* * *
My parents said Augusta, Georgia, the town where my father had grown up, was the right place for him to start his own medical practice at last, but I couldn’t picture living there. I knew it only from visiting my grandparents during the Masters golf tournament once every few years. We had taken road trips there, when my brother and I would splash around in my grandparents’ pool with the children of my father’s five younger siblings. As the oldest of all the cousins, I often got bored hanging out with the little kids, and I’d wander upstairs to find my grandfather’s collection of Stephen King paperbacks.
When we arrived in Augusta that summer, my mother arranged an introduction to two girls my age. She dropped me off at the Augusta Mall, and I soon found myself sitting with two strangers before a slice of greasy pizza too large for its paper plate. After lunch, we cruised the department store perfume counters, spritzing and waving. Should we go to Banana Republic? Oh, definitely. You like belts? I like belts! Maybe things wouldn’t be so bad.
Things were fine.
* * *
I fainted in Augusta with some regularity. I once fainted in my room while I was doing homework, smack right onto my algebra. When I woke up, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. My face looked like wax, white and shiny.
After making it through high school, I selected Davidson College in North Carolina with all the anywhere-but-here intention of a senior who’s just ready to get out. But once I got there, I imprinted on it like a baby duck. I had attended six different schools growing up—none of which I chose—but this one was mine. This town was mine. These people were mine. The modular bed/desk/wardrobe/loft combo in the dorm room I shared with a soft-spoken anthropology major from South Carolina was mine. I made the best friends of my life, and although we all knew it would be over in four years, at least we all knew. It wasn’t just me who would have to leave. Everyone would be shaken back out into the world at the same time, and until then, we were in this together.
* * *
I once fainted in the hallway between my dorm room and the hall bathroom while wearing a towel. Another time, I fainted while getting dressed and hit my head on a chair, giving myself a goose egg I had to explain for a week.
* * *
The further I get into adulthood, the less it has happened. I’ve never fainted while driving. When I became a new mother, I used to wonder what would happen if it ever occurred when I was at home alone with the children. It did, once, and as it turns out, they saw Mom’s sudden nap as a great opportunity to get into the pantry and gorge themselves on salty pretzels and powdery mini-marshmallows.
I still think of fainting when I think about moving, and not just because I fainted everywhere I lived. Neurologists say that repeating the same thought patterns or behaviors over time can create mental pathways your brain automatically takes in the future. If the pattern persists long enough, it forges a circuit in your mind that becomes hardwired. This makes perfect sense when I consider how many of my behaviors as an adult come from patterns set years ago: I brush my teeth starting with the back upper-left teeth, then upper-right, then lower-left, then lower-right, then front. Always the same. If you made me do it in a different order, it would feel like writing with my left hand.
I’m no brain doctor, but I suspect that just as my body developed a go-to response to a drop in blood pressure, my mind came to expect a certain routine: Move somewhere, get used to it, then go somewhere else. I think that’s why later, after spending several years in one place, I got antsy to move, although there were other reasons, too.
I do know that learning to give in to sudden fainting spells and weathering the end of friendships severed by childhood moves gave me practice in accepting, without struggle, the unexpected. Don’t make a big deal, let it pass, everything’s fine.
P-O-I-S-O-N
I was living away from home for the first time. This meant I was doing a lot of things simply because they were not what I would have done under my parents’ roof. Getting haircuts that were bold but not particularly flattering. Wearing crop tops that left my belly chilled by an uncomfortable breeze. Eating cereal and drinking Coke and calling it dinner, not because it made me feel good, but because I could. Because no one could stop me. I was defiantly, absurdly, the boss of myself.
It was also the early 1990s, which means I was emerging into the world having been fed a diet of late-’80s television. If there was a theme to TV relationships back then, it was painful longevity. Perhaps I’d taken in too many seasons of Thirtysomething or too many afternoons of The Oprah Winfrey Show, but I had it in my head that the whole point of a grown-up relationship was to take on life’s rocky obstacles and work things out, episode after episode. This made sense to my goal-oriented mindset. If success at a task came from effort, why would relationships be any different? It must be normal for love to require a lot of work.
