Prozac Nation (31 page)

At a certain point, he realized he couldn't cope with it. I understand his decision, I really do. I understood it even at the time. But it didn't make it hurt any less.

How can you do this to me?
I kept asking when we sat on his bedroom floor and talked, as we sat there for hours one Saturday afternoon breaking up.
You let me be myself, you encouraged me to let you see how terrible I felt inside, you let me get more and more sad and hysterical, and now that I'm as low as I'm ever going to be, you're leaving me.

That's right, he said. He couldn't lie. He told me he thought he could handle it, but he couldn't. He thought a lot of things. He never meant to hurt me.

I didn't, at the time, say to him that he loved watching me get hysterical, got off on it, enjoyed the
mise en scène,
the emotional rawness. I didn't say it because I didn't have to. It was obvious. He was always telling me that my purity, my complete inability to mask my sense of horror, was what he loved about me most. It was like he didn't understand that those qualities, at least in me, were a pathology. My rawness was not in any way about purity—it was about depression. Yes, there was a certain beautiful honesty to my depressed state—I miss it sometimes now. I miss having so little stake in maintaining the status quo that I could walk out of rooms in tears at times that other people would have deemed inappropriate. I liked that about myself. I liked that disregard for convention. And Rafe, well, Rafe loved it.

But it was sick, sicker than even he knew at first. The purity turned into perversity. It turned not into just an awareness of the darkness, but a morbid obsession with it. And as soon as he figured that out, he bolted. He left me alone with my depression, having exhausted him and every other last resort I had.

 

Before I left Providence, I called my friend Archer to tell him that I was coming into New York, that I was feeling crazy and desperate, that I would come straight to his apartment, that he had to provide me with a decent dinner because I couldn't take care of myself. And he said in his Waspy, courteous way something like, Sure, come on over.

Archer is what you call a real straight arrow, a Boston Brahmin to the manner born. He pretty much wanted everything to be simple and pleasant. The blood and squalor of life that keeps the majority of us intrigued and tantalized held no appeal for Archer. After we saw
Casualties of War
together, a movie where Sean Penn and Michael J. Fox play soldiers whose squadron in Vietnam rapes and beats a poor peasant girl to death, Archer just kept asking me what the point was to sitting through all that messy sordidness. Let's just say that Broadway musicals like
Annie
and
Oklahoma!
were probably invented with people like Archer in mind. He was positively dapper. After Archer graduated from Harvard in 1987, he got a job working for American Express doing God-knows-what (something about the database for the travel division he once told me) and it is only because he is picture-perfect handsome that Archer has amassed a stable of vibrant, nutty women into his coterie. He's one of those Yankee gentlemen who collects hysterical Jewesses as good buddies because we are as foreign and exotic to him as the natives in Tahiti were to Gauguin—and no matter how well he got to know any of us, his bafflement never abated. Everything kind of slides by Archer: I honestly believe that when the rain falls down, it never lands on him. If Archer weren't so good-looking, I'm not sure he'd exist at all, since he lacks most vital signs. But his pulchritude is almost part of the problem: Archer is so flawlessly handsome that he actually seems sterile, possessed of such a pure and symmetrical beauty that it is devoid of the Eros and Thanatos and virility that would make a man less physically endowed far more appealing. Basically, Archer is the perfect guy to go see after a breakup because he is the best opportunity to hang out with a gorgeous man and be certain that there will be no sexual tension whatsoever.

That night, Archer takes me to a lovely dinner at a lovely restaurant called Brandywine and remains perfectly unaware the whole time that I'm communicating with him from behind a blurry, opaque glass, kind of like a bathroom window. He is conversing with me about his plans to move to Zurich, why he's a registered Republican, where he gets his shirts dry-cleaned, and all the while I am full of this terrible pain so deep that I dare not let it near the surface. As I step back from my own self-absorption, it seems suddenly incredible to me that I am quaking inside, that, emotionally speaking, I am an avalanche that's about to land, in rocks and pebbles and stones, at Archer's feet, and he is still managing to engage me in a discussion of the presidential primaries. Every so often, I space out and say, I'm sorry, I got distracted, what did you just say? And a couple of times I come very close to saying, Can't you see I'm a mess?! Why don't you ask me why?

