Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [69]
“Hey, Jeanne!” one of the shapes called out to me. It was a publicist named Vera who sat on the board of a nonprofit I was working for, the New York Women’s Film Festival, which helped struggling upper-middle-class white women get their films made. Sometimes I wondered whether we shouldn’t be helping other people get their films made, like middle-class white women or something.
“Hey, Vera, how are you?”
“I’m well, thank you. Jeanne, this is Martha. Martha is showing me some houses. I’m looking at brownstones in the neighborhood. Do you live here?” she asked.
“Yeah, the middle of the next block down,” I answered.
“Really? What number?” Vera asked.
I imagined Vera knocking on my door with a bottle of Merlot, surveying the wet wigs on the hangers outside my door.
“Two-thirty.”
“That’s so funny! We’re looking at two-twenty-nine. That must be directly across the street!”
I became acutely aware that my peers were buying brownstones while I was standing on the street hungover holding a bag of my own feces.
“Wow. I hope it works out. I gotta run, though, I’m late for something.” If there was one person I didn’t want my shitbag breaking in front of, it was a publicist.
“I’ll see you at the board meeting next Monday night. We still don’t have mentors for three upper-middle-class filmmakers from Tribeca. I don’t know what we’re going to do!” She chuckled.
“We’ll figure something out at the meeting. See you then.” I walked away from them, turning down Hoyt, wondering if my bag had smelled while I was standing there talking. No garbage at the corner of Pacific and Hoyt. Geez. I didn’t want to throw it in someone’s private garbage because I have had people yell at me for doing this and I was also afraid of someone connecting me with the poop. Finally there was a garbage at the corner of Smith Street and Pacific. I dropped the bag in.
A FEW WEEKENDS EARLIER I had spent the night up at Eleanor’s house in Connecticut, and I had to have had about four scotches after dinner, which everyone thought was extremely odd. Apparently I had toddled upstairs and woken up Will, Eleanor’s five-year-old, and said good night to him drunkenly. I had recently gotten this very short, very blond haircut which I thought said Jean Seberg or Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. The next day Julia said to me, “You better watch out with that new haircut of yours. You’re kind of reminding me of someone.” She didn’t have to say Mom because I had caught it already when I saw myself in the mirror, bombed out of my mind.
What was wrong with me? I put my brain on the problem every day. I was convinced I had some terrible, terrible disease. Multiple sclerosis, brain tumor, throat cancer. Katharine and Henry had a book at their apartment called Symptoms, by Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, that could take you from chapped elbows to cancer of the spleen in thirty seconds. I would spend hours at their house poring over every possibility of what could be wrong with me. I’m the kind of self-pamperer who will worry I’m going into anabolic shock if I haven’t eaten in an hour and a half. I seemed to have a physical imbalance that felt as though it originated in the brain, so brain tumor was a frontrunner with tinnitus a close second. The symptoms: hopelessness, unbelievable morning thirst, shame, massive headaches on waking, nausea, profound feelings of regret about things I wasn’t sure had actually happened, inability to pay my rent, self-pity, resentment toward the seemingly happy folks of the world, gastrointestinal tropical storms, and self-hatred. One morning I woke up and discovered bruises up and down my right arm. Big bruises. Like someone had punched me. And I remembered I had in fact been punched, repeatedly. By a musician. I thought it would be fun the night before to have a punching contest with this fairly diminutive local Brooklyn drummer. So we traded punches