Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel Page B

percent of it anyway so what did he care. He accused her of always wanting to spend more than either of them had so that I could go to private schools and wear pretty clothes; she would scream that if he’d prefer, I could just as easily go to some horrible public school in Queens, where he lived at the time, and take up with kids who had poor elocution and never went to Bach recitals or exhibits at the Met. Then all she could say was that it was lucky for me that she was the custodial parent. He said she was living in a dream world; she said he was living in a dream world.
    Though I could not hear his exact words, I know he must have accused her of being a lousy mother, which would trigger more screaming on her end; this allegation was the same as telling my mom that her whole life was worthless, that she wasn’t even good at the one thing she was supposed to be good at. Her response was always the same: Donald, she would yell, I have had to raise our daughter all by myself with almost no help from you. I am a saint, I am. You never took her on vacations. You never took her on weekends. It’s all been left to me and I think I’ve done a pretty good job, thanks not at all to you.
    And then the phone would slam and there would be silence followed by her wailing. The sound of her cry was so scary it was as if she were part of the chorus in a Greek tragedy and this was the big funeral scene—and I would think: I am more trouble than I’m worth.
    Their belligerence had arrived about a decade late. The procedure of their separation and divorce had been a relatively peaceful one: There was so little money or property to argue about, save for some good china and some bad Jose Feliciano records, that they never even bothered to get separate attorneys; they just had my mother’s lawyer-cousin draw up the papers. My mother got custody, my father didn’t even fully use his visitation rights, and the combined amount of alimony and child support that he had to pay was fixed at a weekly sum of less than seventy-five dollars. They had such a straightforward and uncomplicated relationship for so many years, or at least so it had seemed, that it was astonishing to watch as my depression became a catalyst for them to address all the mutual rage that they had been sublimating.
    When they started doing battle night after night, I remember thinking that something was really wrong here because last I checked,
I
was the one who was supposed to have the problems. They were ostensibly arguing about what would be the best method of treatment for me, but in the meantime, as they lay screaming, I just hid in my room languishing in an increasingly morose state. Occasionally, in an effort to upset my mother, my father would refuse to process my psychiatrist bills through his insurance plan, not realizing that she wasn’t going to suffer without the therapy—
I
was. Everything had gotten so damned out of focus. Instead of feeling like a kid whose parents
were
divorced, I felt like a kid whose parents
should
get divorced.
    Here was this thing called depression that was not definable in any sort of concrete way (was it bigger than a bread-box? smaller than an armoire? animal, vegetable, or mineral?) that had simply taken up residence in my mind—a mirage, a vision, a hallucination—and yet it was creeping into the lives of everyone who was close to me, ruining them all as I was ruined myself. If it were a pestilence, like the roaches that used to creep around the kitchen of our apartment, we could have called an exterminator; if it were a fire, we could have turned an extinguisher on it; my God, even if it were something simple like having trouble with quadratic equations in algebra class, there were tutors who could have taught me about 2ab or 3 2 or how to mix numbers and letters so they are just right. But this was just madness. I mean, I wasn’t an alcoholic, an anorexic, a bulimic, or a drug addict. We