No One Asked for This

by Cazzie David

  “What about some gratitude?!” she exclaimed.

  “This has nothing to do with gratitude; I’m just asking to be treated like an adult and for you to not scream my name when I’m five feet away.”

  She left the kitchen. I always surprise myself with my desires, and I guess this was what I wanted—for everyone to leave me alone. Why did I want this so much more than being excitedly greeted by my family, with breakfast lovingly made for me? I’m such a contrarian freak.

  I went outside to calm myself with a walk. The fall in Martha’s Vineyard can only be described as cozy and haunted. It’s wildly eerie; it’s the kind of place where it feels like one of us is going to mysteriously go missing, and years later when you walk through the forest you’ll think to yourself, Only the trees know what happened to her that day.

  When I came back, my sister was making a gluten-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, grain-free apple almond cake for Thanksgiving since she can’t eat regular anything because of her stomach. I asked if I could help, for selfish reasons, as I was afraid that if she didn’t let me, I’d go on my phone. She said I could cut the apples, so I grabbed a knife that was already out on the cutting board and started slicing.

  “Caz, that knife is dirty.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I rinsed the knife in the sink and dried it with a rag.

  “That rag is dirty.”

  I rinsed the knife again and dried it on a clean towel.

  “Actually, I’m just going to do it,” she said anxiously.

  I handed her the knife; she put it in the dishwasher and got a new one. I chose not to find that annoying, and in exchange she let me leave the room without calling me mean.

  The next morning, three different family members came into my room to try to wake me up. I mean, seriously, what kind of home is this?! I might as well be in boot camp. I barged into the kitchen, livid. Everyone was there.

  “Well, look who it is!” one of my cousins said.

  “All right, listen! I’m going to say this once: I do not want to see a single face in the morning unless I have decided, myself, that by leaving my bedroom, I am allowing faces in my peripheral vision. Do you understand?!”

  Everyone was silent.

  “No faces. Got it . . . what about a note under the door?” my aunt said. They all laughed. I rolled my eyes and went to pour myself a cup of coffee.

  “Caz, have you gotten your flu shot yet? Rom and I were going to go down to the pharmacy and get them today,” my mom said.

  “Fun.Thanksgiving flu shots. Yeah, I did.” I don’t have a death wish; I would never travel in November without a flu shot.

  “Did you make sure there was no mercury in it at the place you got it from?”

  “Uh . . . no, you took me there last year, so I assumed it was fine.”

  “The vaccine is always changing—you always have to make sure. The mercury is linked to Parkinson’s, ALS, and Alzheimer’s,” my mom said nonchalantly. I dropped my head into my hands.

  “Caz, come on. It’s a fact of life. Everyone gets sick.”

  “No. I can’t ever get sick. Ever,” I said through my fingers, which were now stretching parts of my face in different directions.

  “You can’t prevent it! Everyone dies of illness eventually,” my mom replied.

  “Unless you’re murdered, which really wouldn’t be that surprising since you’re so mean,” Romy said.

  “No, many people die from natural causes. Probably more than people who die from illness,” I argued.

  “What do you think dying from natural causes is?” Romy burst out laughing.

  “Uh . . . dying in a natural way?”

  “Cazzie. It’s a nice way of saying a person got sick.”

  “Mom, is it true you can’t die without getting sick?” I asked, feeling a bit uneasy that I might actually have been thinking positively for once.

  “It’s true that you can get sick from worrying so much and having such negative thoughts!”

  Thanks, Mom.

  Natural causes, I guess, was my Santa Claus. My last hope in this excruciating world. But it was cool to have remembered that nothing was good and that I was stupid in the same moment.

