Pug Hill (16 page)

“Now everyone try,” she says, and obediently, we all do. Everyone bares their teeth and snorts in and out. “Remember your abdominals, pull in your abdominals with every short, sharp intake of breath,” she explains, beginning to clap softly, rhythmically, along with our very overheated—very puglike, come to think of it—breathing. Lawrence jumps up from his chair and fans his hands out to the side: jazz hands. He stays there and continues his Kalabati, waving his jazz hands around. The rest of us continue practicing from our seats, nudged along by Beth Anne’s clapping, encouraged to continue via her enthusiastic nods. I look over at Lawrence—how can I not?—and I have to admit that I see his point.

The happy-hubris-inner-me, the one who proudly wears her own orange caftan and waves her own hands in the air, and shouts ecstatically,
I am one step ahead!
is back. It’s been a big night for her. As you might guess, I don’t let her out very often. But here she is again, standing right next to Lawrence with her own jazz hands, exclaiming,
I know Kalabati, too!

Then of course, the part of me for whom every moment is not a celebration of self, the part of me that would
never
be caught dead in an orange caftan, the part of me who I imagine prefers black clothing and moody vintage overcoats, puts down one of the cigarettes she’s always smoking. She exhales and reminds me what a big loser I have the propensity to be. I actually see that the dark brooding cigarette-smoking inner me might have just made a valid point, so I try to temper the excitement. I’m actually pretty successful at chilling myself out, vanquishing the orange caftan version of my inner self away again, but still, I am nothing if not relieved that I have mastery of all these techniques.
I can relax,
I think,
I really can.

“Great, class,” Beth Anne announces the end of our breathing. Lawrence takes his seat. “Try to practice these breathing exercises right before any presentations. They’ll truly help you to relax.”

I think about my speech: my speech will be made at a party, most likely somewhat spontaneously. It will be delivered, I imagine, from the middle of a dance floor. I think how very likely I won’t even know when it is ten, or even five, minutes before it is time to make my speech. I think how, as is so characteristic of all big scary things, I won’t have any warning at all. I picture some clearly nefarious DJ/wedding singer/leader-of-the-band-type holding his microphone. He has a mullet. He’s taken the microphone off the stand and is walking around with a swagger, holding the mike in one hand, holding the wire to the mike in the other, twirling it, trailing it along with him, like a hideous pet snake.

“And now Caroline and Henry’s daughter, Hope, would like to make a speech,” he will say. I think about how that will happen and how everyone,
all the people,
will turn to look at me and I’ll have to get right up from whatever chair I’ve been sitting in, holding onto white-knuckled. There won’t be any time, any place, to practice One Nostril Breathing, and certainly not Kalabati breathing, unless of course I want to have another reason to be embarrassed in front of people. And again, so quickly, all is lost.

“The Lion is another technique that’s wonderful, just wonderful for relaxation,” Beth Anne says, signaling that we’re moving on from the breathing exercises, and I think how this is a good thing, as clearly the breathing has really done nothing to relax me so much as it has brought me to the bad place. I’m ready to move on.

“First, close your eyes
tightly, tightly, tightly,”
she says, closing her eyes, as you can probably guess, tightly. “And scrunch your face up
tightly, tightly, tightly,
too,” she says and follows suit, both puckering her lips and raising them up to touch her nose while keeping her eyes still tightly shut. We wait.

It appears she is going to stay that way. The classroom is all awkward moment enmeshed in strained silence as Beth Anne continues to stand at the front of it with her face like that, with her clenched fists. I look down at my desk. Around me I can hear the rustling, I can feel the movements of my classmates; I imagine them looking away from Beth Anne and trying, as I am, not to look at anyone else. I stare harder at my desk. I try, even though I know it is hopeless, to zone out, to disengage, to do anything to make this moment pass.

And then, the second I think that what I want most in the world is to get as far away from this moment as I can, I am inexorably drawn, right into the center of it, by the hissing.

