“God’s speed!” I said, trying not to laugh.
She scowled and slammed the door in my face.
I walked back to the second floor landing-turned-upstairs sitting room. “She’s coming.”
Axel nodded and smiled again. Before I could say something that was highly suggestive and inappropriate, I went into my bedroom. It was just to the side of the sitting room, so my retreat was swift. I needed a cigarette.
*~*
I was sitting on my window seat, with my head stuck out the window to prevent telltale fumes from creeping in, when I heard Camelea yell.
“No!”
I dropped the cigarette stub and ran for the door. Axel was seated on the floor with Camelea’s head in his lap.
“Did she faint?” I guessed.
He nodded.
I ran to Maman’s room and grabbed a bottle of smelling salts, then went back into mine and grabbed a bar of dark chocolate from my beside drawer. As soon as I returned, I bent down and ran the bottle of smelling salts back and forth under Camelea’s nose.
“Should I call a doctor?” Axel asked. His forehead was marred by tiny creases.
I shook my head. “No.”
Slowly, Camelea came to.
“Camelea,” I said. “Have you had anything to eat since yesterday?”
Very slowly, she shook her head.
My eyes narrowed. “Tu es stupide?
I handed her the chocolate. Wordlessly, she took a bite.
“She’s hypoglycaemic?” Axel asked.
“Yes. A rather careless one at that.” I waited until Camelea had eaten half of the bar and sat up. “You need to eat.”
She nodded. “I will.”
“Now,” I said.
“Noira, laisses-nous, s’il te plaît,” Camelea begged. “C’est OK.”
I turned my glare to Axel. “See to it that she eats, please.”
“Okay.”
I closed the door behind me, but stood behind it. I wanted to make sure that Camelea was okay. I may have despised her, but I wasn’t about to have Axel hurt her in our home. She may have fainted from lack of food, but she had yelled “No!” before she had fainted.
“You need to eat,” I heard Axel say.
“I can eat later. Stay here with me,” Camelea said.
I leaned my ear against the door. What was going on?
“On one condition,” Axel replied. “I want you to explain what happened yesterday.”
My ears pricked slightly. Could Camelea have possibly gone on a date with this man? If so, did he know that she was unwell? People may have thought that I was crazy, but they didn’t come crazier than Camelea and her version of Christianity.
I stuck my finger down my left ear so that I was better able to hear through the ear that was stuck to the door. I listened, a bit horrified, as Camelea explained about a game that she and her best friend, Raecine, had spent the last three summers playing. Apparently they would pretend to be made-up characters for a day in Manhattan. She’d seduce some harmless fellow before running away at midnight, like Cinderella at the ball.
“My life is stressful and borderline depressing. Even if it’s for one afternoon, I need to be someone else—someone who can be happy,” she said as way of explanation.
If her life was depressing, I didn’t know what mine was.
There was a brief pause at the end of her story. Finally, I heard Axel speak.
“You’re mad!”
Indeed she was.
“What on earth could be going on in your life that would drive you to pretend to be someone else and spend all of yesterday lying to me about who you are, Camelea?” Axel asked. “I had a really good time with you before you ran away. I thought that I was getting to know someone whom I could see myself with, but that person was a lie. How exactly do you think that this is okay?”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” Camelea replied. “Raecine told me not to do it yesterday, but I went ahead anyway. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Why did you do it?” Axel demanded.
There was silence. I imagined that Camelea was not keen on telling him why. I knew why she had done it; it was the same reason why Cienna had turned into a self-obsessed fashion droid, and probably the same reason why I had fallen into the abyss.
“You don’t want to know,” Camelea said.
“Camelea.”
She sighed. “I’m only telling you because I owe you an explanation, but don’t say that I did not warn you that this might be too much for you.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
There was a brief silence before Camelea revealed the secret of why our house of cards was barely able to stand up. “My father left us when I was nine years old, and it was particularly painful for me, because we were very close. We were all close to him. We had to leave France and move to America, which was even more traumatic, especially since my mother had taken a turn for the worst after my father had left. Then my older sister Noira decided that she didn’t want to live and tried to kill herself for the first time when I was eleven. My mother has since devoted all of her energy towards nursing Noira back to happiness, but it never works… Noira doesn’t care about anyone except herself… I’ve basically been alone and miserable ever since my father left, and I’ve spent the last few years watching my mother waste away and not be able to do anything about it.”
When it was all over, the lingering silence crept in. My heartbeat pounding in my ear muffled the sound of any other exchange that Camelea and Axel were to have. Slowly, I backed away from the door. I needed another cigarette.
*~*
Just when I thought that the retched charity gala hadn’t been dragged out long enough, a writer from New York had to choose the moment that Cienna and I were leaving the to request an interview. I sat in a corner of the room and resigned myself to sit in on another vanity-fest.
"Tell me a little about yourself," the lady said. She looked like some sweet, mother-like figured. No doubt her wardrobe and glasses were specifically chosen to evoke trust. I yawned.
"Tell me about your life. How did you become a model?"
I listened as Cienna spun a romantic tale about growing up in Paris.
