“Com-minggg,” we both said, in conscious imitation of my mother’s exaggerated pronunciation.
The house smelled great, and everyone was standing around the table admiringly. My mother, who was not normally all that into presentation, had outdone herself. Roast goose, a vat of sauerkraut sprinkled with caraway seeds, potato dumplings, goose gravy, dinner rolls, two bottles of wine, green candles and a festive red tablecloth. Norman Rockwell does Eastern Europe.
“This looks so great, Mrs. Sullivan,” said Donna while she moved into one of the available places at the table. “Thanks for including me.”
A light film of anxiety broke out on my back and upper lip. I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to do what I knew I was going to do. But I couldn’t help it. I watched the lips of my family, smiling and talking, but I was hearing a whoosh of anger traveling through my nervous system.
“You’re welcome, darling,” said my mom, with tears of joy welling up in her eyes. Since my father’s illness and my quirks, my mom had been drinking a lot of wine. We were all used to her tears for any number of reasons and didn’t much react to them. This time, however, she looked so smug that you’d think she’d given birth to this meal instead of cooked it.
My dad is a teetotaling Irishman with a double chin and a reluctant smile. He was salivating over the meal before us. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing …,” he said.And everybody in the room finished the sentence, which he had repeated at least a million times before.
“… anybody who goes away from this table hungry, it’s their own fault!” Everybody said it but me, that is. Because I was struggling to keep calm despite the tyrants raging wildly in my head.
“Okay,” said my dad. “Everybody can sit down where they’re standing.”
As everyone began to sit down, I went ballistic. “What’s going on?” I shouted.
Everyone turned to look at me in total surprise. My skin was covered with a cold dew. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up like straight pins. I was losing the struggle not to burst into tears.
“What now?” My sister looked bored.
“Now?” I screamed. “Now everybody is in the wrong places! How can you tell us to sit down where we’re standing, Daddy? And why are you trying to do this to me?
“Do what to you, Tara?” My father seemed to be controlling his own anger.
“Mixing me up! You don’t sit there! You sit there! Like always.”
I grabbed my father’s arm between the shoulder and the elbow and lifted mightily in an attempt to physically hoist him out of his chair. “Mom sits there like always! And Gramma and Grampa sit there, please! Please!” I pointed to the chairs where I needed them to sit.
My poor grandparents looked so scared that they aged ten years in twenty seconds. I was like a deranged referee. I practically knocked my “tough guy” sister out of her chair. “Come on, Greta! You sit there like always… and me and Donna sit here … just like always! What’s wrong with you guys? Huh? What are you trying to do to me?” I was hollering and crying and acting as if I had just escaped from some lunatic asylum. But I couldn’t let everyone sit in the wrong chairs. I couldn’t.
“Come on, Daddy! Pleeezzze sit there. Mom! Please! Please! Just like always! Just like always. It’s got to be just like always or else … or …” I was crouched on the floor crying. Everyone else was frozen in time and place.
In spite of all my other quirks, everyone was astounded by my holiday-meal outburst. My grandparents looked more scared than I did. My sister solemnly examined her reflection in the china-cabinet mirror. My mom’s tears of pride had turned to fountains of pain. And even Donna, who was usually pretty casual about my rules, looked undone. It was my father who spoke first.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said. “I’m so sick of this shit.” Because he’d used the Lord’s name in vain, I began to pray for his soul.
“Our Father who art in Heaven—”
“That’s it,” my dad mumbled. He knocked a chair on its side and stormed out of the kitchen.
Within seconds he slammed his bedroom door so hard I thought the walls would crack. My mother grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, my grandparents grabbed the glasses and the three of them went into the living room. Donna went home thinking I was taking more serious drugs than she was and hadn’t told her. Greta and I put away the untouched food, then played Chinese checkers and eventually ate Cheerios for Christmas dinner.
“I like Cheerios,” Greta said. She smiled at me beatifically, like the Blessed Virgin. I was jealous because she was normal. “I like goose with dumplings better,” she said slyly, “but I do like Cheerios.”
“How come you never get mad, Greta?” I asked.
“You think I don’t get mad?” she asked, as calmly and sweetly as ever.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’ve been suspended three times for beating people up. And two of those times were for you.”
“So?”
“So, I get mad!”
“I still don’t get it. You only get mad when you’re not at home?”
“No.” She thought for a long time before answering. “I get mad here. I just act mad outside.”
I watched her calm, thoughtful face chewing her Christmas Cheerios and realized for the zillionth time that whatever it was that made me act the way I did had affected more than my life.
Before going to sleep that night, Greta and I sat in my bedroom and listened to our parents arguing in the front of the house. After a while I couldn’t stand it and put a pillow over my head. “They’re arguing about me,” I said through the foam and cotton.
“Don’t feel bad,” she said, putting her arm around me. “You can’t help it … right?”
“I can’t! I really can’t.”
“I thought so.”
“Why? Why did you think so?”
“Because … you’re not crazy. And so … why would you act crazy … if you could help it?”
“How do you know I’m not crazy?”
Greta shrugged and looked at me with those unblinking eyes of hers.
