Holding Still for as Long as Possible (5 page)

I was at the dinner table a year after the panic attacks returned, vibrating legs skimming the hem of the off-white tablecloth. We'd taken the subway out to Scarborough, where my girlfriend Maria's mom had moved from Winnipeg last year.

“A steal, Hilary,” she was telling me about the tablecloth. “You wouldn't believe it. I should take you to Winners with me.”

Maria's mother appreciated a bargain. She was one of those ladies with a sensible short brown haircut and pants pulled too high up, just thrilled when she could buy a designer brand for less. I loved her.

“Mom, we don't need to do any more goddamn shopping,” muttered Maria, filling up her wine glass. “The basement is like a bomb shelter already.”

It was true — the amount of preserves, cases of drinks, bottled water, and multi-packs was almost impossible to take in with one glance. Maria's mom even had two fridges, full to capacity. She was prepared for disaster and mass hunger, binge eating for thousands. And what she could hold in the tiny duplex basement was nothing compared to what had been in her old house in Winnipeg.

Maria was no longer my girlfriend, as of 3:47 that morning, but we'd decided not to tell anyone about the breakup yet. It was too new, and it just seemed easier to play along for her mother's birthday. My voice was still hoarse from yelling, and things we'd said to each other with such finality echoed in my brain. An endless loop of
Why can't you just get it together
( her ) and
When did you become such a paragon of sanity
( me ) and
You drive me fucking nuts with your bullshit
( both ) and
I'm so tired of you
( both )
.

We'd been dating since the end of high school — seven years. Succumbed to the cliché itch, I suppose. We had become like furniture to each other. But to be honest, we also didn't have a lot of other friends. Except for some brief threesomes and the odd crush, we'd never been with other people. The friends we had were mutual, except for Roxy, who I'd met at the café where I work. Last month Roxy had needed a roommate, and Maria and I decided to move apart, to see if we could still date but have separate lives. That hadn't worked either. Looking back, it was really just a way to break up without saying it.

Maria and I had moved to Toronto together from Winnipeg in 2000. Her mother had moved to Scarborough a few years later to be with Maria's grandmother, who'd since passed away.

Maria and I were so familiar with each other's families that we no longer had to act polite. Maria's mother liked me because I got excited by girlie stuff, and Maria would rather poke out her own eye than go to a shopping mall or get her nails done. She got along great with my mother, who thought women who got manicures were betraying the sisterhood. My mother bought enough groceries that she could have lunch and maybe dinner. The only bulk items in our cupboards growing up were grains, flour, sugar, and coffee. Ingredients.

I think what was worse than a nervous breakdown was the route on the way to it. Everything is scarier when you anticipate it, right? I bet real crazy-town is actually not so bad. Maybe a little bit freeing. Still, I was trying to avoid it with every bit of my anxious, cautious self, and avoiding anxiety only makes it worse. It lurks in your periphery, taunting you with every doubt and possibility you could ever dream up.

Everything's okay. Right? On! Fire! Here we go again. Fuck.

I started thinking:
What if I just stand up right now and start yelling,
You can all go to hell!
What would Maria's mother do if I ruined her birthday dinner? Good Will.

This was what I looked like: a little flush in my pale cheeks, gaunt from months of only being able to eat toast, soup, cup after cup of coffee. I appeared still, calm, smiling politely as if absolutely nothing was wrong. My short legs I'd neglected to shave, under apathetic black tights, holes in the knees. A mini-skirt cinched with a pin, because it kept falling down. Thick grey wool socks. My whole grown-up life I'd been a solid size eight, rounded-out 34 C-cup, and now I was in Maria's Clash T-shirt from high school. Maria, who people always try to feed. I kept thinking that I couldn't be as small as her, but apparently, I was. I fell out of my clothes, and didn't know why. I felt so unaware of my body. My hair, which had always fallen in thick dark brown waves, now a bleached blonde bob. My lips were always dry. I forgot to drink enough water.

I looked as if Toronto had beaten me up and neglected to feed me. But when I went back to Winnipeg over Christmas, all I got from old friends and relatives was compliments. Apparently I looked sophisticated. Thin. Stylishly unkempt.

It confounded me, that inside I felt too hot, then too cold, my heart racing, every light too bright, every sensation heightened. Invasive obsessive thoughts appeared without warning and refused to abate. But outside, glamorous? I watched everyone sitting around me, buttering their bread, slicing meat, so oblivious.

What makes someone do something violent and someone else refrain? What if I hurt someone? What if I just lost it? That would be the worst thing in the world. Oh my god, I could be the worst thing in the world.
A reel of other thoughts followed. They said:
Oh my god, you're being irrational. Calm down. Things are fine.
But the obsessive thoughts were so much louder, so much more fierce. They were like a Pantera song blaring over the soft serenade of reason.

I thought:
Will Maria understand if I explain, if I have to leave? What if I have to leave right now, in the middle of dinner, because I'm afraid of what I might do? I can't eat. Food looks like stones, tastes too sharp.
I decided to go to the bathroom
.
I couldn't believe I had worn high heels. You had to have confidence to walk in shoes that high or else you couldn't stay standing. I tried to breathe.

“Excuse me, I'll be right back.”

“You okay?”

“Yup, just gotta pee.”
No, I'm okay. Listen to the soft song of reason, already.

In the hallway I briefly leaned against the wall. During panic attacks, I searched out solidity in objects like support beams, sidewalk pavement, braced shelving units. I held on, keeping fingers flat, in case they ran off like baby spiders in all directions.

I inhaled slowly, opened the bathroom door and exhaled even more slowly, sitting on the fluffy lilac toilet-seat cover. I took off the black pumps. Ripped open the toes of my stockings. Stared ahead and inhaled again.
I am an emergency. I am not an emergency
. Reason and panic battled it out. I wished
I smoked.

