Because it seems to ground compulsion in an identifiable cause, I sometimes catch myself thinking the instructions arrived that night, as compensation for my losing the violin. Reality, distaining such a legible association of cause and effect, imposed weeks of depressed remorse. My sense was of having lost the thread, of no longer understanding what was wanted of me, or how to live. Only then did the instructions descend.
Ever since we had moved into the house I had gone up and down those stairs without thinking about them, because they were just there, the stairs, a way of getting from one part of the house to another. If the stairs held any meaning it was only the kind of meaning shared by every aspect of the house, which was something like the meaning my own body held for me: like my body, the house was an abiding presence, a given.
Some weeks after the violin night, something woke me. Barely had I gotten out of bed and gone to the foot of the stairs to face upward into the silence of two a.m. when, as if they came softly down from the high shaft of darkness under the roof, the instructions made themselves known. Detailed, sourceless instructions I recognized at once, not because there had ever been instructions about stairs before, but because the conviction they embodied was very, very old and went extremely far back in my life. They were instructions for returning to the rightness of the time before you were a recognizable self, the time when you could not be blamed because you were, as yet, only dark need bound in babyskin. Need, wild need, was going to drive me barefoot up those stairs, across the landing, up the second flight, on whose uppermost stair a ritualized pivot had to be preformed just so, and silently, every breath silent and every footfall silent on the way back down and across the landing where footfalls required tact because the linoleum was tricky and could squeak, then the lower flight, all the way down to the chilly floor of the hallway, where I turned again and again started up, and it was all crucial, every step needing to be done perfectly, but the most exigent part, the cruel essence, was the ascent, because it required uprightness, chin high, no touching the stair rail, no sound of breathing, the ball of the foot no sooner meeting the nap of the carpet than it took the weight shifting from the poised lower leg, right and left swapping effort back and forth, the ligaments behind the knees emerging, cording, strengthening night by night, metatarsals emerging, too, the long toes monkeyish with seeking and pushing off, the bones of the ankle whittled sharp, the muscle running slantwise down the inside of the thigh refined, and the one thing the instructions didn’t say was how long, each night, this was supposed to go on, how many ascents were enough. There wasn’t a number. Just as it had generated its own laws, obsession determined its own nightly duration, to which any perfection I could achieve was irrelevant. My proper role was not that of a striver who could succeed in completing a task, but of sustained and, in a sense, impersonal attentiveness to what it wanted. There was a recognition—enough—that came and closed it down, and then I could go to bed. Some nights an hour was all that it wanted. Other nights I climbed till almost light. One remarkable absence was uncertainty: below the ongoing annotation of errors ran a steady sense of sureness about what I was doing and what was wanted of me. Another was thought, because the absorption of climbing didn’t allow for thinking in the ordinary sense. But it wasn’t a vacant state, it was highly alert. Concentration was lucid, intense, confined to details of execution, to the placement of a foot or the tight grace of a pivot. Whether this was going to go on for weeks or months or years, I never wondered. To articulate the question How long will this last? would have struck me as a possibly dangerous affront to the source of the instructions.
Plenty of nights I was sick of climbing the stairs and lay listening for my sister’s breathing with hatred because the element that cast me out cradled her and didn’t let her go. I would lie awake while urgency, crackling and diffuse, collected its strength. If I concentrated I could hold it off for some time. My opacity to myself drove me to push back against the urgency, but this pushing wasn’t a reasoned attempt to escape its hold: I never wondered how sane or insane it was to be in thrall to a set of irrational instructions. In resisting acting on the obsession I wasn’t trying for sanity, I was only trying to experience its terms with greater bareness of soul. There was pleasure in making the obsession show its full force before I had to get out of bed, bare feet meeting cool tile, and go out the bedroom door and down the dark hall to the foot of the stairs, which were always there and always themselves and always indifferent to what I needed to do. How was it possible that a hundred, two hundred nights’ climbing had left them unchanged? That no one in my family noticed? Could such odd behavior continue unseen forever? Was the failure to perceive anything wrong a failure of love? Or did my stealth and deviousness prevent their seeing?
Other nights I felt almost a kind of sympathy for the obsession, as if it led an existence apart from me. Those nights I had some sense of its project—perfection—being immutable, and of my having happened to be available, and of its needing to work with what it had. A feeling, certain nights, that I was cut out for this. The rightness of cautiously, silently, without putting a foot wrong, meeting every expectation held by—held by whatever required my submission to this endlessness.
When it came a year or so later the end wasn’t distinct enough to engender relief. Once or twice, then several times in a row, I slept through the night, and then, without my realizing I was done climbing, no more instructions came. But by that time they had ceased to be instructions at all, and had become the way I was.
Only when my last analyst, the one I ended up marrying, only when he told me—scolded, really—that I had a good mind and ought to put it to work in support of my therapy, when in his voice a mere forward slash separated the admonition Read from the warning You might try approaching this—my perfectionism—as if it could be understood, did it dawn on me I’d been wasting time: a writer who needs to be told Read is a glazed-over idiot, all these years I could have been researching, I could have walked into his consulting room knowing so much more, could have been a more compelling analysand, one who didn’t rely for salvation entirely, excruciatingly on him, even as I said I kind of thought it was cheating—, even as he shook his head, even as I said —to read on my own, I thought the insights wouldn’t connect, would only confuse things, would—, even as he went on shaking his head, even as I said —amount to another form of resistance, even as he went on shaking his head I inwardly criticized him for his casual refusal to be everything I needed, for his readiness to throw me back on my own self, which could always, fuck you, read, but I did not want to be alone with books, I wanted to be with him, wanted him to want me to trust his insight and his alone, not books’—wasn’t the work in this room supposed to be accomplished through love, which when modified by the adjective transference was nonetheless love, hadn’t my life held enough books and insufficient love, why was he asking me to do things on my own, but okay, from the cardboard box that had made it through every move since New Mexico I dug out a tattered Interpretation of Dreams with its account of the father who dreams his son is crying out from the next room Father, I’m burning while his son in the next room is burning to death, the father struggling from the depths of sleep too late to save him, What good are dreams if they can’t help you save your burning child, I asked my last analyst and he said The dream did try, at his suggestion I turned to object-relations theory, Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss trilogy led to Fairbairn and D. W. Winnicott, Is this doing any good? I asked him and he smiled, he could tell from my voice I already believed it was.
Nicholas W. Affrunti and Janet Woodruff-Borden observe in “Perfectionism and Anxiety in Children”:
Intolerance of uncertainty may link perfectionism with anxiety disorders because the high and rigid standards and perceived negative consequences that occur in perfectionism make uncertainty a fearful prospect. In uncertain situations, perfectionistic children may be unsure if standards have been met, creating fear and worry about the situation. This increased di
stress may in turn increase their risk of developing an anxiety disorder. This may be especially true for generalized anxiety disorder and OCD. For example, perfectionistic children who are also intolerant of uncertainty may engage in worry or compulsive behaviors in an attempt to reduce distress around uncertain situations.
The existence of a lost tribe of perfectionistic children is news to me—how many were there? What rituals did they invent? But “may engage in compulsive behaviors” sounds as if the behaviors are lying around waiting to be picked up; in “may engage in” the child is not active, not the deviser; even the simple word may obscures the uncanny instantaneousness of compulsion, delivered whole into the life of the child, and while I’m grateful for the passage, it omits the enigmatic inventiveness of compulsion, an inventiveness it puzzles me to recognize as my distant but unmistakable own. Well below the threshold of awareness some part of me dreamed up a weird, strict ritual and wrote it into my consciousness as if it were holy. Despite the self-hatred that daily dismantled initiative, that obscure, authoring part of me must have been solicitous toward the rest, and wanted to save it: what I seemed to be witnessing retrospectively was the love some unknown part of my psyche held for me, because look, it had devised the means for enduring searing uncertainty. The more I considered those nights from the vantage point of adulthood, the more stair-climbing struck me as a marvel of anti-self-destructiveness, it was silent, it was neat, involving neither razor blades nor glass and never needing cleaning up after, unlike self-starvation the loss of sleep can remain basically invisible, in the morning the stairs were pristine as ever, my mother and father went up and down unworried, no one else was sucked in, it knew there had to be an end, and it ended. From what well of intelligent love did it issue, this strange rescue, and when will the genius behind it size up perfectionist suffering the way it once sized up uncertainty and say Enough is enough, here’s your way out?
