Skin Game: A Memoir (8 page)

12

Once I started cutting, I never considered that I might stop. I didn’t want to stop. Why should I? Cutting was my deliverance, my knight-errant riding in on a bag of disposable Bics. I cut, and just like that the itching, anxious restlessness was gone. I cut, and was made paradoxically whole.

I cut, and then I could get up and get through the day and eat my dinner and complete my homework, because that’s what you do. It was what was expected of me. It was what
I
expected of me. I could never have failed that duty, even when I wanted to. I would not have ventured the temerity to believe that my troubles justified a failure to meet my obligations. Those obligations drove me like a bus I couldn’t get off; cutting was the fare that made it possible for me to stay on the bus I couldn’t get off.

I cut often—maybe not every day, but every few days, or every week. You might imagine that a person would resort to self-mutilation only under extremes of duress, but once I’d crossed that line the first time, taken that fateful step off the precipice, then almost any reason was a good enough reason, almost any provocation was provocation enough. Cutting was my all-purpose solution.

My scars ought to be a charm bracelet of mnemonics, each a permanent reminder of its precipitating event, but maybe the most disturbing thing I can say about the history of my cutting is that for the most part I can’t even remember the whens and the whys behind those wounds.

It didn’t take much to make me cut. Frustration, humiliation, insecurity, guilt, remorse, loneliness—I cut ’em all out. They were like a poison, caustic and destructive, as though lye had been siphoned into my veins. The only way I could survive them, I thought, was to keep draining them from my blood.

I cut for a bad day in B
¹
—which was almost any day in B
¹
. I cut for the wrong answer on a test, for failing to be cast in the spring musical, for the way my nemeses among my schoolmates taunted me for that failure, cornering me in the parking lot after school and jeering, “Caroline didn’t get ca-ast, Caroline didn’t get ca-ast,” in jubilant singsong. I cut for the humiliation of having given them the satisfaction of breaking down and sobbing in response.

I cut for the evening that the boarding-school boy I didn’t even know settled insinuatingly next to me on the lobby sofa, while his friends clustered sniggering at the foot of the three wide, polished granite steps leading up to the lobby from the wide hallway below. I remember his loud plaid sports jacket, his smug self-satisfaction. He pulled out his wallet, extracted a ten-dollar bill. I remember wondering in that moment where he got a ten-dollar bill, when the weekly school allowance came in increments of four.

“Come to my room later,” he said, proffering the bill, barely restraining his amusement at his own wit. He glanced to his friends for approval; their eyes shone with a hungry excitement at the daring of his innuendo.

It was such a cliché: the mannish insult to my woman’s virtue. I felt a slow, sinking despair at the calculated spite that had gone into it. I didn’t even know this boy, and yet he had gone out of his way to humiliate me here. What had I ever done to merit his cheap malice?

I cut for the day I overheard several girls at school, girls I had supposed were my friends, taking me apart piece by piece, itemizing my apparently abundant shortcomings with the delight of gourmands sampling exquisite delicacies.

“She thinks she’s so special,” one sneered.

“She’s always writing in that stupid notebook.”

“She’s always talking about those stupid boys she knows.”

“Don’t you hate the way she’s always showing off? It’s like she
always
has to say something in class.”

Unaware of my presence just around the corner, they picked gleefully over each and every one of my lengthily enumerated faults until they were left licking my figurative bones. I was mesmerized by the awfulness of it, the way you watch an accident unfold when you can do nothing to prevent it. So I cut as one slashes at snakebites, to drain the venom from my skin.

I cut when the Boys, my boys, put on their blue blazers for the last time that year, applauded the graduates, greeted their parents, stripped their beds, loaded up trunks and rooftop racks, and suddenly all were strangers to me, the world beyond our gates reasserting itself in families I’d never met, bored teenage sisters and gangly pubescent brothers and moms in luminescent green pants standing by directing while the dads wrestled luggage and stereos into the backs of station wagons. I stood forlornly at a distance, like a spy, knowing that I had no place in this piece of their lives. Then they drove off leaving too much emptiness, too much screaming silence, and I had to cut that out of me as well.