“What is crazy?” I asked.
Immediately we heard something crash. Greta tilted her head toward the room in which our parents were fighting. “That’s crazy,” she said. We laughed a lot.
Greta jumped up and pulled back the curtains. “Hey, let’s look at the angels!” Side by side we squinted to see into the dark backyard. “They look fierce in this light,” Greta said.
She was right. They did look fierce. “They’re like you,” I said, thinking about all the physical fights my sister had either started or finished in her eleven years. “They’re warrior angels.”
“Thank you.” Greta looked so proud that I suddenly realized how few compliments she got from me, or anyone. “How many of them are there?”
I quickly counted. “Three … seven … twelve … Fif-fif … uh-oh! There’s fifteen!”
“So?”
“I … gotta go.” Without stopping to put on my coat or boots, I ran into the yard and through the snow in search of a clean space. Barefoot and in my nightgown, I was freezing and crying before I even lay down and started making another angel. I waved my arms and legs like crazy. I was scared stiff, because I had no idea why I had to do this stupid, stupid thing! I just knew I had to. I’d never be able to sleep knowing that there were fifteen angels and not sixteen. It had to be an even number. It had to. Once again, I had no clue why.
When I ran back into the house, dripping with ice and slush, my parents and Greta were staring at me with horror. We were all afraid of what the new year would bring.
15
Kissing Doorknobs
Maybe it was the stress of the holidays, or the strain of going to the shrink again after making the sixteenth snow angel, or the guilt from shoplifting, or the irritation of Donna’s newest boyfriend. I don’t know what caused it. I never did. But one day in late January, as I was walking out the door to meet Donna, I stopped in front of t
he doorknob in our living room and … froze.
Before I knew what was happening, I had placed all ten of my fingers on the doorknob in a little circle with the exact same pressure, the way I had done before when performing my street ritual … but this time I brought those fingers to my lips.
Instantly and instinctively, I spread my lips out as wide as I could and touched all ten of my fingers to my lips with the exact same pressure. I don’t remember what I was thinking when I did it. It was involuntary and yet voluntary. It was natural and yet unnatural. It was the birth of a ritual that would be repeated many, many times. In fact, from that day on, I was compelled to perform that ritual almost any time I came in contact with my front door. It wasn’t easy. It was exacting.
If I slipped and applied more pressure with one finger than another, or if a finger fell off my lip, I’d have to do it all over again. Sometimes I’d have to stand there for a little while to get it perfect. It was hard to do.
My parents got pretty alarmed. Especially after I had been acting so normal for the past month.
“Why? Why? Why?” my mother asked over and over again, as if she was stuck on Replay.
“I don’t know.” And that was the truth. What I didn’t say was that I had to do it. That it made me feel better to do it, even though it made me feel worse. I also didn’t tell her that the big knot that used to be in my stomach was back and that the only way to untie it was to do the doorknob thing. I also didn’t tell her how scared I was … again. I couldn’t tell her that. The tyrants were back in control, and I couldn’t explain why.
My mother had an anxious look on her face again. And that always made her act weird herself.
“I’m going to make you remember that that is not a pleasant thing to do, Tara,” she said through gritted teeth. “You’ve been so much better. So much better! You can’t start this again. I won’t let you.”
Employing a sort of demented Pavlovian reasoning, my mother threatened to slap me every time I did the doorknob ritual so that I would associate it with pain instead of pleasure—as if there was any pleasure involved with any of this.
“Taraaa!” she’d warn as I approached the door. But I couldn’t think about her. I could only think about what I had to do. Whether I wanted to or not. I looked at the doorknob. I made a finger circle with the exact same pressure.
“Tara, please. Stop here.” My mother’s voice was pitiful.
“Don’t kiss them. Please,” she moaned.
I brought those fingers to my lips.
The slap hurt, but I didn’t react. I just continued, even though I knew I’d have to start over. A few seconds later I heard my mother run from the room. I was free to start over, counting to myself. One. Two. Three. Four. In the beginning I wasn’t sure where to stop, how many times was enough.
I heard my mother crying and throwing things in another room. I knew she was as scared and nervous as I was—and just as determined to follow her urges to stop me, no matter how much she didn’t want to hurt me.
Seeing me act this way drove her past all her control points. She felt she had to do something. So we were on a collision course with each other. And the rest of the family became both witnesses to and victims of our destructive and debilitating war of the urges.
But even with the slapping and the hollering, the pleading and the tears, I considered myself lucky. After all, my counting and praying had subsided almost completely. And I only had to do this doorknob thing at home. If I had had to do it with every door I passed through, I would have been humiliated. Not to mention the time it would have taken.
After a few weeks, my mother’s physical punishments were too much for her to endure.
“I can’t stand this!” she’d beg. “Why can’t you stop this?” Slap. Slap.
One day, after a few halfhearted slaps, she changed her ultimatum.
“I’m finished slapping you,” she said in a shaky voice. “The next time I see you doing it, I’m going to take you to the doctor—another doctor! Or maybe I’ll just have myself committed and let you do as much of this as you want.”
