Agorafabulous! (8 page)

One December evening, there came a loud banging at my door. It was rather like the indelicate door-knocking of stern detectives on television cop shows. None of my friends had called or shown up in some time, since it had become abundantly clear I wasn’t going to answer voice-mail messages or emerge from my increasingly noxious lair. I spoke to my parents on occasion, always briefly. I’d claim I was in a hurry to get to class or a party, and then I’d hang up the phone and crawl back into bed. So the combination of shock at the knocking and concern regarding its cause actually propelled me out of bed and to my door. I opened it up, and came face-to-face with Alexandra.

I had two best friends at Emerson College, and Alexandra was one of them. She was a talented comedic actress and a trained dancer, and she had excellent strawberry-blond curls and a strikingly beautiful face. She came from a colorful Jewish family of singers and writers and musicians, and she had been to faraway places like Bali and Arizona. Everyone wanted to know her or make out with her, but she was sparing about allowing either privilege. I was not so selective with my favors, and I always admired her restraint. She was often as bound up with tension as I, but she dealt with it through dance, comedy, acting, and sushi.

She also had another strong passion, and it was this aspect of her personality that must have roared most loudly within her when that door swung open: Alexandra loved cleaning. She did it every day. It stopped just shy of a compulsion, and instead manifested as both a hobby and a great talent. Her room was always meticulously well-ordered. She swept, she dusted, she polished, she vacuumed. And in so doing, she created a welcoming personal space that was as lovely as it was unpretentious. Her place was resplendent with little Buddhas, her friends’ black-and-white photography, reproductions of Victorian fairy paintings, books and rings and smooth stones and beads and tiny beautiful abstract sculptures. Her home was never cluttered, dirty, or unfriendly.

It is also a fact that Alexandra detested peppers with an intense hatred. Freshman year, our friend Christopher thought it would be a great April Fool’s Day prank to squeeze pepper juice in Alexandra’s immaculate clothing drawers and impeccable bed. Another girl in the dormitory, a loudly anti-abortion, conservative, evangelical Christian, thought this was the height of hilarity. When Alexandra entered her room that evening, she froze and sniffed the air, instantly detecting something terribly wrong. When Christopher and the other girl entered and found her trying to hold back a gag as she emptied her underwear drawer, they busted out laughing. Alexandra made friends sparingly and was deeply loyal to those who entered her inner circle. Christopher was one of these; the other girl was not. Alexandra turned her fierce green eyes on the girl and said, “This is exactly as funny as me putting a dead fetus in your bed.” The girl ran off, terrified. Alexandra turned her gaze on Christopher. “I’ll deal with you later,” she said in a low, steady voice. Christopher backed away slowly and hid in his room. Alexandra went out and talked herself down, over brown-rice tea and sashimi.

Alexandra’s aversion to general disorder was barely evident when I opened my door, which was a testament to both her love for me and her talent at acting. She told me later that she didn’t know there were bowls of urine festering under my bed, but I can’t imagine the smell escaped her notice. I know she saw the pile of garbage and the empty soda cans that rolled at my feet, the stained clothes all over the floor and, most of all, my skinny, stinking frame. I hadn’t showered in weeks, and I had been wearing the same urine-stained sweatpants and T-shirt for too many days to count.

She met my gaze and didn’t blink. “We’re going out to dinner,” she said. It wasn’t a suggestion.

“We are?” I asked, confused.

“You should put a coat on, and a scarf. It’s cold.”

The only thing that surprised me more than Alexandra’s presence was the fact that I did what she told me to do. I put on a coat, a scarf, and Mary Janes (not generally known to work with sweatpants, but I didn’t really have fashion on the brain) and followed her down the stairs and across the street to a Malaysian restaurant we’d often admired from afar, back when I was normal.

We sat down and stared at one another for a moment.

“So what’s been going on with you?” she said. “I haven’t seen you in forever, and I don’t even know what you’re up to. How’s school going?”

“Pretty well,” I mumbled, and a waiter appeared with menus.

Alexandra ordered a mango lassi. I ordered water.

“Don’t you want tea?” Alexandra asked. “You love peppermint tea. They’ve got peppermint tea.”

