Carrie Pilby (3 page)

The key to all religions is simply believing whatever they tell you and not allowing a scintilla of rational doubt to enter your mind. None of us was around 2,000 or 5,700 years ago (or 173.5 years if you're a Mormon—sorry, Mormons) to know what really happened, so people decide whose story to choose, and which steadfast principles to select, based upon such important criteria as what their parents forced them to believe growing up and what other relatives forced them to believe growing up. At least Mormons hold off on baptizing their kids until they're eight, but is an eight-year-old going to be any more resistant than a baby?

I keep watching Tonsure-Head speaking mas des-pac-i-o to the Spanish woman and I wait around to see if he'll try to convert me, too. That wouldn't be so bad, if he can give me good answers to my questions about religion. If he does that, I'll give him a chance. That's a big if.

Suddenly, a strange feeling wells up in me that I get once in a while. It feels hollow and icy, and it's right in my gut. It makes
me want to warm myself up inside. I look at him and wonder if this religion is all he has. Who am I to make fun of it? Maybe it's something he loves. Maybe he's lonely.

Something else makes me sad, but I can't put my finger on it.

Then, the feeling goes away in a few seconds. Good.

I keep waiting for Tonsure-Head to talk to me, but he ignores me. I wonder if he realizes that because he himself is not a minority, he himself would not be one of the people he would have reached out to on the street. How hypocritical.

I give up, take the flyer home, and tape it to the side of my protruding closet. It's got an address for the church on the bottom.

It's an organization, so if I join it, I can fulfill the second goal on Dr. Petrov's list. But if I go to one of their services, my real goal will be to infiltrate this organization and expose it as a cult. I don't want it taking advantage of people. I'll protect the gullible.

 

Several days later, I finally have the pleasure of bringing my top-ten list to Petrov. Even though it's really a top-eight list.

Before I can discuss it, though, Petrov asks me again if I've made any new friends. I tell him that I haven't, but to please him, I mention my conversation with Douglas P. Winters.

“Sounds like he might have been flirting with you,” Petrov says.

“Eh.”

“Are you interested?”

“He seemed a little…sex-obsessed.”

Petrov sits back. “I know you think that most people are sex-obsessed,” he says. “While I have no doubt that it's true in many cases, I would gather that if you were older, and if you had more sexual experience, it wouldn't seem as glaring.”

Of course. Petrov thinks I'm a virgin. Everyone assumes that if you think the world is sex-obsessed, you must not have had sex. As if sex is so all-consuming that once you have it, you can completely justify the fact that it's scrolling through everyone's brain twenty-four hours a day. Plus, people think that, in general, if you express perfectly logical criticisms of the way society works, it means you're “uptight” and “need to get laid.” As if sex is a cure for everything.

I haven't ever told Petrov about my experiences with Professor Harrison.

I guess it's true that, because of confidentiality rules, he wouldn't be allowed to tell my father, which is a plus. But I don't see why he has to know anyway. At least, not yet. I spent years in college not telling people about Harrison. I'm good at it.

“How do you know I'm not sexually experienced?” I ask.

“Are you?”

“I don't see how it's relevant to a discussion of whether other people are sex-obsessed. I can have opinions regardless of whether I, myself, have had sex.”

“True,” he says. “But it's hard to comment on what it's like to take a plane if you've never been off the ground. However, if you have had sexual experiences, and you want to discuss them…”

“Nope,” I say. I decide that I'd better change the subject quickly—this time, anyway. “I thought about joining an organization last week.”

“Really?” he says, interested.

I tell him about Tonsure-Head and the church, and how it might be a cult that should be exposed.

Petrov says, “You would have taken the flyer anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Even if you didn't want to expose the church as a cult, you would have taken the religious flyer anyway. You would have
taken the flyer for the same reason you keep coming to see me even though you say you don't need to.”

Oh, won't he please enlighten me about my very own secret motivations for every single thing I do, which I'm sure he has a brilliant theory to explain? “I come here to get my father's money's worth,” I say.

Petrov says, “You come here to talk to me. I'm paid to listen. Maybe you're insecure and think other people won't listen to you. But I do. If you really wanted to stop coming here, you'd refuse to. But you come, just like you took the religious flyer. What are you doing?”

