Let's Pretend This Never Happened (24 page)

This is why whenever I see disheveled homeless people on the street, screaming to no one in particular about how bears are evil masterminds trying to take over the city, I immediately assume that years earlier they’d found themselves discussing this subject at a dinner party, horrified themselves into a complete mental breakdown, and then everyone else just wandered away. And now here this homeless woman is,
years later
, still trying to find a way to wrap up this conversation with dignity and failing miserably. This is why I always give homeless people a dollar and some Xanax. Because I know exactly what they’re going through. Also, I like to nod and try to add something to the conversation, like “It’s an interesting theory, however, I’m not sure whether bears have the cognitive ability to create a complex system of government,” but usually the person I’m talking to just stares past me, fixated on a long-gone horrified audience that now exists only in her head. Then my husband will pull me away, lecturing me about the dangers of provoking the homeless. He doesn’t see what I see: the desperate face of a person who has been driven mad by a dinner party.

You would think Victor would be more sympathetic, since he’s actually witnessed the emotional devastation I leave behind when forced to mingle, but until only recently he had dismissed my ability to completely destroy both our reputations in a single dinner party as an overexaggeration on my part. I can only assume that he placed so little importance on my inability to deal with social situations because (a) my actual anxiety attacks were so severe that in comparison my social awkwardness seemed mild, and (b) he just wasn’t paying that much attention.

And to be fair, the anxiety attacks are much more disturbing to watch, and I’m very lucky that the worst of them happen only a few times a year. One moment I’m perfectly fine and the next I feel a wave of nausea, then panic. Then I can’t catch my breath and I know I’m about to lose control and all I want to do is escape. Except that the one thing I can’t escape from
is the very thing I want to run away from . . .
me
. And inevitably it’s in a crowded restaurant or during a dinner party or in another state, miles from any kind of sanctuary.

I feel the panic build up, like a lion caught in my chest, clawing its way out of my throat. I try to hold it back but my dinner mates can sense something has changed, and they look at me furtively, worried.
I’m obvious.
I want to crawl under the table to hide until it passes, but that’s not something you can explain away at a dinner party. I feel dizzy and suspect I’ll faint or get hysterical. This is the worst part, because I don’t even know what it will be like this time. “I’m sick,” I mutter to my dinner mates, unable to say anything else without hyperventilating. I rush out of the restaurant, smiling weakly at the people staring at me. They try to be understanding but they don’t understand. I run outside to escape the worried eyes of people who love me, people who are afraid of me, strangers who wonder what’s wrong with me. I vainly hope they’ll assume I’m just drunk, but I know that they know. Every wild-eyed glance of mine screams, “MENTAL ILLNESS.”

Later someone will find me outside the restaurant, huddled in a ball, and lay their cool hand on my feverish back, trying to comfort me. They ask if I’m okay, more gently if they know my history. I nod and try to smile apologetically and roll my eyes at myself in mock derision so I won’t have to talk. They assume it’s because I’m embarrassed, and I let them assume that because it’s easier, and also because I
am
embarrassed. But it’s not the reason I don’t talk. I keep my mouth closed tightly because I don’t know whether I could stop myself from screaming if I opened my mouth. My hands ache from the fists I hadn’t realized I’d clenched. My body shouts to run. Every nerve is alive and on fire. If I get to my drugs in time I can cut off the worst parts . . . the shaking involuntarily, the feeling of being shocked with an electrical current, the horrible knowledge that the world is going to end and no one knows it but me. If I don’t get to the drugs in time, they do nothing and I’m a limp rag for days afterward.

I know other people who are like me. They take the same drugs as me. They try all the therapies. They are brilliant and amazing and forever broken.
I’m lucky that although Victor doesn’t understand it, he
tries
to understand, telling me, “Relax. There’s absolutely nothing to panic about.” I smile gratefully at him and pretend that’s all I needed to hear and that this is just a silly phase that will pass one day. I
know
there’s nothing to panic about. And that’s exactly what makes it so much worse.

Those are the painful days that I think distort Victor’s view of just how badly I deal with people. They’re the days when I’m certain he thinks that a little anxiety-induced social awkwardness is really nothing in comparison to a full-blown attack. And then I have to prove him wrong.

Case in point: This weekend Victor took me to a Halloween dinner party for his coworkers. I’d reminded him beforehand that he was making a terrible mistake, because he’d seen over the years a few examples of me fucking up parties. But he patted my leg and assured me I’d be fine. It was exactly the same way he’d patted our cat reassuringly right before we’d had it euthanized. It was
not
reassuring.

The drive to the party was long, which worked against me, because already the sedatives I’d taken were wearing off, and it gave me more time to worry about our choice of costumes. We were dressed as Craig and Arianna, the Spartan cheerleaders from
Saturday Night Live
. When I’d bought the costumes I’d thought it was a pretty iconic pop-culture reference, but when Hailey’s babysitter arrived she’d had
no damn idea who we were
.

Victor and me as Craig and Arianna.
One of us
is not even fucking trying.

“You know?
The Spartans? From Saturday Night Live?
” I asked, trying
not to let the hysteria seep into my voice as Victor (who had never wanted to be a male cheerleader in the first place and still hadn’t forgiven me for picking out the costume) just glared at me. The babysitter stared at me blankly.
“COME ON, YOU KNOW THIS!”
I may have shrieked a little, and then Victor pulled at my arm to go because we’d lost our first babysitter that way, and so I took a deep, calming breath and said, “It wasn’t
that
long ago, Dani.
Remember?
It was in the nineties?” and then she said, “O-o-oh. I was
born
in the nineties.” And then I kicked her in the stomach. But only in my head, because that’s kind of how we lost our second babysitter.