“No, water’s cool.”

“Are you sure you don’t want peppermint tea? I’ve seriously never been out with you and seen you not get peppermint tea if it’s on the menu.” Alexandra’s voice was rising to a higher pitch than normal, and a look of confused concern crossed our waiter’s face.

“Water’s fine.”

“Are you gonna get dinner?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Not hungry?” On the last syllable, Alexandra’s voice squeaked to new heights. “They’ve got all your favorite things. Look, they’ve got chicken with mango and coconut. And they’ve got noodles. Did you want noodles?”

“I’m fine,” I said mechanically and, for a moment, I wondered how exactly I’d gotten out of my apartment. Had I walked, or floated, or what? It was hard to remember.

“I can come back . . .” the waiter said faintly, backing away.

“No!” Alexandra snapped. “We will get a plate of noodles and a plate of coconut-mango chicken, and we will share. And some peppermint tea. And no peppers.”

“No . . . no peppers? Is someone allergic?”

Alexandra turned the full force of her gaze on him.
“No . . . peppers.”

His eyes widened in fear. “Yes, madam.” He skittered away.

She turned and looked at me. “Are you feeling okay? You look really thin.”

And for a moment, something dead inside me briefly flared back to life.

Out of all the parts of the story—the imaginary people in my head, the pissing in cereal bowls, the lack of showering—it is this part that embarrasses me the most. I’ve told this story on stages in cities from Los Angeles to Oslo, including many places in between, but I’ve never told this part. It’s just too lame to cop to in person.

“I did this,” I said, and showed Alexandra the place on my wrist where I’d cut myself earlier that day. I’d done it on purpose, but I hadn’t even broken skin enough to draw blood. I wasn’t a cutter—I always made fun of the goth girls who carved their creepy boyfriends’ names into their arms—but I was bored and I was awake, and it seemed like an interesting experiment. What would that feel like? Would it hurt? I found that it did hurt, but only a tiny bit, and I filed the information away for later use.

Now that’s awkward enough, but here’s the truly humiliating part, the piece I’ve never admitted to anyone else—not to my parents, my friends, my therapist, or my very patient audiences: it was a butter knife.
A fucking butter knife
. What the hell kind of half-assed training-wheels shit is that? I’ve given myself deeper cuts while shaving my legs. It was nothing more than an advanced scratch. It wasn’t even a fully realized effort to hurt myself, much less end my own life. It was pretty much the most pussy attempt at self-destruction ever.

But I showed it to Alexandra anyway.

Her expression was briefly horrified, and then switched to a look I’d never seen on her face before. It wasn’t totally sad and it wasn’t totally angry and it wasn’t totally worried, but it might have had a little bit of all of these things put together, with something else.

“You need help,” she said evenly, lowering her voice. “I don’t know what is happening, but it’s something really bad. You need to tell your parents what’s going on, and go home.”

At this, a feeling I hadn’t encountered in a while—defiance—shot up within me like a geyser.

“You can’t make me,” I said, except maybe it wasn’t me saying it, exactly.

The waiter appeared. “Mango lassi and water?”

“In a minute,” Alexandra said, without breaking eye contact with me.

“No, I’ve got them right here,” he said.

She turned and glared at him.

“I’ll come back later,” he said, and disappeared.

She turned back to me.

“Go home and call your parents,” she said. “Tell them to pick you up. Because if you don’t, I’ll call them. And I don’t care if they get mad at me or you get mad at me.”

“I’m twenty-
one
,” I said, and it came out like a hysterical whine.

“Not right now, you’re not,” she said.

I rose slowly, and noticed with detached interest that someone had shredded my napkin to bits and rained the pieces on the floor all around my chair. Then I trudged to the door, across the street, up the front stairs, and into my building. Once inside, I slowly ascended two flights of stairs before dropping to my knees to crawl up the third. I was too tired to remain upright. In my room, I accidentally kicked over a bowl of urine. Automatically, I fetched a paper towel and dropped it on the puddle. I watched the dark stain spread across the paper. Then I went to sleep.

I awoke three hours later to a ringing phone. My phone hadn’t rung in a long time. For the second time that day, my surprise propelled me forward into an unusual action: I answered the call.

