Prozac Nation (18 page)

I called collect. “Hi, Elizabeth. What's up?” he asked after accepting the charges.

“Finals, you know, studying a lot. Nothing unusual. How about you?”

“Same old thing. I go to work, work all day, come home, watch TV, read, whatever.”

“Oh.” Strained silence. I didn't know what else to talk about, so I thought I'd mention some financial stuff. “Urn, Daddy, listen. I'm wondering, did you ever get those doctor bills that I sent you? You know, for the psychiatric treatment that I needed in the fall when all that stuff was going wrong with all those people and everything. Remember?”

“Yeah, I got them.”

“Well, but, you know, they keep billing me, since I guess you haven't paid them, and, um, you know, at the time, as I recall, you said you would. I mean, I think we even made some agreement through Dr. King, something about how you'd take them immediately to the insurance people at work and let them do the processing. Remember how you promised you'd do that?”

“I did then. But I won't now.”

“But, Daddy, you promised.” I started to think, Oh my God, I know I called looking for a fight, but I didn't think it would start so soon. I was expecting at least a little bit of friendly banter. Why was he already giving me a hard time about something that was so easy for him? All he had to do was sign his name on a couple of forms once a month, and this whole discussion could be avoided. Why did he always insist on turning every little thing into a hassle? Dealing with him was like dealing with a low-level bureaucrat whose only bit of control or power could be exercised by saying
no
to the people who came to him, the people who waited on line for hours, people who were not part of the reason he was so small and powerless, people who were small and powerless themselves. Jesus, the only contact my father had with his paternity was his ability to refuse to give me what I needed.

Fuck this. Fuck him. I can't believe I have to persist in this conversation.

“Daddy, I remember clearly your saying that since your insurance covered ninety percent of it anyway, you'd pick up the tab.” I'd started seeing a psychologist in the fall, precisely because Daddy, via Dr. King, had agreed to pay the bills. If he hadn't done that, I wouldn't have gone in the first place, and now the cost had mounted into thousands of dollars, money I didn't have. “Daddy,” I moaned, “you said you'd pay. I went into therapy only because I had a promise from you. I never would have otherwise.”

“I said that then. And I made a promise. But you didn't keep yours,” he said. “You've just been cold and nasty to me since our visit.”

I felt the rage starting to creep out of me, absorbing and spreading like a tea stain on white cloth. “Who do you think you're talking to, Daddy?” I screamed. “What kind of idiot do you think I am?” I started to huff. “How dare you tell me that I've been cold and nasty to you, when it was you, not I, who went away without leaving a trace four years ago? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Elizabeth, listen—”

“No, no, no. Fuck that. Fuck that shit. For once in your life, you listen to me. Because for four years, you have been disappearing on me over and over again, and then coming back with your apologies and your excuses, going on and on about how the lawyers told you that you should leave, and about how Mommy drove you away, and about how you had no choice. So you listen to me for once. Because I know that every time you've come back, I've been nice because you are my father and I love you and I wanted to have a daddy like everybody else did—”

I started to cry. I hadn't felt it coming. No rush, no warning. Suddenly my face was wet and my voice was receding from a yell to a whimper. “I wanted to have a daddy like everyone else. I just wanted to be normal. I just wanted my daddy back. I never fought with you. I never told you that I was angry at you for leaving. I was never cold and nasty because I didn't want you to go away again. I never had the guts. But then you'd go away anyway. And I would keep hoping that you'd come back again because all my friends had fathers, and they could say that their fathers were lawyers or businessmen or clothing manufacturers, but I never knew where you were or what you did, and instead of being angry at you, I wanted you to just be my daddy again.”

“Elizabeth, listen—”

“No. I won't listen. Because for once you're going to get it right in your face and know how horrible you were! Just for once you're going to quit blaming everybody else and quit making me feel bad and just hear that the truth of the matter is that you're just a selfish horrible father and you left because you're irresponsible!”

