I Don't Have a Happy Place (26 page)

“If you want,” Buzz said, before heading into Tomorrowland, “you could do Space Mountain before we go.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“I think I'm too tired, Mom,” said Minnie. “Is that okay?”

It was fine. I was used to navigating the dark alone anyway. Happy, sad, alone, together—what's the point? Weren't we all on a giant roller coaster in the dark, alone, anyway? I mean, really.

Pluto ran down the ramp into the phony abandoned mine shaft. “Don't forget to hold me with your arm again. Like last time.”

I knew the drill: once safety bar is secured, use arm as extra seat belt. Wait for Pluto to test by pushing arm, hard, because otherwise Pluto is convinced he'll fall out. I'd already done it four times.

The sun hovered above the Magic Kingdom. Using its last moments up in the sky in a show-off move, it turned orange, casting an enchanting golden-hour light across the (frontier) land. Beautiful. Naturally, I wept.

Clickety-click up the rickety track. Pluto pushed my arm repeatedly, testing my strength. We moseyed up, a mix of dread and thrill taking over. Finally, our mine shaft car was at the top. Perched. Balanced. Paused.

I surveyed the Magic Kingdom.

I seat belted my son.

I wondered how much it would cost for a time-share.

Fuck
.

And we plunged.

Whoosh
down the tracks, our bodies jerked and heaved, faces peeled back with the wind.

“Tighter!”

I got you
, I thought. His body wouldn't fit this perfectly in my arm forever, so I tightened my grip.
Don't worry, I got you
.

“Is it over?” He'd asked me this question, on the hour, since we entered the park that morning. I held Pluto's small hand as we exited the haunted mine. “Are we going home?”

I nodded.

“I'm a little bit sad,” he said.

(5a. acceptance)

People ooze from every spoke and hub. The Electrical Parade looms and a
Lord of
the Flies
situation is brewing, as sweaty and frazzled guests try securing plum spots. I'd read a hundred times over to avoid parade routes, but this humdinger seems to cross every part of the Kingdom. We are surrounded.

The sky is moonless, and all around me voices sound underwatery. My scalp tingles, my skin's damp, and I am abruptly overwhelmed with a hunger I believe is plotting to take me down. Pluto and I continue through the masses. We are pieces of well-done meat in the corporate capitalist soup. I feel all my personalities of the day seeping out of me. My mental skin is disintegrating. I am Cinderella at midnight. I need to get out.

Buzz texts me.

Buzz: Eating by the castle. Near Tomorrowland. Where are you?

In a typical Buzz move, he calls right after texting. Tells me he is at a place called Cosmic Ray's. I vaguely recall seeing a ­
Jetsons
-style eatery earlier and head in what I think is its general direction. I yank Pluto, pretend it's a game.

I text Buzz back.

Kim: In the restaurant. Where are u.
(I have a brief fight with myself for spelling you with a u, but quickly let myself off the hook because the situation is dire.)

Buzz: On castle side.

I don't know what he means. That damn castle is on every side. Except in the restaurant I am in. I see no castle.
I see no castle
.

Kim: I am freaking out. Don't know where you are!

Buzz: Relax. At Cosmic Ray's. Bay 3.

Kim: I don't know where that is!

Buzz: Where are i.

Buzz: U.

Buzz: it's at the my race of Tomorrowland.

(What is he even saying?)

I find my way to the
Jetsons
place and stand by the ordering counter.

Kim: at ordering counter of Jetsons place.

Buzz: entrance of Tomorrowland. Go to nay 3.

Buzz: bay 3.

I smile at Pluto, and probably look like an insane clown. I don't know what the hell Buzz is talking about with the bays. I am helpless all of a sudden. In the paper bag people can't find their way out of.

Kim: I don't understand the bays!!!!

(
Four
exclamation marks. I despise the overuse of these things. Officially losing it.)

The phone rings. I am in one of those kidnapping movies all of a sudden and have been up for six nights drinking coffee with Ray Liotta waiting for a call from some creep who stole a kid. I don't even say hello when I answer. I am Harrison Ford gone mental, awaiting instruction.

Buzz speaks loud and slow into the receiver. “Ask someone where Cosmic Ray's is. We are in bay three.”

I don't want to ask anyone for directions, but if I don't, Pluto will have to scrape me off the floor when parade-goers trample me. Lady in hairnet tells me where to go, and I grab Pluto's hand for the last time. Power through.

Minnie sees me first. I am pale and clammy. She hugs me. “I. Need. A. Coke.”

