“Guilt is a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, or wrong. Shame is the painful feeling that arises from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improper, etc., done by oneself or another.” The room appears generally unimpressed with these definitions, but Greg continues. “So guilt involves the awareness of having done something wrong; it arises from our actions. Shame is a painful feeling about how we appear to others (and to ourselves) and doesn’t necessarily depend on our having done anything.”
He pauses to take a sip from his water bottle. “Here’s a hypothetical. If I say something hurtful to a friend, I might feel guilty because I hurt my friend. More painfully, I might also feel ashamed that I am the sort of person who would behave that way. Guilt arose as a result of inflicting pain on somebody else; I felt shame in relation to myself.”
I think about my own offenses, flipping through The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong. Was it wrong to lie to Clarisse about Andy? Was it even a lie? Andy is someone I know online, after all. Andy does live near Gainesville, after all. The truth slips from my hands, a silvery fish that shimmers as it swims away.
Greg makes an a-ha! face, his physical cue that we should be nearing an epiphany. “It’s really important to remember that none of you have done anything wrong. You aren’t responsible for the actions of your parents. Not by the wildest stretch of the imagination did any of you have anything to do with why your parents are where they are.”
Brandon raises his hand slightly, his fingertips just above the top of his head. Greg gives him a little glance and then makes a soft stop sign in the air with his hand, a signal to dismiss Brandon’s question because we already know what it is.
Brandon often wonders if the things we discuss at Wavelengths apply to him because, as he says, his situation is “very unique.” Every time he reminds us of his unique situation, I want to quote Fight Club: You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.
I could recite Brandon’s story from memory, but he would probably enjoy that too much, would be smitten with the idea of me paying that much attention to him. Brandon harassed a girl at his school. He posted despicable things about her online and wrote whore sixty-nine times on her locker with a Sharpie. He told everyone at school that she had given him HIV, that she was a prostitute on the weekends, and that her family sacrificed animals in satanic rituals. He poured maple syrup in her hair during a pep rally. He threw rotten eggs against her bedroom window and tried to kidnap her dog.
The school counselors did “everything they could.” The local police did “everything they could.” The girl’s family was planning to move out of town. They had already withdrawn the girl from school.
Still, the harassment continued, and the girl’s mother finally got fed up with it. So the girl’s mother went to Brandon’s house one day to confront Brandon’s mother in the driveway as she was getting into her car. The two women started shouting at each other. Then the girl’s mother pushed Brandon’s mother. And that’s when the little worm in Brandon’s mother spoke up. You know that little worm…we all have one inside us, lying dormant, burrowing deeper and deeper inside until that moment when the tripwire is activated, the machinery engaged.
Brandon’s mother beat the girl’s mother so severely that she was in a medically induced coma for a week. Her brain was so traumatized that they had to take the top of her skull off to make room for the swelling.
I wish Greg would take Brandon’s question. I would like to hear Greg try to explain how Brandon isn’t even the least bit responsible for his mother serving a fifteen-year prison sentence for attempted murder. Events happen in a chain—a chain Brandon started when he typed that first message online. He kept adding links to the chain. When he uncapped the Sharpie. When he bought the eggs and let them sit in the backseat of his car in the blazing sun so they would rot. Brandon’s mother was just another link caught up in Brandon’s chain. She’s in the women’s prison now, and Brandon is here, sweating in a folding aluminum chair with the rest of us. I wish Greg would tell us all why Brandon shouldn’t feel guilty. People are the choices they make, I can hear him say in response. Your parents made their choices, and you make yours.
Still looking at my feet, I begin to get that feeling of being stared at, and I know who’s doing the staring. I feel weak, forget my resolve, and look up. Clarisse is smiling at me. I make the choice to smile back. That’s all we are—each and every one of us—choices.
After the mouse incident, my mother transferred me to public school, deciding that a no-frills education would be better for me. I made a choice to turn down my energy. I practiced and practiced every chance I got. I twisted the dial at school, notch by notch, until I felt I could blend seamlessly into the atmosphere, making it easier to put on the brakes if needed. I realized I could make myself nearly invisible if I tried hard enough and concentrated long enough. For a long while, it seemed to work like a charm, a talisman to ward off my mother’s worry.
I would make the smallest movements possible, as if I were balancing a heavy book on my head, learning how to be a pageant contestant. I would sit at my desk, my arms quietly resting at my sides. I would try not to stir up too many vibrations. It worked for years.
But then came junior high and Tina Bristol, and my energy started rising again. In The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong, it starts in eighth grade on a Friday afternoon, when Tina and I volunteered to clean the chalkboard erasers.
We had to go underneath the cafeteria stairwell, where there was a little alcove in which the eraser-cleaning machine lived. It was bizarre, actually, a relic from the past. The machine was very loud when you turned it on, and it sucked the chalk dust out of erasers, collecting it in a blue bag that inflated itself with air as it worked. There was a metal tray on the top of the machine upon which you placed the dusty eraser, moving it back and forth. Then you flipped a switch (like a light switch on the wall) and presto! The machine went to work, devouring the chalk dust and rendering the eraser almost good as new.
