Body Leaping Backward

by Maureen Stanton

  I hadn’t known that our big happy family’s falling apart was the source of the big huge cry. For years I’d harbored a fugitive sadness. “It will all come out someday though,” I’d written in my diary. I apologized to Jim for crying and then cried more, embarrassed that I couldn’t control this gushing, but whatever soothing words Jim said made my outburst all right. I smiled and cried more and finally it was time to leave. Opening that stuck spigot, allowing myself that big huge cry—that was all that Jim and I accomplished our first night.

  I paid Jim with a $20 bill as if it were a drug deal, under the table, as if there were something slightly illicit about the interaction. Each week after that, I paid Jim with a $20 bill, money I earned pumping gas, a quarter of my weekly pay. I insisted to my mother that I pay for my counseling, perhaps as a way of paying for my sins, compensating for damage and destruction, the harm I’d caused a lot of people, including myself. I must pay.

  8

  Speech Acts

  Tom Parisi, the nighttime tow-truck driver at the gas station, was charged with some minor crime, so he fled to California, outrunning the local police. Suddenly Gerry, my boss’s brother, drove the wrecker at night. Gerry had gotten into some kind of trouble—drugs, maybe; he wasn’t the violent type—and had dropped out of college. He was better-looking than Henry, taller, lanky where Henry was stout, but with the same copper-brown eyes and long dark eyelashes, a fine straight nose, a square jaw with a cleft chin, and perfect white teeth. Gerry’s hair was dark brown, shaggy to his shoulders. Compared to Henry, there was something soft about Gerry, perhaps just youth, and an impish look, perhaps the slight hint of yellow in his irises.

  I came to know Gerry on sultry summer nights as we smoked cigarettes in the gas station lobby, waiting for an accident to happen. “Ask me the capital of any country,” he said one night, impressing me with rote knowledge that I took for worldliness. He was twenty-one, and I’d just turned seventeen that summer after my junior year. Gerry said he was a voracious reader. I nodded. “I read the toothpaste tube in the bathroom,” I said. He smiled, and together we recited from memory—Crest has been shown to be an effective decay-preventive dentifrice—and that united us as soul mates, at least in my heart.

  Gerry and I talked about books I’d read—Stranger in a Strange Land, Brave New World, Siddhartha, Anthem, The Stranger. These books appealed to me with their abstractness, the language of metaphor, which I understood easily, like Spanish; I could make that translation. Gerry gave me The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda, an anthropology student who’d studied shamanism in Mexico. One story in the book intrigued me. The shaman, don Juan, told Castaneda that there was a spot in the room that was his perfect spot, that when he found the spot, energy and strength would flow through him. For hours Castaneda sat and meditated, then he moved and sat and moved again, trying to find his spot, the spot where he’d feel harmony with the universe, the place where he fit. I wanted to find my spot, not in a room but in the world, the place where I was strong, the place I belonged.

  Castaneda ate peyote and hallucinated that he was a crow soaring above the landscape, like the flying-mattress sensation I had when I went to bed high on dust. The book made sense to me: with enhanced perception one might find truth, like on the night earlier that summer when I’d dropped acid. It was one of those placid evenings in late June when daylight lingered so long that it felt like time had stopped, or was caught, the air infused with tension. Someone drove up to a crowd of kids milling around Mimi’s Variety downtown with a sheet of blotter acid, rows of pinkie-sized Mickey Mouses stamped on paper, and for $2 a hit, a couple dozen kids tripped, just something to do on an empty summer night.

  Paula and I swallowed our tabs and then hitched a ride to the high school parking lot, where kids were loitering, rock music blaring from someone’s car speakers. Nicky was there, but he kept a distance. We’d barely spoken in the weeks since our breakup. Alison was somewhere else, with some boyfriend, or in Westwood Lodge again, or maybe another place, like the scary-looking halfway house near Boston where we visited her once—no plush Victorian furniture, just industrial bunk beds with metal frames in spare cell-like rooms.

