Agorafabulous! (7 page)

I awoke the next morning at one
P.M
., which in addition to not actually being “morning” was three hours past the start of my shift. I felt a jolt of terror zap through me, and I called in.

One of the hair-sweeping, chain-smoking, rap-loving eighteen-year-old assistants answered the phone. It is a feat to speak exclusively in a ghetto Boston blackcent when you are the eldest daughter of an enormous Greek immigrant family, but Athena pulled it off with flair.

“Yo, Très Bien.”

“Hi Athena, it’s Sara.” I did my best to sound weak and pitiful.

“You sound mad sick, yo. Was you supposed to come in today? Bruce is freaking the fuck out, for reals. I think Alejandro did Jell-O shots at lunch.”

I thought fast.

“I’m at Mass General,” I coughed. “I passed out last night. My neighbor called the ambulance. I was dehydrated.”

“Oh shit. My baby’s father went to Mass General last time he got shot. They was good. You wanna talk to Bruce?”

I most definitely did
not
want to talk to Bruce. “No thanks, I just wanted to apologize for not calling in earlier. I’ve been sleeping and—hydrating. On a drip. A—a water drip.” It sounded plausible, to me.

“Feel better, girl.”

I got off the phone and applauded my own quick thinking. I considered sneaking outside in a baseball cap and sweats and sunglasses, and enjoying an incognito day at the mall. But when I got to the door and grabbed the knob, I instantly recoiled, as if it were burning-hot.

The thing—hell, the
Thing
—on my shoulder, which was also the voice in my head, which was also the smartest and most intuitive part of me—you know, that gut feeling/inner wisdom source self-help books are always talking about—well, that Thing said, “Go back to bed. Sleep. If you go outside, someone will catch you. It’s safer inside. You work hard. Take a second mental health day. It’s good for you. If you don’t, you might have a panic attack, you know. You’d better take it easy.”

On Thursday, I returned to work, and was promptly fired by Bruce’s deputy, his partner in codependence, Arlene. Arlene and Bruce shared a condo, a boat, a dozen friends, and a business. They also shared a pronounced disdain for their employees, especially ones who didn’t show up for work and provided fake excuses involving dehydration.

“Here’s a day’s pay,” Arlene said, furiously flipping cash out of the drawer. She pushed it at me and snapped, “Now get out.” The other stylists watched with a range of emotions: sympathy, confusion, and, on one face, glee. (That was Alejandro, who liked me but loved drama far more.)

I wandered home in a daze, filled with a mixture of shame and relief. I’d been fired before, once, from a home décor store called Cute Stuff, which specialized in “distressed furniture.” In practical terms, this translated to shoddily assembled handmade dressers wrought of wormhole-riddled wood, painted in whimsical, bright colors and with rusty-on-purpose knobs and handles. This was part of the lamentable Shabby Chic trend, which inspired millions of idiots to drop tons of cash on the equivalent of pre-ripped, pre-faded jeans with the goal of feigning an interesting personal history.

I wasn’t fired from Cute Stuff because I disagreed with the store’s aesthetic direction. I was fired from Cute Stuff because one time I had my boyfriend call in sick for me. Oh, and a pattern of lateness prior to that. But mostly because I had my boyfriend call in sick for me. He was nice. He played the violin and did lots of drugs.

After I got home from the salon, I called my parents to tell them I’d quit my job—for what reason, I can’t remember, although I’m sure I invented something interesting to elicit sympathy and mild outrage at whatever alleged evil I insisted my boss had committed. I probably claimed my boss had thrown a shampoo bottle directly at me, which likely
would
have happened if I’d stayed on the job much longer, so it wasn’t really a lie.

With the salon job gone, I had to cut back on the activities I enjoyed that cost pocket money—eating at the all-night diner, shopping at the bookstore, buying hippie groceries at Bread and Circus (soon to be purchased by some hippie company called Whole Foods). I enjoyed these adventures for the same reason I enjoyed the urban life: I could move among crowds, listening to other people without engaging them. It was a way to be an island outside the confines of my room.