“Looking at your clock,” I say. “I never noticed it before. You have it strategically placed up on the shelf behind my head, so that when you look at it to see how much time we have left, I'll think you're looking at me. And it's a big clock. I guess you wouldn't want people to go a second over.”

“It's not entirely selfish,” he says. “If a patient runs over the time, it backs up all my other patients.”

“I always kind of wondered what you do if someone's in the middle of a big important story about himself, and his time's up,” I say. “Do you suddenly say, ‘Hold that suicidal thought until next week?'”

“I try not to get into anything too heavy in the last few minutes of the session.”

“Oh, well, that's cheating. If only forty minutes of a forty-five-minute session can be dedicated to serious talk, you're gypping people out of five minutes.”

“Carrie,” Petrov says, “we're here to talk about you.”

“Well, if I talk about you, it brings me out of my shell.”

“Ah,” Petrov says. “It does?”

“No. I just figured you'd like that. Some self-analysis. Deflecting things to you helps me. I thought you'd like the hypothesis.”

Petrov sighs. “Did you bring your list of ten things you love?”

I pull it out and hand it to him. “Yes, but it's a top-eight list.”

“You always have to be the contrarian.”

“No, I don't. Ha ha. Get it?”

1. Cherry soda
   
2. Street sounds
   
3. My bed
   
4. The green-blue hue of an indoor pool
   
5. Starfish
   
6. The Victorians
   
7. Rainbow sprinkles
   
8. Rain during the day (makes it easier to sleep)
   

“Tell me,” he says. “When's the last time you had a cherry soda?”

I think. “Not since I was little.”

“What about rainbow sprinkles? When was the last time you had them?”

By the shore, maybe. Dad and I used to get vanilla soft-serve ice cream in those airy flat-bottomed beige cones. “Not since I was a kid, again.”

“But they're in your top eight favorite things.”

“I guess I just haven't made them a priority.”

“I think,” Petrov says, “that part of the reason for your depression is that you deny yourself things, or you don't seek out the things that make you truly happy. Not everything has to have analysis behind it. Why not just enjoy yourself without thinking sometimes?”

“So when did we decide that I was depressed? Neither of us has ever mentioned the term. We've talked about how the world is full of hypocrites, how a lot of people aren't that smart or don't talk about things that actually matter, and last time, you
said you understood that I was younger than everyone else in college and that might have made things harder for me. But now all of a sudden I'm depressed. Did your friend Eli Lilly just ship you a free eight ball of Prozac?”

He looks beaten. “I shouldn't be so quick to label. But I think you'd be happier, and more at peace with the world, if you sought out things you enjoyed. Sitting home all the time can't make you too happy. When you were in school, you moved ahead by taking tests and getting good grades, and you certainly could feel yourself progressing that way. But now that you're out of school, I think you're in a bit of a holding pattern. If you did more activities related to things you loved, you probably would meet like-minded people and move forward with meaningful friendships and relationships. That's why I thought it would be good for you to join an organization.”

“Should I go find a cherry-soda club?”

“Let's add a Part B to the first part of your assignment,” Petrov says. “The first part was to write a list of things you love. Now, for 1B, go out and do some of them. Get an ice-cream cone with rainbow sprinkles. Go to the store and buy cherry soda.”

“Okay.”

He looks at my list again.

“You also mention sleep, and you mention rain.”

“Sleeping in the rain,” I say. “I'll get on that right away.”

“Good.”

He is so oblivious.

 

When I get home, my hand immediately shoots into my mailbox, which I love almost as much as my bed. I subscribe to fourteen magazines, and just seeing the cavalcade of colors in my box fills me with joy. But what's more, each day brings the potential for new surprises. This is the kind of hope that keeps
me going when nothing else does. Maybe the MacArthur Genius Grant notice will come in the mail.

But today there's only something white and thin inside.

It's an actual letter—rare these days, in our e-mail driven society. It's in a fine white wove envelope, and my name and address are typed neatly in 10 pica that looks like it came from a typewriter and not a printer. It's from the dean's office at Harvard. I've finally gotten him to respond to my request, the rogue.

