The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

by Megan Stielstra

  “Hi!” she says to the sperm.

  “Hi!” he says.

  Cut to a real baby, happy and cooing in a fluffy pink dress.

  Roll credits.

  Or this:

  look at this picture of gross horrible diseased genitalia. this is what will happen if you have sex before marriage. boys will think you’re a wad of chewed-up gum. none of them will marry you. you’ll be alone forever with boils and pus all over your parts. i can’t say the actual words for your parts because those words are obscene and maybe illegal and also i don’t know them. i know they are down there. somewhere. when you are married you will only have sex with the lights off so it’s fine.

  End scene.

  I was mystified by these videos. My mother had always talked to me about my body in ways I’d later understand as feminist: truthful, anatomically accurate, body positive, and body autonomous. I knew that I would discharge blood and mucosal tissue from the lining of my uterus and though that sounded horror-movie terrifying, it was actually normal and no big deal. I had a starter kit for girls under the sink, individually wrapped squares of Advil in my backpack, and a smart, well-educated adult woman at home with whom I was comfortable talking about puberty and sex. If you were one of the many, many parents who avoided these conversations with your own daughter and relied on the public school system to fill in the blanks, I was one of the many, many girls who found her crying in the bathroom after choir practice, promised her she wasn’t dying, and taught her how to use a tampon.

  That said, just because I knew what was up didn’t mean I wasn’t awkward. The day I got my period—oh my god, this is mortifying—my mom made my dad take us out to dinner in Ann Arbor. To celebrate. She gave a toast: blah blah miracle of womanhood blah and I died a quiet death. To be clear: my dad was totally cool. His whole career involved squirrely, preadolescent kids running around with hormones oozing from every pore. The embarrassment I felt was mine and mine alone. Had it been possible, I’d have set off a time bomb to avoid further discussion.

  15

  I played Winnifred in the Chelsea High School production of Once Upon a Mattress. I couldn’t sing for shit but I did shout in a sort of lyrical way, plus I had what is referred to as “personality.” If you’re unfamiliar with the script, Winnifred’s first scene happens after she supposedly swam across a moat, meaning that immediately before I walked onstage, the stage manager dumped a bucket of water on my head. I’ll leave it at this: I was not wearing the right kind of bra to appear cold and dripping in front of my entire small-town community.

  Also: during tech rehearsal I was goofing around and accidentally broke Prince Dauntless’s foot, so the super-cute senior playing him had to perform the whole show from a chair.

  15

  January 17, 1991. I was in the high school auditorium for some rehearsal or another, the musical or show choir, forensics or debate. I loved all of that stuff. I loved being a part of something: those first messy steps of collaboration, learning how to create, to make, a song or a dance, a scene or an argument. There were ten or so of us sitting stage left, and someone came in from the side entrance and said that the United States had just bombed Iraq.

  The bubble of my town, my high school, my family, my privilege. I was scared of Scantron tests; scared of Mr. Terpstra’s class, reciting vocabulary words in unison as he pounded on a desk: i-ron-y a state-ment or e-vent in which the opp-o-site is said or the un-ex-pect-ed hap-pens; scared of dissecting frogs in biology class, the smell and the death and those tiny jawbones, so ridiculously fragile compared to the deer carcasses hung upside down and bleeding out in my garage; scared of the older girls who followed me in their car; scared of walking onstage and forgetting my lines; scared of college applications; scared, like thousands of small-town kids, that I’d never “make it out of here”; scared I’d disappoint my parents; scared of the choreography to “Cold Hearted”; scared boys wouldn’t like me; scared girls wouldn’t like me; scared no one would like me; but that night in the high school auditorium, on break from whatever rehearsal had brought us together and listening to the news about Iraq—it all seemed small.

  It was the beginning of an ongoing dialogue I have with myself about my own privilege.

