What were you like when you were 16? To the world, to your family, to yourself? You might have been like Jenn, the sort of brilliant girl who relished challenging her teachers in clashes of wits, because she nearly always came prepared to do battle and prevail. Or maybe like Jen, quietly romantic, bumping along day to day in class before an evening of listening to Pinkerton and crying into your eyelet lace-trimmed comforter. Are you a boy? You might have been Sean, every mother’s favorite, not too good-looking and never a wandering hand, and railing secretly about being forever in the friend zone. (Not that that was a term we knew then, but truly, he lived there). Perhaps more like Mack, falling upwards into successes you hadn’t sought, finding yourself unexpectedly capable of meeting any task set to you: football standout, student council treasurer, founding member of the Geography Society, junior librarian.
Me? I was a mess. But scarcely anyone knew that truth. On the surface, Little Melissa was a superstar, organized, diligent, kind and focused on pushing on and on and higher and higher until I could pop! above the teeming masses of my classmates. Never arrogant, never cruel, and never going to be the winner of any popularity contests, which I was fine with. Really, I was. Everyone knew I was tight with my crew and my boyfriend and way too caught up in what passed for intellectual life at Burbank High to worry much about shit like pep rallies and keggers. I was a fearless pupil in class, thrusting my hand towards the ceiling frequently to answer a question, but not too much — don’t want to hog the spotlight. I asked piquant questions of my own, turned in my homework on time and always, always took pains to be cheerful with teachers and classmates alike. My parents preened with the satisfaction of having produced one child about whom they had few worries, only grand aspirations.
The truth was far less attractive, and I don’t lay all the grotesqueries and bad juju at the feet of one Joshua K. Brookes. When he slithered into my life, I was a fallow field of self-loathing calling out to be seeded with his poison. Nor do I blame Rachel (much) for my poor self-esteem and nagging self-talk: What kind of a genius listens to Jimmy Eat World and reads Cosmo? Why haven’t you written that novel yet? You’re 16 for God’s sake — by that age, Rimbaud was already writing poems to impress Verlaine.
Not that this chatter was anything new. At the age of 8, I’d found myself in the guidance counselor’s office. It hadn’t been a particularly pleasant day overall. I’d absentmindedly worried my remaining lower baby incisor out during math class, pressing the tooth back and forth with the worn rubber eraser on the top of my #2 pencil. As I completed another flawless eight times table, I sucked hard on the eraser, jabbing the nub through a hole I was certain wasn’t there before. In shock, I opened my lips to drop a bloody tooth into my small pink palm and promptly passed out.
But it wasn’t the fainting spell that brought me to Ms. Olatunji’s office after my trip to the school nurse. “Sometimes people have too much to take in all at once, Melissa, and they faint. The nurse says you’re going to be fine, and not to worry. Your dad is on his way to take you home.”
I’d never been in Ms. Olatunji’s office before, and it was completely unlike any of the other classrooms or offices I’d spotted in my low-slung stucco elementary school. No incessant buzz of fluorescent lights, for one. Instead, the four corners of the periwinkle blue room were lit by brass torchière lamps, each topped with a creamy glass bowl to collect and diffuse the light. Several pots of Devil’s Ivy drooped their tendrils down from the windowsill behind her desk, and instead of posters of times tables and presidents and maps of the world, she’d hung some prints I recognized from my Uncle Guy’s house in Culver City: Degas’ “Dancers in Blue,” “Ball at the Moulin de la Galette” by Renoir, and a huge poster featuring “Icarus” from a Matisse exhibition. I liked this last one most of all. At 8, I saw a body suspended in space, caressed by kind yellow stars in a sea-sky of velvety blue, his heart beating scarlet red with love, even when he was alone, even when he himself felt dark. At 8, I didn’t know the story of Icarus, hadn’t learned yet the tang of its moral for little children who got too big for their boots.
