The Pisces

by Melissa Broder

“Just go,” he said. “Go!”

  He slammed the door. I pivoted on my heel and walked back down the street to my car. I felt worse.

  Later that night I got a visit from a police officer investigating the incident. Apparently, Megan had called the police from the hospital—or she had coerced him into it. I had broken Jamie’s nose. The cop said that the couple would not be pressing charges if I agreed to go to therapy. The couple? Now they were making decisions as a unit?

  “What did she look like?” I asked him.

  “Uh—” he faltered.

  “Would you say she’s better-looking than me?”

  “Ma’am,” said the cop, “I’m going to strongly recommend that you seek help for your anger issues. This time we’re only going to give you a warning. But if the couple hadn’t been so forgiving, you could be facing serious charges of battery right now.”

  “Battery!” I said. “Do I look like a batterer?”

  He was silent.

  “Can you just tell me. Aside from the broken nose, did they seem happy?”

  5.

  I had always thought of depression as having no shape. When it manifested as a feeling of emptiness, you could inject something into it: a 3 Musketeers, a walk, something to kind of give it a new form. You could penetrate it and give it more of a shape you felt better about. Or at least you could make a shape inside it or around it. But this was something new, like a thicker, gooey sludge. It had its own shape. It could not be contained. It was a terror. Of what I was terrified I couldn’t exactly say, but it was sitting on me. Every other shape was being absorbed into it. I no longer slept. Was this all because of Jamie? How could someone who got on my nerves so much have this much power over me?

  I asked my doctor for Ambien. The Ambien helped me sleep. But in the mornings the goo was right there, waiting for me. I was already in it. It was becoming more dense. One night I took nine Ambien. I was not trying to kill myself so much as vanish. I just wanted to go to sleep and be transported into the ether, another world. I guess that vanishing would have meant death, so perhaps it was an attempt at suicide? But I felt afraid of death, or at least, afraid of dying. Was there something that wasn’t death but wasn’t here either?

  I woke up fourteen hours later, ravenous. Doughnuts! I had to have doughnuts. Stoned from the Ambien, I got in my car and the rest was a blur. I must have blacked out. I only remember waking up on the road, parked, wearing my nightie, with doughnuts strewn around the car seats: powdered, cream-filled, a jelly. I didn’t even like jelly. Cars were honking behind me but I couldn’t figure out what to do. So I just stayed parked like that in the middle of the road and went back to sleep on the steering wheel.

  Then I woke up again. Now a police officer was leaning into my car on the passenger’s side. He asked if I could get out of the car. I climbed out hazily. I remember thinking a dumb joke about cops and doughnuts. Then I realized: it was the same cop who had come to my house about Jamie’s nose.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He gave me a Breathalyzer to test my blood alcohol levels. Those were normal. Then he searched the car for drugs but couldn’t find any.

  “I’m really feeling sick,” I said. “First the breakup, now some kind of flu. I was going to get the doughnuts for the sugar. I must have fainted. Anyway, if you just let me go home I’ll be okay.”

  “Ma’am, I can’t let you drive in this condition. Is there anyone I can call to come get you?”

  I thought of Jamie. He was usually my emergency contact. But I didn’t want him to know I needed anything from him. I wanted him to think I was just fucking fine. But I did feel sick. Also scared. Would this be my second strike? Would they send me to jail? I just wanted to be left alone. I felt that if the cop left me alone, I could pull my car over to the side and rest a little longer and I’d be okay. I didn’t want anyone seeing me like this in my nightgown.

  “You can call my sister,” I said.

  I gave him my sister Annika’s number. I didn’t tell him that she lived in California. He left her a voicemail saying I had gotten sick on the road and asking if she could come pick me up. She was going to be confused.

  “Anyone else we can call?” he asked.

  “I’ll be okay,” I said. “I’m much better now.”

  “I’m going to have to ask that you pull your car over on that next side street and park it there. You can gather up your doughnuts and I’ll give you a ride home.”

  “Fine,” I said. “You know where I live.”

  6.

  “You have to get the fuck out of there,” said Annika. “I don’t know what that was with the doughnut incident, but something isn’t right.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Listen, Steve and I are going out of town for the whole summer. Yoga conference in Provence, then Budapest for two weeks, a month in Rome, and another conference. Oh, and then Burning Man with one of Steve’s start-ups. We need a house sitter and someone to watch Dom, love him, give him his medication. You should fly out here. Spend the whole summer. Get the hell out of the desert. It’s a nightmare for you ayurvedically.”

  “I don’t know if I can afford to take the summer off,” I said. I usually did summer work for the library, even when school wasn’t in session.

  “Yes, you can,” she said. “What happened to the money that Daddy left you?” Annika was actually my half sister, nine years older, but we had the same father. He had left us each about $20,000 when he died in his sleep at eighty-six.

  “I spent it on psychics. The rest I’m saving for when I die alone. The cremation,” I said.

  “I’ll pay for your cremation. Also, I will pay you to live here. I want you to treat yourself well while you are out here. Farm to table, spa, all that shit. You need to forget about Jamie. I know he’s at the root of this, even though you won’t admit it. You were always fucking crazy about men. You don’t think I remember when that poet guy dumped you in high school and Dad found you naked in the basement asleep with a steak knife?”

  “It was a butter knife,” I said. “I was trying to open a jar of peanut butter. I was bingeing.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “I spoke to the cop. You broke Jamie’s nose? They want you in therapy and I’m going to arrange it. Group, I think, something for codependents. I’ll ask my guy if he knows of anyone good. You need to be around women, no men, and you need to do the work.”

  “A group? Annika, no—”

  “Good, so it’s settled. You’ll come out here June fourth and stay until September tenth. I’ll be back for a week before Burning Man and we can hang out. And I’ll pay you double what you would make at the library to watch Dominic. I would be paying someone anyway.”

  “I’m not doing the group,” I said. “And I’m not taking your money. But maybe I can come out there. I have to check with the library.”

  “Do you want them to press charges?” she said. “If not, you’ll go to therapy. Also, I’m paying you, so stop.”

  I didn’t protest any further. I needed the money and Annika had it. Tons of money. In the late ’90s she’d gotten into the yoga studio scene in Santa Monica, designed a line of mats made of bamboo. The mats were featured in Yoga Journal in a three-page profile about their biodegradable properties and rich texture for asana. Two days later she received a call. It was Hain Celestial. They wanted to buy the patent. Then Native Foods came calling. A bidding war ensued, and the patent was bought by Hain Celestial for $3.1 million, which she used to get into the tech and innovator conferences during the first dot-com bubble. That’s where she met Steve, a Jewish hippie investor deep in Silicon Valley 1.0. She got him into kombucha, taught him how to relax (sort of), and they got married in Sonoma. Then she moved him down to Venice Beach, used his money to build a giant glass-and-metal cube of a house right on Ocean Front Walk. Later they got Dominic: a purebred foxhound who became their c
hild. Annika hadn’t practiced Ashtanga or Vinyasa yoga in years—only Hatha and restorative—and was fat now. Steve loved her ass and was always squeezing it. He tried to grow what remained of his hair long like Kenny G and casually ran an investment firm with offices in Century City. He wore linen shorts to work. They joined a hippie synagogue in Malibu and were happy.

  Now they complained about the newest wave of gentrification though, what the real-estate agents called “Silicon Beach,” taking over Venice. A new kind of yuppie, shiny like the young ass-cheeks couple. The clothes they sold on Abbot Kinney and Main Street still had some boho vibes, but now they cost thousands of dollars. Rich hippies. That didn’t bother Annika as much as the chain stores that were moving in, upscale and soulless.

  “They’re turning this place into a MILF mall,” she said. “Soon it will basically be Phoenix.”

