by Terri Cheney
It would have been a happy, even ecstatic time, but for one thing: the sudden and unexpected betrayal of my body. I’d gone through puberty smoothly enough a few years before, with all the usual bumps and grinds: the terror of my first menstruation, the strange swellings and sproutings here and there. Somehow I’d managed to stay connected to my body throughout that rite of passage. But at sixteen, the moorings came loose. My body was no longer the container for my soul. It was an enemy, out to shame and humiliate me at every opportunity.
All these years later, I still don’t find it easy to write about my archnemesis, my scourge, the bane of my existence: acne. I realize that may sound anticlimactic. All teenagers get acne. It’s just a passing phase, a hex of the hormones.
Maybe for somebody else.
A pimple was not just a pimple to me. It was tangible impurity, and it didn’t matter to me that everyone else was fighting it too. I’d never been like everyone else. I’d spent my entire life trying to avoid the appearance of imperfection. Nothing was scarier to me than a visible flaw, except perhaps my father’s leaving; and in fact, the two were inextricably linked in my mind. Show a flaw, lose a father.
No doubt my perception was distorted. I didn’t even have that bad a case, objectively; at most, I probably got one or two new pimples a week. But perhaps—just perhaps—there was some undercurrent of truth to my fear about my father, because he was uncharacteristically critical about my acne. I’ll never forget the morning I woke up with a huge, glaring pimple right in the center of my forehead. I tried makeup, which only made it look worse. I tried squeezing it, but it wasn’t ready, and I ended up with an angry red swelling the size of a dime. Finally, in desperation, I pulled on an old Dodgers baseball cap and went in to breakfast. Girls didn’t wear baseball caps to school in those days, at least not to my school, and it looked decidedly odd with the rest of my outfit. (I had a Student Council meeting that day and was wearing my best three-piece suit.)
My father took one look at me and asked, “What’s with the hat?”
“It’s the latest thing,” I lied. “Casual conservative.”
“Well, it looks ridiculous. Take it off.”
“Everybody’s doing it.”
“And if everybody else was smoking pot, does that mean you would too?”
As a matter of fact, everyone else was smoking pot, but thus far I’d abstained out of respect for my parents’ wishes and fear of damaging the only part of me I still rather liked about myself: my agile brain.
“No, of course not,” I said.
“Then take it off.”
Reluctantly, I pulled the cap off my head and revealed the pimple, which was no doubt even more swollen now than when I’d last looked in the mirror. My father stared at me, and when he spoke, after what seemed like ten minutes, he sounded shocked.
“Baby, you’ve got a pimple on your forehead.”
“I know.” I burst into tears.
“How long do you think it will take that thing to go away?”
“Four, maybe five days.”
“Well, you certainly can’t go to school looking like that.” He picked up the phone and got me excused from classes for the rest of the week. I believed in my heart he was only trying to protect me—kids can be so cruel, and I was such a sensitive girl—but his reaction only reinforced my belief that the world was not a safe place to show one’s scars.
I was missing an awful lot of school—my father never hesitated to excuse me when he felt my pimples demanded it—until a complication arose. Tryouts were being held for junior varsity cheerleader. I’d always been a cheerleader, from grade school on. I couldn’t imagine not being one. Cheerleading was part of my identity; it was who I saw in the mirror. And ironically, all the attention that came along with it kept people from looking too close: all they saw was the cute little uniform. I felt safe inside the stereotype.
But tryouts meant I’d have to go to school every single day for the next three weeks to learn the routines and campaign for votes. How could I possibly do that when I couldn’t predict from one morning to the next what my external appearance would be? Courtesy of the Black Beast, I already didn’t know how I’d feel from day to day. Now I didn’t know how I would look. My world was a giant pendulum that someone else was swinging. Neither my body nor my mind really belonged to me or felt within my control.
The solution finally struck me when I was watching my father shave one morning. He nicked himself, and neither of us thought twice about it when he went out of the house with a Band-Aid still attached to his skin. I realized then that the pimples themselves weren’t actually the problem. It was the label affixed to them: “acne vulgaris,” our family doctor had said. (There were, perhaps, uglier words in the universe, but if there were, I couldn’t imagine them.) No one would harbor the same disgust if the pimples were something else—an innocent wound of some kind, for example.
That was one of my first recognitions of the all-important power of the label. Call something one thing, and you’ll evoke a shudder. Call it something else, and nobody will care. It was a marvelous way of wielding power, a discovery I would never forget. (Years later, I was asked on certain nasty forms if I’d ever been diagnosed with a psychiatric illness. “Hypothalamic disorder,” I answered, which was just another fancy way of saying “depression.” It never raised an eyebrow.)
So that morning, once again I picked up Daddy’s razor. I had stopped cutting myself between my legs when the fights between my mother and me had deescalated. But I hadn’t forgotten the feeling of serenity the nicks of the razor had delivered. Holding my breath and steadying my hand against the mirror, I put the tip of the blade against the rawest, reddest pimple, and cut a quick X through the center. Blood and a thick white fluid oozed out and trickled down my face. It was deeply disgusting, and even more deeply soothing. The pimple no longer looked like a pimple anymore. It looked like I’d been in some kind of accident. I quickly put a Band-Aid over it and went out to face the day.
