Head Case (5 page)

*   *   *

The Ritalin makes me dizzy; I have to sit down to catch my breath a lot. I can't be sure that this is when I started using Prozac. That didn't last long. We are on the verge of moving to California; with each move my father is ascending the ranks in the public relations department at Mobil Oil where he began as a researcher in the '70s, right after finishing his PhD in philosophy during a severe job shortage in academia. He is worried about moving his collection of more than a hundred orchids.

Dad always collects things. Before the orchids, it was saltwater fish. He comes home early from work and doesn't even change out of his suit before watering the orchids with a giant spray bottle and inspecting each of them for aphids with a Q-tip full of rubbing alcohol.

*   *   *

Neuropsychological evaluation by Phoenixville Psychological Associates of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania (1994):

Summary and Recommendations: Nicole presented as an adolescent with a clear deficit in spatial orientation. This was a fairly focused deficit which led to problems in various related tasks. Organizational skills were also impaired.

Nicole learned to compensate on many tasks and may cover up her deficits well. Despite her ability to compensate, it requires great effort and time on her part. Because Nicole's verbal skills are so good, these should be brought into her compensatory strategies.

*   *   *

This is a real thing; it's not all in my head. Everyone says so: the doctors, my teachers, my parents. They say that it will probably go away when I'm older. The MRI machine was first invented in 1977, only four years before I was born. It will be thirteen years after my first neuropsychological assessment when I first lie down inside one.

 

1995

Davis, California

The Davis school district has a school for independent studies where the kids with learning disabilities, behavior issues, pregnancies, or juvenile records check in with our tutors. Home schooling is not a trend yet; the independent studies program is a last stop for educational anomalies like us. Once a month, I go to the squat blue building and go over my tests and homework with Anne, who is paid by the district to make sure that the independent studies program is keeping students on track. I go to public school for most of the day, but after school I go to Denis, my tutor, for math class. Anne checks up on my work with Denis.

Denis has three kinds of students in his house at any given moment: the independent studies math students like me, the public school math students whom he also tutors, and the karate students from the dojo he runs out of his basement who sometimes come by after school to practice together or do household chores in lieu of payment for their lessons. He sees three math students at a time at the long collapsible metal table in the middle of his living room. Teenage boys in karate uniforms wander in and out of the house, sometimes sweeping the floor or high up on ladders. Denis often wears his karate uniform while we go over my math homework together. His two young daughters can play on the couch as long as they are quiet and let us work. Denis never turns on the air conditioning in his house because he believes that it's bad for the body, which regulates itself naturally.

It's over a hundred degrees outside and Sterling Norton, my latest middle school crush, is downstairs in the basement in his karate uniform, yelling and throwing chops. Upstairs, Denis is about to lose it on me again. He is a Zen master, but eventually he and I reach the point in our hour together where he hits his head against the long folding table, briefly jolting the other students out of their seats. Sometimes when he does this I cry in front of the other students out of embarrassment and frustration and because I want to do well for Denis, who is so committed to teaching me.

Recently, he's worked out a strategy where I am supposed to use a different colored pencil for each stage of the algebra problems he's assigned me. I hand Denis my paper. He shakes his head slowly in disbelief; sweat rolls down from his ears to his neck. “It's not just that you get them wrong. I can help you with that. It's that you get them wrong in a different way each time.” Over the years that we work together, the shame that I feel from being unable to finish my calculations in front of the public school students swells as I wait outside Denis's house for my dad to pick me up while the other teenage students with freshly minted licenses drive off.

When I try to learn how to drive, the instructor tells me to think of the steering wheel as the face of a clock. Put my left hand at nine, my right hand at three. I stare at her with horror and decide to make a random guess. She repeats her instructions again and again until she forcibly takes my hands and places them on the wheel. “No, like this.”

