After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening

After the Flashlight Man

This page intentionally left blank

After the Flashlight Man A Memoir of Awakening

Nancy McCabe

Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright 2003 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCabe, Nancy, 1962– After the flashlight man : a memoir of awakening / Nancy McCabe. p. cm. ISBN 1-55753-258-3 1. McCabe, Nancy, 1962–. 2. Women--United States--. 3. Teachers-United States--Biography. 4. Authors, American--20th century--Biography. I. Title. CT275.M295 A3 2003 977.8'043'092--dc21

2003004014

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Preface

3

Chapter 1. The End of the Tunnel

7

Chapter 2. The One that Got Away

22

Chapter 3. Ghostwriting

46

Chapter 4. Leaving Sparta

62

Chapter 5. Someday You Will Go to the Moon

74

Chapter 6. Hanging On

94

Chapter 7. One Mean Bad Kid

108

Chapter 8. The Art of Being Human

121

v

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgements This book owes a great deal to many friends who shared their stories with me, inspired me to write my own, and in many cases, took time to read and respond to my drafts. Petra Fiero is the most generous and thoughtful reader I could hope for. Others who read my drafts and offered considerable wisdom and encouragement include Claire Bateman, Karen Hindhede, Ann Moorefield, and Anna Smith, to whom I promise to try other forms of meditation. A special thanks to Sara King, who teaches me to appreciate the little things and patiently read many drafts. Ladette Randolph’s faith in my work helped me write the first chapter. My writing owes much to the support and insight of these friends, whose courage I greatly admire and am inspired by, along with that of Claudia Routon, Cindy Sanderlin, and Ruth Yoon. My former students Leslie Connor, Jenny Schmitz, and Sarah Hahns spurred me to start putting together this book. Thank you also to the many other students, past and present, who challenge me and make me laugh, and to my former teachers and mentors, especially Hilda Raz, Gerald Shapiro, and Judith Slater. I am grateful to my family for cheering me on and graciously tolerating being written about: my mother and late father, Lucille and Bill McCabe, and my brothers, Bob and Jeff McCabe, who gave me the laptop computer that got me through the last stages of this manuscript. For acts of generosity, support, and faith too numerous to list, I thank Gena, Joe, and Jody Shipley along with the rest of the Shipley family. My colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford have provided a warm welvii

viii

After the Flashlight Man come and a creative and stimulating atmosphere; I would especially like to thank Carys Evans Corrales and Scott Corrales and everyone in the humanities division. I would like to express my appreciation to the following magazines for permission to reprint pieces that were first published in their pages in slightly different form: “The End of the Tunnel” from Prairie Schooner and The Pushcart Prize XXV: Best of the Small Presses (reprinted by permission of University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1999 University of Nebraska Press.) “The One That Got Away” from Fourth Genre “Ghostwriting” from So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art “Leaving Sparta,” from Phoebe: A Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory, and Aesthetics “Someday You Will Go to the Moon” from Literary Potpourri “Hanging On” from Massachusetts Review “One Mean Bad Kid” from Writing on the Edge “The Art of Being Human” from Puerto del Sol

This book is dedicated with love to my daughter, Sophie, and my nieces and nephew, Sidney, Treven, and Megan, in the hopes that they will grow up to claim their own stories.

After the Flashlight Man

This page intentionally left blank

Preface More than ten years ago, a stranger cut the screen out of my bedroom window while I slept and shone a flashlight into my eyes until I woke. This terrifying moment became a defining one, challenging the sense of independence I’d started to develop since my divorce the previous year. After a second bizarre incident only weeks after my encounter with the Flashlight Man—my dad’s temporary amnesia—it felt as if the world had gone berserk. Suddenly, the fundamentals I took for granted felt swept right out from under me: safety, freedom, the stability of memory, and a general oblivion to mortality. Around the same time, Betty Eadie published her best-selling Embraced by the Light and near-death experiences became all the rage. My own journey through a birth-canal-like tunnel of light in the middle of one night was more mundane but ultimately no less spiritually profound—the first of a series of events that nudged me awake to the impact of my own past and to new ways of viewing my life. As a child, I’d played in drainage tunnels that stretched under highways and roads. The world I knew was a layered one: it had a surface of grass and tar and gardens, but underneath this, in secret spaces, crickets mourned, beetles scurried, spiders spun webs across entrances, and crawdads fled under rocks. From far away the adult world carried on in the rumbles of tires above my head and the whooshes of cars pushing against wind. In school we learned about the layers of earth, the picture in the science book like a nut cracked open, revealing the outer shell, the mantle zone, the outer and inner cores. All our lives were 3

4

After the Flashlight Man like that. I came to understand the daily details and pleasantries as granite crusts protecting memory and imagination and secrets. The Flashlight Man was relatively ineffectual as a sexual predator, but his intrusion gave me a glimpse of a whole underworld where small acts of violence undermine women’s lives. The strange events in my own life sent me tunneling back underground to retrieve bits and pieces of my past, now cast in a new light. In A Good Enough Daughter, Alix Kates Schulman compares memory to “a secret storeroom at the heart of a maze . . . behind the door my memories rest like dormant seeds full of potential second life that can’t begin till I shine light on them.” But once you seize and pin them down . . . they lose their shimmering complexity, their rich associations, their resonance and ambiguity until . . . they are lost as surely as if synapses had been destroyed, and you can no longer distinguish what’s true from what’s been depicted.

