Sad Janet

by Lucie Britsch

  My point is, there are other weirdos in the woods, and sometimes it makes me feel less alone.

  * * *

  I work at a dog shelter, so I know a thing or two about sadness. It’s like the exact opposite of Disney World.

  Unless you’ve been in a van with a dog on your lap that you’re taking to put down, you don’t know sad. I’d been preparing my whole life for this job. All my years of crying myself to sleep were training so that I won’t cry when I do this job.

  Debs doesn’t know this, but before we go to the vet to have dogs put to sleep, we go to McDonald’s. It’s our little secret. We don’t get the dog a Happy Meal or anything; we’re not that sick. We just get a plain hamburger and feed it to the dog gently, by hand, and tell him or her—but, to be honest, it’s usually a him—he’s a good boy.

  It started by accident. I was starving, and there it was, on the way to the vet. Should I get him something? I said, half joking. Definitely, Melissa said. She didn’t really think we should stop, but I said I’d buy her whatever she wanted. She wanted a little carton of milk, but I refused because that’s weird, so we compromised on a shake.

  I unwrapped the burger. It was the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. The dog didn’t know that, of course. He thought it was the best thing ever. But then so was my crotch. Not even my crotch, but any crotch.

  I can’t believe people eat this shit, I said to Melissa. Melissa and I are both vegans—working with animals will do that—but we’re nonpracticing. You want to be better, but it’s so hard all the time. It’s so sad that you can’t be fucked. I’d always wanted to be a vegetarian, but someone told me once that most wine isn’t vegetarian. I don’t even really like the taste of wine, it’s just that when I was a kid, I thought that when I grew up I’d be one of those women who drinks wine alone at night, and I wanted at least one of my dreams to come true.

  So I’m sad, and I’m stuck out here with these dogs in the woods, but otherwise I’m not really that different from everyone else. I have a job, I have people, I eat junk food in my car after taking dogs to be destroyed.

  And I take Melissa to McDonald’s sometimes. I’m not a complete bitch.

  2

  I didn’t plan to break up with my boyfriend and my family on the same day, but here we are, at a party they’ve thrown me that’s actually an intervention. A party in my own apartment, mind you. They thought I’d be okay with it, they say, because I like intervention shows on TV. I like them, I say, happy they know anything about me, but I don’t love them. What I love is not having the people in my life ambush and try to medicate me.

  At least there’s cake. If there wasn’t cake I might not be so calm.

  We just want you to be happy, my mother says. I would have preferred it if she’d said thinner or prettier or smarter. Anything but the h-word. It’s a lie, anyway: what she wants is for me to be someone else entirely.

  Just take the pills, for Christ’s sake, my brother says, and I want to say, Please don’t bring Christ into my home, he always causes arguments, but I don’t because I’m too busy trying to focus all my thoughts on the cake and not murdering my family.

  He is only saying that because he has taken the pills, the good son. He’s like one of those before-and-afters. Before he started taking pills, he barely gave a shit about himself. Now he’s somehow convinced some poor woman to marry him and have his child. I have to admit they worked for him, the pills. They take the edge off, he’s always saying. People are always saying this, like edges are bad, but really where would we be without them? Ask Bono.

  But then I’ve seen his edge like no one else has. Like the time he came at me with a fork one night at dinner. He hasn’t come at me with cutlery since he started taking the pills, so I guess you could say they work, if not stabbing your sister is the goal.

  I like my edges like I like my hip bones. It helps to know what you’re dealing with. No use pretending the world is soft all the time when it’s really a giant rock.

  The pills work for my brother, but it’s not like he wants me to take them so I can get married and start pumping out babies too. He’s just here because he wants our mother to stop nagging him about me. My mother is a different story. Finding a husband and pumping out babies is exactly the reason she wants me taking the pills. Couldn’t I just get a boob job? I want to say. I hear men like those more than medicated ladies. But I know that’s not true, some men do like medicated ladies. Remember how we all used to worry about guys slipping shit in our drinks, because none of them could get laid the normal ways, with liquor and dim lighting? Now that we’re all medicating ourselves, everything is easier. Now, when a guy asks what you do, you just show him your prescription. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine.

  You’re upsetting your mother, my father says, because this is his one line. What he really means is, Thank god it’s not me upsetting her, so you carry on. Thanks, Dad.

  Your brother doesn’t want you around his kids like this, my mother says.

  Like what? I say. I only see his kids once or twice a year anyway.

  How you are, she says.

  Miserable, my brother says.

  I’m not miserable, I say.

  Depressed, then, my mother says, but she winces when she says it, like it’s something awful that needs fixing.

  I’m not depressed, I say, defiant. I’m sad.

  We’re all sad, Janet, my mother says.

  Just get some help, dumbass, my brother says.

  My boyfriend is very quiet, but then we’ve had this fight so often I can’t say for sure that this wasn’t all his idea.

