Skin Game: A Memoir (14 page)

Instead all I ever managed was to perfect the art of last-minute miracles, from bolting out of bed three minutes short of the morning’s first required attendance to cramming for tests and whipping out papers in bleary all-nighters commenced at ten o’clock on the evening before the due date.

I did everything the wrong way. My clothes were forever rumpled and my collars grubby and no matter how I tied and retied them my crew-neck sweaters never draped artfully across my imperfect and slouching shoulders. I studied in a messy heap amid the tangled linens and blankets of my never-made bunk bed (rather than, as our study skills manuals advised, with two feet planted firmly on the floor, sitting upright at a neatly organized desk with a good reading lamp). I committed vast sums of information to memory on the night before a test, and promptly forgot all of it the minute I’d answered the last question.

It’s not that I didn’t love learning. It’s just that there was learning, and then there was the game of academics, which was another matter altogether, one where measurement was all.

I began with the goal of placing out of tiresome required evening study hall with the necessary 3.5 or better average on a 4.0 scale. Then I got to liking all those delicate intervals between 3.5 and 4.0: the earnest 3.6, the cheeky 3.7, the proud 3.8, the ambitious 3.9, and at last the pristine perfection of the 4.0. Below 3.5 oozed a great, sucking morass, and if a quiz or an assignment came back to me marked with a 3.2 or a 3.4, I could feel the dark waters of failure licking at my ankles. Below 3.5 we were sinking into the nether regions of the B’s, and let’s face it: A B− is just a C+ on borrowed time.

My GPA was only one in a series of numerical value systems in which I invested my faith. I found numbers comfortingly tangible and reliable: weight on the scale, sit-ups counted off, dollars in a savings account. You could dispute the
relative
value of any given number—a 3.5 versus a 3.6, say, or fifty minutes’ exercise as opposed to an hour’s worth—but you couldn’t dispute the numbers themselves. Counting up or counting down, you could rely on numbers to order themselves in neat hierarchies against which you could measure your progress in the world.

My GPA was magical to me. It had the power to confirm or refute my worth. It had the power to shape my present and determine my future. However, I saw my academic success as the thinnest possible veneer laid over my otherwise doubtful underpinnings, as if I were a car-lot lemon running just long enough to dupe an unsuspecting buyer. When you took away the GPA, what was left? At any moment I might blow the whole gig and fall irredeemably from grace. I already felt depressed in anticipation of the event. The Very Good College of all my hopes and dreams shimmered like a Shangri-La on my personal horizon, and now my entire fate, I believed, turned on each grade. One disastrous paper, one quiz blown, and you could kiss the Ivy League good-bye. I couldn’t have articulated which specific, disastrous consequences I expected to result from failure to gain admission to a first-ranked New England college—the contingency was simply too unthinkable in itself. I could just feel a whole future evaporating.

But when your report cards reflect an unsullied sweep of 3.7’s and 3.9’s, then you can steep in the warm bath of esteem from teachers, parents, fellow students.

We are very proud of your success,
wrote my father in a letter to me.

You are on your way towards being one of their best students,
wrote my mother.

When, I wondered, would I fuck up?

*   *   *

One night in my junior year—a night when, unusually, I actually went to bed at a reasonable eleven
P.M.
—I began, as I lay in bed in the darkness, to tremble. At first just a quick shudder, the kind you have when something sets you briefly on edge—a spider dashing over your foot, the sound of fingernails on a blackboard. Then another shudder. Then another and another, and then I couldn’t stop. Waves of uncontrollable trembling, one after the other. I tried breathing deeply. I tried willing my muscles to relax. Still I continued to shake. It started to scare me; I thought I must be on the verge of some terrible illness. Something awful was going to happen to me, and I was so far from home. The more anxious I got, of course, the worse I shook. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I called out to my roommate. I said, “Something’s wrong, I can’t stop shaking.”

She turned on the light and sat up.

“You what?” she said.

“I can’t stop shaking,” I repeated, trembling violently.

“Are you sick?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should I get somebody?”

“I don’t know.”

She watched me shuddering and twitching, but perfectly lucid and conscious.

