Prozac Nation (8 page)

My depression did not occur in a vacuum, nor did it eradicate my urge and desire to get better if there was an earthly way to do so. As my mind seemed to slow-drip out of control, I was still able to contain some of the loss, to make use of the geeky A-student discipline I had cultivated over the years. I kept it all within the realm of something happening to a girl who still manages to wear designer jeans, who is still interested in applying purple mascara and turquoise eyeliner before leaving the house in the morning. I made myself presentably pretty each day just in case the man of my dreams happened to be waiting on the sidewalk outside of Manhattan Day School, all set to carry me away from the geography of my depression, kind of the way Sam Shepard carries off Jessica Lange at the beginning of the movie
Frances,
or the way he remains in love with her thirty years later, after she's had a full frontal lobotomy.

And so, at age twelve, with more and more frequency, I'd find myself sitting inside McDonald's early in the morning eating my Egg McMuffin, my attention fixed on some of the hard luck cases sitting nearby in the orange and red seats, muttering to themselves, wearing clothes that were filthy, smelling from sleeping on the sidewalks and drinking too much Colt 45, and I contemplated the difference and the distance between them and me. How far to go before I, or anyone like me, fell into such a derelict, dehumanized place? Did you have to survive Vietnam (so many of the panhandlers on the subways seemed to be veterans) or did it take poverty, chemical dependency, severe mental illness, and long years in state institutions for this to happen? I would never know.

I must have understood that my material circumstances were such that I alone could keep myself from falling. I mean, if I were a rich kid with stable, self-sufficient parents whom I thought I could trust to attend to themselves and to me, and I were heading for a tailspin, I might feel free to let myself free-fall, knowing that someone else would provide a bottom upon which I might eventually bottom out. But what if you are the only resting point you know of? What if you are absolute zero? What if only you can catch yourself?

 

Mr. Grubman, the very strange science teacher who wears a beret and black turtlenecks every day like a beatnik, keeps me after class because he says my behavior is disruptive. I can't imagine what he means: I'm not one of those kids who sets all the frogs free before we can dissect them, and anyway what we're mostly doing in class is squeezing sour milk through cheesecloth as a way to help us understand the phenomena of everyday life. He's just the latest in a long series of science teachers, maybe the fourth this year, so it's hard for me to take him seriously. He's probably not the one who will be giving me a grade in the end because he too will surely be replaced, and any way grades don't matter to me anymore because there's no future.

At any rate, Mr. Grubman doesn't seem to want to talk to me about much. He says, You seem like maybe you're too intense for this world, and I wonder where he's getting that from. He barely knows me. It sounds like he's suggesting I kill myself.

He keeps me in the science lab for hours. I miss a bunch of classes, and even eat my lunch, cottage cheese with pineapples in a thermos as usual, in his classroom. After a while I have no idea what he wants from me, I am only glad that I don't have to sit through math and English or play kickball during gym because he is keeping me here as a punishment. He asks me lots of questions that I don't know the answers to. He asks, So are you one of those girls who likes fast guys with fast cars?

I don't say what I am really thinking, which is that I'm only twelve so I don't know and in New York no one drives anyway. Instead, I just say, Yes, yes I do.

It seems like the right answer.

Boys are one interest of mine that never really goes away, though to little avail. None of the guys I go to school with notice me. I'm not even on their lists of alternatives after all the girls with names like Jennifer and Alison and Nicole don't work out. It's not that I'm unattractive—I think that maybe I'm even pretty, but my look appeals to an entirely different demographic group. I have cultivated a certain shaggy paleness, I have that boozy and bruise-eyed Chrissie Hynde look, so I end up attracting older guys who are used to women who aren't bright and cheery. Or else I pick up these rocker types, like the guy in the heavy metal band who works at a store called the World Import at the Bergen Mall, where I sometimes go when I cut school. Or the man who gave me his business card during a riot at a Clash concert who takes me to lunch every so often. Or the twenty-three-year-old son of the owner of Camp Tagola, who is actually in law school and is very straight and decent, but still is attracted enough to me that it becomes kind of a scandal around camp and the head counselor tells us both that we have to stop taking walks together or sitting side by side while we watch
Stalag
17. But nothing much ever happens with any of these men. It's all just so much lunch, so many walks and talks, because I'm too young and they're too old so they feel stupid. I find myself praying, wishing, hoping that God could just give me whatever it is that makes girls attractive to boys my age.

And then one day I meet my friend's older brother, a Springsteen fan who's a senior in high school. We talk about Bruce all the time, and he thinks it's amazing that I'm not like all his sister's other friends who are into Shaun Cassidy and Andy Gibb. I get such a crush on him—his name is Abel—and after a while I'm going to my friend's house to see him more than to visit her. I feel this strange affinity, like maybe he might like me too, and one night when we're watching TV in the den with the whole family—it's Tuesday night, so I bet it was
Happy Days
or
Laverne and Shirley
—and I am sitting under an afghan quilt to keep warm, I feel his hand reach underneath the blanket, up my legs, into my panties. I don't try to stop him, I do nothing at all but sit there and take in the sensation because it feels good, it is the only thing that has felt nice to me at all in so many months, maybe even years. I have never had a feeling quite like this before, haven't even come close to the strange electricity that seems to be spinning in my stomach and then just below, and below and below and below. And I can't imagine what I've done to deserve anything so nice.

And I feel blessed. I feel that if God has given me this capacity for pleasure, then there must be hope. So I start sneaking into Abel's bedroom in the middle of the night whenever I sleep over at their house, start wishing he could do to me what he does to me all the time because I never knew my body had such a capacity for joy. I learn to touch him too. With my fingers, my hands, my mouth. I am surprised to discover that I have the facility, in all my sadness, not only to receive but to give a bit of this life force.

