Skin Game: A Memoir (16 page)

I cut with painstaking, deliberate slowness and a mounting sense of—excitement? Anticipation? Expecting to cross, at last, some final threshold, to realize some permanent escape. A blood sacrifice substantive enough to articulate the depth and breadth and conviction of my despair.

But when I was done, and I sat with my ravaged, seeping, stinging arm propped awkwardly on its elbow in front of me, all I could think was,
This is not enough.
It occurred to me, for the first time in all these years of cutting, that no cut ever would be enough. Linearity was a cheap illusion—there was no moving forward with life, no upward, onward, outward: it was all just the same endless repetition. You washed your hair today, but tomorrow it would just need washing again. You made a stupid mistake today, and tomorrow you’d make another.

As if to bear out this conclusion, that night I had the inspired idea to thrust my scabbed-over arm in front of another recently-ex-boyfriend. After years of hiding a hundred inconsequential little scratches and cuts, this was the moment when I chose to reveal myself as a self-mutilator in full sail, with my arm a garish plow zone of bloody furrows.

Wordlessly, I swept back my flannel shirtsleeve with suitable flourish, expecting I don’t know what. I hadn’t made the cuts with the idea that I was going to parade them around for public delectation, and yet it’s hard not to suspect that there was something calculated in my decision to show this, my most extreme gesture of self-mutilation, when I had kept so many other incidents secret. What did I hope to gain? Was I looking for absolution? Was I hoping the severity of my self-excoriations would win me a kind of Chapter 11 from those I had sinned against, setting me free of my emotional debts?

Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t his actual response, which was simply to stare at me in horror.

“My God, what did you do to yourself?” he said, recoiling as though I had ripped open my chest and thrown my still-beating heart on the floor in front of him.

In a movie this scene would have gone much better. A dramatic confrontation, or a weeping confession, or a jump-cut to the psych-ward scene.
Something.
Instead, I just stood there dumbfounded.
What did I do to myself?
Wasn’t that obvious? Did I really need to spell it out?

“Um, I just … it’s only … I mean … I mean, it’s no big deal,” I mumbled, yanking my sleeve down, backing out of the doorway of his dormitory room, turning to flee down the hall. He made no effort to pursue.

Here was the upshot of the whole business: A few evenings later, my ex-with-the-best-friend-from-home sauntered by my room, beer in hand and probably a few down the hatch as well. I don’t remember his precise words, but in a disturbingly cheery voice, as though he were telling a highly amusing story, he took me to task for my entire sorry performance since the (regrettable) day he’d met me, and then conjectured broadly on my probable lapses of the past and all that might unfortunately be anticipated of me in a similar vein in the future. I stood there trembling, silent, wanting to defend myself and yet having to concede miserably to myself the essential justice of his words. Regardless of its intentionality—or, more precisely, its lack thereof—my behavior
was
execrable and indefensible.

In the end, before throwing his half-empty beer over me as a parting gesture, he made one final accusation that I do remember specifically:

“You just talk about your cutting as a spiel to get guys,” he said.

Putting aside the question of whether self-mutilation could be considered a complement to even the most perverse of seductions, we come to the more puzzling issue raised by his accusation: that clearly I had told him about the cutting, and moreover that he obviously didn’t think himself to be the sole recipient of such confidences.

How would I have brought it up? What would I have said? I can’t begin to imagine how I would have broached the subject amid the murmured exchange of lovers’ intimacies. Did I hope to paint myself as poetically tragic and therefore fitting my own odd idea of desirable? Why is it that I can’t remember these conversations, either in general or in particular? Memory is faithless, like a cheating lover, telling you what you believe is true.

*   *   *

Everything led to nothing. Winter Study came to an end and another semester started and I wore long sleeves for a few weeks, until the scabs had given way to barely visible, thin white scars.

I can no longer tell if I have/had real emotional troubles or if it is/was merely melodrama,
I wrote in my journal, genuinely uncertain, as always, of the truth or fiction of my own feelings.

