How to Grow Up (3 page)

Knowing it wasn't time for me to move just yet, I took more 12-step-program advice and made a gratitude list about it. I scribbled in my notebook: big room, cheerful roommates, local pigeons, cheap rent. And I realized there was something else about living with my PMS-ing, panic-prone roommates that I was grateful for.

I'd changed since my twenties. And though some of these changes had been life altering, enormous enough for me to be
very
aware of them, many were small, subtle, and cumulative. In some ways I still lived like a twentysomething, and I sort of prided myself on my youthfulness. But in most ways, I didn't. My ideologies had changed—no small deal for a person who was once 100 percent ideology fueled. My hobbies, the things I did for enjoyment had changed. What I did and didn't do to my body had changed. My income had changed, and perhaps as a result, so had my style, my taste. What I thought was acceptable or unacceptable behavior had changed. My friends had changed (my lovers, not so much). How I expressed myself had changed. I was not the person I was when I was twenty-five, and living with a bunch of twentysomethings was sometimes-fascinating proof of this.

Which brings me to Christopher's second panic attack. It began as a simple knock on my door during a quiet afternoon at home. I was at work in the office part of my imaginary studio apartment. I'd thought Christopher was at work, too, but there he was, timid at my door.

He had made a major change a month or so prior to this: a pledge to stop drinking and smoking pot and snorting coke. The removal of what really is a structure—a social structure, a coping structure, a structure by which you've come to know yourself—is devastating. Even though it's unarguably a positive change, it's also an apocalypse. All kinds of things lurk under your booze intake—your feelings, for instance. Your hopes and fears, your chronic anxieties, whatever chemical imbalance you might be living with. Your past, and your future. Christopher, prone to panic when he was imbibing, found himself plagued with anxiety attacks when he tried to face life sober. He rapped on my door and called out in a child's voice, “Michelle? Can I talk to you? I'm having a panic attack.”

When I first stopped drinking and smoking pot and snorting coke and snorting speed and snorting heroin and snorting ecstasy and chomping hallucinogenic mushrooms, I felt a lot of panic, too. Every morning, panic woke me up, as harsh as an alarm clock, a bolt in my chest where my heart was. My eyes would snap open. Blood would suddenly rush through my veins like a death coaster at Great America.
Oh, great. I'm awake. I'm alive. I'm an alcoholic. How miserable, how humiliating. I'll never drink again. I'll never be happy again. Time to get up.

I gave Christopher the basics. “You're fine. You're not going to die. Panic makes you feel like you are, but you're really, really not. Just trust it.” He refused to lie down because he thought his heart would stop beating. He was afraid to take the calming herbs I offered in case they killed him. He agreed to a cup of tea, which I boiled for him on the greasy stove.

The thing about panic is the more you talk about it, the more you feed it. It's like having a bad trip on acid. You don't want to sit down with a hallucinator and be all, “How you feeling—pretty crazy, huh? Feel like you're losing your mind? Like you'll never come back? What are you looking at over there, a three-headed turtle that looks like your mom, playing a ukulele?” Same goes for panic.

After offering Christopher some reassurances that he didn't believe, I made him the tea and we just talked. I talked about life like life is no big deal, nothing scary, not the void, just this endless stream of moments, some good, some bad, and we are
all
in it together. Here we all are, figuring it out. I talked about the book I was writing, how it was hard. I talked about the flock of pigeons that lived behind our house, how sometimes they all took off with such a
crack
it startled me. How the bunch of them blotted the sun, stippled it like a strobe light with the flap of their wings. I brought it around to my sobriety, how I used to have panic attacks, but they went away.

“That's why I wanted to talk to you,” Christopher said. “You're so calm.”

Stop everything. “Me?” I asked, incredulous. “You think I'm a calm person?” I didn't want to make his panic attack all about me, but this was wild. An ex of mine once told me she'd avoided being my friend, let alone dating me, for months, because she was sure I was a speed freak. This was during my early, innocent days in San Francisco, before I had even heard of crystal meth. I was not a calm person. I talked fast, and constantly. I was riled up. I had opinions. They were important. They were probably more
important than yours, and I would argue with you forever, just to be sure.

