After my shift at home, peeling my clothes off, I leave my T-shirt and jeans rumpled on the bathroom linoleum, my pockets bulging with wads of $20s. These, the distilled bounty of messy 5-, 10-, 25-, and even 1-cent coins, mixed with $1s, $5s, and $10s, I scooped off empty tables with the wadded paper napkins, cold mugs, and hollandaise-smeared plates. I feel a vaguely pleasant physical fatigue after my nine-hour shift, a sense of completion. Heinz ketchup bottles consolidated and wiped; soggy thawed cartons of orange concentrate diluted with tepid Winooski tap water; Bloody Mary mix replenished with a potent cocktail of V8, black pepper, Worcestershire, and raw horseradish; floor swept; hot-from-the-dishwasher silver bundled in white paper napkins; bar sinks drained; till balanced; tables and chairs sprayed and wiped; pocketed apron in the laundry bin. If only I were so orderly. I stink of bacon and home fries.
Waitressing corrupts the authenticity I’ve been working so hard to locate. After acting the part, staying in character for nine hours, I need to degrease my skin and hair as much as I need to mop up the shamefully artificial banter, charm, smiles, and affability I serve up all day.
“It sucks for you to be a waitress. You get paid more for faking,” Dr. Kohl observes. My tips would take a serious dive if I behaved the way I feel. I’m working four days a week. My charm serves me well, even if it means sometimes I don’t know what is me.
“It feels separate from me. Not my life.” How handy; it’s almost as if I’ve gotten a proxy to do the job for me. I’ve certainly had enough practice. I’ve done this job, the first requirement of which is effortless agreeability, since I was 11. I quickly learned to seduce my customers, inveigling them into giving me more of what I wanted—money. It’s no different now.
The raw, red scars, with angry keloid ridges on the inside of my elbow, add a new dimension to an old job. The occasional customer will look at my arm and blurt, “Wow, what’d you do?” or “What happened there, burn?” A few even persist when I try to put them off with “Long story,” quickly moving on to, “More coffee?”
“No, really. What’d you do? Grease splatter?”
I’m astonished by this audacity as much as by the fear and curiosity the scars elicit. Unlike the unmistakable vertical scars on the wrists of suicide survivors, my scars are an enigma—open to interpretation, guesses, and casual speculation. I learn to shut down the conversations I don’t want to have. The irregular, not pretty marks are mine as much as they’re irrefutable evidence of who I am now. I’m oddly proud of them, each one a stamp of time when I thought I might disintegrate and yet managed to find a moment of calm, a modicum of pleasure, a sense of coming back together by experiencing pain and making a new hole-scar-to-be. They’re as much “me” as my nose, eyes, fingers, and breasts. Skin may be permeable—as I’ve proved with the incursions I’ve made on it—but it heals.
Whether I’m waitressing or just walking around there are invariably many different kinds of looking going on, mostly in hot weather when my full arm is open to view, scar tissue etched in pigment-free contrast to the tan skin surrounding the pattern of circles, lines, and irregular shapes.
“At least now I know why people are staring at me,” I tell Dr. Kohl.
I also emphatically tell him I will never allow a skin graft to cover the scars. Never a stigma, they are, as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, “something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too.” I love them.
CHAPTER 41
I Can’t Pretend
Throughout the spring and summer more burns and eventual suicide hang prophetic, as if the choices that matter were made long ago. It’s cold and wet into early June; my favorite patch of white and crimson peonies flattened by rain. I’ve bitten my nails and taken off my jewelry—again.
“Men think long hair is a great thing. By chopping it off I can eliminate harassment from men. I look hideous with my hair short.”
“It’s your hair, why don’t you keep it?” is all he can say.
“Like fragments,” I say, describing how all the encumbrances of beauty were insignificant bits—nothing to me. I’m also referring to the poetry I endlessly write as fragments. I don’t think much of the poems either.
“Skin on arms,” he suggests, making an association between the word and the skin I destroy.
“Proves how tough I am,” I say.
“You are tough, but magic isn’t needed to prove it true.”
“Opposite of fragment is WHOLE,” I observe, “but scary and artificial.” I am on some level purifying myself for the 11s.