“I’ll go get Lucy,” she said, finally, naming the dorm counselor on the floor above us who was casual and unflappable and someone you could trust in a crisis.

“Okay,” I said shakily.

She came back in a few minutes with Lucy, who sat down on the edge of my bed and put a comforting arm on my shaking body.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said again.

“Do you think you’re sick?”

“I don’t know.”

I explained how I’d just been lying there, and started shaking and couldn’t stop. I said I didn’t feel sick or feverish or anything, but still I couldn’t stop.

Lucy fetched a thermometer—no fever. She sat me up and wrapped me in a blanket. Still I trembled. She went and roused my own dorm counselor, Janet, who lived with her husband in a tiny apartment on our floor. Janet, bathrobed and hair in curlers, stood with Lucy, both of them examining me critically as though they were sizing up a thoroughbred with questionable parentage or an artwork with a dubious provenance.

We went through all the questions again. Was I sick? Had I taken something? Had I gotten too hot or too cold? Had I hurt myself somehow?

“Let’s go to my apartment,” said Janet at last. “Maybe Bob can help.” Bob was her husband who, I happened to know, was studying for his master’s in psychology. Bob was stretched out in a lounger in their cubicle of a living room watching Johnny Carson. Johnny and Ed exchanged witticisms. Janet wrapped me in an afghan crocheted in the browns and reds and golds of the seventies. Bob quizzed me with probing questions. Had I been under any particular stress? A test hanging over me? A paper due? Was there anything else in my life that might be troubling me?

Stress, I’d admit to. Stress sounded good, better than all the mysterious, doctors-would-scratch-their-heads, sudden-onset fatal illnesses I’d been imagining for the past twenty minutes. And stress you could qualify for with ordinary kinds of problems; you didn’t have to prove any major mental disorders.

“Maybe I’ve just gotten myself a little tired out lately,” I suggested.

Bob reached down to the coffee table and picked up a small, curved white plastic object with a shiny chrome plate at one end. It was about the size of a woman’s electric razor. I had no idea what to make of it.

“Put this in your hand and put your thumb on the metal part,” Bob instructed.

I held it in my hand and placed my thumb on the metal pad. The instrument let out a high-pitched electronic wail.

“It’s a biofeedback device,” explained Bob. “It’s measuring tension. You concentrate on lowering the pitch and volume and that makes you relax.”

Oh,
I thought to myself, interested, still shaking like an aspen in high wind.

I sat there. The biofeedback instrument went slowly from shriek to whine to hum, and the trembling subsided with it. Bob continued watching Carson. Janet bustled around somewhere in the background. After a while I began to feel self-conscious and awkward with my humming thumb, sitting in their living room, their private space, imposing myself on their off-duty lives. I had caused such a to-do over nothing. Was my stress any more stressful than anyone else’s? We all had schoolwork. We all stayed busy. It was probably my own fault, anyway, for putting off everything until the night before it was due.

Unsure how best to extricate myself, finally I just stood up and folded the afghan and said, “Well thanks, I guess I’ll be going now. Sorry to have kept you up so late.”

Janet popped her head around the doorway. “You’re sure you’re okay now?”

“Oh, I’m fine, really, I mean I’m sorry I bothered you-all with me just stressing out like this.” I was oozing toward the doorway, bowing and scraping and apologizing all the way.

I crept back into my room, where my roommate was asleep, and back into my bed, and lay there for a while, wondering,
What was that all about?

23

There was a family pharmacy nicknamed Doc’s next door to my school, with a drugstore soda fountain where women with cat-eye glasses and beehive hairdos made BLTs and limeades. The fast girls from school hung out on a brick wall behind Doc’s, smoking cigarettes and drinking Tab and talking the fast-girl talk of parties and drinking and sex.

Doc’s was where we went for life’s necessities like toothpaste, and last-minute greeting cards to send for a grandmother’s birthday, and tampons that I stood in line with, praying that it wouldn’t be the owner’s teenage son ringing me up when it came time to pay.