When it was just the two of us, the atmosphere changed. I felt a subtle shift, a sensation of pressure building, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, couldn’t give a name to the feeling.
Tina and I started spending lunch period in the library together. After eating our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, we’d make fun of book titles or invent our own parodies of them, lampooning the dramatic-looking covers of old books from the seventies and eighties that often resembled paintings, depicting teenagers’ faces looking serious or sad or elated.
Tina Bristol had a mother and a father and three older brothers. They owned an RV and loved the outdoors, making frequent trips to the RV park in Bartow and canoeing on the Peace River, the men of the family pulling bass and snook from the water to fix on the grill that evening. Tina had a toughness about her, a no-nonsense sort of approach to people and things. She wasn’t easily upset and knew how to stand her ground around the boys in school who would try and snap our bras or trip us on the way to the pencil sharpener. And she didn’t flinch at kids who hurled insults, the bullies who only wanted to hurt others with their words. They are the broken ones, Tina told me. Not us.
The last day of eighth grade, Tina and I stayed after to help our English teacher pack up her classroom. We removed the decorative edging from the two bulletin boards that flanked her desk. We squatted under chairs and scraped away dried chewing gum of various colors with small putty knives. We took inventory of novels and textbooks, counting and recording them on a clipboard, and then piled them on a cart with wheels. We rolled the cart to the elevator, which we rode to the third floor of the building to deposit them in the book room, a small closet that smelled like musty paper and ink.
The door to the book room was propped open with a small wooden wedge when we arrived. We moved our books from the cart to the shelves, tucking them into their beds for the summer among volumes of Scholastic Readers, hardback editions of Holes, and paperb
acks copies of Tiger Eyes and The Diary of Anne Frank.
If I ever forget what happened next, I can open The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong, remember how I tried the doorknob, noticing it was locked. How I slid the wedge out from under the door, and it slammed shut. How Tina screamed from inside until her voice was raw. How she pounded her fists against the heavy door. How I listened from the other side.
Chapter Eleven
I’m working on homework, solving algebraic fractions on a worksheet I printed from my laptop. Fractions are important, Miss Apploff says in her video lectures, one mathematical concept we will actually use in real life. It’s important to know how to divide things up, how to turn a whole into parts, how to make parts whole again.
I wish it were that simple with people. If you’re missing something, you could just find your complement, your common denominator, become an equation, and make yourself solvable.
But I know that’s not the way it works. The word fraction comes from fracture, which means to break. There are many words for breaking something. Destroy, smash, crack, cut, split, splinter. There aren’t as many words for healing, for putting things back together again.
I always work in pencil for math problems because it’s easier to erase mistakes. When I’m finished, I’ll scan the worksheet and upload it online, beaming it over Wi-Fi signal for Miss Apploff to review. In algebra, you always have to show your work. The answer alone doesn’t matter so much. What matters is how you got there.
I’ve worked halfway down the page when the doorbell rings, its high-pitched ding drawing attention to how quiet the apartment has been all morning. I look through the peephole and see the mail carrier smiling back at me, his facial features slightly enlarged, an effect of the curved lens. He’s an older man with shaggy gray hair peeking out from under his navy blue sun hat. I reach for the brass door chain, slide it across, and open the door.
“Just need a signature for return receipt on this, miss.” He hands me a large white envelope with a green card attached and points out the spot for me to sign by the X. He retrieves a pen from his shirt pocket, clicking the end before handing it to me. As I sign my name, I try to decipher the return address from the corner of my eye, wondering if it’s something for my mother from the state, maybe a renewal notice for her Child Development Associate credential. The mail carrier removes the green card from the envelope, tearing it at the perforations. He places it inside his mailbag and then hands the envelope over to me, along with the rest of our mail.
“Thanks,” he says with a smile. He raises his eyebrows as he turns and walks away.
I put the stack of mail on the kitchen table, flipping through a few bills and a copy of The Paris Review for Shea, until I reach the large white envelope. There are three stamps on the top-right corner and a large postmark of thick black ink stamped over them. It’s addressed to Mira Gibson and Evelyn Gibson. The words are small, the letters very neat, running straight across the envelope. When I write without lines, my words inevitably slant upward, no matter how hard I try to keep them level. A teacher once told me that according to handwriting analysis, upward writing means the writer is an optimist.
I read the return address.
Michael Hayes
DC#353091
23916 NW 83rd Avenue
Raiford, FL 32026
When you read words, you hear them in your mind’s voice, and when you haven’t read certain words in a very long time, they sound strange, even inside your brain, even though you aren’t saying them out loud. Of course I know my father’s name is Michael—it was the most popular name for a boy born in 1975. Of course I know that he’s in Raiford, a place that exists in the middle of the state, even though I’ve never been there, even though I’ve never even wanted to think about the word. Now I stare at it, imagining all the other ways it could be spelled. Ray Ferd. Ray Ford. Rae Ford. It could be a man’s name or a woman’s name.
The envelope is crinkled at the corner, as though it’s traveled halfway across the world to reach me, instead of only two hundred miles from Raiford to Pass-a-Grille. I imagine my father’s hands tucking paper into the envelope, my father with pen in hand. His right or left? It occurs to me that I don’t even know—addressing the envelope so neatly, taking his time, for really that is all my father really has now—time.
The envelope feels light in my hands, a feather with words inside. I want to open it, but opening it will be an act of letting him into my life, allowing his words to reach me, and I’m not sure I can fathom that. Fathom is a unit of measure, a way to test the depths of the ocean. But to fathom something also means to understand. In the Old English, it meant the outstretched arms, as though you could reach your arms out wide and embrace the ocean—a way to comprehend, to make sense of something so vast, so senseless.
I run my hands along the edges of the envelope, wishing I could divine its contents without opening, like a fortune-teller or mystic who could predict the words within. I’ve always been fascinated by psychics and palm readers, all those mysterious people who promise to tell you the future. A long time ago, my mother would take me to a woman named Bianca, a psychic who worked out of a small bungalow behind the boardwalk on Madeira Beach, a neon sign in her living room window pulsing red and pink—$10 SPECIAL.
Inside, I would sit across from her at a small round table draped in purple linen. The window air conditioner would tick and hum, and Miss B, as she wanted to be called, would give me a piece of crystal. She would instruct me to hold on to it while she asked me four questions. Her voice was soft and low as she explained the process. “I’m going to ask you four questions and four questions only. Your answers to these four questions will tell me everything I need to know.”
My mother would sit on the white wicker love seat in the corner, but I wouldn’t look at her. I would pretend that she wasn’t there. It was easier to answer the questions if I believed it was only me and Miss B in the room.
There are things you know in the very very dark core of yourself. You don’t know how they got there, but you know they are real. Sometimes I dream that my brain is the sea, layered with strange creatures you can’t see from the surface. You have to dive down, down, down, to get to the heart of yourself, to go beneath everything you think you know.
I slide my finger under the sealed flap of the envelope and free it from the adhesive. I reach inside, pull out the single sheet of paper inside, with cursive writing in blue ink.
Dear Mira & Evelyn,
I hope you are both doing well. I thought about calling but I wasn’t sure if either of you would want to speak to me so I’m writing instead.
Unfortunately, I have some bad news. My mother died. Mira, you know how much Ella loved Evelyn. She had a Limoges butter dish from France that she wanted Evelyn to have. There is a lawyer in Treasure Island representing Ella’s estate named Dana Apple. Her phone number is (727) 555-8989. You can contact her, and she’ll make arrangements to get the dish to you.
If you want to write to me, that would be great. I would be really happy to hear from you. You can use the return address on this envelope to reach me. Make sure you include my DC number. And just so you know, all of my mail is monitored.
Sincerely,
Michael
I go back to my laptop, search “Limoges butter dish,” and find that Limoges is a city in France, not a brand name. Any hard-paste porcelain made in that area from 1771 to the present can be classified as Limoges. The pieces are collectible, and valuable enough that there are counterfeits to look out for, articles that explain how to spot a fake.
We don’t store our butter in a porcelain dish. We simply buy the spreadable stuff that comes in its own plastic tub. Perhaps my grandmother was an old-fashioned woman? According to her obituary, she was born in 1947, so maybe she grew up with a mother who taught her old-fashioned ways. Online it says that Limoges porcelain was a popular part of a young woman’s hope chest, along with linens and other household items she would take to her
new home after marriage.
I put the letter back in its envelope and take it to my room, sliding it into the space between my mattress and box spring. I open The Catalog of Everything I’ve Done Wrong and add an entry for today: hid something important from my mother.
I’ve had dreams about my father contacting me, but he calls instead of writing a letter. In these dreams, I get to the point of the phone ringing, my mother announcing that it’s my father on the line, but the scene ends just as I put the receiver to my lips. Just like that, the dream world dissolves, and I say hello, hello in my mind until I realize I’m awake.
I go out to the patio, through the sliding glass door, and sit on one of the plastic Adirondack chairs. I stare straight out into the space in front of me, toward the inlet. I let my eyes slide out of focus, letting the edges blur until I have that feeling that my two eyes have merged to become one. I like looking at the world like this, through my one blurred eye. Everything softens and curves, all the sharp angles removed. The problem is that, once I become aware that this is happening, it usually stops so I’ve found that the trick is not to acknowledge what’s happening at all. If I want to stay in this trance, it’s better not to think about it.
Girl at the Edge Page 7