I had never fully claimed my own stories, letting my family’s versions and conventional interpretations set them on the road to what Schulman calls “rigor mortis.” Now, suddenly, I was excavating my own layers, recasting my own stories, fixing them again, perhaps, but in new, more empowering ways. I began to see how childhood experiences—my relationship with a dying aunt, my experience as a white child bussed to a school in a black neighborhood, my encounters with sexual harassment as a teenager—taught me early lessons about power and powerlessness, being a girl and an outsider, and confronting mortality and seeking to transcend it though the stories left behind. As I illuminated the path before me, reviving my stories and finding power in the way I told them, I began to see my way into the future as well. Despite the frustrations, rapecrisis vol-

Preface unteer work and teaching writing to children gave me further insights into the healing power of reshaping experience and accepting human limitations. Attending a meditation workshop, at which I was ostensibly an utter failure, I discovered how my own discovery process had borrowed from many meditation techniques and philosophies. Louise DeSalvo writes in Writing as a Way of Healing that telling our stories is doubly a “fixer”: like the photographic chemical, writing “stabilizes the image,” but the process also, in some way, fixes us, heals us. Reclaiming, recasting, and telling my own stories gave me a route to reinvent my vision of my life. Pinning down one reality is not, finally, as important as being aware of multiple possibilities, associations, truths, and ambiguities, being able to examine them from so many angles that they lose their power. The flashlight that woke me one night has become almost mythical for me in its associations. Light as a metaphor kept reflecting and refracting. The flashlight was an instrument of intrusion in a symbolic rape, an object whose shape itself was reminiscent of the tunnels of my childhood. Metaphor exists to give familiarity to the unfamiliar, but it also can be a tool that robs objects of their power, rendering them something other than what they are, giving the barrel of a flashlight associations more playful than ominous, the way one thing in a dream can dissolve into another altogether. It was a kaleidoscope, taking the pieces of my life and shifting them into a new and fascinating configuration. It was the Gravitron at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City, a ride about which I imagined I had secret knowledge. There, my cousins and I lined up with other riders along the inside wall of a barrel, which spun faster and faster until the floor dropped out from under our feet. First-timers gasped but we remained calm, casual, maybe even a little smug, whirling around, knowing that centrifugal force would pin us to the wall. It wasn’t the spinning we enjoyed, or that uncomfortable

5

6

After the Flashlight Man pressure that held us fast, arms and legs splayed and immobile as in a game of statues; it wasn’t our dizzy stumbles back to solid ground, the knowledge that we could return to stability at any time, that exhilarated us. What drew us back again and again was knowing that the floor could drop out from under us and we would still be standing there on our cushions of air— standing on nothing, maybe, but still standing.

1 The End of the Tunnel

What I remember is waking to light. Still under the inarticulate influence of dreams, I might just have been born into that first bright light, or I might be traveling down a tunnel toward that last brilliant one. Then I feel the weight of my hands against the blankets, the weight of something wrong. Bewildered terror drags a sound from my throat, a hoarse, ragged yell.

Every night, a cat scratches its way up my bedroom screen, then leaps to the ground and claws its way up again. Sometimes it yowls, in heat; sometimes I wake to its long silhouette against the window. More often I sleep through its climbing; I sleep right through the snarl and scramble and hiss and tumble of it and another cat beneath the window. Usually, I just absorb the cat into my dreams. I’ve been dreaming about the cat tonight. It hooks its claws into the mesh and scales the screen, stretching higher and higher. I wait for the usual closure, the cat thumping to the pavement. Instead, silence stirs me awake. I open my eyes to a blinding beam of light. For a few sec7

8

After the Flashlight Man onds, I have no idea who or where I am, am only aware of some primal instinct that shouts danger. The light wavers and steadies. That’s when I return to my body, impaled on that beam. That’s when I sit up and scream, or mean to, but my voice fails me. Where is the piercing scream I practiced throughout childhood, long and high enough to outscream anyone? I produce only the barest croak. A voice drones. For a long time, all I’ll let myself recall is the cheerful, soothing tone, a little apologetic as if to a third person on my behalf. The tone makes me feel instantly calm and a little embarrassed, unnecessarily hysterical. The voice says something about coming back later. Scrambling—then my blind slaps against the wall. Spots of light jump in front of my eyes as my bedroom comes into focus, the hulking shapes of my chest of drawers and bookshelves. It’s 3:30 a.m., a time my body will never forget.

I have lived in Springfield, Missouri, for only six months. Here, I’ve maintained an illusion that harm can never come to me, an illusion that I associate with my Kansas childhood. This Midwestern way of thinking results from a humility so extreme it edges toward arrogance. We are landlocked, far from the coasts—far from the action, we think. The vast plains, the vast sky, remind us of our insignificance. We belong to the flyover, the treeless flatlands where cars break down on their way to Colorado vacations. Alphabetically we never come first or last, the positions of most emphasis; in the Miss America pageant and listings of national temperature highs, we remain buried halfway through. And so I wander into my kitchen at 3:30 a.m. and wash my dishes, because I am not used to believing that bad things can happen to me or recognizing them if they do. After a while, it occurs to me that maybe I should call the police.

The End of the Tunnel

A patrol car coasts silently into my driveway. Light flashes blood red against the pavement and the dark house. An officer trails a light along my bedroom window frame. “He cut out your screen,” the officer says. While I slept only an arm-length away, someone sliced a knife through my screen. I back into the house. The officer tries to take fingerprints, but my intruder was wearing gloves. “He won’t return. They never do,” the officer says after questioning me briefly, mostly questions I am too stunned to remember the answers to. He gives me a slip of paper with my case number on it in the event that I remember anything else. There are two lines. One says, “Crimes against persons.” The other says, “Crimes against property.” That’s the one that has been checked. I want to protest. Instead I fold the paper into a tiny square and put it in my pocket. The patrol car coasts silently away.

Obsessively checking my doors and windows, I am disturbed by the pitch black of the porch. The light switch stands at attention, in the on position. I flick it off: no change. Peering out I find an empty fixture: no bulb, no globe-shaped cover. In the kitchen, the sliding glass door stands open half an inch, enough to admit moths. The lock has been jimmied, but a security bar in the track caused the door to stick. It is so calculated, this effort to pass unnoticed into my house while I slept. In my bedroom, the screen has been cut meticulously—no frayed ends, no incomplete grids, only frame and cool night air. Then the phone rings. “I’m calling about your ad,” says a cheerful male voice, a tad apologetic. I struggle to hold onto the sound: timbre, pitch, tone. “The one for free underwear,” he says.

9

10

After the Flashlight Man I wrote a story, not long ago, involving a series of helpwanted ads and a lingerie party at which the protagonist wins free underwear. Suddenly, it feels like someone has invaded not just my house, but my thoughts; a stranger has swept a searchlight across my most secret self. But that’s silly, I tell myself; I’ve read that story twice to audiences. Still the rooms of my apartment and the rooms of my mind no longer belong to me. Jan and Doris come to get me. We drink tea in their kitchen as dawn lightens the windows. We go over and over what happened but can’t make any sense of it. My hands want to push away the memory of the light that forces me to its center, that penetrates the crevices of my brain. I imagine flailing my arms, swimming and clawing my way out of that pool of light.

