This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  The year I spent in the funeral choir was also the one dedicated, in our school, to the sacrament of penance. We learned about what it meant to sin—which, as it turned out, was what it meant to be alive—and spent most of the preparatory classes memorizing the preamble and combing God’s forgiveness policy for loopholes. When it came time to log our first confessions, we coated up, formed a solemn double line, and marched the couple hundred feet across the schoolyard to the church. As we filed into the back rows, close to the confession booths, I saw the hunched form of the gray lady up front, kneeling alone at the end of the second pew. Jesus Mulvaney, I thought. How bad can one person be? Aware of sinning right there under the twelfth station of the cross, I returned to the litany I had been rehearsing, which had mainly to do with my brother and my bottomless loathing for him.

  Of all the sacraments in my repertoire, penance is second only to Communion in conceptual flair. I had known few performative terrors like that of stepping into a darkened closet to speak through a perforated screen to the invisible man installed next door. Even so, in its total the act was a whopping letdown. The first time out, we virgins felt a little scandalized that our notes compared so blandly. With a few more monthly purges under our elastic rainbow belts, it became clear that no matter what was confessed—from foul brotherly thoughts to lunch-box theft—the penance amounted to a handful of the prayers we said every day anyway. Though the intrigue of praying alone lingered on—for fourth graders the idea of gaining a sacred privacy was key to the sacrament’s allure—we had expected something, somehow, more. And if the gray lady in the second pew wasn’t saying the world’s longest penance, what in Krishna’s name was she doing there?

  Our local Catholic school board’s motto—“The spirit is alive”—invokes the one thing a religious education cannot instill in a child. The rituals, culture, and doctrine of faith combine in a child’s experience to form a burden—if she is pious, as I was, a glorious burden. What it is not is a quest—which is to say a choice—though we might strive to make it so. That part tends to come of its own necessity, and is attended by the hunger—if not the dogmatic zeal—of the convert.

  While preparing for my First Communion at age seven, I became a student of the suffering of Jesus on the cross. Along with the rest of the day’s assignments, at night I went over the story in my head, transfixed by its barbarism and especially stuck on quantifying the pain of such a death, making it comprehensible. I vowed to work, over time, to claim that suffering, beginning with the self-administering of a long, ruthless pinch under the covers each night—my idea of the hurt of a single thorn. I continued for some time, in this private, piecemeal fashion, to offer myself as His disciple, to trade His suffering for mine. Eventually, maybe half a crown in, the pinching stopped—without a clear equivalent for crucifixion, it just seemed like bad math—though two years later I recalled it proudly as a better run at penance than rifling through a few rosary beads.

  One fourth-grade night, after being tucked in by my father and told to say my prayers, I called out mildly as he left the room, “But why?” The reaction was instant: “Don’t you ask me that,” he hissed, wheeling around at the door. “You just do it.” I was startled, angry maybe, but not scared. What scared me were the Sundays when we returned to our pew after Communion, and I watched my dad praying with his head in his hands, not moving his lips or anything.

  I abandoned confession after elementary school, when it was no longer mandatory. Though my guilt about that had largely abated by the time I entered university, even as I eluded Loretto’s nuns and other sisterly comforts, I found myself visited by the memory of the gray lady, ever kneeling. Along with her hypnotic coif and majestic genuflections, I recalled the confidence of her belonging in that church and the calm of her attention—the outward aspect, perhaps, of what Kierkegaard called “passionate inwardness,” a faith that was no burden but a choice that marked “the highest point of individual freedom.” I was acing philosophy, to the incredulity of my TA, who capped a private interrogation about my inaugural paper with a feeble pass, ending my short career in the field.

  And then, on a February evening a few months later, a disciple lacking a deity sat alone in her church for the first time, watching the ripe faces of Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy tender their youthful promises, waiting to disappear long enough that she might be filled by something holy.

  * * *

  Having acquired the idea that this new, Radiohead-loving, hothouse breed of boys were as apt to expire as laugh if a girl worked a little blue, I began telling Rafe the most vulgar jokes I could think of on our postclass walks, watching for signs of wilt.