We faced each other on the blue canvas couch, and I recall sensing that I was a puzzle to her, that there was maybe some string in me to pull and I’d unravel like the old maroon sweater Maman, my father’s mother, had asked me to help her pull apart to reknit a bit smaller for my cousin Pearl.
I can hear my lisping voice still: “I’m sorry, Ms. Olatunji. I didn’t mean to faint.”
I knew this word — faint — from reading too much. Ladies and men swooned in the Victorian novels I’d been allowed to read, and I knew it meant something like falling asleep for a little while before a kind person put smelling salts beneath your nose. (I was quite disappointed no one had called for the smelling salts, as I was very curious what they smelled like in the first place.)
“You don’t have to apologize for that. It’s a natural thing, like burping.” (I giggled.) “Or farting.” (I giggled even more.) “But why did you cry so much? Were you scared?”
Why does she cry so much? was a question that had been lobbed at my parents in my presence and without so many, many times. Not the tears that came when I fell off my bike, the banana yellow one with the training wheels and the woven white plastic basket on the front with the purple ribbon trim and a cluster of three yellow daisies. Nor the tears when Maman had died of lung cancer just after Christmas; she’d lived long enough to deliver that new/old sweater to Pearl. Those tears had context for others — you hurt, you cry.
But I cried when I’d not won our classroom summer vacation reading contest; I’d focused on quality over quantity, choosing to read Oliver Twist (I thought this very mature for 8), and lost to a boy who’d read 25 Goosebumps books in an eight week period. I cried when we visited Santa’s Village out near Lake Arrowhead; I was afraid the gingerbread men perched on the faux-snow covered roof of a refreshment stand would jump down when I wasn’t looking and attack me. I cried when I thought about global warming and that someday soon I’d outgrow my favorite mint green princess dress, the one with the smocking and the great drooping satin sash. I cried when Aunt Suzy, the second most sensible of my mother’s sisters, tried to explain to me the Troubles when I’d asked her what “IRA” stood for. I cried when my dad would take me in his arms and spin me around and sing Cat Stevens’ “Moonshadow” to me, and when he asked “why, Mel?” I could only say, “Because I love you so much, Daddy, and someday I’ll be too big for you to pick me up and then what will I do?”
Ms. Olatunji had a gorgeous coral pink scarf and the kindest brown eyes, and I could tell right away she’d be as easy to fool as my parents. Already I knew that there was something not quite right about how I saw the world and my place in it. Not just that I didn’t bash through my days with my sister’s swagger, or share Jen’s cautious, steady good humor, or care little about what adults thought of me, like Caitlin. I knew — sorry, I’d been told — I was smart. Gifted, teachers said, as if I weren’t there, as if that word wouldn’t simultaneously cruelly build up my ego and tear it to bits when I didn’t measure up to my own expectations of what gifted should be like.
But I had no words for the not-rightness of myself, not yet. I’d learn neurotic and anxious in a few short years when I started digging into the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud on my dad’s bookshelves. Papa called me suréduquée by the time I was 12; I was only able to pick out half of the blazing battle en français between my dad and his father on this topic, but I knew enough to understand that I was a strange little bird indeed.
“Yes,” I lied smoothly to Ms. Olatunji. “I was very, very scared. There was a lot of blood.” No, you were terrified that you’d done something wrong by losing your tooth in class. Normal people don’t jab pencils in their mouth but what do you expect? You’re not normal.
With a soft sigh, she relaxed her shoulders and spread her bright pink lips into a smile of relief. “It’s okay to be scared sometimes, Melissa. Do your mom and dad tell you that, too?”
“Oh yes,” I assured her. That at least wasn’t a lie. Sometimes you’re going to see things and hear things that don’t make sense, but your father and I will always, always try to explain to you, my mother had told me after I’d walked in on my parents having sex only a few years before. The next morning, my mom palmed off to my dad the task of imparting a kindergarten version of the sex and love and growing up education to me. His garbled explanation of intercourse led to me ending up convinced that grown-ups engaged in wrestling matches when they were very, very in love with each other. You can imagine my confusion the time we sat down as a family to watch Wrestlemania VII and I explained to Rachel that Hulk Hogan and Sgt. Slaughter were having sex. (Alex loves this story, and had my dad tell it once more over our post-wedding drinks.)