If cutting this part of myself away makes me less of an object at work and on the street I don’t mind—even if or maybe especially since doing so goes against much of what I’ve absorbed about feminine identity. I’m resisting inhabiting a self dependent on and defined by physical attributes. Maybe disfiguring my arm is a dramatic version of the same impulse.
Dr. Kohl has been trying to convince me to take a different antidepressant—this time it’s Zoloft. I went off the Prozac in the hospital and never went back on. For weeks I’ve been carrying around the once crisp prescription ripped fresh from his official Vermont state pad. It’s now wrinkled and tattered around the edges.
“If you choose to take it it’s a way of taking responsibility for managing your own feelings,” he says. I fill the prescription.
“I have the pills,” I announce at the next session, “I just choose not to take them.”
“Then you should question whether or not you want to be here.” This is scary. I take the pills.
Again and again I dream of being in bed with Dr. Kohl. When I have the dream I wake happy and peaceful, as if a spell has been cast on me. We’re in a big bed—just crisp white sheets and our entangled bodies. The sensation of the dream imprints itself on me, the image an erotic trigger I’ll return to again and again. There’s the scent of sex—it is after all a bed and we’re in it together. But I never have explicitly sexual dreams. Their most prominent feature is the lush serenity of being everything to him in the immediate present. I am protected—safe in a way I’ve never experienced. I hold on to the fullness of the dreams when I wake but the warmth slips away, drifting into the mean daylight. All I can do is dream it again—and I do.
I’m riveted the first time I see him with his wife. I run into them at a performance of Madame Butterfly at Burlington’s art deco performing arts space on Main Street, the Flynn. I’ve never encountered Dr. Kohl outside his office and I’ve never seen even a picture of her—although I’ve heard her voice plenty of times. The strange contact spins me into anxiety over how I look, what I’m wearing, if I can appear cool and at ease. My self-consciousness about being at the performance alone like the loser I am doesn’t help. But it’s his wife that really sets me off—she’s beautiful.
“You and your wife look like a young couple. Entwined, connected, and attentive to each other,” I tell him at the next session. I then add, “She’s abrupt at times [on the phone]. I understand her tone of resentment.” Why not throw in a criticism?
“Are you annoyed with her?” he asks. I’m so tired of that question. What does it really mean? Why is “annoyed” his mental and verbal crutch? What’s wrong with displeased, irked, troubled, agitated, or exasperated? Even peeved would be nice for a change. I skip the question, which I suppose is rhetorical in any case, just part of the grammar of therapy.
Referring to his family, I say, “All these people get to have you most of the time … they’re intimate with your life.” Then I leap right in: “We don’t talk about sex here,” it seems uncomfortable, “it’s so loaded.” I assure him in the same breath that “I’m not preoccupied with these thoughts” about him and sex. He makes me feel less of a fool for bringing it up, yet again.
“Closeness has lots of feelings, now it has sexual feelings.”
I guess we can talk about it.
A month later I dream of being in bed with him and another man at the same time. It was, I tell him, “All warm, nice, con
nected.” The dream captures an otherworldly safety and contentment.
“Two people, now that’s an improvement,” he gamely replies, again sparing me the shame, rewarding my honesty with humor and understanding.
“Never a woman,” I say, perhaps because I want to establish in this realm, as in every other, that I’m nothing like my mother.
“You’re getting warmth confused with sexuality. It’s an easy thing to confuse in an undemonstrative family that acted out sexually.” He then adds, “And Hester didn’t help.”
He notes my “uncomfortable laughter” in response.
“Abandonment versus a gloppy sea of sexuality-affection is not much of a choice” he says. I don’t offer a verbal reply. He suggests “we clear up sex to let the warmth come through.”
I have no idea how to sift out the erotic from all that I experience as “Dr. Kohl.” If only I were a prospector, I could pour water over my mind, tilting my head this way and that to separate the erotic bits. I’m sure I wouldn’t give them up if I could locate them—I’d tuck them away forever.
