Skin Game: A Memoir (3 page)

*   *   *

After my parents married, they moved to Illinois, where my father had been hired to serve as rector of an Episcopal church in a Chicago bedroom community that whispered its wealth discreetly in the details of ordinary life—authentic Oriental rugs, private schools, perfectly manicured lawns.

Early each morning the women deposited their men at the train station for the commute to Chicago; money was made in grain futures, corporate law, investment banking. The women’s lives were occupied with overseeing the army of service people who maintained their immaculate homes and gardens, with raising the next generation of polite, socially poised, well-scrubbed children, and with attending to a variety of good works. It was a world of exquisite understatement, of flawless entertaining, with perfectly mannered children making brief, freshly bathed appearances at dinner parties before being tucked into bed, of faultlessly orchestrated charity events.

To the members of the church board who had hired my father, my parents must have seemed very much the right sort. My father was a Harvard man. My mother hailed from that unassailable Boston suburb, knew which fork to use with the fish course.

But my parents were neither manicured nor restrained, a fact they felt obliged to keep within the rambling confines of the rectory where we lived. They were feet-up-on-the-furniture people, raucous intellectuals, Kennedy Democrats. My mother had fled that Boston suburb as a dissident escapes a repressive regime. My father had made his way through Harvard washing his laundry in the sink, working summers in a candy factory. Our home was threadbare, with thrift-store-salvaged Oriental carpeting, and chairs that welcomed slouching, and my sister and me racketing around the house shrieking and strewing toys. Like my father’s parishioners, our family repaired to a vacation home on Lake Michigan, but ours was a ramshackle cabin, with temperamental homemade plumbing, which my father and his twin brother had paid for with summer jobs and slapped up in the mosquito-infested woods the year they turned fifteen.

My father had no particular gift for cocktail party chatter, the oil that lubricated the machinery of his parish life. He couldn’t keep people’s names straight, did not much care about the vicissitudes and vagaries of Business in the City. He’d suddenly recall that the vestry meeting had started fifteen minutes ago, that he’d said yes to a luncheon for this afternoon. He was wholly guileless in these lapses, his mind already again somewhere else, too restless to alight on any one matter for longer than a moment.

My mother, disappointed in a church that relegated women to bustling around the periphery with covered dishes and silver polish, had left Yale Divinity School, where she was studying theology, to marry my father. (“You’ll be poor all your life!” cried my grandmother in protest when my mother broke the news of her engagement.) But in Illinois, with abstruse theological discourse still echoing in her ears, my mother found herself expected to make her way as the rector’s wife, in attendance upon women whose entire lives—their homes, their children, their accomplishments—were meant to serve as tributes to their husbands’ success.

My mother found these women gracious, generous, and thoroughly intimidating. My father conscientiously attended to his duties as parish priest, but felt quixotically more at home among the lifers he tutored each week at the state penitentiary, following the true calling of his Christianity to minister to the least among us.

My parents’ tenure in Illinois was marked by the uncomfortable feeling, says my mother, that they were masquerading in the guise of their apparent qualifications—that Harvard degree, those Boston bona fides—and expecting at every moment to be unmasked.

*   *   *

What I’m trying to say is that my family has a history of living lives of fabrication, and after a while it comes to seem natural to edit freely. And if you could pick and choose, wouldn’t it be tempting simply to elide what is least pleasant? In my family, we had so profoundly lost the language for anger or unhappiness or despair, for the awkward and the uncomfortable and the unpleasant, that we didn’t even know something was missing. In the home where I grew up, no one ever argued. No one ever yelled, except every now and then my sister—and then we all would look politely away as if it were something she couldn’t help, like Tourette’s, like epilepsy.

It’s not that we lived in a strained silence of the unspoken. To the contrary, we went for words in a big way—scads of words, volumes of words; we would never have been content to buy just one vowel from Pat Sajak. We lived amid piles of books and cascading heaps of
New Yorkers
next to every chair and bed.