“Good. Crying is also natural, but sometimes when we cry too much, when things aren’t sad or scary, it means other things. Do you ever cry when you’re not scared or sad?”
“Sometimes,” I replied, schooling my mouth into a smile to put her off the scent of my misery. “Sometimes when I’m really happy, I cry.” While this was true, it wasn’t the half of it. Sometimes I cry because I know I’m never going to be as brilliant and wonderful and loving and amazing and generous and patient and everything I want to be and I think other people want me to be and why am I even here if I can’t be the perfect person?
“Do you want to tell me about the last time you cried? Before today of course.”
Ms. Olatunji reached forward and placed my small hand over hers. When I stretched to twist the large amethyst ring around and around her finger, she didn’t stop me. “I like your ring,” I whispered.
“Do you?” she replied, staring down at my hand on hers, pinky white on dark brown, soft child nails and lacquered red ones. “I’m going to get married in July, after school is over. It’s from my fiancé. Do you know that word?”
I shook my head, though I knew I’d read it before. Probably in one of the trashy novels Aunt Jane left lying around Grandma and Grandpa Sullivan’s beach house in Quonochontaug.
“It’s what you call the person you’re going to marry, before you get married. Maybe you’ll have one of your own one day.”
With a grave nod, I patted her hand, like I was the one comforting her. Besides Mack and Sean and my dad, I didn’t like boys very much. Who would want to live with one forever and ever?
A soft rap at the door interrupted Ms. Olatunji halfway through a question about whether everything was all right at home. Through the frosted window, I briefly spotted an abstract outline of a man before my dad’s blond head peeked around the door he’d opened for himself.
“Mel,” he gasped, and rushed to pull me up into his arms from where I still held hands with the counselor. I was still small enough that he could balance me on his hip, but I knew that would pass soon. Only last year, Rachel had accidentally tackled him when she tried to hoist herself into his arms. “Baby, are you okay?”
With a rattle of her silver bangles, Ms. Olatunji rose from the couch to smooth my hair as I burrowed my head into my father’s shoulder. “She’s going to be fine, Mr. de Mornay. These things happen. Melissa’s teacher said she’s been putting herself under a lot of pressure to get her times tables perfect. Has she mentioned that to you?”
“Who? The teacher? Or Melissa? And it’s Phil. Please call me Phil.” My dad readjusted me on his hip, and when Ms. Olatunji motioned to the couch, he took her up on the offer. I’m getting too big.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I mumbled into his shoulder. Cradled in his lap, I didn’t want to look up.
“Sorry for what, baby?” he whispered to me. “Ms…. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.”
“Kim Olatunji.”
I couldn’t see the counselor anymore, even if I’d raised my head to look, not with my eyes hot and swollen with tears I was now afraid to let go. Sorry for fainting and sorry for not being perfect and sorry for getting so big and sorry for being a bother and sorry for making you leave work and sorry for all the tears that are washing my face and soaking into your cotton sweater.
“Ms. Olatunji, is everything all right with Melissa?” I could hear the rasp in his voice, the one I’d heard there in those very last days before Maman left us at last.
I’m scaring Daddy, floated through my mind, tipping me at last into the sobs I’d pushed hard against, trying and failing at last to box in the gulps and gasps and keening shrieks that I could not control once they’d seized hold of my body. Once the tears dragged down my small girl’s body into the gulf of confusion and pain, I surrendered, as I nearly always did. In surrender, there was at least some peace. I drifted in the vastness of my sorrow at simply being alive and not exactly as I wished to be, like Icarus did in that sea of velvet blue sky, suspended, feeling and not feeling at once. And in the caress of my pain I felt nothing but the pure sensation of release.
