Would she take them? she says.
Probably not, I say.
I sip my coffee, look down, then up. I was sick a while, I say.
What kind of sick? she asks.
Depression, I say. Anxiety? So many diagnoses, I say, shaking my head and looking down.
I’m bored already by how pedestrian I find these diagnoses. How I’m just like everyone I know who thinks.
And they’d hold that against you? She looks up from her plate.
They’ll hold it over me abstractly. They want me to remember always that they could hold it against me, while maintaining sufficient plausible deniability that they’ve done anything wrong.
I think she’ll respond but she doesn’t. She catches the eye of the waiter and he comes over. She orders us two gin martinis and we wait for them and are quiet. When they come the glasses sit close together, each with a lemon-rind twist. She nods toward mine and lifts hers and we clink them, quietly, before we take a sip.
THE NEXT DAY, I’m at work and my husband texts me a photo of him holding our girls in our apartment. They’re all grinning. The two-year-old has hold of his face with both her hands. I leave early and decide to walk the twelve miles home instead of taking the train. I figure at some point I’ll get on the subway, but I don’t. I still have that feeling, leaving work now daily long before I’m supposed to, that I’m supposed to be somewhere doing something, but I also think maybe what I have to do right now is walk.
An hour in, I call my mom.
What was that supposed to be? I say.
I just worry, she says. She just worries, but she also likes me afraid.
About what? I say. If you worry, why don’t you talk to me?
I’ve been functional for years now, but I think it is a functional that is difficult for them to make sense of. I think they thought when I got better, I’d be better than they think I am.
You don’t talk to me, she says.
Okay, Mom, I say.
She starts crying then, and I know I’m supposed to ask her what I can do to help her, to tell her that I’m sorry. I’m supposed to tell her everything is fine.
She’s telling me that she just doesn’t know why it’s not ever enough for me, all her trying, all her loving. My eyes are dry and I know that I will not start crying. I feel fury at her for crying like this, fury at myself for not being willing or able anymore to care.
Mom, please, I say, trying to sound careful. Mom, I say. It’s okay. I’m sorry, I say, accidentally.
I am your mother, she says. Still crying.
I know, I say.
She stays quiet.
I’m sorry, I say. I’ve said it once and now it seems that I can’t stop.
I thought, she says. I thought when you became a mother … She says the word like it holds something that I have refused to see or understand. That I’ve got it now, it’s been given to me, and that I’ve ruined what it’s meant to mean.
I’M STILL NINETEEN; she’s still twenty. I sit alone in my attic room because she left and order chicken fingers and French fries every night and read and watch TV and try hard not to talk to anyone. I sit out on the roof and all the undergrads file out at night to go places I don’t know about, have little interest in without her. I hardly go to class, much less have other friends, and I watch them, listen to them talk to and yell at one another. I watch them walk out hopeful, underdressed, and buoyant. I watch them come home hours later, still out on the roof, just watching. They’re disheveled, touching one another, in different groups or pairs.
We are very good at desperate emails tinged with self-destruction. Hers are more active, more interactive. We have lives that look concretely, wholly separate, lives that, if one were to track back to the causes, to the feelings and the thinking, might feel largely the same. My depression is the flattest; it’s so boring; it’s all inward—in books, at least, as well as in her emails, the characters all do things. They have too much sex; they drink; they travel and their lives at least are filled with stories that they might tell later when they’re older and they’re better, when they’re the grown-up versions of these unformed, reckless things. I envy her these stories, their shape and texture, the concreteness of her self-destruction. She is looked at, and because she’s looked at, she lives her anger and her sadness out loud and people see; I disappear and so slip down and under. I, sporadically, quite violently, try to be seen and am then further knocked down by how completely that effort fails. I ride the T, and I cry and my hands shake and I imagine that someone will notice, will say something, will take me home with them and tell me how to live, but people look afraid or look away or don’t notice to begin with. The barista at the coffee shop I used to go to with her seems so horrified by my crying and my shaking hands, even as I order the same quiche and chocolate cake and give him money, that I stop going, just to not have to see what I look like on his face as I hold my hand out for my change.
I don’t talk and no one notices that I’m not in class or at the campus center. I buy tubs of Betty Crocker icing at the 7-Eleven that is far enough off campus that I won’t accidentally run into one of the four people I know. I get the chicken fingers I subsist on delivered, when I know my roommates are in class or at a party; I try very hard to only go downstairs to pee or shower when they’re out. I do not sleep but also do not leave my bed and sometimes, just to prove my ineffectuality more surely, I walk around Boston late at night and nothing happens; I walk back to my attic, take my clothes off, get in bed.
She has three love affairs that year and starts selling weed to friends for cash. Her dealer is in love with her; sometimes they have sex, and she uses the discount to pay for her own stash. She lives off campus with two also-gorgeous girls who have tattoos on their forearms—one of them has her nose and eyebrow pierced—and they drink beer before they eat breakfast and when I go to visit her I feel young and small and far away. I hate her maybe. I want her mostly just to feel as sad as I do, to be as trapped, if only so that she doesn’t get too far ahead of me while I’m still the same.
* * *
It’s cold still. I’ve lost track of time and do not know the day or month or whether there’s some place I’m meant to be or have been meant to be this whole week. It’s cold and I’m not wearing enough clothes, running tights, a long-sleeved shirt, no gloves or hat, and I’ve run out to the Charles River in the middle of the night. I stand on the MIT Bridge, the one, in summer, we walked over every day; the water’s frozen at the edges but not in the middle. I have my cell phone with me and I call. There’s something wrong with me, I tell her. What is feeling like? I ask. She’s in love again. All she seems to want to talk about is this man she loves, who won’t love her back, who sometimes shows up at her house at night and they have sex but does not yet acknowledge she exists in the light of day. She says my name over and over. Where are you? she says. I’m on a bridge, I say. I don’t know then but I know now that we’re both children. I want her to feel scared, I know both now and then. I want her to feel more for me than any other person. I don’t care the shape it takes: fear, or love, or sadness. I want her close to me. I want her to feel like she can’t ever leave. She starts to cry and I tell her to stop it, There’s no need to worry. I don’t mean this. I’ve called because I want her to cry and I want her to be scared.