Skin Game: A Memoir (2 page)

Because you know that when teachers ask, “What are you doing?,” they don’t really want an answer. They want you to skip right over the explication of the plot and get directly to the heartfelt confession of your sins. They only ask you what you’re doing, after all, when you’re doing something they think you ought not be doing.

So of course I ended up in the Office, the court of high crimes and misdemeanors alike. Be it discipline or disaster, when in doubt, marshal the forces in the Office.

I was hustled down the hall, past clumps of middle-schoolers doing a bad job of pretending not to be watching, and into Mrs. Warren’s office, where the principal and the school nurse and my homeroom teacher sat in attendance. They ranged themselves in a semicircle of leather seats worn with age, which creaked and crackled with every movement. I perched uncomfortably in an armchair before them, my arms and legs twisted into pretzels of self-consciousness. If they had meant to suggest solicitous concern, to invite my halting confidences, they missed their mark. All the scene would have required was a fierce light blinding my eyes to resemble the interrogation sequence in a thriller.

The grilling commenced, a long afternoon of judicial inquiry in which I was meant to serve at once as both the star witness and the chief suspect, whose job it was to help identify the crime, illuminate the motive, and elicit the confession, all before the bell rang to signal the end of the school day. My confiscated knife—Exhibit A—passed from hand to hand. Heads were shaken in dismay. Questions probed me like insinuating fingers.

“Would you like to tell us about this?” they asked.

*   *   *

I found myself in a delicate position. I’ve always been a sucker for an audience, any audience. While the present situation was uncomfortable and even nerve-racking with its disciplinary overtones, still there was no denying I had myself an audience, four adults gazing at me with rapt anticipation. And I could feel the almost irresistible temptation to offer them something worth their while. Not to fabricate, precisely, but to nip and tuck at the details until I had made for them something more compelling than the truth.

The plain fact of it was that I was miserable—though my misery wasn’t so much sadness as it was a shrieking unease, a gnawing despair, which I had been trying that morning to cut out of myself.

I knew how I felt, but I couldn’t come up with a good enough reason why I should feel that way. I believed unhappiness was something you had to earn through a suitable measure of suffering, the way the characters in my favorite books struggled with blindness, polio, Nazis, shipwreck, blizzards—unspeakable adversities through which, damaged but undefeated, they endured. And what had I ever suffered? Not one damn thing. No poetic privations or romantic diseases. The way I saw it, my life—with its twelve-year-old particulars of tuna sandwiches and math homework and watching
The Waltons
on Thursday nights—was way too mundane for suffering.

I’ll admit that suffering, or rather, the dramatic interest of being One Who Suffered, appealed to me. I could see myself tragic and tortured, wasted by some suitably novel madness or malaise that would leave me wanly luminous, a brave inspiration to friends and family gathered about my bedside. (Against all professional predictions I’d make a spirited and miraculous recovery in time for the final commercial break.)

Life had cast me, however, for another role. I was the contract player, the antic sidekick, the supporting chorus, and it was only the lead players whose troubles counted in the plot. I’d be the quirky best friend in a movie, but never the love interest; I’d be Sally in
The Dick Van Dyke Show,
but never Laura Petrie. When parts were handed out, my sister was called as the ingenue—emotionally delicate, quixotic, and temperamental—while I’d been cued as a Falstaff, forever bumbling about on the sidelines.

Whether we’d chosen those roles, or whether we’d fallen into them by chance, or whether I was the only one who ever even saw them that way, to me these positions seemed as inevitable and inalterable as time itself. My sister might falter under the burden of troubles I couldn’t hope to understand, but unhappiness would never be written into my character sketch.

What I was feeling, anyway—it wasn’t nearly interesting enough to be true and tragic unhappiness. It felt neither romantic nor dramatic nor poetic, but rather grinding and unpleasant, like a sore throat. I was highly suspicious of it, thinking it might, after all, be nothing more than a self-indulgent pettishness, just another way I was trying to copy my sister, like the way I’d taken up the flute after she did.

My situation appeared to me like the continuous, twisting loop of a Möbius strip: I wanted to be tragic in order to justify simply being unhappy, but knowing that I wanted to be tragic made me suspect the very legitimacy of that unhappiness. My unhappiness was a guilty secret, and I thought if I confessed to it I would be roundly denounced, as though I’d cribbed from someone else’s test or stolen from my sister’s closet.

“What right have you to pretend to unhappiness?” they would demand, and I would have no answer.

If someone in authority, however, someone who had the power to grant such things, might allow my unhappiness, then it would at last bear the stamp of legitimacy, and I would be free to believe in it. Only—and here the Möbius strip carried me back again to the beginning—I couldn’t imagine convincing the Authorities of my unhappiness without having some real and substantive cause to point to, and I had no such cause, so wouldn’t that mean that if they believed me, then I had succeeded only in perpetrating a fraud?

I had been mulling over this conundrum for months, ever since this wretchedness had insinuated itself into my life like a poisonous mold, putting out little creeping tentacles until all of me was taken over with it. Now, confronted finally with an opportunity to tell all, I knew I wouldn’t have the courage to try. I couldn’t bear to face their disappointment in me for being so ridiculous and fanciful and self-indulgent as to imagine I could ever be truly unhappy.

*   *   *

“Why were you cutting yourself?” Mrs. Warren asked, and all I could say was “I don’t know.”

I
did
know, but what I knew I couldn’t explain. I was trying to cut myself. I wanted to cut for the cut itself, for the delicate severing of capillaries, the transgression of veins. I needed to cut the way your lungs scream for air when you swim the length of the pool underwater in one breath. It was a craving so organic it seemed to have arisen from my skin itself. Imagining the sticky-slick scarlet trails of my own blood soothed me.

This made no sense, and yet it was the truth. How was I, at twelve, going to explain it?

I tried to tell them about biology class, about wanting to examine my own blood cells. That didn’t sound unreasonable. That sounded like the kind of wacky thing a kid might do in the name of scientific inquiry, like eating bugs or melting crayons in the toaster oven. I tried to tell them but they wouldn’t buy it, this answer closest to the truth. It wasn’t the answer they wanted.

“I’m really sorry,” I ended up saying, over and over, hoping my apology would make the whole thing go away. “I won’t do it again.” Now I just wanted the afternoon to be done with, my knife returned, everyone back to their familiar relationships and routines.

Only they wouldn’t let it go.

“Why?” they kept asking. “Why?”

They tossed theories at me like softballs, hoping I’d swing at one. Blood pacts. TV movies. Ideas that girls got in their heads, sometimes, when they read too many teenage novels.

“Maybe you just wanted some attention,” they suggested—the conclusion, I suspect, they’d already formulated. They hailed from the seen-and-not-heard school of child-rearing; their job as educators was to stamp the savage out of us and subdue us into quiescence, and some of us, like me, were not coming along too promisingly. I was an attention-grabber and hogger of spotlights, no denying. One of those kids who’s always waving her hand frantically, straining from her seat in the hope of being called upon, one who’s not above casually embellishing the dull facts of a story to liven it up for the audience.

When I’d planned out the idea of cutting myself, however, it had never once occurred to me that I would excite the least notice, though now I could see, of course, that this selective blindness had been precisely the fatal flaw in my plan.

“Maybe you should see someone,” they sighed at last.

“Maybe,” I mumbled.

Someone, someday, somehow—it was a good answer all around, full of possibility, devoid of substance. It made me look cooperative. It made them look helpful. It relieved all of us of any obligation actually to do anything further, and then they could just send me home early, the resolution something of a toss-up between a sick day and a suspension. They even, as I had hoped, gave me my knife back.

My mother was called to fetch me. To have your mother called meant you were either sick or in trouble, and I wasn’t sick. I waited in dread for her arrival, but she was whisked right past me into the office.

Behind closed doors, the matter was discussed with her. I was not invited to participate. Instead, I waited awkwardly in the hall outside Mrs. Warren’s office as my classmates filed past between classes, some stopping to whisper eagerly, “Did you get in all kinds of trouble?”