  16

  As soon as we got our drivers’ licenses, we’d go to Ann Arbor, a ten-minute drive east with movie theaters and shopping malls and the University of Michigan (read: college boys). In the summer, they play outdoor movies on top of a parking structure not far from the Power Center, this towering auditorium made of mirrored glass. We’d bring blankets and snacks and stay out until midnight. (“The movie doesn’t even start until ten, Mom! It has to be, like, dark!”) One night, a friend brought a friend who was dreamy as hell and he asked if I wanted to sneak into the Ray Charles concert.

  If you are in need of a pickup line, that one totally works.

  Of course, we couldn’t get in. The Power Center was packed, and two dumb kids were no match for security. Instead, we lay in the grass just outside those huge glass walls and from there, watched the stars and listened: “Shake Your Tail Feather” and “Singin’ This Song for You” and “Hallelujah I Love Her So”—muffled, of course, but still. Later, we wandered to central campus, sat on the edge of the Ye Gods and Little Fishes fountain and stuck our bare feet in the water. We must have talked; I don’t remember what about. I don’t remember what I was wearing, or how he looked at me, if we touched, if the heavens burst open or time stood still or “We are young/Heartache to heartache we stand,” but as far back as I reach down the line of my life, this was the first time I was ever in love.

  What’s more terrifying than that?

  16

  I was one of those special kinds of geeks who cut class to hang out at the library. I read Tolkien and Franny and Zooey and Sassy cover to cover and Sylvia Plath way before I knew what she was talking about and, in 1991, the news. That was the year the world cracked open. Years before we all searched Google a hundred times a day, I took my questions to the librarian: Desert Storm, Duvalier, Mandela, Kevorkian, Rodney King, Exxon, Croatia and Slovenia, Mike Tyson, Anita Hill, Khmer Rouge, HIV. I pounded my poor parents with questions and kept exhaustive notes in my journal. We should all be in awe of teenagers, of youth, youth artists in particular. Holy hell, the emotion! The love and the anger and the energy, all so huge, enough force to power a city. I think back to myself then, and I look at the young writers I work with now, and am blown away by their courage. It scares people, I think. We try to contain it. We teach them to hold back. To be “appropriate.” To be “respectable.” I wonder: What might happen if we got out of their way? What might happen if we actually listened?

  16

  High school was complicated. I imagine that’s the case for most people. Where do you put the frustration? The hormones? The fear? Sometimes, at night, I’d spread blankets on the hardwood floor to muffle my footsteps and sneak outside to the lake. Keeping your balance in a boat is tricky in the dark, but I’d lie still as stone and float across the water, feeling like I was inside the Hubble Space Telescope. You’ve seen this scene in dozens of movies; the hero looks up, millions of stars blanketing her from above, and has some sort of epic epiphany about how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things. How connected we are in the grand scheme of things. How trusting we are in the grand scheme of things. In high school, I fiercely believed in grand schemes, and those stars seemed like proof, an endless bibliography for my desperate teenage questions.

  Let’s be honest: I wasn’t just sneaking out to row around and have feelings. If you’re unfamiliar with southeast Michigan, there are many small lakes, and on any given night you’ll be able to find a couple of teenagers rolling awkwardly in the bottom of a boat. I remember lying on my back. I remember the stars. I remember the whispering: Shhhh somebody’ll hear us. Shhhhh be quiet!

  I didn’t want to be quiet.

