Emma Who Saved My Life (59 page)

How's he doing, by the way?

“Same. Still sick. Chemotherapy is hell and he still sneaks a cigarette now and then—THAT much I like about him. You and I, Gil, weren't talking in November,” she clears her throat, “so you managed to miss the great drama of my going home for his fifty-sixth birthday. It might be his last, so we all came home—even my brother Vinnie who hates Dad more than I do—and we sang happy birthday and I wanted to shoot myself for the emptiness of it all, the sham. God. Where's my piece by the way?”

Piece?

“My piece, my cannon. My ROD.”

Dina and I took your gun to a pawn shop and she'll write you a check; we flushed all extant pills in your apartment down the toilet. Your place is habitable again.

“Sure know how to take advantage of a girl when she's down and out,” said Emma, not too upset however. “Well, anyway, it's my mom and dad's thirtieth wedding anniversay next month, another Last Chance occasion, right? And I tell Mom that I'm not taking time off from work to come out for another dog-and-pony show, and we fight and scream and say things. She was just here, this week.”

Your mother?

“Yeah, and she wants to take me back home to Indiana for a while, and I said yes, so maybe we'll be back in the rolling Great Plains together, we can visit, me with my kidnapped child, you with your big-titted sociologist vegetarian friend—”

How long will you be gone?

“Indianapolis? Are you kidding? I'll be on the first bus back as soon as I … what do you call it? Dry out? Clean myself out? Whatever. And I think I can do that pretty easily in Indiana as I was a scared Catholic schoolgirl there, never took a drink, never did anything bad, never smoked a cig, no sex.”

Just like now.

“Yeah just like now.”

Pause. Still waiting for the Big Story.

“So no one's around, right? Janet's in California doing something on university discrimination, Dina's up in Connecticut at her mother's, I can't find Joanna; Lisa—I'm so desperate I even call Mrs. Yuppie herself … she's not available, she's doing something with the kid, she and Jim are having problems, etcetera etcetera. I even call the girls from work and that's no good. I've seen all the movies ever made by this point. YOU, of course, aren't speaking to me.”

Go on.

“And I'm really vulnerable, so I'm taking a few more pills than I should have taken and I go to my analyst and he trashes me out, calls me self-indulgent, calls me self-involved, selfish—”

I thought you had this guy trained to lick your boots.

“Well I thought so, but he took this day of all days to use the ‘kick in the pants' strategy and I left feeling shittier than ever.”

And that's when you went home and took too many pills?

“Gil, I've told you, this wasn't a suicide, this was an accident.”

Keep talking.

“So I sneak another pill on the way to the group-therapy session, and I remember shit, it's my day to talk and have my guts spilled and have everyone give their sanctimonious advice about my life and what's wrong with it … so, for good measure, I take another pill.”

Oh Emma.

“Anyway, I go on motormouth-mode, I tell these people everything. You should see them trying to make sense out of my life—which, as we both know, is impossible. We talk about my dying father, we talk about my failed friendships, we talk about pills, we talk my celibacy. Lot of theories on that one: Was I secretly date-raped once? Was I abused as a child? Was I actually still a virgin? A lesbian maybe? I heard it all.”

Anything sound good?

Emma laughed mildly. “You know, Gil, apparently I will suffer all my life because I don't want to have some guy's urogenital organs within my body. I must be the freak of the world. I find the male sexual apparatus vulgar—it's like a … a popgun going off. Am I certifiable because I don't think it's a good time having this thing go off inside me once a night? I got a lot of problems, okay, but I have NEVER felt my choice to be celibate was one of them.” She was done with her speech. “I think it's one of my few triumphs over the human-animal state.”

And you told the group this?

She laughed more fully. “Oh no, I really let them have a good session—I cried, I confessed, I was vulnerable, I broke down, I put on a good show. I'm
never
going back there. I told them…”

What? Emma was getting the giggles again.

“I mean, what
didn't
I tell them? I told them things I never told anyone before. About getting rid of my own virginity, for instance.”

My eyes must have widened.

