Agorafabulous!

by Sara Benincasa

  A flash of panic seared my chest. I knew that if I stayed in that car, I was going to die. I was away from my safe place, and I was going to go completely crazy, and they would have to put me away somewhere, and I would never feel safe or comfortable again, and why the hell was it so cold all of a sudden, and my heart was going to—

  “Want to listen to some music?” my mom asked with a bright smile. It was a Fake Happy-Time Mom Face smile, but it was a smile nevertheless. Without waiting for a response, she popped in a Phil Collins CD (every mom has at least one).

  The noise that issued forth from my being surprised even me. “NOOOOOOOOOO!” I roared, and hit the eject button. “Thisonethisonethisone,” I chanted, jabbing the Dave Matthews Band CD at the disc player. Panicked, I tried to shove it in, but my fine motor skills had suffered somewhat. I kept missing the target, first shoving the CD up against the radio buttons, next nearly hurling it like a Frisbee over the dash. My mother caught my wrist and said, “Okay, I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it,” and gradually I lessened my death-grip on the CD.

  She put the CD in, and I sprung forward again, punching the skip button until I got to the track I wanted, “Satellite.” Only then did I sink back into my seat, close my eyes, and begin to breathe normally again. When the song ended, I lurched forward and hit the back button, restarting the song. My mother cast a sideways glance at me, but didn’t say anything.

  By the fourth time I jumped forward to hit the back button, we’d reached the toll booth for the Mass Pike. My mother turned to me and grinned with gritted teeth, a major Fake Happy-Time Mom Face if ever there was one.

  “You know,” she said, “there’s a repeat button.” She hit it, and left the song on repeat for the entire trip home. That’s about four and a half hours of one sweet, mellow adult contemporary groove. Even the most diehard fan will tell you that’s a fuckload of Dave Matthews Band.

  So I sat, eyes closed, holding the white teddy bear, rocking gently back and forth to the same song for more than four hours. Here’s what didn’t happen: I didn’t cry. I didn’t vomit. I didn’t open the car door and tumble out at sixty-five miles per hour. I considered doing all of these things, but I didn’t. I didn’t even set into motion my elaborate plot (conceived somewhere between Connecticut and New York) to claim I needed to use the bathroom and, at the rest stop, rig up an elaborate noose of paper towels to hang myself. It was a totally solid plan, but I put it on the back burner. I just sat there, with the music and the motion and my mother beside me, and all of it was a lullaby. But I didn’t sleep. And she didn’t tell me I was crazy, and she didn’t turn off the music. She drove. I sat. The hours passed.

  When the car came to a stop, I opened my eyes and blinked a few times. We were on the cracked driveway, the one I popped tar bubbles on in the heat of summer. Now it was edged with frost. The sun was just peeking over the edge of the hills. When my mother turned off the car, it sounded like a long exhale.

  She got out of the car, walked around to my side, and opened the door. I tried to move, but she reminded me that I needed to unbuckle my belt first. I wasn’t used to doing weight-bearing exercises like, you know, standing, so actually getting out of the car was a little hairy. But we got it done. After she shut the door, I leaned against it and breathed white steam into the air.

  And somehow—I don’t know what it was, the crumbling basketball hoop, the cracked vinyl siding near the garage, the nuclear New Jersey sunrise—somehow, in that moment, just for a tiny infinitesimal breath of time, I knew I was going to be okay. Not just a little okay, or “stable enough to live outside a psychiatric facility” okay, or “probably not going to kill myself today” okay. But really and truly okay okay, one day. Better than I’d ever been, even.

  I looked at my mom, and smiled. She smiled back, a tired, half-assed smile, but a real one nonetheless.

  “You know what, Ma,” I said. “It’s all gonna work out fine.”

  For the first time on our journey, she allowed her eyes to fill with tears. She looked away briefly and then back at me. I knew she was going to tell me she loved me.

  Instead she said, “Do we have to bring the CD in the house?”

  It was then that I noticed that her eyes seemed to have glazed over, and there was a sort of hollow darkness where her initial peppy fire had been. Four and a half hours of the same Dave Matthews Band song can do that to a woman.

