Prozac Nation (10 page)

Occasionally, my mother would complain that my dad and I were ganging up on her: like the time he enrolled me in guitar lessons and then told her that she was supposed to pay for it because he gave her child support for things like that, or the time he brought me to consultations with a bunch of possible replacements for Dr. Isaac without telling her. She'd yell at me and get furious and say stuff like, Where was he through your whole childhood? He slept through it all and now he's trying to steal you away. He's brainwashing you. Then my mother would spend hours crying on the phone to her sister, who would then have me out to her house on Long Island for a few days so that my mom and I could cool off. Sometimes I would admit to my aunt that I knew deep down that my dad was only taking advantage of my discontent to enrage my mother, but I was happy to take whatever relief from my depression he cared to contribute. I had no scruples: I would do
anything
if it meant I might feel better, even if it made my mom miserable.

Of course, to my mother the most bothersome part of my father's renewed interest in me was the emptiness of his gestures. He could be good to talk to sometimes, but his actual efforts on my behalf added up to a whole lot of nothing. Every time I realized how little he would actually do for me as a father, how indifferent he was to parenting basics like buying me clothes or getting me to school on time or running me over to dance class, my misery was compounded. I could see that he might have understood me better than my mom did, but he really didn't love me as devotedly. He simply liked me more at that point because I had, in all my despair, become rather interesting to him. While he snoozed and napped and zoned out through my childhood, never much excited by my verbal precocity at six, never much taken with my guileless foolishness at nine, he was thoroughly intrigued with the suicidally depressed teenager I had become.

My mother, on the other hand, didn't find it interesting at all: She mourned as she watched me become a morbid, blue stranger who slept in the bed that her child once occupied. One night, in the midst of all these battles, I remember going into my mother's bedroom to kiss her good night. She was lying under her burgundy duvet in her shiny pink nylon nightgown while the independent network news blared from the television. I approached the bed and looked down at her lying there, so small and gentle. Her black hair was twisted around her head, her dark eyes were puffy, coated with the baby oil that she used to remove her make-up, and her dark olive skin, which always made her look as if she'd just gotten a tan in the French Riviera, stretched over her high cheekbones and sharp nose like a painted canvas. Why had I not gotten her looks, her Mediterranean coloring, her sharply etched features, her huge dark bedroom eyes that slanted just right? Why did I look so much more like my father's family, pale, fleshy, with droopy eyes that always looked lazy, individual features that tended to fade and blend as if they were as compromised and uncertain as all of our personalities? I remembered a Polaroid of my mother that was taken when she worked at Macy's, with her long black hair and thick bangs separated by a wide headband. She looked just as beautiful to me now, although her face had hardened and toughened. Age had taken away what little frivolity her arch features had once possessed. But somehow that night, lying in bed, she was all softness and delicacy, a fragile rumble doll.

But I knew she could just as easily snap at me for no apparent reason, and her gaze could turn instantly from loving to harsh. She was that mercurial, especially then, especially since she could not deal with my depression. But as angry as she might sometimes get, as loud as she would yell, and as irrationally as she would rant, in the end she was the parent I could count on. If she and I had a disagreement that was so bad that we didn't talk to each other for days, I could still be certain that dinner would be on the table each evening, that my tuition would be paid, that my clothes would be ironed. She was my mother and that was that. I could never be so certain about my father. When I would run away from home and spend a night in the shag-carpeted attached house my dad and stepmother had recently moved into in Westchester, using the bathroom soap—we're talking a supermarket brand like Tone, nothing fancy—without asking permission first would throw the whole household into paroxysms. My presence was that strange to them.

Our family life was like the King Solomon story in the Bible, with two women both claiming to be the biological mother of one infant. Like the true mother who would relinquish her right to keep the baby before letting the king cut it in half, I could be certain that my mother would weep for my life and give anything to keep me in one piece, but my father, well, I'm not so sure. He's like me, always compromising, always throwing up his hands, never quite certain of the righteousness of his cause. It would have been just like him to tiredly exclaim,
Tear the child apart,
which is what was happening anyway.

