Kissing Doorknobs

by Terry Spencer Hesser

  I didn’t look up. I didn’t stop crying. Like a terrified animal, I froze in place.

  “Tara! Look. No one else is crying. It’s just practice. It’s not real.”

  Practice. I wondered when we would use this ability to crouch on the floor with our hands over our heads. Tomorrow? In fifth grade? In high school? What were they thinking? I kept crying and worrying, worrying and crying.

  There were a lot of parent-teacher and parent-counselor meetings about my fears, but no one seemed to feel confident about what to do. Everyone hoped I’d grow out of my “constant fretting,” or “worrywarting,” as my mother called it. As I grew older, though, my fears got worse. And so, unable to rely on any of the adults in my life to save me from my terrors about this world, I turned my attention to God and the next world.

  Although my mother was not religious, my father was Irish and very Catholic. They had split the difference by sending me to public school enhanced by weekly catechism lessons starting in first grade. I’m sure neither of them could have guessed how seriously I would take my Catholicism.

  From the first class, I worried about original sin, which comes from being born a human after Adam and Eve screwed up in the Garden of Eden. According to my catechism, only baptism could erase original sin. But I reasoned that if that was true, zillions of good but unbaptized people might not get into heaven. How could that be fair?

  I also worried about unbaptized babies who had died. Then I worried about abortions. I wanted to collect all the aborted fetuses in the world and have them baptized to make sure the little souls got into heaven even though their fully formed bodies never made it to earth. By fourth grade, I didn’t care about prochoice or prolife, but I was extremely proafterlife.

  I worried about death and heaven and Judgment Day. I worried about shame, wretchedness, paralysis, disease and accidents.

  I didn’t like passing by the giant crucifix looming above the altar of our big old dimly lit church. It made me scared and sad. Furthermore, since we’d been taught that Christ died for our sins, I was afraid I had had some hand in his pain. Even if Christ was crucified thousands of years before I was born, I still felt queasy about my role in his terrible suffering.

  It was just as hard to look at the statues of the Blessed Virgin and Joseph: I could never meet their gazes. You just can’t crucify a child and then hang out with the parents—even if they are statues.

  I hated the confessionals. Three dark little coffin-sized closets nailed together and hooded with dusty velvet curtains standing along each side of the pews. Not very inviting. Not very … forgiving.

  Inside the two side cubicles, there was enough room for one person to kneel. In the middle there was enough room for a priest to sit without a lot of discomfort—assuming that he wasn’t claustrophobic. There were tiny screened doors cut into the partitions between the priest and each penitent.

  Once I was inside the confessional, dread danced a jig in my nervous system. My entire soul cringed with fear. The darkness and stale air were stifling. I kept my terror in check by listening to the muffled murmurs of somebody else’s sins.

  When the priest finally slid open the shoebox-sized door and let me know he was ready for me, I moved my lips closer to the screen.

  “B-Bless me, F-Father, for I have sinned …,” I stammered. My heart was pounding and I felt dizzy. I was terrified.

  For most Catholics, confession is a way of getting their problems off their chests, a way of apologizing to God through a priest and being forgiven. In my mind, the loop never closed that neatly.

  “It’s been a week since my last confession and in that time I … um … I had a nightmare.…,” I croaked.

  “As far as I know, child, bad dreams are not a sin,” the priest responded in a near whisper, probably thinking about his own bad dreams.

  “But after the bad dream, the nightmare, I got out of bed, crept into my parents’ room and silently lay down on the rug next to their bed. I didn’t crawl into their bed because they don’t like me coming in their bed all the time … even if I need to. So anyway, I must have rolled under their bed after I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew my parents were running around the house calling my name. My mother was almost crying and my dad sounded scared too.”

  “I see,” he said, trying too hard to sound sympathetic.

  “The thing is, when I heard how worried they were, I didn’t come out. I stayed under the bed for a while longer. I liked that they were scared. I felt they needed to be punished for not letting me sleep with them when … when I get scared.”

