Kissing Doorknobs (10 page)

I looked at my music teacher. I knew she thought I was shy. Actually, I usually just wasn’t listening.

My parents were hopeful that I was over the worst of whatever it was. I hoped so too.

Suddenly, in the middle of my Christmas play, surrounded by people I had known all my life, I felt completely alone. I got scared. I squeezed my eyes shut and realized that I was afraid of growing up, of going to high school, of getting lost, of not being able to breathe.

I looked from right to left and then from left to right. I did it again. And again. Obeying an urge, I was performing an outlandish ritual, onstage, in front of
everyone, and they didn’t know it. I hoped. My heart was pounding with anxiety. My arms ached from holding the stupid candles in the air for so long. The tyrants in my head were returning with the force of an army.
Please don’t make me have to pray! I don’t want my mother to drag me off this stage and kill me here in front of everyone!

The image of Sisyphus rolling that giant stone uphill for eternity popped into my head. What did he do to deserve that? What did I do to deserve this? This play seemed to be taking an eternity.

Mercifully, the curtain slowly descended behind me on the stage. The play was ending. I was standing alone before the audience. My heart was beating like a snare drum. This was it. My moment in the sun. Or was it the son. Sun. Son. Sun. Son.

The spotlight illuminated me. Sun. The candles looked as if they were lit. Sun! All
eyes
were on me. Mute and tinsel-laden me. I didn’t utter a sound. I couldn’t utter a sound. The tyrants in my head forbade it.

I was humiliated. I concentrated hard on not crying. After a moment, my mother stood up and applauded as if she had just seen the best performance of her life. Everyone else followed enthusiastically. I was mortified. Keesha was at my side with her arm around me, giving me silent support. I didn’t cry, but for the second time I felt her pity and wanted to get away from it. Luckily, when I came home nobody said anything about the play or my nonperformance. Donna had a date that night with a guy she’d met buying cigarettes at the bowling alley.

A
lthough Donna and I were totally too old, we spent the afternoon of Christmas Day making angel patterns all over my backyard by lying on our backs in the snow and swooshing our arms and legs. Inhaling frosty air through a giant piece of peppermint stick, I studied the cloud-decorated sky and listened to the crusty
whooshes
of our angel music. With Donna by my side, my family tucked safely inside the house and new forest-green Doc Martens on my feet, I felt almost happy—which made me reflexively nervous.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked Donna while digging my elbows deeper into the snow. I looked at a cloud that changed from a woman’s profile into a dragon,

“Oh, you’re not gonna start that trip again, are you?”

“What trip?”

“That praying trip?”

“No!” I said quickly. And then, “At least—” But before I could finish my thought Donna chimed in.

“‘I hope not.’” Then she added, “Well, if you do it again, try not to be so
annoying
this time.”

“Okay,” I said. Then I thought about how much I loved Christmas. I loved the comfort and safety promised by Christ’s birth. I loved the trees, the snow angels, ’The Little Drummer Boy.” I loved midnight Mass with the intense colors and more intense music. I loved the incense and the hope. And then I loved coming home and opening presents, getting as many new clothes as possible. I loved my new Doc Martens. I loved two weeks off school. I loved Donna and my parents and—

“I believe in God,” said Donna solemnly. She stood up to check out her angel. Although I couldn’t really say why, I was bathed in relief to hear that she believed in God. “And goddesses,” she added smugly.

“Which ones?”

“All of them … and then some.”

I thought about her statement. I imagined Roman and Greek gods and goddesses nailed to alabaster crosses. I imagined singing “O Holy Night” in Latin and Greek, dancing down the aisles of the church. Donna interrupted my reverie by throwing a snowball in my face and laughing hysterically.

“Come on,” she commanded. “I need a smoke.”

Carefully we stepped between the angels and sat down on the other side of the garage so that my parents couldn’t see Donna smoking, even though they knew she did it and could always smell it on her breath. When she’d finally got her cigarette lit in the wind, I watched her inhale a long drag. I thought about how close we’d become in the short time I’d known her. How much she meant to me. How comfortable she made me feel in spite of the risks she was always taking.