Eighteen, if barely, and away from home, if barely, having gotten into college, barely, and for reasons of its own the surveillance state inside my head narrows its scope of operations. Its remaining rituals, rather than flagging me as crazy, pass as the worthy drudgery of femininity. The diatribe audible under the blow-dryer searing my contrary hair to straw-straight Joni Mitchell hippie-angel lankness runs Kinks all underneath, maybe they won’t show, eeeeww, tendrils, there’s that bendy S-wave, put your head under a faucet and start over, but outwardly I’m only one of countless girls pitting themselves against their hair, their thighs, their bellies: perfectionism has raised a stark tower from the cornfields to house its captives. If you get on an elevator and start in about how you woke up horrendously bloated, your fellow passenger might yawn before telling you You’re crazy, and she wouldn’t mean crazy as in menacing or abnormal, she’d mean crazy like I understand exactly and might go as far as pointing at her chin and saying How disgusting is this, and when you say What she might say Don’t pretend you’re not about to throw up and when you say What, that tiny tiny pimple? she might say Oh right be kind to the leper. Booklets listing the calorie counts of foodstuffs—egg (large, scrambled) 102, graham cracker 59—receive stricken exegesis, Oh my god, I ate x yesterday, I ate y, I actually ate z!, while down the cafeteria tables girls’ trays are assessed sidelong for further sins of indulgence. Down a hallway, from a half-open door, a voice heckles Pretty, pretty. Such a pretty, pretty, pretty girl. Girls strewn everywhere, lounging on basement couches, daubing wrists with sandalwood, emerging from clouds of Aqua Net. Baby-oiled girls sprawl on towels across the roof of the dorm, flicking through Vogues, their backs a varnished violin array.
I regard my diminished perfectionism with the cold eye of a firefighter discovering a wildfire’s last embers sparkling in tinder-dry grass. I don’t know where it will rise up again, but I know it’s going to. There are panic afternoons when, instead of taking the elevator, I choose the seven flights of steel stairs to my room, barging up the stairwell whose cinder block walls resound pang pang pang pang, but before long my drive slackens, my weak-winded pauses taunt the echoing stairwell to slap me with instructions. The future could be lit by secret rendezvous with perfection, shaped by the need to start over and over from the bottom of the stairs—but for seven Come and get me flights, instructions fail to materialize, and when I let myself into room 777 rank and panting, calmed by the near miss, my roommate says she wishes she had the discipline to work out after classes, too, because look at her behind—she pivots, shirttail twitched aside—Look!, denunciation of oneself properly countered, as I counter now: You’re crazy! I go further: You’re beautiful! She is, but who, in our world, believes it? Mouse, she calls me, a salute to my smallness and tendency to slip down the hidey-hole of a book. Lately this is the paperback Sisterhood Is Powerful I’ve taken to carrying everywhere, its front cover’s clenched fist within the Venus symbol gloriously confrontational. Mouse! Leave the boy-kryptonite here! my roommate hollers when I’m leaving the room, and we laugh. Her mock consternation celebrates the boldness I’m only raggedly capable of, as well she knows. Mouse refers, too, to the fugitive air conferred by damage. Often when someone notices this they will declare Oh! You’re shy with an air of having nailed down what’s been bothering them, but it’s not shyness, it’s instead the communicativeness of suffering, an inward plight willing itself into visibility. It’s my signaling that I should not be esteemed they pick up on, signaling mostly encrypted but occasionally—more and more often—conveyed in a remark too awkward or hurtful to go unnoticed. Strange to be involuntarily bent on such signaling, crazy to feel inwardly meticulous, outwardly hapless. To be, willy-nilly, an asshole: my slips of the tongue have a brashness impossible to reconcile with delicate slantwise me of my envisioning. My Tennessee cousins had owned a book I coveted, a volume of fairy tales, one featuring rival princesses, and when the sweet one spoke pearls and rose petals floated out, and when the unsweet one parted her lips snakes’ heads darted forth, toads tumbled free, a story I read over and over as if the text might mutate and the unsweet one’s mouth produce four-leaf clovers, sapphires, a goldfinch fluttering gladly away. How repellent, the toads that plop from my mouth. How irremediable their alterations of trust. Unlike the person I’ve just managed to offend, I have no right to incredulity. You’ve got a smart mouth on you—this favored rebuke of my dad’s sounded as if an alien mouth had been slapped across my face and my failure lay in failing to scrape it off. At our small college, a fair number of freshmen drop out to return home, a doom I’m often tempted by, but which my parents’ foreseeable dismay rules out. Besides, the cloud movie in our seventh-floor room’s huge plate glass window is driftingly addictive, swags and boilings-up of shadow and radiance, lightning in nerve-bright internal strikes. I don’t want to give up my ticket to that or other visions: Joni Mitchell steeped in blue on a record jacket; the philosophy professor, rumored to be a lesbian, whose Levi’d amble I’ve more than once trailed across campus; the golden broth in white bowls clonked down on Chinese-restaurant Formica; the fortune cookie slips my roommate tapes to her mirror the next morning. Toward my blurted weirdnesses, she remains fondly detached, even amused, given to crying You crack me up, Mouse! I just love you! Such lavish acceptance thrills and disorients me, and when others are its beneficiaries, I decide it’s my business to rail against her tolerance. So naive, I say. You’re asking to get taken advantage of, I warn when her sweetness embraces yet another unworthy, you’re being hugely unrealistic. She teases back Mouse! So mean! But that her paradoxical gift for being both unfooled about someone’s idiocy and accepting of them might be humanely realistic is a possibility I’m steadfastly ignorant of. Too bad, because as if to compensate for the ebb in self-laceration, my critiques of others have grown more scathing—maybe perfectionism is its own universe in which energy can be neither created nor destroyed, only differently manifested. Other-directed perfectionism had little point in my parents’ house, that nest of rival perfectionisms, but now it magnifies acquaintances’ offenses, tacks despisin
g footnotes to interactions, shuns further contact. Yet with her, all is well. In our cinder-block-walled cube with its scrolling cloud movie, she and I are rarely more than seven or eight feet apart, the only easygoing proximity to another person I’ve experienced. Can more such closeness be found, can it be made to last?—it might, if I were capable of learning from her, if the paradox could be absorbed like the lotion I sometimes, in her absence, tip from the bottle belonging to her and rub into my skin. Kind. I want to smell kind. And then one night when an anti-Vietnam protest winds down into dancing in the street, a boy dawns. A boy I’ve seen around, though he doesn’t look like he belongs. You shoulda heard him just around midnight! he sings over the shouting, and I hear, I do, I hear the Who are you? stretching between us, its tension underwritten by his shitkickers versus the metatarsals of my ballet-slippered feet, whose readiness to be stomped on worries me, in my head I’m thrillingly injured, fantasizing his remorse, the dismantling of his stoned, genial flirtation, its replacement by a recognizing tenderness. Against the clamor I shout Watch out! and when he cups his ear I shout My feet! and he shakes his head and smiles and what does the smile mean when he needs to be paying attention and why does a blue-collar-looking local show up at college kids’ shambles of an anti-war rally anyway, why turn up in what must be his work clothes, though his shirt has been lost somewhere—did he take part in the protest? The loitering impudence of his dancing argues no way. That it wouldn’t be like him to chant along. Not a joiner. And if it’s a case of missing not classes but work, he wouldn’t risk arrest. It’s newly dark, the asphalt’s tacky warmth littered with discarded posters. Within the thrash we maintain a two-person cove, the opening only we inhabit, barely bigger than our bodies. Another girl might shout at him to fuck off with his shirtlessness and his tar-stained boots and his drifting ever closer. Watch out! I shout again, pointing down. He smiles till his eyes almost shut. I’m a little furious. Who does he think he is! splutters through my head, and I laugh, and having no clue why, he laughs as well, and since we’ve gotten this far and might be able to ride out the embarrassment of his catching me staring, I let my gaze dip to the asymmetry that’s been nagging for attention, the cyclops gaze of his pectorals, my transit through disbelief-revulsion-pity is quick, almost at once I accept that where his left nipple should be a slant of keloid scar rises instead, damage you can touch but I don’t, dancing has accomplished its transformation, our bodies’ conspiracy a done deal. Our horizon teems with bobbing heads as if an ocean liner has tipped its hundreds into the sea. Several minutes elbow past, in our cove we are nudged and buffeted, I’m worrying for my feet when his boots’ seen-but-not-heard thudding tilts from scary to unerring and trust blinks on, I have no idea how but without looking down he knows where we—the four-footed we of our close fit—are. I hope this is true. The lift of a chin, the torque of a shoulder imply we are still dancing, and it comes to me to step up onto his boots. Lightly. Who do I think I am? He shuffles, teasing. I grab hold of his shoulders—heat. Where is his shirt. His arms close around me. Heartbeat.
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