Kissing Doorknobs

by Terry Spencer Hesser

  “You pushed me!”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “You’re so afraid of being interrupted that you pushed me!”

  “I’m not scared of being interrupted, you jerk! I’m … I’m scared … I’m scared of being” I crumpled into a ball and sat down where I was standing. I sat on a crack. Unevenly.

  “Who are you anymore, Tara?”

  Tears spilled over my frozen lashes and disappeared across my cheekbones. I had never felt so defeated. “I don’t know.”

  Keesha leaned in toward me, but I held back. “Please,” I begged. “Leave me alone.”

  “Okay.” Her face was a mask of resigned sorrow and confusion. “I will.” It was almost a whisper. And with that she turned around and started to walk away. “We thought you’d get over this …”

  We who? Over this! I felt like fainting. Instead, I screamed so loudly that Keesha froze on the spot. “Well … I’m … not! I’m not over it! In fact … I don’t even know what it is!”

  “I’m sorry, Tara,” Keesha said kindly. “I just miss you. We all do.”

  “I miss you too … and I-I miss … I miss me … I miss me!” The icy sidewalk beneath me felt good in contrast to the heat coming out of my pores. In a fetal position, I rocked myself like a sad baby in a cold white crib. I had no language to describe my pain. I had no company in my pain. I just had pain. Isolating, solitary pain. And loneliness. And humiliation.

  Keesha dropped down beside me and held me, cradling my head in her lap. “I’m sorry, Tara. I didn’t mean to make you cry! I just wanted to walk to school with you.”

  I sobbed more loudly.

  “Shhh. Hey, girl … it’s okay. It’s gonna be okay,” she said softly.

  If my eyes hadn’t been swollen shut, I still wouldn’t have been able to look her in the face. Her kindness dissolved my very last resistance against hysteria. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to walk to school with her or anybody else ever again. I missed the way we all used to be, so badly that I felt sick. But the only thing I could do was wail. Breathless, heartbroken, frightened sobs.

  10

  Bad to Worse

  Between March and June, several horrible things happened almost simultaneously. First and worst was my father’s heart attack.

  “Is he going to die?” my sister asked in a tiny, hollow voice as we watched our father being taken away in the ambulance with my mother at his side.

  Pain ripped through my abdomen, shot through my heart and cut a hole in my life. I felt as if my lungs were filling with a cold, damp, permanent sorrow. I cried and prayed again and again and again and again and again and again. My sister cried too.

  I tried to comfort her, but I, of course, was more out of control than she was. “He’s not going to die. He’s not going to die. He’s not going to die. He can’t die!” I sobbed until I couldn’t breathe. Then I lay on the floor next to my sister’s bed. I needed to be near someone I loved, but touching would be too much for me. Finally I fell asleep and dreamed that everything was okay.

  The next day, we all went to the hospital. White walls, white people, white clothing. A zillion machines. As we walked into my dad’s room, his green plaid robe greeted our color-starved eyes. He smiled. We smiled. Powerless, we all tried not to cry. The familiarity of his robe gave us hope. It matched the green monitor checking his heart. Green was his favorite color.

  For the first time, we all felt out of control, not just me. And without a game plan or rules, we immediately and instinctively began the sort of ritual of duplicity that accompanies events outside of human control. We all began to smile. We acted as if he was going to be fine. We acted as if everything was going to be fine.

  I was so wrapped up in my fear and pain that I lost the shred of interest in my friends that remained. I stopped doing any activities outside our house. I stopped doing my homework. I thought of my father and his defective heart constantly. I slept with my mother at night—on my father’s side of the bed—and prayed over and over again. My mother didn’t go nuts, though. She was busy relieving her anxiety with a glass of wine or two and crying quietly.

  After my father came home from the hospital, I kept dreaming that he was dead. To protect all of us from further harm, I stepped up my ritual of prayer. Although my urge to pray for the soul of anyone who swore had lessened for a time, now it returned with a vengeance. Once again no one could say “damn” in my presence without my crossing myself several times and imploring God to forgive him—or usually her, my mother—without punishing us.

