I'm Down: A Memoir (28 page)

“It’s a good thing that your parents don’t pay attention to you,” I said. “You can just do your own thing and eat Hot Pockets and stuff.”

“I want to run away.”

“Don’t be a retard! You have a great house. . . . Just hide in the family room. No one ever comes down here. Get really good grades and in four years, you can be sooo out of here.” I finally paused the game. “You’re in IPP. You’ll get into an amazing school somewhere in New En gland, and your parents will pay for it.”

“I don’t think I can make it four years.”

I saw her tearing up and I looked her in the eye, serious as a heart attack as I said, “You can fucking make it.”

“You don’t understand. No one cares about me.” I looked
at her sitting in her Generra sweater, with the eighty-five-year-old violin that she owned set down sloppily next to her new computer.

“If no one cares about you, why do they buy you all this stuff ?”

“Because they feel bad because they’re never around.”

“Sounds rough.”

“You don’t get it because you’re poor!” she said. She had never said anything like that, something mean meant to shut me up.

But I was feeling surprisingly thick-skinned that day. “Thank God I’m poor. . . . You’d never see me whining because my parents bought me cool stuff and then left me alone to do whatever I wanted. And you know why?” I asked, and then answered my own question, “Because it’s awesome.”

“It’s not as awesome as you’d think,” she said, resigned, but I wasn’t letting it go.

“Are you kidding? We have just played three violin duets, spent three hours on Nintendo, we have a check for a pizza . . . and I still haven’t seen either of your parents all night.”

“Okay,” Violet said, cracking a smile. “You have a point.”

“And it’s almost time for
Next Generation.
Who has it better than you?”

“I get it. I get it,” Violet said, and grabbed the controller of the Nintendo. “I guess I was just looking at it the wrong way.” She laughed and coughed at the same time.

“Man,” I said to Violet, who was back at Nintendo. “You should get that cough checked out.”

My social life was the best part of living with my mother. When I wasn’t swimming, studying, or carbo-loading, I was spending the night with people richer than me. It was like staying in a hotel. Nice bed, clean sheets, new sights. I seemed
to gravitate toward a relatively depressed crowd, because the more depressed my friend was, the more expensive my company was. I liked good dinners, video games, boats, and horses. I liked houses on the water or with wooded acreage if possible. Having both was, of course, ideal. Short of that, having a parent that adored me was a plus, and having a parent who saw me as a charity case and wanted to take me under their wing and improve my station made you my BFF. My friend Eileen’s mom would sit me down and we would talk about music, politics, and how Eileen could improve her grades. Whereas Dana’s dad might talk to me about when they all lived in India, and whether or not his son would ever get his shit together and act more like me.

As for my friends themselves, I had a growing irritation with them that was getting harder and harder to hide. I didn’t think they really appreciated their parents, and it was amazing how much love and support they expected for being relatively inert. They took things for granted, they whined about cold and hunger like it was gonna kill them, they went to therapy, and they nursed ridiculous crushes on homosexual celebrities.

A few weeks after my stay with Violet, I decided to try out staying with Marni Madison. She was the first of my friends to start smoking and in the years since we all had tried to summon the dev il, her verbal skills had improved and now she talked like a third-grader. I had the hardest time with her out of all my friends, because I knew she lived in a beautiful glass house on the sea, and yet she dressed like a homeless person. She woke up every day with what I can only imagine was a direct ambition to look like a wet rat. All she owned were these hideous yet overpriced long gray cotton sweaters that were meant to look “raw.” Once she bought a new one, she’d stretch out the sleeves and have one constantly in her mouth. When she talked to you, she stared into the middle distance.
And at this point, spacey didn’t even begin to describe it—she was catatonic without the commitment.

The impetus for a weekend visit came about when she walked up to me on Thursday in the hallway. She stood next to me vacantly, and I thought she had forgotten why she wanted to talk to me until she took her sweater out of her mouth.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Marni asked, putting her sweater right back in her mouth when she was done.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I might get together with some people, or maybe just watch TV. Depends how I feel.”

“Oh,” she said, but didn’t walk away.

