Head Case (14 page)

Valentine's Day is embedded in the coming week, but I don't ask, “What do you want to do for Valentine's Day?” or, worse, “What are we doing for Valentine's Day?”

That would imply that I cared, that we cared, about such things. Valentine's Day encompasses everything that I am trying not to be. It's a needy, soppy, expectant, frilly holiday; a pink codependent holiday, and I am a blue independent woman.

“Well, there's this concert, and Robert's going to be unveiling this robot he built to sing along to ‘Suck My Giant Robot Dick,' and it has, like, this gigantic phallus that goes up and down while he sings. It's going to be awesome. I don't know if I'd be able to pick you up from Valencia in time fo—”

“Dude. You cannot leave me alone on Valentine's Day for a giant robot phallus.”

“Oh. OK. Why, what's up?”

“The Johnston
r
eunion is that weekend. I was wondering if you'd want to go with me?”

“To your college reunion with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, man, I don't know. That sounds … intense.”

“Peter will be there; you love Peter. And Kristy and Matt—I mean Maddie.”

The Johnston reunion, which is held once every five years in Redlands and welcomes everyone from any class dating back to 1976, happens to fall in my second year of grad school. Valencia is only a couple of hours from Redlands by car. I am bringing Charlie to silently ask for my little community's blessing; I need him to meet Maddie. Although I can't admit it to myself at the time, what I'm really saying by dragging my long-term boyfriend to my five-year college reunion is “Look at me! Here I am, five years after college graduation and finally in a stable relationship! I must be doing something right. I must be an adult now.”

Maddie, whom I dated on and off during college, is one of the people I'm most looking forward to seeing. Maddie is the convex to my concave: extroverted, outgoing, a social butterfly. Still, we were unmistakably a pair, both curious and brutally impatient. Together, we sledded down the concrete stairs of our dorm on couch cushions and broke into the school church in the middle of the night to play the organ, nothing especially new in the world of college hijinks, but we felt we were inventing the world.

Maddie was the first person I had called about my brain. She said, “You mean this whole time
that's all it was
?” As if it was so simple, which somehow made me feel much better. A year later she called me right after she got her first
e
strogen shot.

She and I are both coming back to Johnston with different bodies, bodies truer to our selves. Mine is a secret self, hidden like a blister in a shoe. Maddie's transformation is external and highly public, Matt to Maddie. Our only sameness is that our new bodies are rooted in a physical and emotional history that was incongruent with our external selves.

I don't presume to know what Maddie's transition is like for her; I do know a little about being the unwilling captive of a body that performs a pantomime of fulfilling the expectations of others. I have loved a pantomime of her body when we dated in college, watched those shoulders slope in sleep.

Maddie dresses like a punk-rock Frida Kahlo in skirts sewn together in thick, bold railroad-track stitches, feathers and plastic flowers in her hair. She has breasts, hips, and a new tattoo on her inner forearm, a Russian nesting doll. Stacking selves within selves—it's what we've all done in the five years since we graduated from Johnston.

Right now her voice still has the same deep tone that it had when we were in college, but her inflections have started to change, twisting the periods that used to end each sentence into question marks. Eventually, the tone of her voice will also change.

Several of us are staying at the Stardust Motel, a collection of run-down rooms that's not without its charms, one being that it is in drunken stumbling distance from campus; another being the avocado rotary phones and the framed paintings of unicorns on the wall that look like they were ripped out of children's drawing books.

All of our bodies have changed, of course. Some of us are fatter, and fewer of us are thinner; some have less hair, and some stopped shaving. A few have had babies—one woman who lives in Redlands brings her two young children and husband. My last vivid memory of her prior to the reunion is of when she was tripping on mushrooms, hanging herself out the third-floor dorm window in a hot-pink bikini crying and screaming and threatening to jump, while several people grabbed her by the arms and waist to try to pull her back inside.

A few of us assemble at the house of our former writing professor for some tea and biscuits and to catch up and play with her dogs. As I leave the party, Maddie pulls me in for a hug good-bye and whispers in my ear, “I like him. He's a sweetheart.”

 

IV. Arrival

“I can't explain myself, I'm afraid, Sir,” said Alice, “because I'm not myself, you see.”

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

 

May 2009

Valencia, California

I am here to collect.

As the star of my own vengeful action thriller,
The Claimant
, I want my identity back, someone's head on a platter for making me wait twenty-seven years to find out who I am, someone else's head on a platter for how little this new information about me actually
changes
me. I want your help, and I want nothing to do with you. I am The Claimant.

I'll be graduating from my MFA program in a month, and while I feel both a bit of relief and perhaps even some validation now that I know why I was such a bad fit at my postcollege jobs, I don't know where this leaves me now, other than unfit for the same jobs that I assumed that I'd return to after finishing my MFA.

I try to think of applying for Social Security as a temporary stopgap measure that allows me to remain independent while figuring out where I fit into the workforce. More than anything, I want to teach writing, but I know that those positions are hard to come by even in the best of times. Even if I wasn't graduating in a recession, it's rare for anyone coming straight out of an MFA program to go straight into teaching. The MFA is a studio degree, giving us time to work on our writing and practice teaching for the first time. After graduation, some of us will go on to PhD programs; some of us will adjunct at community colleges; most of us will go back to the jobs we had before we took two years to focus on writing. I don't know what I'm going to do after graduation. Charlie doesn't want me to move in with him in Santa Barbara, and I don't want to go back to my parents' house in Portland. I've been putting out some feelers with friends who live in the Bay Area, but if this claim doesn't go through I'll have to go back to my parents'.