  But Venice would never look like Phoenix, because of all the bums. Phoenix would never allow a homeless community so bustling. Instead they shipped them all to L.A. If you were a homeless person and you weren’t living in Venice, then you were doing something wrong. Venice was the place to be. They lined the lawn between the beach and Ocean Front Walk: camps of them sprawled out in the sun. There was a lot of meth and heroin, young people nodding out, barefoot, army surplus–clad and dirt-encrusted. Others had been there longer, hardened, as though the dirt had completely melded with their skin, reeking of piss, fighting with one another, cranky junkies. They pitched tents and got into brawls, held hands and talked to themselves. At night they walked from the beach to Third Street and formed a tent city two blocks long, leaving the street lined with trash, shit, and sleeping bags in the morning. No one disturbed them.

  * * *

  —

  The first time I came to Venice I thought it was weird, all of these millionaires living among the bums. If you moved here in the past decade, you either had a million-dollar home or you slept on the sidewalk in front of one. That visit had been a disaster. Annika and I rarely ever saw each other, although I had promised for many years to take a trip to the beach. I couldn’t get Jamie’s and my schedules to align, couldn’t get him interested, and I was afraid to go alone—to be intimate with her—without him as a buffer. I didn’t want to be seen too closely or I might have to look at me too.

  “Just come by yourself,” she would say. “I don’t care about him, it’s you I want to see.”

  This was easy for her to say from the comfort of couplehood. Her independence, even though it had been real once upon a time, was now a performance. How could she judge me for waiting for Jamie when she had Steve following her ass around like a Sherpa? I felt judged, even if she wasn’t judging. So I delayed for years. Then, finally, when Jamie was shooting a special on Joshua Tree, we decided I would come out to Venice at the end of his trip and he would take the Airstream out and meet me there.

  I was so nervous the afternoon I flew to see her that I got drunk on the plane. I couldn’t tell if she or Steve could smell it on me when I landed, although he looked at me funny. I was sitting in the backseat of their Prius and watching him gently rub her neck when the call came in. Jamie’s shoot had been extended and he was not going to be able to come. I spoke to him calmly and tried to contain my anger. I didn’t want Annika, or especially Steve, to see that I had any rage. If I could fool them then maybe I wouldn’t have to feel it myself. But that night I got so drunk on white wine that I puked all over Annika’s guest bed. Apparently, in a blackout, I talked to Steve about suicide. I wasn’t threatening to do it, just discussing its merits as a practical solution for the problems of life.

  I spent the remainder of the trip on good behavior. I used the bums to triangulate, inquiring about them often, giving them money. I thought that in the light of the bums I wouldn’t look so bad. I made up a game, “billionaire or bum,” in which I would ask Steve to place a bet on which one he thought a straggly-looking bohemian was. Apparently he was offended. She continued to invite me out there, especially once they got Dominic, but I always told her “soon.” I didn’t invite her to see my world.

  Now it was the bums, especially the kids who ran away out here, who kept Venice from becoming a total Google campus—at least so far. They graffitied the palm trees, made sure the drugs were still flowing. I felt drawn to them, particularly the younger ones, how they just let everything go. How they were able to do that. Palm trees in pristine locations depressed me. But with a little grit they were sexy against the setting sun.

  “Fuck me,” I said to the palm trees.

  When I was on Abbot Kinney, the long yuppie strip of contemporary blondewood-and-metal shops that cut across Venice diagonally, I felt out of place, more aligned with the homeless. Here were so many beautiful women: ombre-headed twentysomethings in boho-chic dresses, minimalist French women clad in black leather with angular jewelry, models even, who made me look at my toe hair and fuzzy legs in disgust. I had stopped shaving since the breakup. My hair, which had always been frizzy, was now even more coarse thanks to an infestation of gray. I was no longer even using henna. The cottage cheese on my hips stood out against my skinny legs. I had stopped giving a fuck.

  Looking at these women now, I thought, What if I could get really hot while I was here? What if I became the old me, or the very old me, or someone entirely new? When I get back home, maybe Jamie would want me again.

  What would I do? Maybe dye my hair auburn, start wearing lipstick again, wax my vagina into some sort of formation. I had always been more of a natural woman, and I assumed that Megan the scientist was low maintenance in the pubic realm, but how natural was too natural? I had gotten so natural that I was naturally dead.

  7.

  After a few days in Venice I went to my first group therapy session: a specialty group for women with depression, and sex and love issues. There were four women in the group, plus the therapist and me. But they all blurred together into a multiheaded hydra of desperation.

  Judith, our therapist and leader, was definitely unmarried. With her unringed hands she held a ceramic mug of steaming green tea and said very little, periodically murmuring sounds of “mmmmm” and “ahhhh.” Occasionally, she asked how some event made a person feel. Everyone called her “Dr. Jude.”

  Dr. Jude was a collector of things—her office stuffed with tchotchkes: Buddha statuettes, a small Freud action figure, licorice pastilles, air plants, an old gumball machine, angel cards, little signs with sayings like “What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?” and “Trust yourself! You know more than you think you do!” Clearly none of us could trust ourselves or we wouldn’t be there.

  Alas, our fearless leader was deeply single and trying to be at peace with it. I wondered if she even had a boyfriend. How could she lead a group on sex and love issues? Who would want to take love advice from a single woman who convinced herself she was happy using store-bought sayings she posted on her wall? And what kind of doctor was she anyway? I didn’t see a PhD next to her name. Was she a doctor of love?

  Dr. Jude had yellowish teeth and a Dorothy Hamill haircut. I guess the yellow teeth meant that she accepted herself and would not be changing for anyone. I was oddly intrigued by her positivity in the face of the abyss, as though I were an anthropologist encountering a new culture for the first time. But when she quoted E. E. Cummings in an attempt to say that we could only be ourselves, I decided she was stupid. Also, she used the words radical acceptance a lot. I didn’t want to radically accept anything. When I returned to Phoenix I wanted everything to be radically different. I didn’t like her. But compared to the disaster that was the rest of the group, Dr. Jude seemed like a winner.

  Our youngest member was Amber: mid-twenties, built like a female wrestler, sweatpants covered in dog hair. Amber had been in the group longest and was furthest along in terms of “doing the work” in the personal growth and love department. She made sure we all knew that. Immediately, in
my mind I called her Chickenhorse, as her head was long and horse-shaped but she had a beaky nose and big pink gums that resembled a chicken’s comb and wattles. She seemed to get aroused by telling all of us we were wrong.

  Dr. Jude had encouraged Chickenhorse to start dating again, but she had not yet begun. Instead, she focused on problematic interactions she had with people in her life.

  “My boss is emotionally abusive. He’s victimizing me,” she said.

  “Can you tell us more?” asked Dr. Jude.

  “I can’t explain it, it’s just a feeling,” she said. “And as the victim, I don’t think I should have to explain myself.”

  “Understandable,” said Dr. Jude.

  “It’s my truth. And I’m afraid to bring it up to his supervisors, because this is what happened with my last boss too. He was another abuser; there’s a pattern of abuse. When I came forward about it at my last job, everyone started gaslighting me by acting like I’m the crazy one.”

  Chickenhorse also found herself in a similar altercation at home. Apparently she had “tattled” on her neighbors to the landlady for playing their music too loud. She left voicemails for the landlady every day for two weeks in addition to knocking on their door every night and yelling that nine p.m. was too late to make any noise of any kind. Now her landlady was accusing her of trying to start a rift in the building. She was trying to evict her for harassment, which was unfair, because it was she who had been harassed by their music. This, too, was her truth.

  I wasn’t sure exactly what had happened to get Chickenhorse in here—only that it involved a married man and a restraining order. I wondered if she’d ever broken anyone’s nose. She seemed more the type to burn your house down.

  Seated next to Chickenhorse was Sara, who, apparently, was not only sensitive to men but also to light, cleaning products, mold, pollen, gluten, dairy, and sugar. She had fibromyalgia, chronic migraines, and, as a result of her hypoglycemia, was given special permission to eat during group. She said that made the room more of a “safe space” for her. Throughout the ninety minutes she consumed two bananas, a nectarine, one dried fig, a large box of raisins, and an entire two-liter jug of water. Her emphasis on hydration annoyed me.