  Under the green-tinted sodium lights of the school parking lot, all the world’s a stage. In my hallucinatory state, everyone around me transformed into caricatures: the tomboy, the dumb blonde, the football star. Their voices grated; their laughter seemed forced. The mood was strange and latent, like the silent static of heat lightning. I had a surreal sense of being outside of myself. I don’t belong here, I thought. I have to get out of here. I leaned against a car and observed everyone as if I were invisible, as if I’d dropped through a hole in the earth, like in that grade-school book that I loved, The Forgotten Door, about a boy who fell through a mysterious tunnel in the ground and plummeted through space. He landed in a place where he resembled everyone but was different somehow; people and objects and the landscape were familiar but not the same, an approximation. Faced with this horrible realization, he wondered, Who am I?

  This was the question I wrote in tiny print across lined paper during geometry, stoned and dreamy as Mrs. Drane’s dreary words circled down a drain, never entering my mind. Who am I? The question returned to me like a boomerang, without an answer. But the boy who fell to earth had one strength—he could read people’s minds. The Mickey Mouse blotter acid had a similar effect on me: I could see through people, see behind their masks. They were not real; none of this was real.

  Later that night I said to Paula, “You can tell who your friends are because they can look you in the eye.” I didn’t mean this as a test, just something I’d observed, but when I said that, she looked away, which surprised me, and then everything felt awkward between us. The next morning I couldn’t bring myself to call Paula, as I had every day for two years, and she didn’t call me, and we never called each other again, and for a while that summer I had no friends. Except Gerry.

  Gerry wanted me to meet his friend Quentin, who lived in Quincy, south of Boston. After we closed the station at ten o’clock one night, we drove up Route 1 in the Egg. On the way to Quincy, Gerry told me about Quentin, whom he’d met in college but who, like Gerry, had dropped out. “He works as a janitor,” Gerry said. “He’s mildly schizophrenic.” Quentin from Quincy crazy with schizophrenia—the z in schizophrenic buzzed like the z in crazy, like the z in the razor blades that Alison used to cut her skin, like the word crazy felt like a razor blade in my mouth.

  I’d read about schizophrenia in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a book that terrified me. The girl in the book slipped into a scary world of her own invention, the Kingdom of Yr, with gods who turned against her. The made-for-TV movie came out that summer. In one scene the girl sits in an office talking to her psychiatrist—a setting like Jim’s office, a desk, armchair, paneled walls—when suddenly metal bars crash down around her, caging her. At least she sees the bars: a hallucination, only without drugs. But I saw the bars, too, in the film, and heard the menacing growling voices of the gods as if I were inside her head, a frightening place. The book was based on a true story about a real girl who was my age and who saw a shrink, like I did.

  But Quentin was only mildly schizophrenic, Gerry said, without further explanation about the degrees of insanity. “He’s a really nice guy.” I gathered I was to be gentle with Quentin. I was mildly excited about meeting a mild schizophrenic, someone interesting, someone who dwelled on the fringe of society, where it seemed to me all the intrigue was, the excitement. We parked on a city street and Gerry ran up a set of stairs to fetch Quentin, who was short with a full beard and a bush of dark-blond hair but who otherwise looked ordinary and not mildly schizophrenic. Quentin sat in the front passenger seat and I was relegated to the backseat of my own car. It seemed that giving Quentin the front seat was part of the special handling he required on account of his mild schizophrenia.

  We drove around on unfamiliar roads, drinking beer and smoki
ng pot, until we landed back at the gas station, where we were safe, like home base, like gools. Quentin and Gerry talked and I listened as they discussed Nietzsche and Sartre, things I didn’t know yet. Gerry lit a joint of angel dust. I wasn’t smoking dust much since I’d stopped hanging around with Paula and Alison, since I’d been in counseling with Jim, but I hadn’t quit altogether. I leaned forward, wedged in the space between the bucket seats like a dog, to hear the conversation between Gerry and Quentin, who was now sitting in the driver’s seat for some reason. The car smelled faintly of gasoline, because I hadn’t changed out of my work clothes, and the air felt electrified with a weird energy that could spark if Quentin began to act crazy, which I thought he might at any moment.

