Skin Game: A Memoir (12 page)

Once, I saw a nature film in which wildebeest were driven mad by a cloud of biting insects and ran bucking and flailing across the plains until they dropped. That’s the way this anxiety felt: unrelenting, like the swarming and torment of a thousand invisible mosquitoes, and it made me, too, want to run screaming and flailing my arms. But I was not meant to be a screamer or a flailer—that was too dramatic, way out of my league.

Sometimes, though, when the apartment was empty, I would go into the bathroom and turn on all the faucets. Water rushed into the sink, splashed into the tub, rattled and rained against the curtain when I flipped the shower on. Amid this cascade, I stood in front of the towel rack under the window, pressing a bright yellow bath towel to my face, screaming and screaming into its thick, muffling folds.

*   *   *

My sister and I shared a small bedroom in this apartment, a dark space with one window facing the tired indirection of western light. Accustomed to separate bedrooms, we chafed at each other in this too-confined space. I lay on the cold wood floor at night, counting my way through my daily one hundred sit-ups, dreaming of the lost bedroom of my youth.

In this apartment, I cut with the jumpy alertness of a cat burglar, ready to yank down a sleeve, palm a razor at the sound of approaching footsteps. In this apartment, I learned the expedience of the quick and dirty cut job, the flesh wound on the fly. In this apartment, I learned to cut in the bathroom.

I had an ugly bathrobe, cheap velour the color mustard turns when it dries on the rim of the jar. I’d slip the blade, in its little gauze nest, into the bathrobe pocket.

“I’m taking a shower,” I’d announce loudly—a touch defiantly?

The hollow-core door shuts behind me. The little button lock clicks into place, and I am, for these few minutes, alone.

I pull the gauze from my pocket, unwrap the blade, lay it on the edge of the sink with a tiny
kchink!
of metal against ceramic. I turn the shower on in subterfuge; licks of steam rise up over the curtain rod.

I prop my leg up on the closed toilet lid, inscribe a careful incision in my thigh. An inch long, or two, but no more. I cut with an infinitesimal slowness that brings the racing speed of my frantic thoughts down and down and down in pitch, like a centrifuge slowing.

The air is thick and wet now. I draw another line next to the first, with half an inch between them. I might dab at the cut with the gauze, a memento of blood I will keep tucked away with the razor. Then I strip my mustard-ugly robe, step into the scalding, scouring heat of the shower, and wash away the evidence in a froth of Clairol’s Herbal Essence shampoo.

*   *   *

In the spring, we moved to a new apartment, where I had my own bedroom again. I had my particle-board bed, the slippery blue nylon of my sleeping bag, the green of my lighthouse lamp, and the sweet bite of the razor’s edge.

When I think of the history of my cutting, it is this apartment and this bedroom with which I associate it most strongly. I only lived there for about eighteen months, and I cut for the better part of twenty years, so I can’t say why this particular setting should resonate most significantly in my memory. Maybe because here was where I perfected the ritual of the act, in the luxury of undisturbed peace.

I always cut at night, hunched on the edge of my bed, illuminated in the ghastly glow of that lamp. Just the anticipation sparked the beginnings of calm. With quiet deliberation I removed the stack of Spanish vocabulary flash cards, unwrapped the blade from its gauze nest, contemplated the precise location for tonight’s cut, carefully sterilized my razor with alcohol; when I was through cutting, I swabbed the cut as well, and mopped up the streaks and stains of blood that marked my skin.

I tried one night to cut deeper, torn between the anticipated thrill of a deep slash and the body’s organic, mindless resistance to such assault. It wasn’t something I put precisely into words, but I knew that I needed to escalate the terms of the engagement. To cut with conviction. To wound for the feverish beauty of the wound itself. I wanted blood—not the refined bubble of sundered capillaries, but a frantic spill, something beyond caution, beyond control.

When I was in sixth grade, a boy in my school, running down the entrance hallway, missed the door handle he’d meant to shove against and instead put his arm through the doorway’s glass upper half. It was late in the afternoon, and I was standing outside, waiting for the carpool, when I saw him walking slowly down the sidewalk towards me, holding his right arm out stiffly, staring at it as though mystified. The glass had peeled his arm like a clove of garlic; his forearm was a livid illustration from an anatomy text, muscle wrapped around bone tied with tendon. He trailed a path in scarlet behind him, and when he suddenly sat down, heavily, on the low landscaping wall near where I stood, a velvet pool sprang up beneath him.

