Agorafabulous! Read online

  “Everybody calm down!” Mr. D’Angelo boomed. “We don’t want no attitude from any of youse on this trip.” Mr. D’Angelo didn’t usually speak like that, but the reality of his choice to spend a vacation with forty whining teenagers seemed to have hit him. It was enough to loosen anyone’s grip on standard American English.

  “She’s the one being a fuckin’ bitch,” Amber said, just loud enough for me to hear. Mr. D’Angelo had already turned his back on the lot of us and ambled to the front of the bus to chat with our Sicilian bus driver in loud smatterings of messy Italian. I don’t know if he had missed her words or if he simply didn’t want to deal with the situation any longer. I leaned against the window and felt my stomach lurch within me. This wasn’t good. This wasn’t good at all.

  The trip to the hotel took about two hours and saw us stuck in a tiny village that was probably far too accustomed to large tour buses full of Americans. Our driver had a bit of trouble with a particularly gnarly turn and nearly ran into someone’s charming five-hundred-year-old cottage, which appeared to be part of the most recent wave of development. The entire town turned out to help, coaching the driver by shouting directions and offering the kind of wild gesticulations for which Italians and Sicilians are known the world over. When we finally inched past the cottage and straightened out on the road, the kindly townsfolk waved good-bye. I imagine that, as we sped away from the miraculously unscathed fifteenth-century home, the butcher leaned over to the cheese monger and said, “At least it wasn’t one of the nice old places.”

  This was my first trip to Europe, where everything is old. Everything is particularly old in Italy, and even older in Sicily. I guess that’s one of the bonuses of being rather close to the continent where human life began. After unpacking at the sixteenth-century hotel, where I shared a room with Leann, a shy girl who kindly assured me that it was okay to be nervous and that it was nice to hear somebody stand up to Amber for once, we were off to see our first batch of ruins. We were joined by a jumpy, painfully sweet English tour guide, Mr. Brixton, who actually wore a tweed jacket in eighty-degree Sicilian heat.

  Mr. Brixton said, “Over here you’ll see the remnants of an Arab settlement. The Moors had a distinctive architectural—Amber, your cell phone likely won’t receive reception here, I’m afraid. Would you like to use mine instead? Oh, it’s no trouble at all, Mr. D’Angelo, I assure you. Now, where were we? Ah yes, Moorish architecture . . .” Amber spent the next thirty minutes screaming at her boyfriend back home about a variety of perceived slights, including but not limited to not reserving a white stretch limousine (“With a fuckin’ sunroof so we can take cute photos, dammit!”) for the impending junior prom.

  The trip continued on like this for a few days, and while I couldn’t sleep a wink at any hour, I found solace in writing. I dutifully took photos of all the historical sites we visited and then recorded my impressions of them at night in my little journal. There were the casual little slights from Amber: the loudly annoyed exhalation of breath whenever I made a comment, the rolling of eyes whenever I asked a question, the little whispers when I walked past.

  In retrospect, maybe Amber was my first passive-aggressive heckler. Every comedian has to deal with the occasional rowdy audience member, but the passive-aggressive hecklers are the worst of all. They sit and sneer at you in disgust and whisper loudly to their friends while you’re onstage. You either barrel through your set and ignore them, or you call them out on their bullshit. I didn’t know I wanted to be a comedian until I was in graduate school, but it turns out I received my earliest exposure to shitty audience members way back in high school.

  But Amber’s little demonstrations of disgust were all endurable compared to the ever-increasing dread that sat with me on the bus and walked with me through battlefields, gravesites, and churches.

  Anxiety is a strange traveling companion. If you stop and consider the grisly stories you’ve heard since you were small, there are many terrible possibilities on any trip. The tired, overworked pilot could fall asleep and crash the plane (this was before 9/11, so I didn’t really pay terrorists much heed). The bus could plunge off a cliff. The hotel could collapse in an earthquake. All these things have really happened to real humans at various points in time, so why wouldn’t they happen to you? One can argue statistics and probability, but an unquiet mind predisposed to irrational terror is unlikely to be swayed by facts and figures.

