Head Case (11 page)

(Months later, while I am studying writing at CalArts, my mother begins reading about a condition called Asperger's Syndrome. She begs my father to call Dr. Volt and set up a screening. My father calls the receptionist, who puts him straight on the phone with Dr. Volt. After an hour-long conversation with my father, he says, “Don't bother coming in for a formal screening. You've got it.”)

*   *   *

“Do you remember my parents?” my mom asks. I am sitting with her at my parents' kitchen table. Taken off guard by this new line of questioning, I'm unsure of how to proceed.

“Yeah … of course I remember.”

“What do you remember?”

I squirm and shrug and try to answer her question. “They were always very nice to me; I don't know, I was really young when they died.”

“You were twelve.”

“Oh. I guess that's not that young.”

Silence.

“Your mom liked musicals. Grandpa bought me a dollhouse once, and it made me kind of anxious because it cost like a hundred dollars, which to me at the time was like a huge fortune—why are you asking me this now?”

“Amy said I should. She says I have no identity of my own.”

I furrow my brow. Amy is my mom's therapist. She is in her early or midthirties; I remember that her office is decorated with photographs of distant and exotic lands she's visited with her husband. I went to her a couple of times, but we never really clicked the way that she has with my mom, who loves her. Not long after I stopped seeing her, she suggested to Mom that I attend Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

“You're a really good mother,” I say.

“Yeah. Amy says I have no identity outside of being a mother.”

I don't know how to begin to answer this.

She suggests more appointments with specialists, more exercises and strategies. If I am cured, who does my mother become?

 

July 2007

Seattle, Washington

I'm meeting Minerva at her brother Charlie's place in Seattle to work out plans for her wedding next summer. Minerva and I have only recently been back in touch—she found me online earlier this summer—but we've quickly picked up where we left off in high school. A friend who worked with me at the essential oil factory is driving to Seattle from Portland, and she agrees to drop me off at Charlie's apartment.

I arrive in the early evening. Charlie opens the door, shakes my hand firmly and brusquely, and then sits down at his desk. He looks back up at me standing in the middle of his apartment and just stares at me, expressionless. I remember his intense green eyes from when we first met in the art room ten years ago. In that moment I make a secret decision about Charlie that I won't tell myself until winter. I store it away like a squirrel until it gets cold out and I need more to survive on.

Minerva walks in from the kitchen and gives me a big hug. “Hi! How
are
you?”

She seems like a different person from the loud, opinionated, irresistible girl that I hung out with in the art room at lunch hour. Minerva is finishing up a degree at Georgetown law; her new fianc
é
is also a lawyer. How do people do this? Commit to a track, a person, and a career? I have no idea. Her certainty frightens me. I've been to only a couple of weddings of friends my age, both of which left me feeling as if I'd just watched a school play. I wanted to encourage and congratulate the newlyweds, but I also felt awkward. I am hoping that participating in Minerva's wedding might change my feelings somehow.

“There won't be any bridesmaids, but I'd like you to be my official wedding buddy.” She and I sit on the couch and chat about the dress that her mother is making her while Charlie bounds around the room, ignoring us completely. He picks up a tangle of cords from his desk, screws open the back of an old Casio keyboard, and puts it down in favor of another old keyboard, begins ripping some knobs off it, goes outside to check out his tomato plants in the front window of the apartment, steps back inside.

When he steps back in, Minerva and I are sitting over my laptop, looking at the site for a label that specializes in re-creating dress patterns from the 1940s. I point out a navy blue dress with an iris embroidered on the shoulder. “That's the one I'm thinking about wearing, if I can afford it.”

“I think my wedding dress is going to be knee length,” Minerva says. While we've been talking, I haven't been able to stop tracking Charlie's jerking movements as he busies himself around the apartment. When he steps outside again, I whisper, “What's up with Charlie?”

