Agorafabulous!

by Sara Benincasa

  “No stressssss!” I chirped, smiling at the cabinets.

  We left the hospital, with me leading the way. Anxiety felt like a distant memory. I couldn’t believe I’d felt so yucky earlier in the day. What had I been so worried about? Everything was fine. The hospital was fine, the sky was fine, the sun was fine. I was fine, Dr. Sophia was fine, everybody was fine. My pills were fine, and I could tell they were really starting to work for me. I was finally okay! It was so nice to be awake! Look at those clouds! Look at those trees! I was in Sicily! How exciting! I felt so blessed. Back home, Kevin was dead, and that was sad, but I was here and alive and that was just wonderful. I should really go to a church and say thank you to God for this blessing of being alive and in Sicily. Oh my God, was that a bird, singing? That bird in the tree was singing.

  We got to the bus, and I insisted that Mr. D’Angelo and Mr. Brixton board first. Then, smiling, I hopped up the steps, said hello to the driver, and turned to face the students.

  All told, we’d been gone for about thirty minutes. Ordinarily, that’s not a long time to wait. But inside a tin box on wheels baking in eighty-degree heat, with the engine and air-conditioning off and windows that were not designed to open, surrounded by dozens of sweaty, irritable teenagers, I think the time passed rather more slowly than it did inside the cool, airy hospital. Thirty-nine pairs of eyes stared at me with expressions that ranged from irritated boredom to white-hot hatred (you can guess where the latter gaze came from). In the midst of my sublime new happiness, I recognized that my peers—who were all going to be my dear friends after this trip—needed some inspiration. And I was the only one truly capable of giving it to them. With that in mind, I decided to make a speech.

  “You guyssss,” I began, beaming as I stood in the aisle. “I know it was sssssso hot on this busssss, and I’m sssso sssssorry you’re all hot and sssssweaty and sssstuff. Thank you for waiting for mmme. The great news isssss that I feel sssssso mmmmuch better! I really think the resssst of thissss trip isss gonna be soooo awessssommmmme.” And with that, I dropped into a seat and stared happily at the ceiling.

  “Oh my God,” Amber said. “And she got fuckin’ drugs? Why the fuck does she get everything and I get bullshit?”

  The driver turned on the engine and the A/C. Most of the students clapped with a mixture of sarcasm and relief. Leann leaned across the aisle and said, “I’m so glad you’re feeling better! I finished all my postcards while we were waiting. I have some extra blank ones if you want any.”

  “Thankssssssss,” I replied happily.

  “Can we get to the goddamned beach now?” Amber demanded.

  “Actually, Amber,” Mr. D’Angelo said, glancing at his watch, “we gotta head back about forty minutes in the other direction and get Sara settled in at the hotel, so we’re not gonna have time for the beach today. But we’re still taking the tour of the Museum of Agricultural Implements at four—not you, Sara, I want you to stay and chill out, just nap or go shopping or whatever you want, that goes for the rest of the week too. Leann, you can stay with her if you want, or you can come with us. No stress!”

  “No ssssstressss!” I said.

  “No stress,” Leann said. She sidled up and put a comforting arm around me.

  A few rows behind me, I heard Amber start to cry in angry, gulping little gasps.

  “This sucks,” she sobbed, stamping her foot. “This fucking sucks.”

  Her friends were silent. I smiled gently to myself, and soon the gentle bouncing of the bus, the warm pressure of Leann’s arm, and the rhythm of Amber’s sniffles lulled me into a deep sleep.

  Chapter Three

  Bowls of Pee

  If the whole point of college is to learn unforgettable life lessons, here’s the main one I took home: when you piss in a cereal bowl and let it cool down to room temperature, it behaves a lot like chicken noodle soup under the same conditions. The solids settle to the bottom, and a layer of fatty scum forms on the surface, like the algae that blooms in untended suburban swimming pools in August.