  Talking about one’s fears can alleviate the tension to a small extent, but who wants to air these concerns in the presence of thirty-nine of one’s adolescent peers? Teenagers are fully consumed with playing the roles they’ve so carefully crafted. They are unlikely to break character to speak gently to the crazy girl. Many teens need someone else to demonstrate cowardice so that they can know for sure that they are not the weakest member of the group. Display that kind of vulnerability and the Ambers of the world might pounce. Better to keep it locked inside, to pretend to have a headache instead of admitting you are afraid of the museum because there’s nowhere to lie down in case you actually do get a headache. Fear built on fear begets all kinds of little falsehoods.

  Wednesday arrived, and with it a particularly harsh sun. This one was going to be extra hot, and we had a flat, dusty field of pottery shards to explore. On the upside for the popular girls, it was Beach Day. Amber would finally get to reveal the bikini she’d bought especially for the trip and smile coquettishly at the Sicilian men who would undoubtedly approach her. She would say cruel things in English that most of them wouldn’t understand, and her best friends would howl with laughter, doubled over in their own, slightly-less-adorable bikinis. I had been advised that bathrooms would be few and far between, and thus had resolved to take off my cover-up only to covertly pee in the ocean.

  The field was as dull as expected, despite Mr. Brixton’s attempt to enliven the morning with discussions of drinking containers throughout the ages. I felt really hot, tired, and thirsty. I hate feeling any of those things, and feeling them in combination is about as desirable as a bout of constipation. The only part I didn’t mind was the sweat, because it cooled me down a little on the rare but lovely occasion that someone walked past me swiftly and created a tiny breeze. It became hard to focus on what Mr. Brixton was saying. Something was tugging at the edge of my consciousness, gnawing at me with increasingly pointy teeth.

  I felt strangely light as we trudged back to the bus, as if my body were trying to detach from the earth but was held down by my sneakers. I was like a balloon attached to one of those little Baggies filled with sand. It sounds vaguely pleasurable, but there was no joy in the wholly unfamiliar sensation. It wasn’t until I sank into my dark blue–upholstered seat that I realized a voice inside my head was growling at me.

  I couldn’t make out the words, exactly, but I didn’t need to. When a fierce dog with gnashing fangs and a foaming jaw growls at you, do you pause and ask it to enunciate? Something very dangerous and unfriendly had a message for me, and it wasn’t verbal so much as it was tactile. I could feel it. The feeling was the frightening evolution of the grinding travel anxiety with which I’d long been familiar. This was not my first panic attack (I’d had them since I was ten, though I’d only gotten the official diagnosis and the attendant pills at sixteen), but it very swiftly announced itself as the worst one I’d ever experienced. All of a sudden, I felt true, real, unabridged, non-condensed, fully realized terror. And as one might imagine, I found the sensation slightly disconcerting.

  I was lucky. I’d grown up in a very safe environment with all the benefits and advantages any person could want: nice family, nice food, nice home, nice education, nice prospects. I’d never been mugged or assaulted. I’d never starved or fallen desperately ill. I’d never faced war or poverty. When I copped an attitude and my father yelled at me for being spoiled, I even agreed with him. Of course, I usually followed it up with a shout of “You made me this way!” but that just better served to illustrate his point. I had a job at a bookstore
that allowed me 15 percent off whatever I wanted to read (and I wanted to read everything). I was headed for college in the fall, and I’d just gotten a secret, totally cool Celtic tattoo on my lower back, a very original place that no other girl I knew had yet decorated. Besides the wrath of Amber, the lack of a boyfriend, and the dead camp friend thing, I didn’t have a single problem.

  And yet there I was, choking on my own fright. I felt as if my lungs were constricted, as if I’d never be able to breathe properly again. I wondered what that would be like. What if I could never take a deep breath? What if this was always how it was going to be, this dry, squeezed gasp for scraps of oxygen? My fingers began to tingle and my palms began to sweat. And then the bus began to move.

  Dying on a bus had never seemed like a good option to me. I’d considered it several times, simply because every panic attack felt like the prelude to a little death (and not the sexy French version of the phrase). I’d had a kajillion panic attacks on buses. It was why I sometimes “missed” the bus on purpose in the morning throughout middle school and high school, forcing one grumpy parent or another (usually my dad) to deviate from his or her own schedule and risk being late to work. I knew it inconvenienced them, but after a while it became such a habit of mine that I didn’t even stop to think about what I was doing. It was an automatic impulse. Once I got older, friends had cars and were more than willing to shepherd me to and from school in exchange for a sympathetic ear during a pregnancy scare or a weekly free dinner at the Flemington Family Diner (a wondrous Jersey-Greek institution that we all nicknamed “Flem Fam”). I didn’t have a car, myself; my parents opined that a car was something you earned on your own, through hard work and careful savings. I’d done none of the latter, preferring to spend my earnings from the bookstore on—well, more books.

