And Then Things Fall Apart (3 page)

Time to sleep.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Sylvia actually wrote a poem called “Fever 103°” that's in her other masterpiece, a book of poems called Ariel. The poem is all about flushing and heat and going and coming and giant flowers, and I always thought it was about, er, sex. Oh, dear reader, a true Plathian cannot survive on
The Bell Jar
alone.

Fever and sex are totally similar, I guess. I'm starting to think all poetry is, in an oblique and cunning way, about human desire and copulation. Even that Carl Sandburg poem “Fog” that we all had to memorize in fourth grade:

 

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Could be about sex if you think about fog as desire and the city as a teenager.

Maybe it's just me.

Chicken pox, by the way, are really vile. And itch. Christ, do they itch. I'm a mature and sophisticated teenager, and I can barely stop scratching. I want to scratch as badly as I imagine addicts crave heroin. I will scratch until my skin bleeds. I will throw a sheet over the itchiest part of my body and rub through the cotton until a little watery blood seeps through, and then, for good measure, just to show the pox who is boss, I scratch some more.

But not my face. Little kids don't know not to scratch their face, so I guess I'm ahead of the game there. Not that I'm so gorgeous or anything, but I'm not ugly, either. And yet I am still avoiding my reflection in the mirror because the pox, when the light is a certain way, look exactly like Big Tim's acne in algebra and seeing that—on my own face!—is so depressing, it might just push me over the edge. The edge of what, I don't know, but every day I feel like I'm clawing my way back to stable ground but can't quite make it to safety. Like can't . . . hold . . . on . . . much . . . longer . . . But of course, I do. Dad does. Mom does. What is the freaking alternative?

Mom didn't even call to let me/us know her plane got in okay. My phone is a piece of scrap metal, right? And I
suppose she didn't want to call the house and have to talk to her soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law.

I, too, am avoiding my grandma, which is hard when you are bedridden and she is the one home all day taking care of you. I'm embarrassed in front of her, like what my dad did has something to do with me. You think I'm upset about my father's ridiculous behavior with Amanda and the way he royally broke my mom's heart and totally screwed up my life, and demolished our entire family? Believe me, my grandma is not feeling like mother of the year. I can just imagine a bumper sticker on her Saturn, P
ROUD PARENT OF A MIDLIFE ADULTERER
! She makes hard-boiled eggs for me to snack on and walks around the house smoking Winstons. When she leans over to plump my pillows, she smells like the back room at the restaurant where the dishwashers have their smoke breaks in winter. And instead of gagging, I inhale more because it smells like things used to be, before the shit hit the fan. My life. Right now.

Oh, and it's summer and ninety-seven degrees, but my teeth are chattering nonstop.

My mother raised me to think all men are kind of stupid. Albert Einstein wasn't stupid, but he also wasn't so nice to his wife and could barely dress himself in the morning. My father can run a business, but he barely remembers to put gas into the van.

To be fair, males and females are practically different
species entirely. In high school the boys run around like eighth graders hopped up on Fruity Pebbles, and the girls already know about Kegel exercises, existentialism, and the three
C
s of diamond valuation (color, cut, and clarity). Even now, in my soon-to-be sophomore year there are some boys who still don't shave. Or smell when they sweat. Or realize that girls do not have cooties. How the hell are these poor simps supposed to know how to sweep a girl off her feet or unburden her of her pesky virginity with the painless dashing aplomb of a dark-eyed, stubbled movie star?

I'm not sure what I'm talking about here. All I know is that Matt is not dumb. He is also no Einstein. But he's just like Einstein. He knows how to spread his fingers apart on my back when we lie down, his mouth on my mouth until I can see how in love we are with my eyes closed. He refers to Sylvia Plath as “that friend of yours,” and I'm not sure if he is kidding or if he really thinks we borrow each other's clothes and have sleepovers. He knows how to make a night out in the city—to see a band or eat sushi or whatever—fun and safe and dangerous, and still get me home on time. But he doesn't understand how I could want to stay home by myself once in a while.

“What do you do? Like, watch TV and stuff?” We have been together for more than a year. I read. Duh. I write poetry and make bracelets and earrings from nonrecyclable kitchen items. I take pictures with my digital camera of things underwater
and make note cards out of them on Snapfish.com. I teach myself how to do actual DIY things from the Internet, like knit, make crepe paper roses, and soap with olive oil. Sometimes I just cram my earbuds into my ears, listen to Beethoven for an hour and a half, and stare out the window at the baseball diamond across the street and think.

He—and when I say “he,” I could mean any guy in high school—is very body identified. Matt especially needs to keep his body active and exercised, like a Labrador puppy. As long as his body is involved—eating, making out, running, wrestling, driving, etc.—he seems to know how to behave. When it's just us talking, especially on the phone and there are no bodies to distract him, he can't quite keep up his end of the conversation. He knows enough at the end to say “I love you,” but after “Hi, Keekie” and before the love declaration, there are a lot of ums, ohs, and I dunnos.

It's not that I think he's dumb. I don't. He's not. Matt starts AP History in the fall. It's just that right now his body is doing all the thinking. I like him. I like his body. So there's not really much of a problem. And sometimes he really does get me, like he is absorbing more of me than he lets on, and when I need it, he lets me know. And it makes up for all the other stuff that doesn't fit so great, and I think about doing it with him all over again. But then again, he is smart enough to withhold vital information from the love of his life. And I thought that was me.

