Ali in Wonderland: And Other Tall Tales (11 page)

The next morning I was preparing a tray to bring up to Thierry. Don’t judge me, I’m a pleaser. A linen napkin with a pot of coffee, toast, jam, and a little vase with a weed I had snatched from the side of the barn. “What is this?” my mother inquired. My sisters were wearing the exact same clothes as the day before, in the same seats, sipping the same PMS tea.

“I’m bringing Thierry breakfast.”

My mother stood. “He doesn’t know how to fix his own breakfast?”

I walked out of the room with the rattling tray like the maid in
Remains of the Day
.

A
t the crack of dawn the next morning my younger sister swung open the door to the guest room and screamed, “Sissy’s in labor! Sissy’s in LABOR!” Lights were abruptly flicked on, voices got louder, and a frenzy mounted. Only Thierry stayed in bed. We were two hours from Washington, D.C., and my mother and younger sister grabbed some blankets and towels and escorted Sissy into the Audi station wagon. My brother bounded out of the house and leaped into the rolling car. My job was to look after my nephews, ages seven and five, who had just witnessed a bucket of water gush out of their mother’s sweatpants.

When Thierry finally descended downstairs, my nephews were spitting chewed marshmallows onto the windowpanes to see if they’d stick. I knew that if the four of us were sequestered in the house all day, somebody would die (the French one). I decided we should all go out and buy baby things for the impending arrival. The crib Sissy had was duct-taped together from the first two kids, so I figured a new crib, blanket, and lots of jingly things would be necessary.

Unfortunately, out in rural Virginia there were no adorable infant boutiques like Posh Tots, Giggles, or Poopies. The only place I knew of was a Kmart forty-five minutes away. We took my brother-in-law’s Ford Bronco, which smelled like stale unfiltered Camel cigarettes and had a dried hawk’s foot dangling from the rearview mirror. Thierry wiped the seat with a paper towel before sitting, as if he’d contract syphilis through the polyester fibers.

It was impossible to converse with the boys over their fart noises and mock Uzi noises aimed at the passing Deer Crossing signs. Thierry and I stared straight ahead in silence. When we got to Kmart, the boys took off like they were chasing the carrot at a greyhound race. I pleaded with Thierry to follow them so they wouldn’t get lost or abducted by creepy farmhands. Kmarts are always massive, but the one we beamed into that morning was the mothership. I was exhausted after perusing just one aisle. The baby section was infinite. There were heaps of boxes with car seats, strollers, bouncing chairs thrown everywhere. Finally a very pregnant Hell’s Angel babe with a tattoo of an iguana gracing her protruding belly mounted a pile of stock boxes. She swiped a crib box off the top rack, caught it with the shelf of her stomach, and handed it to me. Who says chivalry is dead.

Two hours later, Thierry appeared, looking pale, as if he had just been probed
Deliverance
-style in the plus-size men’s department. “I can’t do it,” he kept saying over and over. In the corner of my eye I saw my nephews zoom by. They had ripped open a softball set and were using the store as an open field. Thierry went outside for air while I chased my nephews with a fly fishing pole, dragging the crib box behind me.

We returned to the farm completely depleted. I microwaved some frozen mac and cheese while Thierry attempted to tidy his hair with gels and grooming cream. The phone rang; it was my mother. “Well, it’s a girl! Why don’t you drive the boys into town so they can meet their sister.” It was either spike Thierry in the chest with the antique pitchfork that hung on the wall or get back in the car. It was a toss-up, but we all piled into the Bronco. This time I joined my nephews in the symphony of farts.

“This was not at all what I expected,” Thierry muttered under his breath. What had he expected, Camp David?

We were ten minutes from the hospital when my youngest nephew provided the grand finale to Thierry’s big white-trash adventure: he shat his pants. I was not a mother and so didn’t travel with wipes and hand sanitizer. I had lip gloss and an empty bottle of Xanax in my purse. I screeched the car to a halt and climbed into the back seat. I ripped off his Baby Gap jeans and underoos and threw them out the window onto the highway. I grabbed a Navajo blanket from the car floor and wrapped it around his waist. “We’ll get you some pants in town. If you feel like pooping again, please stick your butt out the window.” The boy was wailing, I was nauseous, and the stench overpowered the scent of Thierry’s lime blossom facial oil.

My mother met us at the hospital front and collected the little boys, carrying the pooper in her arms like an old Persian rug. As they disappeared into the sliding doors of the emergency room, I turned to Thierry. “Maybe we should get balloons or something?”

