Skin Game: A Memoir (11 page)

My sister’s friends never talked about sex, except in wry, sophisticated double entendres. They chattered in French and argued vehemently about people I’d never heard of, with names like Voltaire and Nietzsche.

They were also entirely unlike
my
school friends, those levelheaded girls whose intelligence never seemed to unsettle them from the calm procession of school and music lessons and two hours of studying after dinner. Those girls were my daytime friends, straightforward like the bright, defining light of day.

My sister’s friends, however—into whose company I managed, somehow, gradually to insinuate myself, though I would always, nevertheless, think of them as “my sister’s friends”—were night people. I can hardly remember a time that we were together when the sun was out. We’d drive around Charlottesville, all piled into the beat-up four-door owned by the one boy in the group who had both a license and a car. Then we’d spill out onto the night-shadowed grounds of the University of Virginia, or run around abandoned downtown streets. I remember running through the darkness and the occasional flash of light, breathless with excitement and the cold air raw in my throat. The rest of the city slept around us, oblivious, I thought, but we were alive to the nuanced nighttime subtleties of light and dark. I had stumbled across that startling power of being, simply, young, with all of life’s possibilities still undecided and waiting.

I suppose we must have had curfews, but in my memory we stayed up half the night. My sister and I often slept over at our friend Madeleine’s house; her parents apparently made no issue of our comings and goings. Her parents were, in fact, invisible as far as I can remember, their presence made known only through the endless supply of snack foods stocked in their vast kitchen, snacks I spent a great deal of time thinking about not eating.

During the day my sister’s friends seemed more ordinary and even a bit odd, but at night they intrigued me as mysterious, troubled, brilliant, talking their rarified philosophies and carrying on in angst-saturated crises. My sister in particular had angst, buckets of angst, and she and one or another of her friends would come to some life-altering moment of confrontation standing under the cold light of a city streetlamp on an empty street with their voices echoing against darkened buildings.

Hunched on the hood of a car in the pale blue puff of my down jacket, I could never even begin to understand what the crises were about, but I could see that clearly they were very Deep and Meaningful and Important. Secretly, I kept worrying that I was always going to be just too ordinary for anything but my ordinary and second-best angst, and would live forever vicariously on the edges of things, in uneasy company with a bag of Cheez Doodles.

19

Having so long coveted it, now I couldn’t imagine what I’d ever thought was so special about thirteen. Sure, we were the top of the heap at school, but that meant we were the top of nothing.
Middle
school: doesn’t the name say it all? Now I could see that high school was where life truly began, and eighth grade was just another year of waiting to get older.

That being said, eighth grade, in spite of its girl gangs and chronic chaos and self-imposed starvation, was a good year. In the shelter of my little coterie of Very Nice Friends, I could see that a pleasantly normal world existed in which girls lived in their own homes and brought brown-bag lunches to school and had piano lessons before supper. I couldn’t imagine that I would ever live that kind of life, nor did I exactly want to; I continued to believe that my family’s persistent divergence from the norm was what made us interesting, as though not belonging were our essential defining feature. But I found proximity to that other life comforting. I could visit it, in the homes of my friends who did not sleep on homemade particleboard beds.

In the middle of eighth grade, I and several of my Very Nice Friends were tapped for a new enrichment program for gifted students, a class called Quest that met daily in a tiny glass cubicle off the library. Only some fifteen or so students in the entire middle school were offered a place in this class, and I’m happy to admit that my ego was exceedingly gratified by this singling out. I considered it one in the eye for my former grade school and the slow-learning debacle.

I can’t remember much of what we did to enrich ourselves in Quest, except bask in the warm light of devoted, individualized attention from our teacher and her assistant. We did spend a lot of time writing, which allowed me ample opportunity to produce a copious body of morbid free verse. A lot of dark colors and bare branches and cold rain and colder hearts.

“Can’t you write something more
cheerful?
” asked the assistant, a blond young thing who was probably doing her student-teaching rotation and was still brimful with optimism and idealism about shaping young minds.

In a Swiftian spirit, I slapped down a couple of verses about smooth yellow sunshine pouring like lemon butter across idyllic spring meadows. “Yummy!” I wrote on the final line with a flourish.

“Oh yes, that’s so much nicer,” she said delightedly.

I was very amused at myself.

At the end of the spring, Quest compiled a selection of our short stories into a mimeographed booklet to treasure always. After twenty-two years I do still have mine, slightly stained and worn, one painful piece of evidence from my eighth-grade self.

Set upon

by life’s

joys,

sorrows,

and perfections,

that find

their way

to paper

I wrote rather incomprehensibly at the front, and
To Caroline, Don’t let anything get you down. I’m behind you 100%! CK,
I wrote more optimistically at the back. I signed my name and initials all over the book, part of an endless series of signings and practicings of my signature. I continued working at my signature for years, as though when I settled upon a signature I would settle upon a self.

The Quest oeuvre was, with the exception of one or two light-hearted entries, an alarming litany of the preoccupations of our middle-school minds. In one, a happy family’s life is destroyed when the Communists take over. In another, a man digs up his dead wife, convinced she has been buried alive. In a third, a girl is stabbed to death with a butcher knife, the victim of a terrible family curse. In yet another, a boy’s best friend is hit by a car and dies in a hospital-room denouement. One more story, a pithy one-pager, has a girl slash herself up with a razor blade so that the twelve other girls in her witch’s coven can drink her blood until she’s dead. And that wasn’t even my story. In mine, an unhappy teenage girl with a mean sister and parents who just don’t understand kills herself with a bottle of pills:

…
the last rays of sunlight shone through Janet’s bedroom window, illuminating the still body lying among the shattered glass and debris upon the floor.

