Madeleine Gavaler: ZOLOFT NANNY • Cleaver Magazine

Madeleine Gavaler
ZOLOFT NANNY

Red drips down Dasha’s chin as I watch her through the playground bars.

I hold my phone a distance from my cheek, giving my voice air to wade through before making its way to some faraway woman at a desk who doesn’t know why none of the meds work on me. “Zoloft made me want to kill myself, so actually I would not like to keep taking it.”

I press the sound of her between my shoulder and face, the way suburban moms do when they’re busy cleaning but still have to talk to their friend Nancy—women can hold so many things. I crawl under the slide to the child and lick my thumb, smudging cherry slushie around her massive cheeks. Another nanny, older, wordlessly hands me wipes from her more well-equipped but lower-tech stroller.

“Thank you,” I mouth. My psychiatrist continues to proselytize into my ear about the many months it takes each antidepressant, mood stabilizer, and antipsychotic to work properly. Christine is the doctor in charge of keeping me alive. She is not doing an impressive job.

I set my phone down and close my eyes. Ice hits my lips. Dasha’s grinning face is inches from mine, spoonful of cherry slushie raised to my mouth. I smile back and let her feed me red.

“You look like fancy lipstick, like my mom. Or like ouch and blood.”

“Thanks, you too, babe.”

The two-year-old leans her head against my shoulder, cuddling me as she uses my sleeve as a napkin. I stroke her hair, and we look down at our feet and the phone in the grass. Faintly we both hear my psychiatrist asking if I’ve been exercising lately, because that can be really good for depression and anxiety. I hang up the call with the tip of my sandal.

“Why are you so sad?” she asks, reaching up and touching my cheek with sticky fingers.

“I’m not so sad! I just had some delicious slushie and I’m at the playground with my favorite person,” I remind her. I poke her cheek back, gently.

“Okay,” Dasha says and smiles slightly. “But you seem like sick.”

“Yeah, my brain’s a little sick. Will you give me a new one?” When I close my eyes I see the steering wheel jerk toward blurry trees. Can you cut that part out of me, Dasha? Christine?

She jumps up and mimes cutting around my head, gently scooping out its contents, and sewing it back up.

“A-plus lobotomy, thank you.”

She runs back towards the slides, sneakers alight.

◊

Earlier, Dasha had been sitting on my new velvet couch, eating goldfish while we listened to a Winnie the Pooh audiobook and I scrolled absently through dating apps, vaguely nauseated. “Who’s that, who’s that?” she asked, glimpsing men holding fish on my screen. “Christopher Robin,” I told her.

Now my ex is sitting there on the same couch, a much further distance between us. She scans my apartment for newness, barely containing her glee at being my emergency contact. My phone is open to a search of nearby psychiatric hospitals. I am not winning the breakup.

This couch is very long, I notice. My ex is wearing my clothes, a floral shirt I had left in a trash bag and asked her to take to Goodwill when I moved out. It drapes on her gracefully. My old favorite pair of jeans fit her perfectly. She suggests I became suicidal because of her.

“If you were a cartoon character, that would be your outfit,” she tells me.

“What?”

“Like, they’re always wearing the same thing. Like you.” She gestures at my old t-shirt and shorts with a rip up one side.

“Oh. Thanks.”

I look down at us from above, my knees pointing toward her, hers pointing away toward my yellow chair, the former visual centerpiece of our former apartment. For me it had been sunshine breaking through clouds of dust and poor first-floor lighting. She had never particularly liked my taste in decor. I hated that apartment. Maybe it had been the way a grey wall wasn’t worth repainting to her that first made me suicidal? The way she liked to sit in the evenings with her back to me? It may have been sleeping in a bedroom with no windows in a bed with someone who didn’t want to touch me. Or it may have been a malfunctioning serotonin system.

“It’s so nice that we’re hanging out,” she says, making thoughtful eye contact with the needlepoint dandelion on my wall. “I’m glad we can be friends now. I’m glad you called.”

From my dissociative ceiling vantage, I can see myself processing this new meaning of hanging out, which now includes when you call your ex because you’re suicidal even though you swore you’d never see her again and then she comes over and sits very far apart from you on your couch and compliments the studio apartment you moved into because she dumped you but still inexplicably wanted to live together and the sliver of you that was still alive said well that’s a bad idea and now you live next to a cemetery but you painted it green and it’s rather pretty.

“I like the green.”

“Thank you.” I study her face, illegible. “I don’t want to be alive.”

“You seem like you’re doing okay,” she tells me. “How’s nannying going?”

“Nannying’s good.”

She stands up and peers around the rest of my apartment. “Oh good, I was looking for that shirt.” She points at a striped button-down hanging in my closet. I untangle it from a series of hangers that are also hers and hand it to her. She does not ask for the hangers back. Her eyes linger on other objects she once purchased, nail polish and deodorant, but she does not request their return, after everything I’ve been through lately.

“How are the meds?”

“The meds are not good. I stopped taking the meds.”

She nods. “Well, I need the microwave too. It belongs to the landlady.”

I help her carry it down to her car. She goes for a hug and I go for a handshake. She laughs at my choice, and we shake hands, three ups and downs.

◊

“Hell is other people. Have you ever heard that one?” Dasha’s mom asks. “It describes other parents perfectly. Hell is other parents.” For a moment we both watch her in her mind’s eye, printing “hell is other parents” on expensive diaper bags and selling them on Instagram.

“Yes,” I say.

I get vertigo walking between her house and mine. I sleep in my little green box of dandelions and yellow chairs, and then each morning my world balloons into Dasha’s mother’s air-conditioned castle, jewel tone walls reaching miles above us. Early in the fog, when I had just been left and felt very empty but not quite in the way that I was going to—I mean, before I had reached a therapeutic dose of Zoloft, which rarely, in some lucky individuals, makes you even more desperately want to drive off the highway and impale yourself on evergreens—this woman had asked me to hold her toddler for the summer, and I said oh yes, that sounds lovely.

