Prozac Nation (6 page)

You see, until the very moment when I first broke down at age eleven, I was a golden girl in spite of everything. True, my parents were a little out of it and at each other's throats all the time, but I had more than compensated for that by being adorable and charming in the way of precocious little girls, by doing so well in school, by being stubborn and domineering, by being so fucking persistent.

While we didn't keep a kosher home, I somehow managed to win the school Brochos Bee, the Jewish equivalent of a spelling bee, five years in a row. Instead of spelling words, I had to know what blessings to say on different foods. I retired from this rather odd competition after winning the national contest, against boys with earlocks and girls who wore long sleeves and thick tights in June. For my Bible courses, I would rack up extra-credit points by learning various Hebrew passages by heart and reciting them in class. It always amazed teachers that no one at home could speak or read Hebrew, that I seemed to be tutoring myself (eventually, my mom felt left out and took lessons); the educators seemed unable to comprehend the overwhelming sense of invinceableness I possessed. No one could ever have imagined that as a child I was completely convinced that I could do anything on earth I wanted to By the time I was in seventh grade they set up a separate class for me my friend Dinah and a Russian immigrant named Viola so that we could learn subjects with our own special teacher at our own pace.

And it wasn't just in academic achievements. I taught myself to play tennis by banging a ball up against the wall downstairs from our building for hours every day. Our neighborhood was racially mixed without actually being integrated, and the playground on top of the Food City in front of our building was filled with white children and their moms during the day, while a posse of black teenagers took over the place at night. During that dusky hour when the area began to change its identity, I befriended a teenage boy named Paul with whom I regularly played some version of squash. The fact that he was so much stronger really helped my game. But when my mom found out about Paul—who was, she noticed, a
black teenager
and therefore probably on drugs—she somehow dug up the money to pay for tennis lessons at school. There were no more afternoons on the streets after that. It wasn't until I was sent away to summer camp and first confronted the Jappy girls from Long Island, who had hours of private lessons and country club memberships and courts in their back yards, that I began to doubt that I could grow up to be Chris Evert.

It is hard for me to remember a life that was so cocksure, so free of self-doubt, so pure in its certainty. How did all that life-force energy turn so completely into a death wish? How quickly it seemed that my well-developed superego managed to dissolve into buckets of free-flowing, messy id.

You see, until I really cracked up, at ten or eleven or twelve or whenever it was, you most certainly would have described me as, well, as
full of promise.
That term is loaded with irony to me now because I know how false that appearance of promise is. I know how much latent discontent and sorrow that visible determination can mask, but still I am sure that at one time there was a ruddiness in my cheeks, a beaming excitedness in my eyes that suggested so much possibility. I was an astronaut who was going to fly so high, so far beyond the moon, so far beyond the whole wide world.

But then I never had to worry about a crash landing because I never even took off.

2

It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made her cry—school, homework, boyfriends, the future, the lack of future, the uncertainty of future, fear of future, fear in general—but it was so hard to say exactly what the problem was in the first place.

 

MELANIE THERNSTROM

The Dead Girl

 

I go to Dr. Isaac's office twice a week, which, I think, if I were a normal eleven-year-old kid I would hate and resent, but being me, I like it fine. He asks me a lot of questions about myself and my life, and being someone who just loves to talk, especially about my problems, I think it is mostly a lot of fun. I can't imagine that we're actually accomplishing anything in these sessions. I mean, I really do believe we might have gotten to the bottom of the root of the mess if such a place existed, but my misery is just too random. Dr. Isaac would occasionally make pronouncements that seemed sensible. He'd say, Because your parents divorced when you were so young and pursued such different lifestyles with such clashing value systems, you have a split foundation, you are a fragmented person. Or he'd say, You're very precocious and very sensitive, and as a result you were extremely attuned to all the terrible things going on around you when you were little, so the damage is surfacing now. Everything he says seems perfectly plausible, but it's all one big
so what?
as far as I'm concerned. I know all this stuff already. For me the problem is what to do about it.

Dr. Isaac is the psychiatrist that the school psychologist recommended to my mother when I started to spend more time hanging out in her office than in the classroom. Or maybe she recommended him after the time Mrs. Edelman, the math teacher who doubled as the girls' basketball coach, found me in the locker room one day wounding my legs with a pack of razor blades while my tape recorder played Patti Smith's
Horses.
Without even bothering to ask what I was doing (though she did ask what I was listening to), Mrs. Edelman dragged me upstairs to the psychologist's office—literally pulled me across the floor by my arm until we got to the elevator that was reserved for teachers only, which made me feel special—and deposited me inside her door, pointing at me as if to say,
Look at this,
as if she were an attorney and I were exhibit A, all the material evidence she needed to make her case. And the point was: This child needs professional help.

I think in exchange for solemnly swearing I would never cut myself again, I got the psychologist, who was called Dr. Bender even though she had only a master's degree, to promise she wouldn't tell my mom about what was wrong with me. About the razors.

 

I guess the cutting began when I started to spend my lunch period hiding in the girls' locker room, scared to death of everybody around me. I would bring my functional black and silver Panasonic, meant for voice recording and not music, and I would listen intently to the scratchy sound of the tapes I'd accumulated, mostly popular hard rock like Foreigner, which, trashy as it was, sounded like liberation to me. I'd sit there with my tape recorder, eating cottage cheese and pineapples from a stout thermos I brought from
home (I was, by this time, also certain that I was fat), and it was a peaceful relief from having to deal with other people, whether they were teachers or friends.

Every so often, I would sit in the locker room on the floor, leaning against the concrete wall while my tape recorder sat on the bench, and I would fantasize about going back to the person I had always been. The reverse transformation couldn't be that much of a leap. I could just try talking to people again. I could get the astonished look off my face, as if my eyes had just been exposed to a terrible glare. I could laugh a bit.