“Ew, Mom, really? Soda?”

I want to knock her down but I let her lead me to the table instead. I stare into nothingness until Buzz returns with a red sticky tray. On it sits a large Coke, a basket of undercooked fries, and a gorgeous thirty-seven-dollar hot dog.

(5b. acceptance)(ish)

On the monorail, to the shuttle, to the Heroes parking lot, Buzz was back on his iPhone, Minnie reminded me that she was exhausted and how long until we were at the hotel because she had to go to the bathroom, and Pluto cried because he wasn't allowed to open his Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Ion Pulse Cannon and Target Set to save the Galactic Alliance from the Evil Emperor Zurg until we got in the car. Not yet at Simba 111, and the Disney tingle was
wearing off. I didn't feel well. I got into a small fight with myself.

Knock it off
, I thought.
It's not like you had the best time in the world or anything. Disney tested your malcontent mettle—it was a fierce opponent. Chalk it up to a brief lapse in personality, a chink in the armor and all that. Anyway, it's not like you have to tell anyone what happened. Just go home and take a
Silkwood
shower and scrub off all the pixie dust the park threw at you. No one has to know. Ooooh! Look! Fireworks! Awwwww, so pretty.
No!
N
o, no, no! Look away. Be gone, Magic Kingdom. We don't need your kind around here. You, Disney, are a big bully. You, Disney, are a date rapist.

I walked off that monorail with my head (sort of) held high. I never did end up riding Space Mountain. I couldn't go around fixing all my broken baggage. Plus it soothed me knowing many handles and zippers were still busted. And, in my quiet moments, I still contend that at least, at the
very
least, I didn't buy that darling tiara.

I Don't Have a Happy Place

• • • • • •

S
ometimes I feel bad my mother isn't an alcoholic. Equally troubling is how my brother never killed anyone and that my father only likes me as a friend. If any of the above were my reality, my attitude and daily mood would be appropriate, standard behavior for someone in my situation. People would nod as I shuffled past, whispering how they'd be the exact same way were they forced to live under such conditions. They might even cheer me on when I ventured out to the supermarket, but still keep their distance lest they catch what I was plagued with.

The problem is I wasn't born into brothels, nor did I fight for survival in a concentration camp; I was raised in a regular old Canadian suburban town in the 1970s. And while my mother was nauseous a lot and my father wore makeup, I really never had any legitimate, solid excuse for being unhappy. Which, if we're being honest, kind of stinks.

I come from a long line of malcontents. A small tribe of depressants, neurotics, and mental patients. We run the gamut from garden-variety depression all the way up to paranoid schizophrenia, covering most of the
DSM-V
in between. The
pessimism in my family is Olympic. Unhappiness and negativity course through our (probably diseased) veins. And, in a cruel trick of nature, we tend to live a long, long time.

We do die eventually, though. A few years back, I lost three out of four grandparents in the span of one year. We huddled up at the shiva call, mildly joking how often we'd put on our black clothes that year, sharing deli meat and repeating how we wished we were seeing each other under different circumstances. My uncle ambled over, potato knish in hand, in an attempt to avoid participating in other conversations by joining ours. Ace told the group that we could take a collective breath, rest easy for a spell, because bad things always happened in threes.

“Uh, don't say
that
,” my uncle said.

“Why not?” said Ace, confused.

My uncle shook his head. “Because then it starts all over again . . .”

Later that night in our hotel bed, Buzz repeated my uncle's line a hundred times over. “How do you ever win with that outlook?”

My sad sack uncle is right. Eventually, three more bad things will plague each of us. I imagine, for regular people, once the trauma quota is filled, they take a break. Maybe even enjoy some time off, go fishing, or take in a game. In theory, I'd like to be one of those fishing game–watchers, I really would, but my setting is a little bit too gloomy for recreational activities, or living. People say happiness is a choice, but I think that's just what happy people say when they go out together to be happy. I don't really care for going out.

At this point in my story, I'm used to my setting. It's a defect really, an emotional limp. On the days I leave the house, I can joke about the foundation of my personality, which I have to because I live in a small town now and run into people all the
time. And although they still don't know what to make of me, I can promise they'd way rather think I'm the love child of Larry David and Woody Allen than listen to the Sylvia Plath–itudes that often sneak out of my mouth when I'm asked, casually, how I'm doing.

It's taken me almost my entire life to understand my wiring. I've spent most of my years thinking I was just in a bad mood. I was actually in a bad mood for twenty-nine years before it occurred to me that was an awful long time to be cranky. It was then I finally called for backup.