27

I’ve always believed that immediately upon throwing something away you will discover this discarded item to be the one thing you need above all others. After my Winter Study wounding, in yet another fit of resolve, I’d thrown out all my razor blades. Thus, when I decided, that spring, that what I needed was to kill myself, I was razorless for the job.

As with the other times I’d come to this psychic brink, I felt as though I was trying to solve a problem in the present rather than getting rid of myself for good. Once again, I wanted to kill something
in
myself, wanted to bleed it out until I was left with the bare, clean baseline, the absolute zero from which point I could rebuild a better version of myself.

The catalyst for this particular low moment was a falling-out with my suitemates, women I’d started the year with in happy camaraderie. We were college sophomores, brimming with confidence and pleasure in our wisdom of the world.

The manic course of my personal life over the intervening months had strained our friendship to the snapping point.

“What the hell are you doing with yourself?” one of them demanded at last, confronting me in the stretch of hall that linked our individual rooms. I had, I think, some boy in tow at the moment.

“What do you mean?” I said hotly, embarrassed to be thus taken to task with my latest fancy—oh hell, he wasn’t even a fancy, I hardly even
knew
him, he was just a nanosecond’s distraction—standing by my side: the evidence of my crimes.

“You’re making a mess of your life,” she warned, and of course she was right, but the upshot of this confrontation was a furtive, slinking, mutual avoidance.

*   *   *

It was four o’clock, the suicide hour. It seemed like more effort than I could ever imagine undertaking to walk across campus to the drugstore for more blades. No doubt I’d run into someone I knew, and have to carry on a conversation. How can you carry on a conversation when you’re getting ready to go kill yourself? It’s always the damn ordinary getting in the way like that.

Instead, I decided I would break a juice glass I’d carried up to my room one night after dinner, and get myself a nice jagged piece for the dirty work. My plan was to break the glass by throwing it at the solid, fire-impervious door to my bedroom. I was all caught up in the cinematic drama of the event. I could anticipate already the satisfying
pop!
of the shattering glass and the sudden snow of broken shards upon my floor.

This is anger,
I thought, nevertheless feeling all too theatrical as I let loose with the first pitch, hurling it at the door.

It bounced unharmed to the floor and rolled under my desk.

After I’d crawled under my desk to retrieve it again for the fourth or fifth time, the afternoon’s drama began losing some of its focus.

Self-consciousness kept checking the force of my throw; what were my suitemates going to think? The sound of the glass ricocheting off the door was startlingly loud. Would they come and demand to know what I was up to? Wouldn’t I feel foolishly melodramatic trying to explain?
Yeah, I’m trying to break a glass. I’m either planning to kill myself, or deluding myself into thinking I’m planning to kill myself, but I’m not sure which. Check back with me tomorrow, and if I’m dead, then we’ll know.

I had it all worked out so that Al, our tireless and nearly toothless custodian, would be minimally inconvenienced. Al had always been a great help to us, bringing the vacuum cleaner around when we needed it and assuring us we were all very nice girls and he could tell us he’d seen some troublemakers in his time. I thought it would be the height of arrogance to leave some godawful mess, another case of the privileged college kids sticking it to the help. So I was going to sit on the floor, with my bleeding wrists propped up over the trash can in front of me. How much blood do you lose before your heart ceases to pump out any more? Certainly not a wastebasket’s full, and since the wastebasket was lined with a plastic bag, not even a rinse would be required.

This was my way of going about suicide—getting all caught up in the logistics and the technical details while overlooking the essential issue that suicide was about being dead.

Did I mean to kill myself? I understand that when you really mean to kill yourself, you’re so relieved by having made the decision for good that you’re very nearly cheerful. I’d say what I felt that afternoon was more like a bustling efficiency, as if I were a home handyman readying for a project. Maybe I just wanted to test the limits of my despair, to see how far I was willing to go to get away from myself.

The glass broke, at last. I scratched at my arm, but the cruelly pointed shard felt as crude as a bludgeon. It had none of the simple beauty of the razor’s edge. A razor blade slips between cells the way water insinuates itself through rock, finding the path that is there. I could see already that the whole thing was going to be a write-off.

