Prozac Nation (4 page)

By the time the radical sixties hit their home bases, we, the kids, were already born, and our parents found themselves stuck between an entrenched belief that children needed to be raised in a traditional household, and a new sense that anything was possible, that the alternative lifestyle was out there for the asking. There they were, in marriages they once thought were a necessity and with children they'd had almost by accident in a world that was suddenly saying,
No necessities! No accidents! Drop everything!
A little too old to take full advantage of the cultural revolution, our parents just got all the fallout. Freedom hit them obliquely, and invidiously, rather than head on. Instead of waiting longer to get married, our parents got divorced; instead of becoming feminists, our mothers were left to become displaced homemakers. A lot of unhappy situations were dissolved by people who were not quite young or free (read: childless) enough to start again. And their discontent, their stuck-ness, was played out on their children. Sharing kids with a person you have come to despise must be a bit like getting caught in a messy car wreck and then being forced to spend the rest of your life paying visits to the paraplegic in the other vehicle: You are never allowed to forget your mistake.

My parents are a perfect case in point. Lord knows whatever possessed them to get married in the first place. It probably had something to do with the fact that my mom was raised with many of her first cousins, and all of them were getting married, so it seemed like the thing to do. And from her point of view, back in the early sixties, marriage was the only way she could get out of her parents' house. She'd gone to Cornell to be an architect, but her mother told her that all she could be was an architect's
secretary,
so she majored in art history with that goal in mind. She'd spent a junior year abroad at the Sorbonne and did all the studiedly adventurous things a nice Jewish girl from Long Island can do in Paris—rented a motorbike wore a black cape, dated some nobleman type—but once she got out of college, she moved back home and was expected to stay there until she moved into her husband's house. (Certainly there were many bolder women who defied this expectation who took efficiencies and railroad flats with girlfriends in the city who worked and dated and went to theater openings and lectures—but my mom was not one of them.) She took a job in the executive training program at Macy's, and one day while she was riding the escalator up from the main floor to the mezzanine, she passed my father, who was riding down. They were wed less than a year later.

My parents did weird things after they got married. My dad got a job at IBM and they moved to Poughkeepsie, where my mom went nuts with boredom and bought herself a pet monkey named Percy. Eventually she got pregnant with me, decided a baby was better than a monkey, and moved down to New York City because she could not bear another day in a town that was half Vassar College, half IBM. My father followed, I was born, they fought, they were miserable, he refused to get a college degree, they fought some more, and then one day I wouldn't stop crying. My mom called my dad at work to say that if he didn't come home immediately and figure out how to get me to calm down, she was going to defenestrate me. Whatever my father did when he got to the apartment must have worked, because I'm still alive today, but I think that moment marked the end of their marriage. Sometime after that, my parents were trying to hang a picture in the apartment, and my mom absolutely refused to hold the nail in place while he hammered it into the wall; she was sure he was going to misfire and bang her fingers, and she would end up bruised and broken. After that, they went to a marriage counselor they read about in
Time
magazine who made them play with toy trains to see how their relationship worked. Something about the way they put things together on the tracks made him conclude it was hopeless. My mom threw my dad out of the house, and he went home to his mother and his diabetic, alcoholic father in their cinder-block apartment complex in Brighton Beach, and that was the end.

This marriage could have peacefully ceased to be one fine day with an understanding that it was just a mistake, they were just two foolish kids playing house. Problem was, they had a child, and for many years after they split up, I became the battlefield on which all their ideological differences were fought. This was New York City in the late sixties: Harlem had burned down, Columbia University was shut down, Central Park had become an international center of love-ins and be-ins and drug-ins, and my mom was petrified about being a single mother with a deadbeat ex-husband. She sent me to the synagogue nursery school, thinking this would provide me with some sense of community and stability, while my dad, who turned up to see me about once a week, would talk to me about atheism, insisting I eat lobster and ham and other nonkosher foods that I was taught were not allowed. A daily Valium doser, my dad would spend most of our Saturday afternoon visits sleeping, leaving me to watch TV or paint with watercolors or call my mom to say,
Daddy won't move, I think he's dead.
(One time we went to see
The Last Waltz,
and he passed out. I couldn't get him to budge, so we sat through the movie three times; I think this might explain my abiding crush on Robbie Robertson.)

