Agorafabulous!

by Sara Benincasa

  I thought fast.

  “I’m at Mass General,” I coughed. “I passed out last night. My neighbor called the ambulance. I was dehydrated.”

  “Oh shit. My baby’s father went to Mass General last time he got shot. They was good. You wanna talk to Bruce?”

  I most definitely did not want to talk to Bruce. “No thanks, I just wanted to apologize for not calling in earlier. I’ve been sleeping and—hydrating. On a drip. A—a water drip.” It sounded plausible, to me.

  “Feel better, girl.”

  I got off the phone and applauded my own quick thinking. I considered sneaking outside in a baseball cap and sweats and sunglasses, and enjoying an incognito day at the mall. But when I got to the door and grabbed the knob, I instantly recoiled, as if it were burning-hot.

  The thing—hell, the Thing—on my shoulder, which was also the voice in my head, which was also the smartest and most intuitive part of me—you know, that gut feeling/inner wisdom source self-help books are always talking about—well, that Thing said, “Go back to bed. Sleep. If you go outside, someone will catch you. It’s safer inside. You work hard. Take a second mental health day. It’s good for you. If you don’t, you might have a panic attack, you know. You’d better take it easy.”

  On Thursday, I returned to work, and was promptly fired by Bruce’s deputy, his partner in codependence, Arlene. Arlene and Bruce shared a condo, a boat, a dozen friends, and a business. They also shared a pronounced disdain for their employees, especially ones who didn’t show up for work and provided fake excuses involving dehydration.

  “Here’s a day’s pay,” Arlene said, furiously flipping cash out of the drawer. She pushed it at me and snapped, “Now get out.” The other stylists watched with a range of emotions: sympathy, confusion, and, on one face, glee. (That was Alejandro, who liked me but loved drama far more.)

  I wandered home in a daze, filled with a mixture of shame and relief. I’d been fired before, once, from a home décor store called Cute Stuff, which specialized in “distressed furniture.” In practical terms, this translated to shoddily assembled handmade dressers wrought of wormhole-riddled wood, painted in whimsical, bright colors and with rusty-on-purpose knobs and handles. This was part of the lamentable Shabby Chic trend, which inspired millions of idiots to drop tons of cash on the equivalent of pre-ripped, pre-faded jeans with the goal of feigning an interesting personal history.

  I wasn’t fired from Cute Stuff because I disagreed with the store’s aesthetic direction. I was fired from Cute Stuff because one time I had my boyfriend call in sick for me. Oh, and a pattern of lateness prior to that. But mostly because I had my boyfriend call in sick for me. He was nice. He played the violin and did lots of drugs.

  After I got home from the salon, I called my parents to tell them I’d quit my job—for what reason, I can’t remember, although I’m sure I invented something interesting to elicit sympathy and mild outrage at whatever alleged evil I insisted my boss had committed. I probably claimed my boss had thrown a shampoo bottle directly at me, which likely would have happened if I’d stayed on the job much longer, so it wasn’t really a lie.

  With the salon job gone, I had to cut back on the activities I enjoyed that cost pocket money—eating at the all-night diner, shopping at the bookstore, buying hippie groceries at Bread and Circus (soon to be purchased by some hippie company called Whole Foods). I enjoyed these adventures for the same reason I enjoyed the urban life: I could move among crowds, listening to other people without engaging them. It was a way to be an island outside the confines of my room.

  I kept going to parties for a while, because you didn’t have to pay for those. I never put any of the stuff on offer up my nose or down my throat, and the only people who seemed to be having a good time were the ones who did that. I did, however, spend a memorable evening that summer riding around in a budding celebrity chef’s stretch limo with twenty of his nearest and dearest friends, but that was because he invited me really nicely and I don’t say no to someone who makes a lucrative living by turning rabbits into haute cuisine.

