The Dark Side of Innocence

by Terri Cheney

  I received an avalanche of college applications at the beginning of my senior year. I remember plowing through them with my father every night, making careful piles of yeses, nos, and maybes. As usual, Daddy wanted only the best for me, meaning instant visible status.

  “Oberlin?” I asked.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Princeton?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I was a little surprised by how eagerly he embraced the whole process, since it meant that I’d be leaving him for four years, and he would have to fight my mother alone. But any concerns he might have had on that score were apparently allayed by the prestige of having a daughter in a fancy Eastern college. He was giddy with anticipation, even excusing me from my usual chores because “she needs to focus,” he told my mother, when she grumbled about having to do the dishes. Poor Zach, who was getting his own brand of higher education at Burger King in those days, inherited laundry duty.

  My father had his agenda, I had mine. I searched through the applications for just the right one: the one that would serve as the complete antithesis to everything I now knew. Suburbia to me was a cheesy Hallmark card; I wanted engraved invitations to tea on gold-embossed stationery. Suburbia was leisure suits and bell-bottom jeans; I wanted white gloves and pearls, tweed and jodhpurs. I wanted to re-create the universe—not anew, but to go back in time to a more cultured, mannered, sophisticated era. I wanted, if possible, to leap forward into the past.

  I had an excellent reason for seeking out time-honored tradition, beyond just its surface appeal. If I had learned anything from my life thus far, it was that my only real safety lay in a strong façade. Given my constant internal chaos, I needed a careful exterior. Something to divert the eye from what was really going on inside me—to contain and obscure the monster within. And then at last, after poring through countless applications, I found the perfect façade to hide behind: I wanted to be a Vassar girl.

  I’d heard the phrase my entire life, “Oh, she’s a Vassar girl,” and the image immediately sprang to mind of a certain kind of woman: upper class, obviously, but with a streak of artistic bohemianism thrown in to make the palette interesting. I’d seen it often enough in the movies: Marilyn Monroe, for example, in Some Like It Hot, trying to pass herself off as a Vassar girl to impress pseudosocialite Tony Curtis. But it was more than just the moneyed allure that enthralled me. I thought of the alumnae: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Bishop, Meryl Streep, and so on. Jackie Kennedy went there for a while, even Jane Fonda. Impressive women all, and perhaps because my forays into dating had always been so disastrous, I had a very sketchy sense of myself as a woman. I could feel it, like a lacuna in my psyche.

  At Vassar, it would be acceptable—no, necessary—to be a strong, intelligent woman. This was true, of course, of all the Seven Sisters schools, but in my mind there was an important distinction. While Bryn Mawr or Radcliffe might turn out a lady academic, Vassar would turn out a lady.

  I pictured myself wearing sleek black cocktail gowns and drinking vodka martinis. It had not escaped my notice—indeed, it was a leading factor in my decision—that the drinking age in New York was eighteen. All the while, I’d be carrying on brilliant conversations with other men and women, for Vassar was coed by then, about wide-ranging subjects like art and politics and morals and poetry. It would be brittle and witty and just this side of risqué, for there was something slightly unsettling about a Vassar girl. She was different, a little bit dangerous, even; wild, at times unpredictable. I thought the Black Beast might find camouflage there.

  And so began my single-minded pursuit of honor and glory—offerings to lay at Vassar’s feet. Even though I had straight As and an extensive extracurricular record, I knew I’d have to do a lot more to catch the elitist admissions officers’ eyes. I was, I realized, a nobody from nowhere. Big as Chaffey High School was, even I discounted it. Where was Ontario? Who was I? I took the SAT exam as early as I could, then took it again until I achieved a near-perfect score.

  If there was a contest anywhere, I entered it. If an honor was offered, I went for it. It was madness of a kind—a yearning for acclaim that knew no bounds or limits. My pursuit of romance fell by the wayside; I had little time for friends. My awards-seeking compulsion took precedence over everything. It was a life-or-death proposition, like hacking through Mordor.

