Prozac Nation (5 page)

Pamela, my first cousin, tried to end it all by slitting her wrists, or at least so the story goes. I remember hearing about all the blood and mess, but it was years later when my dad mentioned the suicide attempt to me, adding that her brother had also tried, but with drugs I think, and by then the indelible impression I had always had of my cousins as rather ordinary bland blond kids was too well developed for the information to register. Besides, almost nothing my father told me ever really stuck because I was convinced that he was nuts himself.

I could just as easily dismiss the thing about my great grandmother dying in the asylum as insignificant. After all, back then they put women away for wanting to work for a living or for asking for a divorce. Or she could have had tuberculosis or typhoid, besides. And it was hard to know that there was anything particularly wrong with my grandfather beyond being old and sickly because that's all he was by the time I came along. It wasn't until he died and we didn't go to the funeral that my dad told me what a mean drunk he was, that he beat my grandmother, and that one night my dad broke his father's ribs trying to kill him (who knows if any of this is true). To me, Grandpa Saul was just a docile old man. And Grandma Dorothy, well, she surely must have had an awful life, but I knew her only as the old lady who made chicken soup for me on the rare occasions my father took me to visit (he, of course, would spend the time asleep in a lounge chair in front of the television set) her little apartment full of fake wood furniture, pile carpet, impressionistic wallpaper, with a view of the Cyclone roller coaster in Coney Island. My grandmother always seemed like any other oversolicitous, doting Jewish mother to me.

And my dad—I just thought he was really tired.

It never occurred to me that any of this was a problem.

But now, years later, I must admit that unhappiness seems to run in the family, there have been so many generations of it on my dad's side that I wonder why someone doesn't just—I don't know how—put a stop to it. I don't know why someone doesn't throw a big black umbrella over our heads and pull us all in out of the rain.

So I mention the family history of depression to every new therapist when it finally occurs to me, and they always feel obligated to point out the genetic component of mental illness. But then I'll tell them a little bit about my immediate family background, and sooner or later, as the narrative continues, they're sure to say something like,
No wonder you're so depressed,
like it's the most obvious response. They react as if my family situation was particularly alarming and troublesome, as opposed to what it actually is in this day and age: perfectly normal. I mean, I think about my development and I feel like a Census Bureau statistic or some sort of case study on the changing nature of the American family in the late twentieth century. My parents are divorced, I grew up in a female-headed household, my mother was always unemployed or marginally employed, my father was always uninvolved or marginally involved in my life. There was never enough money for anything, my mom had to sue my dad for unpaid child support and unpaid medical bills, my dad eventually disappeared. But all this information is no more outstanding than the plot of an Ann Beattie novel. Or maybe it's not even that interesting.

In college, I can remember sitting around dorm rooms and coffeehouses late at night during my freshman year comparing family horror stories with my new friends. We'd almost be competitive about whose father was the least responsible (Jordana would always complain that her dad had enough money for fine wines and a Park Avenue apartment, but he still never so much as took her to dinner), or whose mother was the most scattered, hysterical, or just plain out of it from being overburdened with parenting duties (I always won that contest). It was always interesting to see who could hold the record for not communicating with the noncustodial parent (almost always the father) the longest, either because he'd gotten remarried and moved to San Diego or because he was just a cut-rate shithead who'd skipped town for no particular reason.

The more children of divorce I have met over the years, the more common and trivial my own family history starts to seem. And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can't equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common. My reaction has been uncommonly strong, but really, it seems wrong to blame a statistical fact of life for any of it.

When you consider the widespread nature of depression—particularly among people my age—it all becomes completely numbing, like so much pounding on a frozen, paralyzed limb that bruises but no longer feels. The particulars of what has driven this or that person to Zoloft, Paxil, or Prozac, or the reasons that some other person believes herself to be suffering from a major depression, seem less significant than the simple fact of it. To ask anyone how he happened to fall into a state of despair always involves new variations on the same myriad mix of family history. There is always divorce, death, drunkenness, drug abuse and whatnot in any of several permutations. I mean, is there anybody out there who
doesn't
think her family is dysfunctional?

 

But surely my dad couldn't have
always
slept through our visits. After all, he was an avid photographer, he loved his Nikon, and I was his favorite subject. The only sure way to keep him awake was to hand him a camera. His preschool pictures of me are the best: as a two-year-old chasing a squirrel in Central Park; drinking from a water fountain in the zoo; sitting on the desk at my mother's office, my dress inadvertently hiked up so much that my underwear shows; wearing my mom's shoes and sunglasses around the house; walking the dog. There is even one particular shot of me sitting cross-legged on a park bench in stretchy shorts and a white T-shirt with pigtails and thick bangs and Indian beads around my neck, and a cryptic, pensive expression on my face. One of my cheeks is puffed out, like I'm bored or confused. People thought that picture was so cute that it ended up on a greeting card with typed haiku-ish words on it saying, “People like me like people like you.” Apparently it sold well in California.

One day while he was taking pictures of me in the Central Park zoo (I must have been only two or three), I asked my dad when he was coming back home.

“
Honey, I'm not,” he said. I guess I was looking down at the ground at this point because I remember how the zoo was paved with gray hexagonal bricks.

“
But Mommy says you are,” I protested.

“
I'm sure Mommy didn't say that.” He paused, looked exhausted, like he was going to pass out. “Mommy and I are going to live apart from now on, which we tried to explain to you.” As an afterthought, he added, “Which doesn't mean I love you any less.
”

“
But, Daddy,” I persisted, “Mommy told me to tell you that if you want to come back home, she wants you to come back.
”

“
I'm sure that's not true.
”

And, of course, it wasn't.