I was waiting in line there one afternoon, maybe three months into my first year at boarding school. The last of the autumn leaves were blowing in a dank November wind, and first-trimester exams loomed in the coming weeks. I had not yet fully overcome home-sickness, and when I walked every day through the quarter-mile of neighborhoods to our brother school down the street, where I took Spanish III, third period, and made my laborious way through verb conjugations and translating the
Poema del Cid,
the warm lights spilling from the windows of the cozy little Cape Cods hunkered down against the morning chill made me lonely for the normal life I’d never really had.

So I was standing in line at Doc’s that afternoon, idly studying the rows of last-minute purchases shelved neatly behind the counter, when my eyes strayed across a little box labeled “Wilkinson Bond.” It was a very sweet and neat little box, like a tiny envelope, maybe two inches long and a quarter-inch thick. It was set amongst a variety of different sorts of razors and blades, so I knew what it must be.

“And could you add a box of those Wilkinson Bond?” I asked, as casually as possible, as my purchases were rung up. My heart pounded as I waited in dread for the woman behind the counter to demand to know what I needed those razors for. Could my history be read on my face?

But no, she popped the box into the bag with my toothpaste and my shampoo without even a second glance.

I walked back to my dorm with the brown paper bag clutched close to my chest, strangely comforted by the knowledge of that small package inside, yet expecting to be stopped at any moment by a teacher, a dorm counselor. I might as well have been smuggling a fifth of gin back to my dorm room, for the furtive manner in which I scuttled up the back stairway and shoved the bag into the back of my underwear drawer.

What did I expect? That my English teacher would run across me and say, “What have you got in the bag, Caroline? Razor blades for cutting yourself up?”

At the moment of purchasing them, if you can believe me, I didn’t really think it was my intention to use them for what, in my sense, was their obvious purpose. I’m not sure what else I might have thought I was going to do with them. The fact is that I didn’t really think at all, I asked for the box out of impulse, thinking it was so exquisitely small and rectangularly proportioned and desirable. It didn’t occur to me that there was something decidedly odd in finding a box of razor blades aesthetically appealing. I wonder if a heroin addict loves the elegant simplicity of the needle, if a drinker romances the curve and shape of the bottle.

During study hall that night, safely alone—and how could I not have understood that if I waited for solitude, then something was certainly afoot?—I drew the box from the bag stored carefully in my drawer. What delight in finding that each rectangle of a blade came wrapped in its own neatly creased, crisp alabaster square of translucent waxed paper! Unlike the narrow sliver of a blade snapped from a disposable Bic, which had to be held pinchingly by fingertips, this new blade was large enough to grasp comfortably, and rested lightly, easily in the hand. It would skim across skin with the delicacy of the sheerest wisp of drapery stirred in the window by a warm evening’s breeze.

I had to know it now, how this blade would sing its own clear note upon my skin. Only once, I said to myself. Then only once more, because yes, how fine was the swift flicker of its passage! The perfect congress of skin and blade, and the elegant, industrial-age precision of the cut. Like the letting-go of a long-held breath, like the first deep draught of cool water on a parched throat.

I needed cutting now the way a diabetic needs insulin. It was a bulwark, steady and unyielding, I could throw up against the insidious, corrosive lapping of a whispering sea of uneasiness.

*   *   *

It’s surprising how easy it is to get away with self-mutilation, as long as you do your cutting with a measure of self-restraint. If someone notices a cut on your arm or your thigh—even a couple of cuts—what cognitive leap would have to be made to conclude that those wounds had been self-inflicted? Particularly when there’s no other evidence to indict your stability. Everyone knows the signs of a troubled teen, right? Losing interest in school, poor grades, hanging around with the wrong crowd. Loud music. Drugs maybe, or drinking. Acid-rocker T-shirts.

We believe so strongly in the face value of things. What would there have been about me, with my honor-roll standing and my respectable cross-section of friends and the wordplays I tossed into our English-class vocabulary quizzes, to have suggested any cause for alarm?

24

I had a boyfriend, a most coveted item in boarding school, who was one among our theater crowd. He was the first boyfriend with whom I actually went on a date. We ate at Pizza Hut. We saw movies and shared popcorn. We made out in his fifteen-year-old Chevrolet with the passenger door that never opened, Fleetwood Mac playing on the eight-track.