Prozac Nation (14 page)

 

The summer after my father leaves, I go on a cross-country trip, and while I'm away, my mother opens my desk drawer, which she knows is my one secret space, but she just wants to throw in a ruler she's found lying around. Her intentions, she swears, were innocent. She doesn't expect to find a foil package printed with the brand name Ortho-Novum, or, sliding the drawer open a couple of more inches, the remainder of my green and white and peach birth control pills.

When I get home from my travels, my mother tells me that she considered suicide when she found the Pill among my belongings. Don't I know that I'm not supposed to have sex unless I'm married? Is it any wonder that things with Zachary turned so bad if we were engaged in this sort of immoral activity? I keep telling her that we never actually had sex, that at some point Zachary and I realized it would be a mistake, but she's not listening.

How can you do this to me? she asks.

To demonstrate how upset she is, my mother opens up my bedroom window and tells me she is going to throw herself out if I don't swear that I'll never do anything like this again. She is raving. She wants me to go to Dr. Isaac for one appointment to talk about why I behave this way.

And she keeps saying, How can you do this to me?

And I want to scream, What do you mean, how can
I
do this to you? Aren't we confusing our pronouns here? The question, really, is How could
I
do this to
myself?

She is hysterical, and it seems crazy to me, just plain wrong, that my boyfriend left me, my father left me, and I am sitting here trying to talk my mother away from the ledge.

What's wrong with this picture? I mean, who died and left
me
in charge?

5

There's nothing I hate more than nothing

Nothing keeps me up at night

I toss and turn over nothing

Nothing could cause a great big fight

 

EDIE BRICKELL

“Nothing”

 

I don't know if I'm running because I'm scared or if I'm scared because I'm running. It's a question I've been asking myself ever since I arrived here at Harvard in September, and I still haven't figured it out. If I stopped for just a minute—stopped speeding from keg party to cocktail party, stopped drinking and drugging, stopped chasing one boy and fleeing from another—if I just said
no more
and sat down and did some of my reading for one of my four classes, gave
The Iliad
or
Beyond Good and Evil
a chance, would peace be mine at last? Would the calm I've been waiting for all my life finally get here? Or would it all just be more of so much nothingness like it's always been, like it wasn't supposed to be now that I'm here in enchantmentland, here in this American dream, this university with a name that resonates so far that I sometimes think it could create an echo chamber from here to Australia? I
can't believe that even here, even in an institution that seems bigger and better and beyond God the Father, I am still utterly and absolutely just me. Goddamn.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. I was supposed to be an exotic little American princess, a beautiful and brilliant bespectacled literature student reading Foucault and Faulkner at my rolltop desk in my garret room with hardwood floors, full of whimsical plants and chimes hanging from the ceiling and posters of movie stars from the forties and bands from the sixties on the slightly paint-chipped ivory walls. There were going to be lots of herb tea and a beautiful Mediterranean hookah and paisley cushions and Oriental rugs on the floor so that I could run my own bohemian salon from my guileless little love pad. I wanted a futon with a thick crimson-colored bedspread where I could make love endless nights through sleepy mornings with my boyfriend, a guy who had grown up in Connecticut and played lacrosse and the guitar and me, and who loved me with naughty desire, respect, and abandon.

Where is that girl who all that's happening to? Why is she just so way down?

Why do I spend so much time looking out my dorm room window at Harvard Yard, watching the boys with their jeans slung low on their hips, playing hackysack, kicking little beanbags around on the sides of their Top-Siders like everything is fine, not acting like they're doomed at all? How do I get in on the life happening on the other side of this pane where the world is soft like mud and people aren't afraid to roll in it? What I wouldn't do just to be able to play Frisbee or walk to lecture halls laughing and holding hands, being somebody's baby, being Ali MacGraw in
Love Story
or Ali MacGraw in
Goodbye, Columbus,
or anybody else in anything else. My God, where on earth do I have to go to get away from me?