Still, Dani’s saucy ignorance of
shit that was on TV before she was born
was still fresh on my mind as we drove to the party. I tried to clear my head by reminding myself to not accidentally show people my vagina. This is not a usual worry for me; however, the cheerleader skirt was made of a clingy polyester material that kept riding up on my underwear whenever I moved, so rather than continually pulling down my skirt all night long, I’d decided it would be wiser to just go commando instead. I was still a little nervous about this decision when we pulled up to Victor’s boss’s house, though, and as we walked up the long driveway toward the large home I quickly whispered to Victor, “By the way?
I’m not wearing any underwear.
” He stopped in his tracks and furrowed his brow in undisguised panic.

“I’m not trying to seduce you,” I assured him. “I’m just telling you so that you would, ya know,
be aware
.”

Victor stared at me, horrified. “Be aware of
what
?”

“You know,” I explained, “in case you decided we needed to do any really physical cheers, you’d be aware of the whole
‘careful around the old vagina’
thing.”

Victor paused at the doorway and stared at me, his mouth slightly agape. A small sheen of sweat was beginning to form over his forehead. “We are
NOT
going to do any cheers. I didn’t even want to
wear
this damn costume, for Christ sake, and
WHY THE HELL ARE YOU NOT WEARING UNDERWEAR?!
” Then I told him to be quiet or his boss would hear him, and that’s when Victor started shaking a little bit. It worried me, because only one of
us was allowed to have a panic attack at a time, and I’d already called dibs. I wondered internally whether I should explain
why
I wasn’t wearing underwear or just stay quiet, because at this point he seemed so irrational I didn’t even think that I could get him to understand the science of panty lines. Then I looked through the beveled-glass door of Victor’s boss’s house and noticed four people on the couch watching TV.

And exactly none of them were in costume.

This was when I considered running away, because forcing your husband to wear a cheerleader costume for Halloween is grounds for divorce, but dressing him as a male cheerleader at his boss’s party where everyone else is in Dockers will totally get you stabbed. Then I realized that if I ran back to our car now, Victor would probably notice that no one inside the house was in costume, and then he’d quietly follow me back out to the car and stab me in private, and the last thing I wanted was to be stabbed anywhere. I quickly decided I was probably safer with witnesses, so I rang the doorbell before Victor could realize the severity of the situation. Then he pulled his (still aghast) face from mine to turn toward the door, and that’s when he noticed that no one in the house was wearing costumes.

“What.
The. Fuck?
” was all he managed to get out before a man in his late fifties opened the door. The man looked at us strangely, which I thought was rather rude for a host, and I thought I’d just get it out of the way, so I blurted out, “
You know
 . . . the Spartans? From
Saturday Night Live
?” He just kept staring, with his brow furrowed like he was still trying to place us, and I shrugged in defeat and said, “Meh. Don’t worry about it. The babysitter didn’t get it either.”

Victor cleared his throat and gave me the
“Please shut up”
look, while the man at the door said, “I’m sorry. Can I
help
you?” Then Victor explained that we were here for the party and that
apparently
we’d read the invitation wrong (
insert unnecessary glare at me
), because we’d thought it was a costume party, and that’s when the guy stopped us and said,
“There’s no party here.”
I assumed he was just trying to get rid of us, but then Victor pulled out the invitation and the man helpfully pointed out that we were
on North Cleveland Street and we wanted South Cleveland Street. He seemed very relieved to clear this up until I suddenly blurted out, “Oh,
thank Christ!
” Then he looked at me oddly again. Probably because he’s an atheist who doesn’t understand how thankful I was to God that I wasn’t going to get stabbed for forcing my husband to wear a cheerleader outfit to a business-casual affair. Atheists never understand that sort of thing.

A few minutes later, Victor and I arrived at the proper address to find a house covered in Halloween decorations and several people milling around outside in costume. I said a quiet prayer, except I guess it wasn’t quiet enough, because Victor gave me the stink-eye and asked whether I could please try to be on my best behavior tonight. He gave me a list of things to
not
talk about in front of mixed company. “Divorce, death, politics, heroin, sex, cancer,
swallowing needles
,” he droned on. “These are all things
not
to talk about.”

“Got it,” I assured him.

He looked at me dubiously. “Also, most of these people are conservative Republicans, so
please
don’t talk about how much you love Obama. I have to work with these people. And nothing about vaginas or necrophilia”—he’d actually been there for that one—“or ninjas or how your great-great-great-uncle murdered your great-great-great-aunt with a hammer.” I tried to nod an assent, but all of those things he’d just mentioned got stuck there in my head, and I struggled vainly to think of anything to talk about besides the prohibited subjects. I had nothing.

Luckily, the party was fairly loud, and, this being Texas, most of the guests were already drunk and talkative, and so I was able to just smile mindlessly and nod in agreement to whatever everyone else was saying. Victor and I settled into the periphery of a large group of his colleagues. Truthfully, it would have been difficult to get a word into the conversation dominated by a man dressed as John McCain (I shit you not), who launched into a tirade about Obama coming to steal all our guns (
“Where would he even keep them?”
I wondered), and I could see the panic in Victor’s eyes as he tensed and silently begged me to stay quiet. I bit my tongue
and forced a smile. I could see the relief in Victor’s face as he sighed deeply, and I smiled and rolled my eyes at his doubt, but costumed McCain must’ve noticed our exchange, because he chuckled and raised an eyebrow suspiciously as he asked, “What’s this? Do we have a bleeding-heart liberal in our midst?” And that’s when everything started to get all fuzzy, because I was
explicitly
warned not to talk politics, and so I froze in panic and searched my mind for any appropriate response that would change the subject. Then, after a moment of painful silence that seemed to hush everyone around us, I blurted out what was likely the most improbable sentence ever uttered at a dinner party: