by Bobi Conn
On one of the last few days before school ended for the year, a friend had a keg party, and I decided to go. I didn’t take James because I liked talking to this friend so much, an older guy who I thought was the smartest person I had ever met. I may have had a small crush on him. I would ask him his thoughts about various topics or get his opinions on James’s ideas. The more I did that, the less confident I felt that James was as smart as I had once thought he was. The more I talked to my guy friend, the more I felt that my own beliefs had been naïve and not entirely logical. I didn’t know it at the time, but he often told his girlfriend that he didn’t know why I was with James, that I was so much smarter than my husband.
At the party, I started drinking right away, and while I wasn’t keeping track of time, I’m pretty sure it didn’t take long for me to feel the effects. A girl I knew from school started drinking with me, while a cute boy who was clearly hoping to win her over drank a little with us. Julie and I rummaged around our friend’s house until we found a bottle of vodka and some orange juice, which we claimed all for ourselves. Soon, she and I started making out in the kitchen, standing in the middle of the floor. I forgot about the party that was still going on until our host cleared his throat loudly and said with a grin, I hope you all brought enough for everyone. We hadn’t, so we went outside and continued our make-out session sitting on the grass.
Eventually, my friend Iris asked whether I wanted her to drive me home, which sounded like a terrible idea. It was clear, though, that the make-out session could continue in the back seat of my car, so Iris drove, with the long-legged, dreadlocked hippie who sometimes lived with me in front, Julie and I in the back. We took Julie to campus to drop her off at her dorm, but at the last traffic light, Iris—who had only had one cup of beer hours earlier—turned left even though the arrow was red. Red-and-blue lights flashed immediately, and she pulled over on campus property.
The police officer asked some questions about where we were coming from and whether my friend had been drinking, which Iris answered truthfully. The police officer asked whether he could search the car, and Iris told him it wasn’t hers. When he asked whose it was, I leaned forward with a drunk, happy grin and said it was mine, and I would prefer he didn’t. He asked our ages—none of us were twenty-one—then looked at the other officer with a smile and said, Well, since this is a zero-tolerance state, we’ll arrest them all and then search the car.
That was also when I found out Julie was seventeen. You’re seventeen? I asked, shocked. I felt as if kissing an underage girl was the most immoral part of my evening. He sent her to her dorm, and Iris and I went into one cruiser, my dreadlocked friend into another.
At the station where we were booked, I was still drunk enough to give the female officer a grin when she patted me down. She asked whether I had anything in my pockets, and I told her I had a Mini Thin, which she pulled out and told me wasn’t good for me. We had to be driven to the county jail for holding, which was in Richmond, where Eastern Kentucky University had been designated the third-ranked party school in the nation around that time—the same university James had failed out of. There were two mattresses on the floor, and Iris was the only person in there with me. Wearing nothing but my jail jumpsuit and still too drunk to care, I quickly fell asleep.
The next morning, they gave me my phone call, and I called my house phone number. Nobody answered, which seemed strange, so I left a message. I was released on my own recognizance, and they sent me out the back of the jail, where my dreadlocked friend was waiting.
We scrounged some change for a nearby pay phone, and I called a couple’s house whose number I had memorized, explained where I was and how I couldn’t get ahold of James. They came to pick us up a while later, and I finally got home.
I walked into my unlocked living room with nothing on me except what I had taken to the party, no doubt looking like I had spent the night in jail on a dirty mattress. My mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and James’s grandparents were sitting inside.
Where’s James? they asked, clearly irritated.
I told them I didn’t know and had spent the night at a friend’s house.
He knew we were coming. I can’t believe he did this to us. We have been waiting here for two hours.
They got tired of waiting and eventually left. They were angry at him, and like everything else, I was sure it was somehow my fault. I made a couple of calls, but no one had seen James. I walked up to campus, to the dining area, where I was relieved to find him sitting at a table alone, not eating. I thought he would be relieved to see me, or maybe upset because I had stayed out all night. He was neither. Instead, he told me he wanted a divorce. I begged him to reconsider and told him I no longer wanted an open relationship and we could go to counseling, but his mind was made up.
Since I was still working, and paying for the apartment, we decided I would be the one to keep it. Since he wasn’t working or paying for anything, we decided he would continue to sleep and eat there for as long as he needed to. We would have an amicable breakup, mature and conscious of our underlying friendship.
I asked him once to hold me at night as he slept beside me. No, he told me, you make me feel dirty.
Another time, I asked him whether we could spend some time together before he moved out—work on our friendship. Sure, he said.
Tonight?
Sure. But when I got home, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there a couple of hours later, either, so I called a friend’s house, and he was there, enjoying an impromptu party. It was raining a little, so I asked whether he needed a ride, but he didn’t. I wondered when he would be getting home to spend that time with me, but he didn’t know.
