Head Case (20 page)

“I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly: “but it's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

 

March 2010

Portland, Oregon/Saratoga, New York

It's 2:00 a.m. in the Portland airport. I'm about to board the plane to New York to meet my uncle, who will drive me to my first writing residency, in the woods of upstate New York.

I've applied to two PhD programs in writing since graduating from CalArts, three months shy of a year ago, but despite my most concentrated efforts I somehow managed to misfile the copies of my applications for both. I will have to wait out the year if I plan to apply again, and, left to my own devices, what's to stop me from making the same mistakes again? It's an honest-to-God mystery to me what I did, where I slipped up with the paperwork this time. I'm exasperated with myself. I had this same issue with organizing my college and MFA applications, and I struggle with job applications as well. I am the empress of clerical error.

This is the first and only writing residency that I've applied to. When I asked a visiting professor for advice on what to do once I graduate from CalArts, he said, “Just live in your car and go to writing residencies. That's what I did.” So I applied to one that I'd heard authors I admire refer to in interviews and acknowledgments, one where you get a studio to write in and they cook your meals, just to take a shot in the dark. Someone dropped out at the last minute, leaving a six-week window free, which I nabbed as soon as it was offered to me.

While waiting to board, I notice an attractive young man stretched out in a bank of chairs by himself. He's wearing a thick gray sweater and clutching a guitar case, with the kind of artfully disheveled hair that wouldn't be out of place in either Portland or Brooklyn, since they're on the way to becoming the same town. I wonder vaguely if he's some famous or semi-famous musician, heading from one show to another. I'm behind him in line as we board, and he turns his head to smile knowingly at me as he puts his baggage up in the overhead compartment above his seat. I can't decide if I dislike him for looking smug, or if I'm attracted to him, or both. I'm in the row ahead of him, and as we take off I can hear him describing the sound of the Indian drum, the tabla, to his neighbor. “It's just beautiful. Like running water.” The plane is more than half empty; for the length of the flight most of us sleep cradled in our own rows in the dark of the unlit cabin. I feel as if the three hours I'm losing to another time zone are being physically leached from my body as I shift and squirm over my empty three-chair row and try unsuccessfully to fall asleep.

Close to the end of the flight, the plane's deicer breaks down and we're rerouted to Buffalo for several hours, unable to land in New York City. Once we deplane, I immediately turn the corner to plug my dead cell phone into a socket to charge under a wide window. I sit down in a bank of chairs next to the window, to watch planes take off and land. Then I decide that I need coffee first, unplug my cell phone, and wheel my carry-on luggage over to a coffee cart. When I return, my imaginary famous musician is in the row of chairs watching the planes take off, a book in his lap. I don't want to have to think about deciding whether or not to speak to him. Instead, I talk to my mom on my plugged-in cell phone and try to sneak furtive peeks at what he's reading, but I can't see the cover of his book. I'm afraid to take any risks, to open a door to even a slight possibility. I'm a rabid guard dog protecting what Charlie and I have. Having just flown two thousand miles away from him, I'm afraid of wandering any farther by getting lost even a little bit in a conversation with a stranger. I'm afraid that right now any move that I make in a new direction will make it more difficult for me to find my way back home to him. Sometimes when I'm lost, the only thing I know to do is to stand still.

I notice that the young man is wearing an expensive brand of shoes that my dad loves and always buys on sale at discount department stores. “They're worn by the king of Spain!” my dad says, trying to persuade me to wear them. “So ugly, but soooo comfortable.”
Talk to him about his shoes
, a little voice in my head says, but then I think that sounds too transparent, so I say nothing. On the flight from Buffalo to JFK, I finally fall asleep and dream that I'm climbing a ladder with rungs of broken discolored piano keys.

I spend a couple of days at my uncle Ron and aunt Linda's apartment in Brooklyn with my two younger cousins before Ron drives me out into the woods. The night that I arrive at the residency I stand under a large maple tree in the dark with my cell phone, in mock privacy, to call Charlie. After several rings he picks up, sounding out of breath.

“Hey!” I wait for him to catch his breath.

He answers, speaking very slowly. “Heeeey … How's it
goooing
?”

“You sound … weird.”

“I'm biking. To a party. I'm. Out of breath.”

“Oh. Cool. Whose party?”

He's silent for a long time.

“I'm biking to the party of the woman who I am attracted to,” he says with a flat, even tone. I wish that there was a map to lead me either out of this relationship or more deeply into it.

I blurt out, “Fuck it.”

I want to slam my phone against the tree.

“I can't. I can't do this now. You know who you are, Charlie? You're just like Ducky.”

“Danny's
parakeet
?”

“It's like, it's like I put out my finger for you to hop onto it and you, you bite me. So I keep my finger out because biting is how a bird tests for sturdiness in a branch, and I try to keep it still and you
bite me again and again
. I'm getting afraid to put my finger out.”

Now I'm running out of breath.

“Charlie. I need you to just hop on.”

“I've never been in a relationship that I haven't felt ambivalent about.”

“It's been
years
. I'm not … I'm not some exotic mystery girl.”

“But you kind of are. I've never met anyone from outer space before.”

*   *   *

One of the artists has started a meditation group at the residency. Every evening at 5:45, we meet in the living room of one of the cottages that make up the tiny village of the residency. I sit on the rug with my legs crossed next to several other artists, three feet from a couch on which, according to local legend, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes once had sex. In this spot, I try to desire nothing.

