Agorafabulous!

by Sara Benincasa

  “No, water’s cool.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want peppermint tea? I’ve seriously never been out with you and seen you not get peppermint tea if it’s on the menu.” Alexandra’s voice was rising to a higher pitch than normal, and a look of confused concern crossed our waiter’s face.

  “Water’s fine.”

  “Are you gonna get dinner?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Not hungry?” On the last syllable, Alexandra’s voice squeaked to new heights. “They’ve got all your favorite things. Look, they’ve got chicken with mango and coconut. And they’ve got noodles. Did you want noodles?”

  “I’m fine,” I said mechanically and, for a moment, I wondered how exactly I’d gotten out of my apartment. Had I walked, or floated, or what? It was hard to remember.

  “I can come back . . .” the waiter said faintly, backing away.

  “No!” Alexandra snapped. “We will get a plate of noodles and a plate of coconut-mango chicken, and we will share. And some peppermint tea. And no peppers.”

  “No . . . no peppers? Is someone allergic?”

  Alexandra turned the full force of her gaze on him. “No . . . peppers.”

  His eyes widened in fear. “Yes, madam.” He skittered away.

  She turned and looked at me. “Are you feeling okay? You look really thin.”

  And for a moment, something dead inside me briefly flared back to life.

  Out of all the parts of the story—the imaginary people in my head, the pissing in cereal bowls, the lack of showering—it is this part that embarrasses me the most. I’ve told this story on stages in cities from Los Angeles to Oslo, including many places in between, but I’ve never told this part. It’s just too lame to cop to in person.

  “I did this,” I said, and showed Alexandra the place on my wrist where I’d cut myself earlier that day. I’d done it on purpose, but I hadn’t even broken skin enough to draw blood. I wasn’t a cutter—I always made fun of the goth girls who carved their creepy boyfriends’ names into their arms—but I was bored and I was awake, and it seemed like an interesting experiment. What would that feel like? Would it hurt? I found that it did hurt, but only a tiny bit, and I filed the information away for later use.

  Now that’s awkward enough, but here’s the truly humiliating part, the piece I’ve never admitted to anyone else—not to my parents, my friends, my therapist, or my very patient audiences: it was a butter knife. A fucking butter knife. What the hell kind of half-assed training-wheels shit is that? I’ve given myself deeper cuts while shaving my legs. It was nothing more than an advanced scratch. It wasn’t even a fully realized effort to hurt myself, much less end my own life. It was pretty much the most pussy attempt at self-destruction ever.

  But I showed it to Alexandra anyway.

  Her expression was briefly horrified, and then switched to a look I’d never seen on her face before. It wasn’t totally sad and it wasn’t totally angry and it wasn’t totally worried, but it might have had a little bit of all of these things put together, with something else.

  “You need help,” she said evenly, lowering her voice. “I don’t know what is happening, but it’s something really bad. You need to tell your parents what’s going on, and go home.”

  At this, a feeling I hadn’t encountered in a while—defiance—shot up within me like a geyser.

  “You can’t make me,” I said, except maybe it wasn’t me saying it, exactly.

  The waiter appeared. “Mango lassi and water?”

  “In a minute,” Alexandra said, without breaking eye contact with me.

  “No, I’ve got them right here,” he said.

  She turned and glared at him.

  “I’ll come back later,” he said, and disappeared.

  She turned back to me.

  “Go home and call your parents,” she said. “Tell them to pick you up. Because if you don’t, I’ll call them. And I don’t care if they get mad at me or you get mad at me.”

  “I’m twenty-one,” I said, and it came out like a hysterical whine.

  “Not right now, you’re not,” she said.

  I rose slowly, and noticed with detached interest that someone had shredded my napkin to bits and rained the pieces on the floor all around my chair. Then I trudged to the door, across the street, up the front stairs, and into my building. Once inside, I slowly ascended two flights of stairs before dropping to my knees to crawl up the third. I was too tired to remain upright. In my room, I accidentally kicked over a bowl of urine. Automatically, I fetched a paper towel and dropped it on the puddle. I watched the dark stain spread across the paper. Then I went to sleep.

