Growing up & Other Important Mistakes a Thesis Presented to The

Growing Up & Other Important Mistakes

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Elizabeth E.W. Christman

May 2013

This thesis titled

Growing Up & Other Important Mistakes

ELIZABETH E.W. CHRISTMAN

has been approved for

the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Eric LeMay

Assistant Professor of English

Robert Frank

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

CHRISTMAN, ELIZABETH E.W., M.A., May 2013, English

Growing Up & Other Important Mistakes

Director of Thesis: Eric LeMay

This thesis is a collection of creative work. As the title implies, the collected personal essays all deal with issues having to do with my personal growth. The problem they address is the idea of personality, and how we go about acquiring one. My argument, in this thesis, is that our personality is the result of negative experiences throughout life.

The negative (referring to anything traumatic, embarrassing, scarring, etc.) leaves an impression on us, and through a psychological reinforcement, teaches us to avoid such situations and directly affects the outcome of our adult personas. Growing Up & Other

Mistakes is a series of essays that document my own personal set of "negative experiences," all of which constructed my current personality. In them, I attempt to outline my struggle and the resulting attitude.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Introduction ...... 5 Foreigners, Invisible Toddlers, & The Social Pitfalls of Tuna Salad ...... 12 Me & His Old Lady ...... 22 Amsterdam ...... 33 White Girl Dreads: A Brief Affair with Funky Hair ...... 39 A Brief Medical Journal of My Depression ...... 46 The Old Man & The Sea ...... 47 Excerpts from Liz's Personal Dictionary of Misguided, Depressed, & Otherwise Broken Things ...... 53 Bibliography ...... 58

INTRODUCTION

Philip Lopate, discusses the often melancholy tone of the personal essay in his introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay:

It might be called the voice of ‘middle age.’ If the personal

essay frequently presents a middle-aged point of view, it

may be because it is the fruit of ripened experience, or at

least realism...It is difficult to write analytically from the

middle of confusion, and youth is a confusion in which the

self and its desires have not yet sorted themselves out. A

young person still thinks it is possible—there is time

enough—to become all things: athlete and aesthete, soldier

and pacifist, anchorite and debauchee. Later, knowing

one’s fate and accepting the responsibility of that

uninnocent knowledge define the perspective of the form.

The personal essayist looks back at the choices that were

made, the roads not taken, the limiting familial and historic

circumstances, and what might be called the catastrophe of

personality.

Lopate uses the word “catastrophe” at the end of that excerpt to describe the sum of human experience. If you look up the word “catastrophe,” you will find several definitions. “The final event of the dramatic action, especially of a tragedy.” “A violent and sudden change in a feature of the earth.” And, rather obtusely, “utter failure.” 6

I think “catastrophe” is a very good word when talking about personality.

This brings us to that ever-nagging question: who are we? What makes us who we are? What is problematic about this question is that we are always changing. We learn, and our personalities evolve. That is the catastrophe Lopate refers to: personal evolution.

Marcel Proust said in The Past Recaptured, the seventh volume of his semi- autobiographical novel, “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.” What is it about our grief that eventually forms who we are?

And when I say grief here, I do not mean simply the things that affect us in a big way: death, loss, trauma, etc. We experience smaller griefs daily through small embarrassments and sadnesses. We learn from these “little griefs” as well, and they can affect us almost as profoundly as more disastrous ones. Yet our daily joys affect us minimally and are forgettable at best. Why is our happiness seemingly unimportant to the final product?

The answer is in a book. Any book. Fictional or otherwise. Or films, or television, or magazines. Any form of entertainment contains it: conflict. Without confrontation, there is no narrative, and this certainly applies to the personal essay. How many memoir- style essays have you read that discussed the author’s best summer vacation? Their happiest family dinner? Their perfect wedding? Personal essayists write about their painful memories, not their happiest ones. As Proust points out, we do not learn from our happiness. These memories often blur together. Everyday joys fade in and out of each other, becoming indistinguishable and faint. 7

Grief does not tolerate this sort of treatment. Grief is the diva of emotions. She commands the center stage and the spotlight. She demands your attention, and even if you don’t want to give it to her, she will force you. This is because, in our pain, we learn something so we can avoid pain in the future. There are lessons to be learned in these darker memories.

Lopate argues that the beginning of the end of youth—middle age—is what ultimately creates this catastrophe. Experience and reflection are required, according to

Lopate, for our experiences to ultimately mold us. He views life as an accumulation, slowly filling us until we can finally appreciate our past in our twilight years.

The problem with this idea about reflection and learning is the emphasis put on the age. The implication that the youthful and childish cannot experience or be affected by the “catastrophe of personality,” and that that catastrophe begins to end as we age doesn’t agree with my own experience. At twenty-five, I am not the same person I was at eighteen. At eighteen, I certainly wasn’t the same person I was at eight. This is because we learn through grief, and everyone can experience grief, no matter their age. Life does not culminate into an all-defining “you” after your personal tragedies begin to make sense. Life is much more like a series of stepping stones—stones constructed from our personal tragedies, big and small. Humans are, as a general rule, relatively quick witted, children especially so. The younger we are, the harder these tragedies hit us. And we learn from our pain. We appreciate them so we don’t repeat them. Then we move on to the next stepping stone. 8

We often see this sort of “learning” in memoir. Memoirs, unlike personal essays, must construct a novel-length narrative about themselves. The essayist is following the conventions of the essay form, rather than those of the novel. Like most essays, the personal essayist introduces a question or a problem. Lopate says, “Personal essayists are adept at interrogating their ignorance. Just as often as they tell us what they know, they ask at the beginning of an exploration of a problem what it is they don’t know—and why.” Some rhetoricians would call this “thesis-seaking,” and in many ways, it is. We are searching for a reason, a purpose, or a point, our readers in tow, helping them experience the grief so they can learn from our darker memories as well. In A Room of One’s Own,

Virginia Woolf points out this kind of exploration of the self:

Until she proved by summoning, beckoning and getting

together that she was not a skimmer of surfaces merely, but

had looked beneath into the depths. Now is the time, she

would say to herself at a certain moment, when without

doing anything violent I can show the meaning of all [this

life]. And she would begin—how unmistakable that

quickening is!—beckoning and summoning, and there

would rise up in memory, half forgotten, perhaps quite

trivial things in other chapters dropped by the way.

Woolf is describing here how a writer can infiltrate memories and find meaning within them. Even the most trivial of things can carry significance: one small, innocuous comment that means nothing to the speaker but everything to you; a disappointing 9 vacation; a stranger you spoke to for less than a minute who wanted desperately to mean something to you. Personal essayists are searching for the deeper meaning of their memories. We are not “skimmers of surfaces.” We try to dive deep, try to find the hidden things in our lives that made us who we are. As Proust says, “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” (The Captive).

Memoirists do not necessarily need to seek out anything, if they choose not to.

The memoir can clarify its “thesis” beforehand and simply follow the pattern set forth.

The personal essay can be said to be ever-searching, probing, investigating. The memoir, perhaps, is more like a map, retracing one’s footsteps back through time. Judith Moore makes this distinction clear in the opening to her book, Fat Girl:

This will not be a book about how I had an eating disorder

and how I conquered this disorder through therapies or

group process or antidepressants or religion or twelve-step

programs or a personal trainer or white-knuckling it or the

love of a good man (or woman). This will be the last time

in this book you will see the words ‘eating disorder’…All I

will do here is tell my story…I mistrust real-life stories that

conclude on a triumphant note. Rockettes will not arrive on

the final page and kick up their high heels and show

petticoats. This is a story about an unhappy fat girl who

became a fat woman who was happy and unhappy. 10

Judith Moore is not skimming the surface, as Woolf put it, but she is also not playing the role of the explorer or the definer. She is presenting herself and letting her reader draw her own conclusions. However, like the personal essay, she is choosing to write about the “catastrophe of personality.” Like Woolf and Lopate, Moore is writing about the more painful memories that helped define her. The first chapter of her book opens with a friend to whom she was attracted to saying, “You are too fat to fuck.” She lets that sentence sit in the reader’s stomach, lets the pain of the insult sink in before telling us that she was hurt, but that she accepted it as one of the many drawbacks of being “a fat girl.” The personal essay and the memoir have this much in common: the catastrophe of personality, the grief that molds us into who we are, is present in both.

