Lying (7 page)

For me, the adolescent years were not about ripenings. Instead, I felt used up and dependent. If others did not admire me, I thought I would disappear.

I had seizures once a day, sometimes in school. The seizures horrified me; they were thrashing humiliations, especially when I wet my pants. I’m sure it was for this reason alone I did not attain popularity. When I thought of the word
popular
I saw a pert pink flower open in the sun. The sky was blue. A girl smelled good. Not me.

My mother, it turns out, had her own popularity issues. Once, she had thought I might do it for her, be a skating star or a genius. Now, however, I was just a person with a disease. Our paths went wider and wider apart, until at last, one day, I saw I was alone in the woods, with the worms and crows.

And where was she? She turned into a writer of maxims. She said she had an editor by the name of Suki Israel who would one day publish her work. “Dress for the position you want,” she wrote, “not the one you have,” and “If it’s not a beautiful morning, let your cheerfulness make it one.”

The year was 1976, and all over the country love was flowering. My mother caught on. Those were the days when you could go into a bookstore and the entire front display would be of happy meditations. On the fridge, where once had hung a picture of me in my red-and-white skating skirt, was now the maxim she said was her best yet: “Even when you don’t feel brave, pretend you are, for this is how courage comes.”

And so as I went down, down into adolescent sickness and skin, down into daily seizures, she went up, up into the clear air of adage. She sent her work off to Hallmark, to poetry contests listed in the back of
Good Housekeeping
, contests where you had to pay thirty dollars and renew your subscription for the next five years, contests that would turn you into a star. I loved those entry forms, their tiny lines and boxes making it seem so neat, and the promises written in bold black: $8,000
AND A
W
ORLDWIDE
R
EADERSHIP!
With her pen, she scratched her way toward it.

Sometimes weeks and weeks, months and months, would go by, and she’d get no reply to her submissions. The longer she waited, the happier she got. Oh, she was lovely in her state of limbo, when the whole world stretched out before her, the moon a bright surprise above. “It means,” I heard her say on the phone to Nance, or maybe Emma, or maybe
even Suki, “it means I am under serious consideration.” I was not, anymore, under her consideration, serious or otherwise. I was free, free to fall, to smoke, to spit, to kiss; free to dress in black, or in crushed velvet, or in ratty tuxedo tails, it was dizzying.

Over and over again, my mother and I crashed, and in some essential way, we were graceless. Eventually, she would get a reply, a rejection of course, after which she would lie in a darkened room for hours. When she cried, it was for things so utterly separate from me that her tears were personal insults. I told myself I didn’t care. But sometimes I think all the corruption that followed had to do with the fact that there was a space between us, and, when I was thirteen, in an extra rickety world, I needed to fill that space with something, and it would not be her. I told myself I didn’t care, but my dreams were full of women; women lifting me, women treading toward me, while above the moon burned in a beautiful way.

•  •  •

The spring of my thirteenth year was unlike any other. Frail rain fell, casting a silver net over the neighborhood. Then the sky cleared. The sun went down in a pool of red, and all the flowers smelled like lotion.

A little boy came to our school, a Japanese boy by the name of Sumio Yakima. I was cruel to him; I told him “thank you” was pronounced “fuck you,” which won me points with the popular people.

I was inspired. At that point, I was still trying to outrun
my seizures, and I thought I might accomplish that by being mean. I did other cruel things involving lima beans and bananas, the specifics of which I will not mention here. The worst I ever did, though, had nothing to do with hurting another human being. It had to do with God, in whom I believed even back then, and whose name I had promised myself never to take in vain. One day Sarah Kushner gave me a red Magic Marker and dared me to write on the wall “God = shit,” which I did for her attentions, and I pinpoint that as the moment when what I meant versus what I said parted ways, and, with a whimper, my adolescence was born.

•  •  •

Words came in a rush, then, and none of them were mine. “I would love a cerise-colored outfit,” I said to Amy Goldblatt on the trolley one day. “I look like an absolute hag,” I became fond of announcing in the girls’ room during recess, a place with mildewy-smelling green stalls, gunk in the grout of the cracked tile floor, white washbasins with rings of rust around the drains. In there, girls leaned toward the mirrors, fell into their faces’ reflections like it was love, like it was hate, snapping open clam-shaped compact cases and patching up their oily skin. Everyone’s skin was so oily, and girls squealed like they were only half person and the other half was pig, it was so sad, and I trotted along on my little high hooves with the rest of them, rooting about for beauty.