“Yes, you are so calm,” Christopher insisted, kindly taking a moment from his panic attack to flatter me. In 12-step they tell you that the best thing to do when you are in psychological pain is to focus on something other than yourself, so perhaps I was doing Christopher a favor by directing the conversation toward me.

“Aren't I talking all the time?”
I prodded. “Aren't I so loud?”

Christopher thought about it, and shrugged. “No, you're not. You're really calm, and you have your shit together. You're sober, you're a published writer, you're . . . healthy.”

Perhaps compared to a newly sober baby drag queen in the grip of a panic attack, I did have all my shit together. Such assessments are relative. But what really struck me was that compared to
myself
at any other point in my life, I really
did
have all my shit together. When it's hard for you to grow up—because you're poor and can't afford the trinkets and milestones of adulthood, or you're gay and the mating rites of passage don't seem to apply to you, or you are sensitive to the world's injustices and decided long ago that if being a grown-up means being an asshole you'll carry out your days in Neverland with the rest of the Lost Children, thank you very much—when adulthood seems somehow off-limits to you, growing up takes time. You have to want it, and then you have to make a lot of changes. Some changes you make consciously and some without knowing it, and some changes get made for you. It's so much work I forgot I was even engaged in it; it just became
life
.

Sometimes you're so caught in old ideas about yourself, it
takes another person to show you who you actually are today. And the person you are today is a lot more grown-up than last time you checked.

•   •   •

About a month after Christopher's panic attack, the day before Thanksgiving, I was preparing two dishes to bring to a dinner. The first dish was sort of a joke, sort of not—broccoli Velveeta casserole. It's a joke because anything with Velveeta in it is a joke. It's not a joke because anything with Velveeta in it is delicious. I call it my heirloom recipe, but the truth is my mom started making it after I was grown and had moved out of her house. Still, it's
emotionally
my heirloom recipe. To make it, you steam a bunch of broccoli, or, if you're really aiming for authenticity, buy it frozen and nuke it in the microwave. Spread it across a casserole dish. Cut thick slabs from your surprisingly expensive loaf of Velveeta, and layer it over the broccoli. When the broccoli is obscured, take a sleeve of Ritz crackers and crumble them in your hands. Scatter them over the Velveeta. Next, melt some butter. How much butter? According to my mother, just enough to wet the crackers. Or, in the accent of our homeland, the North Shore of Boston, “Just anough ta wet tha crackahs.” Once you've wet the crackahs, shove the casserole in the oven and bake it till it's an unholy cauldron of cheesy goodness.

If the broccoli Velveeta casserole was a metaphor for who I'd been, butternut squash with goat cheese and hazelnuts was a metaphor for who I was today. The recipe came not from my mom but from Epicurious, and was recommended by a foodie
friend of my sister. It called for the roasting of hazelnuts and then the peeling of their skins from their hot little bodies. In my family we called hazelnuts
filberts
. We also called dinner
supper
, the living room the
parlor
, soda
tonic
, a porch a
piazza
, and compost
swill
. The North Shore of Boston in the 1970s and perhaps still today contains pockets of curious old-world language and customs.

I was excited to bring my bipolar, high-low side dishes to the Thanksgiving I'd be celebrating with my friends, the lot of them like me, people from low-income families who'd made it out of our depressing hometowns into lives as artists, teachers, nonprofit workers. None of us were quite sure how we'd done it, and many of us were plagued by guilt at the poor or alcoholic or mentally ill family members we'd left behind, haunted by the puzzle of how we'd figured out how to have such great lives when others, people we loved, hadn't. It was luck—no, we worked hard. It was hard work—no, everyone works hard. We were very lucky.

I knew my friends would appreciate and enjoy both dishes. I snuggled the butternut squash with goat cheese and hazelnuts in plastic wrap and took it with the Velveeta masterpiece to the fridge. I opened it up and peered into the graveyard of meals past, realizing I was going to have to toss a lot of leftovers to make room for my casseroles.

