by Deb Caletti
"Nancy. We're going to be late."
"I'm coming."
"What are you doing?" Dad looked crisp, competent. He had a golf shirt on, tucked into khakis, a travel bag over his shoulder.
"Nothing," she said. She put the bag on the counter.
"Thousands of people fly every day," he said. "I, for one, don't want to miss the plane."
Hugs good-bye, off they went. My aunt looked slightly lost at first, clapped her hands together and said, "Well! Here we are!" with too much cheer and a dose of desperation. She's got that nervous thing around kids that childless people have. Like if they turn their backs, you're going to blow something up. And they're not sure quite what to say to you--either they ask what you're learning in school, or they talk about the economy.
The evening was going along fine. Aunt Beth made macaroni and cheese, with very little butter because she was on a diet,
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so it wasn't so great, but oh, well. We watched a video she brought over, some National Geographic thing about pyramids, which Oliver loved but I was about snoozing through. I decided to go to bed but I wanted to get a snack first, so I walked into the kitchen. I don't know what had been going on in my subconscious for the last few hours, but here's what happened: I see the bag on the counter. It has my mother's lipstick around the edges. Something about that blown-up bag makes me think of those oxygen masks that pop down from the ceiling of airplanes. I think about those airplanes that crashed into the World Trade Center, the hijackers, and my parents on an airplane. I think of those people on that burning plane, and the ones jumping out of the buildings, and suddenly I get this sharpness in my chest, like my grandmother had, and I can't breathe. I literally can't catch my breath, and I feel like I'm in some really small box I've got to get out of or I'm gonna die, and there's no way out of the box.
I clutch the counter. I almost feel like I could throw up, because suddenly I'm hot and clammy and lightheaded. I can't really be dying, right? Fourteen-year-olds don't have heart attacks, but even though I'm telling myself this, my body isn't listening, because I need out of this box and there is no out and I'm gonna die.
I'm gasping and I don't even have enough air to cry out, same as the time in second grade when I landed hard on my back after falling off the jungle gym. I am aware, too aware, of my heartbeat, and then Oliver comes in. I'm panicking, shit, because I can't breathe, and Oliver must see this in my eyes and he goes and runs and gets Aunt Beth. I hear him call her name, but it's really far off, and I'm in this other world where there's
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only this fear and this pain in my chest and no air and this feeling of Need Out!
"Jade? Jade, are you choking?" Aunt Beth is there, and she takes hold of my shoulders and I don't want her to touch me, but on the other hand I want her to put her arms around me and make me breathe again. "Water," she says, and lets me go. "Get a glass of water, Oliver."
I am so cold and hot and clammy all at the same time, that pass-out feeling. But instead of passing out, I throw up. Right on the kitchen floor, and I'm sorry for the gory details. I hate throwing up. No one likes it, I know, but I detest it, and that feeling of choking is the worst. My heart is beating a million miles an hour, and I'm shaking and Aunt Beth gets me to the couch to sit down. The pyramid show is still going on, I remember that.
Oliver stands there looking worried and holding a glass of water.
"It was that macaroni and cheese," Aunt Beth says. Only it wasn't.
Because it kept happening. Three years later, it still happens sometimes. The medicine helps it happen less. That week, though, I succeeded in doing two things--I convinced everyone that I was nuts, and I convinced Aunt Beth never to have children.
My parents came home early from their trip. My father seemed pissed, my mother, sort of relieved. They took me to a doctor, who found nothing wrong. They took me again and again, because I knew something was wrong. They kept saying I was fine, but, excuse me, I know when my own body isn't acting like it should. I felt the symptoms in my heart, my chest, this 16
shortness of breath. Maybe it was a cardiac problem. I could have a hole in my heart or a murmur, whatever that was, or something. I know what I felt. And what I felt was a real, physical happening.
I only threw up that one time, but the other feelings kept coming, at night in bed, and in school--
God, once right during PE. I held onto the gym wall feeling like I was going to pass out, sweat running down my face and the jocks staring at me and then going right on playing basketball.