For years, my mom tugged toward trying to give me a solid, middle-class, traditional upbringing, while my father would tell me that I should just be an artist or a poet or live off the land, or some such thing. But as arty and expansive as his ideas may have sounded, my father's attitude and lassitude were not grounded in any sort of sixties collegiate bohemian philosophy of live and let live: He came from a background that was more blue collar-immigrant than anything else. And instead of college, he'd done time in the U.S. Army. He was not cool or groovy at all, just a fuckup. So while my mom, struggling with her part-time income and trying to take care of me, was frantic to keep at least a toehold in the bourgeoisie, my dad was working overtime (or actually, not
gainfully
working much at all) to stay the hell out of it. This went on, back and forth, for years, until it was clear that all three of us were caught mostly in the confusing crossfire of changing times, and what little foundation my parents could possibly give me was shattered and scattered by conflict.

I don't doubt that there might have been another kind of awfulness in being born to a couple of hippie druggies or politicos (I'm sure the kids a few years my junior have their own lists of gripes), but I'm convinced that it was worse to have grown up in revolutionary times, in the midst of a wildly vibrant city like New York, raised by people who were not really involved or engaged in the culture. Does anyone really want to be a wallflower at the orgy? My mom was desperate to shelter me from what she perceived as sheer lunacy, and my dad, who began loading up on tranquilizers shortly after the divorce, was just plain indifferent. I really believe that had either of them had any strong convictions or values to pass on to me, my worldview might have emerged as more sanguine than sanguinary. Instead, all they had to offer me was their fear: My mom feared the outside world and my dad feared me and my mom; we lived in a paranoid household in which everyone defined his own enemies and pretty soon everyone was implicated.

One day, when I was about ten, my father told me that he had never wanted to have a kid with my mom, that their marriage was for shit and he had thought a child was a bad idea. But once she got pregnant, he added, he was most delighted. He said that my mother wanted to have an abortion, that she'd gotten as far as the gynecologist's office and was all set to have a D and C, and that he physically restrained her to prevent the process. Later, when I told my mother about this conversation, she began to cry and said that the opposite was true: She wanted me and
he
didn't. Given that she was the custodial parent, took care of me and loved me while he slept through most of my childhood and ran away without leaving a trace when I was fourteen, I must assume she is telling the truth. But who really cares? Some people are born to single mothers and turn out just fine. I don't think it matters how many parents you've got, so long as the ones who are around make their presence felt in a positive way. But I got two parents who were constantly at odds with each other, and all they gave me was an empty foundation that split down the middle of my empty, anguished self.

 

They were separated and divorced before I was two.

My only memory of my father living in the same place as me: I am, of course, just a toddler. I wander into my parents' bedroom and find my father still lying there in the queen-size bed under the covers, his glasses perched on his nose kind of crookedly, his head bent to one side, kind of askew. He looks over at me but not really. Or maybe not at all. I have a pacifier plugged in my mouth, one of about thirty that I keep and name, one of about thirty that I stay up all night playing with, as I lie in the folds of covers forming a castle with my knees bent. My dad is still half asleep, forcing himself to stay awake because Mommy is already up and about, already making omelettes and café au lait. The sheets on the bed are pink with maroon and white diagonal stripes of varying thicknesses, definitely the fashion, meant to look a bit like a Frank Stella painting or
a Vidal Sassoon geometric cut. They are so straight and solid, and my dad is so twisted and gelatinous.