The essays that follow are individual explorations of my own various catastrophes. I will not tell you that they are about the same thing, like becoming a woman or overcoming the failings of the men in my life or anything like that. They are and are not about these things, but they are not all about these things. What these all have in common is grief. In one way or another, these deal with a memory that I replay over and over to myself. These memories all taught me something about myself or how to be myself, whether for good or for bad. These do not come together to form a memoir.

These are stand-alone moments, personal essays invested only in themselves. They are not meant to work together to tell you something about the author. They are all catastrophes of my personality, but not catastrophes that are working in tandem to form one cohesive picture. 11

As Judith Moore says in her own introduction, all I will do in these essays is tell my story. Or, in this case, stories. I will tell you about my problems, my personal tragedies. I will tell you about the people in my life and how they affected me. I will tell you about my catastrophes.

These are not essays that will eventually lift you up into a moment of clarity. I never had a “Eureka!” moment, and there isn’t one here for you either. Here are my stepping stones, my own moments of grief. Some are obviously tragic; others are not. Yet these moments were still meaningful to me. Like Proust, I present only my personal illnesses in the hopes that you may glean some meaning from them, the way I hopefully, some day, will. “Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey” (The Past Recaptured).

FOREIGNERS, INVISIBLE TODDLERS, & THE SOCIAL PITFALLS OF TUNA

SALAD

2012

The counselor is asking me about my eating habits. At least, I think that's what he's asking. He has a thick accent, and dark hair and skin. Perhaps he's from the Middle

East or one of those former Yugoslavian countries. You're avoiding the question, a little voice says silently. He's sitting between me and the door. Maybe if I throw my purse hard enough, I can knock him (Macedonian? Turkish?) down and make a break for it. I can run out of the building, out of campus, out of town, until the question isn't even a faint echo on the wind.

The guilty part of my psyche is telling me that this is stupid. It would be much simpler to just answer the man with a wholesome, harmless lie. "Maybe," the guilt advises. "If you don't say it out loud, it'll be less true." My guilt was always coming up with things like this. Little circular logics that kept that daunting reality far, far away. A part of me believes it. My words could shape reality. My flaws could, with a few removed nouns and adjectives here and there, disappear. Who could say otherwise?

Most of me knows this is bullshit. Most of me knows that in reality, reality exists alone. My words are just an interpretation, a series of movements around that reality, spinning it into understanding and comprehension for others. My only choice is to dance the dance well, or to let myself trip.

So I tell him about all the hours in my life that were dedicated to food. The consumption of food, the planning of food, the obsession, the digestion, and finally, the 13 elimination and regurgitation of food. I tell him about the piles and piles of minutes spent in front of a mirror, the red marker in my mind underlining and crossing out bits and pieces of me until I was perfect. I tell him how that made me cry. I force the words out of my mouth and let them spill into the counselor's lap. They burn my throat, and make me hate myself. But I just keep hacking them up, keep spewing words and truths at the floor until there's nothing left in me.

I don't feel better.

1997

When my stress eating mostly involved lima beans and second helpings of tater tots, my parents weren’t terribly concerned. Moving to a new state, leaving home schooling in favor of public school, leaving the city in favor of the country, was all a bit much. It didn’t help that most of the kids in my class regarded me with the same morbid curiosity they would a shrunken head in a curio case. Disregarding all the normal problems that came with trying to make friends with kids from completely different socioeconomic, cultural, and religious backgrounds, there was also a language barrier.

Yes, we both spoke English. But my English was a completely different English from their English. I had an accent, they said, while I informed them that, no, they had the accent…

The move wasn’t going well, and I wasn’t adjusting well, but as long as the worst thing I was doing to my body involved a love for potatoes and veggies, my parents figured at least I was getting my vitamins. It was about all they could do. 14

It wasn’t until the candy that they started to worry. I ate more Hershey’s and

Reese cups than any three kids should, and it was only escalating. I’d buy Fudge Rounds and Nutter Butters from the grocery down the street on my way to and from school, and pocket a few for later. I demolished candy. I was an unstoppable sugar machine, and my parents looked at me with increasing alarm.

Then they had an idea. A tricky, devilish, parenting idea.

One morning, I came downstairs to find a glass bowl the size of a tire sitting on the dining room table. It was filled with M&M’s, my candy of choice. My body seemed to slow down in that moment, as my jaw hung limp and my eyes became a sugar-coated glaze. My attention, mind, soul, became a funnel. A single-minded, chocolate eating funnel.

It was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.

Mom was waiting nearby. She stood up and came to me. She told me I could have as much as I wanted. Dad would later agree that I could have as much as I wanted. He wasn’t a morning person. I never saw him once before schoo. Instead of trying to rein me in, they took off the leash.

For two days, my diet consisted almost entirely of M&M’s. Whenever the bowl began to empty, my parents simply refilled it. It was like a fairy tale: The Bowl of

Chocolate that Never Emptied. I thought it was heaven.

The thing about sugar is, eventually, there’s a crash. And, boy, I crashed and burned. By the third day, my body had had enough of me eating whatever the hell I felt like. It retaliated. 15

That night, when I crawled out of the darkness of withdrawal and came down for dinner, I told my parents that I didn’t want any more candy. The bowl disappeared into a kitchen cabinet. My parents were intolerably smug.

That is, until I found the cookies…

2008

We were having dinner with his parents when my boyfriend said, "Liz is such a good eater."

For a moment, I thought maybe there was another Liz at the table, perhaps too small to see in the overstuffed dining chairs. Maybe there was a toddler just out of sight with my name, someone you wouldn't expect to have mastered the fine art of getting food into the mouth. But there was only me.

"What do you mean?"

"You always eat everything on your plate. And then you have more!" He laughed and smiled at me. I half expected a pat on the head. "You know…a good eater. You like to eat a lot." His parents laughed a little.

After I made the decision not to stab his hand with my fork, my boyfriend began to call me "a good eater" on a regular basis. Whenever I reached for a roll or helped myself to more potatoes, he chimed with a grin, "You're such a good eater!" I should have dumped him for being intolerably condescending. Later, I would dump him for being a coke addict and for refusing to treat his bipolar disorder. Oddly, his reason was that he didn’t want the medication to change who he was. When I pointed out the 16 hypocrisy of refusing to take your meds because it would “change you,” then snorting a line and effectively becoming a manic basket case, he told me I just didn’t understand.

At this time, however, I was attracted to the independence that came with having an older boyfriend, even one who had to live with his mom and dad. Free car rides, access to alcohol and other older people who seemed endlessly cool. And he always had the best weed. These were all very important to nineteen-year old me. More important than offensive jokes at the dinner table. “You’re such a good eater…”

I had never thought of eating as a trait. Although, in a way, I suppose my boyfriend was right. I was a good eater. I could've taken my act on the road, wowed the

Midwest as I helped myself to seconds, and made the coastal towns gasp as I made room for dessert. After all, I had a natural talent for eating. I always had.

In fact, I was a little too good. My boyfriend had stumbled upon my monstrous secret. My eating was self-destructive, a series of punishments, rewards, punishments, rewards, forever. Fasting followed by indulgence, followed by guilt. I was filled with it.

Filled with guilt and disgust.

All the invisible eyes tracing my fat rolls that I had always assumed were there became real in my boyfriend's gaze. "You're such a good eater" followed me to restaurants, to the grocery store, everywhere. I wanted to wrap myself in thinness. I wanted to hide behind a little body. I wanted to be invisible.

2005

Dani, my best friend who I would later decide was a bitch, Bryan, her boyfriend who I had loved since the 8th grade, Josh, who I always thought was a stuck-up asshole, 17 and I sat at lunch together every day in high school. I was the only one who packed my lunch. They always had trays of square-cut pizza with too much tomato sauce, or something labeled “lasagna” that bore very little resemblance to lasagna, or maybe they’d have grilled cheese or chicken tenders or mac-n-cheese. Whatever they had, there were always some brownish vegetables that were mostly left alone. Maybe some pasty applesauce, too.

I had carrots.

Bryan said I ate like a bird. A malnourished one. Dani said I needed to eat more.

Josh never commented because he was a stuck-up asshole. None of them believed it was a real problem. I was a relatively big girl. Too big, certainly, to have an eating problem.

Not big enough, surely, to have an eating problem.

And I ate. A small something at six-thirty before I had to catch the bus. Some carrots to tide me over until dinner. I didn’t like eating at school, anyway. Big girls who ate were “fat.” Big girls who didn’t were “big girls.” I didn’t want to be “fat” anymore.

And I wanted to be just “a girl.” No additives.

