Skin Game: A Memoir (15 page)

Look at me,
mused my Narrator.
Parking! How novel! How charmingly American teenager!

My boyfriend was devoted to me; I blew most of every evening’s study hours talking on the phone with him, and we spent every minute that we could together, and after a while I let my guard down.

Lucky him. Degree by degree I fell apart on him, letting the chaotic Caroline crawl out and go to pieces in the middle of our dates—which I seemed to regard as a kind of shore leave from my public self. In the womb of that old Chevrolet, in a certain kind of desperate mood, I sometimes sank into a nearly catatonic state, curled up in a fetal ball on the worn vinyl of the front seat, mute to my boyfriend’s entreaties. I could feel myself moving farther and farther away, watching this Caroline with her arms wound tight around her legs, and for twenty minutes or a half an hour or more it seemed impossible that she might ever unwrap herself from this paralysis.

At other times I broke down in hysterical, hyperventilating sobs, with no forewarning or subsequent explanation.

“What’s wrong?” he’d beg. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know,” I’d say. “I don’t know,” and I honestly didn’t know.

I even told him, eventually, about the cutting, though in a cautious bit of PR I couched it in the past tense.

“I used to cut myself with razor blades,” I said, pointing to the ghostly scars on my arms. Still he did not forsake me.

Outside the shelter of the Chevrolet, however, I dedicated myself to maintaining for everyone else the impression of irreverent insouciance. I cast myself as the comically maladroit figure at the heart of one tale of misadventure after another. Humor at your own expense allows you great latitude. I’d vent my anxieties by making jokes of them.

“The average family has two-point-five children,” I’d say. “My sister’s the point-five and I’m the other two.” Or, when I had some trouble reaching my parents by telephone, “My family’s given me up for Lent.”

I played comedy much better than tragedy. This capering Caroline was like the sidekick in a half-hour sitcom, there to leaven the plot with ironic asides, the comic relief if ever things threatened to turn grave.

The more devotedly I built this image, the more impossibly difficult it seemed to imagine admitting anything else. I felt I had a responsibility. People were relying on me to be the steady course, the home light burning in the window, the oatmeal when too much rich dining has taxed the taste buds. I wanted to live up to that responsibility. I wanted to be the kind of person about whom people would say, “You know, you can always rely on her.”

Was that apparent me less than a true self? I don’t know. Did her dissociation from my inner life make her only a fabrication? I don’t know. In some respects, she felt the most true, the way she refused to take things too seriously, the way she could see the absurd in the worst moments. I found falling back upon her a relief. She made her way almost easily through the world, got along with everyone, covered well for all my insecurities and uncertainties, and though sometimes her flippancy was like a nervous tic offered up, to my occasional regret, before I took time to think better of her words, for the most part she pretended for me the confidence I didn’t feel. She would brush off the setbacks that incapacitated me. She enjoyed life. I would have been happy to be her.

25

If I tell you now that I had a great time at boarding school, that I count it still among the best three years of my life, does that make sense? For those three years, every day had purpose. I could wake up and feel that I was moving forward with my life, with a steady accumulation of academic honors, with goals to meet, with college to aspire to, with satisfying accomplishments to mark my progress. I could point to these things and say,
These define me.

By my senior year, even the cool girls had extended their camaraderie to me, inviting me to the cool parties—though I wouldn’t have had any idea what to say or do at a cool party. The point, however, was that I’d been invited. I had arrived. I had climbed the pinnacle of high school success. I had my hand in a dozen extracurriculars and my name on a letter of admission from my first-choice college. Had a new boyfriend (the old one having gone off to college and a mutual parting of the ways) who wrote me cerebral mash notes while we analyzed the blood-spattered passion of Federico García Lorca in Spanish V. I’d even almost managed a miracle makeover, shedding those extra pounds, getting my braces off and contact lenses on. My senior year was one big bang-up success, anticipated to culminate in the prep school version of the Rapture, the day on which I would ascend to that Very Good New England College of all my hopes and aspirations.