I have no idea what was said in that conference. I’ve never asked my mother. Did they lay blame? Downplay and dismiss? Did they suggest to my mother that here was another case of Caroline trying to hog the center stage? That’s the possibility I’d lay my wager on.

*   *   *

At last my mother emerged, and in uncomfortable silence we walked the length of the hallway and then crunched across the gravel parking lot to our car. Low clouds scudded overhead, and a damp wind whipped at our clothes.

“What were you doing?” she asked at last.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You won’t do it again?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

Which one of us did I lie to protect?

3

We become who we are through an intricate warp and weft of inheritance and experience too tightly interwoven ever to come unbound. If you could follow any one thread, unweave the patterns, where would it lead you?

I will tell you three stories of my family:

My mother grew up in a Boston suburb of neat homes and clipped lawns, playing field hockey, walking to school, eating ice cream at Brigham’s. She spent summers in cheerless camps in the company of Mayflower descendants, where Spartan conditions and an exhausting, almost continual round of sports were meant to instill the backbone of nation-builders. Sundays, her family bathed in the rarefied, minimalist creeds of the Unitarian church. Her father had a profession in the city. Her mother stood watch over a kitchen where no crumb dared stray.

My mother always felt as though her family’s life, in every particular, was like a backlot movie set assembled to paint an illusion, and she kept wondering when the audience would step through a door or around a corner and discover the jury-rigged assemblage of scaffolding propping the whole thing up. My grandparents were first-generation Americans, and as with so many of their kind and their generation, the entire structure of their adult lives was meant as denial of that fact.

“Masters of ethnic cleansing,” a friend of my mother calls them.

My grandmother had grown up in a grindingly poor working-class Irish family, under the shadow of a drunken father, amid domestic chaos and constant reminders of the impending threat of a Catholic hell. My grandfather was an English Jew. Educated, professional, nonpracticing, but inescapably a Jew. My grandparents’ families never forgave them for marrying each other, but with one stroke the two of them severed themselves from the strangling umbilici of their childhoods, and set out to remake themselves as Americans by Norman Rockwell. In my mother’s childhood, my grandmother’s earlier poverty and my grandfather’s Jewishness were the dark, unmentionable secrets to be suffocated beneath the weight of tree-lined suburban streets and exquisitely modern appliances.

My mother felt formless and groundless in this household, where her family’s only identity was a rigorous nonidentity, where they marked themselves only by who they weren’t, leaving unanswered the question of who they were.

*   *   *

My father’s father was a wielder of words, and in the Second World War he served as spin doctor to the Navy; at my father’s house now I can thumb through a stack of glossy eight-by-ten black-and-white official-issue photographs, my grandfather standing on some carrier deck or airport tarmac, beaming in the company of Nimitz, of Eisenhower.

My father’s father was not, by nature, a man to be persuaded by anyone’s opinion but his own. He referred to himself always in the third person, the central character in what amounted to the one-man show of his life; all the rest of his family labored anonymously in the chorus, meant to hum harmony to his solos.

In my father’s childhood, my grandfather took up and abandoned with equal precipitousness one lucrative job after another. For a time the family would live in luxurious, twelve-room Chicago waterfront apartments with maids and doormen and a smartly dressed attendant to bring the car around when they went out for a drive. Then my grandfather would quit in high dudgeon over some perceived slight or an uncompromisable difference of opinion, and the family’s fortunes would dwindle until they were reduced to cramped walk-up flats and thrice-darned socks, when finally my grandfather, full of grand plans and empty promises, would allow himself to be lured into some new vice presidency or directorship of sales. My father and his twin brother changed schools eight times before the sixth grade.

Their standing in the world was so entirely peripatetic that it was hard to know at any given time if they were keeping up appearances or living below their means, whether they were being imprudently extravagant or needlessly thrifty. On some days my father and uncle might come home to find their father wardrobing them from the Salvation Army; on others, to discover that he had magnanimously distributed all their toys to poor children.