“Why? What’s up with you?”

“Well . . . My mom told me I could take the sailboat out on my own this weekend if I wanted to.”

My ears perked up immediately.
Sailing—I like the sound of that
.

“Yeah?” I said casually.

“Yeah. I could bring a friend,” Marni said, unsure.

“Maybe I’d be into that.”

“Well,” she said, “it was just an idea.”

“No! No!” I said. “I’m warming up to it. . . . I could use some air myself.”

Marni got excited, which for a moment made her seem normal, but she caught herself and put her sweater in her mouth and said, “Cool.” Then spaced out until the bell rang. I had to admit part of my eagerness to stay with Marni was also curiosity. I thought that over the course of a sleepover I might understand what it was that made her so weird.

Oddly, the person I was actually feeling the most connected to these days was my sister. She would come and stay with Mom on the weekends and I was embarrassed how much I looked
forward to it. She had gotten the other scholarship spot on the swim team—another born breaster. So now I got to see her every day at swim practice. We would play together in our lanes after practice, submerging ourselves all the way to the bottom of the pool and walking on the bottom like astronauts. Or arching our backs and trying to jump out of the water like dolphins. Then afterwards, we would shower off and dress together. Then I would head back to Mom’s, leaving Anora waiting in the pool lobby for Dad, who would be late to pick her up. I was always a little sad to leave her, but never worried. She had endeared herself to all the lifeguards there. And when I left, she usually jumped behind the attendant’s booth to watch TV with Tony, a black man in his forties, whose job it was to tell us to be quiet.

I would return to my mother’s house and to my room, where I could practice, eat, talk on the phone, watch TV, study, or draw unicorns until bedtime. Sometimes I used the time to plan my weekend and whose house I was gonna stay at if I didn’t have a swim meet. And I thought about Dad—not at all. Which was handy because since I had left, it seemed I was dead to him. And I was just like my mother—a leaver.

I arrived at Marni’s house at around eleven on Saturday morning. I was supposed to be there at ten, but Mom drove around in circles for a while because she couldn’t believe that there was a house on that particular stretch of beach. In fact, I was also surprised it wasn’t protected land. I got out of the car still unsure if we were at Marni’s house or if it was some wildly bougie caretaker’s house in a state park that paid their caretakers seven figures.

The door creaked open and Marni appeared slumped over in the entryway. “Hey,” she said anemically, and slowly motioned for me to follow her into the house. I waved back at Mom to let her know she didn’t have to stay. But she had already
taken off , intimidated by the prospect of having to meet her parents. I followed Marni up the terrazzo stairs and into her living room.

It was an airy house with huge picture windows, but somehow it still seemed dark. There was a big screen in a side area that was on but no one was watching. And in spite of the TV blaring CNN, the house was eerily quiet.

“Where are your folks?” I asked.

Marni shrugged.

“Well,” I asked slowly, “when you woke up this morning were they here?”

“Of course,” Marni said, quicker than usual. “I just don’t know where they went. They might actually be here.”

“Do they know I’m here?”

“I told them,” she said. It all felt a bit odd, but everything about Marni was odd, why shouldn’t her home be, too?

“Well.” I slapped my hands together. “When do you want to take the boat out?”

“Oh . . . It’s too choppy today. I don’t think I should.”

“But I came over here because we were gonna take the boat out,” I said. “I really want to do that.”

“Why?” Marni asked. “Is that the only reason you wanted to hang out with me?”

I felt guilty immediately and really ashamed. “No. I just thought that’s what you wanted to do. I don’t care what we do. . . . What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know. . . . Hang out . . . talk.”

Yipes!

“We can watch a movie on the big screen, right?” I said.

“No, let’s just go to my room.” And she walked me down the hall to her lair of sadness.

The rest of the afternoon went as followed: Marni told me about how her parents don’t touch each other or her, and how
her dad runs the house like it’s a business. Then around noon her dad walked into her room to tell her that she “lacked talent and character” in front of me. Then she got even spacier. Then we talked about the band Skinny Puppy. Then her mom came in and held up some pink blouses she had bought for Marni. Then Marni told her she wouldn’t wear them and that her mother should return them. Then her mother cried. Then her mother asked me what I thought of the blouses. Then I tried to comfort her mother while Marni crawled into her sweater like a turtle. And by late afternoon her dad was gone, her mom was drinking, I was watching sitcoms on the big screen, and Marni was
actually
catatonic.

