The End of the World as We Know It (14 page)

My left arm was full. My left arm was hamburger. I started on my right arm, the thrill of fresh skin. My arms were a crochet of wounds. A spiderweb of blood. My apartment had blood on the furniture, on the walls, on the door handles. I hadn't cleaned it in weeks. Mice sniffed at the blood on the floor. Blood doesn't come out of wood. Blood leaves dark brown stains.

It went on for two months. The thrill of the cutting never ceased for a second. The pain was excruciating during the day. The secrecy was my deepest joy.

When you're lying on your sofa cutting open your own skin, life becomes very vivid. There is a vivacity you've never known before. And you'll never know it again.

A friend later told me that, all that summer, after the many dinners when I would rush into the night, she thought I was an addict. I was.

My friends meant nothing to me. Work meant less than nothing. The dozens of shirts I threw away, my beautiful cotton and
linen shirts, meant nothing. Eloquence and sex and the pleasures of the world were hollow. The feel of hot blood on the warm late summer nights, alone in my derelict apartment, was all there was.

In September, I was called for jury duty, to start the fourth of October. I could see the irony of being put in a position to sit in judgment on others.

Then an extraordinary thing happened. I was sitting on my sofa, red blood draining into the cheap red cotton upholstery, and the phone rang. It was an old friend, a woman called Doc who lived in Lexington, Kentucky. She actually was a doctor. She was a psychotherapist. She treated rich Kentucky neurotics.

She asked me how I was and what was going on. I told her. I told her in detail. I was thickly bandaged on both arms from the wrist to the elbow. The telephone was spackled with blood. My two dear lovers were long gone.

I was cutting myself, I told her. I couldn't stop. The blood seeped through the bandages, no matter how careful I was. The blood clotted into the gauze.

“Honey,” she said. “This does not sound good. This does not sound
good
, sugar. At all.”

She told me I needed to be in a hospital. She told me I needed to come to the South to be in a hospital, that Yankees had no conception of the deep sorrows that Southerners felt, and couldn't do a thing about it.

“Leave it to me,” she said. “Just get here. I'll get you into the hospital here. They'll take good care of you. I know the head psychiatrist. He's not one of these bullshit guys.” Her slow
whiskey drawl was as warm and comforting as the laying on of hands.

“And don't hurt yourself anymore. It's not getting you anywhere.”

I hung up the phone and cut my right arm just below the elbow.

The next day I got an airplane ticket. I kept insisting on the phone that I wanted a direct flight, not knowing a direct flight was different from a nonstop flight. And I realized something. I didn't know what people wore in mental hospitals, but I imagined that merino wool double-pleated knife-creased trousers didn't figure highly. So I went to Bloomingdale's and bought sweatshirts and khakis and T-shirts, as though I were packing to go to camp.

I picked up my ticket. I would have to change in Pittsburgh.

I went to the hospital to say good-bye. I tried to explain I was going away. I tried to explain it wasn't his fault, although he had no idea what I was talking about. I said that the machinery had been set in motion long before he drove to Connecticut, but I don't think he heard any of it.

His doctor stopped in for a visit, to see how the latest electroshock had gone. I was sitting in a hospital armchair, and there was blood dripping from the ends of my fingers onto the linoleum floor. Nobody noticed.

On the morning of October 4, I went into work early and went in to see my boss, a man who smoked cigars at seven-forty-five in the morning.

“I know I'm supposed to go to jury duty this morning. I just . . . I just wanted you to know I'm not going. I'm going away,
probably for three weeks. I'm going to a mental hospital. I don't feel well.” It was probably the only piece of bad news he ever took with grace.

In the airport in Pittsburgh, as I walked the long way from gate to gate, blood ran down my arm and dripped onto my suitcase. Nobody noticed.

Doc and I sat over drinks that night, at her house. I showed her my arms. We talked quietly. I slept in her guest room and the next morning, she dropped me at the door of the hospital.

I stared at the doors. I was homesick already. I was homesick for the blade and the booze. I was homesick for the men in the tiny dark rooms who always said thank you, who always said something nice. About my body. About my greedy kiss. I was, most of all, homesick for the blood in the golden light from the street lamps, and the pain that shot up my arm like the venom from a snake.

My insurance paid for most of the stay. It had never occurred to me that I would have to carry some of the cost. I paid for the rest with a credit card. A Visa card. It took years to pay it off.

I had my razor blade in my pocket, but I knew. It was over. Just like that, with one phone call, it had ended, one touch to the heart, one voice that got through the haze, one word that saved my life. It was over.

I was a curiosity in the hospital. I had come all the way from New York. The mental hospital was in a town that had the same name as the town I grew up in. The irony didn't escape me.

My brother flew up from Atlanta to spend the day with me. Sweet. The psychiatrist allowed me to go out to lunch. The world was very loud. I told my brother the doctor thought it
would be good for me to discuss in detail what had happened to me. My brother said he'd rather not know. It was kind of him to come, anyway.

My mother called. You don't just disappear for three weeks. I stood at a pay phone in the hall. “What did you do?” she asked, accusing me as though I had committed a felony and was serving time for, say, assault with a deadly weapon. Which, of course, I was, sort of. It was the only time I ever cried in the hospital.

I stayed for three weeks. After that my doctor thought it was best to confront my life in my own context. I was being sent home, high on Elavil.

When I left, the kind doctor told me to stay away from Tanqueray, and to stay away from my apartment. I didn't do either one.

The scars were thick and purple, but over the years, they've turned thin and white. You can barely see them, except in the summer when I get tan, and then they rise to the surface, like lace on my skin. Nobody in my family has ever asked me why I went to the loony bin. My niece, once, looking at the still-purple scars, asked me with shock what had happened to me. I told her I'd had an accident; I'd gone through a plateglass window. With both arms. Nobody ever asked again.

I still carry a razor blade with me at all times. It is always in my pocket. Two weeks ago, I cut myself again, like a drunk taking a drink after twenty years.

It hurt like hell.

The thing about Butter Day was you had to bring your own cream. Every child brought a pint of heavy cream on Butter Day and we couldn't have been happier about it.

In kindergarten and first grade, we went to a little one-woman private school and we had many little festivals and ceremonies to break up the monotony of learning how to read and add and subtract, but Butter Day just about took the cake. It didn't come on any particular day—it came when Mrs. Lack-man wanted it to come—and so it was more sort of like the first snowfall or a hurricane than, say, Washington's Birthday, which we elaborately celebrated. She would just, one day, tell us all to tell our mothers that we needed to bring a pint of cream, heavy whipping cream, the next day, and we would know it was on.

Of course, as kindergartners, we had no idea what was coming, but, by the time we were in first grade, when we heard the word
cream
, we knew. We just knew, because we'd already been through it once, unlike the babies in the other room.

The kindergartners sat on little chairs in one room, and the first graders sat at long tables in the other room, and Mrs. Lack-man was presumably supposed to wander back and forth, supervising both classes, but I got the feeling she didn't really like the first graders anymore, so they were left largely unattended.

When I was in kindergarten, one of my classmates was a little red-haired boy who was the son of the farmer who lived next door to us, although that's sort of misleading since there were ten acres separating our doors, but they were our closest neighbors. Every morning, he would stand at the end of their driveway and my father would pick him up and take us to school.

He was a funny kid, charming actually. But he had problems right away. Serious problems.

When you needed to go to the bathroom at Mrs. Lackman's, you were supposed to hold up one finger if you had to pee, and two fingers if you had to do the Unspeakable Other. It was maybe the second day of school when he had to go to the bathroom, at eleven o'clock, and he held up one finger, but Mrs. Lackman avoided him and went on going over the alphabet. He violently waved his finger, but there was no way he was going to get her attention. She was moving through the alphabet like a freight train, and he just wasn't part of her plan at all.

He peed in his pants. He peed in his pants and it dribbled on the floor, making noise, a wet noise like a tiny waterfall or a gutter spout after the rain has stopped, and Mrs. Lackman paused and looked at him and said to the whole class, “Now, class, look at what a little baby we have! Such a baby he can't even control himself. Don't we just hate babies? Aren't we glad to be grown up enough that we can follow the rules and not be babies anymore?” It went on for a long time, but it was just more of the same, Mrs. Lackman walking up to him and looking at the small puddle on the hardwood floor.

