Land of Enchantment Read online

  “Eleven or twelve or thirteen hours.”

  “And how’s her appetite?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “She says she’s not hungry.”

  “Any thoughts of suicide?”

  Seriously? My dad just looked at me. He didn’t repeat the question.

  “Yes,” I hissed. I wasn’t being treated like I was crazy; I was being treated like a child, like I didn’t speak the language of adults, but of course I understood each of his questions perfectly well: I’d taken depression symptom questionnaires online. I already had my answers prepared.

  He prescribed Paxil, and recommended a woman I could see for talk therapy. My dad thanked him. His politeness was a betrayal.

  Cecilia Lisbon, the youngest of the five sisters who die in the novel The Virgin Suicides, makes her first attempt in June, “slitting her wrists like a Stoic while taking a bath.” After reviving her, the doctor in the ER asks what she’s doing there. “You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets,” he tells her.

  “Obviously, Doctor,” Cecilia says, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.” The perfect comeback—so self-aware, so pointed. How I wish I could have said something just like that to my psychiatrist, but depression slayed my wit, my gumption. Only a novelist could have invented that line for Cecilia.

  The Paxil made me shake uncontrollably. In school or at play rehearsal, I had to sit on my hands. My teeth chattered. I kept my mouth shut. I was told the side effects would eventually go away, but how could I believe anything the adults said?

  Part of my desperation to be hospitalized was so that I wouldn’t have to finish out the school year. Since Daniel had called the police, I was no longer allowed to just stay home all day by myself. I was on “suicide watch.” One morning, my parents had to peel my fingers from the bars of the bunk bed I shared with my sister and carry me, kicking and screaming, out to the minivan to drive me to school. I refused to go to class. As a compromise, I was allowed to sit in the guidance counselor’s office and cry all day. On the wall of the counselor’s office was a big poster that read I CAN ONLY PLEASE ONE PERSON PER DAY. TODAY IS NOT YOUR DAY. TOMORROW IS NOT LOOKING SO GOOD EITHER.

  One of the few teachers I actually liked found me in the office that morning and looked surprised to find me crying. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. Which was a lie. But I didn’t know what to say. Had no one told my teachers I wanted to kill myself? She hovered in the doorway for a second and then left me alone again with that fucking poster to stare at.

  I missed so many days of seventh grade that I almost didn’t pass on to eighth. Once my medication stabilized a little, I was assigned an aide, to help me finish all the schoolwork I was behind on. We worked in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the cafeteria. Any of my classmates who noticed my absence in Algebra could now watch me in this little room, like a panther behind bars, trying to solve problems that had once come easily to me and were now hopelessly unreachable through the fog in my head.

  At our first meeting together, the woman looked me in the eye and, with a kindness that was uncharacteristic for employees of that school, told me gently that she knew how I felt: her daughter had struggled with depression, too.

  I nodded politely. That means you have no idea how I feel, I thought.

  Years later as an adult, I directed a production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with kids at a summer day camp in Coney Island. On the phone with my mom, I mentioned the costume she’d made for me when I played Violet.

  “When you played Violet?”

  “In seventh grade, remember?”

  No, she didn’t remember.

  “I had that lavender gingham dress from Gap Kids . . . and you made two little loops out of elastic, so that when I put my wrists through them I could make the dress balloon out like a blueberry.”

  “That was such a horrible time,” she finally said. “I feel so bad that I can’t remember. There’s so much I’ve blocked out.”

  I wished she could give me the gift that Jason gave so effortlessly: the words of course I remember. The gift of a witness.

  One night while I was waiting tables in Albuquerque, I served a family of four from out of town. They were all very warm and outgoing. When the dad asked what I was doing in Albuquerque, I said I used to teach the performing arts to kids, but now I was writing a book.

  “About New Mexico?”

  A lot of people assumed this. “No,” I said, “it’s about a babysitter.”

  “Oh. Well, I work with kids, too. I’m the director of a children’s theater company in Las Vegas.”

  I only knew one person in Las Vegas, and he was a member of a children’s theater company. I gave him Daniel’s name.

  “Of course I know Daniel!” he said. “How do you know him?”

  “We met online when we were thirteen,” I said, “on an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan club message board.”

  He laughed. “That’s incredible,” he said.

  After work I found Daniel on Facebook and friended him.

  The Gaslight Diner

  (2007)

  During that Albuquerque fall, I started taking the Zoloft and the Ativan. Taking an Ativan turned the volume down. Jason could yell at me, he could give me the long explanations for why he’d lost this job (movie studio security guard) or that one (Olive Garden waiter), he could leave me and go ride somewhere, and I wouldn’t care. It turned off the part of me that cared.

  But I was still depressed. And running out of pills.

  “There’s no psychiatrist who will see me for months,” I complained to my mom, over the phone.

  “You’re not in Chicago anymore,” she said.

  Clearly.

