The Dark Side of Innocence

by Terri Cheney

  “No, I don’t think you’re crazy,” she said. “But I do think there’s something wrong with you. Maybe a doctor can help. I’ve asked around, and—”

  But the Black Beast wouldn’t stand for any more of this. He wouldn’t be caught, not after all these years, not by her or a doctor or anyone else. I tore my eyes away and ran out of the room, slamming the door behind me. It was the last time I was ever invited into my mother’s private sanctum.

  I threw myself down on my bed and fumed and kicked the covers. Here it was at last, the moment I’d always wanted: a chance to find out what was “wrong with me.” But now that it had finally arrived, the truth was, I was too terrified. I was seven years old all over again, certain I’d be carted away in an ambulance, or a straitjacket, or something worse, and my father would cease to love me. Plus, what would I possibly say to a doctor? The reality of my situation was just too bizarre, the feelings far too inchoate to ever be put into words. I knew; I’d tried in my poetry, and even the comforting confines of rhyme couldn’t rein in the blackness of my Beast.

  Toto was lying on my pillow, and I hugged him tight, then threw him hard against the wall. “What good are you?” I shouted, not sure whom I was shouting at: Toto, the Black Beast, or God. “You don’t protect me against anything.”

  The next moment I was down on my knees, sobbing, gathering Toto up in my arms and begging his—or someone’s—forgiveness. My tantrum had ripped apart one of his fragile seams. I got my sewing kit out of my closet and tried to thread a needle with the special golden yellow thread I always used for Toto’s wounds. But my hands were shaking too badly to aim, and I ended up stabbing myself with the needle.

  The pain felt good: appropriate to the moment. So I pricked the tip of each finger, then the tip of each toe. But I wasn’t going deep enough. I stabbed again, more viciously, until little droplets of blood oozed out. They were dark ruby red, almost purple. Like royal blood, I thought. I used to be her little princess, and now she thinks I’m insane. I ground the needle deeper still until the blood began to flow. At last, a queer serenity began to settle over me.

  “Don’t worry, tomorrow we’ll run,” I reassured the Black Beast, then leaned back and let the blood soothe me to sleep.

  But tomorrow never came—at least, not the tomorrow I was expecting. The next morning, my father came running into my room with the mail. “It’s here!” he said, and so it was, in neat, precise calligraphy: Vassar College, Office of Admissions.

  “You open it,” I said, hiding my bloodstained fingers under the bedspread.

  He snatched the letter opener off my desk and slit the envelope in one quick rip. His hands were trembling, and then his voice, as he read the six most glorious words in the English lexicon: “We are very pleased to announce . . .”

  I felt a sharp flutter, which should have been joy but was, in fact, relief. At last, I thought. Escape. And just in the very nick of time.

  Watching my father’s ecstasy was almost as good as having some of my own. He simply couldn’t contain himself. “Julia!” he bellowed. “We’re in!” Then he grabbed me in a big bear hug and squeezed me so tight I was afraid my own fragile seams would burst. My mother came running in. “Let me see, let me see!” She was followed a moment later by Zach, who had an odd look on his face but said, politely enough, “Congratulations, Terri Lynn.”

  None of them noticed my bloody hands.

  Everything happened so fast after that. Acceptance letters came pouring in from other colleges, I received numerous end-of-the-year awards, and the senior class voted me Most Likely to Succeed. My parents basked in the secondhand glory: how proud you must be, what a good job you’ve done, and what a fine family we were. “We always knew she’d do well,” my father told the mailman, puffing out his chest and trying hard to sound humble. “But we never expected anything like this.” My mother gave me second helpings of mashed potatoes without my even asking, beaming as she spooned them onto my plate. Even Zach stopped kicking me under the table.