“Oh, his back hurts. It hurts for him to sit still. His back hurts most of the time; walking around helps.” She shrugs, but she doesn't meet my eyes as she explains, “Scoliosis. His spine is basically a question mark. The nurse caught it at school; you know those checks everyone has to do, touch your toes? I have it a little bit too but not nearly as much. Anyway, our parents
weren't
exactly
together
enough to do anything about it.” Minerva often emphasizes every other word when she speaks; Charlie almost never stresses words.

We step outside and find him downstairs in the parking lot, adjusting the handlebars on his motorcycle, a black machine with a body like a wasp. “It's a redesign of a Kawasaki from the seventies,” he begins, gesturing up and down the handlebars and around the body of the machine as he talks about each piece. While neither Minerva nor I care about the mechanics of Charlie's motorcycle, we can't bring ourselves to interrupt him. There's a soft-spoken persuasiveness in his tone, a level of investment in the people who are listening to him that I didn't expect from a man intent on explaining how something mechanical works to two women standing in a parking lot.

The next morning, we stop at a nearby coffee shop and take our coffees to Green Lake, the park next to Charlie's apartment building. Minerva and I are in the empty playground sitting on one of those merry-go-round-type structures, the ones that you ride by kicking off the ground with your feet until there's a strong spin going, and then you place both feet on the metal floor as it goes faster and faster and you get dizzy, and once it slows down you do it again. Charlie is pushing it for us as he explains to us how subprime lending works. He just helped his mother sell her house in Sacramento, the house that they grew up in, moving her into an apartment. I am less than half listening to him. His drone is lost in the wind as Minerva and I spin.

“Faster, Charlie, faster!” Minerva yells, and Charlie rolls his jacket sleeves up and gives us a big push. He hops up on the nearby picnic table between spins.

When we get back to Charlie's apartment, Minerva says casually, “You want to see some pictures?”

She pulls out a stack of photographs. The photos are of piles of garbage, rolls of paper towels, bags of McDonald's, empty soda cans, plastic liter soda jugs. “It's my mom's house, before we cleaned it up and sold it.”

I had been to their mom's house once or twice during my high school years. I remember high ceilings and a constant hum of anxiety, as if the whole house was an ornament hanging from a string. I don't know how it is I don't remember the mess, but it must have been there then. It must have been the origin of the incessant twinge of tension that Minerva seems, at least externally, dulled to.

I look away from the pictures, embarrassed. “That's about what I expected,” I say quietly. It's not, though. Minerva and Charlie were like Hansel and Gretel, two children in a dark fairy tale. I thought that I knew what their world was like because I'd heard their stories, but I didn't have a clue.

 

September 2007

Valencia, California

In the bag I receive during CalArts orientation is a keychain with the logo of the city of Santa Clarita, the town next door,
SANTA CLARITA—1987
, the year when the town was incorporated. I was six. Valencia, a suburb about an hour and forty-five minutes away from Los Angeles, is best known for its Six Flags amusement park. It is also home to a Walmart, a Target, and strings of gated suburban houses with names like Artist's Terrace.

My old Portland roommate and college friend Miranda volunteers to fly with me from Portland, sparing me the otherwise inevitable caravan with my parents. She is finishing up a degree in naturopathic medicine. My dad calls her “the Not a Doctor” and asks if she “tells people that their chi is fucked up.”

At the Orange County Airport, we pick up the rental car, buy cheap whiskey, lemonade, and fried chicken at the grocery store, and head to the Motel 6 where we'll be spending tonight. We take a brief swim in the motel pool and then towel off and climb onto the queen-sized bed with our dinner. We wipe our greasy hands on toilet paper and yell at the
America's Top Model
marathon on TV.

In the morning, I wake up bleary-eyed and smelling of fried chicken. The sun blasts through the thin motel shades. Miranda drives to the 99 Cents Only Store, where I pick up odds and ends for my new room: hangers, detergent, a trash can, and a laundry bag.

When we arrive on campus, Miranda decides where my mirror goes best, where to place the hooks for my purses and cardigans, where my shoes go in my closet. She walks up and down the halls of CalArts' main building with two copies of the map we were given during orientation week. On the copy that I will keep with me once she leaves, she marks arrows in green highlighter marking paths to the main stairwell, the library, and the cafeteria. Her written directions, broken down into steps with noted visual landmarks, accompany the translated map.