Beth Anne has unclenched her fists to the other extreme, fanning her hands out, stretching them out in front of her. Her eyes are unscrunched, they are the polar opposite of unscrunched, to say the least; they are open wide, bulging right out of her head. The other features of her face are just as assaulting; her mouth is as wide open as I’ve ever seen any mouth, her tongue is flattened out and protruding, wiggling around. Little bits of spittle are flying from her mouth, and with this, through all of this, is all the hissing. Hissing, I don’t even know if that’s the right word. It reminds me of a much exaggerated, grotesque version of the sound people sometimes like to make when they’ve just had a sip of soda, that sort of
ach
sound, but stretched out.

The rustling around from before is gone; everyone is now perfectly still, the silence that just moments before was so awkward, has now morphed into shock.

“That, class, is The Lion,” Beth Anne says, wiping a bit of spit from her chin. “Let’s try it all together.”

And as much as I want there to be, it still doesn’t seem like there is any escape. I look around at the rest of the class, and everyone is scrunching their face up. I picture them all at some point in the future: brilliant public speakers. I picture myself in the future: still seeing public speaking as a slow, painful, excruciating death. The reason for this future difference between my classmates and myself is that I wouldn’t do The Lion. I scrunch up my face and wait for the sound of everyone else hissing. And then, there it is.

I open my eyes wide. I stick out my tongue. I splay my hands out in front of me. I hiss right along with everyone else and as I do so, I cannot say that I feel I have learned a great lesson about how to be a better public speaker, but what I can say is that people do not look well when they are doing The Lion. People, in fact, look quite disgusting.

And if there is any advice I can give anyone, I would like that advice to be that if you find yourself in an Overcoming Presentation Anxiety class, and in that class you happen to find yourself doing The Lion, just look at the floor, or out the window while you’re doing it. Whatever you do, don’t look around at your fellow classmates, eyes wide, tongue thrusting and wagging, spit flying all over the place, so that you are repulsed by your classmates as surely you are to them repulsive. And if you just can’t listen to me, if you just
have
to look around, at the very least don’t look right up and into the eyes of the really good-looking and well-dressed guy in your class while you are both in full-extended Lion so that you pretty much kill any (admittedly quite slim) chance you ever had of sleeping with him.

“Okay, class,” Beth Anne begins again, and The Lion it seems, thankfully, has come to an end. “Let’s talk about our Deities.”

I look at my watch. At this point I’m thinking it’s a pretty safe bet that I’m in the type of situation where things, if they change at all, are only going to change for the worse. I look across at Martine and I think she is exhaling very heavily, but then I think also that I might be projecting, so I steal a quick look at some of the others. I look at Rachel, so frizz-haired and freaky, staring blankly, robotically ahead; Lawrence is still actually practicing The Lion. Alec just looks hot. Oh, right, I’m not supposed to look at Alec. Amy looks pissed, and really, to tell you the truth, at this point I have no idea whether or not I am projecting. How on earth am I supposed to tell?

“A Deity is a god or a goddess,” Beth Anne goes on to explain, and I’m pretty sure I knew that and I can’t help thinking,
Come on we’re just afraid of speaking in public, we’re not idiots, we know what a Deity is.
I look around at everyone staring blankly at Beth Anne. Or at least, I
think
we know.

“Think about your Deities over the week, but don’t pick them until next week, right before class, before you speak. When it comes to Deity selection, the best thing you can do, the way you can get the most power is to pick one at the very last moment,” Beth Anne explains, beaming, and though I have no idea about what, triumphant. I look around at my classmates. It seems no one else has much of an idea as to what she is really talking about, or why she is suddenly looking so triumphant. For this very moment we are not swimming in a vast sea of anxiety, we swim instead in a sea of blank stares. I imagine that in spite of the confusion, everyone welcomes the change.

“Though you mustn’t pick one yet, you can indeed think about them,” Beth Anne adds on assuredly. I steal another quick glance around the room. A few of them, Lindsay, and Lawrence in particular, do look like they are thinking about Deities. Everyone else’s expression seems to be as close an approximation as you can get to, You
have got to be kidding me.
Then, with the mysteries of the blackboard safely solved, Beth Anne reminds us that we should each pick a poem to present next time in class.

