In Spite of Everything (8 page)

But here’s a poignant twist on the rogue planet metaphor: It turns out that rogue planets are not, in actual life, just
Star Wars
metaphors. Not only are they real, but their actual cosmic fate is pretty sad. Recently, I stumbled across a documentary on a science channel about this relatively “new” type of planet. When the first of these celestial bodies were detected in the early part of the twenty-first century, the narrator informed us, astronomers didn’t know how to categorize them. On the one hand, they certainly looked, and had formed, like regular planets. But on the other hand, they were
missing the crucial element: a sun. Evidently, gravitational force had violently expelled them early on from their solar systems, pushing them away at fifty thousand miles per hour. After that, the planets were rendered nomads. I was so struck by this that I went to the astronomy news site
Space.com
and read this passage: “In a mere decade, the home star shrinks to a point of light, eventually indistinguishable from other stars of the sky,” the article read. “This is an orphan world, wandering without destination in the numbing, frigid desert of deep space.” There are a lot of orphan planets; one astronomer at U.C. Santa Cruz reported that he wouldn’t be surprised if 50 percent of planets were “rogue.” It is also possible that, as I have read, beneath their frozen crusts, these planets conceal life at their cores.

An orphan world, wandering without destination in the numbing, frigid desert of deep space
—one of perhaps
half
of all planets in the known universe—that even after years of solar neglect may still harbor a beating heart? You can’t expect the
Star Wars
generation, more than half of whom grew up in the culture of the nest-expelling divorces of the seventies and eighties—and who are now today’s child-attached alterna-dads and moms—to pass up that metaphor. Moreover, however handily neat and potentially tacky that parallel may be, it poses too many rich, allegorical questions that bore into the murky core of our relationships with our parents, our spouses, our children—indeed, into the core of our very genesis.

We can be as maverick, caustic, and snickery as we please about our own origins; when you quietly pause to peer in at those formative experiences, they are often—like the real rogue planets’—just plain grim. Who remembers riding in the way-back of the station wagon with the dog and no seat belt? Probably most of us. Shoot, I remember riding in the
front
seat with no seat belt, as an eight-year-old (and my head cracking the windshield when my dad abruptly slammed on the brakes to avoid running a red light in front of a cop). Who remembers the days before all these fussy “child-proofing” safety measures were de rigueur? I have giant scars from
third-degree burns running up and down my arms marking indelible hieroglyphics from that laissez-faire period of American child rearing. Like many American children of the 1970s, my friends and I were left in the back of the car during grocery runs to the Safeway, and were consequently exposed to our fair share of leering, masturbating perverts in adjacent vehicles. Disgusting, but probably not unusual. At twelve, just after my parents had separated, I spent the night at a friend’s house in which no parents were present and the older brother was compulsively watching porn on a giant TV in the family room, and that night he came on to me aggressively, with such animated images as backdrop. Again, not uncommon. A similar situation emerged on a semi-regular basis at the parentless home of another friend, minus the porn. Same deal.

Same deal for a lot of us. Consider this random sampling, chosen with no special deliberation but from the top of my head. A friend I’ll call Jeremy, who grew up on the West Coast, was regularly compelled, at six years of age, to comfort his single mother as she lay crying on the bathroom floor playing “Send in the Clowns” over and over again; weekend visits with his heavy-drinking father often amounted to trips to the homes of unstable girlfriends and their roving wolf-pack children, who introduced him prematurely to drugs and sex. According to another friend, “Carrie,” her elementary school years in Wisconsin were spent watching TV after school with her brothers while her father smoked pot and “worked” at his desk. Her parents were always throwing bacchanalian parties, occasionally of the “key party” variety depicted in
The Ice Storm
, Rick Moody’s odyssey of the byways of suburban marital degeneracy in the 1970s. My friend “Julie,” who grew up in Texas, grew up in a house littered with her father’s print pornography collection, his carelessly degrading comments, and her mother’s nervous silence. One of my oldest friends, “Jessica,” and her siblings had to themselves an entire floor of their childhood home outside Philadelphia, where they spent much of their time smoking pot, drinking siphoned-off liquor from their parents’ stash, and isolating in adolescent angst,
with rare check-ins from their parents, who entertained frequently in the lower living quarters. (At twelve, I smoked my first cigarette and got drunk for the first time on that floor.) Jessica’s sister, now a mother of three, had this comment about the one-story ranch in which she’s raising her own family now: “My kids are not going to be on their own floor, crying alone.”

