Elena Undone (3 page)

“Yes, they’re crazy—but you know my parents make yours look like a walk in the park—” Tori stopped to consider her surroundings, the church grounds edging up to the children’s park next door. “Yeah…like a walk in the park.” Then Tori returned to the issue at hand and mollifying Nash. She suggested, “You know, Nash, if there were such a thing as minutes kept of all the myriad circumstances and events regarding family dysfunction I believe it would rival all the sands in the ocean.”

“Save it.”

Nash stormed to the car, waiting for them to leave.

“Thank you so much for all your help with the food drive,” Elena intoned as she continued to watch her son and Tori. “We’ll see you next Sunday.”

“Pastor Barry, we’ve got all the buses lined up for the march. We’re all going to be there. Every last one of us,” Elena heard Millie profess earnestly as she chattered endlessly about their anti-gay protest. Apparently they were protesting a protest. Elena couldn’t really follow what it was all about, she already had so much on her plate, and she couldn’t get herself really worked up about every new cause du jour Millie pursued. Half of them petered out and were simply a framework for her histrionics. The other half Millie drove with a passion. Either way, Elena tried to stay out of them.

“Hey El.” Barry walked up to Elena. He said, watching his son in frustration, “Sounds like we’re going to have to have a family chat tonight at dinner when I get home.”

“Barry—”

“Don’t Barry me. He cannot behave like that at church.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t force—”

“Coming to church isn’t an option, Elena, so don’t even start.”

“But we’ve always encouraged him to think for himself. Maybe this just doesn’t speak to him.”

“No, he’s just being a fifteen-year-old who’s used to getting his own way, thanks to you, and him not attending my services will simply not be tolerated.”

Elena realized it was a losing battle. “I…I’m going to get the kids home so I can start dinner. Anything special you want?”

It took Barry a moment to move beyond his anger toward their son, but when he refocused on Elena, his eyes warmed, and he smiled. “How ’bout your famous meatloaf.”

“Yes, well…” They both laughed. Elena’s last new meatloaf recipe had been a “disaster of epic portions” Tori had quipped, even if it had been at the expense of her own idea to try every known version of meatloaf as a “truly valued experiment—the very insight into the American soul through one of its most classic dishes.”

Elena smiled back. “I’ll see you at home.”

Barry kissed her forehead, then sighed. “Would you talk to him?”

“You know I will.”

Peyton—that same Sunday in July

Peyton sat in her most comfy sweats and a dark blue muscle T as she flipped the day calendar page back and forth; back and forth, yet it was still there: “Women’s Pay Scale Article Due!” circled in big red marker.

Feeling overwhelmed, she returned to her work. Then noticed that the pens and pencils in her Franklin Day Planner cup holder had been messed with. Must have been one of the nurses borrowing a pen. She knew precisely where and how each pen and pencil fit into the holder on her massive reclaimed pine dining room table that she used as her desk, and now stringently went to work to set the world straight.

As she fussed endlessly, in the back of her mind she ran the rather pointless equation that every moment she devoted to her OCD was a minute lost to her deadline, but nevertheless, in this particular instance her OCD was winning out.

Living with her obsessive compulsive disorder or “relentless brain drain,” as she referred to it, had been a ceaseless, and for the most part, unwinnable battle since she had turned seventeen and had had her first full-blown panic attack. Convinced she was having a heart attack she had driven herself straight to the ER, crumpling the front end of her Toyota into a garbage dumpster on the way, so shaken was she by her racing heart and inability to breathe.

For the next eight years, she battled this disorder by white-knuckling a cure. Sometimes she drank away her attacks, only to find them worse the next day. Doctor after doctor informed her that she was not only healthy, but inordinately fit. Her obsessive need to swim one hundred laps a day along with her rigorous workout regime had prompted one doctor to fawn, “Your body is like a work of art. Your arms couldn’t be more sculpted. I find women with arms so defined, hmm, quite beautiful. Please just don’t overdo it.” The r d it.”obsequious doctor had smiled at her a little too sweetly and Peyton found a new doctor.