Let me note that this was not my first trip to a therapist. I was sent at nine years old due to a very bad case of what my parents dubbed “behavioral problems.” Buckled into my mother's silver 1976 Corvette T-top, I had no clue where we were headed, as the Bee Gees quietly insisted that we should be dancing. My mother wore smart navy slacks, worrying her cuticles while gripping the top of the steering wheel. She wasn't a chitchatterer, minus occasional mentions of hazardous weather or recent death, so when we pulled into the parking lot she turned off the car and stared out the windshield.

“Okay,” she eventually said, sounding annoyed. “Let's go.”

The car abutted a sign suggesting we park for only one hour. I read the words backwards in my head—my latest obsession. After a few rounds, I asked my mother where we were.

“When we're done,” she said, “you can have a bag of chips.”

•   •   •

Dr. Ingrid Kalisky was the first grownup I'd met who had a bowl haircut. I imagined her walking into the salon armed with a photo of Dorothy Hamill, asking for the faddish wedge she'd seen all over the television, and later trudging out, swearing under her breath never to return to
that
place again. Dr. Kalisky
had also boarded the feminist bandwagon, evidenced by her dark trousers, but one-upped my mother by adding a three-button vest and maroon necktie to her getup.

I slouched and Dr. Kalisky talked about herself. I paid less attention to her credentials, fixating on more intriguing matters—her chair. It was squat, swivelly, exactly like the ones on
The Mike Douglas Show
. And since Dr. Kalisky was already sporting a tie and making introductions, I took it upon myself to pretend I was a guest on the program, like Adrienne Barbeau or Wayland Flowers & Madame.

Having recently exchanged my desire to be a diner waitress for an imagined career in ventriloquism, I was ready. My allowance afforded me a slim volume on the craft, which I'd flipped through once but didn't understand. However, I'd seen enough talk shows to know you could lose your audience if you didn't have a charming story at the ready. I plotted mine, organizing an amusing chestnut about how, not having a ventriloquist dummy, I was left to my own devices, forced to hone my burgeoning artistry by draping our Yorkshire terrier's yellow plastic raincoat and bonnet over my arm to practice. The sounds of laughter and swelling applause bounced around my head, assuring me I was killing.

Kalisky, on the other hand, didn't seem as enthused, and her raisin eyes sent poisonous darts deep into my soul. But really, what good was being a nine-year-old ventriloquist with behavioral problems if you didn't gum up the works every now and again? First, I entertained the idea of answering her questions using my fist as a puppet but worried she'd send me straight to a mental institution, so I created a private challenge instead, just to bug her. The rules were thus: Scan the bookshelves, and if I recognized a single title, then, and only then, would I be able to answer any of her mental health probings.

“So,” said Kalisky, “why are you here?”

Swinging of the boots. Eyes fluttering. Shrug.

“Well, why do you think?”

The top shelf had all the fat, important-looking textbooks. Below those were volumes like
The Drama of the Gifted Child
and
On Becoming a Person
, things I'd never seen out in the real world. I stayed mum.

“I'm fine to sit here until you are ready,” Kalisky said, gripping her Bic. “I have all day.”

I was scanning the lower shelves when I saw it:
Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life
. I knew that book well: the wine-­colored cover, the way the rainbow-hued bubble letters seemed to be walking up stairs. My mother owned two copies. It was now my move. I could advance on the game board, say something insightful.

“I don't know,” I said.

“Bullshit!”

“Excuse me?”

“Ab-so-lu-te bullll-shit,” she said, stretching her words like taffy. “You, my dear, know very well why you are here. To pretend that you don't is complete and utter bull crap.”

My ears tingled. I didn't offer up any facts about myself.

“Mmmmhmmm,” Kalisky said. “Keep it up. Keep up the bullshit.”

She seemed kind of hostile. By the third outcry of
bullshit
, she lost me. The first one, I'll admit, kicked up some dirt. It was not common practice in the Marlo Thomas era for adults to swear at kids. It's not that I'd never heard that kind of talk before. I'd used it myself, on occasion. But I didn't expect it to be hurled my way by an adult, especially a professional one. As the session progressed, no matter my answer, Kalisky called
bullshit
. You could tell she found this technique revolutionary and cutting edge,
like it gave her a sense of badassness not usually reserved for the ­macramé belt–wearing set. It was a tedious hour.