It dawned on me that he didn’t care about our friendship and that, in fact, he was done with me and I had been a fool. I was angry then. Angry at him, angry at myself. I found a razor blade—it wasn’t hiding, I always knew where they were—and dragged it upward along my right thigh six or seven times, moving through the flat moles on my leg without notice. I pulled the blade along my left arm but realized it would be too visible—always put the marks where no one will see. It suddenly occurred to me that there could be too much blood, that I could go too far, so I took a cold shower to encourage the wounds to close, quietly begging my skin to knit itself back together. James saw them a day or two later and snorted his disgust before turning away.
But something had changed as I watched the blood stream down my legs and wash away into the shower drain. I whispered a promise and a prayer, asking God to Please make it stop, and I will never cut myself again. I knew I didn’t want to die this way, in my efficiency apartment or even at the hospital, covered in gashes that no one could sew or couldn’t sew quickly enough. I also knew I wasn’t sure where that fine line was set, where all the most important veins and arteries lay pulsing beneath my skin. And I suddenly understood that there were enough other people in the world who were willing to do me harm and that I couldn’t do this to myself anymore. It wasn’t exactly self-love, and I didn’t turn my life around and stop doing things that filled me with shame or go out and choose better relationships. I just promised not to cut myself anymore, and so I didn’t.
I wore long shorts in the summer heat, and pants if I wanted to be sure no one would see the cuts. But their starting points stuck out below my shorts, and my father saw them once. He demanded to know where they came from, and I told him I had been hiking and got into someone’s barbed-wire fence. There was anger in his voice—it didn’t feel like he cared that I was hurting myself but that he was going to punish me further. He didn’t believe me, and he asked me more than once, but he finally stopped asking, and the cuts became long, unnaturally straight scars. They stand out more prominently when I get a tan, and any carefree time on a beach or in shorts is always tempered with the reminder of what I have inside me—an anguish that seeks an outlet. A wound that marks me as both victim and perpetrator. A pain that my children will notice in some form, no matter how well I hide it o
r how deeply it is buried beneath my love for them.
CHAPTER 20
Say It Right
I started smoking cigarettes when I was a freshman in college. I didn’t realize they were cigarettes at first—James had introduced me to bidis when we were still in high school. The ones he got were usually strawberry flavored, and he told me they were an herbal blend wrapped in a large bay leaf. Eventually, when I picked up my own pack at the head shop in Lexington, the clerk laughed when I asked why he needed to see my ID if there was no tobacco in the bidis.
These are the crack of the tobacco world.
I had always hated that my mother smoked. My father smoked, too, but Mom was around us more and sometimes accidentally burned us with her cigarettes. Each time it happened, I felt slighted, unloved and unseen. I asked her to quit smoking for my birthday and Christmas presents. I won’t ask for anything else, I would tell her. She would sigh and respond, Something else. You have to ask for something else. I didn’t understand, then, how cigarettes were soothing her, giving her a comfort that no one and no other thing could as she tried to survive our father and young motherhood in our little corner of the world.
We always heard how Kentucky was twenty years behind the times, how everything was so much further along in places like California. We joked that the gap was even larger in our holler. Sometimes I watched movies where characters would go into New York City, finding themselves surrounded by emotionless throngs of people and by subways that moved too fast and taxis that moved too slow. The rest of the world looked so crowded to me, so loud and cluttered and clamoring. I didn’t mind being twenty years or more behind everyone else when I watched the sunset, which happened at the mouth of the holler, so all the colors spread out in the widest part of the sky while the hills folded around me, darkening with a palpable tenderness toward foxes and deer and children.
When I went to Speech and Drama competitions in middle school, kids from other parts of the state mocked us sometimes, the way we said pop instead of soda. They mimicked our accents, the drawl and twang of eastern Kentucky I shared with all the kids in my county, no matter how much money they had. I was surprised that anyone from Kentucky would think themselves so different from the rest of us, that there could somehow be more ways to rank and categorize each other. I knew from Grandma Wright’s television that the rest of the country saw us like The Beverly Hillbillies, ignorant and laughable. I knew the news sometimes provided captions when a hillbilly somehow found his way onto TV, trying to say things in a voice the rest of the world couldn’t understand.
When I got to college, I thought that if I spoke carefully, I might be able to hide the shameful truth of exactly where I came from. I realized it was an uphill battle. My classmates didn’t tell stories about dogs being whipped and shot by the creek. They didn’t talk about how a father’s laugh could turn your stomach or how his friends could look at you with some strange knowing in their eyes. They didn’t know how it felt to live in the shadow of a valley that pulled you to it and hid you from the world and gave you so much beauty to adore but no protection from the men who wanted everything inside it.