I often practiced screaming as a child; for the neighborhood girls, screaming was a form of entertainment, a way to assert our presence and keep the landscape from swallowing us up. We liked to scream in the network of drainage tunnels under the highways and roads, some of those tunnels so small I felt crammed into a tin can. I often panicked in those dark, tight spaces where rolls of snake skins shimmered and crumbled beneath my knees, where my face broke through sticky spiderwebs and the shadows of my descending hands sent lizards and beetles darting into cracks. I went on crawling through these passages because I didn’t want to be a coward, but I much preferred the larger tunnels under the Kansas Turnpike. Though dark and dank, at least they were big enough for a child to stand. We usually ran through them, screaming, our pounding footsteps and piercing screams enlarged by tunnel acoustics until two or three of us sounded like a mob. We ran through the cacophony of our own echoes that preceded and followed us like ghosts of ourselves. The sensation of being chased through that shadowy underworld gave me goose bumps on

The End of the Tunnel the hottest day. As we drowned out the muffled sound of cars rumbling above, I focused on the widening promise of sunlight ahead. All that practice screaming, I tell Jan, and where was that skill when I really needed it?

A newscaster comes on with an item about some guy in Minnesota called the Underwear Outlaw. He steals women’s panties and mails them back. We laugh uneasily. Doris snaps off the TV. Once I am safely in bed, Jan cuts off the spare room light. Instantly, colors burst in front of my eyes as if someone has just taken my picture without permission, freezing me in a position I wouldn’t recognize. Finally, I drift into dreams about locks picked with credit cards, glass doors pried with crowbars, chains broken by shoulders hurtling against wood. At 3:20 a.m., I wake completely to a storm. I feel myself flinch at every flash of lightning, jolt with every roll of thunder, but I can’t find my voice. Closing my eyes, I watch a stranger unscrew a globe-shaped light cover and bulb, then move in complete darkness down the side of my house to break the lock on my sliding glass door. He tugs it half an inch until it sticks. Creeping on, down the side of the house, to my open bedroom window, he can see me, through the downturned blind slats, sleeping soundly. I watch him watch me. I watch him cut away my screen. At 3:29, I watch myself struggle from sleep, fixed like a small animal in the glare of headlights. At 3:30, at the flicker of lightning and whip-crack of thunder, I hear myself scream. Once I start, I can’t stop. I scream and scream as I wish I’d screamed the night before. In another gray dawn, Jan and I wait for tea to steep. My screams echo in my ears; my throat feels raw. Beyond that shrill

11

12

After the Flashlight Man memory of my own voice, the faintness of the pats of rain on the roof comes as a surprise.

I was eleven the summer afternoon that a strange man chased my friend Tanya and me. We’d been lazily dangling our feet in the jigsaw cracks of the dried creekbed, nearly asleep in the hot sun, when a snatch of rock music on the gravel road drove us upright, alert. A car pulled over abruptly, raising a cloud of dust, and a dirty, bearded man with long hair slid down the embankment, yelling something unintelligible. We recognized him as one of those hippies we’d been warned might force us to take drugs. We leapt to our feet and darted into the tunnels under the Kansas Turnpike like rabbits into holes, I like to think. The man’s footsteps stopped at the tunnel entrance. I imagine him ducking down to peer in at us making our escape, running hard and fast toward the light on the other side, toward safety. That night we vowed never to tell our parents what had happened, partly to protect them and partly to avoid the inevitable limits on our freedom. We huddled in my backyard and Tanya told me what her mother had said about rape: “When a woman is raped, she usually dies, but if she doesn’t, she wishes she had.” I wasn’t quite sure what rape meant, and I was too embarrassed to ask. I only knew that it had to do with women, so I pictured a woman shivering behind a curtain. My friend Shelley says she pictured a woman with long scratches across her face. We didn’t know what rape meant, so we pictured the closest things we knew: women who were draped, women who were raked.

I resolve to drive away all fear by force of will. After all, except for instant eyestrain around candles or bright lights, except for muscles that will not give up their tension, except for unaccountable terror when I enter my apartment, I am unhurt. But

The End of the Tunnel no matter how firmly I vow to get over it, the power of the subconscious amazes me. For months, without fail, I wake each morning at precisely 3:30 a.m. It is as if I house another person, a secret mind that keeps time while I sleep and wakes me at the moment of danger. Eventually, I name that other person the Sleepwalker because of the way I wake to find her wandering all the rooms, patrolling window latches, checking the blinds. Or sometimes, in the morning, I discover heaped beside me keys, mace, shoes, bug spray, window rods: provisions for escape, items to be used as weapons. The Sleepwalker lets me sleep, but she is ever vigilant. During that first week, alarmed by my perfect record of waking every 3:30 a.m., Jan calls a friend who works for the Rape Crisis Center and then reports back to me. The guy with the flashlight has been around for years. He blinds women, then orders them to undress and touch themselves while he masturbates. He’s known, among rape crisis workers, as the Flashlight Molester, although he tends to run if women fight back. My attempt to scream, no matter how meager the results, was not worthless after all, Jan tells me. Inadequate as it seemed, that yell had declared me a fighter. I muster my remaining energy to dial the police and ask questions. Reluctantly, a detective fills me in on the man the Springfield police refer to as the Flashlight Burglar, who has attacked twenty or thirty women in the last couple of years. “Why didn’t anyone tell me that?” I ask. The detective tries to reassure me. “Hey, it could have been worse. It could have been the Ether Bandit.” This is what I learn: The Ether Bandit, also known as the Ether Bunny, used to break into houses and knock his victims out with ether-soaked rags. When they came to, they had no idea what he’d done to them. “At least this guy, the Flashlight Burglar, he doesn’t usually enter people’s houses, and he doesn’t come back,” the detective says.