On their own floor, crying alone. An orphan world, wandering without destination in the numbing, frigid desert of deep space
. Unknown Regions. The locus of X’s narcissistic wound is sure to be found in these vicinities.

As a parent now, it frankly blows me away to ruminate on the way so many of us lived as kids. Holy shit. How were we supposed to approach dating and relationships—much less marriage—after having hatched from such solitary confinement? Can the orphan planet ever latch on to a new star? It certainly can’t do it by merely flirting with the outer orbit of whatever solar system it happens to be hurtling past along its solitary, pointless trajectory. In physics, it turns out that for the orphan, theoretically, to have a shot at the sure embrace of a sun, it would have to be hurled, and pulled, into it by massive gravitational power. All in or not at all.

In the thousands of conversations I have had with hundreds upon hundreds of Xers who came from divorced households of the 1970s and ’80s, very few of them honestly say they actually ever dated. Had random, lost sex? Yes. Chucked themselves headlong at relationships, whether or not they were involved with the right person? Definitely. All in or not at all.

T
he peak age in girls’ psychosexual efflorescence is thirteen, and for me, turning thirteen converged with my dad’s official leaving and, within a few months of that, with my mother’s regularly depositing me after school at the home of family friends. The parents were often not present, but their almost-twenty-year-old son invariably was. This young man, whom I’ll call Pete, was instantly cast in my mind
as the older brother figure, the prospective new star. No dad? There was Pete. I liked Pete. Pete liked me. He was demonstrably tickled by my snark. Like every northeastern prep school ninth grader, I toted around a dog-eared and heavily underlined copy of
The Catcher in the Rye
, so I was delighted by Pete’s Holden Caulfield gestalt. We had actual smart teenage conversations, which I had never had before, having only recently become a teenager myself.

Plus, Pete knew about real music. He had been in a band of the King Crimson/Traffic/Gentle Giant variety, and his room was meticulously patchworked from ceiling to floor with posters featuring the album cover artwork of bands known to music-heads as
real
musicians. I became Pete’s student in colloquia on the primacy of guitarists like Jimmy Page, Randy Rhoads, Edgar Winter, and Al Di Meola; on stylus care and the key differences between various makes of subwoofer; on how to parse liner notes for salient information. Pete’s parents let him smoke in his room, and since the door was always shut, I learned to roll my own Drum cigarettes and blow smoke rings nonchalantly, perched on my knees on his tapestry-covered floor in my school uniform’s short navy blue kilt and gray knee socks. He took me to parties with his college-aged friends who went to cool, smart schools like Oberlin and Wesleyan. He looked out for me.

In this regard, I might have been like any girl with a big brother. But I was not, as it turned out. Although I had cast him as big brother, Pete had seen himself in a different role. The night he disclosed this by leaning into me on my twin bed while our parents were engaged in a dinner party downstairs, he grinned, kissing me on the mouth: “You knew this was going to happen.” I had not known. He was so much older—I had not known at all. As he pressed me into my rainbow comforter, I started to laugh. “You kill me!” I said, parroting Holden Caulfield. “You kill me!”

The Greeks knew what happens when fatherless daughters are allowed to wander unattended to pick flowers in open fields. The girl is swallowed up by Hades, eats the pomegranate seeds (the food of
the dead), and returns at least seeming like a woman, certainly changed and rootless. Something dark and familiar rushed through my gut the first time I read these lines in Louise Glück’s poem “Persephone the Wanderer”: “Is she / at home nowhere? Is she / a born wanderer?”

I didn’t know where to go, what to do—not then, not in the weeks and the months that followed, and since it was already done anyway, it didn’t seem to make much difference that it continued. My mother, alternately frantic about keeping her job and swooning with grief over my father’s leaving us, did not really register that I essentially vanished. I started dropping out of the things that I had been good at doing, like field hockey and theater; my formerly large circle of friends narrowed to about two. And I smoked. A lot. I started smoking at thirteen, up to almost a pack a day by the time I was fifteen; within the year, I had done most the drugs of the era. In short order, I seemed to be someone who knew a lot. My mother, I think, noted a newly forged steeliness, but I was simply, in her mind, “advanced,” as I was, in her mind, in all things. And Pete’s parents, after all, were doing her a tremendous favor.