I cut when my parents announced that we would be moving off campus in the fall, to an apartment in Charlottesville. To my parents, it was just one more move. To me, it meant giving up my home. A bleak, unbearable vision threw itself up before me: some drab, institutional cinder-block cell of an apartment, like the military housing where we’d visited friends one summer, with broken-down plastic furniture and a forlorn square of yard scratched to bare dirt and hordes of grubby children with snotty noses. I cut for dread of the future.

13

You’d think that once you’d taken up self-mutilation, such an extreme gesture would color the rest of your life. Aside from the cutting, however, every other feature of my life was utterly, ordinary twelve. I had a big crush on John-Boy Walton. I did my homework. I got A’s on all my report cards. I bought K-Tel records at the Woolco in Charlottesville. I went to slumber parties. I coveted a Radio Shack portable tape recorder and a pair of cork-soled platform shoes like the ones Susan Rhodes had worn to school last week. I read Dorothy Sayers murder mysteries, drank my milk, and wrote bad poetry.

I look at a photograph of me from that year, and I’m amazed by just how ordinary everything does look. There are all my animal posters plastered on my bedroom walls. The sun is pouring through the windows. My Flower Power curtains are just visible, and my clothes are thrown over my oak rocking chair, and just out of sight I know is the trash can my mother had given me as a joke with
PLEASE
, PLEASE PICK UP YOUR ROOM! printed on it in letters of ascending size and increasingly loud colors. It’s a room that says “twelve-year-old girl” in every particular. Even the girl in the picture, with her hands on her hips, looks twelve, and as if she might just have been laughing with her father, who is taking the picture.

But there was this other Caroline who was tearing herself apart, who saw only the gray winter sky and the steady progression of her despondence. Why can’t I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum. My unhappiness precluded all else; unhappiness is a kind of narcissism, in which nothing that does not resonate with your unhappiness can interest you.

It’s probably very hard to take a brooding twelve-year-old’s miseries too seriously. The maudlin poetry. The dramatic excesses. The twelveness of it all.

It’s just a stage,
they’ll tell you.
You’ll get over it,
they’ll tell you.

All that may be true, but the trouble is that at twelve you only know how to be unhappy in twelve-year-old ways—it doesn’t make your unhappiness, to you, any less significant.

I scowled and moped and brooded, and I’m sure that my whole family found me a trial to live with, and I hated myself for this sullenness but I couldn’t help it. I suffered a monstrous sense of grievance that every single thing existed for the express purpose of thwarting my happiness. This gnawing distress was so unlike anything I’d ever had to endure that I couldn’t believe it really belonged to me, as though it were an ill-fitting suit of clothes wrongly delivered to my address.

So when I cut, each time I thought,
There, that’ll do it,
certain I’d rid myself of this alien unhappiness for good. For a remarkably long time I continued to believe this, so that when the unhappiness came back, as it always did, it took me utterly by surprise.

I spent a lot of time lurking in my bedroom, festering with an anger that had no clear cause or object. I wrote long bewildered plaints in my journal, by the bilious green light cast by a souvenir lamp we’d bought at the beach one summer—meant to resemble a lighthouse lantern—with a bottle-green base illuminated by a night-light bulb. My old console stereo scratched out muddy refrains from the records I’d borrowed from one boy or another—
The White Album,
“Stairway to Heaven,” the plaintive refrains of Bread singing “Everything I Own”—while I crouched on the floor by my bed, excising my troubles inch by inch, the blood beading black by the green light.

Sometimes one cut was enough, and in the wake of it I felt washed clean. Sometimes, however, I had to experiment to find just the right equation of placement and length and depth, and sometimes I simply needed more than one. Three or four dark threads in perfect parallel might transgress the plane of my skin. Some cuts were hardly more than scratches. Others pressed down through epidermis and dermis, down past the advance guard of surface capillaries, down into the thick of the subcutaneous domain.

