Skin Game: A Memoir (17 page)

And so, with both of us smiling at each other and thinking to ourselves,
This is a serious mistake,
we vowed our lifelong devotion in a lovely little wedding on a perfect August day.

“Get closer to each other,” complained Howie the photographer as we posed for the postceremony pictures. “You’re supposed to be in love.”

*   *   *

Three years later, a judge of the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond signed off on our divorce.

In the interim, we’d made a game go of it, but adulthood hadn’t proved to be anything like what we’d been, all our lives, imagining it would. We expected, I suppose, fascinating careers, and exquisite, architecturally dynamic apartments, and dinner parties with intriguing friends—life like one of those wine commercials, with delighted laughter and the warm glow of candlelight and eager conversation carried on as you lounge casually on the arm of your shabby-chic sofa. Not jobs you feel half-ashamed to admit to and spaghetti for dinner every night in front of the TV in your nondescript suburban apartment complex and wondering if everything you could ever look forward to had already happened.

We spent most of our marriage ricocheting from crisis to crisis—of identity or career or goals or ambitions. Should we go to graduate school? What kind of graduate school? Should we be lawyers? Psychologists? Realtors? Teachers? Should we stay in our jobs? Change jobs? Move? Stay put? Stay married? Get a divorce? Should we change our sexual orientation? Our furniture? Our hairstyles? The cat box? Should we take up running? Unitarianism? Computer science? Should we write? Would we write? What would we write? There was no center that would hold, no true north to keep us from drifting in endless, disoriented circles, not a thing either of us could point to and say with confidence,
This is an absolute.

We took grown-up jobs, office jobs, the kind of jobs we thought reasonable and responsible adults with education loans to pay off should take. We were too gifted in our capacity to imagine in vivid detail the worst potential consequences of risk to consider any other option. No ambling around Europe with a dollar in our pockets. No coffee-shop jobs and writing poetry in the mornings. I worked in insurance claims. He worked in commercial banking. We prided ourselves on how responsible we were. We wore responsibility like a hair shirt.

I had a nightmare once, when I was very young, at the culmination of which I stood smiling, said, “Yes sir,” with agreeable resignation, and was promptly run over by a truck. That was my future ex-husband and me, putting on our business suits every morning, reporting to our respective offices, frozen smiles on our faces and despair icing our hearts, looking into a future that was nothing but another and another trip to the Safeway and
Santa Barbara
recorded on the VCR, and jobs that drove us nearly suicidal with boredom, and plodding unhappily around the mall every weekend asking,
Is this all there is?

Our lives cried out for the geographical solution. Run away. Give up. Start again. But we stayed on the bus of our obligations, and another week passed, and another week passed in a kind of stunned torpor, and in this manner eventually three years passed, until at last we realized that we were no longer buoying each other up but rather drowning together. In the autumn following our third anniversary we got a nice, amicable divorce.

I ought to have felt at
least
a sense of failure at the dissolution of my marriage, but it all seemed so removed from me, just like the wedding we’d started with. It wasn’t really my life, anyway. All I remember is relief that no more effort would be expected of me in this regard.

I was disentangling myself piece by piece, severing my obligations. I wanted less and less to be asked of me. You sometimes hear stories of people who fall into icy lakes and survive drowning because their metabolisms slow to the barest possible level of functioning. That’s what I did with my life, a kind of icing down to the survivable minimum.

Part Three

29

Was it really that life was worse—that
I
was worse—than ever before, or was it just that now I had nothing left to distract me? For as long as I could remember, I’d relied upon school to provide the rhythm and the structure and the meaning to life. Your marks defined your value. School exercised your mind, distracting it from itself. The steady progression upward from elementary to middle to high school to college fostered the comforting notion that life was an evenly spaced series of ascensions.

Without school, even time itself had come unstrung, robbed of its structure. Wasn’t it meant to run in 4/4 time, with a rest on the fourth note of summer? And wasn’t autumn meant to be every year’s beginning, a clean slate upon which to write your new self, swagged out in your back-to-school wardrobe still vaguely perfumed with the department store’s essence? In school, you could continue to believe that no matter how badly last year had gone, this year might be an opportunity for everything to go differently, and on that belief had depended the optimism that it remained worth seeing what the future might hold.

Now in this disappointing adult life—a life I’d been scammed into looking forward to as the culmination, not the sorry purgatorial aftermath, of all those school years—there was no future, no past. Time just kept lurching along in a dreary, monotonous sameness of day and month and year. Like living in a whiteout.

Now, I spent my hours at work stunned, like someone beaten to the point of immobility, and rushed out the door at the end of the day only to spend the evening in solitude, listening to my mind race around in a random, shrieking, undistractable chaos.

I was driving myself crazy.

At twenty-five, I’d spent over half my life being—what? Depressed? Anxious? Muddled? Was there a name, even, for a chronic, restless uneasiness punctuated by suffocating intrusions of despair?

By now, I couldn’t remember ever having felt any other way. I wasn’t certain that I ever had felt any other way. It was almost impossible to imagine that there might
be
any other way to feel.

A creeping uneasiness, like kudzu, had completely overgrown my mind. “Free-range anxiety,” I called it, and with neither apparent cause nor resolution it simply adapted itself to the circumstances at hand, worrying at every moment of my day like a penitent fingering a rosary.

I had become like some parlor game, a prodigy of dread; give me the topic and I’d find the worry in it. I worried about global warming, and about the short-tempered customer who’d cursed me that morning, about whether the roof would leak in the next rainstorm, and whether I’d worked out long enough to be entitled to eat dinner, and whether the cats were overdue at the vet’s, and how long it had been since my car had its last oil change, and why call-in radio shows seemed so full of hate, and what the consequences might be for my body, the environment, and the future of humankind if instead of making dinner I just composed a salad in a nonrecyclable plastic container at the local grocery-store salad bar.

I had become obsessively preoccupied in particular with this disturbing interconnectivity of things, the way the most insignificant of decisions might have ramifications you could never know about when you made them. You stop for gas at the 7-Eleven and thereby miss getting hit by a car that runs the red light in the intersection you would have been crossing if you hadn’t stopped. At the last minute you decide to go to the movie and step into the lobby just as the disgruntled ex-boyfriend of the popcorn girl opens fire with his semiautomatic.

I found it paralyzingly difficult to make even the simplest decisions. So much hung in the balance, so many complicated parameters needed to be taken into consideration, yet always there was too little information, no way to know what outcomes could result. Life was a terrifying, invisible web of consequences. What mayhem might I unknowingly wreak by saying yes when I could have said no, by going east instead of west?

Some girl, perky and fit in her aerobics gear, would stand beside me at the salad bar, scooping up tuna and pickled beets and shredded carrots without apparent thought and I’d want to scream,
HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?

It was exhausting, enervating to struggle thus with every simple thing, every decision generating a hundred corollary decisions taking me farther and farther away from the original issue. My head wriggled and scurried frantically, like an ant mound in a panic. At home, in the eighty-year-old house whose irresponsible purchase was the last gesture of that ill-advised marriage, I spent hours pacing from window to window, maddeningly restless, paralyzingly indecisive.

I need to go, get away, go somewhere,
I thought.

Where would I go? What would I do?
I thought next. I never could think of the place, the action that suggested it might satisfy this nagging itchiness.

I should sort my laundry,
I’d think. I’d contemplate the tangled, jumbled heap, imagine the effort required to distinguish light from bright from dark from white. Was this blue-and-white-striped shirt a dark or a bright or a white? When does khaki cross the threshold from light to dark? Where in the spectrum do I place a guacamole-green sweater? Each load must be large enough to justify the sacrifice of a few more gallons of the earth’s too-little-valued water. Acknowledging that ultimately there was no such justification, that Americans were piggish in our squandering and polluting of the world’s resources all in the ironic quest for some mythical, Edenic state of “mountain fresh” cleanliness. We washed our clothes too often. We had too many clothes.
I
had too many clothes. Why was I spending any money on clothes that just had to be cleaned, when every dollar spent was another dollar’s worth of time I’d be condemned to labor in insurance?