  My father felt he could use any help he could get and accepted my efforts without comment. But the combined stresses of his physical problems and my mental ones took their toll on my mother. Her natural state of mind had become testy. And when she talked, even about ordinary things like groceries or going to the bank, she usually sounded as if her jaw was wired shut.

  I prayed for her. I did it while watching television, while unloading the dishwasher and while reading. Sometimes I didn’t even know I was doing it. When my mother saw me making the sign of the cross while baking chocolate chip cookies, she threatened me.

  “I’ve been patient,” she said calmly, but her voice and body were edgy with anger. “But from now on, from now on, every time I see you make the sign of the cross … I’m going to slap you silly … sillier! So please. Please. Take this as a warning and stop it. Now.”

  “Okay. I’ll try,” I said.

  “Good. Because I’d like everybody in this house to think of me for once. Not you and your things or your poor father and his health or your sister either. But me-me-me-me. Please.” And then she muttered, “Dammit.”

  Immediately I began praying to save her soul. “In the name of the Father—”

  Just as immediately, my mother reached out and slapped my face so hard I thought my head would fall off. It was great! I loved it! Tears of humiliation streamed down my face but I couldn’t help smiling. My efforts at saving the souls of my family had taken on a whole new dimension. I was being punished for piety. Surely this must erase some of my part in Christ’s suffering. After all, I was suffering too now. My flesh was being injured too. And so, with the renewed vigor of a martyr, I ran out of the room, slamming the door behind me giddily.

  Needless to say, my relationship with my mother became more and more strained. My father joked that her reactions to me were caused by PMS, which he defined as Periodically Mean Syndrome. He said not to worry and told me it would pass.

  “I hope she doesn’t kill me first,” I said as a joke.

  “Me too,” my dad said, but he didn’t sound as if he was joking.

  To take our minds off our problems, we decided to go to a carnival together. We should have known better. It was like asking for trouble.

  The St. Francis of Rome carnival is a big event in our town. It’s like a temporary Santa Monica Pier or Coney Island, I guess. When we got there, things seemed ordinary. The carnival was crowded with the usual neighborhood people. Both my parents met a lot of people they knew and seemed to be enjoying themselves. Greta and I saw kids from school and took turns on the games. Some of us won ugly little stuffed toys.

  After about a half hour of pretending we were having more fun than we were, it was time for the rides. Mounting the stairs to the Octopus, I reflexively performed a quick sign of the cross. I didn’t even really know that I did it. But my mother did.

  She grabbed my arm so violently that I almost fell off the platform. “Do that on the ride and I’m going to kill you.” I looked at her crazed expression and saw the fear, futility and helplessness she was raging against.

  I could have cried right there, but my sister pushed me up the stairs and into the steel-grated egg in front of us. As the carnival worker strapped Greta and me in, my mother and I locked eyes. There was no doubt that she would try to keep her promise if I crossed myself.

  I crossed myself. Not just once but again and again for the duration of the ride. I watched my mother standing on t
he ground next to my dad, who was shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Why, Tara? Why?” was all my sister said, but I didn’t answer her. I just kept praying and watching my mother even when we were upside down.

  When the ride stopped, I was frightened. I knew it was going to take a lot more than the threat of a life sentence or even the electric chair to keep her from killing me. I was dead girl walking.

  She knocked two people off the metal stairway leading to the ride and opened the door of our cage before the surprised carnival worker could get to us. Her face was a mask of rage as she pulled me out by my shirt. Crying, I tripped on the last stair and fell to the ground. In an instant, my mother picked me up by my arms as if I weighed nothing at all. She then grabbed both my shoulders and shook me and shook me and shook me, crying harder than I did the entire time.