  I awoke three hours later to a ringing phone. My phone hadn’t rung in a long time. For the second time that day, my surprise propelled me forward into an unusual action: I answered the call.

  “Hello?” I said hoarsely.

  “Hi, Ra-Ra!” chirped one voice.

  “Hey, Ra!” boomed another.

  It was my parents.

  I had forgotten about my non-dinner conversation with Alexandra, so I couldn’t imagine why they were calling me. Had I been of sounder mind, I might have noticed that the clock read 11:00 P.M., which to suburban middle-aged white people is like 4:00 A.M.: they’re only up at that hour if something very big is going on. In addition, they were both on different extensions in the same house, something parents only do when they call to tell you something awful, like that your older brother knocked up that terrible girl who works with him at the carwash, or that your grandmother drowned the cat in the bathtub.

  All these details escaped my attention.

  “Hey, guys,” I said, and it sort of came out smooshed, like Hayguysss.

  “How’s everything going, Ra?” my dad asked with a feigned cheer that, again, escaped my notice at the time.

  “Great,” I mumbled. “Awesome. Really, really good. Like the best.”

  “Whadja have for dinner?” my mother asked, her voice the same high-pitched mode of perky she used with her elementary school students.

  I had to lie, because otherwise—otherwise—I couldn’t think past “otherwise,” so I mumbled, “Food. Really good food. Pasta and . . . hamburgers and . . . salad and . . . water and . . . other pasta.” The Thing sat heavy on my shoulder and dug in its claws. “And watermelon ice cream,” I added, inventing a dish that sort of sounded like the kind of interesting thing you’d eat in a city.

  “You sure, Ra?” my dad asked, and his voice wavered a little.

  Oh shit, I thought, alarm bells going off in my head. He’s on to me. This dude is psychic! How does he know I’m lying? I said “watermelon ice cream”! That’s too good to be a lie!

  I thought fast, and came up with the perfect answer to shut him down.

  “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, and cleared my throat elaborately.

  There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, and my mother piped in. “How’s school going, Ra? You getting good grades?”

  “Yeah. Yup. Oh, yes,” I said. “Like As . . . Bs . . . one B-minus, because this teacher didn’t understand what I was trying to say, but she’s letting me do it over so . . . I feel pretty awesome about that.” I punctuated every few words with a cough. I realized I hadn’t spoken to them at such length in a very long time. It was surprisingly tiring.

  “Good grades?” my dad said. “You sure about that, Ra?”

  Goddammit, I thought. This motherfucker’s good. Maybe he really does have like the eighth sense or whatever. This is getting eerie.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Ra, is everything okay?” my mom asked, and I relaxed a little. Mom was an easy sell.

  “Totally,” I said. “I’m pretty busy right now, actually.” I reached out and turned on “Satellite.”

  “You sure about that, Ra?” she asked.

  Not her, too! What are these people, wizards? Are they fucking soothsayers or some shit?

  I jerked my head to the side and caught
sight of the paper towel I’d put over the urine spill earlier. It had dried and yellowed. The bowl of piss had been sitting there for two days . . . or maybe it was three, I couldn’t remember. I’d kept telling myself I would wash it out in the sink, but the sink and I were having issues because it was giving off a hostile vibe and I just wasn’t interested in the drama.

  “You can tell us if something’s wrong, Ra,” my mom said.

  And then I knew it was over and that they knew everything, even though, really, they didn’t know the half of it. I thought they must be omniscient or something, that they could see all the bowls of pee and the dirty clothes everywhere and the garbage and all the rest.

  “I don’t think I’m feeling too well, Mommy,” I said. This greatly confused the Thing on my shoulder, which commanded me to commence rocking back and forth. I obeyed.

  “We didn’t think so, honey,” my mom said. “Would you like us to come pick you up?”

  My shoulders dropped about a foot, which startled the Thing so much that it disappeared for a moment.

  “Yes, please,” I said, and I felt something I hadn’t felt in a while—tears, real ones, bubbling up in my eyes.

  “Your mother will drive up tomorrow, after she’s done with work,” my dad said.