The male teacher (twit) thought I had cramps and sent me to the nurse's room. Ms. Sandstrom, she's the one who called my mom and told her I had what she thought was a panic attack. She said we should see a psychologist. Actually, she said this after about my sixth or seventh visit to the nurse's room. See, I kept avoiding the gym, in particular, because I thought it would keep happening there since it happened there once, so Ms. Sandstrom was seeing a lot of me. This same thing had happened to Ms. Sandstrom, she told me, when she first moved away from home and went to college. Panic disorder. Anxiety. She had her first attack in the campus dining hall and didn't go back there for five months.
I saw a psychologist, and then also a psychiatrist, who I only visit now if my medication seems messed up. I see the psychologist every two to four weeks, depending on how things are going. I really like the guy I have now, Abe, which is what I'm supposed to call him. His last name is Break hart, so you can understand the first-name-basis insistence. For a guy that's supposed to be fixing people, it seems like a bad omen. The psychiatrist finally put me on medicine because these episodes were making my life hell. I was sure I was dying, only no one knew it yet except me.
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Nothing made sense. I tried to logic myself out of it, not to have the thoughts, but it wasn't like it was always thoughts = attack anyway. Sometimes it was more like attack = thoughts. Once I had attacks, I started worrying about getting more. After I had the first episode, I started listening hyper-carefully to see if it was going to happen again. Was my chest tight? Did I feel short of breath? Could I feel my heart beating? Was I about to lose all control in public? Was I going to die after all, and were all those people who said I wasn't going to feel horrible that they were wrong? Your body does all kinds of things that are disturbing when you start really paying attention, believe me.
And I had no idea when it might kick into gear. It wasn't like I panicked every time I was somewhere high up, or in an enclosed space, or during a storm. It could be none of those things, or all of them. I could (can) panic in a car, a new situation, any time a person feels a twinge of nerves. It's a twisted version of Green Eggs and Ham: I could panic in a train! I could panic on a plane! I could panic on the stairs--I could panic anywhere!
I didn't even want to go to school, because what if it happened there again? In class or something, when we were taking a test? How many cramps can you have? What if I threw up during an assembly, with the whole school there? People who have these panic attacks sometimes have
"social anxiety," which means, basically, you don't want to go out in the world. But I think sometimes they've got their cause and effect screwed up. Would you want to get on a bus if you thought your body might do this? Would you want to be in a crowd of people? Sitting in Math?
That kind of fear, that kind of physical out-of-control is . . . well, private.
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Anyway, I am not my illness. "Girl with Anxiety," "Trauma of the Week"--no. I hate stuff like that. Everyone, everyone, has their issue. But the one thing my illness did make me realize is how necessary it is to ignore the dangers of living in order to live. And how much trouble you can get into if you can't. We all have to get up every morning and go outside and pretend we aren't going to die. We've got to get totally involved with what we're going to wear that day, and how pissed we are that another car cut us off, and how we wish we were in better shape, so we don't have to think about how little any of that really ma
tters. Or so we don't think about how we're just vulnerable specks trying to survive on a violent, tumultuous planet, at the mercy of hurricanes and volcanoes and asteroids and terrorists and disease and a million other things. We concentrate on having little thoughts so we don't have BIG THOUGHTS. It's like those days when you've got a really bad pimple but you still have to go to school. You've got to convince yourself it's not so bad just so you can leave the house and actually talk to people face-to-face.
You've got to ignore the one big truth--life is fatal.
I hurry home after school the day after I see the red-jacket boy. I want to see if he and the baby will reappear. I drop my backpack at the foot of the stairs as I come in, head up to my room.
"Jade?" Mom calls from upstairs. She's in her bathroom, I'm guessing, judging by the muffled sound of her voice.
"Yeah, it's me."
"How was school?"
"Fine."
"The day went all right?"
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"Uh-huh."
"I got my dress for homecoming," she says. Yeah, you read that right.