Now he started to cry. “Elizabeth, don't you think I know that? Don't you think I've hurt for all those years that I couldn't live with you because your mother and I divorced and then I couldn't see you because I was so far away? Don't you think that was hard for me too? And I have paid. I have paid because I seem to have permanently lost the girl who was once my daughter who I loved.”

“Words,” I said. I had stopped crying. “It's all just words. Goddamnit! You should know that actions speak louder than words. But I suppose when you're this lousy, words are all you've got left.”

“Elizabeth, I don't know what to say.” He was gasping. “You should know that this has ruined me too.”

“Well, maybe,” I continued. “But you had a choice. If you couldn't handle having a child, you shouldn't have had one. I didn't ask to be born. I got stuck.” I knew this was a very manipulative thing to say and I didn't care.

“Elizabeth, I'm worried about you,” he said, as if this would ameliorate my anger. I had never cried so hard. “Elizabeth, are you okay over there? Are you going to be all right?”

“Oh, fuck you! Stop trying to change the subject. Stop worrying about if I'm all right now. Obviously I'm not. But I wasn't all right then either. And you didn't care then, so why should you start now? It wouldn't be costing you a dime to do me this one favor and help me pay for therapy. I mean, obviously I needed help in the fall and I need it now. The only way I may ever be able to have a relationship with you ever again is if I get some help. And your response to all this is to not pay my medical bills even though it wouldn't cost you anything at all. Does that sound like what a good father would do?”

“Elizabeth, I'm sorry.”

“You're always sorry,” I yelled. “Instead of being sorry all the time, why don't you just be happy to be your rotten self?”

“But I'm not paying those bills. It's your mother's responsibility according to our divorce agreement.”

“Oh Jesus, Daddy.” More sobbing. “I could be dying here, going crazy, killing myself, and you'd still be standing there and saying that it's someone else's reponsibility to help me out, when you are the only one who is completely able to. Mommy is already overwhelmed with paying for school. But this is just the same old thing. This is awful.”

“Elizabeth, I don't know what to say.” He was crying pretty hard by now too. “I look back and see so many mistakes I've made and I feel powerless. I don't know how to correct what's already happened.”

“You could start by paying for the psychiatric treatment I had in the fall and for me to maybe get some more help now, so that I can work out all this anger I feel for you.”

“I won't do that,” he said. “I already told you it's your mother's responsibility.”

“Oh Jesus, Daddy. I give up. I can't listen to this anymore.”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Try, Have a good life. Because this is it for me.”

Years later, thinking about this conversation, I will remember, as somebody very sagely said during the parricide trials of the Menendez brothers:
Anytime your kids kill you, you are at least partly to blame.

 

On a Saturday night in May, I took some Ecstasy with Ruby to celebrate some minor triumph or other: At some point we'd decided we'd only do it if we could come up with a better reason besides that we're depressed and bored—and we ended up under a table at a party in the
Advocate
building, tying people's shoelaces together and watching them trip. We thought this was about the funniest thing ever until, suddenly, it started to seem hot and stuffy and claustrophobic and we just had to get out. That was how it was on Ecstasy: Every impulse quickly became an imperative, anything that might choke your buzz had to be destroyed, abandoned, shut up immediately. So we headed for the Adams House swimming pool, a creation of art deco decadence full of stone gargoyles and shiny tiles and stained-glass windows that had come to seem like our idea of paradise Late at night after whatever gatherings we'd been to, Ruby and I would retreat to the balmy blueness of the swimming pool sit on the deck and have our postmortem.

That night we talked and talked, babbled in Ecstasy incoherently until we could see the sun beginning to peek through the colored glass. All of a sudden, like everything else in my life that has seemed both catastrophic and unexpected, the humidity started to bother me. It started to bother me a lot. I was pretty sure I was going to suffocate. I wanted to ask Ruby if anyone had ever died from steam or precipitation or vapor or whatever the hell it was that was making me feel like we were trapped in a fucking cloud. My green wool dress itched against my sweaty flesh so much that I started to wonder if I didn't have chiggers or some other parasite crawling underneath my skin, and I remembered that the thing to do was put clear nail polish all over your body to suffocate the little critters. But standing here in this stuffy pool room I reminded myself that it I who was suffocating.