It would later surface that Pete’s parents had known that their son had feelings for me, and in hindsight, this may have been their reason for helping my mother with the after-school arrangement. They were worried sick about Pete because he, as it turned out, had suffered a great deal. Three years before, he had been involved in a car accident in which a girl he loved was killed. Psychotherapy and major surgery had propped him up in the physical world, but he had not shown signs of emotional recuperation. They wanted their son to be happy. So when Pete wanted me to sleep over, they acquiesced, waving me in the direction of the guest room. My mother never said no. I would lie in the guest room bed expecting Pete to come for me, and he always did. That winter I was taken on a family vacation to Mexico, where fancy friends of Pete’s parents from Houston joined us. While I sat by the pool in a bikini that Pete had bought me at the
gift shop, the woman stared at me from under her broad-brimmed hat and whispered to her husband. Pete knocked on the door of my hotel room every night.

Not long after Mexico, I was snowed in at Pete’s house. I woke up in the middle of the night with a hot, intense pain on my left side, just below my abdomen. Worried that it was appendicitis, Pete roused his father, who was a doctor—a psychiatrist. Dr. Lisle, whose birthday happened to be the same as my dad’s, smiled awkwardly and asked me to lift my shirt slightly so that he could press on the region in question. “You are sure that the pain is on the left?” he asked. Yes, I was. He nodded and excused himself to phone a colleague. Meanwhile, Mrs. Lisle emerged, arms folded in bathrobe, looking at Pete, whose eyes were pinned on me, hand on my thigh. When he returned, Dr. Lisle reported that I did not have appendicitis; the appendix is on the right. More likely, I was experiencing
mittelschmerz
. “What in God’s name is
that
?” barked Mrs. Lisle. The doctor ignored her. “I have to ask you, Susie,” he said, an uncomfortable smile anticipating the predicate. “How long have you been menstruating?” I flushed. More than a year, I said. “What does that mean, Evan?” said Mrs. Lisle.
Mittelschmerz
, said Dr. Lisle, is a pain that some women experience when the egg breaks free of the fallopian tube: I was ovulating. Everyone looked at one another. “Ah,” said Mrs. Lisle finally.

That fall, I went to boarding school.

I
n the interim, like so many girls in the early eighties, I went from schoolgirl to ravaged little punk essentially overnight. A lot of suburban girls adopted the punk uniform for the fun of wearing tarty Halloween costumes all year round: heavy makeup, ripped fishnet stockings, teensy tartan kilts. But I didn’t want to look like Billy Idol arm candy; I wanted to crush and be crushed in the mosh pit. I loved the angry, boyish brouhaha of the D.C. hard-core punk scene. I chopped off my hair and dyed it black, white, purple, blue. I wore
oversized shirts and boots. I haunted used record shops, combing through hand-printed records and zines. But I didn’t want to be, or look like, a boy, or even wholly punk. I liked looking like an androgynous waif, inhabiting a generative style netherworld of my own design. Annie Lennox looked too much like a drag queen for my asceticism (plus, the Eurythmics were too bubble gummy for me); Laurie Anderson, though unimpeachably cool, was too pretty. My esthetic eidolons formed a transgendered pantheon: David Bowie; Patti Smith; Joan of Arc; Anne Carlisle in the classic New Wave indie movie
Liquid Sky
; Sid Vicious; Paul Westerberg; Ian McCulloch; Iggy Pop; David Byrne. When I saw Bergman’s
Fanny and Alexander
in 1982 and saw the kindly, cruel, and utterly asexual character Ismael, I breathed: “Yes.”

Looking back on that stage, it’s obvious that there was more to it than just liking the look. The concomitant experiences of having been dumped by the roadside by my dad and having my incipient sexual self pried open by an older guy left me so exposed and raw that I had no time to manufacture any normal boundaries with the male counterpart in general—or to develop my own sexual personhood. I was dependent and fearful, and at the same time full of fury and resentment. I was, at some level, trying to erase my manifest sexuality. I wasn’t going to be Lolita again. In fact, my gestalt—pre-Pete—had been almost identical to the voiceless Lolita’s (the eponymous novel having always been, shockingly, my favorite not at all for its content but for my slavish admiration of its style; after I had my daughters, I couldn’t even look at it). For one thing, I had been at twelve and thirteen that selfsame snarky, fashiony pubescent girl whom puerile men and bitter women wrongly deem precocious and wise beyond her years. For another, my story followed the same crudely drawn lines. The parents are gone; the immature father figure steps in; the girl is idolized even as she is privately exploited; somehow the whole thing is made into a sickening love story. Something in me snaps when I hear people appraise my own girls as being “so grown up.” Let’s get this straight: No one is wise
beyond her years. More likely, she is coping with a situation from which she cannot escape by grasping at adult props she thinks will help her survive. I remember the first time I read Humbert Humbert’s poem, and it still reverberates in black spots: