Memoir section 17: "Lost"

[violetcheetah]

I started grad school later in the month. I was taking two classes: reading screenplays in one class and writing one in another. My previous temp job ended in December, and I started a new one just before the term started. I didn't want a job, especially not working with a receptionist who seemed to take a bath in perfume, but I needed money. My first day had been a Friday, and I deliberately didn't think about the office all weekend. I got up Monday, took a shower, got dressed, even put on my shoes. I was ready to go, past the point of no return. If I were going to quit, I wouldn't have gotten up, certainly wouldn't have put on shoes. I was actually in the hall locking the kitchen door before I stopped and thought. If I went into that office, I'd have to shut myself off, put on a mask. I could do that. But I didn't want to. I went back inside and took off my shoes. I was ashamed because it was probably just laziness that stopped me. But I felt something else that made me more uncomfortable: I was proud. I was sure, even while the other voice in my head told me I was lazy and useless, that I'd made the right decision.

I concentrated on school. I'd had a screenplay idea in mind when I signed up for classes, but I ended up working on another idea, embarrassingly autobiographical, about a woman who returns to visit her abusive parents before her wedding, with a fiancé sort of like Chris. But the main character wasn't passive. She made pointed comments to her parents without saying anything outright, she lashed out sarcastically at her fiancé. She was kind of a bitch, and that part of fun to write.

Writing the first section was like being on cocaine and conducting an orchestra. I sat down to just do a scene outline, but I ended up writing a bit of dialogue, and that led to another bit, and that led to an epiphany about the character, something that didn't apply to my own life so now she wasn't surrogate for me, but a different person with her own motivations, and disparate pieces in my head came together faster than I could even type the sentence fragments of the outline, everything fitting into place. I felt like a writer. I felt like I knew what I was doing.

Of course, then it was done, and I crashed. And I'd have to show it to the class, and it would be so awful that they wouldn't even pick it apart, just sit silently trying to come up with something nice to say. I tried to stay inside myself on the way to class, but my mind slipped onto my shoulder anyway. I scraped my knuckles on the rough concrete of the classroom building a couple of times, but that was as shameful as not feeling.

It was worse than I'd thought: The professor had students take roles and read the screenplay sections out loud. I tried to tell myself that everyone's scenes sounded stilted, with the readers having not read over anything in advance. But I only heard the flatness in my own writing.

The praise was effusive, but mixed with criticism, so I knew they weren't just being kind. I should have been relieved, but I still felt flat, my head numb and buzzing and misshapen. I slept that night, though, with no dreams I remembered, and I was meeting Chris for lunch near the lab where he worked.

I'd never been to his office, never been anywhere near there. I had directions, but I got off at a trolley stop that had almost the same name as the one I wanted, and the directions were useless. Nothing was familiar. I could feel my chest rising and falling, but it seemed like I wasn't breathing.

Something clicked on in my brain. I could almost see a map in my mind, but it wasn't quite me looking at it; I was trying to make it out over the shoulder of a man on a movie screen, and it was too far away and not in focus. But he knew what he was doing — I could tell from the set of his shoulders — and I had to trust him. He looked up out of my eyes, saw where we were, nodded confidently, and turned my feet to walk the opposite way up the street. We walked for over 10 minutes, then he turned onto a side street, and I recognized the name on the street sign from my directions. I didn't bother to look at the paper, just let him keep moving me along his game-board map until I was at the front door of Chris's office. Then I was alone. And late.

Chris had said the guard at the front desk never checked for ID, and to just call from the internal phone down the hall. As I walked past the desk toward the phone, the guard called out, "Miss," but I knew I had only enough energy left to call up to let him know I was there, with none to spare to say anything to her, even to look at her. She kept calling, "Miss," walked over to where I was standing; she was two feet away when he answered. I said, monotone, "I'm downstairs, I'll be outside," and hung up. As I walked past her, she said, quiet but not whispering, "What are you, a retard or something?"

I was crying when Chris came outside, but there was no emotion in my voice as I told him. I let him feel my anger for me. He wanted to go back inside right then, threaten her job; I'd never seen him mad. I said, "Can we just go to lunch now?"

My other class was that night, and I went straight there, sitting outside the classroom and organizing my notes. We were giving five-minute presentations in front of the class, and I didn't think or dread as I copied my outline off my laptop screen before the power died. When the professor unlocked the door, I went to sit down where I usually did, rearranging to have a left-handed desk. Doug, who was sitting beside me, got up, saying to another student, "Maybe I'll see what its like sitting in the back for a change." I caught a whiff of something rotting, I knew it wasn't real, but I could smell it coming from my own skin, almost see it rising like heat waves off summer pavement. I didn't think I could turn off any further, but my whole body disappeared.

When it was time for me to get up and give my presentation, I thought, "I can't do this." But the thought was muffled, like my hands were over my mind's ears. It was time for a break anyway, so I suggested that we take the 10 minutes and I could write the outline on the dry-erase board during the break and save time. Really, I thought if something was on the board for me to look at it would make it easier, make it possible. I tried to feel my body again, just a little, but it was spinning, whirling, and I pulled back outside it.

Then the break was over, and I was sitting on the table in the front of the room looking at the dry-erase board with my back to the class, and the professor said something indicating I should start, and I didn't. I just didn't move. I heard him repeat what he had said. I tried closing my eyes to concentrate, tried keeping them open, but the letters on the dry-erase board didn't seem to form words so I closed them again.

I was shaking at some point, realized I was shaking and it was a relief, because I could feel something. The professor said, "Oh no," sighing put-upon I thought, I thought he was mad, and I tried to just unthink it. That became the only thing in my head, concentrating on telling myself that he wasn't mad while being sure he was. I heard his voice, clearly, but I couldn't figure out the words. I could tell he said the same thing a couple of times, then he was standing next to me, standing almost exactly the same place in relation to me as the security guard had been, only this time I was just relieved, so relieved. His hand was on my shoulder and I could tell he was saying, "Why don't we walk out into the hall?" so I did, eyes still closed, his hand on my shoulder guiding me.

We stood in silence for maybe five minutes before I was aware that I was crying, that he was holding my hand and that the dry-erase marker was in my other hand, both in death-grips. I opened my eyes.

Then I just felt sorry for him. He was so lost about what to do, not freaked out or afraid, but helpless and sorry, was there someone he should call. I tried to articulate, to tell him it wasn't worth the fuss, not life-threatening or in need of immediate attention.

"It just happens. It doesn't lead to anything... worse."

"What do you need now?"

"I need to go back inside."

"Are you sure?"

"If I go home now, I'll never come back."

"Well, I'd rather you not. Never come back, I mean."

I let go of his hand and handed him the marker. I took my seat instead of standing at the front of the room, and I didn't speak, not at first. The professor cleared his throat and read off the first line I'd written on the board, and the discussion got underway without me. At some point someone asked for clarification on something, and I replied before I had a chance to freeze. No one who happened upon that class would have realized anything was different that night; there was the usual spirited debate, unexpected tangents, and occasional laughter.

It wasn't until I was home that the shame hit. Not at the spectacle I'd been, but at the kindness I'd extracted, especially from the professor.

"Do you think he minded?" my shrink asked at the next session. "Offering you that kindness?"

"That's not the point. I made him do it."

"Ah, 'manipulated'; we keep coming back to that."

"I don't — I know what you're going to say."

"That manipulation isn't inherently wrong? No, I'll save that for later. What I was actually going to say was, what was it you forced him to do that was so abhorrent?"

I knew the answer, but I couldn't say it.

"He put his hand on your shoulder?" As he said it, probably without thinking, my shrink moved his own hand, just a couple of inches above his knee, just a slight rotation of the wrist, a slight opening of his fingers toward me. With over six feet between us, in an instant my arms went up, my wrists crossed in front of my face, and one knee drew up as my body twisted away to the side.

He was silent as I tried to control my own limbs, bringing down my arms only to have them spring back up as I tried to lower my knee, trying to relax my fists and instead splaying my fingers concavely, a familiar chorea that I knew better than to fight against, and always fought against. "Just breathe," he said. "Just breathe in and hold it for a second." After a long minute, I reached a truce with myself, hugging the raised knee but no longer in motion.

"Violet? Were you afraid I was going to touch you? Or were you afraid I'd pull away in disgust?" I hugged my knee tighter and tried to keep breathing. He didn't need me to answer out loud.