Sad Janet

by Lucie Britsch

  But by now it’s clear I’ve agitated everyone with my weird talk of shoplifting, and Karen decides to end things early. Seeing Karen grow some balls immediately brightens the mood, and people start gathering their shit and leaving, but not without throwing me plenty of dirty looks. I’m guessing they’re all secret shoplifters and think I’m there to narc them out.

  Just as I’m leaving, Karen corners me. Don’t make this harder than it already is, Janet, she says. Some people want to be here. It’s the kind of thing only someone getting paid to be there would say.

  Okay, I get it, I say, holding my hands up.

  If not for me, for the others, she says. And I understand. All she really needed to say was, Soon, Janet, you will be one of us and this will be easier. One of us. One of us.

  We’re all there for the same reason, I guess, which is that none of us wants to take pills. That’s the official line, anyway: We’re the resisters. We need to be rounded up and head-counted and monitored for at least an hour a week in some fusty church hall with stale snacks and the local Karen at the helm. But these people’s sadness doesn’t seem anything like mine. I feel protective of my own sadness, suddenly, as if it might somehow be under threat. I’m not dismissive of their individual stories; it’s more that I’m bent on preserving mine. If I should let anyone in, open up about myself, I’ll be one step closer to wanting the everyday pills—which of course has been their plan all along. Put us in a room with the people who would most irritate us, drive us to distraction, then offer us the everyday pill at our moment of weakness.

  I button up—in a hurry, like I have someplace to be—and head for the door. I leave fast, before Pharma Guy has a chance to say anything. He’ll probably go home with Karen, and I’m fine with that.

  I’m almost safe in my car, back in my own world, when Pharma Guy approaches. I can’t run him over, because then everyone will know I slept with him.

  Hey, he says.

  Hey, I say.

  So I got the name of that lady, he says.

  That lady? I say. What lady?

  You know, the lady, he says, glancing back at the meeting, and I get it. I’d forgotten I asked him. I had erased that whole night.

  Oh great, I say, hoping he isn’t going to ask me for something in return.

  It’s Vyla Shirk, he says.

  Thank you, I say. That’s not a name, is what I want to say. I don’t, but I’m thinking it. I still don’t really believe she is a real person; it’s all just some bullshit origin story created by some marketing team.

  But now she has a name.

  Maybe he made it up, the name, I think as I drive away. Because he knows I won’t be able to find anything out about her. If he did, it was kind of a sweet thing to do. And I have to admit he’s good at making up names.

  * * *

  When I get home, I lie on the couch facedown for a while, then watch Home Alone, because I’m home alone, and maybe a child. I don’t feel Christmassy as such, but I don’t feel not-Christmassy.

  Watching movies now makes me think of my boyfriend. We fought about movies a lot. Not the way most couples do, about what movie to see or what a movie was about, and you don’t tell him you’re only there for the snacks, but he knows it anyway. We fought about old movies: he wanted to watch them, and I didn’t. He loved watching old movies—from the eighties, not the fifties. Even movies from the nineties were somehow cool again, which is quite a trick since they were never cool to start with. The problem was, the movies made me cry, even ones that weren’t supposed to, and I couldn’t explain it to him. They all took me back to when I first saw them, when I was someone else, all those feelings I had back then about how I thought the world might be and who I might be in it. All of that was destroyed now, somehow, leaving only whatever I was now. One time he asked me why I was crying, and I said it was because I still didn’t have a hoverboard, but I was lying. It was an extreme reaction, but I couldn’t help it. I was sure things would be better by now. They tell you things will get better. They lie. Things will just be shitty in a different way.

  Music is the same way. It makes me feel things I don’t want to feel, so I don’t listen to it much. I can’t afford those kinds of thoughts if I have to get up every day, and I have to get up every day.

  I don’t like anything making me cry. I want to be in control of my emotions. I need to be in control at all times.

  * * *

  Before I go to sleep, I google the name Vyla Shirk. She doesn’t exist, at least not on the internet, and instantly I’m in love with her. Hi, I want to say, I also don’t exist on the internet. As opposed to my mother, for instance, who exists mostly on some online Jazzercise forum.

  I add the words mall Santa to Vyla Shirk, but nothing. I try mall Santa on its own and I get all sorts of porn, which is my own fault.

  Then I try googling the head of the pharmaceutical company, Mr. Big Pharma himself, Richard Grossman. A photo pops up: a middle-aged man who looks like a potato. He’s a goddamn hero, the pharma bros are saying. Nobody says much about Vyla. She’s mentioned in passing, but never by name. They only tell us the backstory so we’re more susceptible, because everyone believes in love, or so they think.

  I look at the potato-faced man, who looks like every creepy man I’ve ever met, and I think about Vyla. She was right to run off with that mall Santa, I think, especially if the sex is anything like all the mall-Santa porn I just saw.

  Sugar Plums would make a great male stripper name, I think, and fall asleep.

  * * *

  The next day at work I intend to walk the shit out of the dogs and get out of my head. The dogs don’t know all the ways I’m messing up and don’t care.