I'm trying to learn how to meditate, to just sit here and not hope for anything. The Zen books that the other artists lend me say that once I give up hope, I will enter the palace of nothingness and nothing will be better or worse—everything will be just as it is, and it will be neither horrible or wonderful, it will just be in between—and that is the grand prize that is not a prize. I am trying to fit everything I am onto the splinter of this very second, but my feelings keep spilling over like a water cracker overloaded with expensive-smelling cheese at some cocktail party you didn't really want to attend until the cracker breaks and then you're walking around with a crumpled napkin, smiling and chatting with guests when all you can think about is where the trash can is hidden. I'm trying to tenderly, gently not care about anything. I'm trying so hard to not give a fuck in the most compassionate way possible. Of course, just by trying I'm already totally screwed.

At one of the nightly dinners toward the end of my six-week stay, I motion to the trees outside the window that are doubled over, as if by lightning. “I wonder what's up with those.” A performance artist tells me that the cabbie who drove him into town also pointed out the trees. “They all split in two here, even all the old ones. You know why? It rains so much here in the summer that the trees don't need to grow roots deep into the earth. All of their roots are shallow, on the surface. They are not rooted deeply to the earth, so eventually they topple, broken in two by their own weight.”

The performance artist looks at me, widening his eyes. “I mean, it's just so …
evocative
.”

The next morning when I'm doing my laundry, I drop a pair of graying granny panties out of the dryer in front of the editor of a national fashion magazine. Everyone here is smarter and fancier than me. I'm barely out of my MFA program; I bungled my PhD applications; even my boyfriend isn't feeling especially fond of me right now. I'm a bundle of nerves most of the time at the residency, and I feel like a total imposter being here, I'm so in awe of this world.

In the evenings after dinner we often walk over to the carriage house to play a billiards game in which you don't use pool cues; you just run around the table and try to use one billiard ball to hit another one across the table and into a pocket. Of course I'm terrible at this game, but it's the most fun that I have at the residency. I'm the worst at it, but I play often; I'm trying to teach myself that participating is more important than the quality of my participation. One night after I lose another game, a painter comes up to me and says, “I don't understand. You keep getting yourself out in ways that don't even make sense.”

I think of Denis, my old math tutor, saying to me from across the folding table in his living room, “I could help you if you got the problem wrong the same way every time, but you do it differently each time.”

I don't know if I want to go home, or if I want to be as far from home as possible. I don't even know where home would be. Can I be both at home and far from it, here? Staying put, just sitting with my feelings in those meditations, feels a whole lot like running screaming with my hair on fire. Meditation, with its focus on the present, makes narration impossible. It is a respite from the story I tell myself of who I am and why. It is an oasis on a map. As with an oasis, I am never sure if the peace that meditation promises is nearly within my grasp or just a shimmering mirage.

My only way in to the evening meditation sessions is to breathe in confusion, pain, and frustration. I breathe out relief. Breathe out relief not just for yourself, but for everyone feeling what you are feeling right now, one of my books says. So I breathe out relief for Kristy, who is self-harming again. I breathe in and imagine her in the bathroom of the tiny nonprofit she works for in Northern California, locking the bathroom door and biting her arms just to feel something, and I breathe out. I'm greedy for relief for myself, so I'm quick to send it on my breath for others.

Many of my old college friends are now scattered around the globe, trying on new homes and careers. Miranda is working at an acupuncture resort in Thailand; Peter is in the Middle East working for a nonprofit. I'm a few months shy of thirty, and it feels as if every week a new news article pops up asking why people of my generation are so late to find a job, get married, settle down. It's as if we've all wandered off somewhere on a school trip, and previous generations are herding us back into two lines with our partners.

Kristy wears a little silver medallion around her neck of Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. She bought it at the gift shop at the Grotto, a Catholic nunnery, when we were living together in Portland after graduating from Johnston. When she was thirteen, Kristy did a stint in what she refers to as the loony bin.

If Saint Jude answers your prayers, you're supposed to put a brief notice in the personals section thanking him. “Thank you to Saint Jude for answering my prayers” will usually suffice. Now that I've nearly survived my twenties, all of my writing at the residency feels like a thank-you to Saint Jude.

 

August 2010

Santa Barbara, California

On the way back from the residency, I stop in Santa Barbara for a week before heading back to Portland. One night, Charlie takes a frozen pizza out of the oven, places it on the counter, and says, “I think you should move in with me. The problem is distance; the problem is just that you're not here enough, and I'm not there enough.”

I want to believe so hard in a problem outside of the two of us, like other people or distance, that I'm more than willing to agree. I feel as if I'm failing at everything; I can't afford to fail at this too right now. I lived by myself in Portland for a total of four months, the first time I ever lived independently, although living in the same town as my parents is still not that independent and neither is moving in with Charlie, but I've never lived with a significant other before so it
feels
like some sort of vague progress toward adulthood.

The night we move all of my belongings out of my studio and into a rental minivan, it's pouring rain. We spend the night in an environmentally conscious motel in Danville, California, called Gaia, the same motel I stayed in with my parents when they moved me out of downtown Oakland back to Portland in their minivan. I chose this place because I remember that it has a small pond with swans, and I had romantic visions of watching the swans with Charlie. But because I don't drive, he has to drive the entire way, and we're only halfway through, and already he's exhausted and his back aches, and I feel guilty. The noise of a wedding in the banquet hall near the pond is scaring the swans tonight. They paddle skittishly around the perimeter of the small artificial lake. We stand on the little wooden bridge over the pool and watch the braver swans bathe themselves in the sprinkling fountain in the center, then we go to sleep. The next day we notice that the minivan has begun to smell like fish. Mysteriously, the source seems to be my 1950s tulip-shaped lamp.

The sky in Santa Barbara is that deep blue of the ocean in TV commercials for Caribbean resorts. It makes sense to me that I've now landed in a transitional town, where a large chunk of the population are either students or tourists. I'm neither; my tag here is “trailer,” which is how grad students and faculty on campus refer nonchalantly to the partner who's just along for the ride.