* * *
Whenever talk among my friends turns to past relationships, it comes out that at some point everyone dated a person who was totally wrong but really fun for a little while.
I knew him socially. He was popular, loud, kind of a clown. Our mutual friends probably kept him around so they could enjoy watching his stunts without suffering the consequences of them. Someone might say, “I wonder what happens if you drink a whole bottle of mustard?” and he would pick up a bottle of French’s and try it. He did spot-on impressions of rappers, presidents, radio commercials . . . you name it. He was human entertainment.
Perhaps I was drawn to him because he didn’t fit the profile of anyone I dated before (or after, for that matter). In my short dating history thus far, I’d been with nice guys, friendly nerds. But when he hit on me at a party, he got my attention. No one had ever just grabbed my sleeve, pulled me over, and kissed me square on the lips before. I probably should have slugged him, but I was too naive to be anything but impressed. He knocked me off-kilter and made me see myself in a new way. Was I the kind of woman who inspired spontaneous kissing?
In retrospect, I picture tiny mythical creatures—fate fairies, you might say—buzzing around the two of us, trying to signal me. There they were, hovering over his head, crossing their arms in a “No!” gesture whenever I leaned toward him. They shook their wands in my face when I picked up the phone to call him. I believe we all have these little voices telling us what we should be doing (whether we call them fate fairies or something else), and when we’re ready, we pay attention to them. But before we’re ready, they might as well be mute. When they first showed up, I was deaf to their protests. I missed the signs.
There was the time he canceled our plans because he said he wasn’t feeling well, so I went out with a girlfriend instead. On my way home, I passed his apartment, where he was having a party so huge, cars were parked on the sidewalk. That was a sign. When I expressed my disappointment that he had lied to me, he asked me why I was being such a nag. Instead of saying, “I’m not a nag, and you’re an asshole,” I said, “I don’t know. Let’s talk about it. We can work it out.” That’s what the dramatic heroines on TV would say.
Once, after we road-tripped to a concert, I found out that every time he got up from our seats, supposedly to go to the bathroom, he’d been going out to my car in the parking lot to sell LSD he’d hidden in my trunk. Another sign. A billboard, really. But I told myself that one was on me, because I had never actually communicated that I did not want to be a drug-running accomplice. Oprah always told couples having disagreements to use a “When you _____ / I feel _____” statement. I gave it a try in my head: “WHEN YOU hide drugs in my car and drive us across state lines, I FEEL nervous because that’s a felony.”
Every time these neon signs appeared, I doubled down on devotion. What I wanted was to get back to the parts of the relationship I did like—the jokes, the dinners, the walking around in public with a guy prone to yelling “I LOVE YOU!” aloud on a crowded sidewalk. So, while my friends went out and had fun, I’d sit on the same corner on my dorm bed for
hours-long phone calls (a necessary form of communication in the pre-texting age), my back against the wall and my blue duvet pulled over my knees, saying things like, “I FEEL that you’re not respecting me WHEN YOU say you’ll call me at eight but you don’t call until eleven the next day.” He’d say, “Don’t give up on us, we’ll work on things,” and I’d say, “Okay, let’s work on it.” And I’d cry. Then I’d keep crying. I swear if I saw that duvet right now, my eyes would well up.
When I look back at my young self all mixed up with this person who did not care if I got sad or hurt (or arrested), I feel for the fate fairies, and I can see the moment they said, “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” and pulled out all the stops. It was the night he came over and lifted his shirt to show me his giant new tattoo: P-O-I-S-O-N with a skull and crossbones.
Did I take the hint? I did not. This was my Very Adult Relationship and no one—no friend, no parent, no symbol inked on skin—could talk me into letting it go. I was not going to fail at it. “Can you believe this shit?” the fate fairies must have said to one another, throwing up their hands.