“The Best of Quest,” our little mimeographed masterpiece was called, and it wouldn’t surprise me if our lead teacher went home and had a stiff drink after she’d read through it all. She took me aside one day at the end of class and asked me if there was anything, in light of my story, that I felt I would like to talk about. My story, she said, was very … vivid.

I liked my teacher. She was young, an exotic blend of ethnicities before such things were so common. But I wasn’t falling for that “anything you want to talk about” line; down that road lay trouble and all kinds of explaining and self-extricating.

“It’s just a story,” I reassured her.

I even jokingly repeated the whole conversation to my parents that night, pointing out the hilarity of her suggestion to throw them off the scent in case they read my story.

Now, of course you could argue that simply by writing that story I’d shown my hand already, and that if I truly wanted to keep my troubles to myself, I would have churned out something more along the lines of the “Yummy!” poem. But at the time my favorite reading was all suicides and madness:
Lisa, Bright and Dark; I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
I figured if a story didn’t end with someone dead or crazy, how good could it be? An opinion apparently shared by most of the rest of Quest. What is it about insanity and untimely death that so captures the imagination of young girls?

*   *   *

I do believe there are people for whom misery is a calling, who are born to it, who make it a life’s work, relishing the entire spectrum of woe. I, on the other hand, wore my troubles uneasily, almost couldn’t quite believe in them. They troubled me plenty, certainly, but I always felt vaguely bewildered and beleaguered by them, as though I’d woken up one morning and found myself saddled with someone else’s miserable life. Surely this unhappiness was meant for someone … well, for someone more characteristically suited for the job? Surely I was not apt enough an apprentice, always trying to shirk my solemn duties with an irreverent gibe at my own expense?

I suppose, then, that what I aspired to, in my romantic and literary notions of madness, was something more poetic and somehow explicable than this grinding discontent I’d been stuck with.

I kept my cutting so resolutely to myself not because I feared
its
discovery, per se, but rather because I knew it would be like the fatally ill-timed sneeze that gives the heroine away when she most needs to escape detection. It would be the signpost to a whole inner life I could neither justify nor explain, a life that was like one of those “find the item that doesn’t match” games.

I credit chronic despair for my sense of humor; the more my preoccupations consumed me, the more I endeavored to suggest the opposite, to appear blithe and irreverent, to strike up a jaunty tune even while the ship went down. I mounted a public self whose job it was to distract attention from any evidence of that other me. I’m not saying I mastered elusiveness all in one stroke; instead, I assembled it piece by piece. I learned to smooth over the gaps, to skim the surface. It’s the storyteller’s art to present a coherent narrative, to omit the details that divert from the chosen trajectory.

I set about making myself a one-girl masquerade, quipping and capering, jesting and gibing, dancing merrily from one topic to the next and never alighting for long on any one thing. Indeed, anytime gravity threatened at all, I would fling a wry quip into the breach like a flare shot up to explode the darkness.

I did send-ups of my teachers, of the chaos of life at Walker, of the mountainous teacher’s aide who drifted off to sleep every day during algebra, of the poor, mooning, lovesick boy in my class who called me every night with nothing to say, but could not hang up. I was nice enough that I couldn’t tell him not to bother, but not so nice that I didn’t make antic faces at my family and roll my eyes as the empty conversation dragged on.

Humor is a high-energy pursuit, an on-your-toes kind of calling, one step ahead of the repo man. Slice off a deftly timed one-liner and everybody’s laughing. How gratifying it is to amuse. How easy it gets to toss off a witticism to ease any awkwardness, to sidestep any solemnity. When you amuse, it even seems, for the briefest possible moment, that you are who you appear to be, so clever and confident and at ease. No one ever asks difficult questions or takes you to task or enumerates your shortcomings while laughing. People like to be amused. They
prefer
to be amused. You can avoid whole categories of the anxiety-inducing by keeping the laughs coming like an endless round of champagne on the house. Then while your court jester of a self is mumming out front, the rest of you can slip out the stage door where you can’t be found.

My family knew me as a certain, particular Caroline, and my friends and teachers knew me as slightly different but basically similar Carolines—flippant, generally reliable, maybe a bit moody around the house, but essentially unremarkable. Can I say that the apparent Caroline was any less authentic because certain details had been edited out? We all have a public face that varies to a greater or lesser degree from the one we show only to ourselves. How wide a divergence between the public and private must there be before we are guilty of living a lie?

Suppose you discovered that your husband, your wife, someone you love deeply, had once committed a terrible, an unforgivable crime. Yesterday, when you didn’t know, you loved that person with all your heart. Today, you know. Nothing about the person you love has changed—all that has changed is what you know. One piece of information omitted can make all the difference in the world.

20

I could see that my life was looking up in every regard, with my Very Nice Friends, my academic successes, the delightful novelty of sheer, placid normalcy in the details of everyday life not lived in a boarding school, the steadily declining numbers on the bathroom scale. So why couldn’t I escape this brooding, suffocating, featureless anxiety? If the origins of my unhappiness had been grounded in the tangible events of seventh grade, now that unhappiness had won a self-perpetuating life of its own. It was as though a groove had been worn into my mind, a path of least resistance down which I tumbled over and again, retracing the same wrong turns and dark corridors.

It was like being isolated in a very small and very bare room with someone extremely anxious, restless, and eager to find fault with me, who would pace and gesticulate and mutter a tireless litany of recriminations and worries. The diatribe carried on unrelenting day and night, flaring and dying away as if in an endless Doppler effect. At its worst I would feel as if an entire chorus had crowded into that cramped space with me to shriek and babble and mill about wringing their hands at me, one among them chosen to get up in my face and wail ceaselessly
What are you going to do what are you going to do whatareyougoingtodo?!!