I also knew, this was not right.
They spoke in front of me, as if I were not there, as if I weren’t moaning and my face wasn’t getting hotter and hotter and hotter while my throat grew raw with my wails. I could not stop, did not want to stop, no matter how mortified I was that I was crying in front of Ms. Olatunji, that surely everyone in the hall could hear. I did not want to stop because the release of my pain was like exploding from a tight pinpoint of agony into Icarus’ field of yellow stars, blazing and glorious and fearsome and powerful. My pain made adults confused and cowering. My pain had power.
I felt alive, alive, alive in a way that so many of my dull days at school — perfecting times tables, reciting robotically the Pledge of Allegiance, sitting quietly when I’d finished early my worksheet on the states and their capitals — made me feel like a cardboard cut-out of Melissa. This Melissa was wild, snakes for hair like Medusa in that book of Greek myths Uncle Dan bought me for Christmas. I admired this Melissa, as much as she terrified me. She was Liss — the hiss of the Gorgon’s snaky hair, baring her fangs and sinking into life. And while the tears and screaming hurt me — my eyes prickled, my cheeks burned, my throat grew more and more raw — it was so, so relaxing to slip into the void of pure emotion. That vacuum had no room for any of my thoughts, and without thought, there was no bite of pain.
They spoke, but it is now only my father’s voice I can hear: No, nothing’s wrong at home. She’s happy there — rides her bike, plays with her sister. Tons of friends. You know my wife’s a doctor, right? Trish says Melissa is a perfectly healthy girl, nothing wrong with her physically. She’s just a little sensitive.
You want her to get examined? Why? She’s a perfectly healthy little girl, as I said. She has… she has a great big heart. She feels too much sometimes. I’d rather her feel too much than be some thoughtless brat who doesn’t care.
She’s perfectly healthy. Perfectly normal. It’s been a hard year for her, losing her grandmother. Yes, I know it was almost a year ago. Her mother says she’s fine. She’s fine.
Slowly the pressure leaked out of the storm, the intervals between gasping sobs increased, my eyes could blink open little by little, and I pulled away from my father’s sweater to look up at him. My handsome Dad, to me at least — I remember hearing Aunt Suzy say my mom chose the least attractive of the three de Mornay sons, that his nose was too narrow and he was a bit “ferrety” in general, but I never saw it.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to them both. “I’m okay now. I was just… I was scared. The fainting scared me. And I felt so bad that I was scaring you, too, that it made me very, very sad.”
That last part was true, even if “sad” was the only word I had at the age of eight in which to package up my bristling anxiety and present it to the world. Ms. Olatunji and my dad seemed to buy it though when I presented them both with a weak smile and a nod that the storm had passed, and the good girl Melissa was back in charge. My dad took me home via Fosters Freeze for a strawberry sundae, since (according to him) my blood sugar was surely very, very low. (It was a great excuse for him to treat himself to a double cheeseburger and a hot fudge parfait, both of which I knew were verboten by my mother.) Tucked up on the couch, watching a double feature of My Favorite Blonde and Quatermass and the Pit on VHS, we didn’t speak of any of that morning’s interlude in the counselor’s office.
And when very late in the evening, in the time I normally set aside for reading under the covers, my mother sat on the side of my bed, she treated me more as a patient than a daughter. “How are you feeling? Fine? Good. The nurse told me you didn’t hit your head when you fell out of your seat, which is good news. Here, let me look at you.”
“I’m fine, Mommy.” I kicked off the shell pink comforter as she turned on the light. “Do you want to see my tooth? I put it under the pillow. Daddy said the Tooth Fairy may not be real but he said there is a Tooth… Tooth Sin-a-kit and they pay for teeth. He has clients who are in the sin-a-kit.”
“Jesus, Phil,” my mom muttered, shining her small flashlight in one eye and the next. “I think he meant ‘syndicate.’ And yes, your father does have clients who may or may not be in a syndicate but I know nothing about it. Now, any pain? Blurry vision? Stomach ache? Your dad said you had some chicken soup for dinner, which is good.”