He hit the side of the truck. “[
Strong French accent
] Are you joking? I want to get the hell out of here!”

“Fine,” I said, attempting to defuse the situation, “let’s go say good-bye at least.” I had no intention of going anywhere, but the public display was embarrassing. Yes, I had just thrown a pair of underwear full of poo out the car window, but I still had a sense of decorum.

My sister’s room was crammed with family members and friends. There was singing and streamers and bouquets of pink carnations. And then it happened. I watched it in slow motion. My mother poured Thierry’s bottle of Dom Pérignon into Styrofoam cups and started passing them around the room—the champagne that was to signify the joy of our impending nuptials casually dispensed to random male nurses. Thierry stormed out of the room. And out of my life.

Au revoir
, Thierry, but remember, we’ll always have Kmart.

Chapter Fifteen

Elevator Down

T
he only perk of a meltdown is weight loss. At the peak of my valley I was ninety pounds. My skeletal body lay on the couch like a bundle of sticks as I blankly watched the World Cup. My best friend, Michelle, would drive by before work to bring me a Jamba Juice full of energy boosts. What I really needed was a metaphysical boost. If it weren’t for my dog, I would never have seen sunlight or smelled air; even pouring dry dog food into a bowl was a Herculean chore. It was 1999; I had left my fiancé, my boyfriend of eight years, and my home, and was questioning everything about my life. And the human condition.

After a second week of insomnia and subsisting on stomach acid, my family descended on my
Bell Jar
by the beach. My mother was hoping that English muffins with sliced tomatoes would snap me out of it. And whenever I started to weep uncontrollably, someone would slip a Scrabble board under my chin. Maybe a triple word score would abolish any dark thoughts!

It was my brother who recognized that my dwindling body fat and self-worth were not symptoms of a breakup, but something more psychologically rooted. It was the first time I wasn’t dependent on parents or a boyfriend. It was just me. And I was anxious and scared. The little girl in me whose parents split just after I was born didn’t want to be abandoned again. Yes, even though I had left my boyfriend. It was a moment in my life that plenty of vitamins and a brisk constitutional weren’t going to fix. It was time to seek professional help.

The first shrink I saw had an office in a bungalow in Venice, California. The furniture was all petrified wood, and the plants grew out of avocado pits and cascaded down to the burnt sienna shag carpeting. I sat on a mushroom stool in the waiting room scanning the spines of books like
Tantric Love
and
Connecting to Your Orgasm
in the bookcase. Everything was breathing, bodies, and being. The therapist entered the room, a homunculus woman with a unibrow and a derriere the size of Kansas. She led me into her office and got straight down to business. “As we work together, I don’t want you to be startled or ashamed, but you will find yourself having sexual fantasies and dreams about me.”

I could barely swallow. “I’m sorry, sexual fantasies about YOU?”

She nodded. “You see, we will be forming a very intimate bond, and it’s perfectly natural for you to sexualize it.”

I stood up and walked out. I wasn’t THAT fucked up.

I needed help, but I was in Hollywood, so actually finding a doctor who wouldn’t rather be doing open-mike night at the Comedy Store or writing self-help books that would eventually star Ben Affleck was a challenge.

Next came a psychotherapist who would have been better suited as a network executive. She wore fitted pin-stripes and stiletto black suede boots, had flat-ironed hair and just a whiff of plastic surgery. Her saccharine earnestness came from listening to too many Marianne Williamson tapes. When she wasn’t running her fingers through overly processed copper hair, she was pulling tiny pieces of lint off her Wolford stockings. Exhausted, I decided to stick my toe in her psych pool. One afternoon I succumbed to my unearthed vulnerability and cried. As I was describing the scene of watching my father pull away in the car, the “therapist” stopped me. “I’m sorry, where did you get those shoes?”

I took a beat and sniffled. “What?”

She moved closer, her eyes still on my feet. “I’ve been looking for those shoes . . . Barneys?”

I sprinted in my ballet flats right out of her office. I was now logging therapy sessions at ten-minute intervals.

My brother took me to a psychopharmacologist in Santa Monica who had been recommended by an alcoholic, unemployed actor friend of his, which at that point was good enough for me. The doctor’s office was littered with New Guinean masks and whittled Indonesian sculptures of men with engorged penises. After forty-five minutes he handed me prescriptions for Xanax, Lorazepam, and Klonopin, and told me I needed to visit him at least four times a week. I mean, that panoramic view of Malibu wasn’t going to pay for itself!

My brother filled the prescriptions, and I popped them like Milk Duds at the movies. This doctor had overprescribed me—my dosage would have sedated a tribe of elephants. In other words, I was higher than Keith Richards. I remember not being able to swallow water; it would dribble down my lower lip. I was also convinced that the chairs in my living room had wings. I stayed stationary on the kitchen floor, moving only to pee or sit up when Michelle brought me a shake. She would hold my head up like a paraplegic and pour the “mango-a-go-go” smoothie down my shirt.

F
inally I flew to New York to seek a team of specialists. If you want your boobs fixed, you go to L.A. If you want your head fixed, you go to New York.

My mother traveled to New York with me, and we stayed in my little sister’s one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment. I hid under a mass of pillows in my sister’s bed while she froze on her rickety couch in the next room. I played Scrabble with myself, and lost, while my mother whispered in the other room on endless secretive phone calls. One afternoon I heard her say “Silver Hill,” which caused me to jump to my feet, hit the board, and send the letter tiles flying. Silver Hill is a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut. And I was damned if I was going to end up like Frances Farmer in a Lilly Pulitzer tennis skirt. “Mom, I am dealing with difficult life issues, I’m distraught, but I’m not trying to eat my own fist!” I guess it’s a generational thing; in her day, you showed a little crazy and were shackled down on rubber sheets. In my generation, you show a little crazy, you get some books on incest and do a beet cleanse.

A friend told me about the outpatient program for anxiety and depression at New York–Presbyterian Hospital. It was day care for sad people. The first morning we sat in a circle in metal foldout chairs. There were eight of us—old, young, black, white, gay, and straight—holding coffee cups or peeling labels off bottled water. One by one patients would describe what had caused them to leave their families, work, minds, to be part of the group morning show. One woman went into harrowing detail about her husband’s suicide, her children’s removal to foster care, her near homelessness and addiction to Ritalin. The next patient was a young African American woman with gruesome scarification from years of cutting. Next was a man who was addicted to plastic surgery. He had every implant invented, including abs, calves, and biceps—a man who wanted so much to be beautiful and yet fashioned himself into a grotesque freak. Whenever he ran out of money for surgery, he attempted suicide, so family members kept subsidizing his addiction.

One unfathomable story after another. Then it was my turn. I reluctantly stood up and cleared my throat. “Um. I was engaged to this guy, and I broke up with him. And then he took this really sexy actress to the Bahamas on a private plane.” I quickly sat down again. The group looked at me like I had just strangled a puppy. Nobody said a word. The silence was deafening. Then the woman next to me put her hand on my thigh. Then the whole group hugged me. They all knew real pain, but didn’t minimize mine. Although you know I’d be the first voted off the island.

W
e were in individual and group therapy from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, with an hour free for lunch. The majority ate a Subway sandwich on a bench in the lobby or chain-smoked outside. I met my mother every day at the Plaza. It was right across the park. We would quietly sit in the Palm Court restaurant sipping split pea soup.

“How was class?” she would ask.

“It’s called group.”

“How was group?”

How could I possibly describe the heartache and pain these people were experiencing without trivializing it? “Fine.” I knew my mother just wanted me to be back to normal, for the whole episode to be behind us. So we would quietly finish our iced tea, and I’d walk back to the hospital.

During this period the doctors started me on Zoloft—a drug I would invest all my money in, and practically do. I considered naming my first child Zoloft; it sounded Greek. Suddenly I had a floor. And the darkness was lifted. I felt like myself, for better or worse. I had periods of nausea while my body was adjusting to the medication. My mother and I would take leisurely walks up Madison Avenue, and I would stop to vomit next to a tree or in a trash can. My mother would rub my back like she was burping a baby. She wasn’t embarrassed or humiliated by my actions; in her true style, she held her head high and acted as though everyone had a daughter circling the drain. Instead of it being the terrible twos, it was the terrible twenties.

By the end of the month I felt like myself again, or at least a stronger version of who I had been the last couple months. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was the realization that life could go on and that I could control it. Or maybe I saw what real pain and suffering was and, for the first time, felt extremely lucky and blessed. I hugged my support group good-bye. They still seemed perplexed about why I was there in the first place. Who knows, maybe a week at the Golden Door would have done the trick?