicide try has always appealed to me. I mean, since I've been such a cosmic failure in my numerous attempts to get addicted to drugs and alcohol, the only terrible thing I can see happening would be if I were to overdose or something. Then people would think I was really sick and not just kind of depressed, which is what they think now.”

“You've got to stop worrying about what other people think and try to just concentrate on what you feel.”

“Oh God,” I said, “all I ever do is think about how I feel, and all I ever feel is terrible.”

“Well,” Dr. Sterling replied with a sigh, before announcing it was time for us to stop, “I guess that's why you're here.”

 

There's something I'm not saying never even said to Dr. Sterling. Because there are all these things that, as a middle-class, college-educated woman—especially one who is in her early twenties, who has biology and time and future on her side—you're not supposed to feel about getting pregnant. You're never supposed to think,
I wanted that baby,
or
I wish I could have kept it,
or anything like that. Pregnancy is just bad luck, a minor inconvenience, something to be dealt with by a simple surgical procedure that doesn't even require hospitalization. There is some pain involved, cramps like having a bad period; and there is some depression involved, but that's just hormones run amok. I've accompanied so many friends to their 8:00
A.M.
abortion appointments at St. Acme's Women's Health Center or whatever the place was called that it's practically a rite of passage, both to have one and to be the supportive friend who waits while somebody else is having one.

I didn't know I was pregnant, so I never needed to think about having an abortion, but if I had known, I wouldn't have had to think about it either. I would have just done it, no questions asked, no discussions raised. Okay, maybe I would have created a pretense of choice, maybe I would have sat with a counselor or nurse practitioner at U.H.S. and discussed my other options, talked about carrying the pregnancy to term, talked about adoption or single motherhood, but it would have been part of a routine. I would have sat and examined the possibility of not aborting with
about as much conviction as a public defender has to give when he is representing a rapist or murderer who he knows is guilty but who has a right to a fair trial anyway. It would have been part of a charade meant to make me believe that when I later marched on Washington in 1989 and again in 1992 demanding a woman's right to choose, I actually believed that idea about
choice.
There is no choice for a girl like me: There's only abortion.

And if a guy behaves honorably these days, does the right thing when he knocks a girl up, it means he accompanies her to the abortion clinic. Maybe he even pays for half or all of it. Maybe he does his
I feel your pain
bit. Maybe he says stuff like,
It was my child too.
But shotgun weddings are now passé. Walking down the aisle is no longer the gentlemanly thing to do. There aren't rules like that any longer. Of course, I know it's better this way. No unwanted babies, no teenage brides and peach-fuzz grooms trapped in marriages that never should have happened. I know it's better.

I know.

No-fault divorce is better too. And still, I can't quite shake this feeling that we live in a world gone wrong, that there are all these feelings you're not supposed to have because there's no reason to anymore. But still they're there, stuck somewhere, a flaw that evolution hasn't managed to eliminate yet, like tonsils or an appendix.

I want so badly to feel bad about getting pregnant, beyond, of course, the surprise and shock. But I can't, don't dare to. Just like I didn't dare tell Jack that I was falling in love with him when I was down in Texas, wanting to be a modern woman who's supposed to be able to handle the casual nature of these kinds of relationships. I'm never supposed to say, to Jack or anyone else,
What makes you think I'm so rich that you can steal my heart and it won't mean a thing?

Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a
HANDLE WITH CARE
sign stuck to my forehead. Sometimes I wish there were a way to let people know that just because I live in a world without rules, and in a life that is lawless,
doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt so bad the morning after Sometimes I think that I
was
forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was all right for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left. Certainly deceit and treachery in both romantic and political relationships is nothing new, but at one time, it was bad, callous, and cold to hurt somebody. Now it's just the way things go, part of the growth process. Really nothing is surprising. My father had a child that he didn't have too much trouble walking away from; it seems only natural that so many of us have pregnancies that we can abandon even more easily. After a while, meaning and implication detach themselves from everything. If one can be a father and assume no obligations, it follows that one can be a boyfriend and do nothing at all. Pretty soon you can add friend, acquaintance, coworker, and just about anyone else to the long list of people who seem to be part of your life, though there is no code of conduct that they must adhere to. Pretty soon, it seems unreasonable to be bothered or outraged by much of anything because, well, what did you expect? In a world where the core social unit—the family—is so dispensable, how much can anything else mean?