  I asked Quentin if I could touch his beard. “I’ve never felt a beard before,” I said. Somehow Quentin didn’t see my request as strange, maybe because he was mildly schizophrenic, and on top of that drunk and dusted. I touched his pelt of a beard, which was softer than I’d imagined it would be. “It’s really soft,” I said. I petted the beard, and Gerry leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Keep doing that, he likes it,” as if Quentin were a wild animal I’d tamed. I kept petting the beard, but then I didn’t know when to stop, which was just one of the many, many things I didn’t know: when a seventeen-year-old girl should stop petting a mildly schizophrenic man’s beard, at midnight, parked in a gas station.

  Gerry and I drove north one Saturday for the Gerry Delaney tour of Salem, a coastal town north of Boston, famous for the witch trials of the seventeenth century, though geographically the “witches” were from the village of Salem, which is now Danvers, an adjacent town. Gerry had gone to college there for two years, but he’d quit abruptly, and the town seemed to haunt him. We cruised past the House of Seven Gables, dark and brooding, and then downtown, where Gerry showed me the witch store, Crow Haven Corner, which sold incense and potions and tarot cards. The store was owned by Laurie Cabot, a famous witch, whom I’d heard on WBCN, the hip Boston radio station I tuned into daily to hear astrological forecasts from the Cosmic Muffin. “There are still witches in Salem,” Gerry said.

  After showing me the witch store, Gerry drove by a bar where he’d been stabbed one night, he told me, though he didn’t say why he’d gotten into an argument serious enough for someone to stick a knife in his gut. He described how he’d stumbled out of the bar and crawled into an alley—he showed me the alley—and had lain there bleeding until “the homosexuals” found him, took him to the hospital, then took him into their home and nursed him back to health. Gerry called his saviors “the homosexuals,” a formal term meant to show respect. We drove to their apartment next, on the third floor of a Victorian house. Gerry paused to look up, remembering the scene, the moment of his near-death, his rescue. We climbed a set of creaky wooden fire-escape stairs and walked into a small kitchen jammed with people.

  While Gerry caught up with the homosexuals, I wandered into the living room, empty but for a lone woman in a black dress flowing to her ankles, swirling to the music, weaving a scarf through the air like an acid tracer, her movements slow and hypnotic, as if she were casting a spell. Gerry came up behind me, whispered, “She’s a witch.” Maybe the dancing woman was Laurie Cabot, the famous witch, or maybe she was just an ordinary everyday witch, one of Cabot’s protégés.

  The homosexuals were moving, so everything in their apartment was for sale. “Just look around,” one man told me. On the wall in the living room I saw a Mona Lisa print. I loved the Mona Lisa, her enigmatic closed-mouth smile; she was keeping herself secret, as I did, or maybe just hiding poor orthodontia, as I did. I asked one of the men how much for the poster. “A dollar,” he said, and I rolled up the print. I found a shallow wooden bowl, also a dollar. “That was hand-carved by Indians,” he said.

  After the party Gerry and I drove to a park, drank some beer, smoked pot. We fell asleep in the Egg and woke to blinding daylight. Gerry drove to nearby Singing Beach, where every step was a note, or at least a squeak, the silica in the sand squelching underfoot. As I walked I heard sink sink sink or maybe sing sing sing against the clap of waves. At this hour the beach was all ours. At the base of a fortresslike rock, I saw a glint of gold in the sand and reached for it, excavating a bottle of André Cold Duck. I’d never had champagne before (or sparkling wine, as it were), so the buried treasure felt like kismet, meant for Gerry and me. We climbed to the top of the rock and stared across the sea, salt mist in the air, on my tongue. Gerry popped the cork and we passed the bottle back and forth, swigging, greeting the morning silently.

  With Gerry, Salem was fantastic, like a chthonic theme park with witches and homosexuals and dark nights of stabbings and a heroic rescue, ancient artifacts from Indians, glittering treasure beneath our bare feet, champagne and the ocean in our mouths.

  In counseling, Jim asked each week if I’d smoked angel dust. He never scolded or berated me, or demanded that I stop, or even preached its dangers, but by asking he forced me to confront my choices, to remember that I had a choice. After talking about my parents’ divorce, we turned to the question that plagued me, that I wrote in those spiral-bound notebooks like liner notes to the libretto of my life: Who am I? Jim said I was suffering from an “identity crisis.” So I didn’t have a complex, as I’d suspected, but worse; it was a crisis. An identity crisis made perfect sense; I’d been incrementally erasing myself with angel dust, like shaking an Etch-A-Sketch screen. I’d spent so much energy concealing my real self, suppressing my feelings, pretending I didn’t care about anything, that I’d lost whatever self I’d developed before my teenage years.

