Skin Game: A Memoir (13 page)

Then one day, late in the spring, I discovered he had gone off to some assignation with another girl. I was talking with a mutual friend on the phone when she innocently let slip the crucial piece of damning information, which on its own meant nothing, but in conjunction with facts already in my possession made the whole story plain.

“I just saw him downtown with Elise,” our mutual friend said, when he had expressly and elaborately explained to me how he would be out of town all day with his mother. “He said you were meeting them there.”

“Oh, I was going to, but then something came up,” I lied. Why was I covering for him when I was the one deceived? Because even in the awful moment of realization, even as one part of me was crushed by this calculated deception, there was another part of me that thrilled to the narrative drama of my new role—the Woman Betrayed.

So this is heartbreak,
mused my Narrator.
This should be most interesting.

This was a wound I didn’t want, and yet there was a tantalizing, irresistible awfulness to it, like poking with your tongue at a tooth on the verge of coming out, feeling that raw and bloody emptiness. I probed at it, waiting and waiting to feel the hurt, making a baroque drama for myself in which this new Caroline in her role of love’s martyr would be proud, unyielding to any apology or entreaty, insisting that she wanted nothing more to do with him since he had chosen to hold her affections so cheap. Not because she actually felt that way, but because she thought she ought to be someone who could have the self-mastery to put principle over emotion.

I could see how, in the face of this Caroline’s continued, steadfast refusal, he would turn at last to the other girl—as he had really, we knew, wanted to do all along—and how Caroline would smile and charm and delight when in their company, never showing the least sign of her broken heart. I saw how he would love the other girl as he had never, we now realized, loved me, how he would laugh with her and adore her and wait longingly for her every word and touch and gesture as I had waited for his. I painted every shade of his love for the other girl in exquisite detail, going over and over each stroke, trying to make it real, trying to make the hurt
my
hurt. But no, I might just as well have been watching my emotions through an observation window.

“Fuck you,” I said, and smacked the phone down when he called me, so casual, that evening, but my words were simply what the script called for.
These are the words of an angry person. These are the words an angry person would use,
I had decided.

And when my putative boyfriend called me back, I might just as well have been eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation, for all that my words seemed to belong to me. It was as though someone I knew very well were hurt and angry, and sitting in the room with her I could agree that she ought to be hurt and angry, and I was most sympathetic with her hurt and anger, but since it was not
my
hurt and anger all I could suffer was a distress on her behalf, a distress one step removed from the actual experience of that hurt and anger. I watched myself
playing
hurt and anger, and so in this and a hundred, a thousand, other moments I could never keep from suspecting, without ever being able to prove or disprove my suspicions, that my feelings and my behavior at any given time might be entirely fabricated. Shouldn’t you be able to know? Shouldn’t such things be apparent?

It was as though upsetting events flipped some internal switch, triggering a deadly calm Caroline sent out to negotiate her way through the event with carefully calculated words and responses. Behind her façade, the real crisis flared in a frantic, mounting panic that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the actual events unfolding. The scripted Caroline soldiered on with her part, the diversionary tactic, and the other Caroline, provoked by distress, got wound up in a screaming interior altercation that overwhelmed and obliterated anything the external world might throw at me.
Whatareyougoingtodowhatareyougoingtodowhatareyougoingtodo?
shrieked the angry, unruly rabble in my head.

That’s when I wanted to tear off my skin and run away from it. That’s when I wanted to cut. I cut to quiet the cacophony. I cut to end this abstracted agony, to reel my selves back to one present and physical whole, whose blood was the proof of her tangibility.

22

I spent two years in public school before joyfully abandoning this unloved experiment in egalitarianism—like a nervous gazelle at the watering hole, I’d passed the whole time poised waiting for something terrible to happen to me, waiting to be mugged for my pencils or beaten up in a cafeteria riot. Rumors perpetually abounded of knifings in the bathrooms and robberies in the locker rooms. Of course no one you actually knew had ever experienced or witnessed such things directly, but still the threat lingered in the air like the scent of sour milk in the cafeteria.

