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: : : —SO HOW'VE YOU BEEN? ASKS Anita, as they're leaving the building. —It seems like forever since we've gotten together.
—I've been, uh, OK, I guess, Lydia says. She's trying to get the clasp on her bag to fasten. —Hang on, she says, —let me just—this fucking thing— Anita looks at her while she stands there fumbling; Lydia can feel it. She can feel also feel something behind the look, an emotion, and Lydia can't quite identify it but it makes her feel shameful.
Later, at the Starbucks, she's trying to get a date out of the calendar in her phone and she feels the look on her again. This time she can identify the emotion in it. It's pity.
She stops screwing with the phone so that she can meet Anita's gaze. —What, Lydia says. Anita, caught, looks away immediately. —Nothing, she says.
—You sure? Lydia says.
Anita nods.
What does she see? Lydia wonders. Do I look that fucking hopeless? Fucking hopeless is how she feels sometimes. She feels like the city is beginning to defeat her. She's been here for four years and what has it left her with? No boyfriend, no roommates, not even a pet— sometimes at night she worries that she's going to die in her apartment and be left there for weeks, decaying into a rotten paste, some abject non-thing that will need to be blasted out of the sofa with a hose.
—Can I ask you something? Anita says.
—Sure, Lydia says.
—Are you getting enough sleep? Because you're starting to look—I mean, I just—I just wonder if you're getting enough rest?
—I'm getting too much rest, Lydia says. —I go home and all I want to do is lie around. I fall asleep on the couch at eight and I wake up at like three in the morning still in my clothes. You know what it is? It's not that I'm not getting enough sleep. It's that I'm depressed.
—Ah, says Anita. —Do you want to know a secret about depression?
No, Lydia thinks. —Sure, she says.
—Depression is a product issue, Anita says.
—A product issue?
—Yeah—same as anything else. You find the right product for your problem and— she snaps her fingers. —I mean they make things that help people in your position.
—You mean like an antidepressant?
—Modern science, baby.
—I don't know, Lydia says. —The whole idea. I mean—to get happiness from a pill—
—You wouldn't talk that way if you had a urinary tract infection, Anita says. —You wouldn't say I don't know—getting a healthy urinary tract from a pill? You don't say I don't know—getting smooth skin from an exfoliating cream? These things are all the same—product issues, each and every one.
—Maybe you'd feel different if it were your brain we were talking about.
Anita opens her purse and produces a bottle of pills.
—Wellbutrin, she says.
: : :
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Index | << | 9 | >>
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