Bull. That's what I had thought before I'd arrived there. I thought everyone would be a genius and wouldn't look at me funny when, for example, I wanted to talk about philosophy or current events at a party or in the dorm lounge. Some of the kids were okay, but some would go “whoosh” and cut their hands above their heads when I said something they deemed too intellectual. I also met people whose test scores were much lower than mine, and some of them had rich alumni parents or played lacrosse or dived really well and that's probably why they got in. There were also plenty of beer-chuggers and bubbleheads and people who talked nonstop about sex, which one would think is odd for a school that everyone had to study like hell to get into, but I guess that's why their gonads exploded as soon as they got
fifty miles from home. I thought that by having an honors program, the students at Harvard who were actually smart could be together.

On rare occasions, I did encounter smart people in school. Once in a while, I'd end up at a mixer with the other prodigies, and we'd discuss the difficulties of being fifteen in a sea of twenty-one-year-old drinkers and Lotharios. I felt a kinship with the others, but they soon grew to love seeing how much they could get away with, while I didn't.

That was around the point that Professor Harrison began to express a more-than-academic interest in me.

I fold Dean Nymczik's letter and balance it in the alley between my computer and printer. Dean Nymczik doesn't understand. Few people do. There are a great many people who believe themselves to be smart—in fact, I'd be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't—but none of them are smart enough.

And this is my father's Big Lie.

The exact lie—let me see if I can remember it correctly—was this: “When you get to college, you'll meet people who are just like you.”

He'd say, junior high is tough, high school is tough. In college, they'll be just like you.

Just wait until you get to college.

They were not. And they are not. I went through four years, and now I'm out. On the rare occasions I meet people now, I find that they consider snowboarding a cultural activity and that their main reading material is TV Guide. And I don't know how to respond to that.

So mostly I stay in bed.

There's a good reason that I don't have any friends in the city. Most people's friends are people they met at college. And most people they became friends with at college are people they met freshman year. And most people they met freshman year, they met during the first few weeks of school.

I did start off with a few friends freshman year. My roommate, Janie, was my friend. But she dropped out of school in November. Another friend I had was a girl named Nora, who was a prodigy, like me. The week before the start of classes, they kept having receptions for prodigies. At one of them, I was standing by the window, staring outside and holding a cup of 7UP, and Nora came over to me. “You look bored,” she said. “Do you know anyone here? I don't.” Then she dragged me over to other groups of people and we stood next to them until we were included in the conversation. It took Nora only a little while to be the leader of the conversation. Unfortunately, the
fact that she was so friendly meant she quickly became friendly with a lot of people. She started organizing all kinds of things, especially during the first few weeks of school. She'd get an idea for something to do, like walk around Boston or head to a movie, and she'd e-mail a bunch of people including me, and we'd meet up and go. But people like that never stay friends with me for long. They're so outgoing and loud and popular that they get swept away by people who are more like them. I shrink in that kind of competition. Nora contacted me less and less. I think she also got a boyfriend. I saw them on campus together. At first, even after we stopped doing things together, when Nora and I would pass each other around Harvard, we would wave to each other. After a while, we just nodded. After another while, we started pretending we didn't see each other. It's weird how once you dip below a certain level with people, you're no longer above the say-hello threshold and you have to pretend not to see them so that it's not awkward. Maybe it happens because it starts getting too risky. You're not sure they'll say hello back, and if they don't, you'll feel embarrassed. I remember that it was also that way with certain professors on campus. Students in a huge lecture class would definitely know the professor, but we wouldn't know if they really knew us. So saying hi to them on campus would put pressure on them to figure out who we were, but if they did recognize us and we didn't say anything, they might think we were being snobby. It was a real quandary.

When I think back to Harvard, I get mixed feelings. I remember the beginning of each semester, when the air would turn cool and I'd look out my dorm window at all the students strolling in their hooded crimson sweatshirts through the fallen leaves. I'd get excited because there were new classes and new possibilities to come. But my hopes would fade quickly as the semester wore on. No one would talk to me in class. I'd eat alone in the dining hall, and I'd spend Saturday night looking
out my window at everyone else, just like the previous semester. And it wasn't that I wanted to be doing what they were doing, but that I wanted them to be doing things with me that I wanted to be doing. And what hurt most was that I was on a campus that students around the world would give their eyeteeth to be at, so I should have been absolutely thrilled, but instead, it seemed like it was everyone else's place except mine.

And now I'm in New York, in a hip part of town that people around the world would give their eyeteeth to live in, and I feel exactly the same way.