The anticipation of a harm that never quite materialized left me in a chronic state of low-level anxiety, a slow drip of a worry. This vague dread, like the ominous rumble of distant thunder, set me perpetually on edge; the fear of an unknown never resolves, because the unknown expands infinitely outward, leaving you to cling pitifully to any small shelter of the known: a cracker has twelve calories; the skin, when cut, bleeds.

Worry is a subject I’ve had considerable time to explore; I’ve made something of a life’s work of it. I come from a long line of worriers, people with a gift for the lightning-quick calculation of all possible disasters sure to follow any course of action, people who can worry without even having to work at it, who can worry while having fun, who can worry without breaking a sweat. We’ve raised worry to an art form.

In my family we don’t pause when we have lost our train of thought to wonder,
Now what was I thinking about?,
but instead fret,
Now what was I worrying about?,
remembering only the lingering taste of the worry itself. What do we worry about? We worry about everything; there’s no matter too great or too insignificant that we can’t happily incorporate into the broad reach of our anxieties.

I would never actually have admitted to anyone that I was afraid of school, but with so many people, so many unknowns, who could say what might not happen today or tomorrow or next week? I went to school every day queasy with dread.

*   *   *

I’ve always been a great believer in the geographic solution: move to a new place or a new love or a new life altogether and leave your troubles behind you like an overlooked suitcase. I don’t remember when in the course of ninth grade I first started thinking about boarding school as a possible option for my own life, but it was one of those ideas that catapults from daydream to reality so unexpectedly that you almost can’t believe in it. I credit my parents, who (worriers that we are) could have mustered all sorts of reasons why it couldn’t be done—chief among these, that we couldn’t possibly afford the tuition—but instead encouraged me. In the spring my rescue from public school came in the form of a nice fat scholarship and an invitation from the admissions committee of a girls’ school in Richmond, seventy miles away.

In the summer before the beginning, as I saw it, of my new life, I imagined—as I always imagined when I was ready to embark on some kind of starting over—that I would remake myself entirely for the fall. I’d read
The Bell Jar
three times in ninth grade (a suicidal heroine, naturally), and Dorothy Parker, and the farcically outrageous S. J. Perelman, and from their collective influence I cobbled together this idea of a self, someone urbane, implicitly literate, darkly comic. I saw this self as a scandalously outré girl who’d live with a cigarette and a martini in hand (never mind that I couldn’t abide tobacco smoke or that martinis were unlikely to be served up with the Tater Tots at family-style dinner in my new school). Of course she would be very skinny, because food bored her, and she would have a raw, ironic urgency about her.

*   *   *

Packing for school, I threw out my razor blades. I wouldn’t need them anymore. I would be leaving that self behind for good, in the company of outdated shoes and unwanted record albums. The key in starting over was to walk away from everything that might damn you by association with the former you, with all her defects and drawbacks.

I was just re-reading last year’s notebook,
I wrote that spring in my journal.
It’s so
ridiculous,
the meaningless, irrelevant things I thought were so important! AUGH!

Every few months or so, I’d start a new journal, in a college-ruled, spiral-bound notebook, its clean white pages my literal tabula rasa. With each new notebook, I’d denounce my most recent former self and her preoccupations, each time declaring my new life to be the new beginning of a higher, better self, who would not be given to such foolishness. I started a new notebook so as to make sure that my new self wasn’t contaminated by the drivel and nonsense of that former, lesser me.

Every time, I truly believed that I had indeed begun again, that I had stepped clear and free of everything undesirable about my former self. Then I’d be surprised and dismayed to discover all the unsavory bits and pieces of me that I thought I’d rid myself of, reappearing like a cancer that had metastasized into my new life.