After we’d been dating several months, I had to leave the country. The British literature program I had enrolled in months earlier was already arranged and paid for, and there was no changing it. Oh, the delicious drama of departure. A long-distance relationship was going to take so much work. It would all hinge on good communication, Oprah said. After some tearful (on my part) farewells by airport pay phone, I boarded my flight to London.
I took the train to Cambridge University, where I moved into a two-hundred-year-old cottage I was to share with eight other young women. I couldn’t bring my blue duvet or many of my things from home, just a suitcase full of cotton clothes insufficient for the cold, damp weather. At a shop in town, I tried on woolly scarves and heavy sweaters, regarding my bundled-up self in a dressing room mirror. I barely had time to think about anyone or anything from home as I hustled from one class to another on the unfamiliar campus and took notes on poems I had never read. Nightly international phone calls were out of the question—too expensive—so I went out and drank dark, chewy beer and met Italian boys who introduced themselves by asking, “Are you Swedish?” It became a joke among my friends that wherever we went, someone would walk up and ask me that question (it was my blond hair, we figured). It got to the point where I thought, hell, I could be Swedish. I could be anybody over here. I could, most certainly, be a girl who doesn’t spend all her time working on her relationship with a poison man.
* * *
When you make poor choices (and when you’ve watched a good deal of TV in your day), you start to feel like you’re living a movie about a person who makes poor choices. Your props and scenery conform to your narrative and become complicit in keeping you in it: The stop sign at the end of your street that you pass every time you drive to see him. Your mailbox. The dresses in your closet. The Rice Krispies in your bowl, crackling their witness. All these things right there in front of you every day cue you to show up as that person, that character, you’ve been. It’s hard to believe you could be anyone else.
This is why you have to change your scenery.
It’s why, for example, you have to move out of your childhood room at some point. It’s why you have to trade your old T-shirt for a blouse. It’s why you have to ditch your flip-flops and get a pair of shoes with soles when you’re going to interview for a job. It’s never really about the room or the blouse or the shoes. It’s about you and which story you’re living.
In my strange new surroundings at Cambridge, not a single stop sign or traffic light or cereal box signaled me to pick up where I had left off back home. My new room looked nothing like my old room. It had different carpet, different furniture, a different closet (with a sink in it!)—and no phone, which meant no answering machine. And so I broke the cycle of checking voice mail every time I came home, heart pounding in anticipation of an angry message from him or, worse, no message at all. I stopped mentally rehashing our past conversations, a habit I’d developed when trying to figure out what I’d done wrong to make him let me down in whatever latest way he had. My head was full of new conversations now, with voices in new accents. I discovered a new favorite food—the Brie-salad sandwich—and as I sat eating with friends on a bridge overlooking the River Cam one sunny afternoon, I realized that I no longer thought of my poisonous relationship in the present tense. I thought of it as a memory, a story that had happened to a person who was then-me but not now-me. Mostly I thought, Damn, I’m so glad that’s over.
It was as if I’d finally harnessed the power of all those moves I’d made as a child. Moving had always put my old world behind me, which seemed unfair when I was a kid and didn’t want to leave the world I was in, but now? To be able to remove myself from one story and put myself somewhere new—to drink and watch and wear new things until my new setting became familiar enough to support a whole new character, a new me? What a miracle. What a relief.
* * *
One evening on my way into town for a night out, I ducked away from my friends into a phone booth. I got out my emergency prepaid phone card and made the call. I told him I didn’t miss him anymore, I wouldn’t be seeing him again, it was over.
“We’ll work on things when you get home,” he replied.
“No,” I said. “No more working on it.”
As I hung up the receiver, I felt the conversation disappear down the wires into a tiny fizzling flicker of nothing. The end. Last scene. Roll credits.
Good Job
A friend of mine recently got a Roomba—one of those automated robot vacuums that cleans your house. We sat at her kitchen counter and watched it navigate the floor. It motored along in one direction, then hit a wall or the leg of a chair, spun around, and headed the other way. It zigged and zagged across the rug, bouncing off obstacles—eager and blind, purposeful and aimless at the same time.