 

The only period during which things were different was when I was with Professor Harrison.

I don't remember thinking much of anything the first time I saw him. It was English 203, The Modernists, second semester of sophomore year. There were twelve of us in the class; they'd broken it into two sections. The other section just got a grad student, and mine got a full professor. We were lucky.

Harrison was average height, about forty years old, with brown hair that was starting to gray. He had a tendency to wear soft V-neck sweaters. He told us the first day that he didn't want this to be a typical English class where we just read the novels and competed to give the best deconstruction. He said that, once or twice, he'd ask us to write our own modernist pieces. I was a little nervous because I've never been as good at writing as I am at other things. Most people like writing to be intimate and revealing, and I resent having to tell the most private details of my life in order to interest people. Plus, writing isn't as exact as other subjects. In high school, I would sometimes start a creative writing assignment and feel like I was skating into the middle of the ice with nothing to hold on to. My best subjects were math and science. I was also pretty good in philosophy and literature, but not at writing my own literature.

Harrison went around the room and asked each of us to tell where we were from and what our major was. I found myself wishing that most professors did this, since people in many of my classes didn't really get to know each other. This was my chance. I said that I loved reading and observing human behavior. When I finished, Harrison smiled, nodded and said, “Welcome to the class.”

We left that day with a writing assignment: to introduce ourselves and then talk about something we disliked about our personalities. Harrison said that plumbing one's own flaws was a characteristic of modernist writing. I wanted to impress Harrison right away, so I had to do this properly. In my dorm room, I lay on my stomach on my bed, cooled by the chilly air that blew in through a crack in the window. I agonized for an hour over the opening line.

Eventually, I decided on, “Of the three grades I skipped, second grade seemed the most abrupt.”

There. I'd put the most salient thing about me first. And it was a little revealing. Surely he'd like that.

I added, “Suddenly, I'd gone from pencil to pen, from printing to script, from oral show-and-tells to oral reports, from running from boys to watching classmates chase them. Skipping fourth and eighth grades was a breeze.”

Yes, this was good.

I told some more about myself, but finding something I disliked about myself was hard. I thought of the first quasi-modernist book I'd read, Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, when I was nine and my French lesson had been canceled. The protagonist had to, it seemed, try and say every extreme thing that came into his head to see what happened. I didn't have a similar quirk. I thought some more. What could I write about that would make a good modernist essay? I could invent something. Sometimes I feel…like a cockroach. Sometimes I feel like
a swing set. Nah. I decided to write about being too studious. It wasn't very intellectual, and it wouldn't incorporate much symbolism. But what the heck. It was just one assignment.

During the second and third classes, Harrison didn't mention the essays we'd turned in. We dissected various modernist authors. One kid in the class, Brian Buchman, was the biggest kiss-up I'd met yet, and at Harvard that was quite an achievement. If he'd been sincere, I would have admired him, but he had a tone that was clearly false. Half of what he was spewing was stuff I'd learned in high school, but he made it seem like he was discovering nuclear energy.

When the third class ended, and everyone was shoving their books into their natty black backpacks, Harrison called me up to his desk.

I stood there while Brian Buchman said goodbye.

“Do you have a few minutes, or are you in a rush?” Harrison asked me. “Do you have time to come to my office?”

“I have time.”

We walked down the hall to a pentagonal cul-de-sac with a wooden door in each wall. A few of the doors had yellowing newspaper cartoons taped to them. Harrison's door was blank except for his name. We entered his office and he sat at a rusty metal desk. He had a few newspaper clippings taped to the painted-white cinderblock walls, and there were papers piled high on a broken chair. I'd heard before that academics got no respect, and the size of Harrison's office proved it. He was a well-regarded professor, and this was what he had to work in.

Harrison leaned back. “I found your introduction very interesting.”

“Thanks.” I noticed there were no photographs on his desk.

“You said in your essay that you study too hard.”

“Well, maybe there isn't such a thing,” I said, trying not to be nervous. “But some people say that.”

I remember noticing that he had a maroon sweater on and suddenly thinking it looked good on him. He had slightly wavy hair and intense brown eyes. He said, “Starting college at fifteen doesn't sound easy.”

“Well, it's not so hard academically. But…”

“Socially, it could be hard.”

I nodded.