  The moment itself was an emotional stew. A blur of colored Christmas lights arced between laughing, screaming, smiling people enjoying themselves. The smells of buttery popcorn, sugary cotton candy, salty sweat and icy fear filled my sinuses as the metal taste of embarrassment trickled down my throat. Heightened but fragmented senses of sight, smell and taste vied for attention against a dull backdrop of humiliation and sorrow.

  Before I knew it, my mother had released me and was sobbing into my father’s chest. I wanted to run to her and stroke her hair and tell her it was only a bad dream. But I knew it wasn’t. It had happened. It had happened in front of the whole neighborhood. She looked like the saddest person in the world. I was dizzy. And nauseated. My father and sister looked stricken with confusion and divided loyalty.

  That moment was the saddest, lowest one of my life, and my mother’s. She was determined to fight for my sanity … even if she killed me. And I was as helpless against her rage as I was against the tyrants in my head.

  That night I slept on the floor at the side of my parents’ bed again. I listened to my mother breathing and muttering to herself in her sleep while my father tossed around. I was sorry I’d made her so crazy. I loved her very much but wasn’t showing it in any way she could understand. Or I could understand. I couldn’t help myself, though. I really couldn’t.

  My mother must have felt really guilty about the carnival incident, because in the months that followed she tried very hard to ignore my rituals.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t help to alleviate my anxiety either. I began to fear the dark. I hated wind and was terrified of being alone. Even the nightly squeak of el trains returning to the end of the line that had once seemed comforting in its rhythmic regularity cut a metal slash through my nervous system. I felt sick but wasn’t sure of what.

  And so I did what I had always done. I clung tighter and tighter to my mother. I became a ball and chain around her neck. I could sense her reluctance, feel her urge to pull away from me. I didn’t care. I clung harder and tighter than ever.

  One horrible afternoon, while I was watching my mother smiling at me from her NordicTrack, our separateness hit me like a bolt of lightning. I doubled over with anxiety and tried not to think about puking.

  “Are you all right?” She didn’t miss a swoosh of her NordicTrack.

  I looked up at her expression of passive fortitude and suddenly realized that she could outwardly show me patience, affection, love and concern …

  “Tara? Are you okay?”

  … while she was with someone else in her mind. I couldn’t control her thoughts, I couldn’t be sure that I’d ever really know what they were. That I’d ever known what they were. Was this possible? Did I know her at all? Was it all a facade? Was her fury the only thing that cracked the mask of her personality? Was anger the only emotion I could ever be sure she was feeling? Did she have to be out of control to be authentic? Did everyone?

  In an instant, I understood that I had a problem I would never be able to overcome. From then on, I knew I would never be able to fully trust my mother. I suspected she was always thinking things that were different from what she said.

  Good morning./ I hate you.

  How was school?/ I’m packing my bags and leaving.

  Don’t I get a kiss?/ If you touch me, I’ll go mad.

  My heart was beating so fast I could barely breathe. My mother had left her NordicTrack and was holding my head and saying something, but I couldn’t concentrate on her words.

  My mother, father, sister, friends, teachers—they could all think something about me that they weren’t telling me. They could pretend. My mother could be pretending she loved my father. She could run off and leave him, and us. Leave us! I could marry someone someday who didn’t love me or who stopped loving me without telling me. Who still smiled at me and ate with me and slept with me. And no matter how much any of us loved anyone else, it would never be enough to ensure that the other person felt the same way. Trust was out of the question.

  “Are you okay?” my mother asked.

  ’Tm kinda … dizzy,” I said.

  “You sure are!” She laughed and got back on her NordicTrack. “But at least you’re not praying.”

  Ironically, although I desperately wanted to control and monitor my mother’s thoughts, I couldn’t control my own thoughts at all. They just jumped into my head and took over.

  I needed to be alone. I wanted to be alone. To think. To try not to feel. After months of remora-like proximity, suddenly I couldn’t stand to be near my mother. Or my father. And the spring rain scared me. So did wind, convertibles, electric can openers and the color red. I didn’t know why. I was totally miserable.