“Anyway, can you heat up the oat milk for her nap? I promise I’m actually about to leave, I’m really gonna leave the house, since I’m paying you to be here.” She chuckles.

Dasha’s mom sells vintage objects out of her living room, so I don’t know where she goes to work. She pays for my company often, putting frilly price tags on dresses and chunky jewelry while her child happily plays independently. I sit between them, occasionally asking questions about what the dolls are up to and the online marketplace.

“How are you doing?” she asks me. “You seem off.”

Can I tell this rich, beautiful mother that I am having a very hard time being alive right now, but thank you for entrusting me with the life of your baby, she is very important and probably the best thing in my life. “I’ve been better.”

She continues to look at me intently.

“My meds aren’t working.”

“Ahh. I went off mine when I was pregnant with her, I cried every day. But I felt so alive.”

“I guess I feel alive.” Sometimes I scratch bits of my skin off and it momentarily invigorates me—is that what you mean? I rub behind my elbow, one of those places.

She nods. “Depression is what makes us human,” she informs me. “Did I ever tell you about my nine-day panic attack in Barcelona?”

“Is it? No, you did not.”

I do not listen to this story; instead, I fly up to the rafters and perch, looking down at this beautiful woman telling me unhelpful shit. I wonder if Christine is beautiful too. Is she even a doctor? Is she just a woman who Googles “What is a mood stabilizer?” I would rather Dasha’s mother prescribe me oat milk and trips to Spain. It seems to have kept her alive.

“Anyway,” she ends, “I left you guys zoo tickets on top of the baby grand, just in case you want to go after her nap, it’s gonna be a beautiful afternoon. Have fun together!”

She finally puts on her mules and leaves, and I carry Dasha up the stairs. She has a crib, but they let her sleep on a queen mattress on the floor, covered in a red patchwork quilt. She mashes the pillows around her, cocooning angrily.

“I don’t wanna sleep,” she says, frowning up at me.

“I know.” She drifts away after thirty seconds of oat milk and nose pets. I lay next to her much longer, eyes tracing the stars on the ceiling, listening to her tiny, slow breaths.

Back down far too many flights of stairs, I pour the remainder of the oat milk down the sink, absently reading the carton for its protein stats. “Can babies be vegan,” I search on my phone. Google refuses to critique Dasha’s mother’s child-rearing menu, opting for diplomatic dietary hedging instead.

Scrolling down an article rigorously debating oat vs. almond milk, I receive another text notification. Our “conversation” is mostly a series of my ex’s questions: Do you want to go for a walk sometime soon? Are these your bras? Most inexplicably: Do you want me to buy you a tv? And of course: Did you take the broom??

I stare at the gray bubbles until they blur into a bright, colorless light that makes my eyes water. I set my phone down on a pile of books about potty training and browse the living room, where Dasha’s mom has encouraged me to shop for a special reduced price. I finger a floral skirt, worth just three of my nannying hours. I press the hem against my waist and sway in the dim living room, where the flowers swish in a semicircle around my calves.

I walk back to the kitchen and slip a few of her Ativan into my bag instead.

◊

I push the stroller up the hill to the lions, a droplet of sweat rolling down from my armpit to my ankle, soaking into my sandal. The sun drenches me and the lions too, who have no deodorant. They roll lazily in their patch of yellow grass.

“I’m bored of the lions,” Dasha announces.

“Okay.” I push us back down the hill, seeking penguins.

I had barely gotten us there, driving through the city in her mom’s shiny car, my phone screaming the correct route to the zoo and dinging persistent ex texts of seemingly benign questions designed to make me sadder and Dasha screaming that I packed the wrong apple juice pouch. “Don’t crash the car, don’t crash the car,” I whispered, tethered to the road only by my angry baby in the backseat. “Don’t crash the car,” she agreed. I gripped the steering wheel until I felt dizzy, and she reached forward with all her might to pet my hair. “Hi,” she said. I reached backward blindly to hold her hand.

We find the penguins. Dasha climbs out of the stroller onto my lap, my dress immediately turning dark blue with sweat where she presses onto me. She shrieks with joy as the penguins swim toward us, shrinks back in fear that they might crash through the glass with the sheer delight of their desire to play with her. She leans back into me and I feel so warm I might burst.

Water rains into the penguins’ tank and we watch them swim up, heads above, feeling the droplets on their shiny feathers. “Are they birds?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I say. Are they? They seem too happy to be birds.

It’s raining on us too, washing off our sweat and warmth and ice cream smears. She looks up at the gray-blue sky and giggles as raindrops land on her eyelashes. We lean there for a long time, and I imagine the rain filling up the penguin tank until it leaks over, the penguins leaping and waddling up to us, Dasha joining their waddle dance. She giggles at my vision and tells me that won’t happen.

I ache for her, I want to wrap her goodness inside of me and let it make me good again. I am paid to rent her briefly each day. I want to be her real mother and I want her to take care of me and I want someone to stop me from being her mother because I’m unfit and then I want them to go inside of my brain and fix the things that are wrong and then give my baby back.

I push us back to the car, Dasha yawning as she flaps her penguin wings, asking me what they eat and where they sleep and who their friends are. I fish for the keys in my bag and my fingers find the rainy paste from the pills, anxiety med soup soaked into the fabric. I stick my finger into the grainy whiteness and lick it. I shudder at the bitterness.

Madeleine Gavaler is a preschool teacher and writer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her short stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in the New Plains Review and The Bookends Review.