Prozac Nation (11 page)

The tears come down, not like rain, but like blows.

Homesickness is just a state of mind for me. I'm always missing someone or someplace or something, I'm always trying to get back to some imaginary somewhere. My life has been one long longing.

 

By the time I go off to Camp Seneca Lake for my fifth and final summer, everything is pandemonium. All I remember are snatches of this and flashes of that chaotic moment. Crying to my father on the phone, my mother crying in the other room on her bed, smoking a cigarette; my father asking me to put my mother on the phone; my mother refusing and then consenting and then crying and pleading with him, asking why he is interfering with the relationship that she and I have. She cries some more. I cry some. My mother and I, each of us in our respective rooms, crying. And yelling. And making up. And hugging and kissing and crying some more because we swear we're never going to let Daddy come between us again. And then, sure enough, Daddy comes between us when Mommy isn't busy coming between me and Daddy That's sort of how it went in those days I was always betraying one of them with the other As if this were a love triangle Which of course it was.

My mother starts to scream and cry about everything I do. When I get a second hole pierced in my ear, she goes nuts and I have to go stay with her sister for a few days. When she sees me talking to my father on the telephone in that conspiratorial tone, the one she recognizes so well without even hearing a word I'm saying, she retreats to her room, to her pack of Gauloises, and goes from numb to hysterical and back again. She calls her sister a lot. She tells me I am upsetting her so much that the internal bleeding is starting to get real bad, that soon I will drive her to an early grave. I tell her that I don't want to make her sad, I just want a relationship with my father and I don't want one with Dr. Isaac. She says that Dr. Isaac saved my life and that Daddy is interfering with the therapeutic process.

And then I say, Well, I disagree.

My dad refuses to pay Dr. Isaac's bills even though insurance covers almost all of it, so my mother has to find the money from the pittance she earns editing a hotel directory. When the cash runs out, Dr. Isaac tells me he's going to sue my father for unpaid bills if someone doesn't get him to just fill out the fucking insurance forms. I am so scared of my dad's ire that I tell him I hate Dr. Isaac, giving him even less incentive to pay for treatment. I tell my mother that I love Dr. Isaac but that Daddy is trying to turn me against him. I tell each of them whatever it is I think they want to hear because it is the only way to guarantee that either of them will love me Insofar as a truth existed for me it changed depending on whether I with my mom or my dad.

I just wanted two parents who both loved me.

In the midst of all this domestic panic, going away to camp should have been a relief. But it was not. For one thing, the Brendan Byrne Arena was to open that summer at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, and Springsteen would be playing for ten nights as the inaugural act. I got tickets for several of the dates, but the camp director told my mother that I couldn't leave the grounds for anything except a wedding or bar mitzvah, certainly not for Bruce Springsteen. No way.

I told my mother that if that were the case then I simply would not go to camp. No way.

When I called my father and begged him to let me stay at his house for the summer, he mumbled some words about being at work all day and that there was nothing for me to do all alone at home. And I would talk to him about how undisruptive I would be, that I would lie in the sun with iodine and baby oil on and read Dickens and Daphne du Maurier and no one would even know I was there, but he just gave me an emphatic no. He said, It's not possible, and offered no further explanation.

When I hung up the phone, I realized I was really alone in this. Neither of my parents seemed to realize that the end of my tether would be at Seneca Lake, that what little faith I still had would just die and I would go under with it. And it seemed hard to believe that these people who were so close to me couldn't see how desperate I was, or if they could they didn't care enough to do anything about it, or if they cared enough to do anything about it they didn't believe there was anything they could do, not knowing—or not wanting to know—that their belief might have been the thing that made the difference.

I have never felt so lonesome as I did that day when I hung up the phone after speaking to my father, after all he could say was the same old no he always said.

In the end, my Springsteen tickets went to my mother's boyfriend's kids and their friends and I was shipped to camp. But as I got on the bus that summer, instead of telling my mother how much I would miss her, I told her that I was going to get back at her.