“Hey, first graders! Come look at what a little baby we have today,” and him just sitting there in his wet shorts, his face as red as his hair.

The next day, she'd brought in a high chair and put it in the middle of the room. She made him sit in it because he was such a baby and babies needed to be put in high chairs. At exactly eleven o'clock, he held up one finger while she was making us do our counting or something, and again she completely avoided him and, once again, he peed on the floor. Except now he was in a high chair and the pee had farther to fall so the sound was even louder.

Every day it was the same. Every day she viciously infantilized him, every day she refused to let him go to the bathroom, and every day he peed on the floor.

It was no wonder he didn't come back for first grade. It was no wonder he became a major felon later in life, doing hard time in the state pen for dealing hard drugs to crystal meth–loving rednecks. Who wouldn't turn into a sociopathic drug-dealing hard timer after going through that at the age of five? But he was lucky. His wife stuck by him and he got over it and now he has a successful excavation business.

My sister, when she was in the first grade, in the unsupervised first grade, suddenly felt one day that she had to throw up. She panicked. She didn't want to throw up on her long table, but she didn't know how many fingers to hold up.

She went to the door of the kindergarten class and held up one finger but Mrs. Lackman shook her head. She went back to her table, but she was feeling worse, and so she went to the door and held up two fingers with what she hoped was a sense of urgency, a sense of immediate need. Mrs. Lackman wouldn't even look at her.

She went back to her table, but she was getting closer and
closer to vomiting, so she got up and ran to the door and held up an unprecedented three fingers, not knowing what else to do, a sure signal of imminent danger, she felt, but Mrs. Lackman looked at her like she was a visitor from Mars or somewhere so she went back to her table and threw up all over Johnny Sheridan, the one boy in her class she thought was really, really cute. Their relationship never recovered to the degree she had hoped.

Later in life, of course, that sort of thing can be gotten over. There is a time you can throw up on your date and get away with it. You can even laugh about it. I did it once in Baltimore after an opening at the Baltimore Museum of Art and we went on with our romance uninterrupted. And she was my French teacher. But this is not the way it is in the first grade.

So, although we were carefully schooled from day one in the one- and two-finger principle, it almost never applied to daily life or even to urgent needs. Mrs. Lackman ran a tight ship. Apparently the natural functions of five- and six-year-olds played no part in it.

My brother had already been through Mrs. Lackman's, where he distinguished himself with his total brilliance. When he came home from his first day there, he told my mother he wasn't going to school anymore. She asked him why and he said he didn't want to.

She said, “But think of everything you'll miss. You'll learn to add and subtract, you'll learn to read so we won't have to read to you anymore and—”

“I already learned to read,” he said sullenly.

“When?” my mother asked.

“I learned to read today.” And then he sat down and proceeded to read anything she threw at him, Dick and Jane books, the
Richmond Times-Dispatch
sports section, anything. He was a sly one.

He was the kind of person who wouldn't show the slightest interest in a thing until he had mentally perfected it and had only to begin doing it for real. Take talking, for instance. He didn't talk until he was three. It drove my parents wild. They kept trying to make him say
wa-wa
like Helen Keller, to say
dada
or
wee-wee
, but he just refused to utter a sound, not a peep. They took him to a doctor. They had his hearing tested. They did everything parents could do with a child who went through every day mute as a rock.

Then one day he was sitting down in his high chair or whatever having some soup for lunch, and he looked at my mother and he said to her, clear as a bell, “I want a cracker.” So when he said he'd learned to read in one day, what he meant was that he'd figured it out a long time ago and he'd been reading things over in his mind, practicing on the sly when people thought they were reading to him. He didn't mean he'd learned to read. He meant he was
ready
to read, he felt the need to go public with the reading thing, the way he'd only spoken because he wanted a cracker to go with his soup. He'd been
able
to talk all along.