During that same period—early in their separation, when they were still making valiant efforts at civility—my father would sometimes babysit for me on nights when my mom went out. Sometimes he'd bring along his girlfriend, soon to be my stepmother, Elinor, and I would play with the huge, brightly colored Pucci scarves that she wore with her turtlenecks, blindfolding myself or fondling the soft silk. Our apartment had a long, narrow, closet-lined hallway, and one of my favorite activities was to stand on my
father's feet as he held my arms above my head for balance, and walk on his shoes with him through the hall, quite literally walking in his footsteps. And when it was time for me to go to sleep, I would make my father leave those same shoes, rusty brown half boots, in the hallway outside my bedroom door. I wanted them to be there so I could look out and know he was still there. It was like I knew he was planning to disappear on me sometime.

Before I went to bed, I always used to ask my dad and Elinor when they were going to get married. Sometimes I'd tell them I was going to fire them both if they didn't do it soon. Not having any idea really what a normal family was like, I thought it was pretty neat that my dad was going to be married and I would get to go to a real wedding—as opposed to the one I'd performed for my Barbie and Ken dolls, or the ceremony I'd had with Mark Cooper in nursery school when he said that I could be Catwoman if he could be Batman, which basically meant that I wouldn't tell on him when he tried to beat me up during rest hour. After all these mock weddings, I think I was hoping to be a flower girl and get a new dress. I guess it never occurred to me that he and Elinor would ever omit me from the wedding altogether: the ceremony, the reception, the dinner afterward. Mommy said that Daddy must have thought that was the best thing to do. But I was only five years old, and all I knew was that there was a party I hadn't been asked to.

I think it was about the time of my dad's second marriage that I first began to have a sense of people disappearing.

 

My mother and I moved to the Upper West Side, and I became part of a whole new breed—or, at any rate, a whole new brand—of child that seemed to have emerged from the collective gene pool at about that time. While that section of Manhattan has since become a haven for yuppies and recent college graduates, when I was little it was full of single mothers, religious Jews, ballerinas, intellectual types that you'd see in Woody Allen movies, and the occasional
artiste.
The playground in Central Park was full of hippie housewives dressed in clogs and blue jeans, sitting and watching their children, who, as a rule, were wise beyond their years, sophisticated waifs in love beads and Danskin pants, patchwork versions of hip who were mouthy and clever, who didn't actually know what sex was or where babies came from but still used words like
sexy
or
fuck you
with the knowing, mimicking voices of children who have spent far too much time in the company of adults.

I think the type is epitomized by the daughter in the film
The Goodbye Girl.
She is far more levelheaded and reasonable than her dancer-mom, who is juggling romance and rent and a career and an aching back with a certain unflappable humor that always seems on the verge of giving way to a complete emotional breakdown. Marsha Mason is meant to come across as, without a doubt, a good and responsible mother—in fact she is clearly nuts about her daughter and has absolutely no negligent or abusive tendencies—but she is, basically, in over her head. That was what my mom was like: Somehow, the bills always got paid, the babysitter always got paid, the private school scholarships always came through, and she always found the odd bit of part-time work that kept us fed and clothed. But it was so very precarious. I always had the vague sense that we were one paycheck or one man or one job away from welfare. I can remember standing on line with my mom to collect unemployment benefits, and I can remember listening to her plead with my father to send me to a
real
doctor, that there was no way she was going to take me to some clinic even if he thought it was good enough. Money, or the lack of it, pervaded the house as only something that is absent can.

But in the midst of this strange and insecure household, my mom and I, much like the mother and daughter in
The Goodbye Girl,
managed to have tons of fun, to be better as pals than we ever were as parent and child. Since I went to a Jewish school where the divorce rate among parents was fairly low (that was the main reason my mom sent me there), I would visit friends' homes and find myself amazed at how glum things seemed compared to life at our apartment. The fathers always seemed so old and distant and unapproachable, wearing their business suits and showing up in the kids' bedrooms only to offer discipline or help with homework. They were already graying and paunchy, and they usually smelled bad, in that certain fatherly way; the moms quite simply lacked style, were dowdy and schoolmarmish, and they often smelled bad to me as well. They were no fun, and they never seemed like the kind of people you could call by their first names no matter how old you were. The sheer joy of having kids seemed completely lost on them. They did not
get down
with parenthood. My mom, on the other hand, really hung out with me whenever she was at home, helping me fill in the patterns on the Lite-Brite or dunking Oreo cookies in milk with me or dancing around the living room with me while we played
Free to Be You and Me.

Alone with babysitters a fair amount of time, I would often befriend the teenage girls who came around to watch me while my mom worked. They all seemed to enjoy braiding my long, long hair or teaching me how to draw with charcoal and pastels, and not just Magic Markers. I'd ask about their boyfriends and try to convince them to invite them over for me to check out. One of my babysitters had a father who was a drunk and held us locked in the apartment in a state of holy terror for several hours as he banged on the door and threatened to kill us both. Another babysitter had an older brother who was studying to be a priest. Years later I found out that she'd become a crack addict and had had two babies out of wedlock.

But it didn't much matter who was given the task of watching me for the few hours between the end of the school day and my mother's return from work because I was always perfectly content to be left alone with one of my many odd projects, whether it was breeding grasshoppers that I'd brought home with me from day camp, or writing an illustrated series of books about different kinds of animals, or just sitting around with my math workbooks and zooming ahead through multiplication and division when everyone else in first grade was still learning how to add and subtract. My inner resources were so thorough and complete that I often had no idea what to do with other children. They all seemed so juvenile to me, especially compared to my mom or to my babysitters like Nelsa and Kristina and Cynthia, who were already in high school and wore bell-bottom jeans with painted-on flower appliques on the pockets and thighs.