With our language creating a diversion, however, we looked the other way, like people whistling past a graveyard. There was something out there, something you couldn’t dare to acknowledge: a writhing Pandora’s box of frustrations determinedly quashed, angry words bitten back, sorrows unvoiced. It could bring down the world if opened. Instead, our words kept the lid on, smoothing cleanly, invisibly over the gaps, an unconscious habit of indirection. No one would ever be so presumptuous as to ask about your troubles, and you would never be so presumptuous as to tell.

*   *   *

On the drive home from school on that February day in 1975, my mother and I would have spoken of other matters. I wouldn’t have known how to tell the plain and simple truth. The truth seemed the most dangerous, the most damning admission, the one I couldn’t allow for.

4

The funny thing about silence is that it always makes the thing not mentioned seem as though it must be so much worse than you imagined.

The day after my school bathroom debacle I went back to school, because what else are you going to do? You go on in life because another day rolls around and expects things of you.

My seventh-grade sociopathic classmates had a field day with the whole affair, smacking as it did of the unforgivable sin of self-importance. I’d called attention to myself—did I think I was something special? Did I think I was better than anyone else? The logic of these accusations was hazy, but the impact powerful. My tormentors deployed them like stealth weapons, the stiletto in the back of the neck to the unsuspecting victim.

“Oh, go slit your wrists,” they’d mutter, sotto voce, sidling past me in the hallway.

But the adults—Mrs. Warren and her company, who only yesterday had so rigorously endeavored to plumb my motivations—now maintained an elaborate silence, the lid clamped down on the fire in the pan, and never mentioned the incident again.

“Hi, Caroline,” they’d cry too brightly in greeting.

“Hello!” I’d smile back cheerily, accomplice to their plan.

Why silence? I’m sure because the subject made everyone hideously uncomfortable. Because to speak of it would only be to give it shape and substance and permanence. Because no one could imagine that something might be seriously amiss with me—scrappy and sturdy and reliable me. You remember the niece in
The Munsters,
the nice perky blond girl who is the wholesomely ordinary note amid the wackiness of her gothic relatives? That was the role to which I appeared to be inseparably wedded: solid and steady Caroline. I always suffered an uneasy suspicion that in the hierarchy of eccentricities that was my extended family, I figured as something of a pedestrian disappointment. Yet I felt an obligation to play my role as it was expected to be performed. I had a responsibility to appear responsible. That’s what people were counting on me for. That’s who they needed me to be.

There was no way there could be anything really wrong with twelve-year-old me. Puppy love, maybe, or a pimple, or maybe a fight with my sister or a bad grade on a test. “Adolescent angst,” my father used to pronounce such matters, and they rated about as high as dust bunnies and soap scum in relation to Life’s Big Issues.

How much of the way we end up seeing ourselves is shaped by our own interpretations? When you construct your worldview on a series of misunderstandings, it’s like building a skyscraper with the foundation out of plumb: A fractional misalignment at the bottom becomes a whopping divergence from true by the time you get to the top. What that silence meant to me was that I had committed an act so appalling as to be literally unspeakable.

5

In the boarding school’s required dress of coat and tie, he managed always, nevertheless, a certain ironic scruffiness, as though condescending to wear the outfit was more an amused indulgence on his part than an actual bow to authority. This boy, this bad-boy sophomore, one of my father’s students. He wasn’t all that bad, really, just indifferent and unambitious, and at the time that looked like bad to me. I thought it was your obligation always to try harder, and it seemed he wasn’t interested in trying at all. He slouched along bored, his tie just this much the wrong side of well-knotted, an incipient shadow of dirty-blond beard sketching the planes of his face, his manner suggesting it was all too much of a bother for him. In the end he’d be just another boy who would never particularly fail and never particularly make much of himself, and didn’t particularly care, but when I was twelve that looked reckless and daring.

I was twelve and I lived in a boys’ boarding school, and though he was by no means the first of my ardent crushes for the year, for a certain time I believed that all my happiness would lie in the moment when this boy cupped my face in his hands and brushed my lips with his own.

He was fifteen and he was bored and he flirted with me because why not? It filled the empty hours. We traded clumsy double entendres wrapped within fiery exchanges of feigned antagonism.