13

14

After the Flashlight Man I protest: He did try to enter my house, and he did promise to return. “Hey, the Ether Bandit really did come back. He knocked one woman out three times.” I abandon my protest. “Yeah,” the officer says, taking my silence for awe. “Someone finally shot him. We followed the trail of blood to the hospital and arrested him.” I vaguely remember reading about this, back when I thought I was immune. “We’d like to get this jerk, too,” the detective says. “But he makes it tough. We have a suspect but no proof. He doesn’t leave fingerprints.” I ask about the phone call I reported later that morning, but my report has not made it into the file. The detective explains that the call, obscenely early in the morning not long after the departure of the Flashlight Man, my only crank phone call in six months at that number, is probably a coincidence. “This guy doesn’t do things like that,” the detective says. “He’s just your basic Peeping Tom. He sees something he wants to look at and he looks.” I complain to the local paper for ignoring the Flashlight Man’s apparently copious activity. Between the spring of 1990 and the summer of 1992, when I leave Springfield for good, I read story after story about a man with a flashlight who continues to enter women’s bedrooms by force. He tells them that he’ll be watching them, that he’ll return if they call the police. In at least one case, he pays a return visit. In another, he physically assaults a woman. In 1991, during the most brutal rape in Springfield’s history, the attacker refers to himself as “we” and talks about his victim in third person while he stuffs carpet fibers and tape inside her and breaks her shoulders, wrists, pelvis, and ankle. “We’ll just leave her alone,” I remember the voice saying,

The End of the Tunnel the voice on the same continuum that has led to such brutality. “We’ll come back later,” says the voice in my memory.

In the months before the Flashlight Man, I imagine, my life was a straight line, mostly, with its little peaks and valleys, a heartbeat on a monitor. Now the line has been twisted into question marks, disconnected curves and dots without continuity or routine, punctuated by sudden starts and sharp prickles of adrenaline, and it’s dawning on me that there may never be any answers. It’s not just the larger questions that drive me crazy: Who is the Flashlight Man? What if he’s someone I know and trust? Or if not, why me? What made him choose me? I can’t shake off the smaller questions, either: The Flashlight Man must have been carrying a crowbar, a knife, and a flashlight; when he left he took my bulb, my light cover, and my screen. Why? Where did he put these things? Does he have a special toolkit for breaking and entering that he lugs with him despite the possibility that he may have to run? I picture him with a knapsack slung over one shoulder, making a run for it down dark streets, the light cover knocking against his spine. Does he display my screen, my light bulb, that heavy globeshaped cover on a shelf or in a case, like trophies? How does he explain this bizarre collection to the landlord or the exterminator?

I become obsessed. If the police really have a suspect, why don’t they search his home for the things missing from mine? Clearly, the police don’t think his activity is significant; clearly they aren’t trying very hard to catch him. Clearly, it is up to me. My friends become alarmed by this new vigilante phase. I spy on people, eavesdrop on voices. Passing the computer lab down the hall from my office, I hear a voice that gives me pause. Its owner emerges. He is a short blond guy with a mustache, and

15

16

After the Flashlight Man with an electric jolt I realize that he is enrolled in a class where I gave a reading of my story. He glances toward me, and I think, he knows I know. I scurry down the hall to my office and lock the door. I’ve stayed late to grade papers because Jan has a night class. Now I can’t concentrate on the papers. My heart is so loud in my ears it might be footsteps. But no: the halls are empty and silent. Then I hear a shuffling, and I stare paralyzed through the vent in the door at the tips of two black shoes. Any second a hand will test the doorknob. The lock is a flimsy one; how long does it take to pick a lock? I wonder. Then, outside my door, a familiar voice calls to a passerby. I fling open the door to confront the journalism professor and newspaper columnist whose office adjoins mine. Mike asks me to talk anonymously about what happened, and he prints the interview in his weekly column. Letters trickle in, including one from a woman who writes that the column raised terrible memories for her. The guy who broke into her house still calls periodically and reads to her from her daughter’s diary—a diary that remains intact in her daughter’s bedroom. Another Flashlight Man encounter, I think. Another writing link. Mike offers to set up a meeting between the woman and me. Mania grips me, a wild certainty that I am on the verge of catching the Flashlight Man.

When Deanne passes me a glass of Coke, an ice cube pops. We both jump. Then we laugh. I expected a smaller, frailer woman. In her late forties or early fifties, Deanne is, instead, tall and solid, with a mole on her chin, an armor of metal bracelets clanking along her forearm, and crepe-soled shoes. “So you think we might have run into the same man.” De-

The End of the Tunnel anne crosses her legs and takes a grim sip of Coke. “I’m all for getting him. Tell me what happened to you.” She shakes her head and clicks her tongue while I talk. Suddenly, the door rattles as if someone is frantic to break it down. I feel myself go rigid. Deanne leaps up to let in the cat. “Stop that, Lamby, you’re scaring our guest,” she says. She pats her lap until the cat settles in it. “So you never got a look at him? Well, I got a good look at mine. He was about 35, 5’8”, with blondish hair and a mustache.” I have to steady my glass. “That sounds just like a student I was wondering about. Would you recognize him? You have to come by and see this guy.” “So we’re going to catch him, huh?” Deanne laughs, a big throaty laugh that trembles her whole body. “Let me tell you what happened to me.” About three years ago, she was dozing in a chair when she felt a tap on her shoulder. She thought it was the cat. Cats. The cat on my window screen, in heat, the cat howling as it climbed and dropped, climbed and dropped. Cat claws, scratching, like a knife against a screen. I lean forward, feverish. Deanne had opened her eyes to the dark shape of a man, hovering over her. “Back then, I had a job working with psychotics,” Deanne says. “I was used to keeping my wits about me in unusual situations.” She closes her eyes and continues her story.

Are you an angel from heaven?” Deanne spoke in a slow, bright voice as she rose and tiptoed to the chain hanging from the ceiling bulb. The man tiptoed behind her. As she reached up, he imitated her posture and mimicked her gesture, pulling an imaginary chain above his head. The light didn’t come on.

17

18

After the Flashlight Man She yanked the chain again. Still, nothing. He continued the weird game of Follow the Leader, reaching up to grab at his invisible chain. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said. When he didn’t object, she led the way, brushing her fingers against light switches. The rooms remained shadowy. Behind her, his fingers repeated the flicking motions of hers. “Let’s talk.” She edged toward the front door. “Tell me your name.” “I’m Ken.” He spoke so softly she almost didn’t hear him. “Did you remove my fuses?” She hardened her tone. He hung his head and nodded. “All right, Ken,” she said. “I want you to leave my house. I want you to go into my garage and replace the fuses, and then I want you off my property.” He obeyed, exiting through the garage. She locked the doors, then watched from the front window until he finally emerged into the driveway. Hitting the porch switch, she caught him in full light, wearing her gardening gloves. “Later I realized I shouldn’t have done that,” Deanne tells me. “I was afraid he’d come back to get me so that I wouldn’t be able to identify him.” But Deanne didn’t recognize him in any police photos. The next week, a man who said his name was Ken called and read passages from her daughter’s diary, which had never left her bedroom. “He must have copied pages while he was here was all I could figure,” Deanne concludes. Tipping her glass into her mouth, she peers over the rim at me. “So we’re going to catch him, huh?”