  If you head west from downtown Chelsea, toward the big lake where the actor Jeff Daniels lives, th
ere’s a curve of train tracks that cuts across the road and runs parallel with it for a half mile or so. And then, right before the road and track split again, pulling away from each other like a slingshot, there’s a little shed. To this day, I don’t know what it’s for—maintenance supplies, maybe? It’s where I’d go to get away, at first riding my bicycle and later, after I learned to drive, my awful orange Toyota, the one I’d gas up with meticulously collected pop cans cashed in at Polly’s for ten cents each. I’d sit on the little steps leading up to that shed. It would take the longest time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, allowing me to make out the outline of my own hand in front of my face. In the rare moments cars would pass, I’d go temporarily blind from the brights turned on high against the deer regularly crisscrossing the road, but then they’d be gone and again—darkness. And then—stars. I’d wait there, sometimes a few minutes, sometimes an hour, but eventually I’d hear the train, first a dull roar from miles off and then louder. I could feel its tremor, climbing up through the tracks and into my shoes. I could see its headlight illuminating everything like a stage spotlight, coming closer, faster, louder, the engine about to eat me alive and finally—finally—I screamed. That’s what I’d wanted to do all along. Scream my head off. Throw my voice at it, all of it, the frustration and the hormones, the confusion and the doubt, everything so raw and wonderful and terrifying.

  16

  I’m neckdown underwater—can’t move, can’t cry, breath locked.

  I look up and standing at the edge of the quarry are boys. Maybe they’re men. I can’t tell. The day had been so beautiful, the water so warm, blue green and glass-still in this dugout mineral pool where we’d come to make out and skinny-dip in the sunshine. He’d left for some reason—food, drink?—I don’t remember the specifics but it would only be for a moment and that was fine, more sun for me. I floated on my back, hair splayed mermaid-style around my head, listening to my breath underwater, in and out, in and out, and suddenly they were there, first just one and then he called for the rest. In my memory there are six or seven, but maybe there were only three? Four? How many would it take? They stood at the edge of the jagged rock, looking down at me trapped in a fishbowl below them. Instinctively, I locked myself into a ball and moved toward shallow water, low enough so I could touch bottom but still high enough to shield my body, to cover myself, to hide.

  Our relationships with our bodies are complicated. I have not always treated mine kindly; other times I’m blown away by its beauty and strength and capacity for joy. This moment in the water was the first time I remember fearing it.

  “Stand up,” they yelled. “We want to see you!”

  How much time passed?

  “Come on! We’re not gonna do anything!”

  Five minutes? Ten?

  “Are you fucking deaf?”

  “Bitch, stand up!”

  “We’re not going to fucking rape you!”

  We’re not going to fucking rape you.

  In the end, the boy I was with came back, and the others left. This was one of a thousand moments in the girl character’s life in which something could have happened, but didn’t.

  16

  If every film about high school is to be believed—Carrie, Heathers, and Pretty in Pink, for starters—nothing is scarier than prom.

  Mine was incredible. I went with my friends Casey and Jeremy, the twins who didn’t get the Doublemint commercial. They showed up on my doorstep wearing matching tuxedos and brought their friend Dave, who’d made his tuxedo out of newspaper. I had a black dress and fishnets and three count ’em three hot dates, so basically I’m in debt to these guys until hell freezes over. A week later we snuck off to the dunes at Lake Michigan, sleeping bags in the sand. At some point I woke up to the moon like a spotlight above us and, on my right, Casey, rocking his head in his sleep and, on my left, Jeremy, rocking his feet.

  A year later I came home from Massachusetts for spring break and met up with Casey at his dorm at the University of Michigan. We went to the Law Library, this ridiculously beautiful Gothic cathedral, and laid in the grass. The stars were incredible; it had been so long since I’d seen them. Casey told me he wasn’t happy in Ann Arbor. I told him I wasn’t happy in Boston. I don’t remember what else we said, but by June, we had both left those cities, those colleges, those lives.

  Twenty years later my family and I were with Jeremy and his three-year-old daughter at Kalahari, an indoor waterpark in the Wisconsin Dells. We’d booked a two-room hotel suite, thinking the adults could talk in one room and the kids would crash in the other, but they were too worked up, chlorine and sugar and spaz. I lay in one bed, singing Big Star to my six-year-old son: “Won’t you let me walk you home from school/ Won’t you let me meet you at the pool.” Jer lay in the other, singing Grease to his daughter: “Summer days drifting away/ To, uh oh, those summer nights.” I adore this memory; our voices tangled in the dark, our lifetime of friendship, a model of men who are good and kind.