My mom has gone to more homecomings than I have--four for four. I went once, with one of my best friends, Michael Jacobs, during a time we thought we liked each other more than friends but didn't really. As vice president of the PTSA, my mother chaperones the dances, which means she goes when I don't. I swear, she's got more pictures taken in front of phony sunsets and palm trees and fake porches than I do (with Mr. Robinson, my math teacher; Mitch Green baum, Booster Club president; Mr. Swenson, P.E., etc.), more corsages pressed between pages of our Webster's dictionary, more shoes dyed to odd colors. She's involved in every other committee and program my school has, too, from fund-raising to tree planting to graduation ceremonies to teacher appreciation days. Most irritating is The Walkabout Program, where "concerned parents" walk the school hallways in between classes to promote safety and good behavior, i.e., to spy. They even wear badges around their necks that read SAS--Safety for All Students. One time, some kid got into the badge drawer with a Magic Marker and swapped all the first and second letters, giving you an idea of how appreciated the program is.
Don't get me wrong. I love my mother, and I feel bad having these mean thoughts. Because Mom, she's one of the few people I can really talk to, who understands me. Sometimes she knows what I'm feeling before I even realize it. And we have a great time together. We make fun of the really bad clothes in the discount stores, and put ugly and embarrassing things into each other's carts when the other person's not looking. We tell
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each other about good books and talk each other into ordering a milk shake with our cheeseburger. But sometimes it just feels like she's this barnacle we learned about in biology. It discards its own body to live inside of a crab (read: me), growing and spreading until it finally takes over the crab's body, stealing its life, reaching its tentacles everywhere, even around its eyes. Well, you get the idea.
"Wanna see?" Mom calls.
"In a sec," I say.
I want to get to my computer. I want to be there if the red-jacket boy happens to come back. I knock on my doorframe three times, which is just this thing I like to do for good luck, then I go in. I log on, and sit down. Then there's a knock at my door.
"What do you think of the color?" Mom asks. Rose-colored taffeta, no sleeves, sash around the middle. The dress actually swishes as she walks. "With the right bra ..."
"It's real nice, Mom." It screams homecoming. Or bridesmaid.
"You don't like it."
"Not for myself, but it's great on you."
She checks herself out in the mirror on the back of my door. She lifts her blond hair up in the back, even though there's not much to lift. She tilts her chin, sucks in her stomach. Something about this makes me sad, the way women with eighties-style permed hair make me sad. The way old ladies in short-shorts make me sad.
"I think it makes me look slimmer," she says. She's always worrying about this--pretty needlessly, because she's average weight. Still, we've got low-fat and "lite" everything, and tons 21
of those magazines with articles like "Swimsuits That Flatter Every Figure" and "Five Minutes a Day to a Tight Tummy." It makes you realize how basically everything we do comes down to a) mating or b) competing for resources. It's just like Animal Planet, only we've got Cover Girl and Victoria's Secret instead of colored feathers and fancy markings, and the violence occurs at the Nordstrom's Half-Yearly Sale.
"You don't have to look slimmer. You're fine."
"God, I'm just glad for fabric with spandex. Just shove in the jiggly parts and zip. Are these considered unhealthy weight issues that'll make your daughter turn anorexic?"
"Nah," I said. "I think they're completely normally abnormal. Besides, you know how I hate throwing up."
"Okay, whew. I can chalk that off my list of concerns."
"Yeah, stick to worrying about me robbing banks."
"Or your drug dealing. I've been thinking that it's something you should quit. I know you like the money, honey, but it's just not right."
I laugh. "You're not going to make me give that up," I faux-groan. This is my favorite version of Mom. The relaxed, watch-romantic-movies-together Mom. The let's-stay-in-our-pj's-all-day Mom.
But suddenly she takes a sharp left turn into the version I'm not so thrilled with. The I-want-more-for-you Mom. I hear it in her voice, which goes up a few octaves. "So? How was school today?" she asks.
"Fine. I told you." I'm trying to keep the edge off of my words, but it's creeping in anyway. "And, no, no one asked me to homecoming."
"Jade. Jeez. I didn't say anything."
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But I know it's what she's really asking. It's in the way she says "So?" As if it can unlock a secret.
"Are you getting your period?" She narrows her eyes.
"No! God. I hate that. I hate when every negative act is blamed on your period." Sometimes bitchiness is just bitchiness, happily unattached to anything hormonal. It should get full credit.
