The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  Between the creek and our house was a hill. I recently drove past and was surprised to find it so molehill small compared to the Everest in my memory: impossibly steep, miles high in the clouds. This was the scene of my recurring nightmare, not the first-person kind where you’re in the dream, but the third, where you watch yourself: a little girl in OshKosh B’Gosh and a yellow bowl cut, running down that enormous hill. She’s so scared. She stumbles, hits the ground, and scrambles up looking over her shoulder. Behind her, chasing her, close, closer, furious and growling and flexing his ridiculous green muscles is the Incredible Hulk, specifically Lou Ferrigno from the 1978 show on CBS. People laugh when I talk about this, but truly I was terrified. I can still hear it: the frenetic piano from the opening theme, the sound of fabric splitting as Banner morphed into the hulk, Ted Cassidy’s deep, scary/sexy voice-over: “Until he can control the raging spirit that dwells within him.” I was scared to let a foot dangle over the side of my bed; he’d grab it and pull me under. I was scared of the basement; that’s where he lived, lurking behind the washing machine or the piano or the tiny black-and-white television, its rabbit-ear antennae wrapped in foil. I was scared to fall asleep, to enter that dreamworld with the running, the stumbling, so close, closer, muscles popping green and veiny. As soon as I got to the bottom of the hill, it would all start over at the top.

  For years, I carried that dream. I can still see it, a video on demand that as the years bled by was replaced with more garden-variety Psych 101.

  I’m about to go onstage. I don’t know my lines. My script is missing pages. “That’s your cue!” someone says, and I’m pushed into the spotlight.

  I’m running around the restaurant, arms stacked with plates. I’ve forgotten the eight top at table twenty-four. When did they seat table twenty-four? Why didn’t anyone tell me? Everyone wants red pepper benedicts but we’re out of red pepper benedicts so customers are pissed, standing and yelling, their children running around unsupervised. One of them knocks into me. I drop a pot of boiling coffee.

  I’m standing in front of hundreds of students and I can’t speak. My mouth is full. I reach in and pull out wads of gum, long and stretchy like taffy. I pull and pull and pull, an enormous pink pile growing at my side. Everyone sits, watching, waiting for me to say something, to quote somebody, to talk, to teach, but I am choking, both hands at my throat and I wake up fast, the movie cliché of sitting up in bed, sweat coated and gasping.

  It’s been forever since I remembered my dreams.

  Who has time to sleep?

  6

  I was dancing with a boy and his dog attacked me. It was a dachshund, tiny and mean. I don’t remember its name. I don’t remember the boy’s name, either. His parents were Gloria and Lenny and I believe their last name was Kravitz, but maybe I’m thinking Lenny Kravitz the musician Lenny Kravitz. They were kind. They laughed a lot. They were the first people I knew who were Jewish. The only grown-ups I ever called by their first names. Lenny was a private investigator—I think that’s right. There were a lot of families on the block. I could be mixing things up.

  This much is true: the boy had cool stuff,* specifically a plastic Fisher-Price record player. Do you know the one? Red, with a yellow arm? It’s retro now. On Walmart’s website they say it “references the funky playthings of the past.” We were dancing to some album, that little-kid frenzy of jumping and thrashing. His dog must’ve thought he was in danger. Its muzzle curled, the growl and snarl before it jumped. The bottom teeth caught me under the chin, the tops just below my ear. I don’t remember blood and I don’t remember pain, although the look on my mother’s face made it clear there was plenty of both. This was an ongoing theme of my childhood, and—let’s be honest—to this day, when I’m supposed to be so grown-up and independent. I see my mom and instinctively match her emotional response, be it fear or sorrow or joy. I’m hyperaware of this now, my own kid six and seven and eight years old: he’ll crash-land, register the damage—skinned knee, goose egg?—and look at me, not for help, but to figure out how he feels. If I panic, he panics. If I’m scared, he’s scared. If I’m like: “Hey! No big deal! Get back on the skateboard!” he’s back on the skateboard. I imagine parents of twelve-and thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds saying, “Enjoy it while it lasts.” But I’m thirty-eight and thirty-nine and forty and still, when my mother is scared, I’m scared; when she’s happy, I’m happy; when she cries at the mere mention of that Hallmark commercial where the big brother comes home from war on Christmas morning and sings “O Holy Night” with the little brother, I’m a wreck, too. I’m wrecked now, crying at my laptop in a coffee shop in Evanston, Illinois. Whose tears are these—hers or mine?—this mother bond tying us together across the miles, the years.