  “So you just stayed under the bed listening to their terror?”

  “Until I heard them calling the police. Then I came out.

  “Hmmm.”

  “They were both really, really mad at me.”

  “Understandably. Is that all, child?”

  “Um. No. Not at all,” I said. I wanted to confess everything. Everything. I wanted to make absolutely certain that when I walked out of that box and finished my penance, my soul would be radiant and I’d be ready to die and go to heaven. Or at least not be doomed to hell.

  “There’s a lot more,” I said. I felt the walls shake as the priest made himself comfortable while muttering something inaudible.

  “What’s that, Father?”

  “Nothing. Go on, child. I’m still relatively young.”

  My confessions always took a lot of time. As a result, the lines outside my box often turned into an angry mob of impatient penitents. Once, the confessor on the other side of the priest passed out from kneeling and waiting so long in the heat. When I heard what had happened, I tried to get back into the box to confess my guilt in the situation, but it was almost impossible. Everyone, grown-ups included, started cutting in line in front of me. And they weren’t even polite about it.

  “Sorry, honey, I don’t have all day,” they’d mutter without looking at me. Even my friends started to cut in.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to be home before I’m an adult,” said Keesha with a smirk as she stepped in front of me.

  Although the priests tried to be patient, they realized that I was more compulsive than penitent in my desire to tell everything. Every sin, every sinful thought. Occasionally they’d even try to end my confession by saying something like “You can sum this up, you know.” But I’d never let them do that to my soul.

  “Oh, no, Father!” I’d moan. “I want to tell you everything.” I’m sure hearing me say everything sent a shiver down the spine of every priest who ever heard my confession. Everything meant they’d be in that box for a long, long time. First with me, then with a lot of others. Everything had lifelong Catholic priests wishing they were Buddhists.

  3

  Fifth Grade

  Fifth grade started out as the best year of my life. For no reason that I could identify, my nightmares stopped, my worries lessened, my eczema was better and I was even used to the stupid drills at my school. So with all that bad stuff gone, I was suddenly feeling a lot of good things. Like love. I loved my family, God, my teacher Mrs. Prack; and my three best friends, Keesha, Kristin and Anna, like never before. It was as if this really good feeling had replaced all my bad ones. I felt great. Open. Present. Alive. I hadn’t felt that good since feeding the peacocks in Michigan with my mother so many years before.

  I learned a lot about my friends at that time. We slept at each other’s houses and talked on the phone every night. It was comforting to discover that they had problems they were dealing with too. I guess I’d been assuming I was the only one in the world with problems.

  Kristin was blond and lived next door to me. She was weird because she always worried about her weight even though she wasn’t even close to being overweight. She analyzed the fat grams of everything she put into her mouth.

  Keesha was black and full of theatrical attitude. Her parents and grandparents had been part of the civil rights movement and, as she told us frequently:

  “Hawney! My mama and daddy and
aunties and uncles did not risk their lives fightin’ for civil rights so that I could sit next to Kristin here whining about not looking like a straw with a head. If we’d a known that y’all were gonna talk so stupid, we’d a begged for separate schools.”

  By fifth grade, Keesha was already no one to be taken lightly.

  Anna was the jock. The summer before, Anna had taught Keesha and Kristin to dive in perfect arcs off the high dive at our local community pool. It was so amazing to see someone with the ability to do beautiful, athletic, incredible things with her body and the mastery to teach others how to do it too.

  I myself never tried. I said I was scared of the height, but actually I thought that swimming pools were communal toilets. Spas for germs. So even though there was enough chlorine in the water to turn us all into summer blondes, I hung out on the side of the pool, where it was dry and germs would have to travel into my system by air.

  My friends didn’t push me, though. Our relationships were easy. We knew each other’s parents. I even felt comfortable enough to bring up the subject of my fears during a lunchtime conversation about horror movies.

  “Freddie Krueger,” said Anna while eating her sandwich and spraying us with tiny wads of bologna and spittle. “I had nightmares about those nails!”