“My shoes,” he kept saying, “save my shoes,” trying to shuffle his feet away from the spreading tide beneath him.

Blood is a color they never get right in the movies. It isn’t a flat, ketchupy red. It shimmers with an iridescence underhued in blue. It is the color of living and dying at once, for surely this boy had severed an artery. With every clench of the fist of his heart, more blood arced from his arm in strangely exuberant abandon.

That’s what I wanted, that reckless letting go, a moment blind to anything but itself, and the blood. Those delicate cuts that were my stock-in-trade, they were nothing more than a mild protest; I wanted to raise the volume. Desire is unmindful of contingencies or consequences.

I leaned to the left, raised my hand high above the jutting edge of my right hip, willed that hand to drop without thought, to follow the blind law of gravity. Each time, my hand flinched at the last moment. Then finally will overcame body, the blade swept in a swift arc flaying the soft flesh of my hip very nearly to the bone.

Adrenaline washed over me in a tingling rush. I peered into the cut. Bloodless for a moment, as though the vessels and veins and capillaries had been taken by surprise, the waxy white of the fat of my hip looked alien and lifeless. Then blood flooded the wound, ran up and over the edge and rolled along the curve of my hip like rain down a window.

A sudden fear gripped me, a catch deep in the gut; the sides of this wound, unlike all the others before it, gapped open. Had I gone too far? Could I stop the bleeding? What if I needed stitches? There’d be explanations demanded. There’d be consequences.

What had I learned in Red Cross junior lifesaving? I scanned my memory for the proper procedures.

Pressure,
I thought.
Apply pressure.

My fingers pushed the edges of the wound together, and I could see that eventually this would do the trick. I released my hold and studied my fingertips, sticky with blood. Blood streaked my hip and pulsed sluggishly from the wound itself.

My mind trickled back to calm, held in the focus of the moment itself, a futureless, pastless Now. Whatever distresses or anxieties had pushed me to this place, I forgot them all. If you can imagine fighting your way through a howling gale and then stepping into a soundproof room and shutting the door, then I can begin to describe the transition wrought by the stroke of the razor. One moment, chaos; the next, a rich, exquisite silence.

The blood was the essence, the structure of this silence. The size of the cut mattered less than the volume of blood. I had discovered, for instance, that a tiny nick to the ear yielded a surprisingly copious harvest. I found this out when a nurse pricked my ear before I had six teeth pulled in advance of having my braces put on.

“The ear bleeds very easily,” she explained to me cheerily, no doubt suffering under the false impression that I might be squeamish, and wanting to distract me, “so we put a little cut here to test how quickly your blood clots.”

I tucked away this useful nugget of information and tested it out on some later date. The ear is too visible a body part to resort to on a regular basis without risking discovery, and in the end it leaves no scar either. While the scar mattered less than the blood, still it placed the final seal on each cutting event, and without it I would have been left with an unsatisfactory sense of incompletion.

Nevertheless, an ear bled well, and would keep bleeding generously if I just swiped at the cut with rubbing alcohol to keep it from clotting over. I’d stand in front of the mirror, watching each drop of blood cling to the bottom of my earlobe like the most delicate of earrings, swelling until gravity overcame it and it dripped to my bare shoulder and trickled down across the collarbone. Then I’d smear the blood across my face and chest and stare at the savage, primal face staring at me.

Don’t think I don’t know how bizarre this sounds. When I’ve stood thus in front of the mirror, my Narrator has murmured uneasily,
You know, this is very weird.
It created a cognitive dissonance for me; I could never quite reconcile just how weird it was with the rest of my life, one piece of me completely around the bend and the rest of me so unremarkable.

I would stare in that mirror trying to register, to recognize something as my self. I couldn’t retain a constant image of myself that was anything like what, intellectually, I thought was probably accurate. Each time I saw my reflection I reacted with a slight mental start of surprise:
This is me? This can’t be right.
I’d stare and stare at myself, and the longer I looked the more abstract and unfamiliar that reflection appeared to me. But the blood—that felt tangible. What is more essential than blood? When we speak of the lifeblood of something, we mean its essence, the life at its center. I kept calling upon my blood to prove to me what was my essence.