  A few weeks prior, I wasn’t scared of dying at all. The room I had been assigned to was deep in the middle of the woods, a cabin that looked even more murder-y than the stereotypical murder-y cabin. It’d be impossible for anyone not to feel like they were going to get murdered every night. I wasn’t scared about being murdered, though—not because I thought I wouldn’t be, but because I didn’t care if I was. The only thing I was scared of was one of the massive trees falling onto my room and crushing me as I slept, only because it’s a much more embarrassing way to die than I’d prefer. Dying via a tree falling on you seems like the universe was trying to kill you, rather than it being an accident. No one could say, “NOOOOO, it wasn’t supposed to happen!!!!!!!!” Because, IDK, it kind of seems like that was supposed to happen . . .

  Being scared of sickness and death again was a clear sign I was getting back to normal, although I don’t know if it was preferable.

  On Thanksgiving morning, I was woken up by a ten-foot stick poking my foot.

  “WHAT THE FUCK!?!”

  “It’s not a face!” my stepdad yelled from the window where the massive stick was coming from, hysterically laughing at his own infuriating joke.

  I didn’t get upset because he seemed so excited about it that it was sad. Too much effort put in. An hour later, I resigned myself to seeing my family. I didn’t want to get dressed for Thanksgiving but I wanted to change to feel a little better about myself. I’d been wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a fleece sweater I’d taken from my mom’s closet every day, and I had very knotted hair from sleeping in a different version of a bun every night. I didn’t want the attention I’d get from coming out in jeans and a sweater. The reactions to me not wearing an XXL hoodie would elicit more attention than waking up. I put on leggings as a compromise.

  That evening, my sister and I sat by the fire as we waited for dinner to be ready. It was freezing in the house because my mom refused to turn the heat on. My sister was underneath a large blanket, which she wouldn’t share and kept exaggeratedly shivering underneath. “Brrrrr, this blanket is so cold,” she said.

  “Is it colder than no blanket?” I said, also shivering.

  After everyone was called to the table, my mother informed us of everything in the meal that had come from the garden, as she did every time we sit down to eat. Ninety percent of what we eat when we’re there comes straight from the ground, because my mother’s dream of having a garden that is even more extra than Oprah’s was fully realized.

  “Let us be so thankful that we have food on the table and even more so that it’s food from the garden. Thank you to everyone who helped make this meal, but more important, to everyone who helped grow and pick this meal.” She’d grown and picked it. “Here we have a salad, everything in it picked from the garden. Carrots from the garden. Mushrooms and sweet potatoes that I picked from the garden.” One person at every dinner jokes, “Is it from the garden?” and I don’t know what’s worse, hearing my mom repeat that everything is from the garden or hearing a family member repeat that joke.

  After about five minutes, my mom suggested we all go around the table and name what we were most grateful for. A tried-and-true Thanksgiving tradition and, for my family, a tradition for most regular dinners as well. My mom’s response to just about anything is “Think about what you’re grateful for.” But it’d be insane if I had to remind myself to be grateful when everything in front of my eyes twenty-four hours a day is a constant reminder. The only thing I could ever think of not to be grateful for is that I’m trapped in this incredibly privileged life saddled with a brain that simply refuses to allow me to appreciate it, lest I detest myself even more than I already do.

  “Who wants to go first?” my mom asked.

  “I wonder what everyone is going to say,” I said sarcastica
lly. Everyone would say family or their health and being able to spend Thanksgiving here, an attempt to suck up to my mom. I would’ve said, I’m thankful for everything but being me, if not for the concerned reactions it would incite. So I’d probably resort to a bad joke like I’m thankful for bread, and everyone would just say, Oh, Cazzie . . .

  Everyone talked about how good everything looked, especially the sweet potatoes, and we all complimented Romy on her table setting. Bottles of wine, one red, one white, were passed around until everyone had filled their glass to their liking. In a side discussion, I looked to my older cousins for wisdom as a part of my constant search for assurance until we heard “One conversation!” come from the head of the table and stopped talking. I turned my attention to my youngest cousins playing and, predictable in my own ways, wondered how much longer we could keep them from finding out how fucked up the world was. I started to feel bad about the fact that I couldn’t get through one otherwise perfect holiday without having imperfect thoughts, and then I started to feel stupid for feeling bad, as if I hadn’t lived with myself for enough time to know it would be like this forever.