On the wall is a poster, popular in the late sixties, of a broken heart held together by a Band-Aid, as if things could be fixed this easily (or perhaps it is making fun of that notion). At any rate, my father, still beardless at this point, is pushing himself up with his hands to sit against the black antique wrought-iron headboard.

This is my only memory of Daddy at home. In all my early memories of him, he is sleeping or just waking up or about to go to sleep. Frequently, during our Saturday visits after the split, my father would take me for Chinese food, and afterward we would retreat to his studio walk-up, turn on the TV, and I would watch while he fell asleep. Usually on weekend afternoons, all that was on were college sports—I recall many NCAA championships—which didn't interest me, and
Star Trek
reruns, which confused me (my dad, on the other hand, is a hopeless Trekkie, but he slept through all of this anyway). Occasionally there'd be a movie about the Donner Party or some other gruesome historical event. Sometimes he'd get me a model airplane or car to construct and paint with bullet gray enamel and the war stripes of the Allies or the Axis countries. I am the only girl I know who builds model vehicles, and it is only because it is all he gives me to do while he sleeps. Sometimes I tap him and try to get him to help me fit a wing in place or paint a tight crevice in a silver fender, but he doesn't budge.

I don't take it personally that my father snoozes through our visits. After all, how much can you really say to a little kid, and probably we'd already covered it at lunch. Later on, when I am old enough to know about these things, I tell my mom that I think he's narcoleptic, and she says that all men are like that, that the army teaches men to be able to sleep anywhere so they do. When I am old enough to ask my father about it, when I wonder why he sleeps through our little bit of quality time together, he just speaks of nerves—of nerves and Valium. Librium and Miltown and whatever else too.

When I am three, my mother goes to Israel for three weeks, ostensibly to look into living there. Though we aren't particularly religious, she thinks that maybe the Middle East, where the war zones are mostly outside the home, is a more stable place to raise a child. My father tells me that she has gone away because she is losing her mind, but whatever the reason, Daddy comes to stay with me for the time being. I think this setup is great because it means I never have to get to nursery school on time: My father sleeps right through the morning.

He sleeps on the green sofa bed in the living room (apparently it is too unpleasant to stay in the bed he once shared with Mommy), and every morning I rise at the crack of dawn and play with my coloring books or read Dr. Seuss or ride on my rocking horse and watch
Captain Kangaroo
and wait for him to get up and make me breakfast. Hours go by. Eventually it seems like lunchtime and I am so hungry that I tiptoe into the living room, stand there staring at him, hoping the power of my gaze will wake him. It doesn't.

Finally, I approach the bed, over at the part where his face rests and the springs and coils connect the mattress to the couch, and I take my little fingers and carefully peel his eye open as if I were a police officer examining a corpse at the scene of the crime. At first, I expose just the white, but eventually the iris and pupil roll into view, and I in turn roll into his view, and he looks a little stunned, like this is not quite what he expected, like who is this stranger standing over his face, or like maybe he's been driving for a long time and he somehow has picked up the wrong hitchhiker.

And I say,
Daddy, it's me.

For three weeks straight, I arrive at school at least three hours late, and every time it happens, Patti, the teacher, just laughs. My dad does his imitation of Donald Duck for me and the other kids, and then he is gone.

 

The first time I see any therapist—and there have been so many first times—there are certain routine questions we must go through. There is the usual medical trivia: Are you allergic to penicillin? Whom do we contact in an emergency? Are you on any drugs? And then there's all the family stuff: not the anecdotal kind that is the bulk of therapy itself, but things like, Is there any history of depression in your family? At first, I always forget about everyone else, about my cousins who tried to kill themselves and about my great grandmother who died in an asylum and about my grandfather the alcoholic and about my grandmother with the terrible melancholia and about my father who was obviously very fucked up—I always forget about all these people and say,
I'm the only one.
It's not an act. I just honestly don't think of any of these people as really related to me because they're all on my dad's side, and I hardly feel like he's in my family.