  “How do I know who I am?” I asked Jim one night. “You get to know yourself by being yourself,” he said, which seemed as mysterious as the poster on Miss West’s wall: As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live, a quote from Goethe. I sat in the back in Miss West’s algebra class, near the window that overlooked the woods, daydreaming and scribbling in my notebooks, pondering that quotation as if it were a koan—Trust yourself and you’ll know how to live. Those words bothered me. What did it mean, trust yourself ? I was supposed to be working algebraic equations, solving for x, but I was x, the unknown. At least Jim’s words—“get to know yourself by being yourself”—reassured me that there was a self inside me to be; I just had to unearth her, like a long-lost favorite dress. I didn’t have to invent her; she was there. For years I’d been inventing someone who was not me; no wonder I did not like that girl.

  I always arrived anxiously early for my Thursday night appointments with Jim, so I’d park nearby at St. Timothy’s Church, in the empty lot overlooking New Pond, and watch the lake sparkle diamonds as the sun dipped, listening to songs that ripped me open, like “It’s All Behind You,” by Andy Pratt:

  And maybe today you came in, ripped your fingernail on the door

  Ran into the TV set and then you said something

  That made everybody think you were really stupid.

  I’d felt that crippling self-consciousness for too long—self-doubt, self-loathing, eased with numbing drugs.

  December 15, 1975—I did the most embarrassing thing in Spanish. Mr. Gurkin told me to pull up the map so I could write on the board and I pulled too hard and it fell on the floor and made a huge noise. I was so embarrassed. Craig, Monica Lande, Keith W., all those cool kids were in there. They were probably saying to themselves, ‘What a fucking clod.’ I almost died.

  The diary entry shows my unforgiving self-consciousness, my feeling uncool, as if coolness was all that mattered, as if a lack of coolness was lethal—I could nearly die from it. Acting a certain way to fit in, while simultaneously suppressing feelings, made me hyperbolically aware of my every move. It was exhausting, which is probably one reason I turned to drugs; angel dust erased the self and thus self-loathing. Whatever squelched my voice in childhood—soap, pepper, slaps, shame, punishment—with angel dust, I silenced myself.

  I can’t remember not being self-conscious, analyzing an
d thinking, interpreting events as I watched them unfold, a narrative stream in my head. In first grade Miss Hanson asked the class how to pronounce the letter A, then called on me. I knew the answer—“Aaaaay”—but I was embarrassed to make that awkward sound. Miss Hanson waited. “Maureen, I know you know the answer.” She saw right through me, like the teacher on Romper Room looking through her magic mirror. But I waited her out, silent. Miss Hanson stared at me with pleading eyes, then called on Betsy Costello, who said, unhesitatingly, “Aaaaay,” just like the sound in my head that I knew was correct. Even then, in that small way, I knew I’d failed myself.

  My self-consciousness was coupled with a compulsion to speak—that fresh mouth—and these two opposing impulses created inside me an anxious simmering feeling, like I could blow. The propensity to speak combined with self-consciousness made me something of a blurter. One night at dinner, when we still had family dinners, in a rare moment of quiet, I said, “Mrs. LaFarge takes acupuncture.” This news had been bubbling inside me all day, this piece of exotica. Everyone laughed, which was not what I’d expected. I’d expected someone to say something like, “Oh, how interesting! How did you learn that?” followed by a discussion of Mrs. LaFarge’s health problems and acupuncture in general. Instead my statement became the family emblem of a ridiculous non sequitur. To me, the moment stands for that inner struggle I had as a girl—between a native outspokenness and a native shyness, an impulse toward courage and overpowering fear. I felt like the pushmi-pullyu from Dr. Dolittle, my favorite book in third grade, the llamalike creature with a head at each end, working at cross purposes, like having your foot on the gas and the brake at the same time.