*   *   *

“I’m searching for my destiny,” I sang in my solo in the Freshman Revue, gazing wistfully into the upper balcony. I’d sung alto in high school chorale, and “alto” was what I wrote on my audition sheet for the revue, but after I sang for the musical auditionist he said to me, “You know, you’re really a contralto.”

And I thought, “Wow, this is college. It’s not just four-part harmony anymore.”

Then I promptly ran out of steam.

I had no sense of purpose in college. I’d spent the last three years focused on the ultimate goal of Getting into a Good College. I’d never particularly considered what ought to happen beyond that goal. Where was life supposed to go from here? What was the point, really, of college? Was it career preparation? Four years to kill before you were forced to concede to adulthood? Four years to devote to broadening the mind and expanding intellectual horizons? Four years of beer parties and casual sex?

I didn’t know what I ought to do, and I didn’t even know how to begin to figure out what I ought to do. I’d just followed the expected path: gradeschoolhighschoolcollege. So now what? I was expected to make decisions for myself, decisions on which a future I couldn’t even envision would be built. How could I decide how to prepare myself when I had no idea what I was preparing for?

So I went on living for my GPA because it was something you could count on, the A that says you’re okay, the B like a red light flashing, warning DANGER! TROUBLE AHEAD!, the C and below unspeakable, unmentionable, unimaginable.

All the confidence I’d left high school with evaporated at my beautiful, ivy-covered New England college, where I was thrown into a crowded little pool where
everyone
was a former high school star, where my nothing little vita from my nobody’s-heard-of-it prep school seemed paltry and irrelevant in comparison to all those utterly accomplished graduates of Exeter and Andover and Choate. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I had abilities. I just assumed, in spite of whatever accomplishments I had thus far managed in life, that everyone I would be competing with would always be that much more accomplished, and confident as well, and would wear the right clothes, and would actually be able to remember what “ontological” means.

I couldn’t help feeling that even English, my chosen course of study, represented a major by default, rather than some bold, challenging choice by means of which I would set the world on fire. All my friends seemed to be choosing the exotic (philosophy, religion, anthropology) or the controversial (economics, political science) or the cerebral (mathematics, astronomy), and here I was reading Wordsworth again, just as in my junior year in high school.

Pinning everything on my GPA invested it with way, way too much importance. I got a D once on a short paper, a one-pager I’d tried to be much too clever with, and I spent the rest of the day seriously considering killing myself over it. Suicide! Over some crappy one-pager for a course I can’t even call to mind anymore.

Well, imagine having to live with that Caroline day in and day out. You might be inclined to go for the razor, too, just to shut her up.

26

For lack of more productive things to do with my time, what I did with college was run through boyfriends the way a chain-smoker burns through cigarettes.

I liked falling in love. It was like a drug. A rush of pure, unintellectualized, unexamined feeling, in all its untarnished newness. For those first few weeks, when you are both on your best behavior and the heady delights of novelty have not yet worn away, what could be more exhilarating? I’d put aside school, friends, sleep, eating, take up his interests, hang out with his friends, maybe even consider his major or sign up for a course he’d approve of. It was pathetic.

I lacked endurance for the long haul, however. That brief flame of passion dwindled soon enough to embers, then to ashes. I would sink again into emptiness, and blame him for the sinking. He wasn’t quite what I’d hoped he would be. Too much that or too little this. Too possessive or too aloof. Too arrogant or too insecure. And then somehow I’d find myself wrapped in someone else’s passionate embrace, without ever having officially severed relations with the old guy. I’d imagine the painful, awkward, unpleasant scene of an official breakup. The anger. The recriminations. I couldn’t bring myself to face it—why precipitate so much suffering? Wasn’t it easier just to let things die quietly away in a hint here, a sign there? I’d let him drift along in ignorance of my betrayal until my distant manner and possibly a most obvious attachment to my new fancy made the picture plain.