After her threat, I couldn’t pry myself away from that darn doorknob. I did my ritual again and again and again and again and again and again for up to a half hour at a time, with tears of fear streaming down my face.
As promised, my mother took me to a new doctor.
“You’ve given your mother quite a scare,” the new doc said to me in a kind tone of voice.
“Uh-huh,” I replied, even though what I was thinking was “You think she’s scared; try being me.”
“Do you understand why your mother is scared?” she continued.
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s human nature. If we can’t figure out why other people act in a certain way or do or say certain things, then we get scared of them. And it’s fear that makes us do and say things we’re not proud of.”
Tell me about it, was what I was thinking, but I just sat there as embarrassed as heck to be there in the first place. I began to count the floor tiles.
“I think that’s what happened to your mother. She slapped you because she was afraid,” she said solemnly.
I was not worried about my mother slapping me. This was not about child abuse. I was worried about my mind, my thoughts. Were they my thoughts? Or had aliens planted them in my brain?
The doctor gave me a pat on the back. I tallied up seventy-five tiles while she told me that I was a good kid and that my eczema didn’t look too bad.
I don’t know what she told my mother privately, but afterward my mother seemed hopeful that whatever was wrong with me would just go away. She bought me ice cream, new jeans and a great sweater from The Gap and hugged me forever when she saw how cute I looked in them.
I could see that my mother was in as much pain about my problem as I was. She needed to believe that the doctor was right. She needed xo believe I’d be cured. To help her out, I prayed it would go away. But I prayed silently, and that was a big improvement.
16
Chinese Food
Fortune-cookie crumbs sprayed the air. My family was finished eating and eagerly splitting the cookies to set their fortunes free.
“‘Problems have solutions but love does not,’” my mother read. “What does that mean?”
My dad, who had forgotten his new glasses, held his fortune about as far from his face as possible. If he ’d been able to stretch his arm to Ohio, his vision would have been 20/20. “‘You will receive important news from an unusual messenger.’”
The eagerness on their faces defined human hope. If aliens landed at the next table, they could easily have deduced that my family had been waiting their entire lives to receive the information hidden in those cookies.
“‘A little kindness is worth more than a little gold,’” read my sister. “What crap.”
While they happily examined their fortunes, I continued straightening my rice and rearranging the contents of an eggroll into an acceptable pattern for consumption. That is, acceptable to me. That is, orderly, with the cabbage stretched out and the other ingredients lying neatly beside it. I didn’t want to eat any mystery ingredients hidden by another unappealing wad of food. As a result, I hadn’t taken one bite, and we’d been eating for almost an hour. My parents were doing their best to ignore my newest quirk.
I was getting testy, though. It took me so long to arrange and eat my meals that it had been weeks since I had eaten any dessert at all. It wasn’t that I cared that much about desserts. I didn’t like them as a rule. There were too many ingredients in them. And too many of those ingredients (like partially hydrogenated soybean oil and propylene glycol monoesters) didn’t seem like things that should be eaten. Desserts, like Chinese food, were as a rule too complicated to dissect. More like science than sustenance. But still, I was hungry.
“Uh-oh!” Greta knocked over her Coke. “Whoops.” Our plates were floating in ugly brown rivers of cola that streamed over the edges of the table and into our laps. As m
y parents shrugged and blotted the tablecloth and my sister grinned sheepishly, I felt a volcanic anger rising up inside of me.
Ignoring the complete disaster she’d just created, my sister grabbed the extra cookie. “Can I have yours?” she asked me.
“No,” I said, just to be mean. “It’s mine!”
“Okay,” she said with a sly smile. She handed me the cookie, but before I could tell her for the thousandth time that I don’t like people touching my food, she said, “Do you think the ink from the paper might have contaminated the cookie?”
She’d won. “Take it!” I snapped. “Go ahead. It’s all yours. Eat it!”
My mother gave Greta a stern look. My sister just smiled at her and said, “Hey, you should thank me. By the time she gets to dessert I’ll have gray hair and you’ll be in a nursing home!”
My father must have agreed. “Come on, Tara,” he said without looking at me, “eat something so that we can get out of here before the second coming of Christ, okay?” My dad was always impatient with my food arrangements after he had finished eating. The waitress returned and looked at the reformatted but uneaten food on my plate.
“Uh-oh!” she said sternly. “I hope you’re not ambidextrous!”
The word hung in the air like a neon sign. Ambidextrous! She meant anorexic! My mother laughed first, but the three of us were quick to follow her lead. It was just what we all needed to break the tension that came from living with what I had.
“She is sorta ambidextrous,” screamed Greta. “She doesn’t eat with either hand!”
Walking home from the restaurant, I watched my sister’s peaceful face. She was lost in her own thoughts and I realized that I’d been so self-involved that I’d never really gotten to know all that much about her.
“Mwa … hahaha!” My mother laughed at something my father said. A chill went through my spine. What if she died? What would life be like without her? Before I could recover from the chill I was counting frantically.
“One … two … three … four … five …”
My sister groaned softly. I didn’t look at my parents or my sister, but I could imagine their faces. If only they understood that I was doing this for all of us.
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