  I suspect I must have been manic—my soaring energy and ambition certainly suggest it. I didn’t need sleep; I barely stopped for meals. And there was a synchronicity to my efforts: if I learned something one minute, I was able to apply it the next. Each new thought flowed into another, and another, and yet another, until there was a liquidity to the universe that I’ve since experienced only in full-blown mania. Everything connected.

  But mania is a great exaggerator, so the teeniest, tiniest flux in my blood felt seismic. As a result, I was terrified the entire time—not so much of having to win as of having to be consistent. The necessity of constantly showing up on schedule for scholastic competitions was like one of my worst nightmares coming true. In the past, I’d never known which Terri would wake up on the day of an exam: the one with all the answers on the tip of her tongue or the one that could barely speak? The one with insight as crystalline as a Dutch still life, sharp and clear in every detail? Or the one whose mind was enshrouded by fog, thick and gray and impenetrable? Based on my past history, I knew I could succeed—I just didn’t know if I would survive.

  I decided to talk to my father about it. I remember one night—I think it was before the big Bank of America competition—I went to him, trembling and very near tears. He was, as usual, nursing a scotch in his brown leather chair and smoking a Camel. He peered at me through the nicotine haze.

  “Baby, what’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I don’t think I can go through with it.” He knew without asking what I meant.

  “But it’s your most prestigious event so far,” he said. “Vassar will be very impressed when you win.”

  “I’m not going to win.”

  “Tell me one good reason why.”

  I wanted to let him in on my dilemma, but only so far. Our relationship hadn’t healed to the point where I was willing to trust him with absolute truth. Besides, I didn’t have words for the truth. I had to fumble for language we could both understand.

  “There will be so many people there, and I truly don’t know . . .” I faltered.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “Who I’ll be when I wake up tomorrow.”

  He looked puzzled. I decided to try another tack, a little further from the truth but still so close to the core that I turned beet red when I spoke the words.

  “The thing is, Daddy, I’m terribly shy.”

  He laughed so hard that his face flushed too. “You? Shy? Honey, you’re a born predator.”

  I knew he meant it as a compliment, but “predator” was so close to “beast,” I got confused and was too scared to continue. Was it possible he had guessed the truth? Maybe the Black Beast had grown so strong, he was becoming visible. That was the last time I ever dared to speak to my father about my fear of competition.

  Fortunately, I woke up the next morning on fire and eager to go. Which didn’t mean the fear was gone; it was just lacquered in adrenaline and a fair amount of alcohol. I’d discovered that with just enough drink in me, I was passionate, effusive, enraptured by my subject. I spoke as if I meant every word, and for that brief spate of time in the spotlight, I did. I forget now what the Bank of America debate was all about, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me back then. It didn’t even matter which side I was on. “Resolved: The emancipation of women is the single most important event of our lifetimes” versus “Resolved: The emancipation of women is a misogynist slur.” Who cared? I was an intellectual whore.

  Every once in a while, I’d be unsteady on my feet, but I’m sure the judges just thought it was nerves. I never drank so much that I slurred my speech—only enough so that
I could move my body freely, fiercely, through the field of battle, without fear of my bête noire, paralysis. It was odd and rather amazing how well I was able to control my alcohol intake when academic achievement was at stake, because whenever I drank socially, all that cautious self-control dissolved like the Certs I was forever sucking to mask my breath.

  One drink at a party, and I’d be wide-eyed; two, I’d be amorous; three, I’d be your bestest friend, your long-lost soul mate and confidante; four, I’d want to tell the world how wonderful life was; five, the world was a vile place, and I was the worst of its inhabitants. I didn’t have the tremendous capacity that I developed later on. At six or more drinks, I’d be spewing my guts out all over the neighbor’s backyard or a convenient rosebush. But I never, in all my extravagant displays of social sloppiness, told anyone about the Black Beast. Some secrets are simply buried so deep that they can’t even be thrown up.

