Driving With Dead People (20 page)

I looked around. There were women and young girls sitting in bathrobes and slippers, their hair in green shower caps. They were reading
People
and
Reader’s Digest
as if they were waiting for a massage or a facial. Soon I was sitting among them in yellow slippers and the white terry cloth bathrobe Mom had given me for my birthday. I wasn’t the youngest one. I picked up a magazine and pretended to read, but tears were already starting to fall.

My name was called and I was led into a smaller room. This time I lay down on a gurney. There was a girl on the gurney next to me. She already had an IV in her right hand. While the nurse was putting an IV into my left hand, I winced. I’d never felt so alone or so ashamed. I kept thinking,
How did I let myself end up here?
and
Please don’t let anything happen to me
.

I looked over at the girl next to me. She had huge green eyes and black eyebrows. She was looking at me, too.

When the nurse left, I whispered to my neighbor, “Nobody knows I’m here.”

“My boyfriend’s waiting for me. But he’s the only one who knows.”

She was the first person since it had all begun who knew what I was feeling. I was so grateful she was beside me. I reached over and held her hand.

“I’m scared,” I told her.

“I’m scared too,” she said, and looked up at the ceiling. Tears began rolling into her hairline.

“We’re going to be fine,” I said, hoping it was true, even as tears started down the sides of my own face.

“I hope so,” she said. The nurse injected something into our IVs and, with our fingers intertwined, we went to sleep.

I woke up to a nurse saying my name over and over again. Everything was blurry. The first thing I asked was, “Is it over?” And she said, “It’s all over.” I began to cry again, my shoulders shaking with sobs.

When it was time to get dressed, I realized how hard it was going to be to drive five and a half hours after being under anesthetic. I listened to the nurse rattling off the “at home” instructions and groggily walked out the door to the waiting room. The nurse at the front stopped me.

“Is someone driving you home?” she asked.

“Yes, he’s pulling the car around,” I said. She smiled and let me go.

It was evening and dark outside again. I was having bad cramps and was very sleepy, but I needed to get back to Kenyon. I would not have thought to get a hotel room, not that I had the money to pay for one. I just wanted to be back at the dorm with my warm quilt and my toothbrush. I wanted to be eighteen and starting college again. I wanted to start over.

I turned on the car and rolled down all the windows, even though it was thirty degrees outside. I hadn’t thought to bring my coat. I needed the air to stay awake. In the five and a half hours it took to get back, I only stopped three times to get caffeine and take care of all the bleeding.

Patrick was furious that I got back so late with his car. I was so exhausted I didn’t care what he thought. I threw his keys onto the front porch by the wooden glider. I couldn’t imagine sitting on a bicycle seat, so I walked it home, my backpack over my arm. My cramps were getting worse.

I spent the weekend in bed but felt terrific by Monday morning. The relief I felt at having my life back, at being in control again, at surviving the worst thing I’d ever been through, was monumental. I absolutely knew that if I couldn’t have had an abortion, I would have killed myself or done what my great-aunt Nettie did in 1922—I would have found anyone who would perform one, and I would have prayed they knew what they were doing. She picked the wrong person, and died at the age of thirty-one.

I saw Mr. Whitfield. “You look great,” he said.

“I feel better,” I said. He smiled and gave me a big hug. I hugged him back.

Patrick saw me that afternoon and said, “You kept my car just to fuck with me.” I swung around and shoved him hard in the chest. “Stay away from me. Don’t say anything to me; don’t even come near me. You are a lying piece of shit.”

I walked away knowing I would never get over that experience. I would carry it with me the rest of my life. I’d always be grateful that I’d had a choice, that my life hadn’t been derailed. I vowed to try to let other people help me the next time I was in serious trouble. I vowed to always be smarter than the person I was dating. I would work on trying to forgive myself, and I would ask others for forgiveness too.

That summer I spent time at Dad’s lake house, and one day when he was flipping steaks on the grill, I said, “I can finally pay back the money you loaned me.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, not looking up.

“But it’s five hundred dollars,” I said.

“We all get a little short sometimes,” he said, leaning down to blow on the hot charcoal.

I felt tremendous guilt. I wanted to tell him what I’d done, to make sure he still would have given me the money if he’d known, but I just stood there, looking at his profile. I wanted to say that my life had almost been ruined but he’d helped me.

“Thanks, Dad,” I managed.

The fall of my sophomore year, Becky was going to marry Mitch, who more and more reminded me of the old, cruel Dad. She walked away from Dad, only to marry his doppelgänger. They were having a big wedding at a church in Cincinnati and a fancy reception at his father’s country club. His family had a lot of money and, once again, we were the hicks.

I’d landed my first professional acting job at a summer theatre in Vermont and had gotten the lead in two of the plays. I was thrilled, until I received a call from Becky.

“We’re moving the wedding to July,” she said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Mitch will be starting school in the fall, so we’re having it this summer,” she said.