And I can't stop running. Mostly I am running away from the black wave. It pursues me all over Cambridge. It chases me on those long afternoons when I walk around Harvard Square, roam into one of the zillions of Third World-style
stores that crowd Mass. Ave., and maybe try on a pair of long dangling earrings. As I consider the merits of a composition of silver wire and glass beads fashioned into the Himalayan fertility symbols, I take a brief look outside the storefront window and notice the way the sun is starting to set awfully early, the way it is always so gray and cloudy, the way the dark seems to come so soon and fast and the light never seems to be here at all. And this heaviness falls all over me, even though all I am doing is looking at some earrings in a mirror. I try to concentrate on jewelry, try to think only of bamboo and lapis lazuli, try to imagine this as some kind of Buddhist exercise in deep mindfulness, but I can't because there's this thing creeping up on me, first from behind, then from in front and from the sides and all over, and I feel certain I am being drowned by some kind of black wave. I know that in a moment my feet will be stuck in the wet sand of the undertow, and I must run before it's too late.

I make my way out of the store, I move purposefully back to my dorm room, tracing my footsteps along the cobblestone paths, running from the darkness. I get to the budding I live in, fidget with the keys, scurry through the vestibule, hurry up a couple of flights of steps, keep putting the wrong key in the lock, finally get into the suite, finally run into bed, where I hide under the covers and pray that the black wave won't drown me. Pray that if I lie here quietly it will pass. Pray that if I get up in a little while and go to dinner at the Union, that if I just go on with life as if this feeling were normal, the black wave will throw its tidal force at someone else.

But when I unfurl myself from a fetal position and uncurl my way out of bed, there is still an ocean breaking inside my brain. The brief relief of seeing other people when I leave my room turns into a desperate need to be alone, and then being alone turns into a terrible fear that I will have no friends, I will be alone in this world and in my life. I will eventually be so crazy from this black wave, which seems to be taking over my head with increasing frequency, that one day I will just kill myself, not for any great, thoughtful exis
tential reasons, but because I need immediate relief, I need this horrible big muddy to go away right now.

 

We drove to Harvard in the rain. My mother and I rode in a white rented station wagon full of my stuff, and full of things I didn't want to bring that she thought I would like, including the shag carpet that used to lie on my bedroom floor when its vivid greens and blues and aquamarines were still fashionable. We were excited as we drove. We stopped at a Howard Johnson's and ate fried clams and pie a la mode and talked excitedly about how exciting it was all going to be. We talked about how I would finally be in “my own element,” whatever that meant. We talked about how I would finally be happy.

But the rain was ominous. No denying it. It was the rain that Dylan sings about in “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.”
Where black is the color and none is the number
and all that. I don't like to get too carried away imagining signs from up high, but it rained so hard that I-95 was flooded. There was no visibility, and we had to stop right in the middle of the highway and not move for a while because all the cars had frozen in the dense wetness. And I looked at my mother, and actually said something like, This really doesn't bode well.

And I think she said, Oh, Ellie, don't be silly.

But when we got to Matthews Hall on Saturday afternoon and discovered that I lived on the fifth floor and there were no elevators, even she became a little less optimistic. Even she couldn't figure out how two women were going to get all this stuff upstairs alone, especially in the early September heat and humidity. And she got kind of discouraged and we realized then and there that there was no such thing as salvation without a catch.

 

When did the running start? Years ago, I'm sure, long before I got to Harvard. I can remember being in high school, walking through Central Park on a chilly day, and the sound of stamping on the crispness of autumn leaves would make me think of the sensation of my head cracking open.
And I would get really scared, scared that it would happen and even more frightened that it wouldn't, that a protracted life of misery and wanting to die would go on and on. And I'd run all the way home, running for cover.

But I thought all that was going to stop at Harvard. I thought it was just a matter of getting away from the physical site of so much of my depression. Instead it was even worse; instead the black wave, the gloom, was everywhere. It chased me like a runaway train and clung to me like leeches. And I wasn't just running in a metaphoric sense: I literally didn't stop moving, never dared slow down to think, too scared to find out what was there.