  As romantic disincentives go, the one about the Newfie, the dildo salesman, and the mistaken thermos seemed like a solid choice. But Rafe was grinning by the door the next week, just the same. He later told me that after we parted on those days, he would add some new embellishment to a deeply architected fantasy of my life. He had me heading straight to my boyfriend’s place—my virile, varsity boyfriend, who lived among the bohemian swells in Toronto’s deciduous Annex neighborhood—where we snickered over my poor, smitten classmate as I heated up Bagel Bites in the kitchen of his exquisitely distressed Victorian town house. He could see us watching television, washing dishes, heading out to the bar—laughing all the way. It seemed incredible to me that anyone could even gin up such a scenario; it seemed evidence of how completely we can be deceived, if we are willing.

  After our final class we faced each other in the same spot on the same corner and exchanged vows to see Flirting with Disaster. Rafe asked for my address and said he’d write; if all went as planned, he would wind up in London for teachers college. We wished each other luck on our final papers and turned to our respective directions for the last time.

  I had written about Mean Streets, unpacking Scorsese’s use of point of view with a terminally psychoanalytic reading of the film and its lead character, Charlie, played by Harvey Keitel in his satyr youth. Reading it today, I’m struck by the baldness of my feints: finding conflicted-Catholic Charlie’s idea of penance to be “wishy-washy,” I taunt him for being “cowardly” and “weak” on every other page, accuse him of “continually feeding his reality through a movie projector in an attempt to stave off his problems,” and cite Charlie’s belief that “nothing is private” as an excuse for using the world and the people in it as vessels for the spiritual crisis he’s too chickenshit to face on his own.

  The previous semester I had turned in a similarly aggressive paper, titled “Comedy of Errors or Tragic Surrender? The Dichotomy of the Hawksian Couple in Bringing Up Baby and Monkey Business.” Still feeling around inside the liberties of auteur theory, I felt no compunction about challenging the likes of Stanley Cavell and his Pursuits of Happiness, a book that examined the “comedy of remarriage” and the cinematic construction of a curiously autonomous “new woman” via several classic Hollywood films, including Baby. Cavell, whose background ran to philosophy and classical studies, applies a Shakespearean trope—that of young lovers retreating into the wild, then returning, clarified, to regenerate society—to several of the films, with varying success. The romance between starchy scientist David (Cary Grant) and brazen, regressive Susan (Katharine Hepburn) in Bringing Up Baby fits both more obviously and less strictly into the mold.

  Cavell admits as much, but I saw something much darker in the couple’s final, dangling embrace. In the Hawks universe, I thought, love could result in a fate worse than death: having no fun. “Love exacts one’s security and individuality” was my take on the ending, “no comfort is taken in it.” In the youth-serum caper Monkey Business, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers play a married couple so comfortable they’re comatose. Romance—the “adult affliction”—ultimately ruins fun, unless it’s child’s play, in which case one can’t call it romance at all, can one? I wrapped up by invoking a different Shakespearean cycle, where every comedy is sown with the elements of the tragedy that will succeed it. “Hawks is d
eftly, if a little sadly, aware” went the last line, “that once one has come full circle, there is nowhere to go but around again.”

  This is all to say that I peaked early in my academic career. I remember feeling proud of the first essay but a little purged by the second, as though I’d pushed my interpretative flexor farther back than it was willing to go, and I’d never walk quite the same way again. I was back to grades I hadn’t seen since the penance years—school had resurged as a life-structuring force—and though I left Authorship in Cinema 224Y a practicing agnostic, in arguing Hawks’s sly antiromanticism I had struck upon something I actually believed. The nebulousness of the auteur theory had cleared a space for a form of passionate inwardness, where the willing might commit themselves to a leap of faith. Yet the result of that kind of commitment is so personal it’s almost painful to see, more so when private belief is reified on academic terms. It felt crafty at best and dead dishonest at worst: Can a faith and its Church be separated? Didn’t I just do this?