In his assessment of the session he writes, “Abandonment theme in all above: tried not to let them pile up. Astounded by it. She doesn’t realize what’s happening here until so much piles up. Burning = the pain and the defense.” He finishes with, “Finally beginning to develop boundaries between sexuality and warmth-affection.”
A few sessions later I blurt out, “I want to come home with you.” I say it before I can think about it. It’s the most directly sexual demand I can muster; I’ve said I want “daughter status” and told him about my undeniably erotic dreams but I’ve never said I’m in love with him much less that I want to have sex with him. I can’t quite admit the desire to myself in spite of his starring role in my erotic imagination. He knows how serious I am about wanting to be his, go home with him, never leave his side. Maybe I’m hoping for a miracle or maybe I’m testing him.
“To act on that would compromise you, make me anxious, and I couldn’t honor our contract,” he says without the least snicker. He then adds, “I’ve told you I can’t take you home.” He writes in my chart, “Not used to not getting the little she asks for. Can she survive her own rage?”
I churn forward, filling time between work and therapy; I mostly read, write, smoke, and eat candy—spice drops are my latest obsession. The hours stick to me. I am lonely but I don’t want to be with anyone except Dr. Kohl. As Samuel Johnson wrote, “When I rise my breakfast is solitary” but “the black dog waits to share it.” Tired as the metaphor has become it seems apt when again and again I find him there; “from breakfast to dinner he continues barking” and I, too, must ask myself, “What shall exclude the black dog from a habitation like this?”
Dr. Kohl sets me up to volunteer with an underprivileged children’s organization called King Street Youth. He wants me to see and feel what kids are like—to see what a baby a nine-year-old is, how young and needy a thirteen-year-old is. Besides, good as our office dance is, all the talk and analysis aren’t enough if after each session I go back to my room to think and write about him. The children’s vulnerability and need get into my blood, just as Dr. Kohl calculated they would. Rather than self-destructing under the unfairness of their situation as I did when I worked at Community Action, I keep my perspective. Maybe I’m holding myself together because I know there’s no choice. I don’t want to check out—either by hiding in a hospital or by swimming out to sea. And yet the calm I experience feels deadly; chaos is invigorating.
Jay, the leader of the program, has a body I come to mark as my type—slightly round, not too tall, with soft features—and easy, understated manners concealing devastating confidence. I spend the summer daydreaming about him, flirting in my own feeble way while ostensibly nurturing children in need of attention and playtime along the sandy strip of Lake Champlain that passes for a beach just north of Burlington. When someone whispers Jay’s dating a coworker on the sly (against company policy) I collapse into my humiliation, berating the misplaced ambition that could imagine he thought about me that way. I’m just another worker to him. How could I have the vanity-fed audacity to think I amounted to more?
On August 19, 1992, just short of a year after I was hospitalized, I succumb to the pressure of doubt—my brain ignites and there’s no way out, no time or will to pick up the phone. Choose, light, inhale. I’ve known for days where this one is going—my foot, to the side of my ankle, where I can throw a Band-Aid on it. Taking a drag to fire up the ember and then holding it to my skin allows my brain to bleed out in a state of perfect concentration. Bliss. Time at rest, the world comes to a stop in that familiar pinprick of pain-pleasure. I want to stay, maybe light and use a third cigarette to really do it right, make a twin for it, all the while resting in the interior of my mind, where an inky calm holds. Keeping the hand in place, breathing, listening. All the months of abstinence had me missing the trance of pain.
I stop at one solid burn. It doesn’t really matter. I’ve risked everything this time. This isn’t a tiny blister. I’ve executed a solid 3rd degree.
In the guilty calm of the aftermath I want badly not to tell on myself. I’ll be in Dr. Kohl’s office the next morning. If I confess he’ll send me back to the hospital as he promised. The burn is a direct violation of the contract I signed when I returned from the hospital almost ten months ago. I can’t disappear there again. I’m not sure I’d make it out this time.
Emotional chaos is my private little hell. I’m in it now. According to the Buddha, we are all burning from 11 kinds of physical pain and mental agony: lust, hatred, illusion, sickness, decay, death, worry, lamentation, pain (physical and mental), melancholy, and grief. This sounds about right.
