Prozac Nation (28 page)

I listened to the new Marianne Faithfull album,
Strange Weather.
It really should have been subtitled “Music to Slit Your Wrists To.” I cried when I listened. I cried when I didn't listen. I wanted to cry to Rafe, but I really couldn't call him twenty-seven times in one day. He had stuff to do. His sister was, apparently, a handful. His mother also. He even admitted to losing patience with me. I still called him a dozen times a day. Once, when he was out, I kept trying late into the night until his mother finally took the phone off the hook. I got scared that the receiver would never be replaced, I'd never get through to Rafe again, and I was up all night frightened and shaking and listening to the busy signal over and over again. But mostly when I'd call, he was there but in the middle of something or cross or preoccupied and when I asked if he still loved me he'd scream
Yes! Now will you just leave me alone!
He hated me for being so fucked up right when he needed to deal with a life that had more in it than me.

I realized I'd better do something, get a hold of myself because no one else would. I announced to my mother that I thought I should go to Dallas for a friend's wedding. I told her I needed her to pay for my ticket, but I'd give the money back because when I got down there I'd write some articles for the
Morning News
and make the trip profitable. She thought that the need to run from place to place was a bad one, a sign of my sickness, and agreed only on the condition that Dr. Sterling said it was okay. Dr. Sterling was away for Christmas, but that hadn't kept me from calling her at 4:00 in the morning several times at her ski lodge up in Vermont, so I didn't see why my mom couldn't call her at the same place during the day. Thank God, Dr. Sterling felt that traveling or doing whatever would keep me going until I got back to Cambridge and back into treatment was a fine idea because she'd been talking to me for the last few days and she'd never heard me sound quite this desperate.

What neither of them knew was that I was planning a layover in Minneapolis on my way back from Dallas so I could see Rafe and make sure he still loved me.

 

So I went to Texas, I made some pretense of writing articles. I showed up at the
Morning News
and took my old desk because everyone was on vacation and the few remaining editors were starved for copy. I interviewed people, I planned to write something about a couple of Texas writers whose books had just been published, but once I finished making transcripts, I realized I didn't have it in me to write.

Every time I talked to my mother, I told her it was all fine and good down here, that I was writing a lot, being paid by the piece, earning my keep, that this was the best thing I'd ever done.

I spent the rest of the time in Dallas in bed, emerging only on New Year's Eve to see
Broadcast News,
and it seemed ridiculous that the Holly Hunter character reserved fifteen minutes every morning to cry when I couldn't reserve a time not to cry all day.

 

Rafe was late to meet me at the airport. When he finally showed up, he found me sobbing in the Continental terminal and started explaining about how his alarm clock was broken.

I wanted to kill him because I took a 6:00
A.M.
flight and changed planes in Houston so I could see him, and now he's talking to me about how household appliances made in Japan are defective and I can't believe he wasn't up all night waiting for me the way I would have been for him. But I didn't say that, realizing in some tiny little sane corner of my brain that I am crazy and he probably isn't.

I sat there and cried all the way into Minneapolis, and Rafe said we'd talk when I was calm.

In a restaurant, he told me he couldn't stay in the relationship, I need him too much, and so do all these other people, and he just wanted to be a normal senior in college who enjoys his last term before graduation and drops a lot of acid and fucks a lot of random freshman women and doesn't have to worry about someone like me.

I didn't respond because I thought I might be dead.

I was supposed to be in Minneapolis only for the afternoon, I was supposed to get on a flight to New York in a few hours, but I refused to board an airplane until Rafe changed his mind.

So we went to his house, I met his mother with her thick German accent and her severe Prussian manner, and we drank white wine and took pictures as if everything were fine, and I conveniently missed my flight. I was so quiet and well behaved that Rafe decided we didn't have to break up after all. Later on, after we'd taken Rafe's sister to see
The Empire of the Sun,
the kid flipped out and gouged a hole in the foyer wall with a
New York Times
umbrella, the kind you get free with home delivery. They took her to the emergency room in the middle of the night because she wouldn't calm down, she wouldn't stop doing violence to the infrastructure of her mother's grand old home overlooking Lake Minnetonka, and it looked like they were going to have to commit her.