“Great boots,” she said, looking at my new Docs.

“Thanks.”

“Christmas present?”

“Duh!”

“So what are you so quiet about today?” Donna managed to exhale words along with carbon monoxide and a thousand other poisons.

I coughed and shrugged.

“People die from breathing secondary smoke,” I said.

Donna looked thoughtful. “Too bad I don’t get to pick which ones.” We laughed and I went back to cloud-watching, but I knew she was watching my face. “I get nervous when you’re quiet for too long. You aren’t counting snowflakes or something, are you?”

“No. I’m counting the months I’ve known you.”

She smiled, and in those few seconds she looked like her mother. She hated her mother, but I didn’t really know why. Part of me thought she hated her mother because she was afraid that if she didn’t hate her she too might end up married to someone named Hal and taking medicine for bouts of depression.

“I’m also worried about you taking drugs.”

Donna didn’t respond. The wind picked up and we shivered.

“I don’t complain when you leave the planet behind, do I?” she asked, and I thought about how she saw it.

“Did you really let a doctor poke a needle into your eye zillions of times?”

She looked startled. “I had a tumor,” she said dryly. “The doctor removed it. And yes, he gave me drugs.”

“Is that why you wore the sunglasses?”

“Duh.”

“Girrrllzzz!” my mother called from the back door.

“We’re back here, Mom,” I said, glancing at Donna’s cigarette.

“Din-nerr.”

“Com-minggg,” we both said, in conscious imitation of my mother’s exaggerated pronunciation.

The house smelled great, and everyone was standing around the table admiringly. My mother, who was not normally all that into presentation, had outdone herself. Roast goose, a vat of sauerkraut sprinkled with caraway seeds, potato dumplings, goose gravy, dinner rolls, two bottles of wine, green candles and a festive red tablecloth. Norman Rockwell does Eastern Europe.

“This looks so great, Mrs. Sullivan,” said Donna while she moved into one of the available places at the table. “Thanks for including me.”

A light film of anxiety broke out on my back and upper lip. I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to do what I knew I was going to do. But I couldn’t help it. I watched the lips of my family, smiling and talking, but I was hearing a
whoosh
of anger traveling through my nervous system.

“You’re welcome, darling,” said my mom, with tears of joy welling up in her eyes. Since my father’s illness and my quirks, my mom had been drinking a lot of wine. We were all used to her tears for any number of reasons and didn’t much react to them. This time, however, she looked so smug that you’d think she’d given birth to this meal instead of cooked it.

My dad is a teetotaling Irishman with a double chin and a reluctant smile. He was salivating over the meal before us. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing …,” he said.
And everybody in the room finished the sentence, which he had repeated at least a million times before.

“… anybody who goes away from this table hungry, it’s their own fault!” Everybody said it but me, that is. Because I was struggling to keep calm despite the tyrants raging wildly in my head.

“Okay,” said my dad. “Everybody can sit down where they’re standing.”

As everyone began to sit down, I went ballistic.
“What’s going on?”
I shouted.

Everyone turned to look at me in total surprise. My skin was covered with a cold dew. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up like straight pins. I was losing the struggle not to burst into tears.

“What
now?”
My sister looked bored.

“Now?” I
screamed. “Now everybody is in the
wrong
places! How can you tell us to sit down where we’re standing, Daddy? And why are you trying to do this to me?

“Do what to you, Tara?” My father seemed to be controlling his own anger.

“Mixing me up! You don’t sit there! You sit there! Like
always.”

I grabbed my father’s arm between the shoulder and the elbow and lifted mightily in an attempt to physically hoist him out of his chair.
“Mom sits there like always!
And Gramma and Grampa sit there, please! Please!” I pointed to the chairs where I needed them to sit.

My poor grandparents looked so scared that they aged ten years in twenty seconds. I was like a deranged referee. I practically knocked my “tough guy” sister out of her chair. “Come on, Greta! You sit
there
like
always
… and me and Donna sit here … just like always! What’s wrong with you guys? Huh? What are you trying to do to me?” I was hollering and crying and acting as if I had just escaped from some lunatic asylum. But I couldn’t let everyone sit in the wrong chairs. I
couldn’t.