Despite my devout atheism—or maybe because of it—I think about what humanity has imagined over the centuries as just retribution for human sins small and large. More often than not there’s burning involved—even the gentle Buddha framed it that way. The ancient Zoroastrians believed hell was transitional but the final stage of escape from its miseries required three days of purification in a river of molten metal. Nice. The New and Old Testaments are full of burning bodies, like those described in Jeremiah 4:4: “Cleanse your minds and hearts, not just your bodies, or else my anger will burn you to a crisp because of all your sins.” Whether it’s Revelation’s “lake of fire” or the Hindu notion of “great terrible hell” (Maharaurava), with its thirty-five thousand leagues where “the whole ground glows like a burst of lightning and radiates heat in a way that is intensely painful to the sight, touch, and other senses,” all the heat and pain in the literature reflect the extraordinarily broad figurative and symbolic power of fire.
But that’s not all. According to the Koran’s extensive treatment of hell, those outside the blessed fold of Islam will be burned in hellfire eternally, “Their torment shall not be lightened nor shall they be helped” (2:86) and “the Fire will burn their faces and they will grin therein, their lips displaced” (23:104). The gory details of heat, flame, and burning in this last passage and countless others can’t be divorced from all the nonliterary witches, heretics, criminals, and vulnerable racial minorities who have faced infernos of sticks and straw.
Fire has always been the most expedient and thorough means of purification through a process Ray Bradbury, in Fahrenheit 451, identifies as watching “things eaten, blackened and changed.” Have I tapped into an iconic desire to punish myself in this particular way or are cigarettes just handy and the burns they make dramatic? “Eaten, blackened and changed …” The words echo. Haven’t I done enough? Is there an end or will this attraction to a ritual purification I can’t quite fathom be with me forever?
That night I draw my foot up, ripping off the Band-Aid. The burn has formed a neat, perfectly circular crater now crusted white, its center deep in the flesh beyond layers of skin that failed to protect me. At any temperature higher than 111 degrees F (44 degrees C) protein begins to break down, quickly losing its three-dimensiona
l shape. Since the cherry on a cigarette burns at between 878 degrees and 1,472 degrees F (470 degrees and 800 degrees C), direct contact with human skin rapidly results in cell and tissue damage. Higher temperatures simply mean the shapes change faster, eventually losing any semblance of protein as the dominant molecules of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, phosphorus, and calcium fuel the flame. Perhaps that’s another reason burning is frequently deployed as a means of torture and punishment. Heat is efficient and the mess is minimal. If you burn a body all that’s left after a good hot fire are particles of bone, easily ignored in the ash pit until a stray dog discovers them.
The hole I’ve made in my foot elicits no emotion. My body serves at the pleasure of my mind, “disembodied, unconscious of flesh or feeling,” as T. E. Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a book I love. I perceive all bodies as he does, “with some hostility, with a contemptuous sense that they reached their highest purpose, not as vehicles of the spirit, but when, dissolved, their elements served to manure a field.”
I could pretend the burn never happened …
At my session the next morning I play verbal dodgeball with Dr. Kohl. I cannot tell.
But the obvious truth on my foot bothers me all day. Burdened by the compulsion to have nothing hidden between us, I can’t keep this from Dr. Kohl, no matter what it costs me. Without the truth, without the whole deplorable story, I risk cheapening the emotions that make his attachment to me worthwhile. If he doesn’t know everything I can’t be certain of the authenticity of his reactions and words. If I lie or pretend, my relationship with Dr. Kohl will be as compromised and artificial as my relationships with everyone else.
It wouldn’t have happened if I could hold on to him longer than the bag of Jelly Bellies I chew and suck over Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Lemon. Tangerine. Lime. Green Apple. Raspberry. Grape. Lemon Lime. Island Punch. Orange. Pink Grapefruit. If I could prevent his shadow from shifting to the fringes of my consciousness the minute I walk out his door maybe I wouldn’t have burned this hole in my foot. As it is I pass out of his presence just as I always do, with too much to manage alone; the good feelings escaping like a scent in winter while the bad ones, the ugly stuff, fall and crack open on the pavement, untenable without him to manage them.
Lights On, Rats Out Page 21