For a minute, I’d feel I had it pinned down, but as soon as I let the blood thicken and clot, that clarity would begin to trickle from my grasp again, and over days or weeks I would lose it until, with another cut, I could feel I had reclaimed it for another fleeting moment.

Part Two

21

In the spring, I ate a tuna sandwich. I had arrived at this sandwich after ten miserable days of a Mexican holiday with my maternal grandparents, during which time my almost pathological fear of being sick while away from home, combined with our tour guide’s chronic warnings of the dire fate awaiting us if we so much as nodded at a piece of fresh fruit, reduced me to a diet of hard rolls and bottled water.

In the airport where my parents came to meet my sister and me on our return, in the cafeteria with the windows overlooking the arriving and departing jets, I ate that tuna fish sandwich with the heartfelt gratitude of a shipwreck survivor, of a condemned man granted a stay of execution. I can remember this sandwich in every detail. It came toasted, on white bread. The tuna was mashed rather than chunky, mixed not with mayonnaise but the sweeter stuff of Miracle Whip, and studded with tiny morsels of pickle relish and bits of boiled egg. Crisp leaves of iceberg lettuce. Out-of-season tomato. Two skewers of toothpick, each tipped by a flourish of curly yellow cellophane. Rippled potato chips on the side. A cold glass of milk.

After nearly two weeks of almost nothing but bread and water, the exquisite variety of taste and texture and flavor in this small feast exploded on me like an incendiary bomb set off in the icy heart of my anorexia. I had given myself permission to eat this sandwich, on the grounds that I had gone so long on so little, and it was this latitude that was my fatal error. Hunger is a crafty negotiator. Once you show the slightest sign of weakness to its honeyed pleas and insinuating manner, it will take this advantage and drive it home, overrunning all your defenses. You can’t afford to allow for any hunger at all, or else you find yourself tumbling down that long slippery slope of compromises.

The painstakingly ordered and structured regimen of my eating disorder fell to pieces, crumbling around me like a cliff giving way. It was a terrible kind of bottomless falling, thinking that I would never, ever stop; over the next three years I gained fifty pounds. Although eventually, after much grief and self-recrimination, I would fight my way back down the scale, I would nevertheless never again have anything like a normal relationship with food or body.

It would be tedious to discuss all the dreary vicissitudes entailed by a chronic eating disorder; suffice it to say that the litany of these preoccupations would add a perpetual, keening descant to the clanging chorus already at work in my head.

*   *   *

In that spring of my surrender, I fell hopelessly for one of my sister’s brooding, cerebral friends. I’ve always been vaguely surprised and somehow self-conscious about my own romantic excesses, as though they have represented my failure to live up to a certain ideal of indifference. I could never just have a crush or a casual fancy, it always had to be LOVE in eighteen-point boldface. I could never help myself, it would come on me every time like a sudden case of the flu, and then all I could think about, dream about, care about, was him—whoever the latest him might be.

This particular him returned my affections after a fashion, though he held decided opinions regarding the measured pace and delicate negotiations by which we ought to go about compacting a treaty of our hearts—opinions influenced rather more than I would have preferred by the bloodless counsel of Mr. Spock.

We maneuvered toward each other with the painstaking caution of brain surgery, each step conducted on the high plane of incomprehensible abstraction that was the lingua franca of all my sister’s friends. Meanwhile, in my journal, a barely half-candid record written with an eye to an imagined audience, I fretted cautiously under these restraints. When would I see him? When would I talk to him again? When would he kiss me? How I ached for his smile, for a word addressed to me when we were together in a group, for a glancing touch. I dreamed of him for hours, flung across my bed with Simon and Garfunkel playing on my stereo. Under the influence of a Dorothy Sayers murder mystery in which Lord Peter and Harriet Vane solve a murder by breaking a code, I’d taken to writing in my journal in a simple substitution code of mathematical and algebraic symbols. “X
³
+UY0” his name read, and it litters that journal like autumn leaves fallen in the yard.