My youngest sister is now sleeping next to the dog in the living room every night, right on the carpet, no pillow, no blanket, and it drives my mother crazy, because the dog is huge, and sheds, and my sister’s going to school covered in dog hair, but I think just let her fucking sleep on the floor if it’s helping her deal with the divorce. My second-youngest sister will now only eat bread with one of these three things on it: butter, mayonnaise, or cream cheese. Because eating bread with white or close-to-white materials spread on it allows her to control one aspect of her life while it totally falls apart. Mediocre family therapy has at least produced that one enlightenment. The second oldest is having sex with her dumbass boyfriend, and I’m pretty sure she’s too sad to get organized enough to use protection. I know he’s too fucking dumb to be organized. I can’t believe she’s dating him. She’s so much smarter than he is, and she tries to pretend she’s dumb and doesn’t care about anything just to fit in. To feel loved? I get it. But then I don’t. Do I think more of my brain than she does of hers? Why should I? Why? It’s not fair. I’d tell her she’s making a mistake, but I’ve done that too many times and it doesn’t work. It would work on me, though. Why doesn’t it work on her? Because I’m the oldest? Because teachers loved me? Did teachers love me because I was the oldest? Does that mean I’m not intelligent, just obedient? In my father’s new apartment there’s never any food, only Cheerios and beer. My mother drives too fast all the time now, so fast my youngest sister now spends car rides bent over in airplane crash landing mode. The other day my mother hit a deer, and while we all sat staring at the blood on the windshield my second-youngest sister said, “Why aren’t we all dead with that deer?” I’m waking up in the morning and hearing voices. Female voices. I don’t remember what they say, I just know that people are talking to me. Very boring. I am not Joan of Arc. I haven’t told anyone because I went on the Internet for a few hours and cleared it all up. It doesn’t mean I need to be treated for anything, it’s just anxiety, it doesn’t mean I’m headed for an official breakdown. I found a case study about some girl my age whose parents were divorcing and she was freaking out about moving in with her mother and the anxiety caused her to hear the voices of her friends and her family talking to her just before she fell asleep, and the voices would get louder the more anxious she was, and more normal the less anxious she was. Her mind turned the volume up and down. She controlled them they didn’t control her. The authors said that the patient “denied” a history of mood disorder and “denied” a history of troubled sleep, and I got so angry at “denied” because blah blah blah men, and what they really should have said was that the patient said she had no histories of those things, but then you know I would deny being imperfect, too.
Every few weeks I received a letter like this from Elinor. No greeting, no closing line, each one a shout from the middle of her life. The first had been sent to Brooklyn and then forwarded to California. I sent her a book for each one I received instead of a reply, and when she mentioned the anxiety I slipped a postcard in the package that said You need to talk to that family therapist, no matter how mediocre they are, about those voices.