I had just low enough an opinion of myself to be able to rationalize each time that the ex was probably relieved anyway. Once I was over any one of these boys it seemed hard to imagine that he wasn’t equally over me—I still can’t quite convince myself that anyone has ever loved me enough to be sorry when I was gone.

I didn’t set out to deceive. I don’t think that I really recognized, even in the midst of it, that it
was
a deception. I’d spent long enough living by the proposition that people were happier when they knew less that editing no longer seemed like deception to me. After burning down the house, however, there’s no point in saying that hadn’t been your intention when you lit the match.

So what I got out of college were squirmingly uncomfortable memories of half a dozen people I can dread running into at reunions.

*   *   *

My first two years of college were a blur of boyfriends that reached its sorry denouement in a beer-sodden midwinter fling with a recently deposed boyfriend’s best friend visiting for the weekend from home.

Sophomore year was a terrible year, with the novelty of freshman year behind us and the long grind of three years until graduation still ahead. It rained all fall. The New England winter arrived early and left late, without even a decent measure of snow to make it charming; our Winter Carnival took place in a sea of squelching mud under overcast skies. Day after day dawned to a lusterless winter light, the sky as washed out and featureless as an old rag.

The liaison with the best friend from home unfolded in the dead heart of January. It was our Winter Study term, one month dedicated to focused study of a single, nontraditional course. Leaving large swathes of unoccupied time for remaining holed up in your dormitory, out of the cold, dispirited weather, drinking Bloody Marys with your suitemates while the dirty sky surrendered to darkness at four o’clock.

On this particular evening I’d had just enough beer to depress me, at just another in the endless series of keg parties that strung the days of Winter Study together, and I sat there too indifferent to move while he wooed me with a dime-store seduction.

“Long hair is so sexy on a woman,” he murmured, his fingers tangling in the waist-length fall of mine.

“This party is boring,” he whispered. “Isn’t there someplace we could go?”

Oh, please, did he get this stuff off the inside of a matchbook cover?
my Narrator demanded from a distance made even greater by the disorienting effect of the beer, but still I went along with a dull resignation, like the condemned mounting the gallows knowing it’s pointless to resist.

I just sighed to myself,
Oh, why not.
At that moment I didn’t even care enough anymore to bother extricating myself.

*   *   *

In the whey-light of another winter dawn, I sat sleepless on my bed, feeling the preceding night’s unctuous improprieties like a greasy residue on my flesh. My life repulsed me. I was stumbling along from one boy to the next without even bothering anymore to justify it to myself, like the addict who can’t see, doesn’t care, beyond the next high, trying to hold on to a feeling—any feeling—that would nevertheless slip away like water trickling through fingers.

“You’re out of control!” one of my suitemates had hissed at me only a day before.

I was so tired, so discouraged, and I wanted to free myself of my self the way a snake divests itself of its skin.

I took my razor blade—my handy razor blade, my dear and trusted and always reliable razor blade—and started at my elbow. An inch, two inches, it didn’t seem like enough. Three, four inches, the razor crept down the length of my arm, with the faint
tthick tthick
of its slow passage audible. I got to my wrist, and watched the way the blood faded in, at first so faint that I could wonder if I was really seeing anything at all, then a precise thread of crimson that almost as soon as it appeared began to differentiate into a hundred individual beads.

Not quite. Try again.

Starting maybe a quarter-inch from the first cut, I drew a second line down my arm in perfect parallel. Elbow to wrist.

Now what? Two long, lonely lines. Too much imbalance on the winter-white canvas of my arm. I cut a third line, again a quarter-inch from the second. A fourth. A fifth. I scored my way, line by line, around the entire circumference of my forearm.

Do you know what? It was exciting, in a low, dangerous kind of way. It was darkly satisfying in its excess. Every additional line was like one more step away from caution and discretion. By the sixth or seventh or eighth long cut, a fiery warmth spread up my arm, and it was the heat of conflagration and exorcism.