It worked. I got a few questions, of the “What happened to you?” variety, but I remembered my mother’s old explanation for the cuts I’d once made on her face with my fingernails. “A neighbor’s cat scratched me,” I said. That same neighbor’s cat scratched me several more times over the next three weeks, but all it yielded were a few jokes and some ribbing. I suppose it would have been enough just to cover the pimples without cutting them first, but for some reason that felt like a lie. Plus I was afraid the Band-Aids might fall off during cheerleading practice, and then my lie would be exposed. So I just kept on cutting and cutting, each time experiencing a wave of solemn satisfaction that I was outsmarting the world.
I couldn’t outsmart my mother, though. “What cat?” she asked me suspiciously when I tried to explain my Band-Aids at dinner. Fortunately, my mother never talked to our neighbors, so she didn’t know I was lying when I described the fictitious litter of kittens that had just been born next door. “They pay me two bucks a day for feeding them,” I continued, knowing that would make it okay.
She really couldn’t blame me, anyway. For as long as I could remember, I’d been taught the essential lesson that the way things looked was far more important than the way things actually were. I never thought to question that lesson—the unshakable foundation of my early life. All I knew of its origin was that it went way back to before I was born, and it had something to do with a baby blue Cadillac.
It seems that when my father was courting my mother, he made up all sorts of stories about his fabulous wealth, when, in fact, he was living out of a suitcase in a Santa Monica flophouse, subsisting on cans of chili and Spam. But Daddy had considerable charm, if nothing else. He looked like a young Frank Sinatra, wavy-haired and slim as the cigarette he held between two fingers, only occasionally bringing it to his lips to take a drag—as if he had a hundred more cigarettes at his disposal and could afford to let this one burn out, or not, at his leisure.
But it took the baby blue Cadillac to convi
nce my mother of his worth. She could choose from plenty of eligible men. She didn’t need a mysterious young man whose only stated profession was “sales.” My mother hadn’t been bred to appreciate mystery. She was from good, solid farm stock, her family’s roots planted deep in the earth. They’d made an excellent living out of the cold, hard soil of eastern Canada, enough to send my mother to the best nursing school around, where she was fully expected to catch herself a man. A doctor, they all hoped. Or at the very least, a dentist. With those cheekbones, those hips, that thick mane of hair, how could she possibly fail? But they didn’t count on New Year’s Eve, and the annual hospital charity ball, or on my father’s inexplicable way with women. Somehow he managed to convince my mother to be his date for the gala, despite the fact that she had several other invitations, all of them from interns or residents. “Just you wait,” he promised her. “You’ll be the queen of the ball.”
So she waited and waited, all dressed up in her cinched-waist ball gown with three stiff layers of petticoats scratching her knees. She waited, and she itched. She waited, and she fumed. But at last, an hour late, my father showed up, and the wait was well worth it.
She could hear it coming all the way down the street: a low, throaty purr, like the MGM lion. Then two sudden beeps of the horn, so loud and brash they startled the roosting pigeons out of the tree beneath her window. She stepped out onto the balcony, looked down, and there he was: street light shining on his smooth, wavy hair, right arm draped casually across the wheel of the most beautiful baby blue Cadillac my mother had ever seen.
“It was love at first sight,” she told me time and again, describing that moment. It’s a phrase that always puzzled me, because that was not my parents’ first date. It was also, naturally, not my father’s car. He had sweet-talked the dealer into letting him borrow it for that night only. So, the truth: my mother fell in love with a baby blue Cadillac. Under the spell of the infatuation, she accepted my father’s proposal that very night. The next morning, of course, he had to return the car.
I heard this story often and early enough to absorb the message: appearances were extremely important in our family. And if you had to lie to uphold them, so be it.
Maybe it was the weird bandages on my face, or maybe it was just my time for the world to fall apart. Whatever the reason, I didn’t make junior varsity cheerleader. I lost. Let me repeat: I lost. Losing out on junior varsity cheerleader may not sound like much of a catastrophe, but for me it felt cataclysmic. When you’re chemically unstable, even the most insignificant thing can kick off a major episode of mania or depression.
I’d never lost anything before in my life. Okay, maybe the odd game of Monopoly or chess with Zach, but never anything that really mattered to me. I always got incredibly nervous before elections or exams, but I always aced them. Always. That was just the way my life worked. Panic and succeed, panic and succeed.
I literally couldn’t imagine life outside the pantheon. How would I ever face my friends? My enemies? The teachers? The neighbors? The mailman? The guy who cleaned the pool? My mind reeled, and the list went on and on.
When I got the call telling me I hadn’t made the squad, I handled it like a lady. “Thank you,” I said politely. Then I reached down and yanked the telephone cord out of the wall. I couldn’t bear the thought of the inevitable calls: “Did you make it? Did you make it?” What could I possibly say? I tried to pronounce the words “I lost,” but they wouldn’t come out of my throat. I had to struggle to breathe, as if I were having an asthma attack.