  “No, we can leave it here,” I said reassuringly, and she exhaled until I thought she would deflate completely.

  “For now,” I added. Because already the bad thoughts were creeping back into my head, and I knew I needed some sound to block them out. But I figured my family could create noise enough for the next few hours, at least. Especially my younger brother, who loudly protested when awakened for breakfast each morning. It was about that time, anyway.

  I can still remember how it smelled then, the cold air and the exhaust from the neighbor’s car idling in his driveway and then, when my mother opened the door to the house, something else entirely. I wanted to throw up and I wanted to black out, but instead I walked into the kitchen and took off my shoes.

  Chapter Four

  Hairapy

  Recovery is a peculiar thing. It doesn’t happen on a set timeline. Some people claim to heal all in one revelatory flash. A man sees the face of God in his glass of gin and suddenly leaves the bar, never to return again. His taste for the sauce is miraculously lifted from him. He goes home to his family and apologizes for his missteps. He is a changed man from that moment forward—no need for therapy or twelve-step meetings. Like a medieval saint, he has experienced a full-scale spiritual transformation. And chances are that like many saints, he won’t shut the fuck up about it. These are the people who become evangelists.

  I hate evangelists.

  Personally, I prefer the more common road to recovery. It’s messy and it’s slow, but I believe it has a far greater chance of lasting than does a sudden, ecstatic declaration of independence from one’s demons. It generally begins with what addicts call a “qualifying event.” My friend, the brilliant (and now sober) comedian Rob Delaney, had perhaps the most dramatic qualifying event I’ve ever heard of. Drunk one night, he drove his car over some parking meters and into a City of Los Angeles utility building. He spent the night in a hospital gown in jail, all four busted limbs wrapped in casts, sans underpants. Without the use of his limbs, and with a lot of alcohol still swirling around in his system, he lost his balance and slid down in his wheelchair so that his gown bunched up above his genitals and exposed him to the other prisoners. The guards pulled him back up and perched him on the chair again, adjusting his gown to hide his penis. And then it happened again.

  Now that’s one hell of a qualifying event.

  Anyone who isn’t taking care of him- or herself can have one of these terrible instances of bottoming out. Mine was certainly that urine-stained night with Alexandra and my mother. But everything doesn’t magically get better once a sick person realizes he or she is in a bad way. For me, the real work began after I got home from Boston.

  My father greeted me when I came through the door at sunrise. He was worried about me, but he would have been up anyway. This is a man who relishes the great fun of listening to Don Imus at the bum-crack of dawn while barreling down a road empty of other, more sensible commuters. His favorite way to relax is a luxuriously late seven thirty A.M. tee time at an inexpensive public golf course forty-five minutes from his home. He took a perverse joy in waking my night-owl brother Steve and me before school each day by knocking loudly on our bedroom doors and then flipping the light switch on. His “early to bed, early to rise” attitude did, in fact, make him healthy and even wealthy compared to a lot of folks, but I wouldn’t say that antagonizing two grumpy teens at the start of each day was exactly wise. Thankfully, Steve was still asleep when I got home, so he didn’t bear the burden of trying to keep groggy early-morning teen rage in check while greeting his unwell sister.

 
“Hey, Ra,” my dad said, hugging me in the kitchen where I’d once tried to punch him a few years before. (It’s an Irish tradition. My brother never did it, so I had to take up the cause.) “How you feeling?”

  “Pretty shitty,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for?”

  “I’m sorry about . . . this mess.” I started to cry.

  “Oh, honey, don’t be sorry for that. Would you expect anyone else to apologize for being sick?”

  “No,” I sniffled, even though I probably would. I apologize a lot. It’s more a reflex than a conscious decision. A Catholic upbringing left me with a perpetual sense of guilt as well as an enduring fondness for judgmental gays in dresses.

  My parents put me to bed, and I slept for hours. They woke me at noon, long after Steve headed off to school, but I hid under the covers.

  “Just give me a few minutes,” I said. “I just need to psych myself up.”

  “Take your time,” said my mom.