  Fresh urine can smell sweet, but it ages in a decidedly bitter fashion. If you leave it in the bowl for a few days, the acrid stench will peel the skin off the insides of your nostrils. If you get in the habit of shoving the bowls into the closet or under your bed, it won’t be long before the whole room is choked with stink. The best advice I can give you is to open all the windows, get a fan going, and hold your breath till you’ve dumped the stuff down the drain and filled the bowl with scented dish soap. Then you can give a ragged exhalation and cautiously inhale again, and all you’ll detect in the air is a foul trace, a barely-there remembrance. It won’t be that bad. Memories of terrible things are almost always easier than the things themselves.

  When I was twenty-one, I got into the habit of voiding my bladder into chamber pots of my own invention. I was afraid to use the bathroom, because I’d had one too many panic attacks there. I wasn’t a religious person, but I was into the kind of hippie spirituality sold in the New Age section at mainstream bookstores. Therefore, I diagnosed my bathroom with a case of seriously bad vibes, and devised a far more soul-nurturing habit of pissing in my bedroom, in dinnerware. They were actually a very nice set of plain white bowls from the Le Creuset outlet back home in Flemington, New Jersey, where I grew up. My mother had bought them for me as a housewarming gift when I moved into that apartment, a twelve-by-ten-foot room with a sink, a hot plate, a mini-fridge, a slim closet, a twin-size mattress on a rolling cot, and a small window with a view of a smoke-choked alley. The bathroom, a feat of space maximization, was the size of an airplane lavatory with a very slender shower stall tacked on. The medicine cabinet had room for a toothbrush, some toothpaste, and a bottle of the pills I still took every morning without fail. When I sat down to pee—back when I still used the toilet—my knees bumped the door. It was impossible to have sex in that shower, a fact I confirmed more than once through trial and error.

  Bathrooms, regardless of size, had always been my place of refuge from the fits of terror that stalked me throughout late childhood and adolescence. I developed rituals to stave off the attacks. I sang the same old church hymn, “Be Not Afraid,” under my breath, over and over again. I rocked back and forth, holding myself. I hit myself in the face to shake my brain loose. (Not hard—I used a totally normal level of force, like you do.) When things got really bad, I’d lean my head on the wall, or even on the roll of toilet paper itself, and cry. No one bothers you in the bathroom, because only pervs try to engage with other people in bathrooms.

  My friend James Urbaniak, who voices Dr. Venture on the cult Adult Swim hit Venture Bros., once played a toilet freak on an episode of Law & Order: SVU. (That’s the rapey one, not the courtroomy one or that other one.) His character installed a secret camera in a bathroom so that he could watch ladies go to the toilet. After the inevitable lurid sexual assault that occurs on every episode of SVU, the cops find the camera and trace it to James’s character. They burst into his apartment, where his sister, played by the wonderful Amy Sedaris, is trying to hide him. Anyway, turns out the toilet freak isn’t the one who committed the violent sex crime. But we don’t find this out before Christopher Meloni hauls him downtown and slams his no-good pervy ass up against the bars. ( James told me that Meloni pushed him so hard that the bars, which are made of plywood, actually bent and had to be replaced.)

  I remember watching this episode back in 2004, a few years after I’d had my own fit of freaky toilet behavior, and feeling a strange sort of kinship with the voyeur character. I didn’t get a sexual thrill from watching other people use the bathroom, but I did share his view of the restroom as a special place, set apart from less exciting rooms like the living room or the dining room. These rooms were prosaic and uninspired places where one was expected to make small talk with any number of irritating companions. But in the bathroom, even if another person sat not six inches from you in a neighboring stall, you were blessedly alone.

  So you can imagine my ir
ritation when I discovered I wasn’t alone in my tiny bathroom in that cramped studio apartment in Boston. I’d moved into the place in May, and as the months passed I gradually became aware that something was following me wherever I went, sitting on my shoulder or atop my head. I didn’t know what the something was, but it was definitely a bad something, the sort of something you don’t want perching on your body. It would say things, unintelligible things that I could feel but not understand. And sometimes it would get rather loud.