“Come on, Daddy! Pleeezzze sit there. Mom! Please! Please! Just like always! Just like always. It’s got to be just like always or else … or …” I was crouched on the floor crying. Everyone else was frozen in time and place.

In spite of all my other quirks, everyone was astounded by my holiday-meal outburst. My grandparents looked more scared than I did. My sister solemnly examined her reflection in the china-cabinet mirror. My mom’s tears of pride had turned to fountains of pain. And even Donna, who was usually pretty casual about my rules, looked undone. It was my father who spoke first.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said. “I’m so sick of this shit.” Because he’d used the Lord’s name in vain, I began to pray for his soul.

“Our Father who art in Heaven—”

“That’s it,” my dad mumbled. He knocked a chair on its side and stormed out of the kitchen.

Within seconds he slammed his bedroom door so hard I thought the walls would crack. My mother grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, my grandparents grabbed the glasses and the three of them went into the living room. Donna went home thinking I was taking more serious drugs than she was and hadn’t told her. Greta and I put away the untouched food, then played
Chinese checkers and eventually ate Cheerios for Christmas dinner.

“I like Cheerios,” Greta said. She smiled at me beatifically, like the Blessed Virgin. I was jealous because she was normal. “I like goose with dumplings better,” she said slyly, “but I do like Cheerios.”

“How come you never get mad, Greta?” I asked.

“You think I don’t get mad?” she asked, as calmly and sweetly as ever.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’ve been suspended three times for beating people up. And two of those times were for you.”

“So?”

“So, I get mad!”

“I still don’t get it. You only get mad when you’re
not at home?”

“No.” She thought for a long time before answering. “I get mad here. I just
act
mad outside.”

I watched her calm, thoughtful face chewing her Christmas Cheerios and realized for the zillionth time that whatever it was that made me act the way I did had affected more than
my
life.

Before going to sleep that night, Greta and I sat in my bedroom and listened to our parents arguing in the front of the house. After a while I couldn’t stand it and put a pillow over my head. “They’re arguing about me,” I said through the foam and cotton.

“Don’t feel bad,” she said, putting her arm around me. “You can’t help it … right?”

“I can’t! I really can’t.”

“I thought so.”

“Why? Why did you think so?”

“Because … you’re not crazy. And so … why would you
act crazy
… if you could help it?”

“How do you know I’m not crazy?”

Greta shrugged and looked at me with those unblinking
eyes
of hers.

“What
is
crazy?” I asked.

Immediately we heard something crash. Greta tilted her head toward the room in which our parents were fighting.
“That’s
crazy,” she said. We laughed a lot.

Greta jumped up and pulled back the curtains. “Hey, let’s look at the angels!” Side by side we squinted to see into the dark backyard. “They look fierce in this light,” Greta said.

She was right. They did look fierce. “They’re like you,” I said, thinking about all the physical fights my sister had either started or finished in her eleven years. “They’re warrior angels.”

“Thank you.” Greta looked so proud that I suddenly realized how few compliments she got from me, or anyone. “How many of them are there?”

I quickly counted. “Three … seven … twelve … Fif-fif … uh-oh! There’s fifteen!”

“So?”

“I … gotta go.” Without stopping to put on my coat or boots, I ran into the yard and through the snow in search of a clean space. Barefoot and in my nightgown, I was freezing and crying before I even lay down and started making another angel. I waved my arms and legs like crazy. I was scared stiff, because I had no idea why I had to do this stupid, stupid thing! I just knew I had to. I’d never be able to sleep knowing that there were fifteen angels and
not sixteen. It had to be an even number. It
had
to. Once again, I had no clue why.

When I ran back into the house, dripping with ice and slush, my parents and Greta were staring at me with horror. We were all afraid of what the new year would bring.

M
aybe it was the stress of the holidays, or the strain of going to the shrink again after making the sixteenth snow angel, or the guilt from shoplifting, or the irritation of Donna’s newest boyfriend. I don’t know what caused it. I never did. But one day in late January, as I was walking out the door to meet Donna, I stopped in front of the doorknob in our living room and … froze.