  11

  Donna

  I met Donna, or rather was accosted by her, while walking home from church one rainy Sunday in July.

  Trying to stay dry, she was standing underneath a garage frame just inside an alley. I knew who she was. I’d just seen her at Mass. I’d seen her for years. She went to St. Francis School. Like me, she was thirteen and going into eighth grade. She was lovely, with dark hair and darker eyes that were almost always hidden by sunglasses.

  I’d heard that she’d had surgery to remove a tumor or something from her eye. Everybody talked about the fact that she was tough enough to have let someone poke a needle into her eye zillions of times. Anyway, in the beginning she wore the sunglasses to protect her eye while it healed, but by now they were a part of her look.

  She already had breasts and a bra that performed a function. Boys, men and even some women ogled her as she walked down the street. She was beautiful and muscular but also sort of pissed-off and angry-looking. She was popular and tough and only talked to the coolest kids. I was startled that she spoke to me.

  “Hey, Twinkie. Got a match?”

  “No. I don’t smoke,” I said coolly.

  “You’re supposed to say, ’Yeah, I got a match. Your face and my ass.’ ” I was so surprised and her reply was so stupid and vulgar that I burst out laughing. She raised one eyebrow. I laughed harder. I even forgot to pray for her. Somehow it sounded more like a prayer than a curse anyway. My face and your ass. I watched her as she found some matches in the pocket of her leather coat.

  “Never mind,” she said, a Kool cigarette hanging out of her thin, pink-painted lips at a provocative angle. “I got one.”

  “A match?” I ventured.

  “No.” She struck the match in vain. “An ass.” Giddy at this spontaneous meeting of unlike minds, I laughed again before asking her, “Did you call me a … Twinkie?”

  She eyed me evenly. She hadn’t found any of this amusing. Finally she spoke. “Relax.”

  That was it. I was gone. “Relax! Re-lax! Relaaaax! As if. …” Tears poured down both my cheeks evenly. “Relax! You don’t—as if—as if—as if that were remotely possible for me.” I wiped my tears away and took stock of myself. In my giddy glee, I had crouched on the ground next to the garage. Both my feet were planted in a puddle of water. “Look, I’m treading water.” I laughed and looked around at the neat rows of garages and garbage cans. “Did you ever realize how neat these alleys are? How c
lean?” I asked. I looked up into her face. Both the angle and her startled lack of a facade were hysterical. I started laughing again. She was dumbfounded. Her tough-girl attitude was gone and in its place was a kid my age playing with matches. She helped me up.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “People say you’re weird,” she said. “They’re right.”

  “Yes, they are,” I admitted giddily. “Yes, they are.”

  She finally lit her cigarette, then inhaled through her mouth and exhaled dramatically in little smoke rings that I spontaneously put my finger through. I was going to say, “Hey, look. I’m wearin’ your ring,” but I was too afraid she would think I was a lesbian trying to go steady with her or something. She looked at me oddly.

  “Sure you don’t wanna cigarette?” she asked. She looked strange. If I was afraid of the world, she already half-despised it. I had no idea why.

  “No.” I thought about it. “I’ve got enough bad habits.”

  “So I heard,” she said, and I froze at the thought of what people must say about me.

  “What? What did you hear?” I croaked.

  “I heard that your family outings are almost as bad as mine.”

  In that sentence I could see the kindness and generosity underneath her tough-girl act. I smiled.

  “Why did you call me a Twinkie?”

  “We’re back on that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. Because you look all blond, packaged and spongy.”

  I considered whether I should be insulted or not, whether I could muster indignation in my current giddy mood.

  “Hey, not in a bad way,” she explained. “I mean spongy, like you could bounce back.”

  “Resilient?” I helped her.

  “Whatever.”

  “Creamy,” I said thoughtfully.

  “Maybe. But only down deep. On the surface you’re a lot of other stuff. Chemicals. Preservatives. Probably rubber.”