  While avoiding the school bus had gotten easier as I’d gotten older, avoiding the bus in Sicily was an impossibility. I had signed up for a “journey into history via air-conditioned luxury motor coach,” which, as it turned out, was tourism-speak for regular old bus tour. And as our bus lurched into action, I knew once and for all that this journey would be my last.

  We had all worn our bathing suits underneath our clothes that day, and I had donned a turquoise bikini top with matching boy-shorts that I hoped would de-emphasize my stubbornly protruding belly. The J. Crew bathing suit, like my Delia’s T-shirt and Express denim shorts, was soaked with sweat from the trudge through the field. As I gripped my seat, willing myself not to writhe in terror, my body went cold. The sweat, formerly such a comfort, now felt like a thin layer of ice coating every inch of my body. I began to shiver. I realized with a start that my bowels were about to evacuate. This made sense, as I’d heard people sometimes crapped themselves upon dying, but I was tormented by the thought that I might not actually expire for a few minutes post pants-pooping. Propelled by the desire to not spend my last few moments writhing in my own shit while thirty-eight human teenagers and an adolescent monster named Amber looked on, I called out, “Mr. D’Angelo?”

  “Yeah?” he hollered back over the noise of the bus. We were bumping over a mountain road that offered gorgeous views of the sea, which smashed against the rocks three hundred feet below.

  “Could you come here for a second?” It was hard to push the words out. I had to close my eyes after the “Could you . . .” in order to finish. Thankfully, the other students seemed immersed in their own headphones and/or portable game players.

  Mr. D’Angelo lumbered down the aisle and peered at me. He looked surprised, then concerned.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you don’t look so good, kiddo,” he said. “You gonna throw up?”

  I tried to speak, but I felt as if I were breathing lukewarm water. I was choking on my own words.

  “What was that?” he asked, putting a hand behind his ear.

  “Agita,” I got out finally, in a scratchy whisper.

  A remarkable shift took place on his face. What had been confused concern was now replaced by a sort of confident, calm determination. I imagine it’s the look a veteran firefighter gets on his face when he and his truck pull up to a blazing house in the woods. “First thing we do is we keep it from spreading,” he says to his younger teammates. “We can lose the house, but it ain’t gonna take the forest down with it. I want the three of you to spray down the trees to the rear. You two head to the left side and you two head to the right. I’ll turn the hose on the house. With a little luck, we can avoid a real mess here.”

  “Change of plans!” he announced in a kindly roar. “Mr. Brixton?”

  “Yes?” the tour guide asked, looked vaguely frightened.

  “Tell the driver we gotta stop at a gas station. A filling—petrol—you know what I mean, yeah?”

  “Certainly,” Mr. Brixton said, looking relieved. This was a request he could handle. I wonder if he’d been scared that Mr. D’Angelo would announce a game of Shirts vs. Skins tackle football, with Mr. Brixton captaining Skins. I could sense that Mr. Brixton hadn’t been the most accomplished student in gym class (we can smell our own).

  “Who wants to use the bathroom?” Mr. D’Angelo asked brightly. Some of the kids were drowning in sonic oblivion, so he kicked his already considerable voice up a notch.

  “HEY! WHO! WANTS! TO! GO! TO! THE! BATHROOM?!” he roared.

  “I thought we were going to the beach!” Amber shot back.

  “We are. We’re just making a quick pit stop, because somebody doesn’t feel good.” I suppose this was his counseling training kicking in—confidentiality, and all that. Of course, it wasn’t hard to figure out to whom he was referring, since he was standing beside my seat and I had long since taken on a pale-green hue.

  He turned and walked to the front of the bus, leaving me alone to face the rest of the kids.