  He was really sweet, actually, and later that summer he toted some pals and me along to a party at his friend Dagger’s house. Dagger was a working magician who flew all over the world, doing industry conventions and private events for the extremely wealthy. Dagger threw epic parties in his restored Victorian farmhouse in the country, a place that looked humble from the outside but which was a fully functional sex den inside. He had a giant cage installed in his living room and a fuck swing in his kitchen. I’m not sure why the fuck swing was specifically placed in the kitchen, but it did contrast nicely with the butcher-block center island.

  Dagger, who was courtly and hospitable, set out crystal bowls filled with neat mounds of pills and powders and herbs of the illegal sort. When I excused myself to go to the bathroom, I noticed a closed-circuit television over the toilet. It was showing a live feed of some of my guy friends pouring wax on a stripper, accompanied by a gentleman who had previously been introduced to me as Sir Sinister. Sir Sinister had four-foot-long dreadlocks and he seemed to be on very familiar terms with several of the surgically enhanced working girls at the party. I sat down to pee, and watched Sir Sinister wave my friends out of the way so that he could mount the girl. By the time I pulled up my underwear, he was inside her. I called a cab and left.

  On my twenty-first birthday I had sex with a boy I thought I loved or maybe could love, sort of, even though we didn’t know each other that well. He was notable for both his sense of humor and for the polite way he ignored the piles of soda cans and cardboard piling up against my wall. (I kept telling myself I would recycle these things, that I would do the right thing and give them a second life as crap that would then be re-junked. The trouble was that my aversion to going outside was growing stronger by the week.) The sex was extremely fun, but it also misled me into believing that it is always an easy thing to climax during vaginal intercourse. Sadly, this is not true for most human women, and not for me, either, as I would eventually discover. The boy went back to his home city. The last time I saw him, he drunkenly confessed that he was in love with me. Then he threw up Carlo Rossi red wine all over my bathroom. A couple of weeks later, he told me over the phone that he hadn’t meant it, and that he’d just been drunk. He never called me or wrote to me after that.

  School started on September 11, except it didn’t. I was late for my first class because I was gripped by the now-familiar fear of leaving my apartment, but I would’ve been only fifteen minutes late if there had been any class to attend. The cab driver who pulled over and picked me up was shaking furiously.

  “And how do you like this day?” he spat. It sounded almost like an accusation.

  “It’s fine,” I said cautiously. “It’s really pretty out.” It was, too.

  He was appalled. “This is a terrible day!” he shouted, banging his hand on the steering wheel. “Everything is terrible today!”

  “Oh,” I said soothingly. “Boston traffic is pretty bad.”

  “It’s not traffic!” he shrieked, and turned on NPR, loud. “They flew planes into buildings and they are blowing everything up!”

  “They? Who’s they?”

  “Terrorists! Crazy sons of bitches!”

  We sat in traffic and listened to the radio. By the time we reached my destination, he and I had gotten to know each other a little bit, in the way that you do with strangers in airports when blizzards or small TSA incidents ruin everyone’s plans. I didn’t know how to say good-bye, so I tipped him and got out of the cab and said, “Thanks for picking me up, Mohammed.”

  “No way is school open today, Sara,” he said. “Go find a TV and watch the news.”

  He was right, and I did.

  School was open the next day. I went, but I didn’t go very often after that. My fear of going outside really had very little to do with the hijackings. In fact, seeing the entire nation gripped by fear made me feel more normal, somehow. For the first time, the world
outside my head seemed as irrational and terrified as the world inside my head. And there was a world inside my head—there was the Thing, of course, and then there were the people I invented to help me when I was really feeling awful. One of them looked and sounded like my grandmother, but with an Irish accent, and she was always baking bread. Another one was some sort of Italian-American uncle with a Jersey accent, but he didn’t last long. He was very encouraging, though. And then, of course, there was my own chattering, worried inner monologue, which never ceased, except when I slept.

  I started sleeping a lot.