I probably never could have gone quite so far as to kill myself anyway, not while any assignments remained pending: let not my epitaph read “She missed the due date.” My Hi-Liter bobbed unsinkable through every crisis. Papers were turned in on time, I showed up more or less reliably for class, I appeared on schedule for my financial aid job, dutifully typing up schedules and team rosters for the athletic department. Academics just rolled on, as inevitable as the sun rising in the morning, and it never occurred to me that I could fail to continue rolling along with them. They were the bus I couldn’t get off.

I made over the afternoon’s fiasco into my next assignment for Advanced Fiction Workshop. The way I saw it, my whole life might be a fiction anyway—who knew?—so I might just as well mine it for twenty pages double-spaced.

The next day I went down to the pharmacy and bought myself a new package of Wilkinson-Bond. Then I was like the smoker joyfully abandoning another attempt at quitting, settling back for that first starved drag sucked down to the cellular level.

28

The winter of that sophomore year, my oracular suitemate had predicted, “You’ll marry a fellow student right out of school, and then you’ll get divorced, because you rushed into the marriage thinking you could find happiness and perfection there.”

Actually I waited an entire year before marrying, but that’s only because my future ex-husband was a year behind me. He was the son of working-class Cape Codders, whose family had lived generations on the peninsula.

In high school and two years of community college he had worked at the A&P where his father was manager, and suffered the summer people who looked through him unless they wanted his help finding the maraschino cherries or the gherkins. Now he found himself classmate to almost an entire school’s worth of the equivalent of summer people—people accustomed to a familiar and easy relationship with money—and he couldn’t help but feel that somehow he was betraying his loyalties and sleeping with the enemy. The two of us had in common, we used to remark to each other only half in jest, that we were educated beyond our station in life.

When we met, we were terribly pleased to discover so much that we had in common, we who both felt never quite at home, who always had one foot in some real or imagined other life. Like me, he didn’t know what he wanted or ought to do with his life, or who he ought to be. Like me, he relied in the meantime on his GPA to stand for himself. Like me, he was a dedicated procrastinator. Like me, he was driven by a merciless and unsympathetic Inner Yankee who demanded,
Downplay your troubles and get on with it.
Like me, he found irony as comfortingly familiar as an old sweater.

Like me,
I say. Like me. We wouldn’t have believed it then, but eventually we would discover that it’s possible to have too much in common.

*   *   *

In the winter of his senior year, after we’d ruled out what we thought were all the reasons why we shouldn’t, we decided to marry. That’s how we put it to everyone:

“We couldn’t come up with any other reasons not to get married,” we said.

Of course, we knew plenty of reasons, reasons that gnawed away at us, unspoken. I know we both suspected the truth we would soon discover: that we were marrying each other not out of a passionate commitment to mutual lifelong devotion, but because we were so overwhelmed at the prospect of having to go out into the world and construct a life for ourselves that we couldn’t imagine how to do it alone.

I think we half hoped someone else would give us a reason to change our minds, would put a foot down where we couldn’t.

“Do you think we shouldn’t get married?” I asked my friends, my co-workers. Everyone thought it was just prewedding jitters. Everyone was very positive and encouraging. We made such a great couple. We got on so well.

A kind of madness overtook us, in which it seemed so much easier, in spite of the misgivings that neither of us had the heart to voice to the other, simply to go ahead rather than cause everyone the trouble of putting a stop to the proceedings.

Our plans went forward, all of them wholly unreal to me—ordering the invitations, making up the guest lists, choosing the food and the wine. I was playing the role of the Bride-to-Be, another interesting role that didn’t seem to have any true bearing on my actual self. The Bride-to-Be Caroline was getting married, and then after we’d had our bit of fun with all that, we’d get back to whatever our true lives were slated to be. A half-hour before the service was to begin, I sprinted up the lawn of the church in shorts and a T-shirt, my dress slung over my shoulder. Got to get in makeup for the show—curtain in thirty minutes.