by Daniel Smith
Sometimes grown-ups were conscripted not to restrain me but to pry me loose from wherever I had affixed myself. Like a tick, I was forever clinging to things for survival. My mother still questions whether she and my father were right to leave me at summer camp when, halfway through a mere two-week inaugural stint, they paid a visit and I reacted as if I’d been held hostage by the Iranians and negotiations had just broken down. When they tried to leave, the counselors had to wrench me from the backseat of their car by my ankles.
I don’t know how long it was after that that the compulsions started, but I know they threatened to lift my anxiety to a new level of self-consciousness. What but some defect itself compels a child to run his index finger over the total surface area of a dinner plate before his anxiety subsides, or to flick the lights on and off precisely twelve times before leaving a room, or to count the underside of his teeth with his tongue by twos? What but something wrong, something fundamentally off, compels a child to clear his throat fifty times a minute, convinced that there is a minuscule but unnervingly sensible blemish in there, a freckle or fold or wrinkle or mole, that only coughing will smooth over?
I didn’t know. That’s the point. Deep into adolescence I didn’t know. To pursue the matter would have been premature. Who cared, in the end, about my breaststroke, so long as I was otherwise active? Who cared about coughing so long as it didn’t signal actual ill health? Who cared about anxiety, even, so long as there was still a chance it wouldn’t flash the full length of its fangs? Even then it was possible that I wouldn’t become my mother.
Then Esther stepped into my life.
4.
esther
She came jangling into the bookstore out of the literal suburban blue, wearing a fulsome smile and looking like a Midwestern diner waitress in a gingham dress and white tennis shoes. Esther’s presence in that place, at that time in her life, baffled me from the start. According to her job application she was in her twenties, a recent college graduate with an impressive academic record. She presented herself as well read, worldly, and ambitious. She wasn’t what you would call pretty. She was small-headed and thick, not fat but abundant, fleshy beyond an ideal one could not help but imagine for her. Her nose was piggish and her teeth too small. But she was provocative. She carried herself with panache, flaunting her curves with low-cut blouses and thin, clinging fabrics. She was lively and chatty and stuffed with ideas, and all this made her seem out of place. By all convention Esther should have been in Manhattan or San Francisco or Los Angeles, rather than where she was, which was at the rump end of a strip mall midway along the Port Jefferson line of the Long Island Rail Road.
When Esther arrived I was fifteen, and I’d already been working at the bookstore for a year. It is not just because of her that I suspect my mind would be much healthier today if I’d somehow managed to halt my professional development just prior to that employment. I didn’t need the work. I already had a job at Food-town, the cavernous, nipple-puckeringly cold supermarket at the opposite end of the strip mall. It was my first job. I worked as what is known as a “leveler.”
Levelers, for those unfamiliar with the term, are essentially debris clearers. They are the mass-retail equivalent of the stretcher bearers and ragpickers who would descend onto Civil War battlefields whenever there was a break in the carnage. After the housewife has picked through the yogurt cartons, searching for the freshest date; after the father has palpated the potato chip bags, deluded that any one is fuller than another; after the nanny has shoved aside the chicken broth up front, hoping to find a can with a lower price buried deep within the shelf . . . that’s when the leveler springs to work. He gathers the toppled merchandise; he rearranges the items in a neat stack, side by side, one on top of the other; he rotates them so that their bright labels face front. Then he waits, Sisyphus-like, for it all to happen again. Leveling is a repetitive, mindless, benumbing job, and it is only now, far too late, that I see how perfect it was for a person of my temperament. My father was a lawyer, and he used to half-joke that he should have become a housepainter instead. What he meant was that unlike lawyering, housepainting had soothingly clear and finite ends. Leveling was like that. There was never any confusion. There was never any ambiguity. There was just the discrete and achievable task, forever.