As I started throwing things away, I noticed a fly. Gross. I kept working, tossing a half dozen half-drunk Odwallas, all past their sell-by date. Oh look, more flies. Weird. None of them were flying. They looked decrepit, more decrepit than your average fly. The fridge was literally crawling with flies, flies too cold, their
wings too shriveled, to fly. Gross. How long had they been in there?

It was a terrible question—
How long has a swarm of flies been living
inside
my refrigerator?
Well, from birth, of course. There was no other way there could have been such numbers, all of them in the same crippled condition. Oh, and what are baby flies called? Maggots.

The fridge had maggots. Or rather, it used to have maggots. The maggots actually were able to gestate and grow up into this marginally functional group of adult flies staring at me from the shelves. Flies healthy enough to have perhaps laid the next generation of flies—maggots—elsewhere in the refrigerator, perhaps behind that produce bag filled with brown, liquefied vegetables, to the right of the gallon of SunnyD that had a sell-by date of 2004.

I shut the door. My heart was racing. I felt like a chick in a horror movie. If I were to open the door again, what would I see this time? If I'd previously been grossed out by the fridge, now I was terrified of it.

I called my two best friends. Conveniently, they were girlfriends and lived in the same place, about a fifteen-minute walk from my maggoty flophouse.

“Hi, can I bring over our Thanksgiving sides and put them in your fridge? Mine has maggots.”
I didn't sob as I said this, nor was my voice shrill with horror, as would be appropriate. I said it the way my friends and I share all of life's miniature tragedies, the humiliations that pop up right when you think you have it together, to echo your psyche with a wicked cackle:
You'll never be
a grown-up! You'll always be a dirtbag! Your ignoble provenance is etched into your very
soul
, and any attempt to have a normal adulthood will be punished by a
plague of maggots
!

I said it like it was sort of a joke, the dark domestic humor of a satanic Erma Bombeck.

Of course my friends let me come over and store my Thanksgiving dishes in their nice, clean fridge. They appreciated the outlandish gallows humor I had about the situation. But because they are true friends, they could also see how it was
not
funny to find your fridge teeming with flies that were perhaps literally born yesterday. “What are you going to do?” they asked. “Are you going to call the landlord? Is anyone going to clean it? Are you going to get one of those little dorm-room fridges to just keep in your bedroom?”

That I was living in a home where I might be better off with a dorm-style mini-fridge in my bedroom revealed how bad my situation really was. I was by now thirty-nine years old, living with people under the age of twenty-five and a fridge full of maggots.

If I turned forty while still living there, I was going to have really low self-esteem. My birthday is in February. I had two months to find a place to live.

That night I hopped into bed and cuddled under my blankets. Sometimes my roomy room got so chilly that I piled all the pillows I had on top of me and tried to stay very, very still in my sleep so as not to send the jumble tumbling to the floor. My space heater looked like it was made in 1960, and Bernadette had found it on the street. She had passed it to me after upgrading. It
occurred to me that I, too, could upgrade my space heater, buy one I could leave on overnight without fearing it would burst into flames. And I could buy a quilt, some cozier blankets. I know some people are born understanding things like this, or maybe they were raised with a solid quality of life that never wavered as they grew up. They know that the latest-model space heater and a high-quality comforter are their birthright.

I am not one of those people, no matter how many designer purses I manage to swindle into my closet, no matter how many trips to Paris I finagle. I am someone whose path to adulthood is not a clear A to B, a straight line through life. My path is more like A, B, back to A, but it's a different A this time, and now B looks so different from my time back at A—and whoa, here's C, what a trip! I'm a grown-up!

Unable to sleep, kept awake by the cold and the inspiration of my brand-new plan to finally move out, I climbed out of bed and went over to my window. Gazing out that back window at the persimmon tree in full fiery flare, I said a prayer.
Please, I know I can live better than this. Give me a chance, Universe. Hook me up. My time here is done. I'm ready for the next level—someplace clean, someplace adult. I deserve it. You know I do.