  I could see him calling my mother up and saying he didn’t know what to do with me anymore. Like I was a thing that needed something doing with. All he’d have to say is something about how he might marry me if I was just a bit different, and she’d be in a cab on her way over to him, to start work on a plan to save me.

  Of course I do need saving—only it’s from them, not from my dark moods, as my mother calls them, which I actually like because it sounds witchy and beyond my control, when really my moods are the only thing I do control.

  They aren’t actually that dark, for that matter. Most days they’re no worse than gray. It’s a manageable melancholia, which feels chic and French. It’s just them that has the problem.

  He says you’re sleeping more, my mother says, meaning this is what my quiet boyfriend has been telling her. He says you only seem to go to work and come home. Are you even still sleeping together? she asks. My father and brother look mortified.

  I’m not answering that, I say.

  It’s a slippery slope, Janet, she says. You know, you could take one little pill and you might feel like doing more things.

  What things? I ask.

  I don’t know, she says, but she knows, looking to my father and brother for help. Not the boyfriend. He’s no help to anyone.

  Normal things, she says.

  If they knew me at all they’d know I don’t believe in normal things.

  My mother is one of those people who maintains that all it takes to feel better is to do some yoga. Of course, she forgets to mention the pills. It’s like when unnaturally beautiful celebrities try to sell you a face cream and you know they’ve had a shit-ton of work done but you fall for it because you need to believe in something, even if it’s just a face cream.

  My whole childhood was spent listening to my mother showing me studies saying that exercise helps lift your mood. Studies all paid for by a sports company, naturally. There weren’t many studies covering the fact that telling your daughter to go jog it out might have the opposite effect. If I’d ever read that going jogging was a perfect occasion to run away from home, I might have given it a try.

  Finally, I’ve had enough. Get the fuck out of my apartment, I tell them. And I’m keeping the cake.

  * * *

 
Once they’re gone, I sit on the floor with the cake and hug myself because no one else is going to. Later I dry-hump a picture on my phone of some guy from some show and then fall asleep, feeling a freeness in myself that is as close to happy as I’m allowed.

  I’ve just lost all the people in my life in one fell swoop, and somehow I don’t care. And it isn’t just because of the sugar high. It’s because they’re exhausting.

  We’ve been arguing a lot. Obviously I have been arguing with my family since I could speak—which, to their annoyance, was earlier than most children—but for some time now I’ve also been arguing with the boyfriend. And not just about how he thought I would be better off medicated, but about other regular-couple stuff, like how he thought that when I told him, Put the toilet seat down, I meant both the seat and the lid, so I’d get up in the middle of the night, sit down in the dark, and pee on the lid. Then I’d wake him up to swear at him. He felt this could wait till the morning. I felt it could not.

  In the beginning, he’d been like me. On the night we met, we were both trying to escape a party we’d been dragged to. He liked my sad. But then he grew out of his, and I stopped trying to make him keep up with mine.

  It’s a cliché, but we said we’d never be those people—people who cared about having a lot of stuff, people who cared about happiness. We would live on love. Love wasn’t happiness; love was something else, something that transcended all feeling. If anything, it veered toward the sad side.

  But then he got a job and a little money and he loved it. He wanted more. I had a job with no money and that was fine. I didn’t need stuff. I wanted less.

  He wanted to embrace the capitalist world, like he thought it was made for him, because as a white man it was. I rejected it all.

  Once he realized that money didn’t work on me, he thought medicating me might work instead. But that was only after I stopped being interested in sex.

  I can only have sex if it’s dark and I’ve had a few drinks. It doesn’t have to be pitch-black, and I don’t have to be blackout drunk. Just a little of both, like I’m squinting at my life.

  We’ve had a lot of arguments about sex. I remember him trying to have sex with me on a Tuesday afternoon and I did not want any part of it. Working at the dog shelter, I get one day off during the week, and I was able to spend it doing stuff Janets enjoy, like not interacting with people. But that day he came home early, I forget why, and he had an idea. I wasn’t prepared for sex—mentally, let alone physically. The mind needs just as much time as the body. It ended up with him shouting, There are worse things than sober sex in the daylight, Janet!, and I shouted back, Yes, but not many!

  When he said, It’s not normal, Janet, people want to be happy, what he really meant was, It’s not normal, Janet, you should want to have sex with me.

  Suddenly, we were characters from a nineteenth-century novel. I wasn’t performing my conjugal duties anymore. I wasn’t keeping the house nice. I wasn’t even happy when he brought home a giant TV, and I love TV.

  I’d always been sad, but now it didn’t fit his needs.

  Finally, to shut him up, I told him I’d go to the doctor. I’ve known forever that if I ever told a doctor everything I feel, they’d tell me it’s all very wrong and try to fix me. I’m borderline so many things. I’m on every spectrum. But I will not have them tell me it’s something that needs correcting. Being on a spectrum just means being human.