When time ran out, Kalisky sent me home with some nonsense on poster board, suggesting that if I cleaned my room and stopped throwing things at my mother, I would get a sticker. Once enough stickers were amassed, a prize would be mine. If we're being honest, the only thing I ever threw at my mother was a pair of those brightly colored sun goggles we wore back then, the ones with the little cutouts that made you look like a bug. I, for one, didn't believe a single tossing incident necessitated a Magic Markered chart and six weeks of smutty language. It was a drag to sit there. Plus it really cut into my after-school crank-calling hours. The good news was that follow-through was not a strong family trait. Eventually my mother tired of the chart and its scratch-and-sniff fruit stickers. I never threw anything at her again. I was cured.

The next time I visited a therapist happened three months before my thirtieth birthday. Not a ventriloquist but a talent agent's assistant in Manhattan, I was very busy being terrible at my job, feeling consistently under the weather, and weeping. Some other ways to describe me at that time:

1. cynical

2. negative

3. dejected

4. skeptical

5. hermetic

6. introverted

I am not trying to be a wisenheimer when I say I truly didn't think there was anything out of the ordinary in that depiction.
It was just a list of words, a flawless one, to describe my personality.

One of my coworkers didn't agree with my assessment and slipped me a business card on her way out to fetch a roasted vegetable salad for lunch. She was a literary agent and she intrigued me. Not only was she a dead ringer for Wonder Woman and at least six feet tall, but she managed to pull off wearing this voguish salmon-colored suit. I wanted her to like me. I assured her I'd promptly call when I got home.

Did I promptly call? No. I promptly took umbrage. I hailed from a long line of crabby people, none of whom got help, so why should I?
What nerve,
I thought,
looking like Wonder Woman and pretending to use her superpowers for good, like I needed some kind of saving.
Just because you got away with being a maypole and somehow still looking classy in a suit that could have doubled as a platter of lox at a bris, does not mean you are the authority on all things mental health.
I spent the next three days giving her dirty looks from afar. I made sure to
tsk
and
pffft
a few times when she breezed by my desk. I made fun of her unwieldy hair. Her dumb suit. And
then
I made the call.

The waiting room rendered me a day player in a Woody Allen picture. The Upper West Side address, the faded terra-cotta Oriental rug—I almost expected Diane Keaton (or Wiest) to walk out of the office with crumpled tissues and an oversized hat. Should I knock on the door or wait to be collected? I coughed, shuffling the
New Yorker
s around to signal my arrival. There was a small round noise machine, placed right outside the door, that was supposed to drown out the sobbing coming from inside, but that apparatus wasn't fooling anyone with its gentle whirring. It wasn't a barricade, it was one of those giant shells you put to your ear, convinced you hear the ocean. I made a mental note to not raise my voice above a whisper when it was my turn.

The door opened, at long last, and out popped the Lorax's mother. After taking in her pencil skirt, complete with purple and chartreuse felted swirly appliqués, and an updo so unnaturally red it brought to mind Atomic Fireballs, I wanted to go home. What would this character know about the likes of me—clearly I wasn't wearing a Bar-ba-loot suit, so where would we go with this? She motioned me in, showing me to a black leather chair. She hadn't even uttered a sound yet and already I deemed her a complete idiot and this whole exercise a colossal waste of time.

“Why don't you tell me why you are here?” Mama Lorax said.

I didn't say a thing—I hated audience participation of any kind, plus I wanted her to intuit what was wrong with me, figure it out, if she was such a hotshot. Shifting on her couch, she breathed evenly and stared, therapist code for
You have rented me for the hour. I can wait
.

“Why do I sit in a chair and you on the couch?” I said. “Isn't the patient supposed to sit on the couch? Or lie on the couch?”

“Client.”

“What?”

“I prefer to call them clients. Not patients.”

There was little sunlight filtering in. The ficus in the corner hung on for its life.

“Would you like to sit on the couch?” she said. “Would that make you feel more comfortable?”

“No.” I tried settling, to have good posture, but the chair was slippery and hissed when you moved. “It's just this chair makes all kinds of weird and awkward noises.”

“Do you feel weird and awkward being here? Is that how sitting in that chair makes you feel?”

And there it was. The quintessential
How does it make you feel
question. Cardigan-wearing shrinks all over town were asking
their patient-clients how everything made them feel. Bad, Lady Lorax, it makes me feel bad. That is why I am here, because I feel bad. I feel bad all the time and apparently, according to Wonder Woman, it is bad to feel bad all the time. I made a mental note to quit my job.

“Look,” I said, throwing her some chum. “I'm about to turn thirty. And don't ask me how that makes me feel because it makes me feel like I'm in
Ordinary People
.”