Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel Read Free Book Online

people like you.” Apparently it sold well in California.
    One day while he was taking pictures of me in the Central Park zoo (I must have been only two or three), I asked my dad when he was coming back home.
    â€œ
Honey, I’m not,” he said. I guess I was looking down at the ground at this point because I remember how the zoo was paved with gray hexagonal bricks.
    â€œ
But Mommy says you are,” I protested.
    â€œ
I’m sure Mommy didn’t say that.” He paused, looked exhausted, like he was going to pass out. “Mommy and I are going to live apart from now on, which we tried to explain to you.” As an afterthought, he added, “Which doesn’t mean I love you any less.
”
    â€œ
But, Daddy,” I persisted, “Mommy told me to tell you that if you want to come back home, she wants you to come back.
”
    â€œ
I’m sure that’s not true.
”
    And, of course, it wasn’t.
    During that same period—early in their separation, when they were still making valiant efforts at civility—my father would sometimes babysit for me on nights when my mom went out. Sometimes he’d bring along his girlfriend, soon to be my stepmother, Elinor, and I would play with the huge, brightly colored Pucci scarves that she wore with her turtlenecks, blindfolding myself or fondling the soft silk. Our apartment had a long, narrow, closet-lined hallway, and one of my favorite activities was to stand on my
father’s feet as he held my arms above my head for balance, and walk on his shoes with him through the hall, quite literally walking in his footsteps. And when it was time for me to go to sleep, I would make my father leave those same shoes, rusty brown half boots, in the hallway outside my bedroom door. I wanted them to be there so I could look out and know he was still there. It was like I knew he was planning to disappear on me sometime.
    Before I went to bed, I always used to ask my dad and Elinor when they were going to get married. Sometimes I’d tell them I was going to fire them both if they didn’t do it soon. Not having any idea really what a normal family was like, I thought it was pretty neat that my dad was going to be married and I would get to go to a real wedding—as opposed to the one I’d performed for my Barbie and Ken dolls, or the ceremony I’d had with Mark Cooper in nursery school when he said that I could be Catwoman if he could be Batman, which basically meant that I wouldn’t tell on him when he tried to beat me up during rest hour. After all these mock weddings, I think I was hoping to be a flower girl and get a new dress. I guess it never occurred to me that he and Elinor would ever omit me from the wedding altogether: the ceremony, the reception, the dinner afterward. Mommy said that Daddy must have thought that was the best thing to do. But I was only five years old, and all I knew was that there was a party I hadn’t been asked to.
    I think it was about the time of my dad’s second marriage that I first began to have a sense of people disappearing.
    Â 
    My mother and I moved to the Upper West Side, and I became part of a whole new breed—or, at any rate, a whole new brand—of child that seemed to have emerged from the collective gene pool at about that time. While that section of Manhattan has since become a haven for yuppies and recent college graduates, when I was little it was full of single mothers, religious Jews, ballerinas, intellectual types that you’d see in Woody Allen movies, and the occasional
artiste.
The playground in Central Park was full of hippie housewives dressed in clogs and blue jeans, sitting and watching their children, who, as a rule, were wise beyond their years, sophisticated waifs in love beads and Danskin pants, patchwork versions of hip who were mouthy and clever, who didn’t actually know what sex was or where babies came from but still used words