  My solution was to keep my life noisy, filled with chatter and bustle. I had just finished my sophomore year at Emerson College, a school for writers and actors and assorted other deviants. It was a colorful, loud, silly place. In the hall between classes, one tiny gay boy or another was always imitating a character from Rent or Hedwig and the Angry Inch. And when that wee flamboyant lad warbled a few bars of the show tune that had gotten him through locker-room beatings in high school, he would inevitably be joined in his crooning by a chubby girl from across the hall. Thus did countless blessed fag/hag unions form in the precious space and time between Page to Stage 206 and Mid-Century Chicana Queer Poetry 307.

  I knew I couldn’t sing, and I was pretty sure I couldn’t act (not that I’d ever tried), but I could write reasonably well, so I did that. I had long, curly brown hair and big boobs and a belly I was still convinced was terribly pudgy, three years after Amber Luciano had made a crack about my weight on that ill-fated trip to Sicily. I made out with boys, and got As and Bs, and found a bunch of friends who were infinitely better-looking and more glamorous than me. They did cocaine and wore really tight Diesel jeans and dabbled in the kind of stand-up comedy where you made a joke about a children’s TV show people remembered from the eighties and then the audience laughed and then you looked at the audience like you hated them and then you made fun of a band you secretly liked and then you rolled your eyes and got offstage and drank whiskey. This was called alternative comedy, and it was very cool. There were a lot of alternative comics out in Los Angeles, and that was where everyone was going to move once they finished school.

  I couldn’t imagine moving to Los Angeles. I couldn’t imagine standing on a stage by myself and telling jokes to strangers. I couldn’t imagine wearing my jeans that tight, not with my belly. Instead, I went to the other students’ shows and then went home and wrote poetry about feelings and cups of tea. I had a lot of both of those in college. I didn’t write about the fits of fear, the panic attacks, because in writing class everyone got to read everyone else’s poems and I didn’t want any of these skinny, pretty people with frayed-on-purpose clothing and sharp tongues to know that I was the wrong kind of different.

  And even in the summer after my sophomore year in college, even in the months when that different part of me grew teeth and claws and an ever-louder voice, I still loved Boston. I loved the orderly, easily navigable flora in the Public Garden; the familiar smells from the Italian restaurants and the twenty-four-hour bakery in the North End; and the floor-to-ceiling stacks of verse at the Plimouth Poetry Shop across the water in Cambridge. I got a job as a receptionist in a hair salon called Très Bien, which is French for “angry queen,” and in between the stylists’ temper tantrums I managed to enjoy myself. The weekly staff meetings were particularly entertaining. During one inspired lecture, the co-owner, Bruce, stared intently at each of us in turn while growling, “There’s a lot of bad hair out there. And some of it comes from the other salons on this street!” Then he threw a bottle of Bed Head shampoo across the room and yelled, “But not from this salon!” I understood why one of the stylists, Alejandro, drank so heavily in his off hours (and, sometimes, during lunch breaks).

  The money from the hair salon job funded some of my purchases at my favorite shops on Newbury Street: challah French toast at Trident Café and Books; trinkets at a little shop called Hope, where a man with long dark hair sold books and crystals and cards with fairies painted on them; and weird goth skull-and-bones candlestick holders in a dusty cave that specialized in refurbished antique coffins and ceramic gargoyles. My favorite item in that shop was a very expensive Victorian hair wreath, which included the intertwined locks of some long-dead mother and child.

  For a short while that summer I had a therapist named Mabia or Mons or something similarly vulvic. Her name was fun to repeat in conversations with friends, but the woman herself, while perfectly polite, was not particularly entertaining. I didn’t go to see her often, partly because she let too many quiet moments creep into our sessions and partly because going to see her didn’t really seem to do anything. Besides, I had figured out a few secrets to staving off panic attacks on my own: urinating three times before leaving the house; murmuring a prayer I’d found in some book by Ram Dass; and carrying a small pebble I’d found on the shore of one of the tiny islands in Boston Harbor, where I’d choked on a French fry and been administered the Heimlich maneuver by a stranger.