  Amber groaned. “What the hell is wrong with her?” she demanded, throwing her head back and rolling her eyes. I sank lower in my seat and focused on holding my bowels tight. The nausea had cleared a little bit, replaced by stabbing pains in my gut. My heart still pounded fiercely, but the shenanigans in my lower alimentary canal distracted me from the growly inner voice that had so frightened me earlier. If I can just get to a toilet, I thought, I’ll be okay.

  “Seriously!” Amber nearly shouted. “What is wrong with you? This isn’t just your trip. Everything doesn’t stop because you ate too much!” Through the thick fog that clogged my ears, I heard a few other kids grumble. Amber’s hot stare bored into me, and a couple of shameful tears spilled down my face. I could control my bowels or my eyes, but not both. One way or another, I was about to explode.

  In my experience, angels arrive in the most curious form at the oddest of moments. They keep their wings folded neatly at their back, and save your ass using brains, brawn, or quiet calculation.

  Leann, the nice girl with whom I’d shared a room the past few nights, said, “I could go. I want to wash my hands.” She held them up. They were covered in a fine dust from the field trip.

  Amber looked at her. Leann was one of those girls who were so humble and quiet that even the mean kids like Amber didn’t pick on them. She posed no threat to the popular kids’ dominance, and she could be depended upon to do all the work for any group project. She would also spot you money if you needed some for lunch, and she wouldn’t ever expect you to pay her back.

  “Just look at my nails,” Leann added. Amber’s eyes widened in dismay. In the handful of classes I’d been condemned to share with Amber, I had never seen her devote much energy to anything other than her fingernails, which she maintained through an elaborate ritual of filing, painting, and gluing. Teachers frequently sent her into the hall for disobeying their command to keep her bottle of nail polish sealed during class. If her parents had allowed her, I’m pretty sure she would have taken the cosmetology classes offered in our school’s vo-tech department. But they wanted her to go to college, so she slogged through French III while sketching nail designs in pen on the top of
her desk. She was quite adept at intimidation and manipulation, but Amber’s one true passion was the female fingernail.

  Amber moved toward Leann, grabbed her hand, and held it up to the light. “Ew, you’re right,” she said with a genuine look of concern. “They do look bad. You can’t go to the beach like that.” She examined her own nails. “Shit, I lost a rhinestone back there.”

  “I have extras in my kit,” her friend chimed in. “With glue.”

  “You think they sell those trucker pills at the gas station, NO-DOZ?” a third member of her contingent asked. “I fucking love those.”

  “I have cramps,” said the fourth bottle blonde. “You think they got Midol?”

  And because the four most popular girls in the junior class were now also falling apart, it was okay to delay the beach in order to go to the bathroom.

  The driver brought us to a filling station and parked in the sun-baked lot. Mr. D’Angelo helped me disembark, and Leann put her arm around me and walked me to the bathroom. The other girls rushed ahead of us and were done with their hand-washing by the time we reached the door. They commenced nail triage in the shade of a nearby tree.

  “You go first,” I told Leann. We were bonding, a little, but we were nowhere near the zone that allows one person to comfortably withstand the sound and smell of another’s assplosion within the confines of a tiny restroom. Come to think of it, I don’t know if I’ve ever reached that zone with any human other than my mother, and I was a baby then so I don’t retain the heinous memory.

  “No, you,” Leann said. She smiled conspiratorially at me. “I don’t really need to wash my hands,” she whispered, and patted me on the shoulder. Gratefully, I lunged into the bathroom, locked the door, and let it all out.

  There was an enormous initial feeling of relief. I felt weak and light-headed, but my intestinal system was mercifully at peace. Anxiety is wonderfully chameleonic. It can disguise itself as any number of maladies: insomnia, indigestion, fatigue, physical pain, or even addictions of every imaginable sort. And once you treat the insomnia or the addiction or whatever physical manifestation the anxiety has thrown up as a smokescreen, you are left with the beastie who started it all. Most of us do not want to face down the ugly, pathetic little demon that we’ve unwittingly allowed to run our lives. Most of us would rather talk to our doctors about irritable bowel syndrome, or complain to our chiropractors about knots in our back, or stay home from work because we’re just “too tired” to go in that day. These symptoms are very real, but they all spring from one nasty little source that must be addressed. Otherwise, getting rid of one bothersome ailment just leaves room for something equally or more awful to pop up in its stead.