But no matter how much makeup I wore, I was still a girl with epilepsy, a girl who pissed herself, a girl convulsed; was there a way to make sickness sexy? That was the year I read
nineteenth-century novels, in which tubercular heroines coughed up blood, and died in feather beds. I bought foundation two shades lighter than my actual skin. I wore a dark velvet ribbon like a choker around my neck, and I took my Medic Alert bracelet off my wrist and sported it instead as an anklet, the scarlet serpent dangling down.

And still, Sarah Kushner did not invite me to her party Friday night. Danny Harris wouldn’t like me. “I am dying,” I whispered to Sarah in English class one day.

“You’re dying?” she said to me. “What’s wrong?”

“Cancer,” I said.

“I thought you had epilepsy,” she said.

“Epilepsy causes cancer,” I said. “Can you believe it?”

She believed it. She invited me to her party lickety-split, and Haskell Crocker danced with me, and Danny Harris held my hand, and every girl brought me pink punch, such beautiful punch, with foamy globs floating on top, and slices of orange and lemon in it. Sweet. Sweet. The whole time, it seemed, Elton John was singing about the sun going down, and I saw it, all the wolves howling while the sun went down, casting steep shadows, marks of sin on me.

•  •  •

My mother picked me up from that party. Before I left, Sarah said, “You could come again next time.” On the one hand, I was thrilled. The cancer story had been a brilliant idea, brilliant. On the other hand, there was something wrong with the tone of her invite. She’d said it in such a soft, gentle way, in a voice so full of pity I felt pathetic.

I got in the car with my mother. I had a numb feeling, and when I looked at my hand it was not mine. That’s all I can say.

“Mom?” I asked.

She didn’t turn to me, though. She kept driving. Her mouth was grim and pressed while above her passing streetlights floated in her beehive hair. The car so quiet. I saw a dead dog on the side of the road.

I thought I might have a seizure. Sometimes I said a little prayer, “Please, God, prevent it from happening, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.” The counting to ten was the most important part of the prayer.

I prayed then, counted to ten, and looked out. The car hummed along in a smoothly sinister way. I recognized nothing, not the houses, not the yards. “Where are we?” I said.

Still, she didn’t answer.

“Mom!” I yelled.

Then she answered. Her voice clacked out of her throat like a prerecorded message. “Calm down,” she said.

“Where are we going?” I said. “This isn’t the way home.”

“I am running an errand,” she said.

I rolled down my window and air, clean and fresh, rushed in, filled my mouth like sweet lake water when you dive down. Through the dense night, I saw we had entered a new kind of neighborhood, a place where the houses were sprawling and pillared, where blue pools lapped and the lawns were wide.

My mother pulled over and turned off the car. “Wait here,” she said. Ahead of us stood a massive home.

“What errand are you running?” I said.

“My editor, Suki Israel,” she said. “I just need to drop off some work. I’ll be right back.”

And then she wafted up the white brick walk, a door mysteriously opened, she sucked into the dazzle of light. And then gone.

I waited.

At first only five minutes passed, then what seemed like ten, and then I lost track of time. It was April, and the night grew chilly, and frost fell on the windshield. I wanted to cry.

I waited some more. The car engine, still hot, ticked, and stopped. I thought it was possible my mother wasn’t coming back. I stepped out of the car, then, and heard a stillness that was not of this world. It was the stillness of a stage set, of a madman’s sleeping mind. I crept toward a window.

What I saw inside there I will not forget. Huge aquariums were built into every wall, jellyfish like lamps in the green water, octopi bobbing, my mother nowhere around. It was beautiful in a frightening way. I saw, then, how essentially ahuman the world was, a place where the real turned to waves, and washed away.