  “Pffft!” scoffed Keesha. “Nightmares about a creep who needs a manicure? Now, Dracula, he was something to worry about, girl.”

  “Did anybody see Interview with the Vampire?” Kristin asked.

  We all screamed happily. “Um … I’ve got something to ask you guys,” I said. “And I’m serious, so listen.”

  Keesha, Anna and Kristin turned toward me. There was a dramatic pause. “Do any of you ever get scared of your own thoughts?” I asked. My friends looked at each other and shrugged silently. It felt as if years went by as I waited for an answer. It was the first time I’d ever admitted that my thoughts scared me.

  “No,” said Keesha. Then, after another long moment during which my stomach felt as if it was doing a figure eight on a roller coaster, Keesha added, “We always been scared a your thoughts.”

  Everybody laughed. Even me. Keesha put her arm around my neck, kissed my cheek and stole a chocolate chip cookie from my lunch box. Then the bell rang and we had to get ready for my most hated subject—gym. I groaned.

  “Come on, Tara, I’ll show you how to put on a gymsuit,” laughed Anna, and we tumbled out of the cafeteria.

  I knew how to put on a gymsuit. In fact, the exertion of putting on my gymsuit was usually the extent of my exercise. I was terrible at gym. When my school picked teams, the jocks picked kids in wheelchairs before me.

  But I didn’t care. I liked daydreaming and hated running. I didn’t want to learn how to dribble or volley or press my own weight.

  “Tara! Let’s go,” screamed Wendy, the captain of our volleyball team. I mumbled something about how stupid it was to have gym after lunch. Then I threatened to hurl, and took my position on the court while sticking my finger down my throat. Almost everybody laughed. Not Wendy, though. She wanted to win.

  The ball was served and then, as usual, instead of paying attention to the game, I found myself counting the number of times I heard the ball make contact with the floor, a fist or even the occasional head. I never knew why I was so interested in the sounds of the ball being played, but the thud was pleasant to me. And the game was boring. I closed my eyes and inhaled. The gymnasium smelled like sweat, perfume, disinfectant and something sour … rotting shoes? I guessed this smell must be an olfactory turn-on to jocks. I wondered if cheerleaders or sponsors of the Olympics had ever tried to bottle it.

  “Tara!” The ball grazed my ear and fell at my feet, and the other team scored a point and cheered.

  I looked at my friends and said, “Ouch.”

  Wendy went ballistic. “That’s the last time! That’s it! What’s up with you, Tara! You didn’t even try to hit the ball!” Her face was red with anger. I looked around for our teacher, Miss Susan, who often cut out of our games to smoke outside the building.

  “Giiirrrlll!” said Keesha, and everyone giggled. I shrugged at Wendy and glanced at Anna, the jock, who looked torn between agreeing with Wendy and being my friend.

  “That’s it!” screamed Wendy. “I’ve had it. That was your ball and you were somewhere else in your head again! You’re off the team!”

  What luck! I’d never dreamed I’d have the good fortune to resume my place on the sidelines with the physically handicapped, who, admittedly, didn’t look all that happy about getting me back. “Okay,” I said evenly, trying not to show my joy. “Thanks.” But Wendy grabbed my arm.

  “Not so fast. I gotta know, why didn’t you even try to hit the ball?”

  “Because,” I replied, and the gymnasium went silent. “Because, what’s the point?” I asked.

  “What’s the point?” Wendy’s eyes were slitted with hatred. “What’s the point?” I could feel the entire class’s eyes on us.

  “Yeah. I don’t see the point. If I hit it back to them, they’ll just hit it back to us. So why not just keep it, as long as they insist on hitting it over here?”

  Even though they were on my team, Keesha, Kristin and Anna laughed until they cried. Wendy ran out screaming at everyone and eventually got a note sent home about her bad behavior. Keesha nicknamed me Jordan, after Michael.