That I didn’t stay a leveler I blame on a book. In the ninth grade we were assigned Of Mice and Men and, self-sequestered in my grandmother’s bedroom in the moments before a Rosh Hashanah dinner, hunched with my back against her closet door, I read the famous climax, in which George, trembling with anticipated grief and regret, shoots big, dumb, rabbit-obsessed Lennie in the back of the head—blam!—murdering his best friend out of mercy. And for the first time in my reading life I wept. I wept for Lennie. I wept for George. I wept for the plight of itinerant ranchers in prewar northern California. I wept for humanity! When I emerged, red-nostriled and stinking of mothballs, I was in my heart no longer a leveler. After that, whenever I stood outside Foodtown after my shift, I would stare at the bookstore at the other end of the parking lot—past the deli and the drugstore and the framing shop and the stationer’s—as if it were some mirage, an oasis of literary sophistication.
It wasn’t. As the only game in town besides the library, the store attracted whatever bookish types happened to live in the area—solitary men and women who lingered broodingly in the poetry stacks for full afternoons. But the vast bulk of the store’s trade in books was off the best seller rack: the newest Grisham or Koontz or mass-market spiritual phenomenon. And the bulk of the store’s trade in general, it turned out, was off the comic-book rack. As much if not more than a bookshop, the store served as a kind of public square for dermatologically afflicted adolescents to congregate and compare notes on the anarchic universe of superheroes, atomic mutants, and demonic villains. They came in droves, these comic-book geeks, day after day, year after year, and in time a large number of them had made their way onto the payroll. By the time I started they were part of the inextricable DNA of the place. The store had philosophy. The store had history. The store had leather-bound first editions of nineteenth-century novels. But more than anything else the store was a boy’s club, as cliquish, restrictive, and leery of outsiders as the Vatican.
It was under these social conditions that Esther and I became friends. To be more precise: It was under these conditions that Esther chose to befriend me. She didn’t have many options. The staff, almost without exception (she was the only female employee), abhorred Esther. They thought her pushy, intrusive, untrustworthy, bizarre—the whole xenophobic litany. Pushy she indisputably was. Esther had the habit of ambushing customers as soon as they entered the store, so that she could steer them toward and sell them on her favorite books. When we ate lunch she would hover at our elbows, waiting for the moment we dabbed our lips to ask, “Mind if I have the rest of that?” If someone teased her about this she would plead shameless poverty, but the staff concluded that she was simply lazy—the type of person who grows fat on other people’s food. Then, perhaps most unnerving of all, there was the oddity and incongruity of Esther’s love life. She was married, to a slight, quiet young man she paraded into the store one morning. And yet she claimed, early on and often, that she was a lesbian. “I love my husband,” she would say. “We have a lot in common. But I only married him because I want a baby. I want to be a mommy.”
I was as unsettled by Esther as anyone, maybe more so. Later it would be Esther who would call forth the most powerful, private, physical symptom of my anxiety: a stab of sharp cold in the heart-side of my sternum, as if an icicle had been lodged there. I can remember now feeling the ghost of that sensation whenever she approached me in the store. A blossoming of frost. An inward recoiling. Yet of all the employees who must have had some version of this experience as far as Esther was concerned, I was the only one who didn’t reject her. I was the only one who made gestures of acceptance and goodwill, the only one who made her feel as if I liked her and was intereste
d in what she had to say—even though I didn’t and wasn’t. Of a dozen people, I was the only one who acted charitably toward Esther. In doing so I opened myself up to her friendship and gratitude.
• • •
It was not a mistake to be kind to Esther, though for many years I was bitterly convinced it was. Esther made a fair show of ignoring the fact that she was shut out of the store’s camaraderie; she never for a moment let on that she knew she was disliked. But of course she did know, and the knowledge of her knowledge, coupled with her inexhaustible ability to act as if she fit in, gave off the odor of unbearable sadness. Esther needed a friend. That I was the one who volunteered for the position has nonetheless always been a source of great confusion for me. Given all that shrinking, all that reflexive desire to turn away—my body itself shouting “No, thank you!”—why did I submit to the contrary impulse?