  So when the doctor asked me how I felt, I said I felt overwhelmed and underwhelmed at the same time. He didn’t know what to do with that. Then I said I felt sad. That was the mistake. It always is. No one ever hears the bit after, when I say I’m fine with it. That it’s how I’ve always felt.

  I half expected him to say, Your boyfriend says you’ve lost interest in sex. I would have answered, Only with him. I’m just not that into live men anymore. Have you seen the news? They’re awful. And he might think I was into necrophilia, and I’d explain that I meant I wanted an image on my phone, or my hand, something that doesn’t talk, and we’d laugh.

  I might’ve asked him if he’d ever woken up to someone masturbating next to him. It’s the first sign of personal apocalypse, I would have told him.

  Only I didn’t get to say much. Before I could do any jokes, he was trying to give me a prescription. No, thank you, I said.

  When I got home, the boyfriend asked how my appointment went. I told him the doctor said I was awesome.

  * * *

  A few hours after I kick them all out, he comes back like nothing happened.

  A more functioning person than I might have thought to change the locks or throw his stuff out on the street, but that would have been so much effort, and I really just wanted to curl up and die a little—only a little, because there was still cake left and I could dry-hump alone till I rubbed myself raw if I wanted, and I did want. You get tired of not wanting things.

  He’d been gone three hours, but that was long enough for me to realize that I like my life better without other people and their bullshit. I explain this to him calmly. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. He knows I like the people on TV more than real people, for instance, because I tell him so constantly. They don’t ask anything of me.

  I ask him if he can crash at his folks’ place. He says, Probably, but can’t I just stay here tonight?, and I say, Fine, but just because it’s late and I haven’t remembered to throw his stuff out on the street yet.

  So we sleep in the same bed one more time, and now I know what heartbreak sounds like, and it’s a lot like next door’s cat scratching in its litter box. We just lie there like we have all those nights before, only neither of us even tries to sleep. We just lie there in silence, apart from the cat and the sound of all hope dying.

  In the morning, I get up before him and leave a note that says, Please be gone when I get back, and thankfully he is. Sometimes having a job that requires you to get up at stupid o’clock can save you.

  * * *

  As if that wasn’t enough agony for one lifetime, a few days later he has his mum come over and help him get his stuff.

  It’s hell.

  Thankfully she brings her dog, so I can just sit on the floor and play with her while they remove all traces of the life we had. At one point they almost drop a box on us, probably on purpose, which is fair enough.

  I was only ever with him for his mum’s dog anyway.

  The apartment is in both our names. No joint accounts, no joint anything. I wanted my own everything. That should have told us something. It was nice having someone pay half the rent, and a warm body was sometimes welcome, but that was it.

  I didn’t have my own dog because we aren’t allowed them in the building, and I get all the dog time I need at work. I cry into their fur now and then, but I don’t have to look at their sad eyes all night, just my own reflected back at me from the TV screen.

  I did bring a dog home once, though, a sick puppy that needed help. I hid her under my coat, afraid that someone would catch me, but no one cared. I was so sure I could keep her alive. I could not.

  Debs was really nice about it afterward. She said the puppy would have died anyway, and at least she got to go home first. No one said, You killed a puppy, Janet.

  That was the last time I brought anyone home.

  3

  I haven’t always been against taking pills. There was a time when I was dying to take pills, back when it was fun still, when it was my choice, when they were from some girl at school who stole them from her brother. But now everyone’s doing it, and I’m not interested. It’s the new normal, and who ever wanted the new normal?

  Why did everything change? I think people got tired of waiting to feel things, because when they did, it was disappointing. Instead, they started taking pills that promised them they’d feel different, at least, and sometimes that’s enough.

  This is the world now—impatient, even wi
th themselves.

  Those clever pharma guys, as they’re usually guys, knew exactly what people wanted. Not happy pills, exactly, they were so last century, but everything’s okay pills, if it isn’t really and never will be. This has made them super rich, even though it’s kept us super sad, underneath it all. People wanted to take the pills because they were everywhere, and suddenly it just seemed easier. Resistance is exhausting. And there are so many pills to choose from now. And they do work.

  You’re just cutting off your nose to spite your face, my mother says. And she gave me this nose, so she should understand.

  * * *

  I’m driving to work like a hero and I see a billboard that says, Pharmacology! It’s personal! I see it everywhere, so I try not to look up. Even when I’m driving. The person in personal is in bold type, in case you needed emphasis. We want you, Janet, they should just say. The pharma companies all want you to think you’re getting a personalized prescription, unique to your needs, but this new company claims they’ve cracked the code.

  I don’t have a problem with other people taking their meds. When I was little, my mother would spend long periods of time in her room with the curtains drawn, and my father would say, Don’t bother your mother, she’s lying down, and I would sit outside her door and wait. When she wasn’t lying down in dark rooms, she was locked in the bathroom. My childhood was just waiting outside closed doors for my mother, wondering what I did wrong.