But I stay silent. The whole point of Archer is that he doesn't ask, he is a mannequin with a few human functions. That night I sleep in the same bed as Archer. He pulls me close at first, but I migrate to the opposite end and cling to the corner like somebody hanging over the side of a tall building, about to slip off the edge.

Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me.

 

I couldn't move after Rafe left me. Really. I was stuck to my bed like a piece of chewing gum at the bottom of somebody's shoe, branded to the underside, adhering to someone who didn't want me, who kept stamping on me but still I wouldn't move away. I couldn't get unstuck. I lay there, gobbling down my Mellaril at regular intervals, wondering why even the dulling effects of this stupefying drug were not strong enough to help me.

At first, I was staying at my mother's house in New York, but eventually I went back to Cambridge because Dr. Sterling thought it would be better if I were close to the center of treatment (i.e., her). It was pretty much the same to me either way. The one big difference was that in New York there was an abundance of food in the kitchen and in Cambridge there was nothing; hence, at home I ate sparingly and listlessly, but at school I just plain starved. Either way, I seemed to be fading.

While I was still in my old room at home, I discovered that the hardest part of each day, as is the case with most depressives, was simply getting out of bed in the morning. If I could do that much I had a fighting chance. To get through the day, that is. I decided to try to do some writing, hoping it might afford me the same sense of release that it once had, so many years before. But as soon as I sat down at my typewriter, I froze before the keyboard. I couldn't think of a damn thing to say. No poems, no prose, no words.

Jesus, I wondered, what do you do with pain so bad it has no redeeming value? It cannot even be alchemized into art, into words, into something you can chalk up to an interesting experience because the pain itself, its intensity, is so great that it has woven itself into your system so deeply that there is no way to objectify it or push it outside or find its beauty within. That is the pain I'm feeling now. It's so bad, it's useless. The only lesson I will ever derive from this pain is how bad pain can be.

 

One day, after much hemming and hawing, I had decided to see the movie
Ironweed
with my friend Dinah. I was on my way out when the phone rang. My mother was calling from work to tell me that she'd figured it all out, which is how she knew that I should take the semester off from school, return to Cambridge, and just go to therapy every day, devote myself full-time to recovery.

This wouldn't have been such a terrible idea, except that I had already considered checking into a mental hospital and had discarded the idea after Dr. Sterling and a couple of other psychiatrists I consulted insisted that it wouldn't be necessary. Stillman would be completely adequate in an emergency situation, and Dr. Sterling strongly believed in the value of sticking with a workaday routine, of taking classes and swallowing drugs and attending therapy sessions all at once. She believed I had a better shot at learning how to deal with the world while I was still a part of it, and to take time off from school, to sever my connection with Harvard, would deprive me of the many resources—Stillman for instance—that she thought would be helpful.

Returning to school was the path of least resistance, and Dr. Sterling had convinced me that was my best option. After several fruitful conversations with her, I had even settled it in my mind that somehow, some way, with Dr. Sterling's guidance, I would eventually be
okay.
I would survive breaking up with Rafe and I would survive depression. I didn't completely believe this, but I'd told myself that getting back to school would be the initial step toward any kind of hope. At a point when it was almost impossible for me to make any decisions and stand by them, I'd at least done that much. And now my mother was calling to tell me that as far as she could tell I was so incurably insane that I ought to take time off from school—in fact, she thought I should maybe drop out altogether and work for a living—so that I could maybe get better.

“I've never seen anyone like this,” she kept saying.