“Oh come on, I'm sure I told you that one. No?” Emma seemed rather proud of this. “Paul, my first boyfriend always said he didn't want no Catholic schoolgirl virgin so I went home and thought about it and went, hey why not, let's get this over with, so I broke my own hymen so I could be a woman of the world at sixteen. In retrospect, I'm glad I lost my virginity to myself. I wouldn't want it any other way,” she added laughing. “
Well,
you should have seen the vultures, the amateur psychiatrists fall all over themselves to analyze this. This was the cause of my celibacy, this was the cause of everything ever bad in my life, etcetera.”

Maybe it does have something to do with it.

“
No
it doesn't. Anyway, the Bitch Cheryl asks what therapies I've been taking and I tell all about the masturbation therapy and how it seems to be working and loosening me up and making me…” She buries her head in her hands. “I mean,
how degrading,
to sit there and talk about your masturbation therapy—I mean, I'm at an all-time low. I tell them that just this week—hot off the press, folks—I became comfortable enough with myself to engage in penetration. And I started tearing up, tears of joy, because I had reached this landmark.” Emma picked up the pillow underneath her and buried her face in it: “Just let me DIE, put me to sleep, put me down…”

I stifle any laughter and say
everyone
tells things at those groups, no big deal.

“Oh but there I was having this drug-induced crying jag with these creeps and the Bitch Cheryl comes and hugs me and there is
applause
and support and nurturing and group positiveness and everyone pats me on the back and hugs me and GOD, I saw myself. I said to myself: Emma, you're at rock bottom. You've officially become someone that you'd make horrendous fun of.”

Don't be too hard on yourself.

“And so I run to the bathroom and get some tissues to stop being emotional and stop crying and I feel like such an idiot for doing that psychoanalytical striptease out there so I take another pill.”

Sounds like a mistake.

“Right. So I'm walking back home just to be moving and not sitting around feeling bad and who should I run into but Joanna.”

Joanna, whoopdiedoo.

“From the temp agency, remember? I know you hate her and think she's a bore, and she is, but she cares about my problems. Anyway I'm desperate enough to go out with Joanna and we go to a bar. I tell her I'm depressed and I make up something just to justify my being so down—I tell her you and I broke off our engagement and we're not speaking.”

Me and you?

“Yeah well I needed some sympathy and that's what I said. And we weren't speaking, that much was true. So Joanna is a pal. I have one tiny vodka and orange juice and then, since she's buying drinks (so desperate for company she'll foot the bill, I figured) I keep telling her just an orange juice please, just an orange juice. Well she thinks I mean the same drink over and over again and to be a pal she has the bartender put double and triple shots in there and I can't tell because I could be drinking shoe polish at this point, I was so out of it, my tongue wasn't working—”

So you got drunk and had too many pills in you?

“Well I had this fifty-milligram bottle, right? And I had this illegal other bottle I'd gotten hold of and I thought the latter was the former so I thought I had three medium pills in me and I really had much too much. Well anyway this wave of nausea hits me, the abyss is opening before me, I sense all that stands between me and the void is my ability to keep myself awake. I tell Joanna to get me to a hospital except it comes out like Joooo uhnnnna, gib me to duh hahhhhhspill … It's like I have novocaine in my mouth. NEXT thing I know I'm in the bathroom and someone is splashing cold water on me, then someone's trying to get me to throw up but even my gag reflex is asleep here, and then I'm being led to an ambulance.”

But how did you end up in Bellevue?

“I'm getting there, hold your horses. I'm in the ambulance, right? I'm stabbing myself with my fingernails to keep myself awake. The attendant pokes me and slaps me so I won't pass out. I mean, this is it, Gil,
me and death,
the Distinguished Thing, hourglass and scythe. You know what's odd? There's a very reasonable part of me that's still thinking quite clearly and that reasonable part is sort of laughing. Like when the guy slaps me, it's thinking: Hey buddy, watch those hands, you enjoying this? And when Joanna threw water on me in the bathroom at the bar, it's thinking: You're really messing up my blouse here, Jo. You know, Joanna, if you did something different with your hair you might just get a date or two. I mean, this still small voice is cracking jokes.”

You were delirious maybe.