  My favorite part of my job is walking the dogs. If you’ve ever seen a dog’s face when someone says the word walkies or jangles a leash, you know what those sounds mean to a dog. It breaks my heart how excited dogs are at the mere idea of being taken for a walk.

  Then again, imagine not being able to walk yourself. Imagine having to be walked.

  Walks are always my favorite part of the day. Melissa tries to spoil them by trying to go with me, so I have to get around her by walking the dogs who don’t play well with others. Which suits me fine, because I can relate. Also, the walks give me a chance to get out of my own head for a while. Usually I go too far into my own head, just to stay out of the world, so it’s a nice change of scenery.

  Today, when I get back, Melissa is standing there grinning. Did you have a good walk? she asks. As if you can have a bad walk. Maybe if you’re being chased by someone, sure, but mostly walks are good. They’re pure. Yes, thanks, I say, but then I realize she’s talking to the dog.

  The walks do give me some joy, but I don’t see it as joy, exactly. It’s closer to peace, maybe. Walking with a dog is the closest thing to free, for me and the dog. We forget about the leash and the clock and the fact that eventually I’ll have to return the dog and go back to the world.

  Melissa follows me inside. They were talking about your pill on my radio show, she says. My ears prick up naturally at this. She follows me to the bathroom, but I’m just washing my hands, so I don’t tell her to go away. I want to hear more, obviously. I know my pill is all over the news, but I don’t watch the news. Until Vyla surfaces, I’m not that interested.

  There was some pastor, she says, and some man from the drug company. One lady called in and said, What will they come up with next, a birthday pill? She laughs, and I don’t, because that was my idea.

  And? I say.

  And what? she says.

  And what was the verdict? I say, worrying that she turned over to some Christian rock channel and I’ll never know what the world thinks of me.

  Most people think it’s great, she says. I mean, don’t you? We all just want everyone to be happy, don’t we?

  She’s such a moron. I want to ask her all the obvious q
uestions: Didn’t anyone call in and say maybe pills aren’t the answer? Is it possible that we just shouldn’t care as much—not just about the holidays, but about whether everyone we know is happy? Everyone’s sad now, it’s a fact, so why keep pushing us all to be something else? I don’t ask her any of these things.

  Sure, I say.

  * * *

  When I leave work that night, I don’t want to go home—I’m too worried that I’ll start drinking, or worse, thinking—so I take myself to the movies. The theater is filled with people who are out for the night with other people, and they look at me like I’m pathetic, but I don’t feel pathetic. I just feel like a moviegoer.

  19

  The next day, Pharma Guy shows up at the shelter with his girlfriend. He’s obviously shocked to see me; I’m obviously shocked to see her. He’s uncomfortable at the sight of me, for a second—like most people; I look like how hard life is—but he quickly pretends we’ve never met, and I return the favor.

  Later he’ll probably say, Remember, I told you about her.

  I’m not even mad, just numb.

  He definitely didn’t tell me. I would have remembered. I don’t do sleeping with other people’s boyfriends. I don’t even do sleeping with my boyfriend if I can help it. So the fact that he’s made me someone who sleeps with other people’s boyfriends—without my consent—makes me super mad.

  I feel sad for his girlfriend. She doesn’t look awful. I feel sad for him that I’m the person he cheated with. I feel sad for all of us because we will never understand why any of these things happen, but they do, and we push them down and keep going until we can’t anymore.

  I really wish I’d stolen that turtle now. It was the only thing that hasn’t made me sad in a while, and it’s a lump of plastic.

  We’re looking for a dog, she tells me, his girlfriend, and I think, No shit, because that’s pretty much our thing here. I wonder what’s wrong with the one they have; I thought he seemed pretty great. I want to say, But you have a dog, but I can’t, because then she’ll know I slept with her future husband, which sounds like a rom-com I would totally watch.

  Pharma Guy’s phone goes off, and he excuses himself to answer it, so I start the tour without him. I think about making her take home a dog I know will probably maul her in her sleep, but I don’t even like him enough to bother.

  His girlfriend has great legs. I wonder if the dogs notice or care. I don’t see real-life human-lady legs very often. We’re always covered up here, even in the summer. I see them on TV, but I don’t believe they’re real. I don’t trust anyone who looks like they don’t have any stretch marks. This girl looks like she probably doesn’t. She’ll probably spend her whole pregnancy rubbing cocoa butter all over herself like she’s meat.

  As we’re walking down to my block, she lowers her voice. This dog idea is just to test the waters, she says. You know, before a baby. You know, a lot of serial killers had dogs, I want to say, but I don’t. I don’t get it—she’s acting like having a dog is a totally new idea to her. But your boyfriend already has a dog! I want to say. What is happening here? Has she never been to his apartment? Or did she make him get rid of it, so he can start over with her? The number of people who dump their dogs when they start a family is truly astounding.

  Before we get to my block, she sees a dog in Melissa’s that looks like the one she had growing up. I’ve lost a sale, but at least it allows me to palm her off on Melissa and sneak back to my hole, where I won’t be seen again till they’re gone.

  Later, I tell Melissa who he is. I want her to know what sort of home she’s sending her dog off to.