I stood up and stared into the aquamarine water that was flat and motionless. It felt like I was standing and looking down into that pool for hours, when really it was just minutes. I started to think that I might just like to fall into the water and drown. Die like a Rolling Stone, like Brian Jones. Die in a swimming pool and let my body float to the surface like William Holden's corpse in the opening shot of
Sunset Boulevard.
Go overboard like Natalie Wood, or drown deliberately like Virginia Woolf. Die young. Die glamorous.

Jesus Christ. Was I scared of suffocating to death or was I kind of wishing for it?

And how many times a day did death fantasies creep into my thoughts? So many times I had planned my own funeral, knowing for sure that any death at my age would be considered a tragedy, surely worthy of a full-length feature in some publication, maybe the
Boston Phoenix
or
New York,
where I'd been an intern during my senior year of high school. I knew perfectly how the story would go: She was so full of potential, Harvard, a dancer, a writer, blah blah blah. And then the reporter would try to figure out what it says about our society when a promising young person with so many options chooses to do herself in. I could see it all: My life would suddenly be infused with all sorts of symbolism and meaning that it simply did not have as long as I was alive. As long as I was alive I'd be staring into swimming pools at daybreak empty and aching.

But of course, I knew I'd stay alive. I knew that even if I jumped into the pool, I wouldn't have the guts to drown myself, though I am told that if you resist the natural urge to come to the surface for air, drowning is the least painful method of death that there is. Pain or no, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it? Couldn't talk and thoughts of suicide be considered a whole malady of their own, a special subcategory of depression in which the loss of a will to live has not quite been displaced by a determination to die? In those pamphlets that they give at mental health centers where they list the ten or so symptoms that would indicate a clinical depression, “suicide threats” or even simple “talk of suicide” is considered cause for concern. I guess the point is that what's just talk one day may become a real activity the next. So perhaps after years of walking around with these germinal feelings, these raw thoughts, these scattered moments of saying I wish I were dead, eventually I too, sooner or later, would succumb to the death urge. In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead.

I spent the next few days virtually comatose, ordering in food on the rare occasions when I was hungry. Ruby came and visited me when I didn't return any of her messages. Hadley, one of my floormates in Hurlbut who was starting her freshman year for the second time after being deferred by a suicide attempt and a stay at McLean, left me a card that said, “500,000 heroin addicts can't be wrong.” It was the only laugh I'd had in a while. I panicked some about an exam that I had to take on Wednesday, but then I realized that I was at Harvard, the school with the all-purpose excuse system, so there was no reason to worry. That morning I went to U.H.S. and sicked out of the test, pleading mental problems. All I had to do was sign on the dotted line. (The staff never say no to anyone who doesn't want to take an exam for any reason, because the last time they did the guy killed himself.) When I explained to the nurse practitioner who handled my case that I'd been in therapy for a while but had run out of money and was all messed up again, she said I ought to go see a crisis management counselor at U.H.S. to help me sort out my immediate troubles.

“Mental health is on the third floor—” she started to say.

“I know where it is.” I nodded. “Believe me, I know.”

When I got upstairs, I was astonished by just how familiar the place had become, how accustomed I was to the magazines
(The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic,
and other periodicals not even crazy people would want to read) and the bright orange plastic chairs in the waiting area. After a little while, I was called in by a woman doctor who had open office hours that morning. On her door it said
HANNAH SALTENSTAHL, M.D.
She sat in a swivel chair next to her large wooden desk, while I settled on a couch opposite her. The room was full of plants, posters, paintings, and Central American tapestries, which were supposed to make it less antiseptic and more cozy. I was used to therapists' offices after so many years in and out of them. They all looked the same The decor that was meant to express individuality and comfort was actually just the universal look of a mental health practitioner's place of business.