I'm Down: A Memoir

by Wolff, Mishna

  And from what I could tell Dominique was all woman. After dinner while Dad and Dominique snuggled on the couch, I went to the bathroom—a beige room with magenta accents that smelled like a department store. It was full of perfume and makeup, and there was a mirrored tray with nail polish in every color you could ever think of—even purple. I picked up a bottle of perfume and smelled it. It smelled different from my grandmother’s, and then I tried to set it down on the counter exactly like I found it. I thought about looking in the drawers, but decided that I had been gone too long already, and would save that for the next time. But on the way back to the living room I noticed Dominique’s bedroom door was cracked and I couldn’t resist peering in. I cautiously looked for Dad or Dominique before sticking my head in the door. The room was as neat as a pin, and all the furniture matched. And from her open closet door I saw a hint of what I thought looked like brightly colored feathers. I was so captivated that I hardly noticed Dominique behind me watching me look into her bedroom.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, and I spun around like a top. I was snooping. And I was scared beyond belief that I had embarrassed Dad—and now he would put a hurt on me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I was coming back from the bathroom and the door was open. . . .”

  I was relieved when Dominique smiled and said, “You wanna see my room?”

  I didn’t know what the right answer was and at this point I was much more concerned with not getting in trouble than with seeing anything, so I just stood there sheepishly while Dominique opened the door wide and stood by her bed. And when she waved me over, I happily followed.

  “Let me show you my closet.” She beamed. She was very proud of it. And I was dying to see what another woman’s closet looked like. I knew what my mom’s closet looked like. It was filled with work uniforms, blue jeans, and sweaters that weren’t particularly ruffly.

  Dominique on the other hand owned two feather boas and had over a hundred pairs of shoes lined in perfect rows, including a fuchsia pair and a turquoise pair, because as she said, “You never know.”

  Dominique put me in her fuchsia shoes and threw the matching boa around my neck. By the time Dad walked over to see what we were up to, I was sashaying around her room like an extra from The Cotton Club.

  Dad looked alarmed. “What are you doing?” he asked, hovering in the doorway while Anora gleefully ran in and jumped up on the bed with us. “Mishna, did you ask Dominique if you could see her room?”

  But Dominique just said, “Oh John, you’re just jealous.” Then she slapped my shoulder like I would get it. “We’re just having a little girl time.”

  Dad became sheepish and softly kicked the door frame before asking, “Well . . . how long does that last?”

  But Dominique just giggled and went back to trying hats on me. I could tell Dominique and I were going to be great friends.

  As weeks turned into months, and Dad and Dominique got cozier, she let Anora and I in on a little secret, something she no longer had the energy to conceal: she hated kids. A fact she managed to work into sentences like, “You Wolves”—that’s what she called us—“You Wolves, go upstairs and stop making noise! I’ve got a headache, and you know I don’t like kids!”

  Or, “Who ate my cake? See, that’s why I don’t like kids!”

  Or, “Who spilled Capri Sun all over the interior of my Prelude? See, that’s why I don’t like kids . . . always spilling shit.”

  Dominique would yell at Dad, too. She’d roll her neck like a cobra and say, “John, if you think you can come in here with your wolf kids, sleep with me, and not do a damn thing around here? Well, you can take your nappy-headed kids, and your big, lazy, no-TV-fixing ass, and get the fuck out of my house!” I found it oddly festive. And I absolutely understood why she hated kids. After two months with her, I hated kids, too. Little need machines that got greasy fingers all over everything and cost lots of money. And, like her, I had no clue why people had them. And even though I didn’t get along that well with Dominique, I really understood that she hated all kids and not just us. And I imagined she’d probably like me when I grew up. Nothing personal.

  Dominique is on the right, in a very casual look for her.

  What Dominique loved was horror films. And though I had never seen a horror film before, I really couldn’t understand the concept—why make yourself scared, on purpose, when there are electrical sockets to stick forks in? When we spent the night at her house sometimes I could hear bits of horror coming from the TV in the other room. And one night, when she came over to our house, she was holding a VHS.

  She no longer did her hair and makeup for Dad unless they were going out, so she had her messy hair in a scarf and a pair of jeans on as she went into the fridge and grabbed a beer. It was the first time she had brought a movie over to our house and as she walked over to the VCR, she waved the movie around as though it was important and kept repeating the word “classic.” Dominique stuck the movie in the VCR, and plopped herself down on the couch.

  “Mishna,” she said. “You can watch this movie with me if you want. This movie is a classic!”

  And as the opening credits rolled, she unwrapped a Blow Pop, put it in her mouth, and sucked it in between sips of her beer. She said it made her beer taste better, and I believed it did.

  I walked over to the couch and remained standing as I checked out the opening credits. Why not? I thought. If I don’t like it, I can stop watching. Besides it’s rated R. At my school R-rated meant “Rated Really Cool.” I’ll just see what all the fuss is about, I told myself. Like a rated-R scientist or a rated-R investigator.

  “Okay,” I said. “But this is my first scary movie.”