  We are both, to this day, uneasy around weenie dogs. I’m sorry if you have a weenie dog. I’m sure your weenie dog is great. I have a pit bull, and I get pissed as hell when the entire breed is blamed for the actions of one. Believe me, I’m aware of my hypocrisy. Intellectually, I’m not afraid, but the mind’s got nothing on the gut. I see one of those yippie little battery-operated hot dogs and I’m out of my seat, backing away, the thump-kick of heartbeat audible across the miles, the years.

  6

  I was an only child, which meant I was lonely but also that I had magical powers. I could talk to people inside the television. I could whisper to the sky and start a thunderstorm. I could move stuff with my brain because I was actually a Jedi. I begged my mom to take me to movies about Leia, ones where she got trained in the Force and her light saber shot into her outstretched hand and shwwwooop lit up blue and electric and ready to save us all. I cried my eyes out watching The Force Awakens. I’d been waiting for Rey since I was six years old.

  But above all else: I could bring back the dead.

  We kept rabbits in a hutch behind the garage and one of them got pregnant in the winter. My dad built an insulated nest, hay stuffed and heated from below with a lightbulb for a furnace, but the mama bunny gave birth just outside of it. When I opened the hutch the next morning there was a pile of dead bunny popsicles, ice crystals like freezer burn on the thin pink skin. I immediately forgot everything my father had taught me hunting pheasants, the conversations my mother and I had after reading The Big Wave, the leaves turning colors and drying up in the fall, drawing maps of the Mesozoic era in kindergarten class, life and death intertwined in a big old circle like a snake eating its tail and I looked at those tiny bodies and thought, Get up.

  I said it out loud: “Get up.”

  I waited. I waited hours. I waited days.

  Part of me is waiting still.

  6

  I was very sure I would die playing Don’t Touch the Floor, that game where you pretend the ground is red-hot lava.

  7

  My dad studied Henry David Thoreau, who wrote that “one achieves an ideal spiritual state via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine.” My mother, an early childhood educator, told me we’d examine many different religions all of which had a rich cultural history that would teach me so very much about our wide, wild world and later, when I was a grown-up, I could choose whichever I wanted.

  No way could I wait to grow up.

  “What happens at your church?” I asked a girl in my first-grade class, some princess in kneesocks who inexplicably kept her whites white.

  “Lots of things!” She was sitting on the reading carpet brushing the tail on a My Little Pony. “People sing about Jesus and line up to eat wafers and have religious experiences.”

  “What’s a religious experience?” I asked. I was fascinated, partly by the religion but mostly with the pony.

  “It’s when Jesus speaks inside your brain and you know he’s with you all the time but not in a creepy way,” she said. The pony had glitter on its butt. Its tail was blue and shiny. “And also when you say ‘he’ the h is capitalized. That’s really important.” She looked at me, suddenly worried: “Don’t you talk to Jesus?”

  I
shook my head no.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her mouth an upside-down U. “You’re going to burn in hell.”

  That night, before bed/after bath, I went to the line of green leather-bound encyclopedias on the bookshelf and counted volumes up the alphabet: Conifer–Ear Diseases, Earth–Everglades, Evidence–Georgian S.S.R. I pulled down Geraniales–Hume and sat crisscross applesauce on the oriental rug, then flipped through pages like my mother showed me: G to H, H–A, H–E; heelwalker (insect); Hefner, Hugh; Hekla the Icelandic volcano; H-E-double-L hell. The context was over my head, of course, but there were lots of words I recognized—darkness, dead, shadows, demons—and pictures both terrible and fascinating: Signorelli’s The Condemned in Hell from the chapel of Saint Brizio and the right-hand panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, both depicting agony and pain and things generally traumatizing for seven-year-olds and grown-ups alike.