So I had carrots. Because they left me hungry and empty and no one had a good reason to call me a fat-ass. I could wear my hunger like a badge.

Dani always had a chocolate fudge brownie covered in sprinkles with her lunch.

She saw me watching her unwrap it the same way a man might watch a woman undress.

“Do you want some? I’ll split it with you.”

“No,” I said reluctantly but firmly. “But…could I smell it?” Dani looked confused for a moment, then laughed and said sure. And I took the brownie and inhaled as much 18 chocolatey air as I could, letting the smell fill my stomach. Everyone laughed about it and the “brownie smelling” became a daily joke. Because Liz, obviously, didn’t have an eating problem.

1998

In the third grade, I brought my lunch to school in a soft, pink lunchbox. Every day, in this lunchbox, I had the following: a tuna fish sandwich on a Kaiser roll wrapped in cellophane, a chocolate pudding cup or a package of Snackwell’s Devil Food Cakes, and a bag of carrots. I might as well have been eating deep fried dog ears with a side of pinecones as far as the other kids were concerned. Tuna salad was about as acceptable as webbed toes. It was not regulation school lunch, i.e., bologna on the kind of white bread my parents deemed barely good enough for ducks. A dab of mustard was exotic.

Mayonnaise in small quantities was acceptable. Lunchables were very chic at the time, but not quite as chic as buying a school lunch. That tray seemed like a VIP pass to normalcy. Ham or turkey were the old reliables of the lunchmeat world. Fish, however, was right out. Fish was odd. Fish was smelly. Fish came with other strange things, like salt, pepper, onions, or celery (although if my mother had ever dared put celery in the tuna salad, I would sooner pull my pants down during math class than eat it).

My non-regulation lunch, however, was not why I tried my best to tuck myself at a lonely corner of the table during lunchtime. My tuna salad didn’t do me any favors, but

I was already on the outskirts of the social hierarchy. I was what the other mothers politely called “funny.” I had a funny disposition, a funny attitude, a funny je ne se quoi.

I had funny curls and funny clothes with way too many funny neon colors and a lot of 19 stretchy polyester bits for a nine year old. I liked to play funny games that involved pretending I was something I was not. This was a very disturbing concept for the other children. They didn’t really get the idea of make-believe. The girls liked pretending to have boyfriends and Dawson’s Creek and making jewelry for their besties. The boys liked chasing the girls and kickball. Trucks were also OK. Running around screaming things like, “The troll king is coming! He has an army! And dragons! We must flee or perish!” didn’t exactly make me Princess Popular. It did ensure that I would always try to stay the hell away from everyone else at lunchtime. Lunchtime was great when you had friends. When you didn’t, it meant the people with friends would try to amuse themselves with the people who didn’t. In other words, me.

What I was to being an oddball, Rachel Warrant was to being popular. She was like some kind of social elite machine. She was born with a tan and bouncy hair that didn’t need much product or attention but got plenty of both. By eight, she was an expert with a mascara wand and knew all the ins and outs of eyeshadow application. She told people that next summer she was going to New York to join the Spice Girls. Some people believed her. Rachel Warrant was, in a word, unreal. And today, the queen of the schoolyard was sitting dangerously close to me. And she smelled something fishy.

And today, the queen of the schoolyard was sitting dangerously close to me. And she smelled something fishy.

“You’re eating that?” She pointed a long, painted finger at the sandwich I had just unwrapped. 20

“I like tuna.” I tried to sound dismissive. Maybe if I pretended like it was no big deal, she would get distracted and go back to talking about nail polish or whatever the hell those girls talked about. It didn’t work.

“That’s gross,” she said it like it was a commandment, some kind of lunchtime gospel that I had sullied with my fish-based sandwich. “What else are you eating?” I didn’t want to show her, but not showing her would produce a far worse outcome than any kind of mockery she could spit out: rumors. At least if she saw what I was eating, no one could say I had a bag of worms or something. Well, they might, but this significantly reduced the chances of that happening.

After seeing the contents of my lunchbox, Rachel said something completely unexpected: “Do you know how many calories are in there?”

My nine year old self was very confused. I had, of course, heard of calories. I knew they had to do with keeping track of food, which was something I was most definitely not interested in doing. Counting calories seemed like it would slow down the consuming process, and that didn’t sound tasty to me. But I had assumed that calories were an adult activity, like my dad’s post-dinner scotch or going to the bank. What use did people my age have for counting calories?

“I only eat 1200 calories a day,” Rachel declared proudly, twirling her hair and gazing off at the cement wall. She then began to list all the things she ate in a day. At nine years old, another nine year old was laying out her diet in front of me. And for the first time, I felt really sorry for Rachel Warrant, who had abandoned her childhood and was obsessing over something as silly as food. 21

“Silly, silly, silly,” I thought.

ME & HIS OLD LADY

Our relationship was born of the 21st century. It was new and exciting, living in the glory of the post-Y2K scare. It was composed of wires and motherboards, moving at

100 megabytes a second (we met on Facebook). The first time we met in person was at

Stephen's, a restaurant famous at the time for its large papier-mache art that hung from the ceiling (my favorite was an obese woman swimming in an innertube). We doodled on the paper tablecloth and talked about politics. We drank wine and he paid with a credit card. It felt adult. It felt mature. And it was, for a while, the most mature relationship I had ever been in. It was picnics and movies with subtitles and live jazz shows. It was turbulent nights out at the bars and lazy nights in watching bad movies.

For a while, it was a lot of fun.

Ryan and I had been dating for a few months. He was older. He smoked Camels, and his fingers were yellow and rough from the habit. A gentle wisp of the smell of tobacco followed him everywhere. He was like a well-dressed ashtray. He wore a leather jacket and played the guitar, the piano, and the accordion. He had a special fondness for ragtime and hip-hop, and was currently getting over a nasty coke addiction. My mother didn't get what I saw in him. To a nineteen year old, he was perfect.

We were somewhere in rural New York, near the Catskills, where there was still a stubborn layer of snow clinging to the mountainside. The landscape was imposing. Low, jagged mountains squatted against the horizon, huddled under the sky. Their sides threatened to brush against each other and rain rocky debris down upon unsuspecting tourists who dared drive along the narrow road carved haphazardly into the stony wall. 23

Ryan's little blue Jetta was not fitted for such a road. This Volkswagen was designed for leisurely trips through picturesque villages with clearly defined traffic lanes. If this car were a person, he'd eat too much cake and take long naps every afternoon. This was a car that enjoyed the finer things. It was not luxurious, but contentedly comfortable. It was the

Bilbo Baggins of German engineering. And as the Jetta clung desperately to the twisty mountain road, I could almost hear it longing for its pipe and a comfy place to lie down.

He had suggested that, over spring break, we take a vacation, just the two of us.

The prospect of a springtime romantic getaway instantly produced images of hot sand and icy tropical drinks and cool sea foam brushing lightly against my toes. I agreed that a vacation was a good idea. The sunny beach in my mind, however, was mercilessly crushed and swept under the rug with one word: skiing.

Now, my mind was flooded with aching calf muscles and snow that ignored the specially-designed pants you tucked carefully over your boots and soaked your socks with icy malice.

“Everyone goes to the beach,” Ryan had said, his voice waxing acid; he emphasized “everyone” like he knew them personally, and just plain didn't like them.

“Let's do something different. Something special.”

Ephebophilia is a sexual attraction to mid to late adolescents experienced by adults; hebephilia is an attraction to younger pubescents. These two terms often get lumped with pedophilia, the sexual attraction to children. Gerontophilia is the quiet, mild- mannered cousin of these forms of chronophilia.—arousal stimulated by persons from a certain age group. Gerontophilia is the sexual preference for the elderly. Pedophiles are 24 intoxicated by the corruptible innocence children embody; ephebophiles and hebephiles are looking for youthful, barely blossoming girls and boys (nymphets, as Nabokov called them). Gerontophiles, on the other hand, have no interest in childish naivete. They are drawn to experience, to aging skin and bodies retreating from fertility and functionality into quiet submission to time. Age is not just wise, but sexy. Desirable. Undeniable.

Jerry wasn’t attracted to these things. He was more like Humphrey Humphrey and his nymphets. He was twenty-three when he met his future wife. She was about fifteen.

We were staying with a homeless, middle-aged musician named Peggy. She was house-sitting for an elderly woman who lived just outside of Woodstock. No one told me exactly why she was without a permanent residence, but after meeting her, I assumed it was from an incurable case of eccentric.