For someone who loves to be alone a lot, I'm starting to go a little crazy. No one is really talking with me, to me, around me. Since I started hanging out so much with Matt, and frittering the rest of my time away with the backstabber-to-the-stars Amanda, I have been totally ignoring my friend Nicola—aka, Nic. And what I mean is, almost entirely. She just doesn't get it. It takes too many words to explain the details of what's happening with me to her, a girl I have known since grade school, who gets straight
A
s, who never says “fuck” in front of adults, who doesn't have her virginity hanging on by a thread. She has probably written me off. Which I deserve, I suppose.

So, yeah, lots of silence except for the occasional dog bark and ice-cream truck jingle. And like Esther Greenwood, I find the silences—the world's and my own—are totally depressing me. I'm not exactly initiating conversations here. I'm asleep most of the time, and then I wake up and want to cry and scratch at the same time, which is confusing.

Crying and scratching. They are both supposed to offer relief, but they don't. My muscles feel bruised and my bones hurt where they get near my skin. I am happiest when I'm typing. And then I push the typewriter off my lap and curl my body around it like a sea horse and fall asleep like Esther, knowing that when I wake up, things will be more or less exactly the same.

ANAGRAMS FOR THE TIME BEING

In a bell jar everything is
Distorted.
Words lose meaning but gain momentum.
Amanda, friend from hell,
Becomes a
Half-informed alderman.
Sylvia Plath
Is
Lavishly apt.
Mother, Father, Amanda, and me
Almost transforms into the
Madmen of the Earth Armada.
This one reluctant virgin
Is now an
Earth-convulsing nitrite.
Jesters gesture,
And
Listen
Now is
Silent.

In
The Bell Jar
Esther gets ptomaine poisoning from bad crabmeat on the
Ladies' Day
banquet table. She's in the bathroom puking her guts out, all shivery and pummeled by tsunamis of nausea. Which is totally how I felt today as I retched into the toilet. And I mean
exactly
. I am utterly and completely as sick as I have ever been.

Well, once I had a stomachache so bad, my parents finally dragged me to a pediatrician, who thought I might have appendicitis and so did a rectal exam—yes, a RECTAL exam—only to determine that I had a stomach flu.

My parents have their own business, and health insurance costs a freaking fortune. We have it, but visits at the peak of illness before I die are cheaper in the long run than shucking out cash for regular checkups when I am apparently healthy. Thank you, Dine & Dash, for making my life even more miserable than it is already.

In Sylvia Plath's masterpiece,
The Bell Jar
, the modern
classic beloved by passionate, sophisticated girls the world over, Esther Greenwood returns to her mother's suburban home after a whirlwind trip to NYC, where she sort of lost her mind. She is demoralized by being alive. She is homesick for something she has never experienced. She longs for something she cannot explain while dogs yap behind fences and station wagons roll down quiet blacktopped streets. It freaks her out and inspires her to down a jar of sleeping pills.

Being at Gram's isn't as bad as all that, but it ain't so spectacular either. Gram has this neighbor, June, who has a brown Labrador named Hershey, like the chocolate, who wants to maul all humans. I like animals. I am kind of into them, seeing as how they are becoming extinct left and right—practically keeling over and dropping dead all around the world. Even my pseudo-vegetarianism is a non-cruelty thing. Kind of like how the Hippocratic oath works for doctors: First, do no harm. I try, unlike most of the adults I have the misfortune to know, not to hurt people and/or animals. At least not on purpose. So if eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich means one less horrifically slaughtered long-lashed cow, why not? Is meat really so delicious?

And so this dopey dog, Hershey, barks and snarls and bares his teeth at anything that walks on two legs. That includes mail carriers, Gram, me, garbage men, babies, kids on bikes. I have often sat, chin in hand, daydreaming
of Amanda reaching down to pet Hershey, saying, in that stupid Betty Boop voice she liked to put on for effect, “Ooh, what a nice wittle doggy,” right before Hershey lunges three feet into the air and chomps on the side of her face, skewering her eyeball with his canines.

His bark is not chocolaty. It is like this:
Woowoo! Woowoo! Woo! Snarl, snarl. Woowoo Woowoo! Woo!
And then he slam dances against the chain-link fence until June lets him back inside the house. Every two hours, the Hershey show.
Woo!

I totally relate to Hershey. He is cute and ferocious. He's as trapped as the rest of us here. Maybe he was hurt before, or is, like, a rescue dog or something. Abused. Because when you have been hurt, and I mean betrayed, and your heart gets tromped on by people you really trusted and loved, you get kind of mean. And skittish. At least for a while.

Speaking of betrayal, let us not forget the boyfriend who has forsaken me; or my beloved and adulterous father hiding in his lair in the basement—so depressed and self-centered, I can hardly look at him when he emerges; or my fever and itching and overall malaise. Or that my mom has pretty much abandoned me. And no, it's not suicide-inducing, but it is pretty strenuous on my coping skills.

The icing on the cake is that I am having some kind of technology withdrawal. I'm here all alone and it's not horrible, but it is
quiet
. Silent. There's no radio music, no TV blaring in the next room. No street noise slipping in through
the open windows. And the loneliness is like an invisible animal in the room, like a giant cat. Every once in a while I feel like I could stretch my arm out past the typewriter on the bed, touch its tail, place my palm on its enormous flat head, and stroke its ears.

Without the Internet I feel unplugged from the world. There is a new stillness that I have never noticed before. With computers you can set up your whole day so that everyone you have ever known or want to know is sitting in one big cyber room, waiting for you to show up. Whether you do or not, they are there. And knowing they are there is a great comfort. And it's not just the cyber room but the entire world at your fingertips. The
globe
is your freaking oyster. Without it, here, under the covers, my world is—this room. This bed. This brain. All my annoying and heartbreaking problems. And an invisible cat curled up on the pillow next to my head, waiting for me to pass out so it can smother me while I sleep.