  She tracked down Dr. Schultz, my psychiatrist from middle and high school, and made a phone appointment for me. He was the third doctor I saw in adolescence, after the initial Mr. Grumbles look-alike, and then a woman who told me, when I said I thought I was getting better, that she didn’t think I was qualified to make that assessment. Dr. Schultz never spoke to me like someone who wasn’t qualified to make her own assessments. Whenever we talked about teenage girl body issues, he acknowledged how difficult it must be to grow up in the body of a young woman, without presuming that he knew what it felt like to be a young woman. We also talked a lot about acting and identity. Most important, he spoke to me like I was intelligent, even though I worried that I no longer was. Depression had killed my powers of concentration, my creativity, and my curiosity—traits I’d never thought to cherish as a child because how could I have known they’d go away?

  Dr. Schultz was the one who’d cured me of my voices as a teenager. “Have you ever asked them to go away and leave you alone?” he asked.

  I’d shaken my head. “I never thought of that,” I admitted. I’d always felt like their victim, powerless, but the next time they came, I tried it. I told them to go away and they did. I haven’t heard them in over ten years.

  Before our call, I Googled the doctor and found on his website that he specialized in treating adolescent ADHD, which had nothing to do with me, since I was an adult—at least I felt like I was an adult. Wanted to be an adult. But I was still so dependent. Everyone wanted to help me, but no one could. No doctor’s appointment, no book, no medication, no late-night intervention was going to keep me away from Jason, as much as I sometimes wished for a rescue. It was hard to get anyone to understand my conflicting desires: I wanted to be protected from Jason while also staying with him. Imagine if Rapunzel got saved from her tower but then the prince let her visit the witch on the weekends, for that familiar pain, that yank of the hair—that’s what I wanted.

  I didn’t say any of this to Dr. Schultz. I’d always felt comfortable telling him anything, whether about hearing voices or cutting myself, and here was my opportunity to speak candidly about my
life with Jason. But I had to be realistic about where I was, and what I could hope to get from our single phone call.

  “I live in New Mexico now, with my boyfriend,” I said, getting straight to the point. “He told me I have to be on medication because I’m too crazy without it. He thinks I have trichotillomania, too.”

  “Why does he think that?”

  “Because I pluck my eyebrows twice a day.”

  Dr. Schultz chuckled. “You know,” he said, “my niece was staying with us over the weekend, and she brought so many . . . accessories with her, hair straighteners and all that, it was just amazing. I can’t imagine having to be a young woman today.”

  “So . . . you don’t think I have trichotillomania?”

  “You can tell your boyfriend that your doctor says you do not have trichotillomania.”

  I felt like I’d scored a point against Jason.

  I told him about my anxiety attacks, and about seeing a general practitioner who would give me only ten Ativans. “Wow,” Dr. Schultz said. “Very conservative.” He said he would call in a prescription for Wellbutrin to add to the Zoloft, and thirty Ativans.

  At least I had my pharmaceutical cure. No one was coming to save me, but I hoped the pills would make my life in the tower easier to endure.

  The new medication knocked me out, turned the volume even lower. My metabolism went through the roof, and I always felt on the verge of fainting, like a Victorian heroine. I tried to regulate my life with a routine that was independent of Jason’s chaos: make breakfast, take pills, write, eat lunch, check the mail, go to work, eat protein bars to stay upright, come home, eat dinner, stare at the wall. According to Jason, this wasn’t any better than the way I’d been before. He would call my mom because “she’s a professional and it’s her job to help us.” One night I overheard him tell her that I would always be sick, that she would be caring for her sick daughter forever.

  I didn’t see it then, but I see it now: although my voices went away as a teenager, in Jason I found their qualified replacement. The sicker he said I was, the more it seemed to be true: I was the victim of something beyond my control, and I would be its victim forever, always dependent on others to help me live my life. To disprove this theory I would have had to leave him and forge ahead on my own. I couldn’t do that. He made me believe the story he told me about myself, and I stayed with him because if he was right then it meant he was the only one who truly saw me.

  At the diner, the girls were me, Ruth, Jenna, KJ, Anna, Lois, Claudette, and Stephanie. KJ was the oldest, a mother of five, and she wore special shoes for her bad back. Stephanie was the most beautiful and also the quietest. Claudette once made pot brownies and Ruth got so high off one that she had to leave work and go home. Jenna was always stoned, her pupils like dark moons when I said hi to her near the salad prep station. Lois was homeless, living in a halfway house. Anna went to school.

  We were white and Hispanic and Navajo. On the books we made $2.17 an hour. In the computer every night we had to enter 10 percent of our sales, whether we made that much in tips or not. To legally serve alcohol in the state of New Mexico, I had to take a daylong class taught by a grad student in American history, in which we watched videos of drunk driving accidents and pledged to serve greasy food like fries to sober any customer who seemed too sauced. On the diner menu, you could choose from three different kinds of wine: red, white, or pink. We poured it from a spigot in a box.

  When Stephanie rolled up the cuffs of her T-shirt I could see the bruises her boyfriend’s hands had left on her arms in the shape of a grip. We all worried about her but felt there was nothing we could do for her other than avoid talking about the bruises because she didn’t want to talk about them. Luis, who worked in the kitchen, was in love with Stephanie. He was on probation, but I couldn’t imagine what his crime had been because he was so gentle and funny and warm. In his spare time, he did custom paint jobs on cars. When Stephanie came in busted, or didn’t show up for her shift, Luis’s face would pale and he’d swear to us that he was going to kill her boyfriend. On those days, we didn’t joke around with him when picking up our orders from the heated window.