“But I can’t make it,” I said. I didn’t have the money to fly home.

“I know,” she said. “Gina Burns is taking your place. She’s the same dress size as you.”

Each time our relationship was revealed as the empty, hateful thing it was, I was caught off guard. I hung up the phone as quickly as possible. With Becky, I was always convinced I’d done something unforgivable to her that I just couldn’t remember.

I talked to Mom later that week. “Becky doesn’t want me in her wedding.”

“She doesn’t want you taking all the attention,” she said.

“I wouldn’t do that,” I said.

“You’re the center of everything,” Mom said. “You make sure of that.”

Stunned, I slowly walked back to the rehearsal for
Oliver
.

One month later Mom placed a picture of Becky in her wedding gown, JoAnn in a fuchsia bridesmaid’s dress, and Jamie in his gray tuxedo, on the buffet table by the front door, where it sat for years.

A reminder that for one day at least, it was exactly the way she’d planned: three children.

When I got back to school, I started dating Joel, a bisexual magician. He was wholly original, introducing me to sushi and teaching me Ashtanga yoga. He was the funniest person I’d ever met. He wasn’t “normal,” but neither was I.

Mom loved him, Jim tolerated him, and Dad just shook his head in disbelief at my incredibly bad choice. I didn’t care.

It ended in disaster, but not until I participated in at least forty magic shows performed out of the back of his Audi hatchback. The final saw through my middle was Joel sleeping with Patrick Romano. The ultimate betrayal.

Joel eventually had a nervous breakdown, barricading himself in his apartment. His parents, who were Baptist ministers, shipped him off to South Dakota to convalesce.

After Joel my sophomore year became less about studying and more about parties.

My roommate and I threw a luau in our dorm room, and I woke up the next morning to find vomit right outside my door. I nearly stepped in it when I walked out to pee.

“Who the hell puked in front of my door and just left it here?” I bellowed down the hallway, where several doors were open.

“You did!” came a voice from one of the rooms.

I ducked back into my room and gingerly closed the door. Looking in the mirror over my dresser, I could see my hair was mangled and tangled with leaves and small twigs.
What the hell happened last night?
I had no memory of even going outside.

I looked over at my roommate, who was still sleeping. She had wavy brown hair all the way down to her waist—only it was also tangled up with dried leaves and twigs. I shook her awake. When her eyes opened and she saw my hair, she started laughing.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked.

“The same thing that happened to you,” I said, pointing to her head.

She got up and looked in the mirror. “Oh, shit,” she said, fingering the mess.

“There’s vomit outside the door,” I told her. “Apparently, it’s mine.”

“What did we do last night?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I’m terrified.”

We didn’t find out how the foliage had gotten into our hair or what had gone on at our party, but I did discover that I’d written a check for eighty dollars to Pizzaroni’s delivery for nine muffulettas, which apparently fed our entire floor. Not exactly luau cuisine. There were cigarette butts in my spider plant.

I decided to take my acting seriously and settle down. I didn’t want to end up like Jamie, who was still in Salt Lake City, with no college degree, and only booze to distract and comfort him.

My junior year at Kenyon started with Mr. Whitfield calling me into his office to discuss my having a nose job.

“How was it singing in ‘Annie Get Your Gun’?” he asked.

“It was great. The only problem was that some of the notes were too high, and I couldn’t belt them. I have to develop my upper range—from scratch.”

“What about your breathing?” he asked.

“My breathing?”

“You’ve been complaining over the past two years that you can’t breathe through your nose. Is it bothering you?”

“It bothers me, but it’s not keeping me from singing,” I told him.

“I think you should consider having a consultation with a plastic surgeon I know,” he said.

“Probably too expensive,” I told him.

“If there’s a medical problem, insurance will pay for it. I’ll set up the appointment.”

Mr. Whitfield drove me to that appointment and when we were in the examining room, he told the doctor about my breathing and then pointed to the bump in the center of my nose.

“This is what I’m interested in getting smoothed out,” he told the surgeon. “Is it possible to get this nice and straight as well as narrowing down the bridge?” he asked.

“That’s no problem,” he said.

I was watching them go back and forth as if I weren’t in the room. I wanted to breathe through my nose, I wanted to look prettier, but I hadn’t planned on surgery.

“When can we schedule the surgery?” Whitfield asked, turning to me.

My eyebrows flew up. “I have to talk to my mom and dad first.”

“Well, let’s book a date. We can always move it.” Whitfield turned to the surgeon. “Should we shoot the ‘before’ picture?” Clearly Whitfield had done this before.

That January I had my nose straightened and my deviated septum fixed. Insurance paid. As soon as the swelling went down enough to reveal a lovely straight bridge on a very narrow nose, Whitfield was talking about fixing my teeth.

“They stick out,” he assured me, as if I didn’t already know.