  I alone was untouched by the furor. I was pleased, of course, by all the offers and awards, but it didn’t make much of a difference in my dreary mood. The Black Beast continued to mope and whine. “You’ll never get out of here soon enough,” he said, even as I crossed the rapidly diminishing days till graduation off my calendar with an emphatic red X. Only one thing broke through my veil of gloom: the subject of my mental health seemed to have been dropped for good, now that my future appeared assured. There was no more talk about doctors or shrinks, or anything being “wrong” with me—only kudos and congratulations and expressions of joy from all my teachers, my friends, and even the neighbors. The one time my mother tentatively said, “Remember what we talked about the other day . . .” my father shot her such a look, it could have killed a cobra midstrike. She didn’t say another word.

  Shortly after I accepted Vassar’s offer, Principal Osder called me into his office.

  “There were several ties for valedictorian, and the graduation committee has selected you to speak at this year’s ceremony,” he said. “Congratulations, Terri. We’re all so proud of you.”

  It was a very big deal to be valedictorian, not just because of the large size of our class but because for the first time ever, the speeches were going to be broadcast live by a local TV station. The news caught me off guard, and while I mimed the appropriate gratitude, I struggled to figure out how I actually felt about this. I’d been so disillusioned by the whole Tiny Teena debacle, I honestly didn’t know how much more I had left to give to the school. Part of me was just plain tired of performing, or maybe just plain tired; and I’d hoped that my graduation would be a fun, stress-free affair. A celebration, for once, a chance to kick back and party, not another mad scramble for the spotlight. For a moment—just a heartbeat, really—I considered saying no. But the Black Beast spoke up, loud and clear.

  “Don’t you dare!” he said, and while I wasn’t exactly sure why he said this, his voice was so adamant, his tone so insistent, I smiled at Principal Osder and said, “Thank you, sir. I’m truly honored.”

  My father, of course, was thrilled to pieces when I came home and told him the news. “Great, that gives us three whole weeks to work on your speech. We’ll make it letter-perfect,” he said.

  He looked so happy. What were a few more words, a clever turn of phrase or two, another bright light in my eyes, if it could bring him so much pleasure? I got out my three-by-five cards and waited for inspiration to strike. But the only words I could come up with were those same old well-worn seven: “I have to get out of here.” Hardly the makings of an inspirational speech.

  Finally, I pulled out my thesaurus and jotted down all the polysyllabic words that struck my fancy, thinking that perhaps if I wowed the audience with my erudition, they wouldn’t notice that I had nothing to say. Throughout the following weeks, I piled on all the synonyms I could think of for every trite concept expected of a commencement speech: auspicious, propitious, roseate, utopian, and so on. I rifled through my myriad books of quotations, squinting at the tiny print for hours at a time, coughing up a little Longfellow here (“. . . the great world of light, that lies behind all human destinies”) and a little Churchill there (“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”).

  I bored myself sick with valor and hope. My father hung on every word.

  You would think that hours of poring through awe-inspiring quotes would at least have lifted my sagging spirits. But no. As is always the danger with browsing through books, I was constantly diverted by other words better suited to my real mood. The Black Beast kept pointing out other quotes: “Use that one! No, that one! That one is perfect!” He was a continual buzz inside my head, like one of those wildly fornicating mosquitoes Galway Kinnell had described in his poem. I simply couldn’t ignore him. I’d try to copy down something uplifting, but the pencil would jerk out of control, or else my hand would just lie there, inert.

&n
bsp; Longfellow may have been lilting, but Nietzsche was only a few pages away, calling hope “the worst of all evils, because it prolongs the torments of man.” And for every good old Churchill soldiering on, there was a Voltaire decrying “the mania of maintaining that everything is well when we are wretched.” I couldn’t help it; these were perfect quotes, echoing exactly what I felt. I eventually gave up and just jotted down everything that the Black Beast liked and threw all those cards in a separate pile. What for? I didn’t know. It made me feel so queasy, I had to put the book of quotes away and go ask my mother for some Pepto-Bismol.

  Actually writing the speech was easier because it was just like sitting at our dinner table: I said everything except what was really going on inside. But I felt worse and worse with every word until, finally, I told my father I was done; I just couldn’t write anymore.

  “Do you think it’s the best speech you’ve ever written?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then you’re not really done with it, are you?” He pushed the speech back into my hands. It lay there like a dead white whale, stinking up the place.