“It’s important, class, that you feel comfortable. Should you not feel comfortable reading a poem, please feel free to read a passage from your favorite book.”

Options
are
nice, I think, as Lawrence shakes his head from left to right and back again.

Beth Anne explains that if we start right away next time, we’ll all be able to fit in our poems. Then for the following two classes, we’ll need to split into groups to deliver our longer presentations.

“I’ll give the assignment for your longer presentations after we’ve completed our poems. I don’t want you to think about that yet, I don’t want to distract you from your first assignment,” she tells us as if we are all ADD children who simply can’t bear the thought of thinking of two things at once. Everyone looks happy though, and I wonder if maybe we are.

“Okay, but for the groups,” Beth Anne adds, “let’s figure that out now.”

We spend a lot longer than you would think would be necessary figuring out when everyone will present his or her longer speech in front of class. Everyone has ideas about whether they think going first is better, or last, or somewhere innocuous right in the middle.

“Such decisions,” Beth Anne explains, “cause anxiety, and we are all here to overcome anxiety rather than create more.” So, because of that I guess, I can’t think of another reason, we watch as Beth Anne rips a piece of Xerox paper into seven strips and writes something on each strip. She rolls each strip into a tight ball and places them all on the center of her desk. We take almost as long as that going up to her desk one by one and selecting one of the tightly crumpled balls of paper, all the while I still have the sensation that I have somehow gone back to childhood.

Once we are each back at our desks with our pieces of paper, Beth Anne says we can open them. Mine has a tiny 2 written in the center. I’ll go in the second group, not next class, or even the next one, but the one after that. I recrumple my piece of paper, thinking that there had to have been an easier way, and thinking also that I already know what poem I’ll read next time, my favorite one. I try not to think of the longer presentation, since for one thing, we’re not supposed to, and for another, we don’t know what it is anyway.

I look at my watch again, and it’s not like this class flew by the way time does when you’re having fun, but I’m actually surprised, and more than a little relieved, to see that it’s time to go.

“Well, I think this has been a great class. I think we really learned and accomplished a lot,” Beth Anne says, nodding again to us, smiling at us warmly, telling us that, like last week, she’ll remain after class for a while to answer any questions.

“Great class!” Beth Anne calls out again after us as we shuffle out the door and stand in front of the elevator, leaving her alone in the room, questionless.

“Do you feel relaxed?” Amy says, to no one in particular, as we all stand, each of us with our arms crossed in front of us, staring at the lights on top of the elevator, waiting for the “five” to light up, waiting for the doors to open. The communication has startled me, and I stare ahead harder, not wanting to engage.

“I am not feeling so much relaxed,” Martine says in a way I think sounds ever so slightly contemptuous, or maybe, just French.

“Me, neither,” says Lawrence very loudly.

Alec chuckles, much more a
huh-huh
than a
caw-caw
I notice, and says, “We should really all just go get a drink.”

He says this, remember, to a group of seven people about whom it is questionable as to whether or not we are actually socially ept. We all take a moment to look around cagily at our group. I notice some people even uncross their arms, and then, almost shockingly, six of us agree to go for a drink. It is only Rachel who says, “I cannot. I need to get home,” so much like the robot I secretly think she is, and disappears through the stairwell door.

“Cedar Tavern is just a few blocks down on University.” Alec offers as we walk out onto the street. Everyone nods in agreement. “Great, maybe we can get one of those big tables in the back,” he adds in as we head down the street. Alec and Lindsay walk in front, the well-dressed leaders of our strange group. I walk behind them, Lawrence, Amy, and Martine, silent behind me. Alec strides purposefully, Lindsay not quite as proficient in the posture department, keeps pace with him, but is slightly hunched over.

He turns to her. “So, dude, are you that girl from that accounting firm whose pretty raunchy e-mail got sent
everywhere
?
”