“I've know Peggy since I was a kid,” Ryan explained to me in the car. “There's always been a lot of sexual tension between us. But we've talked it out.”

This was when I started to suspect I hated my boyfriend.

The details of this conversation between Ryan and our homeless hostess are vague and particularly well-guarded pieces of dirty laundry. The only soiled information I could steal from the hamper was that Ryan had been fourteen, a budding, youthful boy who was erupting with acne and Oedipal love. I wondered if Peggy actually felt the same way about him at the time, or if she'd been humoring Ryan to avoid hurting him. It wasn't unreasonable to assume that a naïve woman might lead a young man on so he won't get his heart broken. A perfectly reasonable explanation. 25

The temporary apartment was small—a sort of senior citizen bachelorette pad— and mostly cat-themed. There were shiny china cats with thinly-painted eyes, and porcelain plates with kittens sitting calmly in gold-framed white voids. Carefully stitched cat eyes stared vacantly from most of the cushions and blankets. If I had been brave enough to go through the dresser drawers, there surely would have been some spectacular cat sweaters, the kind that are framed in daisies. The apartment also featured one live cat: a fat, orange tabby who specialized in looking disinterested. His name was forgettable; one of those cliché, cute animal names, like Sgt. McTubbums or Whoopsy Poopsy.

Peggy greeted us in the gravel parking area as the Jetta came to a thankful stop.

My heart sank. She looked fantastic for her age, or, I begrudgingly thought, for anyone's age. Her hair—gray, courtesy of Father Time—shined in tight, bouncy curls that vaguely reminded me of a silver fox. Her skin was very tan and freckled, and her smile was white and enthusiastic. Her breasts were infuriatingly perky. I noticed glumly as she led us inside that her ass was fabulous.

But that didn't matter, because looks weren't everything. Solid relationships were built on compatibility. If your personalities didn't mesh, it didn't matter how fabulous your ass was. Unfortunately, Ryan and Peggy were like peanut butter and chocolate.

They talked endlessly about music and music culture, about spirituality and happiness and other hippie bullshit. Peggy was not very religious, but very spiritual. This is the mantra often uttered by pseudo-religious types who nervously stand between religion

(finding it too dogmatic and restrictive) and atheism (finding it too depressing) and choose a happy middle ground instead. Peggy was one of these. Ryan was visibly 26 comforted by her fluffy, easy-to-swallow ideology. He was often depressed by death, and

Peggy easily filled the void with her happy-go-lucky-sunshine-and-lollipops approach to life, conveniently wrapped up in her attractive, maternal body.

I could not fill this void in the same way. I was everything Peggy wasn’t. I was young, depressing, realistic, an atheist, a couch potato, and about as musical as a sofa.

Looking at them, all I saw were similarities. Except, of course, for Peggy’s crow’s feet.

I can imagine Karen’s attraction to the older man who pulled up in his old truck outside of the high school, leaning against the bumper, arms crossed, tonguing a cigarette. It probably stemmed from that Jurassic part of the brain, that reptilian desire that lurks in the back of our thoughts, flicking its forked tongue and telling you, “Yes. Go for the Marlon Brando bad-boy. He is strong. He is sexy,” while your better judgment frantically talks about responsibility and long-term commitment in a shrill squeak. She probably wouldn't even question what a man who was so much older than she was was doing hanging out by a high school.

I can imagine Jerry, too. The wolf in the sheep's costume, stalking the schoolyard, drooling over barely formed hips and breasts. I can imagine Jim yearning for those young, bony bodies that were still, in so many ways, the bodies of children. But I don't like to.

The Urban Dictionary defines jam as follows: two or more musicians making music together, but not an official band. It took Peggy and Ryan approximately half an hour to get out their instruments—a fiddle and an accordion, respectively—and begin 27 making vaguely folkish music together. I watched helplessly from the 4x4 dining nook as

Mr. Cuddlesnuff rubbed his head against my hand in a way that suggested he was merely bored, and I was the most amusing thing available. My boyfriend and our hostess sat on the couch, running their fingers quickly up and down their instruments, rocking back and forth in time with each others' bodies, knocking their knees together, sweating with enthusiasm and laughing...

I told them I needed some air.

Karen and Jerry were married while she was still in high school. Her parents told her not to. Her friends probably told her not to. Common sense should have told her not to. But she was experiencing that hyper-love young people often experience, that love that seems to tear at your insides and exists outside of any partner or actual feelings you may have. Like many young girls, I'm sure Karen thought she had found The One, her

Knight in Shining Armor who would rescue her and whisk her away into a sunset that never ended. I'm sure she thought she was some kind of country princess or rural

Cinderella, and this was her happily ever after.

Two days later, someone suggested we go skiing. “Yes,” I thought, remembering the warm sand and hot sun I was missing, and the forty-eight hour musical interlude I'd just endured. “Why don't we do that.”

We took Peggy's SUV, a forest green Jeep from the 90's. It thundered along the mountainous terrain in a way that would have made the modest Jetta cry. We mostly 28 talked about Old-Time music festivals, which resulted in me staring very sullenly out the window. Ryan enthusiastically fed me a line his mother had used on me several times:

“Republicans play Bluegrass, Democrats play Old-Time.” I nodded, not really understanding the difference between the two. Something about how you play the banjo, but to my untrained ears, it was all the same twang. Peggy agreed, then talked endlessly about her Women's Studies minor she had received sometime in the late 70's. I wondered if Ryan's parents had even known each other in the late 70's.

The resort was mostly deserted, save for the locals, identifiable by their modest, personalized gear, and the hardcore enthusiasts, who were wearing enough neon to dress every teenager from the 1980's. Ryan wondered out loud where everyone was. I informed him that they'd probably all gone to the beach, adding an edge of iciness to my voice that was excessively inappropriate, but immensely satisfying.

Stuffed into my unflattering ski suit (I resembled a lumpy, burnt marshmallow strapped to skis) Ryan and I were left to practice on the Bunny Hill while Peggy, her body still managing to look trim and sporty, warmed up on the real mountain that towered menacingly behind us. Since we were at the same experience level (zero) I assumed we would both be reasonably bad. This was half true: I was very bad. For the first five minutes, I focused on standing. This endeavor was met with little success.

Introducing movement produced horrible results. Meanwhile, my boyfriend whizzed past me in flashy zigzags like he'd been doing it for years. As I attempted to stomp up the slope, toddlers rushing past me in a blur of colorful woolen snow caps, he called down to me from the top: 29

“Enough practice! Let's go try the mountain!” He said it with a kind of boyish enthusiasm that only succeeded in filling me with bitter exasperation, not unlike pouring butane on an oil fire. I smiled and called back, “Alright,” and barely saved myself from falling face first into the snow.

We waited by the ski lift Peggy had indicated as our rendezvous. When she came back down, her face was red and gleaming. I tried not to imagine doing things to it with my ski pole.

“Shall we?” she asked, and we lined up and waited for the lifts to scoop us up and carry us to the top. I watched the skiers beneath us, shredding and weaving and appearing to be having a great time, and quietly hated them all.

My performance on the Bunny Hill should have been a huge indication that I was not ready for anything remotely athletic or challenging. There was a voice coming from my Common Sense. It was screaming. When was the last time you did a stretch, let alone played a sport? You've never skied before, you have no natural ability, and you're about to throw yourself down a mountain?! There's still time to duck out and try to convince the bartender at the lodge that you're twenty-one! I smothered it under an emotional tumor of jealousy, frustration, and denial. This was my romantic vacation. I was here to have fun. I was going to prove to Ryan, Peggy, and myself that I could have fun.

Karen had six children by the time she was in her mid-thirties. Two of them miscarried. There were two girls: Sara, the oldest and my peer, and Lisa, the youngest.

People often muttered quietly about Jerry and his daughters. He was always a little too close to them, always touching them a little too much, joking about their bodies and their 30 sexualities in ways that were inappropriate for a father. They found bruises on Lisa's thighs once, I heard, but nothing came of it. I don't think anyone wanted to believe that this man had married this girl to make more girls for himself. No one wanted to think about his incestuous harem, his pre-pubescent farm, his chronophile paradise.

Maybe that's why I could find out so little about Peggy and Ryan's relationship.

When an older person takes a younger person as their lover, there's a sense that someone is at a disadvantage: he doesn't know what he's getting himself into, she's using him, why can't they find someone their own age, etc. The age difference, even without the inbred connotations, gives your skin the creepy crawlies. The idea of the old and the new co- mingling their bodies, the thought of the near-death and the near-birth uniting in carnal bliss, of that snake of existence coiling in on itself and eating its tail, is too profound and disturbing for most well-adjusted people to contemplate for too long.