I was left alone in the house, alone in the guest room in the Minneapolis dark, and I was so frightened that I called Dr. Sterling.

“I'll be on a flight to New York tomorrow,” I tell her after I've explained where I am. “Rafe and I have patched things up, but I don't know. I've a feeling it might not last.”

“You sound okay about that,” she says.

“I am right now, because I'm still here.” I pause for a minute to try to figure out why I don't sound more upset. “Let's face it, it's five in the morning and I'm calling you, so I can't be that okay.”

“I think you should come back up to Cambridge right away, and we need to think about some very aggressive form of treatment. I'm worried about what's happened to you over the last few weeks. And you're always saying, ‘What do I have to do to get people to take me seriously?' Well, listen, you don't have to try to kill yourself first. I take you seriously now. I think I might be able to arrange with Stillman or one of the other Harvard hospitals to have you checked in as a full-time patient, with me supervising your case through one of the doctors I know there.”

I'm silent. I'm stunned.

“But the first thing you've got to do is get back here where I can see you. I can't be much help by phone.”

“Dr. Sterling?” I whimper.

“Yes?”

“Thanks.”

10

I myself am hell

 

ROBERT LOWELL

“Skunk Hour”

 

It is a Saturday night in January and I am lying in a bed in the infirmary, watching television. I am also reading Margaret Atwood's book
Surfacing,
even though it is hopelessly polemic and dated, hoping it will awaken my feminist consciousness, hoping it will inspire me to want to get out of bed and go out to the wilderness and explore my relationship with the earth and tree roots and sheep and my own naked, unshowered, unadorned self, which is what the narrator in the story does. By the end of the book, she is covered in mud, a real live natural woman burying her own shit in dirt, as if
that
is what it's all about. I am going to have to inform my friends, all of them right-minded women who think they should read
Surfacing
because it's supposed to be a feminist classic, not to bother.

Maybe what I really need is some Thoreau,
Walden
perhaps, since everyone says that it will make me happy to be alive. Henry David puttering around in his garden and all that. Not that I can even aspire to happiness anymore. I am just hoping that something can show me that there is a way to live that is so satisfying and fulfilling in and of itself that I won't even want Rafe anymore. I would like, so much, to be one of those independent women like Barbara Stanwyck in
Baby Face
or Jean Harlow in
Red Headed Woman
or any
film noir
star in any old movie who can love 'em and leave 'em with impunity. Unfortunately, in the blue-and-white-striped cotton pajamas that are the Stillman uniform, I am just me.

The U.S. Figure Skating Championship is on TV, so I watch the various competitors do their routines, listening to the sportscasters make references to back camels and triple jumps and high leaps. It is the women who are competing tonight. The only ones I've heard of are Tiffany Chin, the delicate Asian girl who is doomed to take second place to Debi Thomas, the Stanford premed who is doomed to give a lousy performance at the Olympics and walk away with just a bronze medal.

Debi is kind of chunky, not in any way pretty, nothing at all like the figure skaters I always idolized and fell in love with when I was little. They were always lithe, lean, if not beautiful like Peggy Fleming then adorable and charming in a pixyish way like Dorothy Hamill. I know that skating is supposed to be about pirouettes on ice, about double toe loops and triple axels and not feminine beauty, but I am as seduced as anyone by the superficial side of it, and can still remember going to the Ice Capades at Madison Square Garden year after year, dreaming on and on about growing up to be Peggy Fleming. She especially was blessed with blue eyes and black hair and a dancer's lankiness that was never again duplicated by an American skater, never again repeated at all until Katarina Witt.