"I'm sorry. I hate that too. It's just . . . You. I want you to have a great year," Mom says.
"I don't even want to go to homecoming. And no, it's not because of anxiety." We'd been mother and daughter long enough that I hear that in her voice too. When you've got a situation like mine, people are always looking at you sideways, trying to figure out what's you and what's the illness, as if there's some distinct line down the center of my body they should see but don't. "It's because of people dancing like they're having sex while you're trying not to feel weird about it and everyone all made up and phoniness and because somewhere inside you're always wishing you were home, eating popcorn and watching TV." In my opinion, dances like that are one of those painful things we all pretend are fun but really aren't.
Mom sighs. Her dress rustles. "I hear you. I do. Wait, what am I saying ? I never even went to a dance when I was your age. But your senior year. It should be fun. It should be one of the happiest in your life."
"You always tell me how much you hated your senior year," I say.
"I hated all of high school," she admits. "I was so glad to get to college, I cannot tell you. Let's just say, I was a late
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bloomer. College, now, that was a good time. College, I was good at. I had friends, went to parties, got good grades--the whole thing. But high school. Oh, my God."
"Ha-ha. You ate lunch in the library."
"Don't remind me. Not that there's anything wrong with the library."
"I don't eat lunch in the library. I'm happy," I say. "Look." I put on a huge, toothy smile. Wiggle my index fingers in the air. "See? Yay, happiness is flowing throughout me."
Mom smiles. "You goof."
"Happy happy, joy joy. Three cheers for late bloomers."
"What do you keep looking at? It feels like you, me, and your computer are having this conversation."
"Nothing." I focus on her. "Just elephants."
"All right. Oka
y. I'm going to go change." She says this reluctantly, as if getting back into her jeans will change everything back, coach to pumpkin, glass slippers to the big yellow Donald Duck ones we gave her for her birthday and I think she actually hated.
I'm glad when Mom leaves, because I don't want to miss that red jacket. I was so sure he'd be back that I'm bummed when I finally realize I must be wrong. No boy. No anyone, except for the Indian man in charge of the elephants.
I try to do homework--Advanced Placement American Government, Advanced Placement English, Calculus, Spanish, and Biology, which shows why I barely have a life. It's hard to concentrate, though. I keep peeking up, still holding out impossible hope for the nonexistent red jacket.
Another knock--Oliver, this time. You wouldn't believe how many years it took to train that kid to knock. He's ten
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years old, so minus one before he could walk--nine years. See, I'm not in Calculus for nothing.
"What?" I say, and he comes in. I bust up when he comes through the door. I could never quite get over the sight of Oliver in a football uniform. Oliver's kind of small for his age, and he has this narrow face and thoughtful, pointy chin. His hair is a soft blond like Mom's, where mine is black like Dad's. He looks too sweet for football. He is too sweet for football. That's why he's coming to see me.
"Don't laugh," he says. "I hate it. Help me." He holds his helmet under one beefed-up arm, just like you see the real football guys do. He waddles over, sits on my bed.
"Talk to him. Tell him how much you can't stand it." Him, meaning Dad. My father, Bruce DeLuna, is a financial officer for Eddie Bauer, and a bit sports obsessed. To him, there's nothing that can't be cured by a brisk jog or vigorous game of touch football, even anxiety. He had this whole "cure" mapped out for me once, which actually included calisthenics. Dad's the kind of person who thinks he knows "what is what" and how exactly things should be, which means he misses the point about most everything. I've gotten him off my back, though, mainly by using his narrow-minded female stereotyping to my benefit. Shameless, but it's a survival tactic. See, I'm a girl (the "just" hovers somewhere nearby in his mind, you can tell), and even though he constantly reminds me that I should be doing my "cardio," he lets me off the hook on the team-sports thing. He tried me in softball for a while, but I'm one of those wusses that flinch when a baseball flies at my face. A ball hit me in the leg once, and after that, all I could do was crouch and hover and wonder when it was going to happen again. I'm sorry, it's not my idea of a good time to stand alone