Turning resulted in falling. Getting up resulted in falling. Downward movement resulted in falling. It took a matter of minutes for me to become the very likeness of Dan

Akroyd at the end of Ghostbusters when he's covered in a fresh coat of Staypuft. I could feel my legs and hips throbbing with fresh bruises. Ryan and Peggy, patient at first, quickly forged ahead and out of sight, and I was left to the mercy of the skiers. They didn't even attempt to feign pity. They openly snickered at the sweaty, marshmallow girl with damp hair barely avoiding a tree, only to fly into a snowdrift.

Three runs later, there wasn't a part of my body that didn't ache, and the skiers were playing hacky-sack with my pride somewhere on the trail. I attempted to play it cool when I asked if we could leave: 31

“I hurt. Everywhere. I don't want to ski anymore.” I tried not to whimper.

“Oh...” Ryan and Peggy looked at each other, both disappointed. “One more run?

Then we'll go.” I attempted to adhere to this seemingly innocent request, but my body refused to cooperate and demanded to sit down every few minutes. My companions were gone almost immediately, and as I vainly tried to catch up, it dawned on me that at this pace, it could take hours to reach the bottom, and my energy was waning fast. I decided to adopt a “fuck it” attitude and chucked what was left of my tattered dignity into the pine trees. Ignoring the confused faces that normally flew past me, but had taken the time to slow down and watch, I took off my skis and slid down on the sled God gave me: my cold, bruised ass. People called from the lifts and watched in amusement as I slid by, legs stretched out ahead and skis resting in my lap. I waved at a few of them, a genuine smile on my face.

At the bottom, people raised their eyebrows at me as I hoisted my battered body off the ground with the grace of a drunken gazelle. I dumped my skis in the depository by the deck, where the more glamorous looking resort patrons nursed brightly colored cocktails and laughed at nothing in particular, and promised myself a hot bath and something really unhealthy to eat.

It was about this time that I noticed Peggy and Ryan were not on the deck. I couldn't have beaten them down the mountain; my rump was not designed to out-slide skis. At least not on snow. I searched the patio, checking all the sunbathers' faces before looking in the changing room and cafeteria. No Ryan. No Peggy. Beyond exhausted, beyond upset, I slumped into an armchair, and waited. 32

Half an hour passed.

They came from the ski lifts. They were sweaty and smiling. They looked happy.

I thought it resembled the kind of happy that you feel when you've done something you've been waiting to try. Maybe I was imagining it.

“Sorry,” Ryan said, standing with his skis. “We decided to go a couple more times.”

“Oh,” I replied quietly, noting the glances and barely hidden looks, their bodies so close as they stared at each other across the generations' gap. I didn't know if I believed him.

AMSTERDAM

I could tell you the things you expect me to tell you about Amsterdam—the cafes, the drugs, the prostitutes, the outdoor toilets. Instead, I’m going to tell you about the buildings. Something a lot of Americans don’t realize about Amsterdam is how incredibly old it is. The oldest building is the Oude Kerk (Old Church), a giant curvature of stained glass and 800 year old wood. The stone floor is a graveyard, hiding 14th century skeletons in its dank underbelly.

The city becomes younger and younger the farther out you get. From the air, it doesn’t look that different from the growth rings of a tree, newness spiraling outward.

The closer you get to the center, the older everything gets. Modern buildings peel away to reveal the baroque, renaissance, and medieval. Tall, squished-together buildings that are larger at the top seem to lean over the streets and watch you with their thick, opaque glass eyes. You half expect to turn a corner and find some wizards huddled together, twirling their tangled bears and looking over strange, leather books. Or perhaps just peasants, soot covered and wrapped in rags.

The most ancient part of Amsterdam is De Wallen (The Quays). The cobbled streets are so narrow that they only permit the passage of the most European of cars.

Restaurants have ingredients delivered in cramped Volkswagens and short hatchbacks.

The buildings seem to hunch over you with their age. Even the air smells older, perhaps from the lack of car fumes. This cornucopia of history, this blast from the past, is more commonly known as the red light district. This is where my hotel was. 34

If I looked out the Western window, I could see the decadently ornate train station, rippling in gold and mosaic. Further off, I could make out the Westertoren’s steeple. If I squinted, I could see the blue crown that sat at the top.

If I had had an Eastern window, one that faced the road where the hotel’s entrance was, I would see women in tights bodices sitting on display in windows like life size dolls, and theatres advertising, “Live Porn!”

I know I said I wouldn’t talk about prostitutes, but it’s kind of hard to avoid.

But what I really want to tell you about Amsterdam, what I really want to elaborate on, are the French fries.

My father and I bond over very few things. This is not because we don’t have a lot in common. On the contrary, our interests are mirror images of each other. When I was two years old, I woke up in the middle of the night. I could hear my father downstairs, still awake. I went down, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and curious. He was sitting on the couch with the lamp on, a glass of bourbon in his hand. He had just started watching the original King Kong. “Would you like to watch it with me?”

Whenever dad tells this story, he always smiles at the end when he says, “When Kong falls off the Empire State Building, Elizabeth turned to me and asked, ‘Monkey go home now?’”

This spurred my love for old movies. My dad and I would watch Laurel and

Hardy, The Birds, North by Northwest, We’re No Angels…it was our own little world of black and white, just for us. 35

We still talk about old movies. We also both read an excessive amount of science fiction, and both enjoy ancient history. We never do not have things to talk about. Yet we rarely talk. Dad and I seem to stumble around one another socially, tripping over interests and conversations, kicking our feet and itching to just crawl back into comfortable silence. Perhaps this is because we’re both antisocial. Maybe it’s because my dad was nearing his seventies and had run out of gas. Maybe it’s because I lost a considerable amount of respect for him after I realized he was a lush.

But we talked about French fries. Those fried taters managed to bring us together.

Before mom, dad had another wife. Carol. I know nothing about her except that she died and dad still buys her favorite perfume for my mother. This always results in a huffy fight that goes nowhere. “Dick. Carol wore this!”

Carol and Dad, apparently, spent a considerable amount of time in Amsterdam, doing what people usually do there. Dad always had drug stories. He used to be a substitute teacher, and when he wasn’t ignoring the syllabus and reading Dickens or talking about Russian history, he was telling one of his drug stories. Students loved him for it. He was quirky and honest and he swore, and they loved him for it.

Dad never told me drug stories. I understood why, what with me being his only daughter and all. Nevertheless, I was jealous when I found out through a student in one of his classes that my dad used to smoke pot. That should have been our bonding moment, I thought, pouting inwardly.

But dad told me about Amsterdam.

I came home to visit before my big trip to Europe. During dinner, dad told me: 36

“Amsterdam? Carol and I went to Amsterdam in the late sixties. They served these French fries on the street with sides of mayonnaise.” He raised his very bushy, very

German eyebrows, clearly expecting this to get a reaction.

“So that’s why you eat them like that!” Mom and I always teased dad for dipping his fries in mayo. We thought it was gross, one of his weird quirks. Like coughing and farting at the same time. But no. It was something he picked up in Europe.

“Hmm. Anyway, you should try them while you’re there.”

“I will. I will.” I thought this was a lie. I thought I had no intention of eating fried potato wedges smothered in mayonnaise. But I guess I was telling the absolutely disgusting and also delicious but maybe just drunk truth.

My friend Allison and I arrived in foul spirits. Amsterdam was our first stop, but immediately, the city had been soured for us. Our plane out of London had been cancelled twice. Once in the evening, and again when we were twenty infuriating minutes from our destination. Engine troubles, we were told. Despite dashing through the airport and outrunning the other passengers, we couldn’t get another flight until the late afternoon. We didn’t get to our hotel until after seven p.m. We’d lost a whole day and had spent three days in airports and on planes. So far, Amsterdam seemed pretty uninviting.

Nevertheless, Allison and I were determined to have fun. A friend of her dad’s who’d been living in the city for some twenty years met us at our hotel, offering to take us to a café and give us a little tour. 37

This is when we did the things one normally does in Amsterdam. This is not a story about those things, so I won’t give you the details. Needless to say, after several hours, we were both making thorough fools of ourselves.