  Whenever you’re going through something, people tend to tell you, “Everything will be okay.” And you’ll say, “How do you know?” And they’ll say, “Because they always turn out to be, no matter what,” or “You’re capable of getting through anything.” Well, neither of those are true. Things won’t always turn out okay. And there is plenty of stuff I am totally incapable of getting through and even some mild traumas that I would rather euthanize myself than endure. I will never be able to accept that the world is a fucked-up place, that good things happen to bad people, that injustice and stupidity are rampant, and that horrific, awful things happen every day that no one asked for. Everything will not always be okay, but as I look around the table with the unavoidable gratitude that comes just from having sight, the fact that my dad is still alive, my cat is in my home, my sister is healthy, my family is annoying but I have one and they love me, I haven’t gotten radiation poisoning from my phone yet, and right at this very moment, at least during this dinner, everything is okay . . .

  Possibly for one of the last times ever.

  * * *

  And then, inevitably, it was my turn.

  “Cazzie, what are you grateful for?”

  * * *

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my editor Kate. I don’t know what this book would be like without you. Something like this but a lot worse. If it’s still bad then thank you for making it so much less bad than it could have been. Thank you for always pushing me only in the right directions, for your consistent support, sensitivity, and insight. How someone can simultaneously be so wise and in tune with the trivialities of pop culture is beyond me.

  Dorian, thank you for believing in me even though you still have yet to know whether or not you were right to do so. Thank you for championing this book, for understanding me and therefore being able to speak on my behalf, as I time and time again proved to be unable to do so.

  Naomi Bernstein, my dear friend, without whom my smartest points in this book would be the dumbest. Thank you for letting me pretend it’s possible I could have come up with lines that only someone as intelligent and self-aware as you could think up. If I could steal a person’s brain, it would be yours, and I am eternally grateful to you for letting me rent it out with your edits.

  Elisa, I know the reason God will never give me a husband is because he gave me you. Thank you for your endless generosity with notes and reassurance, for always telling me the truth in such comforting ways that they feel like lies, for always being there for me, and helping me even when you know I don’t need it.

  Thank you to my mother for the endless material and for having such a good sense of humor about said material. Also for making me feel confident enough to write this book from the beginning. I’m sorry for possibly ruining your experience of having a child. If I could do it all over again I would be a perfect little angel. Any strength I possess is because of you.

  Romy. Thank you for being the first person I consult on everything. You’re the best version of what Mom and Dad’s DNA could possibly make. You’re everything that is good. The human embodiment of a cupcake.

  Dad, you’re my best friend in the world. Thank you for always making the time to read my work, from my middle-school homework to my college essay to the essays in this book. Thank you for never giving up on making me a better person and writer even though it’s useless. Having you as a dad, mentor, and hero is the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

  Liana, thank you for your brilliant ideas, for going above and beyond to help make everything I do as thoughtful as it can be, for keeping me in check, and for your honesty and unwavering support.

  Pete. I love you. Thank you for being encouraging when you did not have to be. Your bravery inspires me and your friendship means the world to me.

  To special friends who took time out of their lives to read early segments of this book: Nicole, Rebecca, Rose, Owen, Taylor, Molly, Jessie, Ella, Karine, Nick, Crissy, and Maddie.

  Others who either eased my anxiety about this book or helped with it in some way: Sharon, Alyssa, Nick S., John, Miller, Jackson, Lily, Chen, Kyra, Lisa, Emily B., Jared, and Sophie <3.

  Thank you to everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

  * * *

  About the Author

  © Katie McCurdy

  Cazzie David is the creator, writer, and star of the critically acclaimed web series Eighty-Sixed. She is a columnist at Graydon Carter’s Air Mail and has written for Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Reporter, Glamour, In-Style, and Vogue.

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  Footnotes

  * For legal reasons, I’m required to clarify that the above material is adapted from A Series of Unfortunate Events.I am not cool enough to actually hire Lemony Snicket.

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