The salient concept here is the well-known “fight-or-flight” response. Whenever an animal—a Komodo dragon, a Labrador retriever, whatever—is presented with a threat or perceived threat, it has one of two choices. Either it can confront the danger head on or it can bolt. No matter what it chooses, its body responds to the threat by preparing—quickly, very quickly—for action. The sympathetic nervous system, the part associated with the really primitive and reptilian stages of evolution, kicks into gear. Here is a description of this process, drawn randomly from a library book about anxiety:
Activation of the SNS . . . leads to hyperarousal symptoms such as constriction of the peripheral vessels, increased strength of the skeletal muscles, increased heart rate and force of contraction, dilation of the lungs to increase oxygen supply, dilation of the pupils for possible improved vision, cessation of digestive activity, increase in basal metabolism, and increased secretion of epinephrine and norepinephrine from the adrenal medulla.
You know those stories of mothers lifting cars to save their babies? Those are sympathetic nervous system stories.
The problem of anxiety isn’t that the organism responds to threats by near-instantly powering up. That’s clearly a good thing, species-survival-wise. It’s that sometimes the organism starts seeing threats too readily. Same book as above: “Chronically anxious people exhibit a persistently elevated autonomic arousal level often in the absence of an anxiety-producing situation.” Never mind the debate about how much of this is due to faulty wiring and how much to the organism’s learning to think of harmless or not-very-dangerous things as potentially existence-threatening. The point is, anxiety is a neurological warning system, the sole purpose of which is to keep the organism safe and whole. Anxiety says one thing and one thing only. It says, “This right here? This right here is probably really bad for you. You should think seriously about taking off.”
And taking off, or some version of it, is exactly what anxious people do. Sometimes taking off means staying put. The anxious person looks at his car parked in the driveway and envisions accordioned metal, melted tires, burning flesh—and he doesn’t drive. He looks at a wedding invitation and envisions awkward conversations, drunken relatives, demands to join a conga line—and he sends his regrets. He looks at the gently undulating surf and he envisions jellyfish, riptides, stray hypodermic needles—and he sets up an umbrella and opens Us Weekly. At other times taking off means actually taking off: bailing on a date, bailing on a relationship, quitting a job, skipping town. But always it means the deeply felt impulse—the involuntary impulse—to escape. To avoid.
With Esther I felt this impulse and I ignored it. I was in the school choir. I had a glow-in-the-dark retainer. My favorite band was The Eagles. I had neither the mental equipment nor the wish to become the confidant of an impoverished married lesbian with a pregnancy fetish, particularly one I didn’t much like. I didn’t even need to articulate this to myself. My very being, my good old trusted, pre-cognitive, wisdom-of-the-body instincts, told me so—and I turned away. I plugged my ears and did the opposite.
I didn’t fully understand this contrariness, or even much forgive myself for it, until I visited my mother in her office and she used a clinical term that none of my therapists had ever applied to me before, but that I immediately saw fit my brand of anxiety perfectly. The term was “counter-phobic,” and it refers, just as it sounds, to those instances in which an anxious person moves toward rather than away from an object of distress. He moves toward whatever he is afraid of or made uncomfortable by because . . . well, there are any number of reasons. It could be straight-up masochism. It could be, it often is, because the thing feared by one part of the mind is valued and cherished, even worshipped, by another. How many great religious lives have been characterized by the fruitful cohabitation of trembling and ecstasy? How many great artistic lives? How many performers experience terror in the wings, experience terror just thinking about waiting in the wings, but still walk on stage when the curtain rises? These are counter-phobic responses, and just in the world of music there are countless examples. Pablo Casals said, “Nerves and stage fright before playing have never left me throughout the whole of my career.” The same is true of Arthur Rubinstein and Luciano Pavarotti. Yet none ever stopped performing. The first time Tchaikovsky conducted an opera he was so panic-stricken and disoriented he held onto his chin the whole time—so, he said, his head wouldn’t fall off. “Up to the age of forty-six, I regarded myself as hardly able to direct an orchestra,” he later told a reporter. “I suffered from stage fright, and couldn’t think of conducting without fear or trembling.” Paul McCartney used to get so frightened before playing with The Beatles that he almost quit the band in 1964, before Help!, before Rubber Soul, before Sgt. Pepper’s, before Abbey Road. The Beatles without Paul. Think of it. It’s almost as horrifying as a headless Tchaikovsky.