“You little minx!” he’d cry in pretended outrage, lunging after me as I snatched his wallet from the pocket of his blazer and danced away laughing, eyes wide with excitement at my daring.

Staying just beyond the reach of his hands, I’d pluck through his wallet, my fingers an insinuating intimacy once removed, pull out the driver’s learning permit, the Social Security card, the photograph of that other girl, his claimed girlfriend, at another boarding school too far away to seem real—all blond Botticelli rising out of the bland blue sea of the school-portrait backdrop. Her picture made me not jealous so much as strangely exhilarated, like a voyeur.

*   *   *

That spring, on Sunday afternoons in the empty school auditorium, he would draw me behind the heavy, musty drape of the backstage masking curtains, his kisses the pro forma tribute we understood was demanded by the protocol of the occasion in order to license his hands to roam freely about the domain of my flesh.

Those hands, dried and cracked from the winter cold, scratched at my skin. The air smelled thick, textured with the dust from those curtains. I watched motes drift idly through the beam of sunlight falling through the open stage door.
So this is it,
I thought.

It’s not that I didn’t want to be there—this novel recreation intrigued me; it was uncharted territory. That my body was the ground of this exploration was neither important nor unimportant, really nothing more than a statement of the obvious. It didn’t feel as if it had any relevance to me. It didn’t particularly feel, even, like my body. It was just a body, and on those afternoons it was a body performing in one particular guise out of the number in which it had been lately appearing.

*   *   *

One afternoon he slouched against a wall, arms folded, to engage me in the usual dialogue of innuendo. He shifted position, absent-mindedly shoving up the frayed sleeve of his yellow button-down shirt, revealing on his forearm a series of ugly gashes, dried and crusted. He wanted me to ask.

“What’d you do?” I gasped, riveted by the raw slashes, the blood-rusty stains on his shirt.

“Razor blade.” He laughed, dismissive. It was lurid, livid—beneath his notice. Who knew what games he and his friends had been up to, who were always double-daring each other with buck knives and bravado?

I couldn’t stop staring. I knew how the skin would feel with the feverish burn of those wounds. Of course, razor blades—why had this never occurred to me before?

*   *   *

Razor blades. When I was a kid, I was intrigued by the little slot in the back of the medicine cabinet, the one you could shove a worn razor blade through to dispose of it. Why, I wondered, did razor blades merit their own means of disposal? Why couldn’t they go in the trash like everything else? And if you took down a house, ripped out a wall, would you find entombed within it a thousand rusty blades drifted like metallic snow among the joists?

Razor blades. They of the Jekyll-and-Hyde reputation. The razor shaves us for work, for passion, for college interviews and wedding receptions and Sunday visits with the in-laws. Then there is that other razor, the razor of extinguished hope and surrendered expectations, flaying open a wrist like a gutted fish.

But there’s another kind of razor, too, for the laying down of edges, the definition of borders.

I started with a Bic disposable razor from the linen closet at home. Cross-legged on my bedroom floor, I fingered the yellow plastic guard over the blade, then pulled it off to brush my fingers lightly over the edge of the blade itself. I broke away the plastic sheath surrounding the razor, and it cracked with a crisp and satisfying snap under the prying blade of my Swiss Army knife. I felt methodical, reasonable, like a home handyman with a project, my tools laid out before me. How clever of me so artfully to dissect this plastic assemblage.

At last the razor—slender, gleaming dully in its plastic bed. I plucked it from its housing, perversely careful not to cut my fingers.

In the utter stillness of the afternoon, the sunlight poured through my window to warm the honey-colored wood of the floor where I sat, amid a scattering of toys from some other lifetime only a few months gone.

I let the razor’s edge kiss the pale skin near my left elbow, and then drew it slowly—so slowly that I could feel through the blade the faintest tug of resistance and the sudden giving way of the flesh—along my arm. There was a very fine, an elegant pain, hardly a pain at all, like the swift and fleeting burn of a drop of hot candle wax. In the razor’s wake, the skin melted away, parted to show briefly the milky white subcutaneous layers before a thin, beaded line of rich crimson blood seeped through the inch-long divide. Then the blood welled up and began to distort the pure, stark edges of my delicately wrought wound.