  During academic competitions, however—in what I later came to think of as my “professional drinking”—I limited myself to three or four deep swigs, max. I doubt that anyone even suspected I’d had a single drink. I just didn’t look the type. Nineteen seventy-eight may have been a wild time for fashion, but I partook of no extremes: no mile-high platform shoes, no garish tie-dyes or fringed leather vests. I wore cautious suits and tailored separates, and I snipped my waist-long hair that year into the precisely manicured bob that I’ve clung to the rest of my life. In old photographs, I look like a lawyer-in-training (which, as it turns out, I was).

  I soon amassed a great many honors, all the way from local-yokel commendations to National Merit Scholarship finalist. They looked great, piled up high on my bookshelves and spilling out onto my desk. But I was running my mind and body so hard that my mother became worried. She didn’t share my father’s rabid excitement about the prospect of my attending Vassar. She wanted me to stay close to home; she thought Pomona College would be ideal. One night she came into my bedroom while I was preparing for the next day’s contest.

  “Stop that for a few minutes and listen to me,” she said, taking the pen out of my hand.

  “I can’t, I’ve got too much to do,” I said, grabbing it back.

  “You don’t look well. You’re losing weight, and there are circles under your eyes. I hear you up and about at all hours of the morning. Aren’t you sleeping?”

  With her mother’s instinct and nurse’s insight, she’d honed in on the truth, but I couldn’t let her know, for fear she’d curtail my activities. Sleep had always been a big problem for me. When the Black Beast was in paralysis mode, I did nothing but sleep: days and days at a time of unwholesome, sweat-soaked, dream-heavy slumber that left me weary upon waking. But when he was in mission mode, as he was at that moment, I rarely slept. A quick snatch of an hour or two near morning seemed to suffice. I couldn’t close my eyes any longer than that: there was too much to see to, too much to do.

  What my mother couldn’t know, because I did my best to keep them hidden from her, was that I’d begun to develop some troubling obsessive-compulsive tics. “Tics,” at least, was what I called them, but no doubt that was putting it a bit mildly. On days when I was scheduled to compete, I could barely make it out of my room. I had to close the door, kneel down, and cross myself sixty-three consecutive times. (My lucky number, twenty-one, times my other lucky number, three.) All the while, I’d be saying a one-word prayer to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes: “Please please please please please please please . . .”

  The hardwood floor was so unforgiving, I had permanent bruises on both of my knees. If I forgot my count, I had to start again from the beginning. And then I had to repeat the whole ritual right before each competition, just to feel safe. So I spent a lot of time in strange bathrooms, down on my knees. If someone came in while I was doing my routine, I had to stop and do it all over again. I began showing up earlier and earlier to the events to make sure that I had time to “prepare,” as I called it.

  Alcohol, again, came to my rescue. I’m sure the tics would have been much worse without its soothing effect. I kept a bottle in my car at all times and fortified myself immediately before each contest, and during breaks, if possible. I didn’t like to think about how much I was drinking. The few times that I did, usually in the midst of a horrific hangover, I rationalized to myself that others didn’t have a Black Beast to pacify. When the Beast refused to let me move, I simply had no choice: I needed the drink to jump-start my body. It wasn’t merriment, it was medicine.

  And then once fluidity was restored, there would always be that moment—that single brief and shining moment—when I didn’t feel despair. I didn’t feel elation. I didn’t feel much of anything, and for me the absence of constant, nagging emotion was a glorious sensation. At those times, alcohol didn’t make me drunk, so far as I could tell. I think it made me normal.

  The concept of “normal” had me stymied. I wanted it and despised it all at the same time. I didn’t know, and I guess I never will, how much of my anguish was illness and how much was normal teenage angst. Certainly the intensity of my emotions, as compared to my friends’, seemed way out of proportion, and the severity and rapidity of my mood swings were most peculiar. For a good part of my adolescence, I watched my friends and brother like a hawk, trying to mimic what seemed like normal reactions to various stimuli. Oh, I thought, so this is how one does disappointed. This is how one does happy.