  I looked at the urine-soaked paper towel and then the empty bowl and then at the full bowl sitting under my bedside table, and then I thought about all the sharper knives I had in the drawer, the ones I hadn’t tried yet. And I thought about how much I wanted to die.

  “I think I need you to come now,” I said. “I don’t know if I can last that long.”

  “You feel pretty bad, huh?” my mom said. It was as if we were discussing a nasty case of the flu, which is to say, she spoke to me just as if I had any normal illness and wasn’t totally fucking bat-shit crazy.

  “I think I might be really sick,” I said, and began crying in earnest.

  “Oh, honey,” my dad said. “It’s all gonna be okay. We’re gonna get you some good help. You don’t need to cry like that.”

  But I did. Because as soon as I told them how fucked up I was and that I needed them, I realized that I couldn’t go home to New Jersey, because I couldn’t leave my house. I could never leave that room ever again. I was going to die there, which would be really inconvenient, because they’d have to break into my house to retrieve my corpse, and that would probably involve a lot of paperwork and the police, and my dad really couldn’t stand bureaucracy and my mom really didn’t like stairs, and they’d have to climb the stairs to get me. It just really sucked how everything was going to turn out, and it was my fault.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I kept saying. “I’m so sorry, I’m really, really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” they kept saying. “It’s okay. It’s really, really okay.”

  “I want to—I want to hurt myself,” I said through a sob. I was so embarrassed. “Please don’t be mad at me.”

  “I’ll be there in five hours,” my mother said. “Read a good book.” She made it in four.

  It would be a few years before I’d sort out exactly how my parents had gotten the red alert on the state of my brain. Apparently, Alexandra had gone home and called my other best friend, Katherine, who had grown up in New Orleans a pure and virginal Southern belle despite the fact that her childhood babysitter had been a drag queen and her mom and stepfather were prone to dressing up like identical French prostitutes for Mardi Gras. But while Katherine’s mom was outgoing and sociable, Katherine was shy and bookish. Her idea of a fabulous weekday evening was curling her dark hair while sipping a glass of wine and reading a book by e. e. cummings. Her apartment in Boston was full of old framed Art Deco advertisements that featured elegant ladies powdering their noses. She seemed always to be surrounded by diaphanous pink fabric and stained-glass mosaics. She had an undeniable bosom and a regal bearing, and she usually smelled like night-blooming jasmine or some other delicate flower. Though they weren’t especially close, Alexandra was fascinated by Katherine and often said in an awed tone, “She is just a real woman.”

  Between the girls, it was decided that I had indeed gone off the rails and that the best thing to do was for Katherine, who knew my parents better, to call my mom and dad. It pleases my vanity that this was a tag-team effort. Any average crazy person can worry one friend into action. But two? That’s advanced achievement in the art of being nuts.

  My parents fielded Katherine’s call, spent a few moments quietly freaking out, and walked over to a psychiatrist neighbor, who advised them not to tell me that my friends had clued them in. I would need a support system, or so he said, and I needed to feel that I could trust my friends. The best thing for my parents to do would be to call me and see if they could draw the truth out of me on their own, without mixing anyone else up in it.

  “Okay,” they said. Then, I imagine, everyone threw a hand in, counted, “1, 2, 3, TEAM!” and broke the huddle.

  My mom arrived in my dad’s gas-guzzling SUV, but she did not come alone. She brought with her a large white teddy bear in a T-shirt that read GET WELL SOON. I don’t know where one purchases a large white get-well bear on the Massachusetts Turnpike at two A.M. Quite frankly, I don’t want to know what she had to do to get that bear.

  She knocked at my door, and I opened it in pretty much the same state in which I had opened the door to Alexandra several hours earlier. I saw a look of dismay very briefly flash across my mother’s face before she rearranged her features back into Fake Happy-Time Mom Face. You know the one—it’s the expression every mom wears when family members who really suck drop by for a surprise visit, or when you ask her if she wishes she’d dated more before settling down. Fake Happy-Time Mom Face is a brilliant mask. I think they hand them out in maternity wards, along with pamphlets about not shaking your baby. My mother’s Fake Happy-Time Mom Face comes complete with wide, cheery eyes and a pinched smile. Should I reproduce one day, I’ll model my Fake Happy-Time Mom Face after hers. It’s a good one.

