Sad Janet

by Lucie Britsch

  * * *

  You’re supposed to start taking the pills at the start of November because they take six weeks to kick in. If those TV ads work, on the morning after Halloween, pharmacies around the world will be full of hungover people like me shuffling in to pick up their meds. Maybe our collective sadness won’t feel like sadness anymore? Maybe it will feel like something else, something hopeful? Probably not. It’ll still be waiting in line in a pharmacy like we’re waiting for death, which we are.

  * * *

  Last Christmas Eve, after Melissa had left for the day, Debs asked me if I had any place to be. I said no, even though I did. She said she had somewhere to go, so I agreed to watch her kids, even though it meant throwing a wet blanket on both her kids’ Christmas Eve and mine. I’ll be back real soon, she said, in time to do all the Christmas shit, she said, definitely.

  Her kids weren’t bothered because they had a new computer game, something to do with zombies or war or both. It was supposed to be a Christmas gift, but that whole family has zero chill. If Debs never comes back, this might be my life now, I thought, and I was fine with it.

  I used to watch Debs’s kids so I could snoop around in her house. Going through people’s stuff is one of my few remaining joys, but I know the odds are against me: I’ve never found anything interesting. Not even a vibrator. That’s how joyless we all are. We don’t even think we deserve even basic pleasures. I do know she sleeps with a baseball bat by her bed, though, so maybe she hasn’t murdered her husband yet.

  Of course she did finally come back. We were watching Home Alone like we’d never seen it before when she swooped in and squished between us on her tiny couch. If it was a boat, we would have thrown the babies out and saved ourselves. We both had a little drink, and eventually the kids kissed me on the forehead with their sticky drooling lips and disappeared upstairs to brush their teeth. When they were smaller, they used to stare at me or hand me wet things—Cheerios, mostly—and I just said thanks. Now that they’re older, they mostly climb over me like I’m furniture and I sit back and take it. Sometimes it’s nice to be furniture in someone else’s home.

  Debs said I could crash if I had nowhere to be. I’ve got many places to be, I told her, but nowhere for me. I heard myself getting singsongy, but I didn’t care. I was a little drunk, it was Christmas, leave me alone. Then we all trundled off to our corners, feeling fizzy and festive, me on the couch with dog blankets. Debs shouted at us all to go to sleep and we did, because she’s actually, literally, the boss of us all.

  * * *

  The next morning was Christmas. Debs wasn’t sentimental, so it was just like any morning but with presents, and the kids got to eat junk for breakfast. There were still twenty rowdy dogs who needed feeding and cleaning and walking, which is a buzzkill every day but also what saves us.

  When we got to the shelter, Melissa was there. I was aghast. She said she forgot it was Christmas, but she was lying. Debs had given us both two days off; neither of us was supposed to be there. Trouble is, we’re drawn to Debs like moths to—well, not a light, but more another moth, the mother of all moths. She is Mothra.

  Eventually, Debs made me leave. Made me go to see my parents. Told me to shower first. Told me to be nice. It’s Christmas, Janet, she said, and not just for you. So I did as I was told—okay, I didn’t shower, just had a whore’s bath—and I wasn’t really nice, but I wasn’t mean either. I was just there. By the time I got to my parents’ house I’d already left behind the best part of myself, with Debs and the dogs at the shelter.

  * * *

  This Christmas is going to be different. This year, apparently, I’m going to be off my head on whatever these drugs are—all so I can really be there, which doesn’t make any sense. Where is it that I’m supposed to be? Somewhere, anyway. Anywhere but here is fine by me.

  Debs is taking her kids to the library like a fucking hero. She tells me I’m in charge, though I know she’s only saying it to soften the blow because I can’t go along to the library with them. She knows how I feel about libraries.

  Once, I stole a library card. It was just there on the ground in the street. Someone else would have ignored it, someone better would have handed it in, tracked the person down. I stole it with the intention of using it fraudulently.

  That’s fucked up, the boyfriend said.

  Why? I said.

  You know it’s free to use the library, right?

  I’d thought about getting my own library card, but I knew that meant going somewhere and filling out forms and having to tell someone who I was and where I lived and that I existed at all, and that all felt like too much. This was better. I promised myself I wouldn’t borrow anything risqué, no bawdy Victorian romps or books about serial killers. Nothing they could point to when I did something worse and say, Well, I mean, just look at the books she borrowed.

  Stealing that card was the perfect crime. Free books—the dream! At least until the owner reported it lost and got a new card and my card got cancelled. If I really loved books, I would have murdered him, or just gone and gotten my own card.

  Why do you do these things, Janet? the boyfriend would say. You’re fucked up, he wanted to say, but didn’t because he still had a girlfriend, and I was still fuckable. He was just mad I got off on weird stuff like petty crime more than I got off on him.

  * * *

  When I get home, I want to watch TV, but I daren’t. I can’t switch it on now without being assaulted by Christmas. Finally I close my eyes and decide to click the remote till I find something I can stand—some weird documentary about crime, maybe—but no dice. There’s no escaping it now.