“Hello?” I said hoarsely.

“Hi, Ra-Ra!” chirped one voice.

“Hey, Ra!” boomed another.

It was my parents.

I had forgotten about my non-dinner conversation with Alexandra, so I couldn’t imagine why they were calling me. Had I been of sounder mind, I might have noticed that the clock read 11:00
P.M.
, which to suburban middle-aged white people is like 4:00
A.M.
: they’re only up at that hour if something very big is going on. In addition, they were both on different extensions in the same house, something parents only do when they call to tell you something awful, like that your older brother knocked up that terrible girl who works with him at the carwash, or that your grandmother drowned the cat in the bathtub.

All these details escaped my attention.

“Hey, guys,” I said, and it sort of came out smooshed, like
Hayguysss.

“How’s everything going, Ra?” my dad asked with a feigned cheer that, again, escaped my notice at the time.

“Great,” I mumbled. “Awesome. Really, really good. Like the best.”

“Whadja have for dinner?” my mother asked, her voice the same high-pitched mode of perky she used with her elementary school students.

I had to lie, because otherwise—otherwise—I couldn’t think past “otherwise,” so I mumbled, “Food. Really good food. Pasta and . . . hamburgers and . . . salad and . . . water and . . . other pasta.” The Thing sat heavy on my shoulder and dug in its claws. “And watermelon ice cream,” I added, inventing a dish that sort of sounded like the kind of interesting thing you’d eat in a city.

“You sure, Ra?” my dad asked, and his voice wavered a little.

Oh shit,
I thought, alarm bells going off in my head.
He’s on to me. This dude is psychic! How does he know I’m lying? I said “watermelon ice cream”! That’s too good to be a lie!

I thought fast, and came up with the perfect answer to shut him down.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, and cleared my throat elaborately.

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, and my mother piped in. “How’s school going, Ra? You getting good grades?”

“Yeah. Yup. Oh, yes,” I said. “Like As . . . Bs . . . one B-minus, because this teacher didn’t understand what I was trying to say, but she’s letting me do it over so . . . I feel pretty awesome about that.” I punctuated every few words with a cough. I realized I hadn’t spoken to them at such length in a very long time. It was surprisingly tiring.

“Good grades?” my dad said. “You sure about that, Ra?”

Goddammit,
I thought.
This motherfucker’s good. Maybe he really does have like the eighth sense or whatever. This is getting eerie.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Ra, is everything okay?” my mom asked, and I relaxed a little. Mom was an easy sell.

“Totally,” I said. “I’m pretty busy right now, actually.” I reached out and turned on “Satellite.”

“You sure about that, Ra?” she asked.

Not her, too! What are these people, wizards? Are they fucking soothsayers or some shit?

I jerked my head to the side and caught sight of the paper towel I’d put over the urine spill earlier. It had dried and yellowed. The bowl of piss had been sitting there for two days . . . or maybe it was three, I couldn’t remember. I’d kept telling myself I would wash it out in the sink, but the sink and I were having issues because it was giving off a hostile vibe and I just wasn’t interested in the drama.

“You can tell us if something’s wrong, Ra,” my mom said.

And then I knew it was over and that they knew everything, even though, really, they didn’t know the half of it. I thought they must be omniscient or something, that they could see all the bowls of pee and the dirty clothes everywhere and the garbage and all the rest.

“I don’t think I’m feeling too well, Mommy,” I said. This greatly confused the Thing on my shoulder, which commanded me to commence rocking back and forth. I obeyed.

“We didn’t think so, honey,” my mom said. “Would you like us to come pick you up?”

My shoulders dropped about a foot, which startled the Thing so much that it disappeared for a moment.

“Yes, please,” I said, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in a while—tears, real ones, bubbling up in my eyes.

“Your mother will drive up tomorrow, after she’s done with work,” my dad said.

I looked at the urine-soaked paper towel and then the empty bowl and then at the full bowl sitting under my bedside table, and then I thought about all the sharper knives I had in the drawer, the ones I hadn’t tried yet. And I thought about how much I wanted to die.

“I think I need you to come now,” I said. “I don’t know if I can last that long.”