  Sleep was my respite and my vacation. I loved sleeping. I loved the moment of dropping off into unconsciousness, even when it brought nightmares. I would wake up, frightened, but then the Irish grandmother’s voice would sing me a lullaby and tell me that everything was going to be all right, and I’d relax back into slumber. I got really good at sleeping for long stretches of time. Years later, I would have a counselor who participated in super-marathons, running for one hundred miles over several days. I was like that, but with sleep. Marathoners learn certain tricks to keep themselves going, and super-marathoners become even more expert in the art of endurance. I learned that a good night’s sleep—twelve to eighteen hours—could, in fact, be achieved without the use of sleeping pills. (I disdained sleeping pills as harmful chemicals. Because I enjoyed such a healthy, natural lifestyle.) The number-one key to eliminating obstacles to sleep was to eliminate excess energy in the body—the sort of mindless juice that led to time-wasters like showering and answering phone calls. And the number-one cause of energy in my body was food. So I stopped eating it. An ingenious fix, really, and one that worked brilliantly.

  There is a unique and insidious delight to denying oneself readily available nutrition. I imagine this is quite different from being starved by some horrid outside force—a bad harvest, an occupying army, a modeling agent. I have led a life of comfort and privilege, with a roof over my head and a loaf of bread within easy distance. To deny myself my favorite foods—to deny myself any food—was to wield control over a part of my body that challenged me each day to sate its needs. I could not control my brain, or my soul, or whatever it was that demanded I wrap myself in blankets and rock back and forth a prescribed number of times before daring to fetch a glass of water. But I could control what I put in my body.

  I don’t know if I had an eating disorder in the traditional sense, but I think I can understand a little of the anorexic mindset. People with eating disorders appreciate the absolute pleasure of watching their flesh shrink against the bone. Yes, weight-loss champions on reality television shows testify about the joy of going from a size fourteen to a size six, how they learned to eat healthful meals and how they’ve grown to love exercise, but that’s not the sort of reduction I mean. The pain of self-denial turns exquisite when you feel the points of your hip bones pressing against thin skin. As my grades tumbled and my waking hours shrank, as my crowd of friends diminished and my garbage pile rose higher, I lay beneath layers of quilts and felt myself getting smaller and smaller. Shrinking was wonderful. And I was watching myself disappear.

  I did eat, a little bit, sometimes. I had dwindling food supplies, but occasionally hunger would drive me to open up a year-old can of beans or scrape the mold off a piece of bread. I didn’t get too down on myself for eating, because it wasn’t adding more substance to my body and it certainly wasn’t giving me any of the dreaded energy. When I ate, I nibbled in bed and thought about dying.

  Lying in bed was vastly preferable to moving about my apartment, which had, unfortunately, turned into a hotbed of conflict. This was mainly due to the hostility of certain objects in my home. For example, the television stared at me plaintively, begging to be turned on when I most definitely did not want to turn it on. Television fried your brain and made you do stupid things, as I explained to it at three A.M. one morning. The answer was apparently not to its satisfaction, because the TV copped an attitude that made me feel weird whenever I looked at it. I covered it with a tie-dyed cloth so that I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. I had a similar altercation with my computer, which also earned itself a drop cloth.

  It wasn’t that these appliances actually spoke to me out loud or anything crazy like that. It was more of a vibe. You know when you know someone at work doesn’t like you, even though they’ve never said anything explicitly rude to you? It was like that. My household objects were giving off bad vibes. And pretty soon I realized that the Thing that sat on my shoulder had somehow managed to take over my bathroom, which was when I had to break things off with the toilet and start pissing in cereal bowls. Thankfully, the lack of solid food in my system made defecation a rarity.

  By the time I started squatting over bowls and peeing, I was too enmeshed in my own half-imagined new world to stop and wonder whether it was a healthy activity. It was just something I did, like turning on the same CD as soon as I woke each day (or night, depending) and playing the same song over and over until I fell asleep again a few hours later. Because I was a white girl from suburban New Jersey, my omnipresent musical companion was the Dave Matthews Band. In the waning days of the fall semester, I listened to their hit single “Satellite” countless times. The repetition was soporific, and guided me through the terrible few hours when sleep simply would not come.