“No,” she said excitedly, “it was impeccable. It told me in my own voice—I mean, it was MY voice—that I had to stay awake or fall off into a possible coma. So I sat there and fought to keep awake. Out I'd go for a second and then I'd shake myself awake, digging my nails into my arm—see?” She raised her right arm and showed her scars.

Oh my.

“So I get to City Hospital downtown and the still small voice is going ‘Oh boy Emma, you're in for it now. Hack city. Amputate first and ask questions later.' There's a gunshot wound over here, a knifing there, a rape a mugging an assault—your basic weekday night. I'm on this table and then next thing I know here comes Doctor Kildare—no, handsomer, this is a
General Hospital
dream, this is the doctor little girls dream of playing doctor with. And the still small voice goes, ‘Great, Mr. Hot comes along and you're too zoned out to end your celibacy here and now.' He sticks a tube down me and I'm all for that—I'm easy at this point, motorcycle gangs, Shriner conventions, just pile 'em on boys, I'm in great spirits here.”

What was this tube?

“Stomach pump. They pour this vat of water into the tube and I have this sense of it going into me and then they lower the end of the pipe and siphon everything out of me—oh, the humiliation. Dr. Kildare, forgive me, what a bad first impression. And then something odd happens. That last little spurt of energy and consciousness was like some kind of last reviving before
death,
and I start losing it, going black and the doctor is looking worried and looks at his nurse and then I'm out. It's because I'm breathing so shallowly I just about shut down right there.”

Let me guess. Here's where you died.

“Ha ha. So next thing I know I wake up and I'm looking at the ceiling and my heart is racing. And that voice is back, funnier than ever, going, ‘Well, maybe you've been reincarnated and you're back.' And then I touch my chest as my heart is beating so hard. Nope, I have breasts—not that these are breasts—so I'm not a child again. My heart starts really racking around in my chest and NO ONE is around me. I've been rolled over to some hallway and I guess some other emergency came in and I got parked and I'm having a heart attack. I'm sure of it—it must have been two hundred beats a minute and I think, shit, it's gonna burst or jump out of my body or tear itself apart. So I rear up to get off the table, but my
head
is still full of drugs and I fall back.”

What was all this?

“They gave me a shot of adrenaline fearing I was fading out. But this shoots straight to my heart and something's gone wrong and I'm having a heart attack. So I steady myself and get up—where is Dr. Kildare? The downers and the uppers are fighting it out in me and I start panicking in a big way—I freak out as I've never freaked out … I'm absolutely sure I'm dying, my heart is pounding and that's all I can hear and I'm running about trying to get help, running into walls, into all kinds of emergency-room junk. And I come face to face with the big attraction, this guy who'd been cut up in about fifty ways and they're all attending to him and I can't get their attention. So I start trashing the hospital.”

You
what?

“I started pulling over IV racks and turning over tables and hitting the walls and going seriously crazy—all these free-clinic type doctors staring at me, restrain her, tackle her, someone says—”

But weren't you telling them you were having a heart attack?

“You know, that's the interesting thing, Gil. I don't think I was. I was yelling it in my head but maybe not to them. Anyway, here comes some Goon Number Two with a syringe and someone near me says ‘angel dust,' as if I'm freaking out on angel dust, and I see the syringe and enough of my brain is working enough to know that they're bringing out a sedative. No, NOT a sedative, I'm yelling to myself—and I fight them, hit the doctor, make a run for it, all the time this crushing pain—it's like someone is standing and jumping up and down on my heart. Someone tackles me, someone holds me, but I kick and bite and I get away, turning over big metal trashcans in my wake.”

But they got you, huh?

“Yes, so they got me. I had two rounds of sedatives and one of uppers in me and with that I checked out. I gave up: I said to myself as it got black, all right, stupid girl, this is it, look at those fluorescent lights getting dimmer, there's the last thing you'll ever see, that crappy cork-paneled ceiling and that light and I guess I'm not the first to die seeing that as a last sight, all the middle-aged businessmen being wheeled in here a minute too late to save them, they see the cork-paneled ceiling too and the fluorescent lights…” And here Emma sighed.