I would imagine myself doing the things I once did, like playing tennis. Every so often I would make a decision, first thing in the morning as I headed out the door for the school bus, that I was going to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that day; I would be friendly, I would smile, I would raise my hand in math class from time to time. I remember those days, because I could see how my friends would get this look of relief on their faces. I would walk toward them, standing in a huddle in the blue-carpeted hall outside of the classroom, and they would half expect me to say something like
Everything's plastic, we're all gonna die . . .
and instead I would just say,
Good morning.
And suddenly, their bodies would relax, their shoulders would drop comfortably, and sometimes they would even say,
Oh wow, you're the old Lizzy again,
kind of like a parent who has finally accepted that his oldest son has become a Shiite Muslim and is moving to Iran when, suddenly, the kid returns home and announces that he wants to go to law school after all. My friends, and my mother for that matter, would be relieved to find that I was more the me they wanted me to be.

The trouble was, I thought this alternative persona that I had adopted was just that: a put-on, a way of getting attention, a way of being different. And maybe when I first started walking around talking about plastic and death, maybe then it was an experiment. But after a while, the alternative me really just was me. Those days that I tried to be the little girl I was supposed to be drained me. I went home at night and cried for hours because so many
people in my life expecting me to be a certain way was too much pressure, as if I'd been held against a wall and interrogated for hours, asked questions I couldn't quite answer any longer.

I remember being in a panic one day at school when I realized that I could not even fake being the old Lizzy anymore. I had, indeed, metamorphosed into this nihilistic, unhappy girl, Just like Gregor Samsa waking up to find he'd become a six-foot-long roach, only in my case, I had invented the monster and now it was overtaking me. This was what I'd come to. This was what I'd be for the rest of my life. Things were bad now and would get worse later. They would. I had not heard the word
depression
yet, and would not for some time after that, but I felt something very wrong going on. In fact, I felt that
I
was wrong—my hair was wrong, my face was wrong, my personality was wrong—my God, my choice of flavors at the Haagen-Dazs shop after school was wrong! How could I walk around with such pasty white skin, such dark, doleful eyes, such straight anemic hair, such round hips and such a small cinched waist? How could I let anybody see me this way? How could I expose other people to my person, to this bane to the world? I was one big mistake.

And so, sitting in the locker room, petrified that I was doomed to spend my life hiding from people this way, I took my keys out of my knapsack. On the chain was a sharp nail clipper, which had a nail file attached to it. I rolled down my knee socks (we were required to wear skirts to school) and looked at my bare white legs. I hadn't really started shaving yet, only from time to time because my mother considered me too young, and I looked at the delicate peach fuzz, still soft and untainted. A perfect, clean canvas. So I took the nail file, found its sharp edge, and ran it across my lower leg, watching a red line of blood appear across my skin. I was surprised at how straight the line was and at how easy it was for me to hurt myself this way. It was almost fun. I was always the sort to pick scabs and peel sunburned skin in sheets off my shoulders, always pestering my body. This was just the next step. And how much
more satisfying it was to muck up my own body than relying on mosquitoes and walks in the country among thorny bushes to do it for me. I made a few more scratches, alternating between legs, this time moving the file more quickly, less cautiously.

I did not, you see, want to kill myself. Not at that time, anyway. But I wanted to know that if need be, if the desperation got so terribly bad, I could inflict harm on my body. And I could. Knowing this gave me a sense of peace and power, so I started cutting up my legs all the time. Hiding the scars from my mother became a sport of its own. I collected razor blades, I bought a Swiss army knife, I became fascinated with the different kinds of sharp edges and the different cutting sensations they produced. I tried out different shapes—squares, triangles, pentagons, even an awkwardly carved heart, with a stab wound at its center, wanting to see if it hurt the way a real broken heart could hurt. I was amazed and pleased to find that it didn't.

 

Enter Dr. Isaac.

His office is on 40th Street and Second Avenue, a long ride on the M104 from school, so I often have to leave early. I consider this a huge advantage: I hate school. Sometimes I will schedule appointments with him in the middle of the day, telling my mom that there was no other time available, and then I leave school and don't bother to come back. Dr. Isaac asks me about this: Aren't you missing a lot of school lately, Elizabeth? Sometimes I lie to him and say it's a day off, it's some rabbi from the fifteenth century's birthday or something like that, but after a while I figure—I mean he
is
my therapist—I might as well just tell him I'm cutting. Cutting school, that is.

My truancy is starting to show. My grades fall below B's. I used to practically flagellate myself for getting anything below an A—I mean, an A—was cause for alarm—and now I simply do not care at all. Teachers pull me aside to ask what's wrong. They make themselves available, say things like, If you ever want to talk, I'm here for you. They tell me that they know I can do better than this. My Talmud teacher, Rabbi Gold, takes away the leather-bound copy of
Through the Looking Glass
which I read under my desk during class instead of trying to follow the convoluted rabbinical argument about exactly how big a drop of milk has to be to render an entire pot of meat nonkosher (one sixtieth of the whole is the conclusion, but some disputing parties say one sixty-ninth). After class, he tries to talk to me, though I fade into abstraction. I hear him muttering some words in his vaguely liturgical singsong voice—something like, When one of my most brilliant students can't even tell me what sidrah we're studying today, I know something is wrong—but I just don't care I feel bad that I've insulted this nice man with my indifference to what he's teaching but I don't see what I can. do about it I don't care that I don't care but I do care maybe a little bit about not caring about not caring (if you can follow the convolutions)—but maybe I do feel sorry for all the nice people whose efforts are wasted on a waste case like me. All this just amounts to more grist for the mill of the ill: On top of feeling sad I also feel guilty.