  I suppose it’s clear by now that I wasn’t exactly firing on all mental, physical, or emotional cylinders at this point. I’d actually forgotten about Fake Happy-Time Mom Face and thought she was just in a genuinely upbeat mood. As for me, well, I was doing all right. I’d spent the past four hours rocking back and forth to “Satellite,” and tearing the dried urine-soaked paper towel into tinier and tinier pieces. So that was productive. I also wondered if I should try cutting myself a bit deeper with a knife this time, just to see what happened. Maybe for kicks I’d use a steak knife with an actual sharp edge this time. I was making plans for the future, which is generally a positive sign for a suicidally depressed person, except when said plans actually involve suicide. But at least I had goals.

  Fake Happy-Time Mom Face smiled at me and asked, “You ready to go?”

  “I was thinking,” I began. “Maybe you could stay in a hotel room tonight and we could go tomorrow if I still feel bad. And if I don’t, we could just have lunch, like a girls’ weekend.”

  Fake Happy-Time Mom Face disappeared and was replaced by Actual Stop Fucking Around Mom Face. “Sara. It is not the weekend. It is Tuesday night—well, Wednesday morning. I took off work tomorrow so that I can bring you to the psychiatrist. We are not staying in a hotel room and I am not leaving you here. We are going home, now. Did you pack?”

  “Pack? Uh—yeah. Yeah, I packed.” I totally did not pack.

  Fake Happy-Time Mom Face returned, smiling sweetly. “Great! Then get your stuff, and let’s go.”

  “Uh . . . okay,” I said. “Just uh . . . just give me a minute.”

  I puttered around the room, gathering a few important things: one unused Band-Aid, one copy of the August issue of Yoga Journal, and the Dave Matthews Band CD. I did not pack: any clothing, any schoolbooks, or any toiletries. I did put on shoes. I forgot to put on socks first.

  “Ready to go,” I said.

  My mother, who had not ventured past my front door, pointed at a bowl of pee sitt
ing on the kitchen counter and asked, “What is that?”

  “Chicken soup,” I said, and tipped it into the sink. I gave myself a mental high-five for being so clever.

  At that point, I think my mom decided to drop any requests for me to take a shower, tidy up my room, pack a real suitcase, brush my teeth, or dress like a functional human adult. Clearly, getting me home was going to be task enough.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Alexandra had the advantage of surprise. My mother had the advantage of being the person whose job it had been to tell me what to do and what not to do for the first eighteen years of my life. When you’ve got nothing left, you revert to old programming. I did what my mother told me. I locked the door behind me and followed her down the stairs.

  When I got to the car, the teddy bear was there, strapped into the front passenger seat. I guess it would’ve been a real tragedy if my mom had hit a pothole and the teddy bear had lurched forward into the dashboard or, God forbid, onto the floor. That’s the kind of accident that haunts a person for the rest of her life. My mother was not going to have teddy blood on her hands.

  I opened the door, unbuckled the bear, and got into the car, sitting bolt upright with my arms wrapped around my new stuffed buddy. I had the nagging feeling I’d forgotten something, and that was when my mother buckled me into the seat. She draped a blanket over me and offered me a bottle of water, a can of ginger ale, and one of those “nutritional” candy bars. Just looking at food made me feel nauseous, so I shook my head no and clutched the bear tighter.

  Before I knew it, we were barreling down Newbury Street at an unprecedented speed for my mother in the city. We may have broken thirty-five miles per hour, an astonishing feat considering my mother’s habit of crawling along at twenty miles per hour until an angry mob or a uniformed police officer commanded her to speed up already.

  I closed my eyes and nearly dozed off for a few moments, until it fully hit me: I wasn’t in my apartment. I wasn’t near my apartment. I was speeding away from my apartment, and I couldn’t turn the car around and go back. Yes, I was with my mother. But I was in a car, and I was not at home.