I went back to the car. What felt like a long time later she emerged, smoothing her skirt, her hair slightly mussed—or did I just imagine that?—smiling now as she stepped down the path, and when I said, “It’s been hours, Mom,” she said, “It’s been minutes, Lauren,” and I got so confused—water, vapor, twisted time—that right then I felt a craving in me, a
craving for something safe and solid and absolutely absolute.

•  •  •

That was the night I started to steal. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I really started to steal a few days after that, or a few weeks before. Maybe it’s just certain narrative demands, a need for neatness compelling me to say
that was the night
or
and this led surely to this
, my life a long link of daisies, a bolt of cloth unbroken, I wish it were.

So, that night. If not that night, I assure you it was around then.

I stepped onto our lawn. Around me, I could see the more modest homes of our neighborhood, and they comforted me in their familiar size and shape. Across the street from us, the Slotnicks grew cherry tomatoes in the summer, and Mrs. Slotnick always brought me some, vitamin C, she said, being the cure for every disease.

Now, I walked toward the Slotnicks’ house. I remembered how, years ago, when I was ten, I had rung people’s bells and waited in the bushes, loving it when, for just one moment, a door opened toward me, a place of possible comfort.

I thought I would do that again, ring a buzzer and hide, nothing more. But, instead, when I got to the Slotnicks’ front door, I turned the handle and slipped in.

Houses hold us, and all that is dear in our worlds. I slipped in, and felt the walls curve to cup me, and smelled roasted chicken and other just general living odors, sweat
and steel wool pads leaving swaths of blue soap that are beautiful. A home has many purposes, but it should primarily be a place where you can cry and run a good fever.

And as I stood there, hunched in the Slotnicks’ front hall, I had a sense of immense peace, and then longing. This is how it started. I looked around me. I heard someone moving in the next room. I didn’t want to be caught. On the hall table was a hat. There was an umbrella with a few broken ribs and on the wall, surrounded by other photos, a picture in a plain wood frame, an old-fashioned photograph of a lady in a garden, her hands heaped with greens. “My Aunt Henrietta,” Mrs. Slotnick had once told me.

I looked at Aunt Henrietta, happy in her garden, her whole body sepia-soft, and I thought how good it would be to have her. So I took her. It wasn’t a big deal, it was just one picture, and a little one at that, so I took her. I slipped her in my pocket, and before I left the house I saw the small space I had made on the Slotnicks’ wall, a gap in the middle of human history where Henrietta used to be, and for a minute I felt full, the emptiness now outside of me.

•  •  •

Things become addictions for no good reason except that you started them. If that night I had gone to my parents’ liquor cabinet and poured myself a shot of Scotch, then it probably would have been Scotch that sang to me forever after.

However, it wasn’t Scotch. I became addicted to tchotchkes, anything solid and small enough to fit in the palm of my
hand, people’s personal possessions with their personal smells still on them. What I liked even more was the thievery itself, the rush and spice of it, how for one moment I could step into a place so steeped in adrenaline the world was real and rimmed with red. I didn’t know then that the word
epilepsy
comes from the Greek word
epilepsia
, which means “to take, to seize.” My body had become epileptic years ago, but when I turned thirteen, so did my soul.

What I stole: a small tin filled with pennies from the Shocketts’ house; an egg timer, also from the Shocketts’ house; a mug with Bugs Bunny on it; an anchor-shaped paperweight. I never once stole from a store. (All right, once.) I stole from the houses in the neighborhood where I lived, edging my way in, the carpets sucking up the sound of my footsteps, the family, unsuspecting, eating meat loaf in the kitchen. I stashed all my goods in the toolshed out back, the one my father never used (“He can’t even figure out how to hold a hammer,” my mother would sometimes say, scornfully). The toolshed was itself like a little house, brown flower boxes beneath its windows. It was a world, and as it filled with my goods, it became my world. Sometimes I would go out there at night, just as the springtime sun was setting with a soft hiss, and the light was full of richness. The blue mug glowed; the tins quietly twinkled. I felt a satisfaction come over me then, and I would sit on the buckled brown floor of the shed, and hug my knees, and watch.

•  •  •

I got my period. This was a disappointment. In school we had a book on teenage emotions, in which there was a whole chapter devoted to the emotions around getting your period. The book said you would feel full of things, water and grief and little sparkles of joy.