  “Well, you picked a good one to start out with,” Dominique said. “Have you heard about The Exorcist?” I shook my head as Dominique said, without taking the Blow Pop out of her mouth, “I’ve seen it seven times. Never gets old.”

  “How scary is it?” I asked.

  “It’s less scary,” she said, “and more a classic.”

  “Okay,” I said, and plopped down next to her.

  I sat next to Dominique in the dark of the living room trying not to pee myself and by the time Father Merrin arrived at the MacNeil house, I was in the fetal position.

  Dominique took the Blow Pop out of her mouth and laughed. “Girl, it’s just a movie!” Which helped, but not enough for me to open my eyes. So she leveled with me, “Listen. There are no real demonic possessions.” But I had seen Dad get mad in traffic and I was inclined to think that there were demonic possessions all the time.

  Still, she had a point, it was just a movie and with some deep breathing I managed to calm myself enough to open my eyes and sit upright on the sofa. I am a rock, I am a mountain. But when Regan’s eyes rolled back in her skull, I jumped up off the couch and announced, “It’s time for me to go now!” and ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and stood with my hands over my ears, humming, “The Sun Will Come out Tomorrow.”

  When I got to school the next day I took a quick survey before roll call and deduced that no one in my class had seen The Exorcist, though everyone had heard of it. And by the time we had our first recess it didn’t matter that I had seen only the first third of the movie. I had become an Exorcist expert.

  At recess, I held court on the playground, halfway up the jungle gym, picking and choosing from the crowd below who was allowed to hear my recounting of the epic, and making up the parts of the movie that I was too scared to watch.

  “So . . . ,” I said as Matt Johnson, Zachary Stein, and Catrina Calder sat with rapt attention, “the girl Regan had a devil in her stomach. And it busted out and killed her mom.”

  “Dude,” Matt said.

  “I know,” I said. “And there was this priest, who comes over to fight the devil in the amulet. The priest knew kung fu, and he wasn’t afraid to hit a girl.”

  “That is insane,” said Zachary. “I have to see this movie.”

  “Yeah,” I
said, “you do.” Given his name was embroidered on the inside of his coat and his mom picked him up so he wasn’t late to Hebrew school, the likelihood of that happening was pretty bleak. “But dang,” I added. “Your mom would never let you.”

  “Mine, either,” said Matt.

  “My mother only lets us watch National Geographic and one hour of cartoons on Saturday.”

  “Bummer,” I said. “That’s harsh.”

  ______

  For the next week I fielded Exorcist questions like, “Can a grown-up be infected?” Or, “Did the priest have throwing stars?”

  Even snotty Christopher Scott came up to me at lunch to ask, “So if she had a flying bed, why didn’t she just fly away from the people that were trying to get the devil out of her?”

  To which I casually replied, “Look, it’s just a really cool movie.”

  And the scary movies just kept coming. Over the next month, I saw the first twenty minutes of Hellraiser, The Omen, and nearly half of Prom Night II. I would end each viewing in the same way: bathroom, hands over ears, Annie. But the next day, I’d walk into school, just busting with excitement. It was better than Christmas Eve. It was better than my birthday. I would wait till Mrs. Lewis had finished attendance and we were working “independently,” then I would drop a bomb to whoever was close by.

  “So . . . I saw Hellraiser last night.”

  Math was over. It was Mishna time.

  I reassured myself that it wasn’t lying so much as filling in the spots I missed. Besides, my renditions had to be at least as creative as the movies themselves—maybe more.

  About a month after I first saw The Exorcist, I was approached on the playground by a girl in my class named Lilith Gardner. She wasn’t the most popular girl in the third grade, but she was the leader of her group. She strode up with Violet, Kirsten, and the rest of her crew, who looked like normal eight-year-olds, but were about four to six years away from becoming the goth kids. They all thought elves were real, and they were a little too interested in the morbid side of science class—constantly buzzing about dissection.

  I was alone on the turning bar when Lilith walked up. And when I saw them coming, I stopped spinning.

  “Hi, Mishna,” Lilith said.

  “Hi!” I said.

  “Can you draw?” Lilith asked, cutting to the chase.

  “Draw?” I asked.

  “Yeah, draw.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  Kirsten explained for her, “Like, elves or horses.”

  “Or lesser demons or wizards,” Lilith continued. “That kind of stuff .”

  “I don’t know,” I said. They were asking for some pretty advanced stuff .

  “Well . . . ,” Lilith said. “Okay.” She was just standing there deciding whether or not to walk away and never talk to me again.

  “Okay . . . yeah,” I said. But what I was thinking was, Please ask me to join your drawing club. I will learn to draw whatever you want! I will work hard and practice till I know how to draw the best horse ever. I will learn what a demon is. Just, please don’t walk away! But Lilith stood there saying nothing.

  It was Violet who said, “Draw with us next recess.”

  And Lilith shrugged. “You saw all those horror films, right?” Lilith asked.

  “Yeah . . . ,” I said. “Like Exorcist, Hellraiser, Prom Night . . . yeah.”

  “Well,” she said. “Try to draw some of that stuff, too.”