At first, listening to her story, my brain has raced, filtering out events, clinging to isolated details: cats, surprise, light, fear. But as Deanne continued, I felt oddly shamed by her compe-

The End of the Tunnel tence and frightened at the crazed fervor she reflected back to me. Mine drains slowly away, crowded out by disappointment and then just plain exhaustion. I understand that there are some things I cannot control, that my Flashlight Man and Deanne’s Ken are mysteries that may never be solved. I wanted them to be the same person so badly that at first I was willing to ignore obvious discrepancies. I wanted to figure things out and get my life back. But now it is as if during the last couple of days someone else has astrally projected herself into my body. Now as that other person abruptly departs, I want only to go to Jan and Doris’s and sleep. I feel a letdown so final, it is indistinguishable from relief.

Jan and Doris laugh hysterically at Deanne’s story, and Doris renames Ken the Mime Intruder. That cracks us all up, not because it’s that funny, but because we haven’t laughed in days. It feels like loosening my belt a notch, giving up some tension. The Flashlight Burglar, the Ether Bandit or Bunny, the Underwear Outlaw, the Mime Intruder: do we diminish or merely downplay their impact with these cartoonish names? We drink tea late, our nightly ritual, and I recall bouts with bronchitis, how only what is hot enough to blister my tongue succeeds in soothing my throat. Now, anything hot enough to burn reminds me that I’m still alive. Sometimes I reheat the tea to boiling, concocting little tests, little reassurances: the possibility of a burn forces me to stay alert, and avoiding the burn reminds me that I have some power to protect myself. I sip tea with Jan and Doris and struggle for reasons to laugh and try to accept what I will never know, every scalding passage a journey toward calm. Later, in bed, I will picture the deft cloth-covered hands of a faceless man. The hands twist loose my porch light. I watch a dark shape move on to my sliding glass door; I watch hands

19

20

After the Flashlight Man quickly pry the lock and jerk at the door; I hear muttered cursing. As a knife slashes its way around the screen, I slip out of bed, creep to the window, and slam the frame on the imaginary fingers of the Flashlight Man. Then I open the front door and stare down his apparition, taking a cue from Deanne. “I want you off this property,” I tell him in a full, confident voice. “I want you out of my life.” And slowly, gradually, he fades away.

Years ago, the city of Wichita widened Highway 54, making the system of drainage tunnels inadequate, creating a flood plain. With every rain, the creek burst its restraints and turned the bottom level of the house where I grew up into a soggy wading pool. In our early twenties, Tanya and I confessed to our mothers about the man who chased us into the tunnels. Tanya’s mother had her own confession: One day she’d glanced out the window to see us trotting across yards from the David’s store. Three feet behind us, a man followed, matching his pace to ours. He stopped when we stopped, picked up speed when we did. Tanya’s mother shot out the door, shouting our names, and the man bolted. Tanya and her mother, my mother and I, all stared at each other, caught in an almost reverent silence. Our mothers looked queasy; they looked as if they could barely fathom the miracle of our survival. But we savored these memories they would have willingly erased, our lives suddenly more exciting and more charmed than we’d ever imagined. I knew nothing bad could really happen to me; I was too unimportant to be attacked or murdered. And then, a few years later, I woke. The light I woke to failed to draw my soul like a magnet or to suggest comfort and warmth like those lights at the ends of Near Death Tunnels. No life flashed before my eyes. For those brief moments, past and future no more existed than when the cold water tap gushes hot and the hand jerks back, the whole present focused on sudden surprise,

The End of the Tunnel sudden pain. Only later did I understand that I, we all, are always in greater danger than we imagine; the past follows, ghost-like, into the present, the knowledge of our deaths weaving underneath like tunnels underground, like blue veins under skin. I woke, this subterranean knowledge rising abruptly to the surface, bursting its restraints, so that six weeks later, the ordinary experiences I have temporarily left behind have the capacity to amaze me. I am mesmerized by the fruit and vegetable aisles at the grocery store; at pyramids of lettuce, oranges, apples, cucumbers, bananas, carrots, kiwi; at a range of possibilities I have forgotten, reds and greens and yellows, leaves and stalks and globes, beaded with the rain of the overhead sprinkler system, doubled in the mirrors above. That night, in the clubhouse of my new apartment complex, we prepare for aerobics class, opening doors and windows, pulling back curtains so that for a second I remember the cowering draped woman in my childhood image. Our reflections dance in the glass of the patio door, and I don’t care that from outside, anyone can see in. The shadows of our circling arms sweep the wall, and my heart pounds, blood races with all the choices I forgot during weeks of tension and fear: grapevine, jazz square, mambo step, kick-ball-change; Jonathan apples, Red Rome, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious; anger, sorrow, wonder, joy. In the glass, there’s another me, as if on the other side of light, a shadow self, my Sleepwalker, also dancing.