  The music channels are the worst. Mariah fucking Carey. Just say the word Christmas and she’s there, like a dog when you drop a sausage. It’s always Christmas in her heart, but also in her house—I know this because I saw it on MTV’s Cribs when that was a thing—and I wondered why no one thought that might indicate a problem. She said she loves the holidays because it’s an optimistic time. Maybe they should have hired her as the spokesperson for our pill, but they probably figured we’re just a bunch of goths, and goths don’t go in for Mariah much, not in public anyway.

  In that case they should have gotten Morrissey. But he wouldn’t do it, of course, because he wants us to all be sad. Sometimes I think Morrissey is the only one who understands me, and then I remember he’s barely Morrissey anymore, which ruins everything.

  I wonder if Mariah is taking these pills. I’m pretty sure no one is making her go to any meetings. I don’t care as long as she’s okay. My empathy for humans is weird and fleeting.

  Finally, I find some dumb horror movie—the girls in these films are still dumb, even though we’re supposed to be better now; guess no one told this director or he didn’t care—and soon I’ve stopped thinking about Mariah altogether. Someone somewhere will be thinking about her.

  13

  I feel like I’m standing in a cornfield and willing aliens to take me. I don’t care if they’re the probing kind or the cute cartoon kind, I just want them to take me.

  For once, I’m doing what everyone wants me to do. I am surrendering, Dorothy. I keep waiting for my boyfriend to leap out of the shadows at any moment and embrace me, tell me all is forgiven, try to move back in as if nothing had happened. I’d have to knee him in the groin and run for the hills. Or the woods, at least—I was going there anyway.

  Everything I’ve worked for, this small space I’d made for myself in the universe—all of this is nothing now, or so I’m being told. I myself am nothing, reduced back to dust, and not even stardust but everyday household dust. Dust I’ll have to brush into a pile and reanimate into a Janet, so that people will think I am remade, when really I’m just a dust bunny to be puffed away or vacuumed up.

  One little pill every morning for eight weeks. Eight weeks, Janet, my mother says, like it’s nothing. Eight weeks, my doctor says, and it sounds
like a lifetime. A lot can happen in eight weeks. Then, bam, it’s Christmas. Come the New Year, you wean yourself off: half a pill every day for two weeks, then half a pill every other day for one week, then no pills. I’m already counting the days till no pills.

  Meanwhile, of course, I have to get up every day and go to work and pretend this is all normal.

  My doctor told me to google the information leaflet, and I googled the shit out of it. This was war, and I wanted to be ready. That it was war against myself I chose to ignore. So I downloaded it and printed it out—am I the only person who still has a printer?—and I sat down and read it. For all I knew, there was a chance they’d test me on it at some point. We might get whisked off to Lapland to meet Santa at his pharmaceutical factory.

  The leaflet was pretty standard as far as drug leaflets go. I’d seen enough of them, since childhood, to know what I was in for. I read Emma’s Prozac one when she couldn’t be bothered. (You’re taking your reading thing a bit far, aren’t you, Janet, she said. No one reads those things, Janet, she said, they’re like the terms of service. Maybe they should, I said, and started reading. When I finished, I went and found her. That had the worst ending ever, I said. Everyone dies. I guessed, she said.)

  You must follow the guidelines for the pills to work, I read. No shit, Shirley. You must wean yourself off them as directed. No thinking you’re smart and together enough to just throw the pills away the second you escape your family.

  This already sounds like no fun.

  It doesn’t say what will happen if you just neck all the pills in one go. I’m guessing death but in a festive way, like you think you’re a reindeer and try to fly but trip on some fairy lights instead and die of frostbite where you’ve fallen in the snow.

  Nowhere does it say that you should avoid getting pregnant, but I’ll avoid it as usual. It doesn’t say what you should do if you do get pregnant, but I know anyway. I do wonder what would happen if I went through with it, though. Would the baby love Christmas, like Mariah-level love, or hate it? There are so many Prozac babies by now, and they don’t seem any happier. I think about things like this a lot, because as a woman I’m hard-wired to always be thinking about babies even if what I’m thinking is that I definitely don’t want any. Mostly I want to forget I’m a woman and just be a person, but it’s almost impossible.

  I stay up late, lying in bed, reading the leaflet like I’m studying for a test. It says the pills might disrupt your sleep, but I don’t know how you’d know it was the pills and not the parties in your building, or the drunk Santa in the street yelling about his wife who left him, or the fact that you fell asleep reading this leaflet in the first place.

  The pills are meant to build up silently in your system—under the surface, like a fungus, I guess—until wham, you can’t do anything but let their effect consume you. You reach for your Frosted Flakes and you notice that Tony the Tiger is wearing a sweater with a reindeer on it and you don’t know how it happened but it happened, and somehow you’re meant to feel it’s okay.

  What this tells me is that the world has little respect for people like me, people who need easing in. Take this pill, week after week, and nothing—and then suddenly it’s a full-on assault to the senses. Every single TV commercial is yuletide, every song glib and festive. It’s like you’re suddenly in Whoville, which makes me the Grinch, and I’m fine with it.

  Side effects may include making your heart grow three sizes.