After our tour guide, having lead us up and down the main drag and letting us gape at the bodies for sale had gone home for the evening, we decided that we were really, really hungry. It wasn’t a normal, everyday kind of hunger. It was the kind of hunger that would not be satisfied until you drowned it in excessive amounts of grease and fat. We thought and thought, and I remembered the French fries dad had told me about. I told Allison, and she said, “What the hell.”

So we searched, and were quickly rewarded. Apparently, the trend wasn’t dated.

Only a couple of blocks from our hotel was a sign that read, “Frites.” Fries! We headed for it. And lo and behold, the only thing for sale was French fries served in a cone, covered in a heart-stopping layer of mayonnaise. But not just mayonnaise. Garlic mayonnaise, jalapeno mayonnaise, light mayonnaise, chipotle mayonnaise. I had no idea that such flavors of mayo existed. We both chickened out and settled for large cones with the simple, classic mayonnaise. Our first bites were slow, hesitant, fearful. Our faces lit up with surprise as the sweet, heavy tang paired with the salty fries delighted our mouths.

“Why have I been eating French fries any other way?” Allison exclaimed as we stumbled back to the hotel. We sat down in the lobby at a long table, picking the last few fries out the cones, refusing to give up a single bite. 38

When I came home, I told my dad that the fries were delicious. When we eat

French fries now, we look at each other knowingly, feeling sorry for everyone else who is still, rather quaintly, dipping their fries in ketchup.

WHITE GIRL DREADS: A BRIEF AFFAIR WITH FUNKY HAIR

I got the idea at a protest in Washington, D.C. It was 2004, the March for

Women’s Lives. Most of us were marching for the right to “control our bodies.” We had this shared nightmare that men carrying Bibles and women in long skirts would take all of our birth control and flush it down the toilet, that all of the Planned Parenthoods in the country would be set on fire. But there were other concerns. Lesbians stood together, holding hands and looking defiant; witches wore pointy hats and let their untethered breasts hang in loose blouses; women with big hips and tight jeans hula hooped across the mall, and this was before twenty-somethings with bleached hair could be seen doing the same thing in front of Hooters. It was so anarchic, so blissfully chaotic and ugly and beautiful. To a fifteen year old from rural Appalachian Ohio, holding a sign with a woman’s naked body with my mother and swearing at pro-lifers who leaned over blockades hissing and preaching at us couldn’t have been more delightful.

It was a little girl who planted the seed in my head. She was young, no more than eleven, slim and blonde. She reminded me of a little pixie in her earthen clothes. I remember her as not having any shoes, but not in a sad, depressing way. Tucked behind her ears were a handful of thin, pale dreads. Later on, in our bus back to Ohio, I would remember her and her hair. I would be lying down on the seat staring at the shadowed ceiling when I asked my mom, “Do you think I’d look good with dreads?”

Within a few months, what had started as a fleeting fancy turned into unbridled desire. Yes. I was going to be that girl. The girl with the dreadlocks. I would wear baggy brown clothes and boots covered in polka dots. I would dismiss make-up as a tool of my 40 enslavement by the patriarchy. My jewelry would consist of buttons covered in swear words and political statements. Yes. I was going to be that girl.

Being that girl was a lot of work. In the mornings, I washed my hair with

Dreadhead Dread Soap, a special tangling shampoo. When I came home from school, my mother and I spent approximately two hours waxing every lock. We dipped our fingers into the yellow wax, rolled and rolled it into my hair until my dreads shined and the hairs clung together. Each one was individually rubber banded, to keep the base clear of tangles. They broke out during the day, so I had to shake the snapped bands out of my hair, and we replaced them as we went. Mom and I talked casually as we rolled, rolled, rolled my hair in front of the television. We watched The X-Files and talked about how

Dana Scully’s face looked like a mish-mash of features borrowed from other women. Or sometimes we’d watch Monk and sing along to the theme, trying to imitate Randy

Newman’s gravelly voice with little success. You’d better pay attention, or this world we love so much. Might. Just. Kill. You. I could be wrong, now. BUT I DON’T THINK SO!

At this point, we’d both start laughing at our outburst of enthusiasm and couldn’t finish the song.

My mother and I used to sit like this when I was little. We'd sit in bed after she came home from work, her long hair folded into a sensible bun. She was a waitress at a restaurant called The Townhouse, and she often didn’t come home until very late, smelling of grease and sweat. But the perfume she wore always clung stubbornly to her hair. This is because she’d always dab some behind her ears. “Wrists and ears,” she’d tell me. “The heat makes the perfume rise.” She’d sit down next to me and give me a dollar 41 from her tips. Then she’d take down her hair. I liked to watch her take the bobby pins out, methodically and slowly sliding each section out of place. I liked to watch her put it back up again the next day, enjoyed the rhythm of her fingers kneading her hair into neatness.

We were still folding hair together. Folding it into a designed disorder.

I was becoming that girl. The girl who spent hours and hours on her hair.

At first, my dreads just looked like very small, frizzy ponytails. Nobody commented on them; people did stranger things with their hair. As they slowly tangled, took on their intended Medusa-like shape, people began to raise their eyebrows. More than one person told me it looked like I had a bunch of poops on my head. I kind of liked this better than when people complimented them. I didn't want to be liked. I wasn't liked anyway. I was surrounded by born-again farmers and their children. My family had, in the seven years we had lived there, been accused of being witches, Satanists, atheists, and communists. Many people with more good-natured dispositions referred to us as “the hippies of Pennsville,” chuckling and smiling at our hand painted peace signs. There had been other problems, too. Once, a group of boys I had never met before threw rocks at me on the playground while calling me a fat ass. I was ten at the time. When I was old enough to start developing opinions on things, I became politically liberal (A bad thing to be in rural Southeastern Ohio. This was at the height of George W.'s popularity; my classmates and I got into shouting matches until we were red in the face.) I was also probably a lesbian, always said with a wrinkled nose and a turned lip, like it was some kind of Voodoo gris-gris that would curse the speaker if spoken too loudly or too clearly. 42

So I wasn't interested in being liked. I was interested in making people uncomfortable, in making them cringe and shrink away from my strange ugliness. I wanted to be offensive. So I made myself a hideous thing, in any way I could. I took up swearing and used it liberally. I received my first detention, in fact, for swearing at a boy in the seventh grade. He insulted me, I don't remember how, so I turned to him and said he was a little bitch if he thought I cared. My teacher overheard this, and took us out into the hallway. After she scolded me and asked if I had anything to say for myself, I told her, "Well, he is a little bitch." Another boy in my science class flirted with me so I would let him copy my work. I scratched his arm so badly every time he attempted this that he bled. I began belching in the lunchroom, just to make anyone near me uncomfortable. I got a reputation for being something of a bitch, and I was delighted.

When I saw those little blonde dreadlocks, I knew they were the next logical step in my little rebellion.

I’d like to clarify something about dreadlocks: they’re not hair. At least, not in the strictest sense. Dreadlocks sit like long strands of stone on your head, weighing down heavily against your neck and shoulders. You don’t twirl dreads around your finger while you’re daydreaming about what Brad Pitt looks like naked. You don’t run off to the bathroom between classes to check your dreads with the other girls frantically teasing and combing in front of the mirrors. Don’t worry. They look the same. They haven’t moved an inch.

In some ways (excluding the tedious waxing and specialty shampoos), having dreadlocks was less tiresome than normal hair. Dreads basically have two looks: up, and 43 down. Other than that, it’s really out of your hands. No pumping mousse into your scalp to fight the frizz. No crushing your curls into your knuckles every hour to keep them tight and bouncy. As far as appearances are concerned, dreadlocks are the ultimate cop out.

Soon, my dreads began to harden. They weren't a loose arrangement of hair anymore; they were rough like felt and hung heavily down my back. I bought them accessories. Special ties so I could pull them back into a thick ponytail. Baggy hats that stretched over them easily. Hairbands with wooden tassels that framed my face. I thought they made me look exotic.

Really, my dreads were just a costume piece. They were an excuse to dress up and pretend I was a left wing extremist. After all, if all I really wanted was easy, guiltless, uncontrollable appearance, I would have just shaved my head and wore baggy hemp dresses. My dreads were like the plastic crowns I used to wear at Burger King: a prop for my make believe games.

I have always been fond of costumes. When I was little, I would wear ladies’ fancy underwear out to restaurants, confusing the tight bodies and plentiful taffeta for the makings of a ball gown. My parents would have to explain to the hostess that I thought I was dressed up, and to please, humor me.