“You sure you don't have somewhere to be right now?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. This is my last class on Thursdays.”

“You the oldest in your family?”

“I'm an only child.”

“Mmm,” he said. “I had a younger brother. It created some tension when I got so much more attention in school.”

“Did you skip grades?”

“I only skipped one grade. But I found it hard. For you to have skipped three…that must have been quite an adjustment.”

I nodded again.

“How are you finding school?”

He looked straight at me. I hadn't found anyone that interested in me since back when I had interviewed for college in the first place.

We ended up talking for more than an hour. We got to things I hadn't told anyone. I told him about sitting in my dorm room freshman year, after my roommate had moved out, feeling miserable even though everyone kept saying how lucky I was to have the room to myself; I talked about the earliest smart things I'd said to adults that had made their eyes widen, like going up to a woman in the library when I was seven and pointing to her copy of Call It Sleep and saying, “That's a good book.” I talked about figuring out how to play “Für Elise” on the inside of the piano when I was five. I stopped several times for fear I was boring him, but he kept urging me on. At times, he would reciprocate, telling a story about something smart he'd done as a kid, or
a time he had felt out of place, and I almost felt as if he thought he needed to impress me. That was strange.

“One day, the boy who lived next door to me was reading a comic book on his stoop,” Harrison said. “He wouldn't show it to me, so I stood in front of him and started reading it upside down, out loud. He was amazed, even though it's not so hard to read upside down. He thought I was a genius. Then he ran and got a bunch of his friends, who kept giving me things to read upside down. They made me feel like some sort of superhero.”

I told him about something that had happened with a neighbor of mine.

“When I was in first grade,” I said, “this sixth-grader who lived on my block came up to me on the playground at school and told me he was doing a report and he needed an example of a case in which the First Amendment wouldn't apply. All the kids used to ask me for help, even the ones who picked on me. I told him that yelling ‘Fire' in a crowded theater was an example, even though we have the First Amendment right to free speech. Then, the next day, in the lunchroom, he ran up to me all out of breath and said, ‘Carrie! Carrie! You'll never believe this! I looked in the encyclopedia, and they took your example!'”

Professor Harrison threw his head back and laughed. I realized then that the story was funny, and I laughed, too. He laughed some more, and that made me laugh more. The more we laughed, the more it seemed fun just to laugh, even after the joke had gotten stale. It was a good feeling that something that I'd merely considered strange in my childhood was now amusing, an experience to look back at and laugh about with someone. There were plenty of bad things that had happened—oh, if only I could recycle them into amusing stories! And Professor Harrison would understand.

But our time had to come to an end. Harrison looked at me
and said, “Well, I know you have to move on.” I said, “Not really, but…” but he just laughed and got up. He shook my hand. His hand felt warm. I said I appreciated the discussion, and then I left.

As I walked back, my mind raced a million ways.

He was smart—no, brilliant.

He liked to hear me talk.

He encouraged me to talk more, and always had a response.

I felt more excited about the conversation than I had from any in years. But I also knew that this was probably the last time we'd spend that kind of time together—probably he was having those sorts of meetings with every student to discuss their essays, and probably they were all as enchanted as I was. And just like with my outgoing friend freshman year, I'd quickly move out of Harrison's scope, overshadowed by people who were louder and more “fun.” Besides, surely, Harrison already had a throng of people outside of class that he belonged to. Former students, relatives, colleagues. He was great. How could people not swarm around him?

There was still relatively little I knew of him, but what I knew was terrific. I felt like I wanted to back him into a corner and quiz him for hours. And of course, I also wanted him to ask more things about me. I had been saving things up for years to tell someone who was interested, who cared.

Harrison hadn't made fun of one thing I'd told him. He hadn't said “whoosh.” He hadn't barked “SAT word!” when I'd used a big word. He'd agreed with what I'd said and sometimes built on it. The most amazing discovery in the world is someone who understands what you're about without your having to go through your entire life history to explain it.

But my time was over.

During the next class, my feelings were confirmed. I got no wink or knowing smile from Harrison. He didn't single me out
in any way. I was disappointed. I still thought I should mean more to him. Hadn't we shared secrets? Weren't we friends now, whereas everyone else was just a student to him? He had told me about feeling alienated and lonely as a boy. Were those things you told everyone? Had he told everyone?