This physical contact brings me such happiness that I want to tell everybody I know about it, I want to walk up to women in the streets and tell them about this thing I've discovered, as if only I am privy to it. I want to give blowjobs to guys I see here and there, wondering if they will respond the way Abel does, or is it just something unique to him. I want to let Dr. Isaac know this little secret of mine, but I can't say a word to a soul. Everyone will think it's sick, will think I am being molested because he's seventeen and I'm only twelve. No one will ever believe that this is the only good thing in my life.

So when Mr. Grubman bothers me with all his questions—his strange, salacious questions—I think to myself that maybe I should tell him my secret. But then I don't, don't dare. I am somehow afraid of how weird he is, afraid that he will turn me in and then they will send me away, lock me up in a prison for unchaste girls. I am scared that they will throw me into an institution not because I am depressed and need help, but because I am a girl, a good girl in my own way, and still I am capable of such crazy lust.

 

That summer, I am just thirteen, everything sucks and I am stuck at camp wondering about the Olympics. One day right after clean-up period, right after our beds have been inspected for hospital corners and our cubbies have been checked to make sure all the Archie comics are piled neatly, I sit on the porch of my bunk listening to Bruce Springsteen's first album. Paris, a girl I also go to school with, comes outside to sit with me. Paris is, I guess, what I would call a friend. I've known her since kindergarten, and like everyone else who's been in my life for a while, she's just kind of waiting for me to snap out of this funk so that we can have play dates and polish our nails in baby pink like we used to do when we were seven. She lives across the street from me so we still walk home from school together sometimes, which can't be any fun for her because all I want to talk about is the oncoming apocalypse in my brain.

Paris tries to be understanding. I don't make this process very easy for people. After weeks of haranguing the girls in my bunk about the genius of Bruce Springsteen, when they finally say that they're getting to like him, when they ask to borrow tapes or make requests to hear
Born to Run,
I just start yelling that they're all a bunch of unoriginal copycats and Bruce belongs to me alone. I make them swear that if they ever meet anyone new and claim to like any Springsteen songs, they'll remember to footnote me. And they all throw up their hands and say, Look, we're trying. So Paris comes and sits down beside me and I make her a little nervous when I tell her that she's got to listen to this song called “For You.” She's afraid I'll be cross if she doesn't like it or—even worse—that I'll be really furious if she does. I explain that the song is about a girl just like me who kills herself. We listen to the first verse to the cryptic lines about a girl's fading presence about “barroom eyes shine vacancy,” about someone whose grip on life is so vague that to see her you have to look hard.

That's me, I say to Paris. I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who looks so very vibrant and shimmery, but who is in fact soon going to be gone. When you look at that picture again I want to assure you
I will no longer be there.
I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible, getting covered over more thickly with darkness, coats and coats of darkness that are going to suffocate me in the sweltering heat of the summer sun that I can't even see anymore, even though I can feel it burn.

Imagine, I suggest to Paris, only knowing that the sun is shining because you feel the ache of its awful heat and not because you know the joy of its light. Imagine being always in the dark.

I am going on and on this way to Paris, who is still uneasy, and is not quite sure what to say. You know, I continue, I'd be just like the girl in the song except for one thing. One thing. And that's that he says she's all he ever wanted. He loves her so much. The whole song is about how he's come to take her to the hospital, to rescue her from suicide.

I start, as if on cue, to cry. I am so caught up in the idea that nobody would actually try to save me if I were to slit my wrists or hang myself from one of the rafters in the bunk. I can't believe anyone might care enough to try to keep me alive. And then I realize that, yes, of course they would, but only because it is the thing to do. It's not about true caring. It's about not wanting to live with the guilt, the insult, the ugly knowledge that a suicide took place and you did nothing. Once I make a suicidal gesture, then everyone indeed will come running because my problems leave the realm of the difficult, workaday, let's-talk-it-through stuff and I become an actual medical emergency. I will qualify as a trauma case that Aetna or MetLife, or whichever insurance carrier I've got, will actually cover. They'll pump my stomach, stitch my wrists, apply cold packs to the bruises on my neck, do whatever it is they have to do to keep me alive—and then the heavy-duty, institutional-size mental health professionals take over.

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn't seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were normal, day after day wearing down everybody who gets near me. My behavior seems, somehow, not acute enough for them to know what to do with me, though I'm just enough of a mess to be driving everyone around me crazy.

I cry some more and go on and on about how nice it must be to have someone so in love with you they'd sing about the day you died. Paris opens her mouth, probably to say something about how people would like to help, people would like to let me know they care, they just don't know what to do, but I shut her up. I don't want to hear the company line right now. And if anyone ever loved me enough to write such a beautiful song about me, you know I wouldn't kill myself, I continue. In the end I have to think the girl in “For You” is totally crazy because she decided to die when there was so much love for her right here on earth.

Yes, Paris says, talking to me only to offer the comfort of a human voice, not because she can say anything that will make a difference. I see what you mean.

Oh, Paris. I cry some more. No one is ever going to love me that way because I'm so awful and all I ever do is cry and get depressed.

If I were another person, I go on, I wouldn't want to deal with me. I
don't
want to deal with me. It's so hopeless. I want out of this life. I really do. I keep thinking that if I could just get a grip on myself, I could be all right again. I keep thinking that I'm driving myself crazy, but I swear, I swear to God, I have no control. It's so awful. It's like demons have taken over my mind. And nobody believes me. Everybody thinks I could be better if I wanted to. But I can't be the old Lizzy anymore. I can't be myself anymore. I mean, actually, I am being myself right now and it's so horrible.