I kept going to parties for a while, because you didn’t have to pay for those. I never put any of the stuff on offer up my nose or down my throat, and the only people who seemed to be having a good time were the ones who did that. I did, however, spend a memorable evening that summer riding around in a budding celebrity chef’s stretch limo with twenty of his nearest and dearest friends, but that was because he invited me really nicely and I don’t say no to someone who makes a lucrative living by turning rabbits into haute cuisine.

He was really sweet, actually, and later that summer he toted some pals and me along to a party at his friend Dagger’s house. Dagger was a working magician who flew all over the world, doing industry conventions and private events for the extremely wealthy. Dagger threw epic parties in his restored Victorian farmhouse in the country, a place that looked humble from the outside but which was a fully functional sex den inside. He had a giant cage installed in his living room and a fuck swing in his kitchen. I’m not sure why the fuck swing was specifically placed in the kitchen, but it did contrast nicely with the butcher-block center island.

Dagger, who was courtly and hospitable, set out crystal bowls filled with neat mounds of pills and powders and herbs of the illegal sort. When I excused myself to go to the bathroom, I noticed a closed-circuit television over the toilet. It was showing a live feed of some of my guy friends pouring wax on a stripper, accompanied by a gentleman who had previously been introduced to me as Sir Sinister. Sir Sinister had four-foot-long dreadlocks and he seemed to be on very familiar terms with several of the surgically enhanced working girls at the party. I sat down to pee, and watched Sir Sinister wave my friends out of the way so that he could mount the girl. By the time I pulled up my underwear, he was inside her. I called a cab and left.

On my twenty-first birthday I had sex with a boy I thought I loved or maybe could love, sort of, even though we didn’t know each other that well. He was notable for both his sense of humor and for the polite way he ignored the piles of soda cans and cardboard piling up against my wall. (I kept telling myself I would recycle these things, that I would do the right thing and give them a second life as crap that would then be re-junked. The trouble was that my aversion to going outside was growing stronger by the week.) The sex was extremely fun, but it also misled me into believing that it is always an easy thing to climax during vaginal intercourse. Sadly, this is not true for most human women, and not for me, either, as I would eventually discover. The boy went back to his home city. The last time I saw him, he drunkenly confessed that he was in love with me. Then he threw up Carlo Rossi red wine all over my bathroom. A couple of weeks later, he told me over the phone that he hadn’t meant it, and that he’d just been drunk. He never called me or wrote to me after that.

School started on September 11, except it didn’t. I was late for my first class because I was gripped by the now-familiar fear of leaving my apartment, but I would’ve been only fifteen minutes late if there had been any class to attend. The cab driver who pulled over and picked me up was shaking furiously.

“And how do you like this day?” he spat. It sounded almost like an accusation.

“It’s fine,” I said cautiously. “It’s really pretty out.” It was, too.

He was appalled. “This is a terrible day!” he shouted, banging his hand on the steering wheel. “Everything is terrible today!”

“Oh,” I said soothingly. “Boston traffic is pretty bad.”

“It’s not traffic!” he shrieked, and turned on NPR, loud. “They flew planes into buildings and they are blowing everything up!”

“They? Who’s they?”

“Terrorists! Crazy sons of bitches!”

We sat in traffic and listened to the radio. By the time we reached my destination, he and I had gotten to know each other a little bit, in the way that you do with strangers in airports when blizzards or small TSA incidents ruin everyone’s plans. I didn’t know how to say good-bye, so I tipped him and got out of the cab and said, “Thanks for picking me up, Mohammed.”

“No way is school open today, Sara,” he said. “Go find a TV and watch the news.”

He was right, and I did.

School was open the next day. I went, but I didn’t go very often after that. My fear of going outside really had very little to do with the hijackings. In fact, seeing the entire nation gripped by fear made me feel more normal, somehow. For the first time, the world outside my head seemed as irrational and terrified as the world inside my head. And there
was
a world inside my head—there was the Thing, of course, and then there were the people I invented to help me when I was really feeling awful. One of them looked and sounded like my grandmother, but with an Irish accent, and she was always baking bread. Another one was some sort of Italian-American uncle with a Jersey accent, but he didn’t last long. He was very encouraging, though. And then, of course, there was my own chattering, worried inner monologue, which never ceased, except when I slept.

I started sleeping a lot.