"Paris!" The journalist said, all wide-eyed and with a mouth etched in childlike excitement. "Paris! How exciting!"
I almost expected her to start salivating like a rabid dog. No wonder Cienna loved modelling; I could just imagine how high she felt at the moment from such a reaction.
"Yes, Paris." Cienna blushed. She lowered her head ever so gracefully, the humble It Girl.
"I was born in Paris, and I lived there until I was nine. It was wonderful, simply won-der-ful!" She looked off into the distance with a dreamy expression on her face. The journalist sat up, beaming.
"We had a very Bohemian existence at home, my mother, my sisters and I. Draw up a list of Who’s Who in the art, music or cinema world, and you’ll find that they had passed through the doors of our house. Our front door was never locked. One guest in particular changed my life forever…”
The journalist seemed to be on the edge of delirium as Cienna spoke of our first meeting with Anna Wintour. She was a client of Maman’s.
“…It was all very marvellous." Cienna finally finished.
"Yes," the woman said, all but falling out of her seat. "That does sound marvellous. Simply marvellous."
Cienna was quite the storyteller. Nevertheless, having read quite a few of the articles about my B-list sister, I knew what would happen next.
The journalist would go to her computer and type up an article about our enviable childhood and how it was no wonder that Cienna was so fashionable, coming from the fashion capital of the world and all. And girls across America would see her looking stunning and porcelain doll-like in her oversized sunglasses and her Louboutin heels, surrounded by glamorous people doing glamorous, carefree things. Those girls compared themselves to her, perfectly touched up by the latest airbrushing and PhotoShop techno
logy and looking like a dream.
"The beauty of this," someone once wrote, "is that here she is, a girl who can speak English, Italian and French. A girl who can read German. A girl who got an almost perfect score on her SATs. A girl with unlimited potential, who can be anything that she wants to be, who chose Parson’s and runways over Columbia."
"Yes," Cienna replied, after the journalist made a similar observation. "And yet I chose to model."
The woman smiled, set aside her iPad, and said, "The new breed of model: intelligent, well-bred and beautiful."
Cienna gave another tiny, bashful smile, looked down at her perfectly manicured nails and blushed. “Thank you.”
She should have been an actress.
Still, there was always something missing from the articles that I read. It was something that all of the interviewers seemed incapable of questioning. They never stopped to wonder why the girl who had everything chose to smile for the camera and have everyone dying to be her and know her. It was obvious that Cienna never bothered to tell them.
*~*
That night, I dreamed of my first failed suicide attempt. It could have just happened for how fresh the memory was. I woke up the next morning after the doctor had pumped the sleeping pills from my stomach to a look on Maman's face that for as long as I live, I will never forget.
Her eyes were fluffy clouds, barely able to keep from bursting and bleeding a waterfall of tears. When she saw that I had woken up, she winced and her jaw tightened. Her eyes were dull greens in a black hole. The worst thing, however, was the overwhelming disappointment that she would later express to me.
I’ll never be able to look at a rosary again without seeing Maman, clinging to hers like a Band Aid, weeping while she thought that I was asleep, and demanding that God tell her what she had done wrong.
**~*~**~*~*~**
¯ CHAPITRE TROIS ¯
COLORBLIND
When I went down to breakfast the next morning, it was to find a disturbingly large bouquet of red roses in the center of the kitchen table. Camelea hovered over it, sniffing away and swooning like a bothersome fruit fly.
“Your suitor sent you flowers?” I asked.
“You missed Mass,” she replied. I didn’t need to turn around to see the disapproving glower on her face.
I went over to the coffee press; tea wasn’t going to be enough today. “I overslept. Forgive me.”
I didn’t bother explaining to Camelea that Mass was something that I went to in order to appease Maman and that I didn’t believe in the fairy in the sky. A lecture on the personal furnace that awaited me in the afterlife was not what I needed after the only time that I had managed to sleep in the last three days was to dream about my suicidal days of yonder.
“Not drinking tea this morning?”
I turned. Cienna had taken her place at the table. A bottle of Nutella was soon in her hand.
“These are for you!” Camelea announced, a drugged-up look on her face as she pushed the bouquet towards Cienna.
Cienna slammed the plastic bottle onto the kitchen table. “That fucking boy!”
A boy had sent Cienna roses? First Saint Camelea, patron saint of all psycho-fanatical Christians, had gone out on a date. Now Cienna, a girl who didn’t seem to have any male friends, much less a boy friend, was being sent flowers.
Camelea must have recognised the significance of this, because she ignored the curse word, and in a voice of heightened rapture, said, “Who is it from?”
“Nicolaas Calisto, He Who Annoys Me The Most, sent the flowers,” Cienna snapped, teeth snarled as she hastily stood up.
“Isn’t he the one who sent you flowers this spring when The Westbury Times announced that you were selected to intern at Donna Karen this fall?” Camelea asked. She looked positively delighted that Cienna might have a persistent suitor.
“Yes!” Cienna barked, snatching up the vase of flowers. “The same fucker who also sent a bouquet to my photo shoot last week in Central Park!”
“Where are you going?” Camelea called, jumping up as Cienna stormed out of the kitchen.