  And I did, and every recess after that. Initially, I wasn’t a good-enough drawer, and I couldn’t even come close to drawing Pinhead from Hellraiser. So I traced things out of books, and added my own flourishes so that I could call them my own. And after a while, I could draw the two or three things that I traced. I sat with my new friends on the playground filling a notebook with eighty versions of the same brown horse. Brown horse as a unicorn, brown horse as a pegasus, brown horse as a brown horse. I was even invited to my first sleepover at Lilith’s house, where we spent the night playing The Legend of Zelda and asking the Ouija board about math. And all of this added up to me sort of having a crew. Granted these weren’t the princesses on the foursquare court, but I saw them as a bridge clique. Sort of a stepping stone on my way to bigger and better friends.

  But soon my little bridge clique dropped a bomb on me. Lilith, Violet, Kirsten, and I were drawing what we all deemed to be a very important series of female vampires, when I said, “Hey . . . have you guys started this stupid book report?”

  It got quiet for a second—like a needle scratching across a record player. And then Violet said, “I finished it last night.” I thought I heard her wrong.

  “Finished?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Lilith said. “It’s due Friday.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I thought I’d just do it Thursday night, or something.”

  Violet rolled her eyes. Then Kirsten said under her breath, “That explains a lot.”

  “What?” I asked. I was getting really infuriated. “What, are you all mad at me or something?”

  “Well,” Lilith said. And by the looks of everyone’s face, she was speaking for the group. “We all sort of think . . .” Nods all around. “Well, you kind of act stupid.”

  Kirsten softened it. “We don’t think you are dumb, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  Violet finished her thought, “But, you really act dumb and it’s hella lame.”

  Wow! I thought. Time to stop saying “hella.”

  Lilith continued, “It’s not that we don’t like you, but we’re all going to MIT and we don’t want to get too attached to someone who’s not also going to MIT.”

  Then I said the most honest thing I had said since I got to IPP. “You guys . . . I don’t think I can do the work.”

  “What do you mean?” Kirsten asked.

  “I mean”—I was trying not to let anyone see how upsetting it was to me—“I just look at like the instructions for the structure of our book report and I don’t get it.”

  “Well, what don’t you get about it?” Violet asked.

  “I get none of it!” I said. “It’s like looking at instructions on how to build a rocket ship.”

  “Listen,” Lilith said, “just try.”

  What they were asking seemed impossible to me. We had like three hours of homework a night, and with the added burden of not understanding most of it, that translated to even longer.

  “Well, why don’t you ever call me?” Violet asked.

  “Isn’t that cheating?” I asked.

  “Um . . . no,” Violet said. “You should call me when you get stuck.”

  “What,” I said sarcastically, “like every night?”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. That was a great idea, but Dad hadn’t paid the phone bill again so I couldn’t dial out . . .

  . . . But I could receive calls.

  “Violet,” I said. “Will you call me at night this week? And next week I’ll call you, like a game?”

  “Okay,” Violet said. “Whatever you want.”

  “I want you to call me,” I said. “This week.”

  So that week Violet called me every night, and the next week I spent at Mom’s, under the new arrangement, and I called Violet every day. It was in those two weeks I started to notice that when Lilith, Kirsten, and Violet weren’t talking about druids or trolls, they talked constantly to each other about what we were working on in class—I guess up till then I had sort of tuned it out. They didn’t get all this schoolwork done ’cause they were magic—they had a really cool trick. When they didn’t understand something—rather than close the book and run to the garage to sniff gasoline—they asked each other for help. And sometimes we even sat and worked on schoolwork during recess. Although I felt like deadweight in the group, I was starting to find ways here and there to contribute. And occasionally, when the teacher asked for an answer, I raised my hand with everyone else. And, surprise—our schoolwork wasn’t completely boring. And I started to think, Hey, I’m not terrible at this school
stuff. And this school isn’t totally awful either. . . . Too bad my stupid neighborhood is where I live.

  Then one night, I was over at a barbecue at Dominique’s parents’ house with Dad and Anora. Dominique had a huge extended family and her parents lived in a big old house that was able to fit tons of people. It was the kind of house that I thought was beautiful, if only it weren’t covered in plastic.

  I asked Dominique, “What’s the plastic for?”

  “My mom keeps it on the carpet and furniture to keep it nice.”

  “How would they know it’s nice,” I asked, “if it’s always under plastic?”

  “Oh,” Dominique said. “They take it up for company.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood. I kinda thought we were company.

  “Who comes over for company?”

  “Why you so nosy?” Dominique said. “Jeez.”

  And I walked off thinking, I just wanted to know who I have to be to get into the living room.

  Anora was doing her thing. I watched her walk up to Dominique’s sister, blink her eyelashes, and say, “Do you like my dress?”

  To which she responded, “Oh yes.”

  A minute later she was saying to Dominique’s sister-in-law, “I wish I had pretty long nails like yours.”

  Or to her dad, “Do you want to see me do the running man?” and Dominique’s relatives pulled candy out of their asses to give to her. Dominique’s uncle, who didn’t have any candy, reached into his wallet and gave her a dollar. That’s how cute she was.