“Mom, listen, the last thing I should be doing right now is trying to give you perspective, because I'm lacking it myself,” I began. “But for Christ's sake, I just broke up with my boyfriend, I've been upset and hysterical, but I'm going to get better. I don't think that your calling me and telling me that I'm in worse shape than even I know is very productive. Because, Mom, I know I
couldn't
be any worse off than I think I am.”

“It's just—” she hesitated. “It's just all so crazy. You go running to Dallas and Minneapolis to make yourself feel better and you keep getting worse and worse, and, Ellie, you know I can't cope with this. It's too much for me. I don't understand why you get this way, I don't know what's happening to you, but I want it fixed. Every time you come home, it throws my life into a frenzy because I can't cope with what you're going through, so I want you to go back to Cambridge, and get some sort of job, and go to therapy and get better once and for all.”

Her tone combined hysterical fear with mournful horror. Once again, I felt like my depression was a broken car and she was ordering me to
just fucking fix it,
as if my mind could be rewired like a faulty transmission or unresponsive brakes. My mother wanted results, and fast, which is exactly what I wanted, but it didn't seem to work that way. I began to cry because I couldn't understand what my mother thought she would accomplish by saying these things to me.
I
was the one depressed, and somehow she managed to make it sound like I was supposed to feel sorry for
her.
I hated the way our emotional states were still so symbiotic, our moods so mutually dependent. Talking to her for a few minutes had sent me from a cautious belief that I might recover to a feeling that I was cursed, marked like Cain with depression for life. I desperately wanted to get off the phone and wash my hands, my face, my whole body, clean myself of this sullying substance that seemed to spread over me as I listened to my mother.

“Mom,” I said, “Mom, I was beginning to resolve to get better, and now you're making me feel like I'm much sicker than I am. Mom, I've got to meet Dinah for a movie, but before I hang up I really want you to tell me that you have faith in me, that you believe I'll be okay. I can't stand this feeling of thinking that you maybe know more than I do, that maybe you're right, that maybe I'm a hopeless case. I can't stand this feeling!” I was practically screaming. “Mommy, please tell me you're with me on this.”

“Ellie, I don't know.”

I started to contemplate leaving school. One word went through my head:
derailed.
Completely derailed. Thrown off the track of life. It was the same sensation I had when I thought of staying in Dallas at the end of the summer instead of returning to school. I felt like I'd just be somewhere
out there,
that without Harvard to anchor me I'd begin to disintegrate and float into the ozone layer, that years would go by and no one would even know I was gone. It was bad enough to be depressed
and
at Harvard, to be depressed and nowhere at all was implausible. Contrary to everything I'd learned while I'd been there, I still thought of Harvard as salvation.

It took forty-five minutes on the phone with Dr. Sterling for her to convince me that my mother was being impulsive, that everything my mother said was not the word of God. “To be completely frank, Elizabeth,” she said, “both of your parents, in my dealings with them, have been pretty crazy. I wouldn't take what she just said too seriously. It sounds like she was having one of her tirades.”

I arrived at
Ironweed
an hour late and walked out five minutes later because it was too depressing.
There
was a movie that never should have been made. I didn't want to go home because I was scared to be alone, I didn't want to stay in the theater because I was afraid of the dark, I didn't want to be with my mother because I was scared of her. So I went to an old friend's house, and as soon as I got there I realized that I couldn't bear to be with people, that I really wanted to be alone. As soon as I was out in the street, I realized I didn't want to be alone after all, realized I didn't want to be anything at all.

 

Tolstoy is frequently quoted as saying something about how all happy families are the same, but unhappy families are all unhappy in different ways. Of course, he's got it totally wrong, completely ass-backward. Happiness is infinite in its variety, and happy people, happy families, can find their joy in so many different ways. It's true that happiness is not very profound as far as art is concerned—it is not the stuff that lengthy Russian novels are made of—but a family that is happy has the ability to do so much, to try so much, to be so much in ways that unhappy families are too smothered in their own sorrow and melodrama to explore. When you're happy, there's so much you can do, but when you're sad all you can do is sit around and be miserable paralyzed by despair.