A bottle of yellow cleanser sat beside the sink. What if I drank it?
What. If
. I read the label. The entire label. I put the bottle back down on the counter. Put each shoe back on. Every sentence said to completion in my head started with
What if.
Just go back
.
Go back to the kitchen. Walk down the hall. Everything is fine. Tap tap tap. I'm acting like a junkie. They're going to think I'm on drugs.
I almost wished I
were
on drugs. It would explain how I was feeling.
Good Will
.

These are your loved ones. These are the people who love you most in the whole world. You have never even so much as slapped anyone across the face. Seeing people in pain is horrifying to you. You are safe.
The soft refrain played and I listened to it.

What makes someone evil? What makes them snap?
Good Will. Good Will.
What if I just went crazy? What if this was what crazy felt like?

I walked down the hall pretending to look closely at all the framed Sears portraits on the wall featuring the best of the mullet, the bowl cut, the high-bangs-and-braces combo.

“Hilary, you look so pretty. You've really lost weight. Toronto agrees with you,” Maria's mom said, before biting into a dinner roll.

Bombs. Cracked skulls. Fire. I could light this table on fire,
I thought.
Tip candles to tender cheeks, slam fist into gravy boat, pick shards out of skin.

Maria grabbed my hand under the table, squeezed twice in a row and whispered, “Everything's fine. Just relax.”

She was the only one who ever noticed my subtle unravelling. She promised me I was not dangerous. “It's a form of anxiety disorder,” she would explain, highlighting lines in her psychology textbooks with lime green and calming blue. “Obsessive disorder. Repetitive bad thoughts. It doesn't mean you're a bad person.”

Similar thoughts occurred to me whenever I stood on a high bridge or a balcony.
What if I jump? What makes someone jump?! What if I
. . . the thought ran around in my brain and didn't stop until I got back to the ground. In the past I've walked twenty blocks to avoid taking the subway, certain I would jump in front of the train. I used to press my palms to the pavement afterwards to stop the spinning, so grateful to be standing where there was nowhere to plummet from.

“Billy, I forgot you started using a nickname. I like it. It's spunky! I mean, I would think a short form of Hilary would be Hildy or Hilly. But Billy, huh?” Maria's mom said. “Is it so people will stop asking you about your music career? So you won't get recognized so much?”

“I just like it. I like girl names that could be boy names,
I guess.”

Holding up a glass of wine in a toast, Maria's mom said, “To getting older!”

Happy. Yes.
Tap tap tap. When I was eight years old, I crossed my fingers for good luck for an entire year. My fingers grew curved. My index finger a half moon at the tip. Monster digits. I've never been right.

Good Will.
Good Will
. I repeated those two words. They were magical prescriptive words, meant to be said in careful combination so as to control the universe of uncertainty. The first time I said them, I was on the road and the tour bus had taken off without me.

I was presumed to be asleep in my little cot in the back of the bus, pink curtains pulled around me. Uncle Jonny had taken his drunken girlfriend's word that
the
little one
was back there, when it was really Lou the sound guy and a music journalist from the Edmonton arts weekly. When Jonny's girlfriend heard make-out sounds she thought it best to leave it alone. Not tell Jonny and get him all riled up. Meanwhile I was dealing with a disgusting tampon emergency in the even more disgusting bathroom at the Irving station just outside of some small town in Saskatchewan. When I came out, I sat in the station restaurant for eight hours, smoking cigarettes and eating plates of fries, saying
fuck it
to the no-carbs diet.

After two hours I stopped looking out the window for the returning bus. I knew they'd be in Vancouver before the rest of the tour figured out I was gone. With a thin grey hoody and a five-dollar bill, I was undeniably
left.
Finally, I talked my way onto a truck going to Winnipeg that had stopped to fuel up. The driver said, “My daughter loves your music
.
”
I curled up in the front seat. The guy's T-shirt said
Good Will Trucking Service.
I repeated the slogan. My magical two words:
Good Will.

What can I say about being famous? Why is it such a destination? Because you want to be liked, I suppose, in an exaggerated way. But what's underneath that, really? It's a fight against our eventual death. That's creativity in a nutshell. A messy tug-of-war with imagination to erase that feeling that nothing really matters anyway.

So I've been famous, the kind of famous where girls in grocery stores said to me,
You made me believe in myself / leave my abusive boyfriend / forgive myself for the abortion
. Sick kids wrote me letters. There were
Seventeen
magazine articles. Minor endorsement deals. And what did I feel? More scared to die than ever. Before I'd been scared to die, but also, really excited to live and make my dreams come true. My dreams came true. Then I became scared that this was the height of feeling: watching from the stage while crowds sang songs about my silly little feelings. You were not anything they wanted to be, but they believed you were. They believed being you would make such a difference in their lives. Their belief anchored them. Pacified them.

Therefore, you have no choice but to believe nothing. Because fame makes the whole world seem ridiculous. And stupid people love it. Are fuelled by it, get God complexes and forget how to eat and shit without their assistants. But have an ounce of intelligence and be famous, and you will be fucked in the head forever. Spiritual death. I promise.

This was why I counted everything. I put things in order. I made it all make sense, because ultimately, nothing did. It was a trick I played on myself and it worked. And even that thought, that nothing matters, was trite. Was no big revelation. But if you felt it in your chest, it hurt. It was a physical pain. A lack.

I lifted a spoonful of sweet potato to my lips and swallowed, thankful the conversation had shifted away from me. Maria's mother talked about her new business venture — candle parties. Like Tupperware, but with candles. My fingers stopped tingling. My throat stayed open. My heart slowed. I swallowed and tasted gasoline. My heart started up again and didn't slow until Maria and I were on the subway home.