  “Yes it is true!” I told my mother, fully freaked out. “It’s in the encyclopedia!”

  This is a memory I go to when I consider the type of parent I’d like to be. She sat me down and explained that she’d left Catholicism at eighteen because she didn’t believe in hell. She showed me other books, other pictures, other ideas of what the afterlife could be. And she gave me an age-appropriate sort of lecture that boiled down to: check your sources.

  7

  Fire drills were easy: get up, go outside.

  Tornado drills: those were more complicated.

  The emergency siren starts screaming. Teachers tell everybody to remain calm, this is just a drill, and your first-grade class stands up in an orderly fashion and lines up at the door. Classes from upstairs are coming downstairs because downstairs is safer so the hallways are packed, students like sardines with our backs against the lockers. Stay away from gyms and auditoriums. Stay away from glass and windows. Slide down to the floor, tuck your head into your knees, and put your hands over your neck. This is to prevent paralysis in case anything falls you are told. When you ask what will be falling, you are told debris. When you ask what debris means, you are told: Shhhh be quiet. Pretend this is a real tornado.

  I was very good at pretend.

  I saw funnels of whipping wind slam into our school, ripping off roofs and flinging children to their deaths. I saw jagged shards of broken window flying through the halls, people curled at the waist to protect their internal organs, grabbing hold of each other to keep from being swept away in the furious wind. I saw office supplies like airborne missiles, my friends flattened under upturned furniture, my parents searching through our decimated building to find my tiny, broken body in the rubble, and I sobbed into my knees, locked in a ball with my back against the still-there wall.

  Now our kids have active shooter drills.

  I wonder what they pretend.

  7

  I didn’t see my dad much during the week. He worked as an elementary principal in Perry while getting his associate’s in Lansing; later, he stayed in Michigan while my mom taught in Colorado; later still he commuted between my school in Owosso and a new job in Chelsea, so weekends were our thing. We went hunting, mid-Michigan forests and endless dead-grass fields. We went fishing, eleven thousand inland lakes with walleye and bass and trout. We went canoeing on the Shiawassee River—me in the front, him in the back, dog in the middle. Once, we went over a waterfall and the boat flipped. It was thrilling, my first remembered adrenaline. I came up for air and saw my dad swimming toward the dog. He didn’t have to take care of me because he knew I was a good swimmer. He’d taught me, throwing me off piers and into deep ends before I could walk. He trusted me, believed in me, and if he believed in me, I could believe in myself! I could kick through the frothy water, get myself to shore, and what a great metaphor for life!

  Recently, I recounted this memory to my dad—the waterfall, the swimming, the metaphor—and he looked at me like what the goddamn hell. Of course he swam to grab me when the boat flipped! We were in the rapids! I was just a kid! Zeke wasn’t in the water. He hadn’t even been in the boat! We’d pulled to the shore to let him out and then we went over the waterfall—because you always go over the waterfall, that’s what a waterfall is for—and he grabbed me underwater, got me to land, and went back for the canoe, hustling ’cause my snowsuit was wet and he was worried I’d—

  “Snowsuit?” I said.

  “It was November,” he said.

  “We went over a waterfall, in Michigan, in November?”

  That’s what a waterfall is for.

  “You were freezing,” my mother said when I brought this up to her—the rapids, the canoe, the snowsuit. “You were purple. I thought you had frostbite. I thought we’d have to go to the hospital. I got you out of your clothes and put you in the bathtub, cool water first till your body adapted to the temperature and—”

  Their stories tangle together, the he said/she said of my childhood, but what happened next is a memory all my own. My dad came into the bathroom and my mom pulled the shower curtain, as though that thin layer of vinyl would shield me. Then she lit into him, loud and furious. I sat naked under the tepid faucet, learning all sorts of things like: grown-ups make mistakes; grown-ups get mad; grown-ups yell.