“Hey, Marni!” I had now been trying to cheer her up for about a half hour. “You want to watch
Saturday Night Live
later?” I tried to make it sound like the best thing that could happen to a person.

“Ughn,” Marni said without taking her sweater out of her mouth.

“I’ll take that as a yes!” I said.

She took the sweater out of her mouth and said clear as a bell, “Do you ever just feel like it would be better for everyone if you didn’t exist?”

I thought she was being a terrible host.

She continued, “Not to kill yourself—just not existing.”

“Yes,” I said. Then trying to ease things, “Sure.”

“Not like I do.”

I really didn’t want to fight about it and said, “How ’bout something to eat? I’m hungry.”

“I’ll go ask my mom to take us to Jack in the Box.”

I thought about that a second “Wait, your mom who’s in the living room?” I said. But what I meant was, “Your mom who’s been drinking since four and is passed out on your Italian sectional?”

“Yeah,” she said, and took off to wake her mom.

“I’m sure we can find something to eat in the fridge. I don’t have to go anywhere.”

“I like their curly fries,” she said, and bounded out of the room.

Ten minutes later I was in the backseat of a swerving, careening piece of glass and metal helmed by a drunken house wife. After four tries, and at my behest, Marni’s mom finally found the headlights, which I had to point out were diff erent from the turn signal. Oddly, Marni seemed more easy and relaxed in this possibly life-threatening situation than she had all day, and as Mrs. Madison made right turns that left skid marks, Marni conversed relatively normally with her about history class and what her mom might cook for a potluck later in the week. I had to admit, except for the driving, Marni’s mom really was more fun to be around when she was intoxicated, and barely resembled the hysterical woman from that morning.

Of course, I was relieved when we peeled into the drive-through at Jack in the Box in one piece. And it seemed like Mrs. Madison had sobered up a little during the ride. That’s when the lady’s voice at the drive-through said, “Welcome to Jack in the Box, can I take your order?”

And Marni’s mom said, “Why the fuck not?”

That night Marni and I started to watch
Saturday Night Live
but wound up getting too tired and fell asleep in Marni’s room. She had a trundle bed that we had to push a pile of dark clothes out of the way to open and it took us twenty minutes to find some extra bedding, but ultimately I fell into a deep restful sleep.

That is until I was awoken in the middle of the night by Marni’s dad coming into her room, flipping on the light, and
yelling at Marni about how he had to move her bike in order to park his car, which quickly escalated back into the earlier conversation about her lack of character.

Marni was rattled again and went into her bathroom, while I put the pillow over my head and tried to go back to sleep. But then I had to pee and, thinking Marni was just smoking, thoughtlessly barged into her bathroom.

I flung the door open to find Marni was not smoking. Marni was cutting herself. She was slumped over the tile floor of her bathroom with an X-Acto knife making a series of short marks in her left forearm.

I was too stunned to say anything, but I think my face said it all because Marni immediately got defensive and said, “It’s okay. I’m just relieving some stress.” And from the looks of her arm, she wasn’t new to this form of pressure release.

“Stop that!” I demanded. “What the fuck?”

“I’m sorry.”

“What the fuck?” I repeated.

“Why didn’t you knock?”

“Why are you cutting yourself? I don’t understand why anyone would do that to themselves.”

“I don’t know!” she said, confused. “It just makes me feel good. It’s not what you think. I’m not hurting myself.”

“I think you’re making your arm look like shit, and you might want to wear short sleeves one day.”

“Doubtful,” Marni said, and then realizing that wasn’t the point, said, “Well, I guess you’re gonna go now.”

“No,” I said, knowing there was no way in hell that I was getting my mom out of bed at this hour and there was equally no way I was getting back in a car with hers. “I’m gonna stay. But you gotta give me the knife.”