You had to be smart to get into Berea College—and not just smart, but you had to be able to prove it on a test and have letters of recommendation and a grade point average that showed you could perform like a smart person for a long stretch of time. It’s hard to do those things if you’re worrying about money for milk and whether Dad is going to kill your mom or your grandparents or maybe even you. So, while I found myself surrounded by people who liked to take psychedelics and wanted to save the world from itself, and they thought it was just fine to be smart, there was once again a wall, an invisible barrier reminding me that I didn’t quite fit in. I had spent most of my childhood learning to survive our home and very little of it learning to survive in society. I didn’t know how to pretend that I felt good around people. I hardly knew how to feel good unless I had a substance to do that for me. I didn’t know how to say the right things or read normal people—I could only recognize the ones who scared me.
To get into Berea, you also had to have financial need—it is a school for lower-income students, predominantly from Appalachia. It took a while for me to realize we hadn’t all experienced what it meant to be lower income in the same way. At lunch one day, I took a handwritten list to the cafeteria with me and shared it with some people I knew, a young woman and older male student who were in my loosely defined friend group, but we weren’t particularly close. My list was titled “Top Ten Reasons Why It’s Good to Be Poor,” or something along those lines. I had come up with a list of what I thought were irreverent, ironic reasons to enjoy poverty—and that included things like “You can’t buy enough food to get fat on food stamps.”
The young woman read my list and, with no small amount of disgust, told me how it was not funny and how poor people have a difficult time getting access to good food, how obesity was a serious health problem among the poor. The guy sitting next to her was also not amused. I didn’t say anything, didn’t respond to the chastising. I didn’t know what to say—I thought it was somehow obvious that food stamps weren’t enough to keep us fed all the time. I thought it was clear that my always being too skinny was tied to poverty. I thought everyone knew I was making jokes about myself and my own life, trying to laugh at the pain and absurdity. It hadn’t occurred to me that not every other person going to Berea College experienced the same definition of poor. I thought that all poor people were the same—that we all feared our fathers and knew how to take a serious whipping without making a sound. I thought we all grew up afraid of hunger and accidentally drinking the snake venom in the fridge. But again, I found I was from a different world, and despite all of us falling below a certain financial threshold—at least on paper—I didn’t understand these people. And they didn’t understand me.
I didn’t respond to her. I sat there, my mind racing through memories of cans of beans for dinner. My bed covered with marijuana and my father telling us that was our Christmas. My brother ridiculed for his cheap shoes. Me being ridiculed for just once having a shirt that wasn’t cheap. I couldn’t begin to say it all. I didn’t know how to say that I had ached with shame for our food stamps, that I knew the hunger that marks us as wrong and revolting, and the people who call us such things.
I didn’t know how to say any of it, so I said nothing.
After my second philosophy class, I declared my major in philosophy instead of English. My professor wanted me to be a philosophy major, and I told my English advisor that all I really cared about was getting to read and write, and doing those things a lot. There weren’t many students majoring in philosophy, and no other females at the time. Most of my core classes had just a few students, which suited me well.
One of my philosophy courses was about the environment, and for the first time, I found myself in a class with a lot of my party friends. We usually had potlucks and went hiking, or James and other guys would play music for us while we danced and smoked weed or drank. We shared concerns about saving the environment and signed petitions to end labor abuses in far-flung countries that I couldn’t pick out on a map. I didn’t spend a lot of time talking about philosophy to most of the people in my friend group, but it seemed like we shared a lot of the same values.
One day in class, an active environmentalist I was often around stated that smokers shouldn’t receive socialized health care if they ended up with cancer. I don’t know how the conversation got to that point. It often seemed like so many of my friends couldn’t distinguish between their values and logical thinking.
I waited for my other friends to disagree with the girl, who may have been arguing for socialized medicine—that was certainly a popular view among our group in the late nineties. But no one spoke up, no one challenged the idea that health care should only be available for most people, most of the time. I understood her point that smokers make choices known to lead to cancer, and how can we all be expected to pay for their mi
stakes? But I thought of my own mother and her smoking and wondered whether my friends would turn her away from a hospital in their utopian world.
I thought of the other choices people make—choices my family made, choices I made and was still making—and how ugly they look to the world. Smoking, drinking, my dad and his pills. Cutting myself. All the drugs I took—mostly handed to me, at least at first, until I felt they made life more bearable, even though I knew the risks. My mother’s choice to marry a monster, her choice to have his children—was it a choice? Should we have been saved? Aborted? Would it have been better to never have been born at all?
And it suddenly seemed that the world they envisioned, a world with clean streams and free health care, with protections for workers and women and children, wasn’t a place for our kind of people—people who smoked cigarettes to steady their nerves, who sometimes snorted a line of Lortabs with Dad because that was the most loving thing he ever offered. People who had babies they couldn’t love with men who didn’t love them. My liberal friend summed it up perfectly in class that day: They made their choice. They have to live with it.
CHAPTER 21