21

2 The One that Got Away

—1—

Don’t you remember this?” Dad kept singsonging as we trudged along the pavement at Silver Dollar City. “You used to watch this waterwheel for hours.” I had just moved to Springfield that summer, forty-five minutes from my parents’ lake house near Branson. Up till then, I’d rarely visited my parents there. Now, Mom and Dad were eager to show me the sights, catching me up on what I’d missed. As we strolled through Silver Dollar City, Dad kept referring to times when I was little that we had visited this Ozark theme park, this tourist trap. But as the wheel cut through the water in its lazy revolution, I felt no flicker of interest, no stir of memory. How could I have watched this for hours and retained nothing of it? I wanted to believe that if something matters, it cuts an impression in our brains, that at least it leaves a few wrinkles like the windblown surface of the water before me. I wanted to believe that even if I didn’t remember the waterwheel, it was the reason I found, say, hot baths or Cheerios at midnight comforting. 22

The One that Got Away We hiked up steep inclines, then chased our feet down them, passing cabins that housed woodcarvers, glassblowers, and spinners. “Do you still like the big cookies?” Dad asked. “You used to love the big cookies.” I looked at him blankly. He was enjoying this, wielding the power of telling me who I used to be. He owned a past I had forgotten, and I was starting to feel resentful that he had the advantage, that I couldn’t wrack my brain into recalling. “Remember the cave?” Dad said. “We must have gone through it half a dozen times.” He smiled. He looked smug. It bugged me that I couldn’t remember the cave. That summer day, a few months before a stranger would disrupt my life and my dad would temporarily lose his own memory, that day as the sun flashed and steamed off the pavement, I shivered a little, briefly spooked by what might be stored in my brain that I couldn’t remember. Were the cave’s recesses what gave my mind ideas for creating its own hiding places, I wondered, for swallowing things up in darkness?

My parents were thrilled to have me living so close by. Once they came to get me to go eat at the Dinky Diner, a restaurant near Reed’s Spring Junction that served tiny hotdogs, tiny tacos, and tiny chicken legs. Another time, my parents bought me and my little brother tickets to the Shoji Tabuchi Show in Branson, where a Japanese fiddler performed for an audience decked out in pastel polyester and haloes of permed hair. My little brother had just had one section of hair spiked, one straightened, and one frosted. Skull earrings dangled from his triple-pierced ear. He related to me his fantasy that Def Leppard would leap onto the stage with electric guitars. Depending on whether the number was fast or slow, women in sparkling evening gowns or checked square dance dresses flitted around Shoji Tabuchi, singing backup. During the show’s

23

24

After the Flashlight Man frenzy of changing colors and flashing lights, applause scattered across the theater. The clapping gathered force when waterfalls suddenly came to gushing life at climactic moments in the music; when lights reinforced plaintive or celebratory notes by dimming, brightening, or rapidly skimming the stage; or when performers ended a patriotic song by suddenly creating a formation that made all their costumes fit together like a big American flag. On Highway 76, traffic came to a standstill, and the air was sweet with funnel cake and cotton candy. There was never a burned-out bulb in signs for go-carts and bumper cars and miniature golf courses and water parks and 3-D movies, for the Elvis-A-Rama, a 100-foot mural depicting scenes from his life. Signs for hotels and restaurants and country music theaters throbbed with lights and sparkled with sequins: the Baldknobbers Hillbilly Jamboree, the Foggy River Boys, Boxcar Willie, Mickey Gilley’s Family Theatre. Lights blinked and pulsed and chased each other above the highway. And Dad said, “Don’t you remember coming here? Branson wasn’t this developed then, but we used to camp and fish down at Tablerock.” But this bright, cheerful, wholesome surface was just that, bringing forth nothing hidden.

Why had I avoided visiting my parents before my move to Springfield? Why had I denied them the pleasure of showing me around? My reasons had something to do with our family stories that had become as fixed as photographs but, I thought, discolored by time. And so the mother bought five ceramic fish to hang on the bathroom wall, I had written in my early twenties, thinking that I was making up a story. Five fish, two parents and three babies blowing pink ceramic bubbles. Five: the perfect number for a family, she thought. Those five pink ceramic fish would

The One that Got Away play the same mute game of Follow the Leader across the bathroom walls of every house where the family lived. Often the little girl stared up from her bubble bath at the row of ceramic fish. She thought about the stories her parents told about her, all the cute things she’d said and goofy things she’d done, and she pictured all those stories as perfect pink bubbles that had floated from her parents’ mouths to settle and harden into fact there on the bathroom wall. I’d always felt confined by the stories told over and over by my family, stories in which I heard the hostility but not the affection that was just as surely there. As a little girl, so the stories went, I was a “dizzy blonde,” prone to crawling forward down stairs rather than backing like normal babies. My parents kept the basement door closed and agreed it was a wonder I hadn’t fallen and suffered brain damage. Evidence of my ditsiness included my tendency to put shoes on the wrong feet and then just giggle when Dad despaired aloud. Even when I was grown, he’d say, I’d still need him to help me with my shoes. I flatly refused to learn to tell time, spacing out during the second-grade teacher’s explanations, then my dad’s repeated patient ones. Once I even came out mildly retarded on an IQ test. A few years ago, coming across my Campfire Girl Manual, I understood, to some extent, my family’s conclusion that I was a bit of an airhead. I had a choice of activities to earn my beads, but none of the challenging ones are marked: I didn’t construct a chemical hygrometer or start my own marimba band. Instead, I apparently earned one bead by lowering a glass over a candle, showing that fire could not burn without oxygen. I gained another bead by demonstrating a relaxation exercise, pretending to be a rag doll for five minutes. Despite all this, I was good at school, my grades consistently higher than those of my brothers. The family myth expanded to accommodate this fact: I wasn’t very bright, but I was the one who managed to “follow the rules.”

25

26

After the Flashlight Man But wait, I protested years later, wasn’t I the child who risked plunging headfirst down the stairs and later resisted learning to tell time? Did those things really show adherence to rules? The baby book my mother kept only sporadically is a record of the things I climbed—when I was ten months old, under “Funny Antics,” my mother wrote, “Climbed upon divan using toy on floor as steppingstone. Climbed up on divan using end table as steppingstone. Climbed out of crib using brother’s bed as steppingstone.” “Keep your feet off the furniture,” Dad kept saying to me when I was a little older because of my tendency to climb whatever lay in my path, always going over rather than around. Dad threatened that when I grew up, he would come to my house and tromp on my couch in muddy shoes. And while he was at it, he would litter my car with candy wrappers and scream in my yard when I tried to work. I laughed hysterically at these images and continued to ignore conventions. How was that following the rules? I asked my parents indignantly, years later. The little girl stared up at the fish on the wall, at the round, perfect bubbles. She took a vindictive glee in poking and pinching the real bubbles before her, watching as they popped and vanished, turning to soap scum on her hands. Deep down, though, she felt a vague unease at the fragility of bubbles.