  “Don’t take too long,” said my dad. “It’s a beautiful day.” I heard them walk away to do whatever parents do when their adult child is afraid to leave her bedroom.

  “You are gonna do this,” I told myself as the bright midday light filtered through the crocheted blanket. “You are gonna get up and feel the carpet under your bare feet. It’s gonna feel nice and normal and homey, and you can just stand there and enjoy that feeling for as long as you want. And then you’re gonna meditate, eat a good breakfast, maybe do some yoga in the living room, and then, to mix it up, write a short story at the dining-room table. After that, you can type it into your brother’s computer in his room and print it out and send it off to a widely respected small literary magazine in the Midwest. They will accept it and you can send your professors back at school a copy of the magazine when it comes out in two years. ‘I got into the Frankenmuth Biennial Review,’ you’ll write in a note. ‘Looks like I didn’t need college to be a literary success! Ha ha, just kidding, thanks for all the good times in The Art of the Personal Essay 302. Sorry I never handed in that final project.’ ”

  By the time I got up, it was two P.M.

  “We made an appointment with Dr. Morrison for you this afternoon,” my mother said when I emerged from my room. She and my father were sitting at the kitchen table, and I could tell they’d been having A Serious Talk. Dr. Morrison was a shrink who had successfully treated two other people in my family—one for severe anxiety, the other for addiction. He had a great reputation among our clan, which is why my parents had decided that I would be the third member in fifteen years to enter his care. It might sound a little unorthodox to share a mental-health professional among family members, but I like to think of it as an ancient approach. I imagine several generations of my father’s Celtic ancestors consulted the same shaman whenever young Arthywolgen was possessed by the tree-spirits or little Domnighailag expressed an interest in Christianity.

  “Oh. Okay,” I said. I’d heard only good things about this fellow, and I didn’t regard the prospect of meeting him with any kind of dread. In fact, I thought it was particularly nice that he was going to make a house call.

  “We need to leave in forty-five minutes, so you should take a shower and eat something,” my mom added.

  “Leave,” I repeated. “Leave the house?”

  “Yeah, you want me to make you a peanut butter sandwich to take with you?” my dad asked.

  “Maybe I could go tomorrow,” I said.

  My father and mother had evidently prepared for this conversation.

  “We think the best thing to do is to get you there as soon as possible,” Mom said.

  “It’s better this way,” Dad said. “You’ll get it out of the way and start getting better. The holidays are coming up, and you don’t want to be stuck at home.”

  Actually, I very much wanted to be stuck at home. My room was pretty and pink and smelled like the dried prom corsages that decorated my desk. That same desk also displayed a chunk of volcanic rock I’d brought home from Mt. Etna in Sicily. We had a fluffball of a young orange tomcat named Bing, so christened by my mother in honor of the Bada-Bing strip club on The Sopranos (my particularly warped brand of feminism is perhaps in part due to some things I learned at home). We had four television sets and loads of books. What more could life outside the house possibly offer me?

  “Go on and take a shower, honey,” Mom said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  Sometimes in the course of battle one needs to give up certain territory in order to achieve the greater goal of overall victory. It occurred to me that I might make a stronger case for staying in the house if I were scrupulously clean and pleasant-smelling. Emily Dickinson had probably been an impeccably tidy gal, and her family had let her crazy ass roam the home in white dresses for her entire life. I had lost the optimism I’d enjoyed for one brief moment on the icy driveway early that morning, and was again convinced of my incurable loserdom. Since I would probably live with my parents for the rest of my life, it made sense for me to accede to some of their unreasonable demands up front. With this in mind, I smiled and nodded and went into the bathroom.

  There was nothing haunted about this particular powder room, which was one of two full bathrooms in our thirty-year-old, three-bedroom ranch. It smelled like a mix of Ivory soap and my brother’s current department-store cologne of choice. It had a bright, cheery window and a bunch of clean, fluffy towels.

  I turned on the shower and sat on the closed toilet, watching the water hit the floor of the tub. I wasn’t really scared of being in the shower. I was afraid of coming out of the shower with a wet head. I’d had a monster panic attack immediately after a shower one time, which initiated an attack of stress-induced diarrhea. There are few experiences less pleasant than sobbing on the toilet, naked and shivering, as your heart pounds out of your chest and you piss out of your asshole. It’s the kind of thing you might be hesitant to revisit.