  * * *

  On November first, I tell Debs I’ll be late. She doesn’t care as long as I show up, which is just what I want everyone to ask of me. I dig my prescription out from the bottom of my bag, brush the granola dust off—into my mouth, because I’m disgusting—and march myself down to the pharmacy. On the way, I comfort myself that I can always change my mind when I get there and pick up a box of condoms, just to make everyone’s day a bit more exciting. I could even leave one on the street, so that people who see it will feel gross but a little bit nostalgic for sex.

  Instead I walk in through the sliding doors, shut down a chunk of my brain, and wait in line for the bottle that will change my life. I wish my mother were here to see my sacrifice. She would have come if I’d asked, but who asks their mother to come with them to the pharmacy? Melissa would have come too, would have seized the opportunity to slather me with makeup samples. Debs is the only one with sense enough not to have come. She’d just wonder what the fuck was wrong with me that I couldn’t go on my own. I have actual work to do, Janet, she would say.

  I try to distract myself by guessing which people in the queue are getting my pill. It’s not hard to find my people. I spot one immediately, a guy in his pajamas and a big coat. I feel an urge to salute him, but you can’t do that anymore without people thinking you’re some kind of overly social Nazi, so I just nod.

  There’s a girl with super-thick black eyeliner and a cigarette behind her ear, and I want to marry her. I hope she’s at my meeting.

  There’s a cute boy listening to something loud and shouty. He doesn’t realize we can all hear it, or maybe he doesn’t care. Thinking he’s cute makes me mad. I want to punch myself in the ovaries and tell them to quit it. I don’t want to meet new boys at the pharmacy, but there they are, taunting my vagina. I’m done with men and families. If I have urges, I deal with them myself, like a grown-up.

  My mum would love if I met someone, even if it was at the pharmacy. It would make a good story to tell our dogs: We were waiting for the same meds, I would say. It was meant to be. There should be a dating app for that: You’re on this, they’re on this, you can talk about your side effects. Your mouths will both be too dry to kiss, but there are dry-mouth lozenges in Aisle 5.

  There’s a woman with a small child curled round her leg; she keeps peeling it off, only to have it curl back round her like a snake that wants her dead. If the boyfriend was here, he would be making stupid noises and faces at it, like I do to dogs. I keep wondering why she doesn’t shake her leg and fling the kid into the tower of cough medicine.

  The rest of the customers are regular folks lining up for regular meds. They look at us like we’re freaks because we are. Who can’t be happy at Christmas? Us, that’s who.

  I buy candy and condoms because I want to feel young again and hopeful. The woman at the counter doesn’t care, which is a shame because today I only have eyes for her.

  * * *

  All day I can tell Melissa wants to ask me where I was this morning, but she can’t because it’s none of her business. I almost want to tell her because no one else cares, but I don’t. Part of me hopes she goes through my bag. She’s not my mum, so I don’t care. She stares and stares and finally tells me she’s there if I want to talk ever, about anything, by which she means, Please tell me everything because I live to live vicariously through you.

  She thinks she catches me taking a pill and asks shyly if I feel anything yet, and I don’t have the heart to tell her it’s a Tic Tac. Instead I just tell her I’ve been having cravings for sugarplums, and she thinks I’m being hilarious and not mean. She’s like an annoying little sister, even though we’re the same age; this probably means I love her but will sit on her and threaten to punch her if she tells anyone.

  Debs doesn’t care what I’m doing as long as I do my job and don’t try to touch her. She knows about the pills because they’re all over the news, and she knows I’m part of it because I have to tell her medical stuff, but she hasn’t asked anything about it. Just tell me if you feel weird, she says, which is no help because I always feel weird.

  Finally I decide to throw Melissa a bone and tell her about the guy at the pharmacy. She goes all moony, as expected, and asks me what he looks like, because that is what daft people need to know to process any information. I wish I had someone I could count on to ask some weird question, like how big his dick looked or how he smelled, just for variety.

  To mess with her, I tell he
r he looked just like some lame actor she likes. Melissa brings out the Bad Janet in me.

  Finally, when I get home, I look at the pills. Things are moving quickly. November 1 is almost done.

  The pills aren’t gift-wrapped, which is disappointing. I feel cheated already. There’s no box or ribbon. Just an ordinary bottle of pills.

  I pull out the same pamphlet I’ve seen before, its warnings like the worst slam poetry: Tremors and shaking. Decreased sex drive. Exhaustion. Loss of appetite. Restlessness. Diarrhea. Increased thirst. Blindness. Blindness! Happy fucking Christmas, Janet. Not to mention increased anxiety, aggression, irritability, hostility, worsening of depression, and suicidal thoughts. Just what every little girl dreams of for Christmas.

  The pill is green and red. Of course.

  I shake one out in my hand and look at it. This is some fucked-up shit, I think, but I admit I’m a little curious about who I’ll be if I take it. The dream daughter. The perfect girlfriend. The joyful employee and colleague. Fuck that shit, I think. I like who I am. It’s everyone else who has the problem.

  The pamphlet doesn’t say what to do if you change your mind. If you have concerns, it says, talk to the host of your meeting. You must attend every meeting, it says. It doesn’t say that it’s because these pills haven’t really been tested on civilians yet and they need to know we’re okay.