When I was a child, my dad had such power over me: he remembered me before I could remember myself and could say who I was with the stories he told. In comparison, I knew little about him. “What do you do?” I’d ask him sometimes, wanting to know his job, the name of his work. Other kids’ parents were electricians, neurologists, and teachers, but when I inquired about the nature of my dad’s job, he’d say only, “It’s top secret.”

The One that Got Away Every morning he went off to Boeing Aircraft’s military plant. I pictured someone jumping on boxsprings, or Ramona the Pest pulling her kindergarten classmate’s springy curls. “Boing boing boing,” I’d say. Frequently, we saw Dad off at airports and, on his return, rummaged through his briefcase for gifts: Space Needle pens, Statue of Liberty and cable car pencil sharpeners, a gold-plated Sights of Washington D.C. charm bracelet. Dad’s silence made him seem omnipotent in his knowledge. Once, Department of Defense investigators interviewed our neighbors and my brothers about Dad’s work. Everyone was stumped for answers. Dad had no trouble obtaining security clearances. Once, in high school, I tried listing details I knew about my dad as I brainstormed for a character sketch. It came down to one or two of his childhood stories and my own memories. He spent a Saturday every spring fighting the rototiller into straight lines, plowing up earth, and came in smelling of dirt and grass. Every year he grew things my friends had never heard of, sour green gooseberries and red stalks of rhubarb that he made into pies no one but him would eat. He raised pigeons in the backyard, musty grayish birds that warbled all the time in their dirtbald chicken-wire coop. Why pigeons, I never knew. They were not even the kind you could send off with secret messages, trusting that the birds would eventually boomerang their way home; Dad raised the kind of pigeons exterminated as pests in big cities. Eventually, I asked my dad enough questions about his job to figure out that he wired military airplanes. So he was an electrical engineer, I concluded. But he would not be pinned down. His degree was in math and physics, not engineering, so though he held a job exactly like that of an electrical engineer, he could not accurately be called one, he said.

27

28

After the Flashlight Man

When I moved to Springfield, the old roles rapidly restored themselves: Dad was still the Keeper of Secrets, the Guardian of Memory, the Repository of Knowledge. One day, I arrived at the lake house and found my mom, aunts, and cousins all wearing Band-Aids in the exact same spot directly above their left ankles. “What’s with the Band-Aids?” I asked, and Aunt Gena pointed to a nail sticking out of the couch leg. “Everyone keeps running into it,” she said. “I bled. I could sue.” “Your dad won’t fix it,” Mom added. “You should watch where you’re going,” Dad said. “I don’t go around running into nails.” Later that day, I too scraped against that nail and blood dotted up along the thin scratch. None of us made a move to remove the nail ourselves, though.

My parents had bought the lake house and started spending weekends there when I was in college. My brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins scheduled visits; I didn’t. I was busy with classes, my job, and my boyfriend, and increasingly tired of jokes about my supposed inability to park a car or distinguish stars from streetlights—jokes that had become family habit. I married young and knew, on the road to my honeymoon, that even then my room was being converted to something unfamiliar. The next time I stopped by, a week after the wedding, my younger brother’s stereo blasted against the south wall. The rose-and-trellis wallpaper had been replaced by paneling and by the bared teeth and spiky hair of heavy metal stars. The closet door hung askew and all the windows had been papered with aluminum foil to block out the sun. A hamster ran mindlessly on its wheel, permeating the room with a vague urine smell. It shook me up, how easily all signs of my presence had been erased. Coming home, sleeping in this room, I’d reach

The One that Got Away out in the darkness, remembering where my desk, my books had been, blindly I reached out into empty spaces. Sometimes, Dad brought out the shoeboxes of snapshots, numbered and filed, and I turned through them, mystified by the tow-headed little girl, her messy hair like a chick’s fluff of down. I had to take Dad’s word that that child, arranging dolls and pretending to iron, was me. These domestic activities certainly hadn’t proven prophetic, and I couldn’t remember ever having hair so pale. Dad, the documenter of my life, now narrated what I couldn’t recollect. You were four, he’d say. We were at Yellowstone. Or: don’t you remember the house on Morris? You kids built that snowman behind the garage. Flipping through photos, I seized on one of my thirteenth birthday. Relieved recognition flooded me. In the picture, my grimace floats above burning candles. Leaning forward in his chair, my older brother appears positioned to bolt off to something more important. My little brother crouches under the table, using its base as a highway for a colorful plastic toy from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. My mom hunches over a textbook, studying. I still had the diary in which I’d complained about being ignored on my birthday. And here was a picture that confirmed my version of things. “This is exactly how I remember it,” I told Dad, my wonder turning to triumph. From the time I was eleven, I had kept diaries and journals, and that day I stumbled into a new power. Any family member who claimed that we bought the Bobcat in 1978 or that the trip through Plains, Georgia, was in 1979 could be instantly disproved. Suddenly I, the Dizzy Blonde, had become a Keeper of Memory, a Repository of Knowledge to rival my dad. Maybe I was a bit overzealous, obnoxious, even; at any rate, Dad began to look at me bleakly, as if I were stealing from him his parental prerogative.

29

30

After the Flashlight Man

The first time I visited the lake house, it was deserted on a latewinter weekend; I had grudgingly taken up my parents on their offer to let my husband and me stay there on our way back from Arkansas. We followed my dad’s detailed instructions down to Hoot Owl Point and fished out the keys he’d given us. I halted in the doorway. This was the right house, all right. There was the old living room couch, the long, muddycolored yellow couch where I used to lie and read, letting the arm covers slip down to puddle on the floor. There was the old booth-style kitchen table, the vinyl seat torn where my older brother’s belt buckle had caught it. The tin dishes we ate from when we camped, my grandfather’s flower-stamped silverware, a hideously bulbous lamp had all vanished years ago, discarded, I assumed. Now, my glance sweeping the room set off eerie pinpricks of memory, the whole past concentrated the way it is suddenly when you bite into a cookie made from an old family recipe, or when you sniff the air the first summer day that someone flips on the air conditioner. I had long been fascinated by memory and forgetting. I was a sucker for movies and books about amnesia, the kind where a woman wakes up after a twenty-year coma and thinks she’s still a seventeen-year-old cheerleader. Or, after a car wreck and two clinical deaths, a woman no longer remembers her own name, recognizes her husband, or even knows what a husband is. I was glued to the page as Sybil suddenly finds herself wandering the streets of strange cities with no idea how she got there. I was transfixed by the story of the woman who didn’t speak Russian but claimed to have the same scars, birthmarks, ears, feet, handwriting, and facial proportions as the youngest daughter of Russia’s last Czar. I had been through obsessions with time travel and with children raised by wolves, gazelles, and apes. For the amnesiac, the time traveler, the feral child, the world becomes a minefield requiring constant negotiation to heal the rifts between