“To burn these roses with my hair straightener!” Cienna’s voice came round the corner. “Then I’m going to send them back to him via FedEx, the stupid fuck!”
“No you can’t do that!” Camelea jumped from her seat and went after Cienna.
Thankfully, none of them noticed the flood that was rushing out of my eyes. Cienna and Camelea having men who were interested in them, while my carnival received no visitors, shouldn’t have reduced me to such a pathetic state of misery, and yet it had. I sat for ten minutes, convulsing like an epileptic and trying to stifle my howls.
I thought about calling my therapist at Golden Ridge, confessing that I was going through withdrawal, and ask for something to help assuage the symptoms. Instead, I left my untouched coffee and went upstairs to the darkness of my room. There was no way in hell that I was going to confess to such a thing. I’d surely end up back in that hellhole, sitting across from that insipid man.
*~*
I had to meet with Dr. Stein every afternoon. His office looked like the inside of a log cabin—there were even deer heads decorating the walls. We were kindred spirits, the deer and I, put on display for the world to see and unable to do anything about it.
From the moment that I arrived at Golden Ridge Hospital, I was poked, prodded and examined by all. I was a ride at a fair: up and down the Ferris wheel. Everyone came as they pleased, and when they’d had enough, they left with their notepads filled with furiously scribbled notes ready to make their prognosis. Everyone was there, supposedly, to help me, to save me from myself.
“Tell me about school Noira.” Dr. Stein had us seated before the fireplace.
“What about school?” I asked.
I didn’t want to talk about school; I didn’t want to talk about anything. Sleep turned my eyelids into wet cement as I struggled to stay awake. Visions of lying in bed, buried under miles and miles of comforters, plagued my mind.
Those first few days were like stumbling through a thick fog with no lights. The Cymbalta rendered me a victim of insomnia, and the antipsychotics transformed every object into a massively comfortable bed. I wasn’t allowed to nap in the days either. There were all sorts of activities that were geared towards my recovery. At Golden Ridge, they didn’t use words like “insane” or “normal.” I was just “unwell,” and if I followed their tried and tested program, I would have a speedy recovery and be able to take on the world just like everyone else who had “graduated” from there.
I wasn’t unwell; I was a failure. I knew that they’d never understand, so I kept quiet. Like a string puppet, I let them pull me wherever they wanted me to go.
“I understand that you stopped going to class,” Dr. Stein continued.
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you tell me all about that?”
“There was no point.” I said simply. “I didn’t know what I was going to pursue my degree in. What was the point of going to class?”
The other students had direction and knew their purpose in life. I couldn’t pretend as if I gave a damn about how liberals and realists differed in their opinions on whether or not states should utilise multilateral foreign policies. If I wasn’t majoring in politics, what was the point of sitting through an international relations class?
I explained all of this to Dr. Stein.
“I see,” he said. His pen ran from left to right on his notepad as he struggled to keep up.
“And what about your cellular phone? Your mother says that she stopped being able to contact you in early October. You had it disconnected? Why?”
“Must I really go through all of this? I feel tired. Perhaps after I’ve rested.” I started to stand.
“Noira,” Dr. Stein said. “We’re all here to help you, but I’m afraid that we cannot help you if you do not tell me what happened that day.”
“And then I can go to sleep?” I looked him in the eyes.
“I promise.”
So I told him everything. I turned off my cell phone to avoid people and their questions, to give myself more time to think without them pressuring me and lecturing me about how bright my future was and all of the potential that I had. I saw darkness in my future, and my only potential was to end up being an NYU dropout.
“I see.” Dr. Stein said, scribbling a few notes on his legal pad.
“Based on your medical records, you’ve lost a lot of weight. Did you stop eating?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Why?”
“I wasn’t hungry. Why else would I stop eating?”
More scribbles.
“And the cuts on your arms. How did you get those?”
I looked down at the long, purple gashes on my arm and fingered them. How had I gotten them indeed?
“I don’t really remember much.”
“Why don’t you try?” Dr. Stein smiled. Unlike Anne-Marie, my nurse, his smile did not reach his eyes. There was nothing loving about him at all. He was approaching retirement, and perhaps it was from the stress of heading a psychiatric hospital, but his face seemed to be folding into itself, like he was retreating from yet another crazy patient. He looked like a ghoul from some unfortunate child’s nightmare: a ghoul in large, square glasses and a bald-spot in the middle of his head.
“Try to remember a little,” Dr. Stein prodded.
I closed my eyes, eager to get away from him. Furniture lounged over me, drawers open; monsters taunting their prey.
“The furniture was bothering me, I remember that much; the dresser especially. It kept jeering at me, like a jackal. I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t stop.”
“Wouldn’t stop what?”
“Looking at me,” I replied.
“The dresser would not stop looking at you?” Dr. Stein said.
I decided that I despised him and his thinning brown hair and U-Haul-sized nose.
“Yes, and why are your repeating what I am saying?”
I wanted to end the session, even if it meant not recovering and never leaving. Anything to not have to sit there across from him as he scribbled in his notepad and repeated me. I didn’t need a mimic.
Sleeping Awake Page 3