My parents were in the kitchen. They’d been eagerly awaiting that phone call too. My mother had even made cupcakes with orange and black icing, the school colors. “Congratulat—” they started to shout. Then they saw the stricken look on my face, and the shout died on their lips.
“What’s wrong, baby? Was there a tie?” my father asked.
I shook my head, still speechless.
“You can’t mean—”
I nodded.
“No.”
I nodded again.
“Well, what do you know about that,” he said and sank back into his chair.
My mother tried to soften the blow. “There’s always next year,” she said. “Varsity cheerleader’s much better than junior varsity.”
It’s easy to look back on your life and see the moments that might have changed everything if they were handled differently. I’ve often wondered if my father had taken me into his arms, or if my mother had said, “Don’t worry, sweetie. We love you anyway,” what my life might have been like after that. I didn’t need to be taught how to win, but I desperately needed to know how to lose. I never learned that lesson.
An awkward silence stretched out between us. We were in foreign territory, and nobody knew what to say. Finally, I said, “I’m exhausted. I’m going to my room.” And so I did. For twenty-one days.
It was the longest continuous period of despondency I’d ever experienced. I didn’t want to watch TV. I didn’t want to read. I could barely be bothered to breathe: what was the point of sucking air out of a universe that so clearly despised me? I didn’t even come out for meals, although a gnawing, unappeasable hunger tormented me. I stayed in my room until everyone else was asleep, then I crept to the kitchen and devoured everything in sight: the leftovers from dinner, giant bowls of cereal, all the cookies in the cookie jar, slices of bread slathered with butter, heaping tablespoons of brown sugar, chocolate syrup straight out of the can. I consumed anything that didn’t need defrosting—even odd things, like iced coffee packets and raw pancake mix. It didn’t matter what I ate, it wasn’t enough to fill up the sinkhole in my heart, the big caved-in place where my confidence and self-esteem used to be.
My mother noticed the missing food, and at first she accused Zach, whose appetite was indeed enormous. When Zach denied it, she turned to me. “I can’t help it,” I said and started to cry. “I’m starving.” My mother never could stand the sight of my tears, and that was the last she said about it. I think it was easier for her to just replace the food than try to reason with my inexplicable hunger.
To stay out of school, at first I faked a tummy ache. Then the flu. Then asthma. Then the flu again. But by the end of ten days, even my father was growing concerned about how much time I was missing, although he dutifully picked up my homework for me. I couldn’t do the work, so it didn’t much matter, but he insisted.
“Should we send her to the doctor, do you think?” he asked my mother.
“She’s just having one of her spells,” she replied. “Ignore it, and she’ll get bored soon enough.”
I was way past bored. Bored would have been a pleasant relief from the intensity of pain I was experiencing. It was physical—so physical I wondered if, indeed, I did have the flu. My joints ached. The knuckles on my fingers throbbed, and the muscles in my face and throat felt so stiff and sore, it was an effort to speak. So I said less and less, just “yes,” “no,” and “I don’t want to.” With one exception: my acne got so bad, I finally called the doctor to see what he could do. He prescribed a strong dose of steroids—hardly the best medication for someone with chronic depression, but of course, I didn’t know that then. From that point on, I slid into a bottomless, black void, a place so dark and desolate that I was astonished to see the sun rise every morning, as if it were just another cloudless, temperate Southern California day and not the end of all life as I knew it.
In the beginning, my friends called every day to see how I was doing.
“Rhonda’s on the phone,” my father would say.
“Tell her I’m in the shower.”
“Maria wants to talk to you.”
“Tell her I’m in the shower.”
Allison, Elisa, Patty, Donna, Carrie—practically all the Mauna Loas called. I was always in the shower, until, finally, they gave up.
All except Rhonda. One of the reasons she was my best friend was that she didn’t take no for an answer. Whenever I would drop out of sight, which
was often, she would pester me until I agreed to see her—although not until the worst of the “spell” had passed. But about a week into my illness, Rhonda also stopped calling. I was filled with foreboding because I knew she wasn’t one to give up so easily. Sure enough, the next night, there was a knock at our door. My mother peeked through the kitchen blinds, then came into my bedroom to tell me it was Rhonda. I froze.
“You can’t let her see me like this!” I pleaded. I hadn’t showered in a week. My hair was lank and stringy; no doubt I even smelled bad. Then came another knock, this one louder than the first. “Just don’t answer it,” I begged my mother. “She’ll go away eventually.”
“She saw me peeking through the blinds,” my mother said. “I can’t pretend I didn’t see her.”
I thought fast and furiously. “If you let her in, she’ll see what a mess the house is in, and she’ll tell her mother. You know what a gossip she is; she’ll tell everyone. It’s obvious we’re not fit for company.”
That struck home. My parents almost never entertained because, in my mother’s opinion, the house was never “fit for company.” “Fit for company” was deep, dark code: it meant that everything had to be spotless, shiny, and pristine. As a result, to this day I have an immense fear of guest towels. Whenever those tiny, delicate, intricately embroidered monsters emerged from the linen closet, I knew there was big trouble ahead. Inevitably, they would be followed by a week of dust rags and silver polish, Lysol and Windex, and frozen dinners for breakfast and lunch.