  My father, an English professor, had been recruited into his school’s makeshift film department that year. Our reading lists were compared for degrees of difficulty, and raids of his essay piles yielded a depressing sense of the mean. Cinema studies was desperate for scholars, he often hinted, and would be only more so in a decade, when his cohort retired. The professor’s life is a good one, he’d say, coming as close as he ever would to persuading me to do anything.

  And I’d think: Run.

  * * *

  The road was home that summer. Something had to be. The in-betweenness of student living—generally little more than a sleeping arrangement—and the displacement of childhood bedrooms had sent the concept of home into its scheduled state of flux. Not expecting to have a job helped offset the heartache of not finding one: more time for the pavement. Every morning I ran by my old school and the adjacent church, cutting into the local park across the street and passing the deer and goats pacing their petting-zoo enclosures. A single, rogue peacock ever stalked the grounds, scaring children and uninitiated runners with his appalling, woman-in-peril call. In Springbank Park I’d find the Thames and its slacker patrols of Canada geese, following it downtown through to the north end, past the university. From there I turned east or west, depending on my mood, and took the big roads back.

  My toenails were blackening and falling off as quickly as they grew in, and my period had stopped completely. As a way of escape, distance running is the sensory negative of sexual oblivion, the cosmic hiccup of swallowing and being swallowed at once. Ruled by a kind of bodily intuition, runners develop an animal awareness of their surroundings, twice a second deciding where the foot falls, trusting churning legs over uneven terrain, gauging the relative traction of four hundred kinds of ice, predicting the paths of three dozen moving bodies, sensing whether the inevitable car sneaking up behind will yield or try to force itself past at the moment of convergence. Only when I lost track of the passing minutes would time show itself every moment. On returning home I would stand in the kitchen where I used to bang pots on the floor, sweating and staring at the clock in disbelief.

  The city was an open question I attempted to answer each day. Looking back, looking from above, all that running appears as a radically, almost pathetically physical solution to a metaphysical problem of homesickness, a search for the portal or spatial alignment that would release me back into the world, even as I pounded into my bones the idea that to get anywhere a person had to be alone.

  At the time it felt more like obeying a survival instinct, that what kept me running was the future’s scorch at my heels, the threat of engulfment from all sides. The present, with its finger puzzle of feminine identity, was only more untenable. Better to be nobody, maybe, just a streak on the road. Better to hide than to show the world your halfness.

  In the safety of that suspension I could wait things out as a pure observer. Not that there was so much to take in, on the surface, anyway. My news of any given day shrank to civic esoterica: a roving micro-reporter on the morbid tip, I collected accidents, roadkill sightings, insect conflagrations, and sad tableaux, like that of a smattering of cars parked outside the liquor store at eight forty-five in the morning, their drivers counting down to the day’s re-up. I’d devote weeks to exploring newly discovered cemeteries, collecting archaic or punny names, felicities of phrasing, a particularly staggered stone angel.

  The sound track to this ecumenical smallness had a new supplier: a few weeks after our goodbye in Toronto, the first letter from Rafe arrived, and soon after that a cassette tape. Other than the polar force of his interest and a few fragments from our walks, my impression of Rafe from the previous year was smudgy: I had grown unused to regarding things—that is to say humans—in situations where they might regard me back. I tended to be surprised when people noticed or spoke to me—even a little disappointed—and narrowed focus until the moment passed. But letters, those folded emissaries of personality, could be pored over outside such pressures. They could be created, in other words, and create their readerly ideal. The tapes, with handcrafted covers and calligraphed track lists, were a blend of Wilco, Weezer, and Pavement, obscure neo-punk like the Queers, the Donnas, and the Muffs mixed in with their antecessors. Stuck between CDs and preteen tapes, I had been surviving on a diet of the Police and old Tom Petty from my brother’s abandoned cassette collection; anything outside of nasal, blond eighties rock was a gift.