It didn't occur to my family at first that I might be eligible for Social Security, but my father had a conversation about me with a student of his who has a heart condition. The student suggested that we look into it. Even with his help, it took a year to find our way through the byzantine coding system that I would have to fit into in order to be recognized as officially disabled.

It takes me several drafts to fill out my Social Security paperwork.

1. Name of disabled person (First, Middle, Last)
NICOLE FREDI COHEN

2. Social Security number
084-92-3656

3. Date (month, day, year)
5/27/09

4. Your daytime telephone number
(503) 697-4499

Describe what you do from the time you wake up until going to bed.

• Wake up

• Drink pots of coffee (2–3)

• Eat breakfast

• Pretend to self and others that we can help each other become “better writers.” Try not to think too hard about this.

• Go to class

• Think about this too hard

• -Avoid cafeteria (crowds, lines, inevitable spilling, too many options) at all costs

• Eat hummus

• Eat lunch

• Glare at pile of reading for school

• Check email

• Consider writing a poem in the hopes of concluding global issues

• Miss parents' cats

• Study/write

• Eat hummus

• Eat dinner

• Sneer with judgment at own bookshelf

• Watch TV

• Take off headphones

• Go to bed

In interpreting my daily tasks as official government business, I see how much extra time it takes for me to complete mundane chores. The organizational ritual of hanging up and organizing fresh laundry, for example—making sure that all of the clothes are hung facing the same direction, placing like with like; it takes me a lot of time, and I have to really force myself to do it. After my parents and I figure out the paperwork together and send it in, we wait to hear anything. I am categorized under “Impairments, Mental,” as subscribing to the subcategories (of which you must pick at least two) “Marked restriction in activities of daily living” and “Marked difficulties in maintaining concentration, persistence, or pace.” It's difficult for me to consider myself someone with a mental impairment—I was raised in a family that values intellectual curiosity above all else—but if I learned anything in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, it's that strength and weakness share a home in the head.

The woman who calls me for my Social Security interview has no first name. She does not exist outside of this phone call.

“This is Mrs. Dixon. I'm going to ask you a series of questions to confirm for me what you've written here on these forms for us.”

“OK.”

She is stiff and formal with me; I mimic her intonations. Mirroring is a simple and highly effective coping mechanism for blending in, one that comes automatically to me. This is how I ace interviews for jobs that I could never possibly maintain. Appearing competent, putting on the verbal version of a suit and tie, is one of my favorite things to do because I
feel
competent when I do it and am thus temporarily treated as such. I get the job, and it's not until an average of three months later, when I've flipped the numbers while jotting down an important phone message again, or miscalculated the final total from behind a cash register and have to ring you up a fourth time as you are calling for my manager, that my incompetence is unmasked.

This interview is for the job of being disabled, and yet still I'm masking, trying to appear as “together” as possible. I have no idea what is expected of me here or how to be that person. I'm new here; even though I've never been anyone else. As a professional mime, taking my social cues from someone else, I don't know how to interview for the job of being myself. Mrs. Dixon asks me to verbally certify that everything I say is the truth, and she is explicit about how everything that I say is legally binding in that if the federal government thinks that I am lying, I could go to jail and/or they could make me pay back any Social Security that I am granted.

All of her basic and straightforward questions about dates and time are exactly the kind that I have never been able to answer. I have a copy of my paperwork out in front of me with the amount I make in a month, in a year, and the dates I have worked. This is my script, not to be deviated from. Mrs. Dixon did not get this memo, however, because she keeps asking me questions that are not covered in my papers, forcing me to improvise.

“How many hours a week did you work at Vowel?”

“Ummm … I'm not sure … Can you hold on for a moment, please?”

I flip through the forms. The answer is not in here. How could it not be in here? I must be missing it. I flip through again; I can't find it. I will have to say
something
. How many hours a week is it normal to say that I worked? Barring any knowledge of the correct answer, what is a proper guess? Eighty hours? Sixty? I worked part-time, so would it be more like fifteen? Thirty? How many hours generally pass from when I walk to my desk with a cup of coffee in the morning and when I break for lunch? I have absolutely no recollection. My brain doesn't hold on to hours. I don't understand calculating days in blocks of time. I understand “a long time” and “a short time,” although these concepts are constantly reversing and backing up on each other, since what feels like a long time can be a short time and vice versa. I would guess that I worked half a day at Vowel. Don't ask me how long that is.

“How much were you paid?”

I answer straight from the paper in my hand while moving my finger over the numbers as a safeguard against flipping them, a commonplace act that in this moment could forever place me erroneously in a higher or lower tax bracket.

I practiced beforehand by reviewing the paperwork several times, but in the moment I'm so nervous and flustered that I can't find the answers on the paper. I want to say: “I don't know, OK? I don't know what I made or how long I worked. I show up at a certain time, take lunch at a certain time, and then I go home. I get a check for that time; I put it in the bank. Just like you, I sleepwalk through these things without memory. Unlike you, I cannot fill in these blanks with assumptions. I don't have that repository to draw from, how much I must have worked and how much I must have made. I have no idea. And that, Mrs. Dixon, is exactly why I am on the phone with you.” Instead, I shuffle my papers and try my very best to give the right answers, feeling confused and utterly helpless.

“I see … and how long have you had these symptoms for?”

“Uuuuuh … since June of last year.”