It is not until later, much later, through confessional articles in
People
magazine, that I learn that all these women suffer the loneliness of the road, the stress of having to stay in shape, the difficulty of being a professional athlete. It is at the same time that I discover that many of the pretty ballerinas in
Swan Lake,
the beautiful but not quite unique models who wait on tables and do occasional spreads in
Glamour,
the tennis champions, the girl backup singers—that all these women who seem to be in enviable positions are in fact mired in misery.

Even Debi Thomas has her own problems. She will eventually transfer to the less competitive University of Colorado, get married, and give up skating altogether. But on this particular night, she delivers a transcendent performance, completing all those triple flips, twisting through all those back camels, making all those grand leaps, getting the sportscasters to gush about how she's in top form, how she's really been gearing up for this meet for a while—and would you look at her do all those jumps in tandem! Debi, for tonight, is a star. She has no grace, but she is strong and solid, traits that seem especially admirable as I lie in bed weak and unstable.

I too get carried away with the joy of Debi's moment. She smiles as she skates, looking so confident, and I think, To hell with
Surfacing
and the Cro-Magnon woman's existence, it is figure skating, the mastery of metal blades on thin ice, that is what living is about. I know from my own dance lessons that it is taxing and exhausting to get to the point where your dancing is actually enjoyable, to arrive at a place where the mind no longer has to concentrate on when to
relevé,
when to do the
pas de deux.
It takes years of practice for the limbs to develop an internal memory. But when they do, when the body takes over, it feels like freedom, like
dancing
instead of just dancing. So I watch Debi skate, knowing all the hard work and the years of training that lead up to this one performance (and to others, but this is the only one that counts right now) and I start to cry.

I think I am crying tears of joy because there is beauty in seeing this young woman, my age approximately, giving this exhilarating performance. I cry when I look at her smile. Because she smiles as she skates, knowing that she is doing everything right and that this is the right thing for her to do. And I am still crying when she ascends the center platform in the winners' circle, the high one above the two lower pedestals for the bronze and silver medalists, to receive her gold pendant. I cry, and Debi cries too. This triumph proves that her bad luck at the Olympics hasn't ruined her and that, as the sportscasters mention with undue gravity, her loss to Tiffany Chin at the U.S. Championships last year was just a fluke.

I am still crying long after the broadcast is over, and I realize these are not tears of joy at all. These are, in fact, the same tears I cry when I see Gorbachev on the nightly news and know that this man has changed the world as we know it and that he proves that one man can make a difference. These are the same tears I cry when I hear the gospel song that goes
This little light of mine, I'm gonna make it shine,
and I think of the way that ordinary people are able to triumph, in ways small and large, over adversity.

And I remember being in junior high and crying this way for hours after seeing Robert Redford in
The Natural,
crying over the way determination and conviction can make a simple baseball player do supernatural things. The tears pour down after the movie as I eat dinner with my mother at Sbarro in Times Square on a Friday evening, and she demands to know what I am so upset about. And all I can say, over and over again, is that he's a natural, he's a natural, it's such a gift to be a natural, it is such a responsibility, it is so hard to be a natural.

And then my mother says, because she seems to understand, “You relate to this, Ellie, don't you?”

I nod my head yes.

“You relate to this because you're a natural too?”

Yes, I want to tell her, and maybe I even do say that, but I am crying because whatever my gifts, the pieces of good buried inside and under so much that I feel is bad, is wrong, is twisted, are less clear than the ability to hit a ball with a bat and break the scoreboard or do a triple pirouette in the air on ice. My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world. My gifts are unspecific. I am an artist manqué, someone full of crazy ideas and grandiloquent needs and even a little bit of happiness, but with no particular way to express it. I am like the title character in the film
Betty Blue,
the woman who is so full of . . . so full of . . . so full of something or other—it is unclear what, but a definite energy that can't find its medium—who pokes her own eyes out with a scissors and is murdered by her lover in an insane asylum in the end. She is, and I am becoming, a complete waste. So I cry at the end of
The Natural.