  Rafe, who displayed a seismographic exuberance on the page, was still doing all the things I used to do: going to shows, goofing off with friends, pining after the unavailable. We felt far apart indeed, and so I did what any girl would to bridge the gap: I wrote to him. I answered every letter and eventually made tapes of my own, and in this way we passed the months, ferrying various selves back and forth, submitting ideals for approval and carrying home the blueprint for what the other preferred us to be. Which is to say we amused each other, greatly, and grew attached to our amusement. Over the following four years of correspondence I became the more attached by far, an attachment that manifested in the physical world, naturally, as near-total evasion.

  * * *

  At some point in my third year of university I sent my first e-mail—in reply to my first receipt of an e-mail, from Rafe. The keystroke-by-keystroke creation of an entire medium suited those just then pioneering their voices very well in that it concentrated mutual, epistolary invention into a full-blown phenomenon. Much advertised for its connective properties, e-mail was a godsend to a budding isolationist because it created the illusion of remaining in touch.

  By then Rafe and I were also sessioning into the night on the telephone. We talked about old movies, new bands, our eccentric, ordinary families, and, after a late-summer confession about the extent of my habit, the status of my feet. A sometime runner himself, instead of raising an eyebrow over my running the better part of a marathon every day, Rafe extolled my discipline. I had given myself away, he said, by showing up to class one day in a pair of Sauconys—the sneaker of the serious. In fact I only wore Nike, and never to school. Even at the time, I noted the greater misapprehension—coming from the most curious, observant person I’d ever met—with a mixture of relief and disappointment. Another second hand was added to the master clock: How long before he finds me out, and this whole thing implodes?

  So much of falling in love is a biographical project; we turn our stories over and hope for the best. Should you inspire the full-dress treatment, you will find yourself loved but also much altered. Rafe could have sent Boswell to his cups: if I let slip some uncomfortable family angst, he would clamor for more; if I mentioned the constant and repulsive shedding of my toenails, he’d leave a packet of customized press-ons at my doorstep; if I acted like a jackass he—and this really beat all—was quick to forgive. Especially if you haven’t yet pieced together a workable self, to find yourself fully formed in someone else’s imagination is irresistible the way Kryptonite is irresistible. When inhabiting her felt like c
heating, I’d try to undermine this other me, but nothing—no weirdness, no open disabuse, not all the tasteless dildo jokes in the world—seemed to shake her hold. I’d never seen anything like it and worried, in lieu of precedent, that this kind of fascination amounted to a form of idolatry, or at least a profound self-distraction. It took years for the shadow my interlocutor was dodging—the sometime girlfriend he rarely mentioned, and then as a casual acquaintance—to emerge, and in the early months it hardly seemed to matter: we were pen pals, mostly; phone buddies, at best; e-mail—what? What even was e-mail?

  Rafe was a kind of savant of the form; no one had told him it was too cold and impersonal for tone and feeling. His dispatches brimmed over with his personality, his wit and humor, his maximal syntax. Where I plodded along worried about spelling and spacing, seeking a reflection of the familiar, e-mail was just another way in which everything Rafe touched became a natural extension of him. I’m not sure I ever learned more from another writer. For him our daily correspondence comprised the vivid description of a life in progress, where I was trying to write myself into the world.

  Both of Rafe’s parents were high school teachers. This was his plan as well, and no postgraduate detours kept him from it. He headed straight into teachers college—in London, as expected, where I stood him up one evening that fall out of pure, nervous stupidity and he temporarily lost my number—and then to a placement in a Toronto high school. Among many other traits, I envied his certainty, the easiness he exuded toward all things except, increasingly, me. The relationship we had built from longing and fiber-optic lines was bulging in unsightly places. I pretended not to notice. Wasn’t this the fun part, anyway? Wouldn’t the dreary confines of adult romance put an end to playing around in our pretend world? Did we learn nothing from Master Hawks? Although constant, enigmatic communication suited the wearier half of us just fine, for Rafe the question of our future evolved into the crisis of discipline already familiar to me: Can a pursuit have meaning if it extends beyond choice? Is it devotion or just masochism to go on uncertainly?