  Did you know about the fiancée? she asks, confirming her low opinion of me.

  I did not, I tell her, but I’m not sure she believes me.

  Then she surprises me by saying he was good-looking, and I suddenly remember that we’re like women on a prison island who haven’t seen men for years, and sometimes just a whiff of Lynx body spray does funny things to us.

  It’s nearly December. Christmas is almost definitely happening. There’s no backing out now.

  Every year, around this time, I hope everyone will be as exhausted by the prospect of the holidays as I am and we’ll just do a half-assed Christmas, where we mostly lie around in sweat pants, eating whatever’s within reach, and there is no performance. Shouting at the TV is the new singing songs round the piano, anyway, and everyone knows it—even the mums who are always trying to get everyone to sing round the piano, like they’ve just watched Little Women but forgotten that one of them dies.

  But it’s never like that. Even when everyone seems like they’re wilting and might fuck it off, they somehow spring back to life as soon as Christmas is in sight. Like Nosferatu in the shadows, ready to descend. Like a plant you think is dead because you definitely did everything necessary to kill it but somehow it’s still alive. People came back from the dead for Christmas the same way. The same goes for relationships—even the ones you thought were dead and buried suddenly perk up and demand you water them.

  When you’re a kid, of course, Christmas is all laid out for you. You don’t have to do shit. It’s all about tradition and ritual, and you rely on the grown-ups in your life to make sure everything happens as it should. They tell you they’re doing it all for you, so you’ll have a great childhood, but really they’re doing it because they didn’t have a great childhood, but somewhere along the way all that sadness swells up, and you’re not supposed to see it, but it’s there. By then you’re fifteen and it’s suffocating you, so you start telling everyone it’s all bullshit, and no one appreciates you pointing it out because It’s Christmas, Janet.

  Then, finally, you reach the age when you realize you don’t have to do any of it anymore, if you don’t want to. You were probably doing it for longer than you wanted to, just because you thought you should. And it seems like a flash of genius, of clarity, that you don’t have to do it anymore.

  But what if you do want to, it’s just that you don’t feel it? That’s how it is with most relationships, and I think maybe that’s how it is with holidays too.

  All the things adults do—the jobs, the homes, the families, the organized activities—are things I just can’t do. I want to, but I can’t. The boyfriend, he thought I could. Maybe I should have appreciated that more—that he had this hope in me that I don’t have. I genuinely don’t think it was that he wanted me to be something I’m not. I think he thought that if he believed I could do it, then he could do it too, and then we’d both be doing it. I miss that hope he had in me. Other things—like the fact that he thought that lying down on my back in bed was my way of signaling that he could mount me—I don’t miss. Now I sleep in whatever position I want, when I sleep at all.

  But I still have to do Christmas somehow.

  * * *

  My mum’s number pops up on the landline. I never answer the landline, but it keeps ringing, and then she texts me, Answer the phone Janet. So I pick up.

  When the boyfriend lived here, he would answer the phone and it would annoy the hell out of me. It might be something important, Janet, he said. It never was. I always hated the idea of someone calling me at home because it meant they knew I’d be there. I want to be seen, but at the same time I want to be invisible.

  Still, my mother always calls on the landline, and I know I should be grateful to hear her voice, but as soon as she speaks, I remember why I left.

  Janet, you’ve poisoned your father, she says.

  What do you mean, poisoned? I ask.

  Not literally poisoned, she says. But you’ve poisoned him with your words. Or with your ways, I forget which. All I know is that she’s angry because my father still hasn’t thought about making the Christmas cake and somehow, I’m to blame.

  It needs to age, Janet, she says, and I think, You’re aging us all.

  He said he doesn’t feel like it yet! she yells at me.
Like I’m the one who invented the idea that you could not feel like doing things. Where else does this come from? she yells. When has he ever not felt like it before?

  I don’t know, I say. I didn’t say anything to him, if that’s what you’re getting at. He’s his own person, I say, knowing full well this hasn’t been true since he met my mother.

  You need to fix this, she says before hanging up.

  I call my dad. Which scares him to death, I’m sure, because daughters don’t call their dads up out of the blue unless they’re dying or pregnant or—worse—need money.

  Mum said you haven’t done the cake or something because you didn’t feel like it, I say, throwing my mum under the bus. I do this to soften the blow, because I actually do need money, and if he’s just mad at her, not me, he’s bound to send me some money because he’s glad I’m not dying or pregnant.

  There’s time, he says. I take this to mean he isn’t unwell, as my mother thinks, and also I’m not the troublemaker, as she thinks.

  It’s okay not to feel like it, I tell him. Talking about not feeling is as close as we’ve ever come to talking about feelings.

  It’s not okay, he says, it’s awful. I don’t know how you do it. And I hear something in his voice that no daughter ever wants to hear in their dad’s voice: The sound of despair. The sound of when you’ve taken on a sadness that isn’t your own, one you don’t have a place for. One you don’t have words for. It’s the kind of sound helpline volunteers must hear all the time, the kind specially trained dogs can smell a mile off.

  Maybe I’m just bloated, he says, and to be honest he does sound a little gassy.