The hardest part is envisioning how to set up systems and routines. The second-hardest part is maintaining them. I am habit Teflon. Routines do not stick.

In Valencia, the only places in walking distance of graduate housing are two strip malls containing negligible variations on the same stores. A Starbucks here, a Peet's there, this way a Vons, and that way a Safeway. I tell myself that being unable to leave Valencia of my own accord has a lot to do with one's mind-set. I am a monk; art school is my abbey.

The walls of the school are constantly repainted: one day beige, one day blue, one day pink. Every Thursday there is gallery night, where art students exhibit in the main gallery and everyone drinks wine from Trader Joe's and eats cheese and walks around and pretends that we are in an art gallery instead of a giant hall with linoleum floors that looks like a high school gym.

In the mornings, I can hear the gamelan troupe practicing from my room. When I stop for coffee in the cafeteria, there's always the same girl wearing the same leopard-print lingerie and ripped fishnets, toddling around on the same pair of broken black kitten heels. She wears a small heart-shaped sticker on her face, which sometimes moves from one cheek to the other. I quickly learn not to visit the bathroom across from the dance auditorium because the seats are splattered with vomit left behind by bulimic dance students.

On the walk back from class, every so often I see a bearded campus security officer in his dark blue uniform peel open a tin of cat food and place it on the ground for the tribe of feral cats who live in the bushes. When he comes back, the tin will be empty.

In the campus housing unit I share with an actor, a photographer, a filmmaker, and a stage manager, the locked cabinet holding the radiator and air conditioning emits a pulsing screech for possibly one minute at random hours.

I pretend to myself that I'm writing from an SRO in New York in the 1940s by wearing my maroon thrift-store kimono, pouring three-dollar-a-bottle red wine into a glass tumbler, and sitting in front of my laptop. As long as I keep the shades drawn to block the view of the main building, I can properly place myself in the role of a formerly renowned author of pulp lesbian novels, now down on her luck and forced to move into a seedy hotel. Sometimes I put on some Nico and pretend that I am in the Chelsea Hotel instead. “Chelsea Hotel” is a much more straightforward distraction involving putting on a pair of tight jeans, ironing my hair, and smoking pot with my upstairs neighbors.

Pot boils time down to a syrup, slows a day down to molasses. It evens the playing field. In the thick haze of getting high, no one keeps track of
where
or
when
, and you've got a built-in excuse for losing track of time, homework, your keys. All that matters is what's in front of you, and if you can't find what's in front of you, you just sit back and relax until, inevitably, a new sparkly proposition or personality comes around to entertain you.

Being a little slow, a bit flaky, just disorganized, cushions all expectations, all the sharp angles of responsibility, in bubble wrap.

Being a fuckup is an excuse as flimsy as it is sturdy. It's a container for the cluttered detritus of all my smaller mistakes, like losing track of papers, books, classrooms, and time.

 

December 2007

Seattle, Washington

Charlie had sent me a brief email earlier in the semester telling me that I could stay at his place in Seattle if I wanted to come visit him and Minerva while I'm in Portland on winter break. Now, in December, I'm here, but Minerva is nowhere to be found. She is at her fianc
é
's parents' house in the suburbs. She texts me throughout the day about the flower arrangements she's going over with her fianc
é
's mom, and as it gets dark she decides to stay there for the night.

I'm at a bit of a loss for how to behave alone around Charlie, but he had mentioned something about a bottle of whiskey in his cupboard, and tonight I don't need to do much convincing to get him to pop out two glasses and the bottle. We sit on his couch with our glasses, drinking to alleviate the awkwardness between us. He turns to put music on, a Tom Waits album, and I can see the curved landscape of his back beneath his black T-shirt. It looks like his shoulders are crowding each other for room, an anatomical fault line where the geologic plates of his body disagree.