  Their divorce wouldn’t happen for a decade, but still: this is the only time I remember hearing them fight.

  7

  My son is seven. It’s no longer possible to have a conversation over his head. He hears us talking and wants to know—“Mom, what’s a primary? Who is Laquan McDonald? Where is Syria? Why can’t our friends go the bathroom? What’s a trump?”—and I take a deep breath and do my best.

  When I was seven, the question was: “What’s a pink slip?”

  Michigan was cutting public school teachers like crazy. My mother couldn’t find a job with my dad’s school in Perry, or near my dad’s school in Perry, or even in the same state, so they both applied for everything listed on the MSU job bulletins. A position came up in Denver, fourth grade with a focus on integrated learning, and the headmaster wrote my mom and asked if he could fly her down for an interview.

  “I wasn’t sure what a headmaster was,” she told forty-year-old me. “But I had seen Goodbye, Mr. Chips, so what the heck.”

  “Wait until you see the library,” she told seven-year-old me. “It has a hundred thousand books!”

  The plan was this: Mom and I would go to Colorado for the academic year while Dad stayed in Michigan, both of them applying wherever they could. You see this all the time in education, both K–12 and the academy: one partner gets an offer, the other doesn’t, and what happens next? The relationship ends, the family splits, a career is sidelined, or you do the distance with your fingers crossed. Something will come up, right? Right?

  My memory of this time is vague in detail but clear in emotion: It sucked. I missed my dad. I had awful nightmares. The city was always on smog alert. Money was tight tight tight. Since my mom worked at the school with the headmaster, I got tuition remission, but we both had trouble with culture shock: kids getting dropped off in Rolls-Royces, parents who were dignitaries and gone months at a time, my mom doing parent/teacher conferences with nannies, second graders with second and third houses in foreign countries called Nantucket and Napa and the Hamptons. One time, I was invited home after school with a girl in my class and she made me eat a bar of soap. We were in her bedroom; it was on the fifth floor. She told me to go into the bathroom; she had her own bathroom. I should get in the shower; she had her own shower—with glass walls like Willy Wonka’s elevator. “Pick it up,” she instructed, pointing at the soap. “Pick it up and eat it.” She stood there, watching me through the glass. I remember my front teeth sinking into the hard fat—green and scented sickening, a rich man’s Irish Spring. The texture was nails on chalkboard. It’s still in my mouth, still choking down my throat, chunk and bile and chemical detergent, but I kept going, staring back at her and chewing slow.

  I didn’t eat the whole bar. Half, maybe. Then: “You may stop,” she said, and wen
t back to her bedroom to play.

  My mother cried when I told her, so I cried, too. She must have asked why I did it. God, what did I say? Because I was the guest? Because I thought this girl was better than me? Because I was scared? I don’t remember. What I do remember is the look on my mom’s face. I knew we’d be getting the fuck out of Denver.

  I didn’t go to anybody’s house after school after that. I waited for my mom in the library. It really was incredible.

  8

  The whole year I was in Denver, my life in Michigan stayed the same: our house, scary basement, rabbit hutch, Everest, and my best friend, Sara, without the h. She lived on the other side of the creek four houses down, and I was allowed to walk there by myself. Her parents treated me like one of the family and ohmygod they were tall. I had to bend my head all the way back. They had a swimming pool and my hair was always green from the chlorine, sometimes mermaid, sometimes alien. In their living room was an L-shaped couch—L-shaped, it blew my mind!—and, get this, MTV. We’d sit cross-legged, jaws on the floor, watching the video for “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. We were too young to get the lyrics and too small-town white to understand the magnitude of the first black artist in prime-time heavy rotation. All we heard was his voice. That three-note synth. The pink shirt, the black-and-white loafers. When I walked home after dark, four houses back and across the creek, I’d imagine the ground lighting up beneath my feet. Instead of being scared of what was hiding in the bushes, I danced down the asphalt.