Mommy, how can you do this to me? I am so sick and crazy and in such a precarious state of mind and you know it, and I can't believe you're still sending me away like this. How can you do this?

Ellie, you know there's no other choice.

Mommy, if you could only know how far gone I am, you would
find
another choice. You make it sound like I can't do stuff on my own all summer. How bad would it be for me to just hang out and read and see movies? How bad?

You need to be with other kids your age, she said, really hedging. It would be bad for you to stay at home and just get more and more stuck in your own head. Anyway, it's already paid for. Besides, Dr. Isaac said it would be good for you.

Dr. Isaac is a dope. The fact that you've turned him into your guru proves that you're even more of a dope. And I hate you for doing this to me, and as God is my witness I will make you pay.

I did not even kiss her as I approached the stairs to the charter bus. She actually had a camera and was trying to get me to pose with her, arms around each other, while one of the other parents took a shot of us, as if this were all perfectly normal and I wasn't vowing vengeance. I could not figure out why the hell she had to expend so much energy on pretending everything was okay when it so obviously was not. If she put anywhere near as much effort into admitting there was a problem and dealing with it, maybe there wouldn't be one.

As I took my last steps toward the bus, I said to her, If you send me to camp you might as well be sending me to my death.

Oh, Ellie, stop being Sarah Bernhardt, stop being so melodramatic. You'll have fun. Just give it a chance.

I've given it four years. You will live to regret sending me off for a fifth. I swear.

And as I sat on the bus, I thought: All the years. You will pay. I could not think that her life was hard, that she had her own problems, that she needed a break, that there were so many things I wouldn't understand about how difficult it was to be Mommy. I believed then that the pain I was going to feel for the subsequent eight weeks was greater than any justification. No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.

 

As a child, I remember being left in a lot of different odd places because my mother had to work and my father wasn't there. Weekends and vacations were often spent at my grandparents' house on Long Island, days off from
school were spent on organized group trips to amusement parks and museums. After a while, in my imagination, summer camp was conflated with the afternoons I spent at Schwartzy's, an after-school place my mother sent me to where all the other kids would play Monopoly or basketball or pinball while I sat in the corner and brooded and read, the only girl in a skirt while all the other children were rugged in their blue jeans and sneakers. The only people I would talk to at Schwartzy's were the women who took care of us, who were always enchanted by my waist-length brown hair and the way I sat still like a little grown-up, legs crossed, posture precise. I couldn't wait until Mommy came to pick me up. The relief of her arrival was so dramatic for me, almost like a wheezing asthmatic who is suddenly given her inhaler: When Mommy arrived, I could breathe freely again.

And here I was, at summer camp, the same kid as ever, stuck in a version of Schwartzy's that lasted eight weeks instead of a mere few hours, lost in a loneliness that felt like forever, like a solitude that would never go away.

 

On the first day at Camp Seneca Lake, I began a ritual of hanging out in the director's office and telling him that if he didn't throw me out of camp, I was going to take a drug overdose. I explained to Irv that I didn't much want to die, but I knew that I could take enough pills to land me in a hospital, which would mean, at least, that I'd gotten the fuck out of camp. I told him that I'd taken an Atarax overdose a couple of summers before, that everyone had believed it was an accident and I never disabused them of the notion, but now I wanted to make it entirely clear to him that should I take too much of some combination of Motrin and aspirin with maybe a bottle of NyQuil to wash it all down, he could rest assured that I'd acted deliberately, of sane and clear mind and body.

In response, Irv said: You'll ruin your reputation. People talk. Rumors spread. Everyone at all the other camps will find out and everyone you go to school with will find out.

Who did he think he was talking to?

Other days I would tell Irv that rather than hurting myself with pills, perhaps I would just pack a knapsack with some tapes and books and a change of clothes and a tube of Clearasil and walk off the camp grounds one morning and head for the bus station. He told me that the farmers in this most rural and backward area would probably rape me on the road.