  I’d always liked daydreaming more than sports, so I didn’t feel bad about my gym status. In fact, I would have liked to be more casual about my other school-work. But I was as rigid in the classroom as I was easygoing in the gymnasium. If my handwriting wasn’t perfect, I’d erase and do it again … erase and do it again … erase and do it again, until …

  “Tara?”

  “Hhhiiiyyyaaahhh!” I was always so startled when interrupted that I could have leapt to the ceiling and hung from the tiles. “Sorry. Yes?”

  “Everybody else is finished.”

  “Okay,” I said, handing over my test and thinking, But everybody else’s is probably sloppy.

  Although my tests were neat, they were almost never finished, because of how much time it took to make them look perfect or because I really thought about the questions. Really thought about them. I was in an advanced reading class and the work was challenging. Multiple choice was very time-consuming. As an example:

  31. Larry and his friends decided to______all modern conveniences and camp out as the pioneers used to.

  a. forsake b. justify c. belittle d. exploit

  Although I could see that a. was the answer that my teacher was looking for, I couldn’t help considering the ramifications of b., c. and even d. I thought of how people regularly exploited modern conveniences while belittling them and then tried to justify doing so. Unfortunately, with all that thinking, I wasn’t coloring in enough dots to finish.

  “Tara?”

  “Hhhiiiyyyaaahhh! It was a rerun.

  “Sorry. Yes?”

  “Everybody else is finished.”

  “Okay.”

  But despite the good things in my life, and for no reason, I began to worry again. Constantly. About everything.I worried so much that I worried about worrying. And I didn’t know why. Worries just popped into my head. I’d see a squirrel and imagine it smashed by a car and then I’d imagine other car accidents with smashed and bloody humans. I imagined terrible things happening at home while I was at school and unable to help. My father could die. My mother could die. My sister could run away. And what would I do without them? How would I be able to stand their loss? I knew my worries weren’t normal. I knew because my friends had worries too, but they were nothing like mine. Mine were perpetual. And horribly vivid. They came between me and the real world. Also, I had a nagging suspicion that maybe I was responsible for the bad things that were happening in the world … like maybe I could be doing something to stop them. I just didn’t know what.

  To distract and comfort myself, I started to draw large, safe, happy families in the margins of my workbook or
test papers. Then I started drawing rope around the families. Instead of just drawing them together, I tied them together. I drew smiles on their faces. My teacher noticed. My grades were starting to slide a little. She wrote a letter to my parents hinting that I might have some attention deficit problems.

  “I pay attention!” I hollered at my mother. “I pay attention to lots of stuff. … more than most of the kids! I have to pay attention to all different stuff … at the same time! I think I have attention overload!

  It was true. For as long as I could remember, I’d been an advanced student, able to pay attention to both the world around me and the one in my head. It was like playing two video games at once or watching television and listening to the radio. It was noisy. It was exhausting. It was stressful. It was not attention deficit!

  My mother clicked off the television program she was half-watching. “Then stop drawing.”

  I put my head in her lap and smelled detergent and something else … perfume? “Okay,” I promised. “I will.” And then I thought how pleasant it might be to be tied to my mother, how secure it might feel. I wanted the umbilical cord back again. I doubted she’d feel the same if I told her.

  “Is there something bothering you?” she asked, so sweetly I almost smelled flowers.

  “No!” I lied. “No!”

  I didn’t tell her I was worried all the time. I didn’t want to worry her. Anyway, I didn’t like to say my worries out loud.

  I did keep my promise to stop drawing pictures in class, though. But right after that, I started to collect troll dolls. Little naked fat people with short legs and long punk hair. I lined seven or eight of them up on my desk and whispered to them in class.

  “Pay attention,” I’d tell them in a strict voice. “Come on … turn around … look at me. What are you thinking? Are you happy? Are you thinking that you’re naked, with weird hair? Are you worried about falling on the floor, getting stepped on … being separated from the others? Well, don’t. I’ll protect you. I promise.”