 

On Halloween of my freshman year, I found myself running through Harvard Yard because my best friend (at least so far), Ruby, was pursuing me and threatening to kill me, her pocketknife unsheathed, screaming something like, You bitch, I'll kill you. She was attacking me because I had stolen her wimpy boyfriend Sam, and she'd just figured it out. The telltale signs: a notebook of mine in his room, a stray earring on his bureau. We'd unexpectedly crossed paths on a precariously narrow staircase that was obviously not big enough for the two of us. But there we both were. I started wishing that the banister was a little bit higher, and a lot more sturdy. Ruby was livid and started to run after me, calling me a whore and a traitor to the feminist cause and a lunatic to boot.

The funny thing is, I didn't really want Sam, Ruby didn't either, and he probably didn't want either of us. She and I had discussed him extensively over the seventeen or so cups of coffee that we tended to down after lunch in the Union, and I knew she had grave misgivings about this effete prepster who read Milton Friedman in his spare time and had arms so weak and thin they could barely even play a decent game of squash, much less hold you and make you feel safe. But I guess in the spirit of the mind games we all seemed to play, I wanted Sam because he belonged to Ruby, and she wanted him back because he didn't want her any longer. I understand now that if we'd all just done our homework and gone to bed before midnight and woke up in time for morning classes—if we'd lived like normal people—all this nonsense could have been completely avoided. We'd have been too busy in the purposeful pursuit of life to participate in this kind of sideshow. But we weren't. We were all nuts and desperate. We couldn't help creating this love-triangle psychodrama out of the nothingness that drove all three of us, all of us being completely crazy, sad, empty.

You see, it was no longer just me. Harvard was full of nut cases, and we'd all managed to find each other, as if by centrifugal force. Still, no one's desperation came close to matching mine. People at school were sufficiently eccentric to offer a new playground for my neuroses, to create novel opportunities for acting out. But in the end, after the curtain dropped over these little dramas, they all seemed able to go back to their rooms and back to their lives, they all seemed to know that it was just a game, that it scuffed you up and wore you out a little, but that you would get on with it. Only I seemed to be left behind, crying and screaming about wanting more, wanting my money back, wanting some satisfaction, wanting to feel something. I was the only person going to a prostitute in search of true love. But somehow, no matter how often I was disappointed, I was always game for the next round, like a drug addict hoping that a new fix will give him a rush as good as the first one. Only I'd never even had the initial euphoria that makes a junky keep coming back for more. I always sought solace in places where I knew, absolutely, that it did not exist.

And I knew, as Ruby chased me just beyond the Yard, toward the Science Center, that I had finally crossed some line. It all became so clear to me. I knew that
this was insanity:
Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.

I was scared of the way I felt as I ran away, knowing that if I stopped, I might have to confront the reason why I was always running—and I'd have to admit that there was no reason. Run, run, run. Was it toward something or away from something else? The senselessness of this display was too upsetting to contemplate. Just as all my previous machinations for escaping from the demons in my head had failed, this latest scheme wasn't going to work out either. Sam wasn't just a boy to me. He was yet another version of salvation. His father was the president of a major motion picture studio, and when Sam approached me in the cafeteria and said he was going to take me to Los Angeles and take me out of my life and out of my mind, when he said we could write screenplays, when he said, Hey, baby, I'll make you a star—when he said all these things I knew they were lines and still I bought them. He said we could go to his house in the Bahamas for winter break. He said we could go to Cannes for the festival. He said, he said, he said. And I believed him. I imagined a buffered universe of sunshine and safety. I dreamed of going off to a never-never land where scary moods and ugly thoughts and black waves just didn't exist. For a few days, while planning my transport via Sam, to a place where nothing bad ever happens, I was almost in decent spirits. I could concentrate on reading Hegel for more than a minute at a time.