“Look,” my friend said. “It’s like a drunk bee.”
“Or us in our twenties,” I said.
* * *
“Entropy = disorder. Time progresses, entropy in the universe increases, things fall apart.” I wrote this on page one of my notebook in my first chemistry class at Davidson, which I took because I was sure I would be heading to medical school after college. Is there any creature more confident in her future plans than a college freshman who has yet to complete a single semester?
There were more doctors in my family than any other professionals, and I understood what the physician’s path looked like—med school, residency, practice. It took that chemistry class plus a year of calculus to make me realize that wailing and gnashing teeth over molecular diagrams and indecipherable equations was not a behavior I should indulge in for several more years of schooling, and that I might not have been cut out for the mathematical aspects of life in the medical field.
English, on the other hand? Joy! Three hours writing a paper beats three hours measuring the levels of corrosive liquid in a test tube any day. I declared my major and made it my goal to graduate with high honors. Bang—done. But then?
I knew I loved to write, but to me, “writer” meant novelist, which I’d never wanted to be, or journalist, which didn’t appeal to me, what with so much boring fact-checking. As a little kid, I used to sit at breakfast, reading the back of the Cheerios box and editing it in my head to make it snappier and more interesting (“crunchy Os”—really? How ’bout “tiny whole-grain life preservers”?), yet it never occurred to me that someone did that as a profession.
I saw no point in going to grad school for English, because the goal of that path seemed to be a job as an English professor, and if there’s one thing I cannot do at all (other than maintain balance while walking down stairs in high heels or self-administer a bikini wax), it’s teach. I was once invited to guest-teach a poetry class for a day in college, during which hour I shot rapid-fire questions at the class while growing increasingly peeved at their slow response time, until one kid finally yelled, “
Could you GIVE US A MINUTE?” Afterward I ducked into a stairwell and rage-cried. So, no—not teaching. Process of elimination didn’t leave me with much.
Mostly, as my friends seemed to plug along in pursuit of their postgraduation dreams, I stared terrified into the abyss, wondering if I’d be able to see my dream once my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Looking back, I realize pretty much everyone felt as lost as I did. But I didn’t know that then, and I wanted a plan of my own. I would not allow entropy.
* * *
The easiest thing for a diligent student to do is to accept an assignment. So the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I tricked the professional world into solving the problem for me by playing internship roulette. That is, rather than apply for jobs in a field in which I wanted to work, I applied to a program that matched up interns with openings. I couldn’t answer the question “What do you want to do?”—so I asked, “Well, what do you think I should do?” Show me what to want, and I’ll show you how I can get it.
I ended up being placed with an organization called Arts and Citizens, the mission of which was to raise awareness and funds for the humanities. I didn’t have the first clue as to what I would be doing, but I very much liked that out of all the applicants in the program, an employer had picked me. Plus, I knew what “arts” were, and I knew what “citizens” were, even if I didn’t really know how one might “raise awareness and funds.”
I learned a lot as an arts advocate. I learned, for example, that there are some questions you should ask in the course of the interview process. Specifically, ask the agency if all the organizations participating in the program know that they signed up for it and are actually expecting an intern to show up. You may be surprised to find that the answer is no. I don’t think my boss remembered applying for an intern, or at least didn’t expect that she’d really be granted one. She was a polite, quiet, Patagonia-fleece-wearing gal of about forty, always clutching a sheaf of ripped-open envelopes as if she’d started opening the mail and forgotten to finish, and she looked up at me in surprise every morning when I walked through her door. She was the only other person I ever saw in this internship, because—here’s another thing I learned—sometimes the term organization is used loosely to describe a one-person letter-writing effort that operates out of a storage room above a theater. The “organization” might be just one desk and one chair for that one person, a set of supply shelves containing various paper products, and an enormous, ancient computer with a black screen and a blinking green cursor and a keyboard that goes KABOING every time you hit a key. (Time to write a form letter: KABOING KABOING. KABOING KABOING KABOING.)
I Miss You When I Blink Page 5