  I don’t know when things began to curdle and spoil inside me that year. Certainly the ingredients had been present since childhood, but it’s hard to say what finally flipped my crazy switch. It’s tempting to blame it on September 11, 2001, but that’s too pat and also quite stupid. I lost no friend or family member on that day. It was sad and it was frightening, but it also provided an excuse for me to stand in line for three hours with the boy I secretly loved, chatting glumly while we waited to donate blood at Massachusetts General Hospital. Once the initial shock of the news wore off, I found myself wondering if it was true that tragedy brought people together and, more specifically, if I could get him to tearfully make out with me. Anyway, it turned out he couldn’t donate blood because he’d used coke too recently, but we still got to spend the afternoon together.

  So it wasn’t September 11 that did it, and it wasn’t the invasion of Afghanistan, and it wasn’t the release of Destiny’s Child’s blockbuster sophomore outing, Survivor, which was completely awesome and probably delayed my descent into madness. I still don’t know what it was, just that it was. And so, in the latter half of 2001, I enjoyed an extended spell of what the Victorians might have politely called “hysteria.”

  One Tuesday in August, I woke up and stared at the stained ceiling, just as I always did. I had timed my alarm to give me fifteen ritualized minutes to prepare for and get to work, one block away. I liked to sleep as long as possible before facing each day. And then, every morning, I got up, rushed around, and dragged myself out the door to the salon, or to class, or to an appointment with Minses or Magina or whatever the fuck her name was. I was usually late getting to wherever I was going, but I always got there.

  This day was different.

  This day I woke up, stared at the ceiling, and was gripped by the certain knowledge that, if I left the apartment, something terrible would happen. I did not know what the terrible event was, only that it would occur, and with a fury. One might reasonably ask how I could have “known” such a thing, without any clear evidence. Well, one of the benefits of having debilitating anxiety is that you know certain facts that no one else in the entire world knows. You gain a hyperawareness, a sort of sixth sense, and a new world is revealed to you, festering and smoldering just beneath the surface of what the rest of the poor, benighted populace sees. That raving street-corner loon who screams that the end is nigh? He’s just smarter than you are, and more perceptive to boot. That wackadoo who claims she’s the reincarnation of Mother Teresa? She is, and she pities you for not having the special gift to see the truth. The anxious person who knows that, should he board an airplane, he’ll die in a fiery, violent crash? He’s absolutely right, and woe unto those who blithely take flights without contemplating imminent death.

  So I didn’t need evidence or logic to know that something singularly terrible lay outside my door. I just needed my inner knowing, my sixth sense, the still small voice that shrieked, “YOU’RE GONNA FUCKING DIE!” upon my awakening. With brilliant insight like that, who needs “evidence”?

  I called in sick to
work. It seemed an astute move, considering the threat of destruction and all. Bruce at Très Bien took the absence in stride, offering a slightly harried and vaguely sincere “Feel better” before hanging up the phone. I rolled over and went back to sleep. I dreamed of raising my arms like wings and taking flight, looking down at all the McMansions and planned subdivisions in my hometown. It was a nice dream, a recurring one, and one of my favorites.

  When I awoke, it was dark and the clock read 12:00 A.M. I’d slept fourteen hours, a new personal record. My stomach grumbled, and since I didn’t keep much in my mini-fridge, I decided to put on some pajama pants and leave to grab food at a local diner. Something about the darkness of the night sky through my windowpane told me that it was safe to leave the house now. It wouldn’t be safe forever, mind you, but it was safe for the moment. I figured I’d best take advantage of this grace period, and I brought my journal to the diner and had a lovely time downing French toast, scrambled eggs, and tea. I wrote and smiled and enjoyed being the type of person who eats eggs and toast and tea at a diner after midnight, with a journal in tow. I felt like a real writer.

  I awoke the next morning at one P.M., which in addition to not actually being “morning” was three hours past the start of my shift. I felt a jolt of terror zap through me, and I called in.

  One of the hair-sweeping, chain-smoking, rap-loving eighteen-year-old assistants answered the phone. It is a feat to speak exclusively in a ghetto Boston blackcent when you are the eldest daughter of an enormous Greek immigrant family, but Athena pulled it off with flair.

  “Yo, Très Bien.”

  “Hi Athena, it’s Sara.” I did my best to sound weak and pitiful.

  “You sound mad sick, yo. Was you supposed to come in today? Bruce is freaking the fuck out, for reals. I think Alejandro did Jell-O shots at lunch.”