  Mike and Matthew were the teenage busboys who made me coffee malts and drove me home at night after my shift if Jason couldn’t or wouldn’t come and get me. Mike snorted coke, which made us worry about him, but Matthew just smoked pot all the time, which seemed okay—therapeutic even—because his dad had just died.

  There were coin-operated jukeboxes at each of the tables in the diner, and Jess, the nineteen-year-old cashier, kept an emergency stash of quarters to save us from Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” coming on again. Since about 50 percent of the staff was high at any given time, we’d always rather hear “Splish Splash” or “Purple People Eater.”

  During the busy season around the holidays, Warren, one of the managers, hired someone new to alternate shifts with Jess at the register. Misty was older, probably late thirties, and wore high-waisted jeans with her standard-issue Route 66 T-shirt tucked in. Almost everything about her was big—she was tall with big boobs, big hips, big legs, big arms. But her voice was high and thin and always on the verge of cracking. Whether she was talking to me, or giving someone change for their bill, it sounded like she was going to cry. She was so awkward it made some of the other waitresses uncomfortable, and they badgered Warren about why he had hired her.

  “Be nice,” he said. “You don’t know her whole story. She really needs this, and I said we’d try her out and see if it works.”

  I wanted to be nice to her. Not just because Warren said so, but because I was drawn to her weirdness, her vulnerability. At the diner, I got to meet all kinds of people who were nothing like me. More than once, Warren had had to pull me away from one of my tables because I’d been there for too long, asking my customers where they had come from and where they were going.

  Near closing, when it finally slowed down in my section, I would go talk to Misty. She wore her coppery hair clipped back in a half ponytail, and her darker roots showed. I asked her about her life, where she was from, what she was doing now.

  “I live with my boyfriend,” she told me.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  “He’s younger.”

  “Mine, too!”

  We bonded over this single commonality. Eventually she told me younger meant teenage. Misty was suspended from her job as a special ed teacher; that’s why she’d needed new work. She was suspended because she was in a romantic relationship with her student. He was eighteen or nineteen, old enough that it wasn’t illegal, just inappropriate and shocking. I listened and nodded. Who was I to judge? We had the same problems with our teenage boyfriends, nagging them to keep up with their share of responsibilities when they just wanted to play video games. Some nights Misty gave me a ride home in her Jeep. How she’d met her boyfriend wasn’t even her most surprising story; one night, rattled, she told me she’d just seen her sister, who admitted she was in an incestuous relationship with their father. “She rubbed it in my face,” Misty said. “We didn’t see him for years, but still. What am I supposed to say?”

  It would be easy to say that I gawked at Stephanie’s bruises and listened to Misty’s stories because they made my own life seem better by contrast. I admit that, like a tourist to a disaster site, I witnessed the misery of my coworkers. I had chosen Albuquerque as my destination and I could leave when and if I wanted to: this was my privilege. But at the time, I didn’t think of my life with Jason as a story worth telling. I had no perspective on what was happening to me. I listened to Misty, and nodded sympathetically, and patted her shoulder when her eyes filled with tears, because I saw that it helped. It was the only thing I could do for her.

  It took a long time for Lois to tell me she was homeless. She was a recovering alcoholic who had escaped an abusive husband. Lois was blonde and had the skin of someone who had grown up in the sun
. She seemed hard and soft at the same time. When Jason unexpectedly showed up at the diner one night to tell me he’d spoken to my mom on the phone and told her about all the pot I smoked and how he believed it was making me psychotic, it was Lois who took the coffeepot out of my hands, steered me by my shoulders to the back parking lot, where we bleached the cutting boards each night, and calmed me by the light of the moon.

  Four nights a week I waited tables and one night a week I took the number sixty-six bus to my friend Ellen’s apartment near UNM, for our writing workshop. Ellen was about fifteen years older than me, with dark curly hair, a dry sense of humor, and a kind of rare laugh that had to be truly earned. I found out about Ellen and her writing group online, and even when other members dropped out, Ellen and I continued to meet on a weekly basis. More than anyone, she supported the reason Jason and I had supposedly moved to Albuquerque in the first place: the novel I was writing.

  “Don’t shoot yourself,” begins one of Ellen’s critiques, “but I haven’t pulled any punches because I want you to sell your book.” She was tough on me not because there was something wrong with me or my writing, but because she took my work and my potential seriously. I was used to going after what I wanted like a wild horse, ready to buck anyone who stood in my way, but Ellen trained and contained me, showed me how much I still had to learn and practice.

  Here was someone I could have told about what happened in the six days between each of our meetings. I could have asked her what she thought I should do if the young man I loved was diligently working to persuade me that anything that was wrong with our relationship was caused by my mood disorder. But as much as I yearned for some reasonable person to tell me I didn’t have to live like this, I also didn’t want to be the young naïve waitress with relationship drama. That was one part of my life; Ellen’s book-filled apartment was a refuge from the turmoil.

  I never told her anything.