She had seen specialist after specialist consumed with the idea of inoperable brain tumors, an as yet undiscovered rare blood disease, an electrical malfunction within her heart—it had to be something. Because even when her mother noted with jarring coldness, “This is all in your head and you need to stop it,” she knew whatever she had was real. If her heart could pummel out of her chest in the middle of the night during a deep sleep, it wasn’t her imagination. Either that or her body had a mind of its own.

One day as she walked by the front of a bookstore she saw a book that literally popped out at her:
The Good News about Panic Attacks, Anxiety and Agoraphobia
. The sales clerk had stumbled as she was putting up the display and the book flew into the front of the window toppling all the other books in its path.

Peyton walked in, bought the book, started reading it before she even left the store, and didn’t put it down until she had gulped it all down, sitting at the first Starbucks she encountered, swallowing every word whole, the very sustenance she had needed all these many years to finally bring comprehension to what she believed had become insanity. She did not return to work that day. After she finished the book, she walked to her car, drove to her favorite park, sat at a bench overlooking the vast and beautiful view—not the high-rise buildings of the city, but the endless stretch of Baldwin Hills, a vista of sagebrush, green and open skies. As the sun was beginning to set she cried.

She cried for hours over finally being able to put a name to all her strange brain ruminations and her physical body attacks that made her feel an utter loss of control. Not to mention exhausted by the severity of her clamoring heart, her inability to breathe, her feeling utterly outside of her own skin. The physical aspects were daunting, but it was the surreal and bizarre thought process that had taken more out of her than anything. Her do-or-die need for ritual and the fanatical compulsion to follow random thought patterns as if they had any meaning or bearing of any kind on reality had completely devastated any confidence she had in the ability to be normal. Although, as time had gone by, all her daily rituals had
become
her reality and a great deal of her rational mind had finally come to the conclusion that she truly had gone insane. Yet, here she was, on the printed page. She finally knew herself. A person who had severe and chronic OCD. Breathing deeply, she finally owned her disorder or condition—what it was didn’t even matter to her any longer. Because now she could understand it.

The next day she made an appointment with one of the psychiatrists listed in the back of the book who all specialized in OCD and Panic Disorders. She met with the rather slight and strange little fellow by the name of Dr. James at the very first appointment he could give her. But within moments the kindness in his eyes, the warmth of his smile put her at ease. Unlike any doctor she had ever known, this gentle man called her daily to check in with her and he made her feel immediately safe with his thorough knowledge and guidance. He was used to patients dropping their medication due to the side effects, which Peyton had to agree were onerous. “The pills can’t do anything for you in the bottle,” Dr. James stated a number of times when he called to check on her progress. But along with medication, and the next year in therapy, Peyton finally began to fully under kn fully stand the mechanics of her OCD. She felt like a new woman—the best version of herself she could be. She had lived for eight long years crippled by this disorder, narrowing her life experience to a pure subsistence of writing and swimming maniacally, rarely going out, joining her best friend Wave for rare social outings, but mostly holed up inside, reading in the few free moments her rigid schedule allowed. And then she had found freedom.

It was during her second year of adjusting to life in a more normal manner that she decided to tackle the project of writing her personal memoir. Her agent had said it was sort of like the new AA—everyone seemed to be coming out of the closet and baring their soul about one syndrome or another. Regardless of Emily’s crass pitch, Peyton wrote the book to speak to all the other people out there who had been suffering as she had, so they would know there was a way out—and if there was anyone she could keep from suffering even a second longer, she was determined to do so. For Peyton, taking care of her OCD was as life-affirming as a drunk quitting the bottle.

Her memoir,
Trust, Who Needs It?
—
An Agoraphobic’s Memoir
hit number two on the Self-Help Book List the first week it was out and soon thereafter number one. Peyton won numerous awards and a bit of notoriety, she dated another well-known out lesbian in the entertainment industry and within the worlds of OCD junkies and lesbians she had a weird melting pot of fans, and was noted in
Curve
as a “celesbian on the rise.”