“I feel okay, I guess.” My knees flexed up ping ping as she tapped them with her little hammer. “Daddy and I watched some movies and I had a nap and then Rachel came home and called me a weirdo because everyone in school was talking about what happened.”
My mother’s lips drew in tight, like the cinching of a sack. “Did your father hear this? I’ll assume no. Your sister… never mind. Do you want to stay home tomorrow? I have the morning off, and Uncle Guy can always come by at lunchtime.”
A morning with Mommy meant snuggles in her bed, listening to NPR Morning Edition and drinking Earl Grey tea (very milky for us both). An afternoon with Uncle Guy usually involved watching more horror movies, the really gnarly and sexy ones that my dad expressly forbade me from ever mentioning to my mother that I’d seen, and ploughing our way through a half a gallon of Dreyer’s Rocky Road. This was an eminently more pleasurable schedule for the day than sitting through another unspoken competition with Ricky Strathern over who had the greater knowledge of magnetism and static electricity, and I gave my mom a quick nod.
“Your father said you were scared by the fainting, perfectly normal reaction. Don’t let the school scare you into thinking that crying isn’t okay. It’s easier for the school to deal with kids who don’t make their lives harder. You’re a challenge to them, Melissa, and that’s a good thing. You’re smarter than half of them and you’re only eight — and they know it. Good. Life is about being true to yourself, and not letting other people whack that out of you because it makes their lives easier.”
She gathered me up in a squish of a hug and tucked me back into bed. Rachel told me later she heard my parents whispering about me, about whether Emerson was the right school for me, but I stayed on through the rest of third grade, and in public school for the grades to follow. I simply worked harder at hiding the Gorgon Liss from Ms. Olatunji and every teacher in whose classroom or path I’d been placed.
Not that I’d become some Perseus, holding high the head of the Gorgon I’d slain. Oh, no. As I grew older, I learned how to keep her concealed, at least most of the time. But Liss hissed and thrashed still within me, dragging me by the arm deep down into her savagery. The blows she struck were solely upon me. Her words echoed and slunk through me, through my body and brain: You’re not normal and you weren’t made for this world. Look at yourself — if you’re so great, why are you so strange? Why haven’t you scrambled to the top yet? If you’re not the best at anything, you’re the worst at everything. The worst. No one will ever want you. Why don’t you let me out anymore? Why don’t you let me scream and stamp your feet and throw you down on the floor to thrash? You know how beautiful it feels not to think.
When Josh Brookes slipped that come-hither note beneath my copy of Coleridge, it had been a quite a while since anyone had seen or heard from Liss, anyone but me, of course. Jenn had missed the very worst of my tantrums by the time she showed up in my fifth grade homeroom, and only knew I used to pitch fits from the stories Sean and Cait shared with her during recess.
“You wouldn’t believe it, but Mel hasn’t always been so perfect,” Cait drawled, stretching out the (very forbidden at Emerson) bubble gum from between her teeth as far as her arm could reach. It snapped with a bright click before she shoved it back in for another chomp. She couldn’t actually blow bubbles yet, so stretching would have to do, and only behind Mr. Fontana’s back once he passed by us.
Sean laughed, and only laughed harder when I stuck a finger in his side. “Mel used to scream and cry so hard when she got stuff wrong or she thought something was unfair that she made herself sick. Remember that time –“
“Stop,” I whined. I knew what was coming. While it wasn’t nearly as bad as the incident in Ms. Olatunji’s office — that had been the talk of the school for an entire week, nearly a kid lifetime — it was another low point of grade school.
Next to me, Cait bounced up and down, bubble gum forgotten. “Oooh! Oooh! You mean the time Mel threw up in a trash can because Ricky Strathern beat her in a spelling bee?”
As I said, a low point. The best thing that ever happened to me at Emerson was Ricky Strathern moving to Sacramento the summer between third and fourth grades.