I keep taking my hands off the wheel as I turn the car, and then I place them back in an incorrect position. I don't notice until the teacher corrects me. I make continuing attempts at three-point turns around the empty high school parking lot, until eventually our hour-long lesson is over. Next week, we do the same thing again. After about three lessons of this, she gives up.

I take math lessons at Denis's house from my second year of middle school to my high school graduation. In that period, I switch schools four times. My parents blame the school districts, saying that the West Coast public schools don't compare to East Coast public schools. I receive what the neuropsychologists call “roller-coaster grades”—high grades in the subjects that I like (English, art) and low grades in what I hate (math, science). It's not that I'm not trying; it's that I don't even know where to begin. Once a teacher marks me as disinterested, however, it becomes personal for both of us.

My work with Denis prevents the district from holding me back a grade, a threat that looms annually. I beg my parents to put me in independent studies courses full time, but they say that I have to remain “socialized.” I argue that I'm not socialized, anyway, so what does it matter if I stay home all day? “That's just the problem,” my dad says. “You would stay in your room forever.”

 

1997

Sacramento, California

Halfway through my sophomore year of high school, in 1997, my parents take me out of public school and enroll me in Sacramento Country Day School, half an hour away. Since no one has been able to successfully teach me how to drive, my parents join the lower-school carpool circuit. In the mornings I'm loaded into some parents' van with their middle schoolers and elementary school kids. I still go to Denis for math in the afternoon instead of taking math at the school. There are twenty-five kids in my new class, one of whom listens to Bikini Kill.

I'm in the art room during free period working on a collage of a grasshopper destroying a city skyline when an older-looking bearded guy, closer to college age, shuffles in wearing a leather jacket held together by duct tape over a flannel shirt. He's a couple of inches shorter than me; I can see the blond roots showing on the top of his black hair. Strapped to his back is an army duffel bag with a pair of chipped alabaster mannequin legs sticking out of it. Wordlessly, he begins reassembling the mannequin, his moss-green eyes signaling a surgeon's intent. His hands are large and square, with chipped black polish on his nails.

I try to look indifferent, but I'm nervously twisting glue off of my fingers as I watch him snap limbs onto a torso out of the corner of my eye. This guy is intense; he's got a John Bender in
The Breakfast Club
thing going on for sure. I'm trying to figure out how to start a conversation with him when Minerva, the best artist in the school and the head of our arty girl gang, runs into the art room straight for the guy, wrapping her arms around him. “Chaaarlie!”

I know the name from Minerva's mythical-sounding stories about her older brother, who lives in Seattle. “Charlie's dating this girl, and she's twins! Their names rhyme, and the only way you can tell the two of them apart is that one of the girls is missing a toe. And their dining-room table is a coffin! Isn't that
wild
?”

Charlie's visiting from Seattle for the week, from what I can overhear. The siblings ignore me and dive into some kind of heavy conversation by the doorway. I pretend to focus on my collage, but I can hear scraps of it from the table where I'm working.

“An emotional tourniquet. Do you know what a tourniquet is?”

“Yes, Charlie, I know what a tourniquet is. God.”

He notices me and changes the subject, pointing to the mannequin.

“I brought this down from Seattle. Found it in a dumpster.”

Later that night, Minerva calls me. “My brother likes you. He says he likes something you did with your hands.”

“He did? What did I do with my hands?”

“I don't know. He said that if he didn't have scruples, he'd take you out for coffee. But he has a girlfriend. And scruples. Anyway, he's not visiting for that long.”

Minerva is the one who invited me to join our group of friends. My first week of class at Sacramento Country Day, I got lucky. The English teacher, Mr. Maisel, gave us the only creative writing assignment for the year, to write a short story. The next week he read sections of mine aloud to the class, praising it. “I mean, she can't punctuate for shit, but the new girl's really good.” In private school, the teachers can curse.