After several weeks of our almost daily talks, Irv and I began to develop a strange rapport that could almost be construed as affectionate. Maybe we even begrudgingly liked each other, kind of the way a cop might find himself with a certain distasteful fondness for a murder suspect he is questioning. After hours and hours of listening to anyone's sad luck story in a stuffy interrogation room, it's only natural to start to feel for the poor fool. One day Irv just flat out said to me, in an echo of sentiments I'd heard so many times before, Elizabeth, you're a pretty girl and you're obviously bright enough, so why not just try to be normal? Why not enjoy what there is here at Seneca instead of fighting it so much? There's no reason you can't fit in.

After that remark, it was clear to me that Irv had no idea just how awful it could be to be thirteen. Our negotiations had reached a definite impasse.

I wrote to Dr. Isaac: “I am sitting by the pool and looking up at the clear blue sky. There is an eagle flying across it, and this should be a pretty sight, but it only makes me think of how I long to be free of my human limbs so that I could fly like that bird. I know if I were dead, I would be all spirit and no body, so I pray for my own death.” He wrote me back with a bunch of platitudes about how he felt for me in my pain. I responded: “There's no need for you to feel my pain with me. Just get me the hell out of here!”

That summer I was so dogged about wanting out that after a while my plan to take an overdose took on the premeditated tone of a cold-blooded murderer who kills without emotion and later recalls the act with all focus on details and paraphernalia, as if connecting the dots: And then, and then, and then. A perceptible change in my attitude had actually taken place. Because I was so angry at
both
of my parents for keeping me quarantined at camp; I no longer chose sides (some choice, like a criminal on death row who must opt for, say, the electric chair or lethal injection) and my depression turned into a militant rage. Depression has often been described as anger turned inward, so I can see how being infuriated at my parents allowed me the luxury—or perhaps I should say, the salvation—of having that anger at long last turn outward. It was as if I had finally found my strength again in hating the hell out of both of them. And it came as a relief to know that I truly had no one, nowhere, and nothing, that my belief that this whole life thing was just a big sham had been confirmed completely. I could now safely sink into the surrender of what little was left, I could experience the leisure of borrowed time and the pleasure of free-falling. And once I had decided that I was going to commit an act of self-destruction, if that were necessary, I felt released from the harshness of the pain: I had found a way out. Damned if they wouldn't learn themselves a lesson when I left the campground not by bus and not by car, but stretched out in an ambulance and heading for the emergency room.

It was not until some time after visiting day that my father, in what was pretty much his first and last act of paternal authority, came up with a plan of reprieve for me. This gesture of solidarity, of course, didn't involve moving in with him. He had simply arranged for me to stay with his sister Trixie, who lived with her husband and two kids in Matawan, a decaying industrial town in central New Jersey. They had a split-level house with an above-ground swimming pool in the back yard. Bob, Trixie's husband, was a foreman in a factory or something like that, and he was the kind of man who came home and grabbed a Pabst Blue Ribbon at the end of the day and ate his dinner in front of the TV set. The furniture all had plastic coverings, the vegetables came out of a can, ketchup was the main household condiment, Cool Whip and Snack Pak pudding were the basic elements of dessert. In other words, they lived in the blue collar nightmare of my pathetically romanticized Bruce Springsteen dreams. You're finally getting what you want, my mom said when I'd call and describe the setup to her.

Of course, it wasn't really very much fun. In fact, it was absolutely dreary, the kind of experience that made me realize why Springsteen wanted out of this life so badly. All I did all day was hang out, smoke pot, and watch soap operas with my cousin Pamela, who was going to start junior college and major in secretarial science in the fall. But at least I didn't have to go to activities. We went to shopping malls and video game arcades without asking anyone's permission. I went to see Tom Petty at the Capital Theater in August without Irv's blessing. I read whatever abstruse texts I wanted all day and all of the night without anyone interrupting for cleanup or swimming or soccer. I listened to Derek and the Dominos'
Layla,
which had become my album of choice that August. I slept past dinnertime. No one ever questioned anything I did: My father had somehow made it clear to Trixie that I was in a bad way for the moment, and so long as I wasn't bothering anyone else, she ought to just let me be.