My favorite costumes, however, were my mother’s things. I loved going into her bedroom and rifling through her jewelry. I was especially desirous of a long string of black pearls she wore to funerals, and a small beaded handbag that hung unused on the wall. 44

The smells were the best. I’d fondle the tiny bottles of perfume in my fingers, tracing the sharp curve of the glass. My mother always wore Estee Lauder’s Beautiful. It was my least favorite. It was too floral, too springtime. My favorite was Dior’s Poison. It was a short, fat, dark bottle on the back of her dresser. Dark, musky aromas ballooned under my nostrils whenever I took off the stopper. It reminded me of exotic women with long lashes and red lips like the femme fatales in the old movies my dad would watch.

She had curves that didn’t quit and eyes that said, “Take me,” the bottle whispered seductively. I didn’t trust her as far as I could throw her. I breathed in the Poison and wanted to be a dark, sensuous woman wrapped in dark pearls, a beaded purse hanging limply from my pale wrist.

The only thing that had changed since then was the kind of woman I wanted to be.

I traded in glamorous jewelry and dark makeup for handmade signs and passionate ideologies. The femme fatale I so admired now seemed tragically sexist.

Like Kafka's Samsa, I awakened in my bed and had transformed into a monstrous vermin.

When my friends asked me why, why I had ruined my natural curls, why I wanted dreadlocks, I told them vainly that I liked them, and didn't care enough about my appearance to spend a lot of time on my hair. I wanted to wake up in the morning and just go. I wanted to have no control over the appearance. I wanted it to just be.

I had my dreadlocks for fourteen months, roughly. The costume had become tiresome. I was getting ready for college, and I saw it as an opportunity to become a 45 different person. I could create a completely new persona, from scratch, where nobody knew me. The girl with the dreadlocks had been done. I was ready for a different identity.

Even their death was a spectacle; I went to the cosmetology department at my high school and paid a girl $2 to cut them back until I had regular hair. Her scissors struggled to cut through the thick ropes on my head. The other girls watched, intrigued and visibly disgusted by the whole ordeal.

After that, I dyed my hair purple and spiked it into tiny, stiffened peaks. I bought colorful clothes and tried to smile more. I discovered that laughing felt better than swearing. I didn't let other people's opinions of me bother me so much. I tried to yell less.

I started trying things like drawing and writing and acting. Even when I wasn't very good,

I had a good time. I wanted to be that girl. The girl with neon hair who was always having such a good time.

I still didn't wear makeup. There was a part of me that still wanted to be that other girl. The girl in the baggy brown pants and long, long dreads.

A BRIEF MEDICAL JOURNAL OF MY DEPRESSION o Wellbutrin (generic name: bupropion hydrochloride)

• Side Effects: They're bug bites. Or at least, they were bug bites. Now,

sitting with my fiancé and soon to be mother and brother in-laws, eating

dry mashed potatoes and turkey covered in a thin gravy, it occurs to me

that I'm itchy and red and swollen and I don't know why. I spend the rest

of Thanksgiving in bed, on the phone with a nurse over an hour away. o Zoloft (generic name: sertraline hydrochloride)

• Side Effects: My head hurts. It always hurts. I don't want to do anything. I

want to sleep. I want to sleep for ten, twelve, twenty hours. Or not at all. I

can just lie here. I can lie in the dark and hurt quietly. o Effexor (generic name: venlafaxine hydrochloride)

• Side Effects: Bryan tells me that I talk in my sleep now. Once, I cried. I

tell him about my dreams. I dreamt that my son was born a monster, sick

and deathly. But I reached into his incubator and he squealed and hugged

me and I knew I loved him and couldn't live without him. I dreamt that the

world was flooding, and I cried when we had to leave our pet lizard Gobi

behind to die in our apartment as we escaped to higher ground. We

couldn't take him; he'd die in the cold. I dreamt that my father was driving

down the road, my car following behind. Suddenly, he swerved into the

grass and into a pond. I pulled over and dragged him out of the water. He

told me it was an accident, but I knew he was lying. 47

THE OLD MAN & THE SEA

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

--T.S. Eliot, “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

There’s a picture my mother has saved over the years as evidence against my dad, so when he tries to deny that it happened, she can pull out the photographic proof and say, “No, this definitely happened.” It’s kept in a photo album my grandmother made for me when I was born. It’s pink with white polka dots, and my name is knitted onto the front with a teddy bear and a bunny on either side. The picture is by itself, a blemish amidst pages of happy memories: me attempting to eat my first cupcake, grinning with globs of chocolate smeared on my face; me having my first Christmas, drowning in green and red wrapping paper; oh, and that picture. Mom likes to show it to guests.

I was a little less than a year old, and had recently added crawling to my limited skill set .So far, I had also acquired eating whole fruits, recognizing certain people, and babbling.

We were at the zoo, near the sea otter tank. My mother gave me to my dad so she could go the bathroom, and as soon as she had disappeared into the ladies’ room, my father set me down on the ground, lied down on the grass, lit a hand-rolled cigarette, and closed his eyes in ecstasy. When my mom came back, she whipped out the Nikon and 48 caught on film my dad half-napping and my diapered bottom crawling off into the distance before fiercely scolding him.

My dad was not a bad dad. Often, he was a fun dad. The kind that schizophrenically slipped into made-up personas with funny voices for my amusement, or helped me build cushion forts in the living room, or took me to work and let me watch movies for free while he sat in the projection booth. He was, however, not really cut out for the job. He adapted himself rather well to fatherhood, learning to live by a schedule that focused mostly on my play-dates and doctor’s appointments. But he didn’t inherently have the skillset. He wasn’t playful or patient, and no one would describe him as

“nurturing.” He was an introvert, wrapped up in himself, and often inattentive. And my mother can prove it.

When I was six, my father almost killed me.

He took me to the beach. The word “beach” resonates hot California sunshine and attractive sunbathers lying on their bellies, baking in coconut oil on sand the color of a

Banana Republic window display. This was not that beach. This beach was driftwood and broken bottles. It was loud seagulls and a louder highway. It was vacancy and loneliness hiding in the shadows of the chicer, more fashionable beaches across the bay. It was

Oakland. It was home.

My father wasn’t old yet back then. He was never young in my lifetime, but he was still standing resolutely in Middle-Aged. He’d only lost a couple of his crooked, tobacco-stained teeth. He could still be bothered to pick me up and swing me around (a game I called “Airplane”) without complaining about my size or his bad back. He paid 49 into his social security, and his eyes could still see well enough to take pictures. My dad was a photographer. Sometimes he’d let me help develop pictures in his darkroom—a sort of large, converted closet with a sink. He’d give me rubber tongs and instruct me in the delicate process of dipping blank photos into various tubs of chemicals. I felt like a mad scientist, hovering over the dangerous toxins in the glow of a lone red bulb as dad warned me don’t put your hands in there! I loved watching the white voids slowly fill with rainy nights and neon signs for trashy, San Francisco strip clubs (“Eve’s Apple”) or thin, grainy shadows exiting churches into a blinding light. I leaned in close, ignoring my father’s warnings, and gazed at the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen, arms shaking from the effort of standing still, in awe of it.

He was, however, colorblind.

We were sitting on “the beach blanket,” a tatty brown comforter missing most of its stuffing. My parents deemed it barely comfortable enough to separate our rumps from sand. Dad leaned on his elbow, one leg bent into a pyramid, a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He could have been mistaken for a sulking college student in his baggy blue swim trunks, except for his Colonel Mustard mustache and his bald spot. And me.

I quickly became bored playing with the skirt on my swimsuit and dancing around the beach blanket, and wandered toward the water. It was low tide; wet clumps of garbage and seaweed were scattered like monstrous bodies along the beach. Dad had explained low tide to me before: “The moon pulls the ocean back and forth,” he pointed 50 to a space in the vast blue sky, illustrating where the moon could potentially be. “So sometimes the water is very close, and sometimes it is very far away.”

Dad did not explain rip currents. If he had, he would have told me that rip currents often occur at low tide. He would have said that surface rip currents are invisible, so the water looks calm. He would have said that sometimes a rip current will drag you out to sea even if you’re only waist deep in water. He would have told me that they are very, very dangerous.

I had wandered far away from my dad, who still sat on the beach blanket, reading.