  Despite the torpor of my words, despite the sluggishness of my intellect, tomorrows crept, as tomorrows will, until at last the Big Day arrived. It was a bad hair day. It was a bad skin day. It was a bad day all around. To get me going, I knocked back several slugs of the Strawberry Hill I kept hidden in my closet—not enough to make me drunk but enough to face the mirror. It didn’t help.

  I gave up trying to coax a curl out of my hair and just slicked it back behind my ears. The black cap and gown made the most of the dark purple circles that rimmed my eyes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d really slept, without visions of steel traps and cages chasing me.

  “Terri Lynn, don’t you maybe want to put on a little more blush? You look rather pale,” my mother said as I walked into the kitchen.

  “What for?” I asked, pushing aside the plate of toast and scrambled eggs she had fixed for me.

  “So you look nice for all the people.”

  “We’re all walking corpses. I might as well look like one.”

  “Suit yourself, dear. But there will be pictures, you know.”

  I knew, I knew. I was sick to death of everyone asking me if the TV cameras were going to make me nervous. Nervous would have required some spark of animation in my body. The extra publicity was fine with me—maybe they’d cover my funeral too: “Valedictorian kills herself after stunning oration. Family, friends distraught. City mourns. Film at eleven.”

  But by the time I was seated up on the stage, staring out at the football stadium full of thousands—literally, thousands—of unfamiliar faces, I was a good deal less cavalier. The TV camera bored a hole in my forehead. The red light was the devil’s eye, winking at me. A few other people gave some speeches, which I didn’t really listen to. I grew increasingly nervous, perspiring under my cheap polyester gown. Then my name was called, there was applause and a few catcalls, and I stepped up to the podium, clutching my three-by-five cards for dear life.

  “Fellow graduates of the class of seventy-eight, Principal Osder, distinguished guests, family, friends . . .” I faltered, took a sip of water, and started again. “Today is the day—Today is the day—” I looked down at my notes. It was a soaring speech, full of trumpets and triumph and onward, sweet victory; and none of it was the truth. I had all sorts of mountaineering metaphors I’d intended to use at the start, about climbing the summit, scaling the peaks, and so on, but they all sounded like hackneyed drivel to me.

  I looked out at the eager, upturned faces and picked out a few that I recognized—faces I had come to know and even love over the past four years. Rhonda, grinning from ear to ear. My cheerleading squad. The Student Council. Miss Miller, who had let me skip class to write. Tiny Teena, sniffling in the back row. They all deserved better than this. Hell, I deserved better than this.

  I coughed to cover up the uncomfortable silence, while a tremendous battle raged inside me: who was going to speak—me or the Black Beast? It was the same damned battle I’d fought since I was seven, and I could feel my hands begin to clench into the familiar, too-tight fists.

  “Not now,” I argued.

  “Now,” he insisted.

  I closed my eyes, and the Black Beast opened them. He looked around at all the unsuspecting faces, and a savage pleasure swept through my body. So much undefiled innocence; so much experience to impart.

  When I spoke, I barely recognized my voice. It was lower than my normal register, with an urgent vibrato underneath that could very well be mistaken for a growl. The slow, stately tempo felt strange, because usually when the Black Beast spoke, he talked so fast that people had difficulty understanding him. Now he—I—we—enunciated every word, every syllable.

  “Today,” I said, clutching the podium and staring fiercely at the little red light, “is nothing. It’s—” I cast around feverishly in my mind for an appropriate metaphor, wishing to Christ I’d brought along some of those great Nietzsche quotes. But even if I couldn’t remember the exact words, their emotional resonance still stayed with me. I seized on the lyrics of a popular song that had been nearing the top of the charts for the last few weeks: “—dust in the wind. That’s all we are and all we’ll ever be: dust in the wind.”