  My mother had always advised me to distract myself when I felt “jammed,” which is how she described the state of being stressed out. She liked to take sudden solo drives to New York City in order to escape the sometimes-suffocating life of a working mother and wife in what she termed a “cupcake neighborhood.” The other moms seemed content to watch television and throw dinner parties, but my mom needed a lot of multisensory stimulation in order to keep boredom and its twin, depression, at bay. Today, I follow her advice by juggling as many odd, fun, creative comedy projects as possible. But when I was twenty-one, I hadn’t yet figured out how to devise the type of distraction plan (today I call it a “career”) that produces such enjoyable results as additional income and sex-drenched e-mails from elderly gentlemen.

  That’s when I caught sight of the pair of scissors sitting in the catchall basket on the counter.

  There are a few items that should never be left near a person in a state of nervous breakdown, including but not limited to: knives, guns, drugs, babies, credit cards, and scissors. When the afflicted individual in question is a woman, the scissors become even more dangerous. Sure, she may stab herself or a loved one, but she may do something even crazier: attempt to cut her own hair.

  I’d recently seen the marvelous Jean-Pierre Jeunet film Amélie, a modern fairy tale and a truly wonderful work of art. In the film, lovestruck, socially anxious Amélie wanders around Paris in a fetching short bob with adorable blunt-cut bangs. It’s the sort of look an adult woman should only attempt if she looks exactly like Audrey Hepburn, which the French actress Audrey Tautou does. It’s also a strong argument for the predictive power of personal nomenclature. Tautou’s parents named her after Hepburn, and so she grew up to look like Hepburn. My parents named me after a biblical character who laughed at God, and so I grew up to be a blasphemous jokester. And I was about to become a blasphemous jokester with a very unfortunate haircut.

  My urge for hair modification may have had a genetic basis. I am the granddaughter of a former beauty parlor owner and, more important, a na
tive-born child of New Jersey. Hair salons are my natural habitat. I grew up listening to my mother and her close friends Gee and Karen, a stylist and nail technician, tell raucous and raunchy stories in a hair salon on the first floor of a converted house in Central Jersey. I’d picked up a few tips there and in my own brief career as a Newbury Street salon receptionist in Boston. For example, I knew most stylists only cut wet hair, so it stood to reason that I would need to douse my thick, curly faux-reddish mane in water before I hacked it into a modern masterpiece. Since the shower was already on, I took the logical leap that it would be advantageous for me to get into said shower and use some shampoo and conditioner. Thus ended my fear of the shower. Vanity trumps anxiety.

  I soaped, I loofahed, I shampooed, I conditioned, I conditioned again. I shaved while I conditioned. The hot water felt surprisingly good, and I reflected that the scent of coconut is really superior to the scent of dried urine and old sweat. When I emerged from the shower, I felt a sense of triumph at my ability to complete this basic human task. I didn’t feel the least bit anxious. In fact, I felt rather delighted. If I were normal enough to start showering again, I probably didn’t need to visit Dr. Morrison at all.

  Then I dropped the towel and picked up the scissors.

  All those years in hair salons had taught me that a short, curly haircut can go wildly wrong. In fifth grade, some older boys on the bus used to call me Medusa when I sported one unfortunate puffball short cut. This was both a nod to my coiled, serpentine locks and to my ugliness. Later, they added “Jewfro,” though they knew I wasn’t Jewish. Nothing confuses suburban white people so much as vaguely ethnic tresses on one of their own. When my hair grew long and more manageable, the jeers turned to fascination and admiration. A woman asked if she could touch it as I waited in line for the bathroom at a Dave Matthews Band concert at the Meadowlands. A drunk guy started playing with it while I sat at a Yankees game with my mother and brother. In high school, girls always wanted to know what kind of product I put in it, and if I used a blow-dryer, and if it looked like that all the time or just when I scrunched it after washing it. Strangers remarked on it at the mall. At the Newbury Street salon, the stylists admired its thickness.