Sleep was my respite and my vacation. I loved sleeping. I loved the moment of dropping off into unconsciousness, even when it brought nightmares. I would wake up, frightened, but then the Irish grandmother’s voice would sing me a lullaby and tell me that everything was going to be all right, and I’d relax back into slumber. I got really good at sleeping for long stretches of time. Years later, I would have a counselor who participated in super-marathons, running for one hundred miles over several days. I was like that, but with sleep. Marathoners learn certain tricks to keep themselves going, and super-marathoners become even more expert in the art of endurance. I learned that a good night’s sleep—twelve to eighteen hours—could, in fact, be achieved without the use of sleeping pills. (I disdained sleeping pills as harmful chemicals. Because I enjoyed such a healthy, natural lifestyle.) The number-one key to eliminating obstacles to sleep was to eliminate excess energy in the body—the sort of mindless juice that led to time-wasters like showering and answering phone calls. And the number-one cause of energy in my body was food. So I stopped eating it. An ingenious fix, really, and one that worked brilliantly.

There is a unique and insidious delight to denying oneself readily available nutrition. I imagine this is quite different from being starved by some horrid outside force—a bad harvest, an occupying army, a modeling agent. I have led a life of comfort and privilege, with a roof over my head and a loaf of bread within easy distance. To deny myself my favorite foods—to deny myself any food—was to wield control over a part of my body that challenged me each day to sate its needs. I could not control my brain, or my soul, or whatever it was that demanded I wrap myself in blankets and rock back and forth a prescribed number of times before daring to fetch a glass of water. But I could control what I put in my body.

I don’t know if I had an eating disorder in the traditional sense, but I think I can understand a little of the anorexic mindset. People with eating disorders appreciate the absolute pleasure of watching their flesh shrink against the bone. Yes, weight-loss champions on reality television shows testify about the joy of going from a size fourteen to a size six, how they learned to eat healthful meals and how they’ve grown to love exercise, but that’s not the sort of reduction I mean. The pain of self-denial turns exquisite when you feel the points of your hip bones pressing against thin skin. As my grades tumbled and my waking hours shrank, as my crowd of friends diminished and my garbage pile rose higher, I lay beneath layers of quilts and felt myself getting smaller and smaller. Shrinking was wonderful. And I was watching myself disappear.

I did eat, a little bit, sometimes. I had dwindling food supplies, but occasionally hunger would drive me to open up a year-old can of beans or scrape the mold off a piece of bread. I didn’t get too down on myself for eating, because it wasn’t adding more substance to my body and it certainly wasn’t giving me any of the dreaded energy. When I ate, I nibbled in bed and thought about dying.

Lying in bed was vastly preferable to moving about my apartment, which had, unfortunately, turned into a hotbed of conflict. This was mainly due to the hostility of certain objects in my home. For example, the television stared at me plaintively, begging to be turned on when I most definitely did not want to turn it on. Television fried your brain and made you do stupid things, as I explained to it at three
A.M.
one morning. The answer was apparently not to its satisfaction, because the TV copped an attitude that made me feel weird whenever I looked at it. I covered it with a tie-dyed cloth so that I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. I had a similar altercation with my computer, which also earned itself a drop cloth.

It wasn’t that these appliances actually
spoke
to me out
loud
or anything
crazy
like that. It was more of a vibe. You know when you know someone at work doesn’t like you, even though they’ve never
said
anything explicitly rude to you? It was like that. My household objects were giving off bad vibes. And pretty soon I realized that the Thing that sat on my shoulder had somehow managed to take over my bathroom, which was when I had to break things off with the toilet and start pissing in cereal bowls. Thankfully, the lack of solid food in my system made defecation a rarity.

By the time I started squatting over bowls and peeing, I was too enmeshed in my own half-imagined new world to stop and wonder whether it was a healthy activity. It was just something I did, like turning on the same CD as soon as I woke each day (or night, depending) and playing the same song over and over until I fell asleep again a few hours later. Because I was a white girl from suburban New Jersey, my omnipresent musical companion was the Dave Matthews Band. In the waning days of the fall semester, I listened to their hit single “Satellite” countless times. The repetition was soporific, and guided me through the terrible few hours when sleep simply would not come.