  But while they had desires, they didn’t seem to yearn. They sought to achieve, but not to a frenzy. When they felt rejection, it eventually passed. They didn’t wallow in sorrow as I did, prolonging it and nurturing it, reveling in the ecstasy of pure suffering. In short, their emotions appeared to me to be watered down, like the cheap wine that I drank so often.

  My acute awareness that I wasn’t normal was one of the reasons the essay portion of the Vassar application had me so concerned. It had to expose my inner core without hinting at the havoc that lay within. But how could I fully express myself without tipping off the admissions officers to my bizarre inner life? What if a whiff of the Black Beast came through?

  Once again, Miss Miller inspired me. “Why don’t you give them ‘The Game’?” she suggested. In a moment of semi-sloshed bravery, I’d shared bits and pieces of it with her, but I’d never shown the entire thing to anyone, not even my father. It made me feel too raw, too naked—like Dorian Gray face to face with his portrait. But I was a little bit in love with Vassar by then, and it seems that whenever I am in love, I can’t help but serve up my heart. So I typed up “The Game,” gave a copy to Miss Miller, and submitted it with my application.

  The end, or so I thought. But no: Miss Miller mimeographed “The Game” and, with my reluctant permission, handed it out to all her classes. It became something of a cause célèbre, and for the first time in my life, I was popular for a reason that had nothing to do with the usual trappings of popularity: good looks, money, or social connections.

  “The Game” was only a few pages long, but it was alive; it bristled with indignation. I’d tapped into something universal in adolescence: anger at the status quo and a dawning realization that life was not going to work unless and until one played by the rules. It was those rules that I really raged against—who made them up, and where was I when they’d been put to the vote?

  Why, for example, did I have to spend an hour every morning putting on mascara, curling my hair, picking out just the right outfit, all in a vain attempt to be “pretty”? Why did pretty matter at all? Why wasn’t ugly ever given its due? Even I, who’d always hated ugliness so much, had evolved enough in the past few years to realize that every ugly person had something unique: a certain lack of symmetry that ought to be celebrated, not reviled. True beauty could never lie in conformity. Conformity wasn’t beautiful, because it wasn’t brave.

  The piece ended on a disturbing note—disturbing in retrospect, but written rather matter-of-factly at the time. The only draft I retain reads:

  I am bored, I am t
ired. My muscles ache with every movement, and I can no longer muster intensity for such a trivial little game. I seek a challenge, a freshness—the next level of competition. Unfortunately, it’s not to be found on these playing fields, and so I shall move on. The best players always move on, or else stop playing altogether. Which is perhaps the smartest move of all.

  I think it was the first true suicide note I’d ever written, even though I had no concrete plan. I simply knew that I had to get out of there somehow, even if “somehow” meant death.

  It was the misfit in me reaching out to the masses, and the masses responded. People I’d never seen before, never even knew existed, came up to me in between classes to tell me how much they’d loved what I’d written. Fat kids, skinny kids, kids from the chess club and the math club and the marching band—these, perhaps, I’d expected to get it. What astonished me was how many of the popular kids also seemed to understand. Bobbie Brandon, who’d been voted Prettiest Girl three years in a row, sat down next to me at lunch.

  “Your story was really neat,” she said, and her articulation ended there, but the tears in her turquoise-shadowed eyes spoke volumes. Even Elisa, who hadn’t said a word to me since the whole Bob Greene fiasco, stopped me on the way to English class and gave me a big hug.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” she said.

  It was a heady experience, feeling understood: one of, not one apart. Headier still was the knowledge that I could move my world with words.

  For a week, nobody could touch me. I was soaring, high as a fighter kite, and twice as full of big blue sky. Human beings weren’t so bad after all. They’d just needed a push in the right direction. A warm sense of belonging suffused my body; I could feel its glow upon my skin. When I looked in the mirror, for once I didn’t see flaws. I saw a face—just a face, like any other: two eyes, a nose, and a mouth that wouldn’t stop smiling. “Look at me, I’m one of you!” I wanted to shout to anyone who could hear me.