  One December evening, there came a loud banging at my door. It was rather like the indelicate door-knocking of stern detectives on television cop shows. None of my friends had called or shown up in some time, since it had become abundantly clear I wasn’t going to answer voice-mail messages or emerge from my increasingly noxious lair. I spoke to my parents on occasion, always briefly. I’d claim I was in a hurry to get to class or a party, and then I’d hang up the phone and crawl back into bed. So the combination of shock at the knocking and concern regarding its cause actually propelled me out of bed and to my door. I opened it up, and came face-to-face with Alexandra.

  I had two best friends at Emerson College, and Alexandra was one of them. She was a talented comedic actress and a trained dancer, and she had excellent strawberry-blond curls and a strikingly beautiful face. She came from a colorful Jewish family of singers and writers and musicians, and she had been to faraway places like Bali and Arizona. Everyone wanted to know her or make out with her, but she was sparing about allowing either privilege. I was not so selective with my favors, and I always admired her restraint. She was often as bound up with tension as I, but she dealt with it through dance, comedy, acting, and sushi.

  She also had another strong passion, and it was this aspect of her personality that must have roared most loudly within her when that door swung open: Alexandra loved cleaning. She did it every day. It stopped just shy of a compulsion, and instead manifested as both a hobby and a great talent. Her room was always meticulously well-ordered. She swept, she dusted, she polished, she vacuumed. And in so doing, she created a welcoming personal space that was as lovely as it was unpretentious. Her place was resplendent with little Buddhas, her friends’ black-and-white photography, reproductions of Victorian fairy paintings, books and rings and smooth stones and beads and tiny beautiful abstract sculptures. Her home was never cluttered, dirty, or unfriendly.

  It is also a fact that Alexandra detested peppers with an intense hatred. Freshman year, our friend Christopher thought it would be a great April Fool’s Day prank to squeeze pepper juice in Alexandra’s immaculate clothing drawers and impeccable bed. Another girl in the dormitory, a loudly anti-abortion, conservative, evangelical Christian, thought this was the height of hilarity. When Alexandra entered her room that evening, she froze and sniffed the air, instantly detecting something terribly wrong. When Christopher and the other girl entered and found her trying to hold back a gag as she emptied her underwear drawer, they busted out laughing. Alexandra made friends sparingly and was deeply loyal to those who entered her inner circle. Christopher was one of these; the other girl was not. Alexandra turned her fierce green eyes on the
girl and said, “This is exactly as funny as me putting a dead fetus in your bed.” The girl ran off, terrified. Alexandra turned her gaze on Christopher. “I’ll deal with you later,” she said in a low, steady voice. Christopher backed away slowly and hid in his room. Alexandra went out and talked herself down, over brown-rice tea and sashimi.

  Alexandra’s aversion to general disorder was barely evident when I opened my door, which was a testament to both her love for me and her talent at acting. She told me later that she didn’t know there were bowls of urine festering under my bed, but I can’t imagine the smell escaped her notice. I know she saw the pile of garbage and the empty soda cans that rolled at my feet, the stained clothes all over the floor and, most of all, my skinny, stinking frame. I hadn’t showered in weeks, and I had been wearing the same urine-stained sweatpants and T-shirt for too many days to count.

  She met my gaze and didn’t blink. “We’re going out to dinner,” she said. It wasn’t a suggestion.

  “We are?” I asked, confused.

  “You should put a coat on, and a scarf. It’s cold.”

  The only thing that surprised me more than Alexandra’s presence was the fact that I did what she told me to do. I put on a coat, a scarf, and Mary Janes (not generally known to work with sweatpants, but I didn’t really have fashion on the brain) and followed her down the stairs and across the street to a Malaysian restaurant we’d often admired from afar, back when I was normal.

  We sat down and stared at one another for a moment.

  “So what’s been going on with you?” she said. “I haven’t seen you in forever, and I don’t even know what you’re up to. How’s school going?”

  “Pretty well,” I mumbled, and a waiter appeared with menus.

  Alexandra ordered a mango lassi. I ordered water.

  “Don’t you want tea?” Alexandra asked. “You love peppermint tea. They’ve got peppermint tea.”