And as I passed from grade school into middle school and on through the doors of Burbank High, barely anyone recalled I’d once raged and fainted and vomited my stress and self-abasement on the floors of Emerson. Others’ recollections of our own agonies rarely reflect the sharp points that we may still feel of those moments within ourselves.
But still the Gorgon Liss spoke to me: So what if the teachers still think you’re so smart? So what? You’re just better at hiding me, Melissa. You know what a failure you are, and if there’s one thing you’re clever at, it’s hiding that truth. You’re nothing, nothing, and will never amount to anything. Oh, your daddy said you’re brilliant? He has to say that. If he didn’t, your mom would never forgive him. And she only thinks you’re so smart because it makes her look better. Where’s all the achievements you said you’d have by now? You know what would make you feel better. You know.
I did. Mostly it was just a little scratch on the tender inside of my arm, a little bite inside my mouth, a fingernail pushed a touch hard into the back of my hand, just enough to see the half-moon dent form before fading away. Sometimes it was a harder thwack of the back of my head on the back of the bathroom door, or a deep sink of my teeth into the side of my left pointer finger. I liked that one best of all — my stomach settled, my shoulders let go their usual tightness, and I floated in the bliss of pure feeling, little thought as long as I kept my mouth there. And when I pulled away, oh! the sense-memory of the pressure might stay a while, its own secret delight.
Never too hard, never too deep, never leave a lasting mark. I wasn’t a cutter, not like Sean’s older sister Bethany. Cutting seemed too obvious, a call for help, a permanent reminder of failure. I’d seen Bethany’s arms, seen the criss-crossed threads of white and pink and rosy red on her forearms, and felt repulsed. Loser, I admit I thought. If you do it right, no one should know.
I wasn’t in it to punish myself, after all. Well, not completely. I hit and bit and jabbed at myself to stop the assault of my thoughts, and not only the ones that called me a disgrace and a teenaged never-came-to-aught. There were too many ideas — dreams, beginnings of stories, binomials, algorithms, equations, conjugations, whose birthday was it next week or next month, recipes, lyrics, cousins’ names, the constellations, the names of the Presidents in chronological order, book jackets, music charts, road maps, taxonomic classification, the calorie counts of each week’s cafeteria offerings, the GDP of each country in North and Central America — that pinged and fizzed and swung around in my head, the constant chatter of accumulating knowledge. I’d been tipsy precisely twice by the middle of sophomore year, and while the alcohol did a decent job of stilling the buzz inside, drinking brought risks of disclosure and punishment and consequences. A little bite or scratch could be hidden easily, and the endorphins didn’t cloud my brain like alcohol, but rather took me out of it, just for a while, just long enough to let go. The long-tailed refractory zing left me clear-headed, satiated, ready for the business of looking like I was at the top of my game.
Alex doesn’t understand any of this. He caught me once, back in Pasadena, back in the old house that Jules had turned his back on when he decided he wouldn’t wait any longer for me to leave him first. I’d gotten sloppy being on my own, sloppy about hiding it, that is, and the pain of losing Julian called for acute treatment on the regular. Alex had returned from a quick trip to the liquor store for another bottle of Pinot to find me desperately trying to sop up the blood flowing from my hand where I’d scratched too hard into the flesh.
“If you hurt, sweetest, I don’t know how making yourself hurt more helps in the slightest,” he’d said softly as he pressed hard into the wound with one of Julian’s crisp white handkerchiefs. “Homeopathy is a load of old bollocks.”
I pushed the Gorgon further down, deep down in my mind. You never did much of anything to help anyway, you asshole, I cursed her as I made space for more socially acceptable balms for a riotous, roiling mind: wine, whisky, the occasional edible. But none quelled the noise and cut through the nonsense and made me feel so goddamn good as a middling thwap to my face when the clamor of it all made it impossible to think, to see properly.
I’d learned that trick from Josh.
meandering again 