And so it went. It was too much. It was beyond coping with.

Was this what it was like to go crazy, I wondered? Not a sudden splashing into the ocean of madness, but a creeping by degrees, a slow immersion?

I tried to cut my way out of this quagmire. With no husband to keep watch over my skin, it was easy to flick a line or two into the curve of bicep or thigh. What good did the cuts do me, however? At best, they earned me a few hours’ respite; at worst, no more than a few minutes’.

There are self-mutilators who say with anguished resignation that they fully expect to end up dead within a few years; whatever you are trying to cut yourself free of, eventually you realize that with every cut you buy yourself just that much less time.

I can’t go on,
I thought.

But I did. I always did. Unable to imagine how I might do otherwise, I went on doing what I thought was expected of me. I went through the motions of life. I had one or two friends with whom I managed an occasional movie, and a desultory sort of boyfriend who virtually vanished six days out of the week, reappearing each Saturday so I could make him dinner. At work I played comic relief, making my alleged life the subject of a running patter for my co-workers. My crumbling house, its perpetually unattended renovation projects and dispirited urban environs, my absentee boyfriend and my on-the-spot ex-husband who still dropped by to do his laundry, the car that was always coughing up bizarre and costly mechanical ailments—all these were woven into a farcical narrative at the center of which a character bearing my name fumbled along in chronic ineptitude.

This brisk and bright public self was so damningly successful that for a period of time she was patently being groomed for a managerial position at work, buffed and primed to lead in a business that I loathed down to the last twist of my DNA. Worse yet, I actually tried to live up to this expectation, so as not to disappoint my groomers.

I wanted to give up. Ten times a day I wanted to give up. I craved giving up. I would read, almost longingly, stories of nervous breakdowns and suicides and wonder,
How did they muster the nerve to default on their obligations?
Where would you begin such an abdication?

*   *   *

One Sunday out of an indistinguishable series of Sundays parading before and behind me, I stood in the bathroom with blood dripping from my earlobe. A blank, emotionless face stared back at me from the mirror. She could have been no more than a vaguely familiar stranger, someone you pass on the street who makes you think ever so briefly,
Where have I seen that face before?,
but who, in a moment, you have forgotten. Her eyes were the gray-green of the ocean on a blustering winter day, and they studied me impassively.

How could she be so flat, so affectless?

Wake up!
I demanded of her. I smeared blood across her cheek, her throat. My fingers left smudgy stains on her skin.

I will take this razor to that face, I will hack and slash down to the blood and bone and structure until I find something I can recognize. I will tear away this agreeable Caroline, this fucking responsible Caroline who is never anything but what she thinks is expected of her.

I stung the curve of my cheekbone with a hairline scratch, barely visible.

How much would it take to buy me giving up? How much to get off the bus? With my face in tatters, surely at last I couldn’t be expected to go to work?

In my mind I had constructed a fantasy of place, the refuge for those with the courage to give up. I could hear the squeak of rubber soles on tile, the rattle of gurney wheels, the soothing patter of medicalspeak being traded over my head. Crisp white sheets and crisp white walls and nurses padding crisply down the hallway in their nurse’s sneakers. I could lie there, clean, white, empty.

Only, I knew already what would happen, as inevitable as choosing the slowest-moving line at the grocery store. I’d be plugged in with some roommate—some girl in a religious mania, no doubt. She’d have that dazed, dreamy codeine look of the born-again overdose, and she’d babble on day and night about how Jesus told her the CIA had bugged her toaster oven, so that instead of lying there, suspended in pristine emptiness, I’d be perched cooperatively on the edge of my bed politely nodding. Then they’d haul me before a psychiatrist who would probe for the dark and desperate torments that had driven me to shred my face.