I was unaware of the tide coming back in, rushing to meet me as I was drawn to it by the smell of the ocean—a siren’s scent of fish, salt, and old garbage—and the small, harmless sound of seawater rolling in. The waves began licking my toes and dragging my feet under the sand. I wanted the water to wash my legs and torso, too, so I kept going. And when the ocean picked me up and carried me away, I cheered and giggled, expecting to be buoyed up and planted firmly back down on the sand. This did not happen. My little body was sucked into the dark, endless sea before being briefly released onto the surface.

Over and over again, I went under the water, my lungs burning for breath. The bright sky and beach flooded my vision just long enough for me to see my dad, growing smaller and smaller every time. I tried swimming to him, but I might as well have been swimming against a wall. There was an invisible lasso dragging me out to sea. I tried crying out to him, but the words were drowned quickly in my mouth as the ocean swallowed me up and knocked the air from my body. 51

As I was pummeled repeatedly by the heaving Pacific, I wondered if this would be it. Hours later, once my father finished his book, he would notice that I had disappeared. A search party would be formed, my parents weeping dramatically on their knees like the professional mourners of Ancient Rome. My body would wash up on the shore days later, wrapped in trash bags and seaweed like a human sushi roll. Was my brief stint at existing going to be snuffed out so unceremoniously before I’d even scratched the surface of the world? I was still finessing my major motor functions, and life was being wrenched cruelly from my tiny hands. My epitaph would read: “Here Lies

Elizabeth: Lover of My Little Ponies and Blow Pops.” At the funeral, my family would talk in hushed, melancholy tones, about my potential, because there would be nothing else to talk about. Was that all The Universe had planned for me: untapped, limitless potential?

Six year old shouldn’t think like that. Six year olds shouldn’t think they’re going to die.

My dad must have looked up, wondering where I had gone, and noticed I was nowhere. His eyes must have wandered over the horizon and seen a little speck in a multi-colored tiger stripe swimsuit bobbing on the water. Because he was coming out to me, his figure becoming more distinct, larger, more real with every breath I unsuccessfully stole and quickly lost in the seawater.

The next thing I remember is sitting on the beach, crying as my father wrapped me up in a towel, trying to comfort me. The actual rescue is nothing but blank space in my memory. The moment of relief, being plucked from the water and carried to safety, is 52 completely overpowered by the fear of death, and a certain amount of angry, hot blame I heap on my dad.

I also don’t remember the fight that followed when dad took me home and told mom what happened. I do remember him never taking me to the beach alone again.

EXCERPTS FROM LIZ'S PERSONAL DICTIONARY OF MISGUIDED,

DEPRESSED, & OTHERWISE BROKEN THINGS

Bittersweet—You look at me and smile that smile that's happy and warm and full of promises. Your knuckle is tracing small circles in my back. This makes me smile like I'm getting away with something. I look at you and ask, "How's your girlfriend?"

Cadaver—he was my father’s first wife’s dad. He wasn’t family, but he was. My dad’s first wife died of cancer; her family stayed close, even when he remarried. Even when he had a daughter. I called him grandpa Hal. He gave me presents when there was no reason to. His house had a room filled with beautiful toys for his grandchildren to play with. Old porcelain dolls, antique baby carriages, little tin men and women littered the house. He was the first dead body I’d ever seen. His face was pasty and the color of old peaches.

His hands lied clasped and motionless against his chest.

Caesarean—the doctors said there was a problem with my heart. They told my mother that I could die. So we were taken to surgery. I was rushed into a world full of fear and hope. I was born in the legacy of emperors and great men: broken, violent, and gloriously alive.

Grandmotherly—grandma Christman wasn’t the kind of grandmother who made cookies or knitted you stockings or did jigsaw puzzle. Grandma Christman sat. She sat in

Bucyrus, Ohio, in a little house at the end of a gloomy, quiet road inhabited by other sitting people who treated the outdoor air like poison. I remember sitting outside in the yard during my first thunderstorm. We didn't get a lot of thunderstorms in California. Just quiet rain. I was alone. Grandma Christman didn’t go outside. She had her wheelchair and her decaying mind holding her back. She had dementia, and thought I was my mom and dad was his brother and that it was 1945 and the war was finally over. I couldn’t tell if she made dad mad or sad. She was bitter. Life hadn’t been good to her. Grandpa

Christman left her when dad was six. They never saw him again, but he occasionally sent me a Christmas card with a picture of him with his 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 6th wife. I never met him. Grandma Christman hated him, I guess, and could only show her love for her children through the whip of a belt or the coming down of a heavy hand. I’m glad she didn’t love me.

Hangover—Waking up. Throbbing. Eyelids peeling back. Everything's still spinning in a kind of Bailey's haze. And there he is. Naked, hand hanging next to his bong. He smells like an ashtray that forgot to put on deodorant. God, where’s the bathroom? Stumbling past the door, tiles cold and sending goosebumps up my legs, I think, “God, what was I thinking the last few months?”

Idiotism—a stranger comes up to me outside of a coffee shop like we’re old friends.

His face tells me he knows me. I look up from my book and smile so he will believe that

I know him. I don’t want to be the one that doesn’t know who the other one is. But he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t believe that he knows me. He selected me, perhaps among others, to bear witness to his good news. He smiles in that manic way that warns people to stay the hell away. He says, “I’m moving to Florida on a whim to meet my soulmate.

Isn’t that wild?!” I nod and tell him that that is, indeed, wild. Then he leaves to spread the word or catch his ride or whatever, and I wish that someone else had been there so that I could laugh.

Magnum Opus—she was on the wet ground, her Mike’s Hard Lemonade hanging limply between her fingers. Her pants were gone, discarded in the woods and caked with vomit. She leaned against the car door and slurred something about not being drunk. She asked where her pants were, and we told her. She was seventeen, and celebrating the birth of her son.

Neighborly—Shortly after our neighbor, a skinny, sour woman with three children was evicted, my parents had a barbecue. My uncle was examining our neighbor’s garden box; all the apartments had one. Before leaving, she had planted conium maculatum—poison hemlock. It was deadly if consumed. Children often confused the roots for carrots. Uncle

Dale told my mother immediately. This was the second time she had made a rather sinister, clumsy attempt on our lives that, outside of an episode of Murder, She Wrote, 56 would never have worked. The first time, she placed an upturned nail behind the wheel of my mother’s car. This plot, I suppose, was designed to send us plummeting over a highway to our deaths. The hemlock was quietly uprooted.

Preach—It was an unsuspecting church in the shopping district. People walked by with bags of twenty-dollar scarves, little boxes of rings and "I'm sorry" gifts, and stiff, vacuum-sealed salamis and cheeses, never suspecting that just inside, people were talking hellfire and God's wrath. I was my friend’s “mission,” and I was curious, so I went. The preacher was screaming about damnation and Jesus, and everyone was screaming with him. It was a divine chaos; people would jump up in a panic and beg for mercy. Others swayed in their seats, eyes closed, lips mouthing a quiet prayer. One could not simply sit and listen; one had to praise His Name with every inch of one’s body and soul. But a sudden silence washed over everyone as a woman in the front began babbling incoherence and gibberish. The preacher said she was speaking the word of God. I would have laughed if my friend hadn’t immediately started spilling out the same stream of gobbledygook. The preacher said, again, that she was speaking the word of God.

Tempus—I was a freshman in college when I met the time travellers. I was surprised to see them wearing jeans and baggy t-shirts instead of monocles and three-piece suits. I was more surprised to see that they lived in a cramped dorm room with Pink Floyd posters plastered on their closet doors. Even without having ever seen a time traveler before, I had to admit that they seemed relatively modern. Their homespun time machine 57 was erected in a corner of the room. It had the general shape of a phone booth, and was composed almost entirely of stolen EXIT signs. They glowed in a dull yellow and red amidst a twinkling of Christmas lights that wrapped around the frame of the thing. I walked inside of it and, with my limited knowledge of time travelling mostly based on

H.G. Wells and Doctor Who, decided that this was not a very impressive machine.

Virgin—The first time was two times, with a boy whose best quality was availability.

He wasn’t a smart boy, a funny boy, a handsome boy, but a boy who looked my way when nobody else was, and I was a lonely girl who was ready to feel like a woman. The first attempt occurred on a cold, cloudy afternoon in late winter. A cool fog hung over the river as we groped each other uselessly in the backseat of my Nissan. I drove him home after it became obvious to both of us that nothing was going to happen without more enthusiasm, which I didn’t have. We tried again in my bedroom. Maybe music was playing. Maybe I’d lit a few candles. All I remember is fear, then pain. After a few minutes, I began to cry and we stopped. I didn’t feel like much of a woman.