The fact was that OCD was a condition one learned to live with. Medication helped Peyton’s remarkably intense panic attacks to all but vanish. Her OCD, however, flared up on a regular basis depending on how much stress she had to endure and at this juncture, she had learned when to give in and let the ritual double-checking take over…sometimes it just was easier to cave, get it over with and get on with life. As she did now, lining up the pens for the ninth time. Nine was her number and she always performed her rituals in three sets of three. As she was finalizing this last set of three she heard the silky voice.

She knew before she even turned around that Margaret would be dressed in something seductive. As she began to swivel, very slowly to resist what she knew was coming, she saw her in the corner of her eye. Sure enough, the svelte and exceedingly attractive Margaret was clad in lacy attire. With her Marilyn Monroe tousled blond hair, her eerily transparent blue eyes, Peyton could feel before she saw Margaret’s
come-fuck-me
leer. Margaret was known to be assertive, or “a bloody hounddog!” noted Wave, and was used to getting what she wanted.

“Hey…stranger,” Margaret purred. “I’ve been waiting…”

“God baby, I’m so sorry—but I can’t.”

“Oh, but I think you can.” Margaret came up behind her, seductively slid her fingers down the front of Peyton’s T, stopping to gently cup Peyton’s right breast. She bent over her, kissing the edge of Peyton’s neck. The chill that ran down Peyton’s spine was not desire. As Peyton was about to turn to convince Margaret to wait, Margaret leaned closer still to reveal her secret weapon: a frozen vial of sperm.

Peyton smiled, bargaining, “Babe, I know I said Ige now I s’d be home early…but I have to get this article to Emily…how ’bout in an hour or two. Three tops?”

Margaret’s smile slid from her face. She slammed the baby-making paraphernalia on the desk. “Right! You know what, Peyton? If it’s not a deadline, it’s your mom. Or your mom. Or your mom! Any normal person would have kept her in that home. Where she belonged. I don’t even know if it’s that safe for her to be here with all the loony tune nurses you’ve got running around this house.”

Peyton clammed up.

“I’m so over it, Peyton. Really. I know you think you’re some sort of goddamn saint, but you’re a martyr—”

“Trust me, she won’t be a problem for much longer.”

“Look, don’t make me the villain here. This was your goddamn idea. I’m ovulating now.” Margaret pursed her lips. “You have your schedule—I have mine.”

“Margaret—”

“You don’t have to fuck me, okay Peyton? Just squeeze this slime up my uterus.”

*

“Now that’s what I call high seas romance,” Wave Fontaine remarked to Peyton, as she refilled her coffee cup, having been told in mini-segments, between Wave waiting upon other customers, the series of events that let up to their “kind of royally fecked up evenin’.”

Wave’s vernacular was unique as it comes and when people often asked where she came from, she’d respond “specifically South Manchester, but with twelve years of Glasgow thrown in for good measure. But I’d get kneecapped if I was to describe it as Scottish.” With burnished red hair, fair faced and freckles, “God sprinkled ’em all over me—even my arse for God’s sake!” Wave was an entity unto her own, with her boho-chic style, her genuine sweetness and “sincerely codependent” persona. And Peyton loved every ounce of her.

As Wave continued on her appointed rounds of coffee pouring, she returned and gently bowed and with the most elegant turn of the hand, she filled up one of regular Pinot Latte customers she was serving. “It’s all in the wrist. Yeah, I spent years at university perfecting just this move.”

Peyton watched her dearest friend in the world with admiration. She didn’t know how anyone could be so inordinately friendly, bubbly and bright all the time, but that was Wave. She was a spectacular mix of bawdy stage performer who’d spew out the most random crass offerings in one moment and in the next be the wisest, softest, most nurturing and loving soul Peyton had the great fortune to know. It didn’t matter what was going on, Wave was all over it, snappy, good-natured, fiercely loyal and protective.