After class, Minerva came up to my desk. “I think you'd be a good fit for us,” she said coolly. “You like theater, like Alice, and art, like me, and music, like Alex, and everyone likes Gladys.” Gladys is a year older than us and the toughest girl in school; she lives with the history teacher and his wife. If you don't like Gladys, then you're against her. Gladys is cool with me eating lunch with everyone in the art room.

Minerva gives me a short story that she ripped out of a newspaper where the major plot point is that a woman accidentally flushes her keys down the toilet.

“Read this. She reminds me of you.”

Minerva's boots are held together by silver duct tape, as is Charlie's jacket. I've heard the rumors that Minerva is here “on scholarship,” as Charlie was before he graduated a couple of years ahead of us, that they can't actually afford the school but that they're so gifted that the school waives their tuition. Charlie was kicked out for stealing the keys to the school, and as a consequence he was forced to attend public school in Folsom, where his mom lives, for that year, but he was readmitted a year later. Everyone knows that Minerva is the best artist in school. We're known locally as “the atheist school” among the other private schools, which have religious affiliations and uniforms. Both Charlie and Minerva are confident and magnetic, and I feel special that Minerva's chosen me to be part of her group.

Junior year my circle of friends has a blowout fight in the girls' bathroom because Gladys doesn't want Minerva's boyfriend, David, to be part of our group's plans for prom, which is held every year on a riverboat docked in the Sacramento River. “This is my senior prom, and I want it to be right.” I'm too intimidated by all of the yelling between Gladys and Minerva to open my mouth. Minerva doesn't speak to any of us after that.

*   *   *

At some point during my junior year, Mobil downsizes, and, after having worked there for twenty-five years, my father loses his job in public relations. My parents work out a deal with my school where we pay month to month. “You are not to tell anyone about this,” my father says. “It's for your own good.”

Junior year is also the year when my parents decide that I need to update my neuropsych testing, since I'll be applying to colleges the following year. My mother is still looking for an answer, for something more. My testing is covered by the Davis school district, since our house is there.

*   *   *

Psycho-Educational Report performed by the Davis Joint Unified School District of Davis, California (1998):

Nicole is a mature, articulate young lady who is functioning in the superior to very superior range on tasks that involve overall oral language development, such as vocabulary, knowledge, and comprehension. In contrast, she scores below average on spatial organization tasks and in the borderline range on tasks of visual-motor integration. These disabilities have impacted her life dramatically as she has progressed through the educational system. It would be logical to assume that such a verbally articulate young lady would be able to make normal progress in all subjects; however, math and science are subjects that are typically adversely affected by motor-visual-spatial concepts.

 

June 1999

Sacramento, California

In order to graduate from high school at Sacramento Country Day, I need a passing grade in chemistry. Despite my backlog of tests and phone calls from both my dad and the Davis School for Independent Study, I cannot circumvent this requirement. I meet with the chemistry teacher after school once a week, a sort of farce that we are both bound not to acknowledge. Mercifully, she grants me a D
+
, allowing me to graduate. Denis gives me a silver pen in a long box.

After being rejected by thirteen colleges, I'm sent back to the school's college counselor, who slides a pamphlet across the desk toward me. With its picture of a pair of feet standing in a river, it looks like an ad for some sort of “back to nature” hippie retreat. This is the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, housed within the University of Redlands.

The Johnston Center is a self-designed degree program with a “learning and living community” component. Most important, no grades are assigned.

My dad drives down to Redlands with me to visit the campus and interview with the director. In keeping with the “living and learning” component of the program, the building where we're meeting has professors' offices on the bottom floor and dorm rooms on the second floor. It's almost the end of the school year, and it's deathly hot. The building is mostly deserted when we walk up except for a couple of students sitting on the front steps. We pass a large guy wearing a ratty Pixies shirt, his long purple hair up in two buns. Internally, I'm bargaining with any higher power that could prevent my dad from opening his mouth, but I know it's a lost cause. I'm already preparing to take the hit of embarrassment when he says “Nice hair” to the guy as we pass.