I steered clear of Whitfield’s office for a while. Sitting in the costume shop with my friend Bella, she asked me about the nose job.

“Whitfield thought it’d be better for my career if I could breathe through it,” I told her.

“He’s always trying to get girls to have plastic surgery,” she laughed. Bella had been a student in the department for almost five years, taking a couple classes each semester. She’d seen a lot of girls come through.

“Why does he want girls to have surgery?”

“He wants all women to look like someone he could fuck,” she said, not even looking up from her sewing. I could feel the shock and embarrassment moving up my neck in a steady red wave. I excused myself and went for a two-hour bike ride. I needed some air.

The summer following my junior year at Kenyon, I was accepted to the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. Teachers from Juilliard gathered for six weeks of acting workshops. I was proud to be accepted. Acting was usually the place I felt strong and self-assured. But once I arrived, I had an unexpected crisis of confidence.

Most of the students came from the East Coast, and I came straight from the cornfields. My teachers tried to change the way I spoke (“You have a Midwestern drawl with an annoying nasal quality. It’s difficult to listen to”), the way I walked (“Please stand with your head directly over your shoulders and try to walk as if you were poised”), and the way I breathed (“You breathe very high. Have you ever thought of breathing from your diaphragm?”). Until I arrived at Chautauqua, I’d had no idea what a mess I was.

I worried myself to death, rehearsing every line, every dance step, every breath I took, and where in the monologue I was supposed to take it. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t make friends, and I didn’t do good work.

I figured if I couldn’t cut it at Juilliard, I couldn’t cut it at all, which only brought on more angst.

Several messages from Mr. Whitfield came in that summer. “Give me a call when you get a chance.” Finally, I walked to the pay phone.

“Hello?” he said.

“Mr. Whitfield, this is Monica.”

“Monica Peterson—you finally called me,” he said.

“It’s hectic here. I’m completely miserable, by the way. You might as well know, there’s no way I’m getting into Juilliard for graduate school. They think I’m retarded, and they might be right.”

“Don’t worry about that now. You have all next year to worry about that.”

“Instead of coming back to Kenyon, I’m enrolling in beauty school and learning to perm hair.”

“I wanted to ask you something,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve been sensing something from you, and I thought we’d get it out on the table.” I heard him shut his office door.

“What?” There was nothing he could say to upset me at this point in the summer.

“Are you attracted to me?” he asked. I was wrong—there was something he could say to upset me. Mr. Whitfield was forty-two years old and married. His daughter was four years younger than I was and he was ten years younger than my father.

He took another approach. “Do you feel any attraction toward me?” I didn’t, but I was mortified and he kept waiting for an answer, so I finally said, “I guess so.”

“I feel the same way,” he said, and hung up the phone.

I stared at the number pad on the pay phone. What was that?

I took my time walking back to my dorm, sitting by the lake, watching the sailboats bobbing in the sparkling water. I was in this magical place where everyone was focused and talented and the scenery was picturesque, and yet I felt just the opposite. With my call to Whitfield, my problems just got bigger.

When I returned to Kenyon in the fall, it was my senior year. Whitfield cast me as Ariel in
The Tempest
and had the costume designer put me in a white unitard. The set designer said my butt looked like “two little bears in a bag wrestling.” I knew who the unitard was for.

After rehearsal one night Whitfield asked if he could drive me home. And that’s how it began—the thing I couldn’t picture—my professor and me having sex. It was seedy and obvious.

Worst of all, it was mind-blowingly terrific. If it had been terrible, it wouldn’t have been a problem to stop, but it was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. Rifle-toting Adam was a novice compared to Whitfield, who was interested in what my body could do and how many times it could do it. I was surprised to see that my body could do quite a few things, quite a lot of times.

Boys asked me on dates, but I was busy with Whitfield, in the lighting booth, on his desk, in the costume shop, and in his car. His only attempt at being noble about his marriage was his refusal to kiss me.

“This is not a romantic relationship,” he once told me as he pulled up his jeans, “it’s physical.”

So, when he’d call and I’d be curling my hair for a date with someone else, I’d tell him, “I’m trying to find something physical
and
romantic.” We wouldn’t speak for a day or so, and then back to the lighting booth we’d go. We became obsessed with each other and stayed that way throughout my senior year.

When it was time for graduate school auditions, I chose an acting conservatory as far away from Whitfield as I could get: San Diego, California. UCSD was affiliated with the prestigious La Jolla Playhouse regional theatre, which was the combination I wanted—a professional theatre and a focused acting program. When I told Whitfield, he kissed me on the mouth and begged me to go to NYU.

He would have easy access to me in New York, since he frequently traveled there. I wanted to focus on attaining my master’s degree and fall in love with someone who hadn’t been alive during World War II. I couldn’t have Whitfield calling and visiting. The closer I got to graduation, the more he wanted to kiss.