What made my life different from the parable is that both of my parents did have claims. And in order to remain whole, I needed both of them, but that seemed not to be an option. Something inside me was not just depressed but dividing, cracking, splintering, pulling me back and forth between my two parents, and occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.

 

Can divorce possibly work when a child is involved? I know that these days a small industry of marriage counselors and divorce therapists devote themselves to easing the process of parental separation for the sake of the children, and I know that all these people are just trying to help, trying to arrange things so that as long as we're stuck in Alaska we might as well have a good warm coat to wear. But can this situation ever really be all right?

Any breakup, even of a brief romance, is rife with potential for all kinds of emotional rampages. So how can we possibly be so pragmatic and realistic and eerily, creepily sane as to ask a couple going through a divorce to try to check their feelings and behave themselves and cooperate and be nice for the sake of the children? Of all the odd demands that modern life makes on humanity, the most difficult may be not only its insistence that we comfortably spend our adult lives going from one situation of serial monogamy to another, but its expectation that we get along, maintain friendships, share parental duties, and in cases even attend the second and third weddings of our exes. It asks that we pretend that heartbreak is a minor inconvenience that can be with just the right amount of psycholanguage with just a few repetitions of the mantra
for the sake of the children.

I occasionally find myself respecting my parents for making no show of such civility, of not even staging amicability for my sake at my worst moments. I know it would have been better for me had they managed to do that, but I might have been just as distressed by the hypocrisy, the false smiles, the feigned friendliness.

Often during those thirteen-year-old days, I would talk to my father late into the night, drearily rambling about the blackness of it all but sometimes telling him I hated my mother because sometimes I thought I did. I would drag the phone on its long extension cord from my mother's bedroom to the narrow corridor leading to my room and I would speak to him in a whispered hush about my dismal life. Of course, this drove my mother crazy. So when I got off the phone, to make her feel better I'd tell her that Daddy really didn't care about me at all. I'd tell my mom that I hated my dad, which seemed to satisfy her for a little while, long enough for her to seem okay until the next time she found me talking to him in conspiratorial tones about needing to get away from Dr. Isaac, and then she'd cry all again, telling that loyalty to my father turncoat ways, were making her so sick she was bleeding internally

One of these nights, she'd threaten, I'm going to be so sick that you're going to have to take me to the emergency room because of the blood, but you'll be too busy complaining about me to your father to even notice, and I will die and then how will you feel?

And then how would I feel? I could never answer straight, I'd just cry and hug her, and let my head fall against her collarbone and say, I don't want this, I don't mean for this, why can't everyone just get along?

In the proper fashion of divorced mothers, during her sane, lucid moments my mother would, of course, pay lip service to the idea that I ought to have a relationship with my father. Everybody needs and deserves a mommy
and
a daddy. In reality, she didn't want me to get too close to him. She wanted him around, but only in his rightful, Saturday-afternoon place. And who could blame her? How could my mom tell me, whom she loved more than anyone else in the world, that she wanted me to have a good relationship with my father, whom she hated more than anyone else on earth, and not get found out? Ditto my dad.

It is no surprise that a generation of children of divorce have grown into a world of extended adolescence in which so many of them have slept with one another and remained friends, have put the conflicts of sundered relationships aside for the sake of maintaining a coherent life. Divorce has taught us how to sleep with friends, sleep with enemies, and then act like it's all perfectly normal in the morning. Sometimes I have to admire my parents for being so psychologically unenlightened, for avoiding self-help books with titles like
I'm O.K., You're O.K.,
for choosing—or rather, not choosing, but simply instinctually acting—to be true to their own untrammeled, unfettered, unresolved, and unexamined emotional immaturity. Every so often, they would try to put on a face of mutual concern, telling me that their feelings for each other shouldn't affect me, but it always rang false, like putting an elephant in the middle of our cramped, poorly lit living room and trying to suggest that I ignore the beast, that he would be tame and well behaved, that we could just live and work around him. I admired the
fact that rather than trying to do what was right in a situation that was so obviously wrong, they did what came naturally.

We went to Alaska and we froze to death.

 

I went to camp for five years in a row, a different one each year, a different setup in a different rural town in the Poconos or the Catskills or the Berkshires or wherever I could enroll at a discount rate. And the funny thing is, after my mother had sent me off to these places that I thought were so lonesome and horrible, instead of hating her for it, I just spent all summer missing her. All my waking and sleeping energy was devoted to missing my rather minimal, unstable home. Starting on June 28, or whatever day it was that I got to camp, until I'd come home on August 24 or so I would devote myself fully to the task of getting back home, never even achieving a brief reprieve.

I'd spend hours each day writing my mom letters, calling her on the phone, making sure that she'd know exactly where and when to pick me up at the bus when it was time to return. I would run to the camp's administrative offices to make sure that notices about the return trip would be sent to my mother so that she'd know where to find me. I'd extract promises that she'd arrive one or two hours early. I'd call even my dad and get him to promise to come at least a half hour before the estimated time of arrival. I'd talk to the head counselor and express my concern that I might be put on a bus to New Jersey or Long Island and somehow end up in the wrong place and never find my way back home. I would ask other New Yorkers in my bunk if I could go home with them if my mother failed to materialize at the bus stop, I would call grandparents, aunts, uncles, and babysitters (always collect) to find out where they would be on August 24, just in case my parents didn't come to get me. Instead of discovering the virtues of tennis and volleyball, of braiding lanyards and weaving potholders, I would spend the full eight weeks of my summer planning for my two-hour trip back home.

Sometimes, even now, when it rains in the summer—the kind of cold, dreary downpour that they're always referring to in blues songs, the kind that makes it feel like autumn or even winter in July—I experience déjà vu, and can feel my head fog over, feel my whole body tense, as I remember the rainy days at camp, those dark, depressing days when the rain came down like blows, when I walked around in my yellow slicker feeling chilled and bruised and battered, wondering what I had done wrong to make my parents banish me. What had I done to deserve this and how could I undo it?

I was such a good kid, I really was. I didn't need anyone to entertain me, I was so resourceful. Left alone I would have probably read the collected works of Tolstoy, or at least Tolkien. I might have sketched on my pad or written another one of the children's books about animals I had started turning out regularly at age five. By God, I was genuinely happy being alone. Which is, I'm sure, the exact reason that I was sent to sleepaway camp and forced to deal with other kids my age: This was yet another bid at making me normal.

I can't get away from the suspicion that it all went wrong at summer camp, that my exile began back then, that my spirit broke—and broke and broke and broke—a little bit more with each passing summer. Everything ended for me at camp. I stopped writing my books, stopped collecting grasshoppers, stopped feeling pretty, stopped wanting to know what makes lightning and rainbows and tsunami winds if it isn't God, stopped wanting to know if there was a God, stopped asking questions that all the adults were too tired to answer anyway, stopped wanting to want anything at all anymore knowing for sure that I could never have it that I'd been expelled from that place where possibility still existed.

It doesn't matter how many years go by, how much therapy I embark on, how much I try to achieve that elusive thing known as perspective, which is supposed to put all past wrongs into their rightful and diminished place, that happy place where all the talk is of lessons learned and inner peace. No one will ever understand the potency of my memories, which are so solid and vivid that I don't need a psychiatrist to tell me they are driving me crazy. My subconscious has not buried them, my superego has not restrained them. They are front and center, they are going on right now. And what I feel as I think of summer camp is completely ugly:
I want to kill my parents for doing this to me! I want to hack them to death for this because I was the best little girl in the world and instead of making me feel good about all the things that were good about me, they sent me away and I never really found my way back home! I was special! I had promise! And instead they threw me away and tried to make me ordinary! They threw me away with a bunch of normal kids who thought I was strange and made me feel strange until I became strange! And after all these years, I still despise them for doing this to me!