  It’s bigger than the quarry. It’s bigger than the fear.

  17

  I was on the debate team. Senior year—regionals, I think? The topic was the environment. I argued the negative, which meant defending the status quo. The environment was fine. No global warming, no extinct species, no damage from oil spills, and as a very high and mighty vegetarian I didn’t know if I could pull it off. Then I walked into that competition and saw all the boys. Hundreds of them, no joke. They wore suits. They organized their index cards alphabetically. They looked at me. At first I wondered if I had food on my face. I wondered if my skirt was too short. Then, as I came out of the bathroom, I overheard one of them say, “Looks like someone’s here to make quota.”

  I’d like to tell you I kicked their asses, but honestly I don’t remember.

  It pisses me off that they’re still in my head.

  17

  I didn’t know how to react to my parents’ divorce. I had yet to begin the lifelong work of figuring out how to fit between them. If I do this, will I remind him of her? If I say that, does she see him?

  The essayist Chloe Caldwell writes: “I didn’t think I had the right to be sad.”

  Here’s what I do know: they loved me fiercely. I also know what a privilege that is: parents who love you, and who demonstrate that love in word and action, through childhood and adulthood.

  17

  I was scared that someone I knew would see me in my Arby’s visor with its stupid fucking cowboy hat logo. Now, I’d like to reach back across time and give myself a little talking-to about what really matters: pride in hard work, saving for college, and standing alongside kind people who made me laugh.

  18

  New city, new coast, new college: new ridiculously tiny dorm room in Boston. I don’t remember much about my classes. Mostly they were lecture-style, two-hundred-plus students sitting in auditoriums, the professor waaaay down there. We copied notes off of a slide projector. We took blue-book exams that were graded by TA’s. I dated one of those TA’s. He was nice but I didn’t love him, so I saw other guys, too. That’s what we called it—seeing people—which mostly meant checking out their CD collection and making out in the dark. I remember lots of groping. I remember wondering why nobody turned into princes. Was something wrong with my kisses? Was I the wrong kind of girl? We don’t question the pop songs. We question ourselves, and I was mad at Whitney Houston and Lisa Loeb and all their heartfelt longing, right up until I walked down the hall in my dorm and heard a guttural, wailing sort of scream-singing with just a bass beneath it. I stood there, listening, finally knocking on the door and asking what the hell is that. The girl who lived there showed me the album cover: PJ Harvey topless in black and white and flipping her wet hair. The next day, I went to the Virgin Megastore on Newbury Street and bought the CD, eventually scratching it and going back for another copy. And another. Another.

  It was the first music that felt like mine.

  My favorite part, then and still: “I’ve called
you by your first name/Good Lord it’s me—Jane!”

  18

  I had one friend at college. Her name was Meg. Meg and Megan. She had glitter eye shadow, a fake ID, and Rollerblades. I had Blood, Bread, and Poetry by Adrienne Rich and a PowerBook 140 with a trackball and internal floppy drive. We cut class and went dancing and she got me a job at a fancy southwestern restaurant around the corner from FAO Schwarz. I was too young to serve alcohol so instead I was a food runner: meals came up in the kitchen and I carried them to the table. Back and forth, back and forth, all night, every night—and during the day, still as stone in auditorium seating, some professor or another reading from his PowerPoint.

  To pass time, I counted jalapeño poppers.

  One, one hundred, one thousand.

  How many jalapeño poppers equal a semester of undergraduate tuition?

  There have been many times I’ve been afraid of math. Mr. Clarke’s AP algebra class. The miles between Boston and my mother. Buying a condo, losing a condo, setting up my kid’s college savings plan, my own student loans, my husband’s student loans, my students’ student loans, and our country’s student loans, but nothing is as awful as doing something you hate to pay for a waste of your time.

  18

  Journalism was not for me. My teachers said I used too many words and also there was this new thing called the Internet.