The counter-phobic impulse keeps people going who might otherwise crumble. More than that, it drives people to seek out what is terrifying. As a stance toward life it’s a perversity, the higher mental functions flipping the bird to the lower mental functions. It’s also something of a gift, both to the counter-phobic person and to the world. Because who gains anything from playing it safe? Who wants to listen to instinct if what instinct has to say is “hide”? Where’s the fun in that? Courage, the writer Ambrose Redmoon said, “is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear.” The counter-phobic impulse is like that, and it’s responsible for any number of things the world would be demonstrably poorer without: the Freedom Riders, the Velvet Revolution, Jackie Robinson, Doctors Without Borders, Lenny Bruce.
And yet it’s worth pointing out that there are two pretty big flies in the heroic ointment. The first is that the impulse to disregard the anxiety signal is no more or less good by definition than the anxiety signal itself. In other words, just because it can be useful, productive, progressive, and noble to be counter-phobic doesn’t mean it’s always useful, productive, etc. Sometimes it’s just stupid. For every Evel Knievel there are fifty morons willing to drive a motorcycle off a cliff. It’s like the old saying about even the paranoid having enemies: Even the hopelessly neurotic have good reason to be anxious sometimes. The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that’s trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that’s nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head. The hard work is in learning to step back and analyze the data dispassionately.
In a sense, the counter-phobic stance would seem to be doing something like this. The counter-phobic person looks at his anxiety, judges it inhospitable to what he wants to achieve, and acts anyway. But in another sense, the counter-phobic stance is just that: a stance. It’s an attitude, not as deeply embedded as anxiety but not fully conscious either. So it can be dangerous, because it muddies analytic waters that are already muddy to begin with. It adds another layer of difficulty to the anxiety problem. Anxious people have to learn to distinguish between their correct and incorrect anxiety impulses. Co
unter-phobic anxious people have to learn to distinguish between their correct and incorrect anxiety impulses and their correct and incorrect counter-phobic impulses. They’ve got double the work.
The second problem is that a counter-phobic attitude doesn’t mean an anti-phobic attitude. Just because you don’t allow anxiety to dictate your behavior doesn’t mean you’re going to reap any benefit from your intransigence, clinically speaking. A moral benefit, maybe. A creative benefit. Possibly a career and/or ego boost. But will it be therapeutic? Not necessarily. Maybe not at all. Paul McCartney says he doesn’t fret much before a concert anymore. But note again Casals’s “stage fright . . . never left me throughout the whole of my career.” When he said this he was seventy-seven; he started performing at six. That’s seventy-one years of unbroken anxiety.
Think about this for a minute. It’s easy to applaud Casals’s confession as a testament to his fortitude, professionalism, grace under pressure, love of audience, and any number of other artistic virtues. Probably we should applaud. But then stop and think what the confession meant for Casals the man. Think about the enormous, awful conflict it suggests. Casals’s entire life was dedicated to playing the cello for the benefit of other people. Maybe the thing was pushed on him when he was a kid but after a certain point it became his choice; it became something he willed himself, that he decided, to do. Tens of thousands of practice hours, performances before queens and presidents and generals and aristocrats and more acid-penned critics than you could count in a week. A fierce, monastic, lifelong dedication. And to what? To something that made his heart race like it was going to shoot blood out of his ears. To something that he dreaded so deep in the core of himself that not even seven decades of experience could ameliorate the sensation.