  I heard Principal Osder shifting nervously in his seat behind me, but the Black Beast kept on going. “No matter what accomplishments you think you have achieved, no matter where you go from here or what you ever do, you’re dust, and the wind is always blowing. Even as you sit here today, it’s blowing seconds of your life away. You might think you can stop it if you attend the right college, or get the right car, the right job, the right spouse, but you can’t. You’re just fooling yourself. The wind is always blowing.”

  “Terri—” Principal Osder whispered. I didn’t turn around.

  “Thousands of Chaffey graduates have come before us. Many more will follow. But mere numbers don’t add up to spit. The only thing remotely special about today, the only possible beauty in these boring, worn-out ceremonies, lies in whatever personal message is received by each one of us, as unique individuals. The labels we’ve attached to ourselves can’t do our living for us. We become dust in the wind the second we drift away from what we’ve made ours, from our own tiny but essential peculiarity.”

  Rivulets of sweat began to run down my forehead, stinging my eyes. I wiped them away and went on:

  “So know this, if you know nothing else: happiness is for each person something totally different, and what matters most to each of you probably means nothing to anyone else. Look around you. I mean it: actually look to either side of you.”

  A confused murmur rose from the stadium. Faces turned nervously from side to side.

  “Do they really care? Do they even know you, have you ever let yourself be seen? No. Understand that now, and you will save yourself a lifetime of grief. So let’s ponder not the magic but the true insignificance of this moment: one more speck of dust, caught up in one last breeze.”

  And then, all at once, I ran out of words. The Black Beast had had his say, and he left me, as he always did, to deal with the consequences. “Thank you very much,” I said, stepping back from the podium. I sat down next to Principal Osder and waited.

  Silence, a vast echo chamber, a throb of empty air: nothing, not even a cough.

  One Mississippi.

  Two Mississippi.

  Three Mississippi.

  And then it started. A single, lonesome clap from somewhere out in the bleachers to the left of me. Followed by another, and another, and another until, in a rippling percussive wave, the single claps became applause. Polite at first, perhaps perfunctory, I thought: just a way to ease the tension. But no. The wave began to build until it swept the entire stadium. The air, which had vibrated with such uncertainty a few seconds earlier, resounded with whistles and cheers. The students got to their feet, followed by the audience, the teachers, even Principal Osder. I alone s
tayed seated, stunned. I’d expected boos and hisses and eventual censure; anything but a standing ovation.

  Hadn’t they heard a word I’d said? I felt like a criminal who, for the life of me, couldn’t get caught.

  Three months later, I was seated in row twenty-one on the red-eye to New York, waiting for my Vassar adventure to begin. My entire family had trooped out to the airport to see me off: my mother openly crying, my father’s hands trembling a little as he slipped five hundred more dollars inside my purse “just in case.” Even Zach looked a bit misty around the edges, although he pretended to be more interested in the airplanes than in me.

  I was more than a little shaky myself, never having been farther than a hundred miles from home on my own before. It felt like that first day at Pomona College: “What will I do if I can’t find the bathroom?” But although I was properly tearful for my family’s benefit, inside I couldn’t keep the excitement from bubbling over. I was finally leaving, getting the hell out, going far, far away from everything I was so certain was “wrong with me.”

  I boarded the plane, stowed my bag under the seat, and fastened my seat belt low and snug, just like the rules tell you to do. The stewardess walked by and smiled at me—a good omen, I thought. There would be plenty more smiles from here on in, if only I kept to my agenda. The graduation speech had taught me a lot: my instincts were all wrong, I realized. I could never, ever trust the Black Beast to do anything but get me into trouble.

  Although my speech had been a wild success, it had frightened me to the core to hear words coming out of my mouth that I had never intended to say. I felt like I was walking on razor blades in thin-soled slippers. So from that day forward, I vowed to do everything differently. I even tried switching hands from right to left when I ate and wrote and blow-dried my hair, just to confound my natural instincts.

  The engines whined, and we started to taxi. I’d flown many times before, but taking off always made me nervous. I reached into my purse and got out my mother’s pearls—my pearls now, since to my utter surprise and delight she had given them to me as a graduation present. I stroked them, their cool, smooth opalescence soothing me, as it always had for as far back as I could remember.