Though sometimes I wanted to go deeper, I made certain my cuts were nothing I couldn’t reasonably pass off, if necessary, as a bad cat scratch or an accidental brush with some sharp protrusion. I never cut so deep that I couldn’t attend to the wounds myself: simple pressure to slow the bleeding, the injured body marshaling its arsenal of defenses, a complex chemistry to make, like the setting of wax upon a letter, first the easily broken gel of a clot and then the firm seal of the scab.

I cut only where I could hide the evidence under clothing: high on my arms and hips and legs. I had to keep my cutting secret; I knew I couldn’t expect anyone else to understand. They’d want the reason I couldn’t offer, the explanation I didn’t have.

For some reason, I believed that I had above all else an obligation to protect everyone—my teachers, my family—from the knowledge of my cutting. What they did not know would not cause them pain.

14

It’s easy for me now to offer up my explanations and analyses—I’ve had almost a quarter of a century to think on it. When I started, however, I had no idea, really, why I was cutting. I just knew it was what I had to do.

I wasn’t blind to the fact that it looked pretty crazy to be cutting yourself like that, but it puzzled me that I didn’t
feel
the least bit crazy. You had to be pretty crazy, didn’t you, to keep cutting yourself with a razor blade?

Maybe, I thought, the cutting was just the first harbinger of craziness, like the preliminary spatter of raindrops that presages a sudden downpour. I kept testing gingerly around the edges of my mind for evidence of craziness, as one might progress cautiously across boggy ground. Any sign of a soft spot here, a spot likely to give way?

If I wasn’t crazy, then why was I doing something so obviously nutty? It bothered me that I couldn’t ferret out my own motivations, as if they were being hidden from me the way a doctor won’t let you see your own medical chart. I couldn’t even decide for sure if I really did
need
to cut, or if I was just doing it to be dramatic.

As I sat hunched over my arm or my leg with the razor blade, I argued back and forth with myself as though I were the topic at hand in moot court.

You’re just cutting to look crazy,
I accused myself, as the blade bit through my skin.

Isn’t cutting yourself inherently crazy, though?
I asked in my defense.
How sane can you be if you’re cutting yourself to prove you’re crazy?

That only proves your craftiness,
the prosecution riposted.
You have to act crazy in crazy ways, after all, to look crazy.

The way I saw it, the only way to prove the validity of my cutting was to keep it an absolute secret. If I told anyone, somehow let it slip, then right there in the telling would be the evidence that I was cutting only for the melodrama of it, cutting for attention—because once you admitted to these things, didn’t the very act of admission render them suspect?

I knew, without being able to put the matter into so many words, that no one would believe me if I told them … what? That I kept a razor wrapped in a gauze pad, secreted away in a green steel file box, underneath a stack of three-by-five index cards I used as flash cards for Spanish I? That with the razor I kept little squares of blood-soaked gauze, dried to a rust-brown, like powerful relics? That sometimes, in the bathroom, I would cut myself, and standing in front of the mirror smear the blood in long, livid streaks across my face?

15

At the end of seventh grade I left my private school. It seemed ridiculous to pay good money to a private school to make you miserable. In the fall, I would transfer into a middle school in the Charlottesville public system—at least, in public school, the misery is free.

My sister had just finished ninth grade at Charlottesville High School; its spanking-new facilities, painted in relentlessly bright reds and yellows and greens, with exotic amenities like the Media Center and a television studio (which no one ever used, but that was beside the point), looked so much more modern and sophisticated than the tired cinder-block beiges of my private school.

In my seventh-grade class, however, was a girl who had transferred in from the city schools. Invested with the exotic, worldly-wise cachet of having come from those wild unknowns, she was like a war refugee, captivating us with horrific tales of public school life. She painted a picture of teeming, restless masses, of a school year punctuated by riots and cafeteria fights and the occasional knifing.