So it was that the sadly familiar and essentially unchanged me arrived at my new school, a plump and bookish scholarship kid with all the wrong clothes. I swear that every other girl in my school was a slender five foot seven, with perfectly blunt-cut, shoulder length hair the color of corn silk, a Fair Isle sweater draped just so across her shoulders, and a delicate gold coil of a belt ringing her neat khaki waist.

In a TV movie, I’d have been destined from the opening credits to torment; I’d have been a lonely outcast sitting miserably alone in my dormitory room on Saturday nights. Fortunately, life is not a television movie.

When I first arrived, I discovered that I would be sharing my dormitory room with three other girls. Ours was the last room on the hall, at the corner of the building, so that we had the advantage of two tall windows. However, we also had two iron bunk beds, four mahogany-laminate bureaus, four closets, two desks, two bookshelves and, in the corner, a small, venerable porcelain sink—all jammed into a surprisingly small cube of space. The paint scheme was that debilitating shade of industrial green, the color of decrepit mental hospitals and police department basements. I was torn between a resolute determination to be happy about everything at my new school (I feared doubt; to allow even one misgiving would be to risk burial under an avalanche of them), and a sinking dismay at the thought of spending the next nine months shoehorned into this unprepossessing space with these three girls.

I didn’t like feeling encroached upon by the chaos of their stuff, their talk, their musical taste and their shampoo bottles and their sweaters flung across the furniture. So, over the coming weeks, without being obvious about it, I confined myself to those spaces I had staked out as mine alone: my closet, my bureau, my top bunk on the bed. I had to tuck each thing of mine safely within these protected zones. I wouldn’t put my books in the shared shelves or my record albums in the communal pile or let my sweaters mingle with the others. In the opening weeks of school I suffered painfully from homesickness; as an antidote, somehow each of my things served as a sacred vessel through which Home was embodied within the walls of my dormitory room. These vessels could be contaminated, lose their power of embodiment, in contact with all the otherness in this room. I can’t quite define what I feared—perhaps the disintegration of my coherent self.

Nevertheless I got along with all my roommates, because I almost always get along. I am masterly at sidestepping conflict and avoiding dissent. If I can find common ground, however narrow and tenuous, I will stake it out. I mold myself to the shape that suits the situation. I can’t remember quite what role I assumed amid my three completely unlike roommates. Generic teenager, I believe, is the position I took. Talk about boys and clothes and hair and parties—girls’-hut stuff—though of clothes and hair and parties I knew virtually nothing, and of boys I thought it best to keep much of what I knew discreetly to myself. Like a deep-cover spy, however, I could wing the colloquialisms in the foreign language of girlness, and by this means get along.

I suppose I could have kept it up all year, but as it turned out attrition was on my side. Within six weeks two of my roommates had left school, one running away and the other yanked home by parents feuding through a bitterly contentious divorce, and that left only two of us to enjoy what had now become a conversely voluminous space. My remaining roommate was a high-spirited party girl who occasionally smoked dope in the closet and made me feel unexpectedly sheltered and naive with her outrageous tales of sex and drinking in her beachfront hometown, and though we appeared to have almost nothing in common, nevertheless we hit it off as well as you might hope for a roommate. I let myself, at last, spread out into my new life.

*   *   *

My new school was nothing like the one where I’d grown up. It sat on a long rectangle of campus smack in the heart of a rarefied Richmond neighborhood of brick colonials and Georgian revivals, with the requisite stately oaks and patiently nurtured boxwoods. It was very much a place for the Southern daughters of Southern daughters, among whom I found myself once again the Token Yankee, but it was no mere finishing school. We were expected to live up to the school’s long tradition of intellectual rigor, and to do our educators proud in the college admissions sweepstakes.

I rose to the bait, and applied myself to my academic life as one pursued by demons. I perpetually aspired to be one of those girls who rose at seven, after a full and restful night’s sleep, and consequently arrived at morning chapel an hour later bathed and coiffed and looking like an incarnation of the L. L. Bean catalogue, with her books and her papers tidily arranged.