The One that Got Away familiarity and strangeness. That tension of identity is especially compelling for those of us who always saw ourselves as outsiders: a larger-than-life representation of that experience, but with the startling freshness of a poet’s vision. Now I wandered through my own interval between the past and present, memory and forgetting, the intimate and the unfamiliar. This bedspread, that dresser, these ragged washcloths: I knew the weaves and grains in the same way I knew the lines etched on my palm or the design imprinted on a penny, things I could identify if placed before me but could not, offhand, describe. Stepping into the bathroom, I stopped short. As if out of my own imagination, out of a story I’d written or a dream I’d dreamt, four pink ceramic fish swam across the wall. Two parents and two babies blew pink ceramic bubbles. Shouldn’t there be five fish, though? I wondered. Where was the other baby? Flinging her wet towel toward the rack, the daughter caught instead one of the baby fish on the wall, I wrote, inventing an answer, I thought. It leapt from its place, crashing to the floor and splintering into five jagged pink ceramic shards. A fin skidded across the tiles to settle against her foot. Then, suddenly, her mother was in the doorway, face white with bright red splotches, the way it got when she was angry. “How could you?” She knelt on the floor to gather the pieces with shaking hands. “What is wrong with you?” she yelled at the daughter, who stood dripping in her bathrobe, shocked at her mother’s disproportionate rage. “Why do you always have to ruin everything?”

Throughout my early twenties, I protested the dizzy blonde stories. In the wake of my vehement campaigns against them, my accumulation of advanced degrees, my divorce, and numerous relocations, the family myth gradually shifted. Now

31

32

After the Flashlight Man in my mother’s favorite oft-repeated story about me, I am three years old, announcing of my own volition that I want to attend the day-care program offered by the hotel where we are vacationing. Furthermore, I instruct my parents, if they should happen by, they must pretend not to know me. I have settled, grudgingly, for this version of myself, despite its heartbreaking undertones: how, even at three, I was raring to leave home; how, even at three, the spirit that would eventually take me far from home was manifesting itself. I like the way this story erases the self-doubt and fears of loneliness, the broken attachments and painful losses of the intervening years, the way it suggests that, even now, some mythical reserve of cold-hearted determination will see me through.

Not long after I moved to Springfield, I saw in the national news a story about a man who was convicted of a crime based on a daughter’s long-forgotten, now recovered memory. Suddenly, everyone was talking about recovering what had been repressed, as if the memory were a graveyard in which what was buried could rise from the dead. The idea haunted me: could we ever really resurrect what had been forgotten? It was Christmas, and Mom launched into a story: “I remember you were such a little thing,” she said, her version of “Once upon a time . . .” I sighed and waited for her to drag out a familiar story, told to me with the exact same words as the last time as if she were on the witness stand. It would be years before I really sympathized with that fierce need to finally pin down the past, that fierce longing to stand firm on our small islands of history while the shores of reality shifted around us. “You must have been two or three,” Mom said. “You were playing in the bathroom, and you knocked one of those fish off the wall.” Now I was listening. Goose bumps prickled across my scalp and arms. I didn’t remember hearing this story before.

The One that Got Away “I can’t ever remember being so furious, so out of control.” Mom folded the corner of some waxed paper; my mother habitually folds everything, once, then twice, then three times, pleating the pages of books, crafting the church bulletins into fans, leaving waxed paper scarred. When my mother has forgotten everything else, her hands will still remember how to fold. “I yelled at you and hit you,” she said. “And then I thought, ‘Why, I hate my own child. This is just a stupid ceramic fish, and I hate my own child over it.’ I worried that you’d be traumatized forever. Don’t you remember?” I just shook my head. I struggled to recall the scene I thought I’d only imagined: the clean fish-shaped space on the wall, the fish smashed to scaly shards and pink dust fine as powder. I didn’t remember this, really, yet the fish had spent years floating beneath the surface of my memory. Now I waited for that memory to emerge the way fish under ice reappear with the thaw. Nothing came to me, no real memory of that day that I broke my mother’s bathroom decoration. And yet somehow, I had been aware, all this time, of the presence of those fish under that ice, their fleeting movement, their darting shapes. —2—

At first after the Flashlight Man, before I give in and rent a new apartment, I think that I will wake one morning to find that my irrational fear has evaporated, and that day I will leave Jan and Doris’s and move back home to my duplex. But whenever I return to pick up clothes or books, my heart pounds so hard I feel faint. My mind feels like a house in which I used to live freely, rattling around in the basement and attic of memory and desire. Then that bright light swept like a searchlight through my mind, uncovering a terror I didn’t know was there, sending

33

34

After the Flashlight Man other emotions scurrying into hiding. Now I huddle in one room furnished by fear, afraid of the trap doors and dark passageways that remembering or yearning might create. It’s as if some terror was already there, waiting to be illuminated, not something left behind by that bright light. Maybe there was always a fear, under the surface, that if I left my marriage and lived in the world no longer protected by a husband or father, something like this would happen to me as punishment for my audacity. I am pretty sure that I can conquer my fear, my feeling of being both physically and mentally constricted, of keeping my thoughts in check. I just need to go back to my duplex, withstand one night, prove that I can do it, and emerge unharmed. Only that will drive away fear: only that will allow me to reinhabit my mind. When my parents offer to come stay with me, I know Dad won’t make good on his long-ago threats to scream in my yard or tromp across my furniture. I kind of wish that he would, that we all could do anything to feel freed from the fear that cages me, anything to reclaim my space from the presence of a stranger. But I didn’t spend so many years waiting to grow up and leave home only to become a child again now. Instead, I ask my friend Shelley to stay with me. Shelley tends to haul around a backseat full of little old people, various friends and relatives on their way to doctors or court or Walmart. This time, it’s Jean, the mother of Shelley’s husband’s first wife, in tow, and we all bunk down in my living room. Jean is so tiny that she can stretch out full-length on my loveseat; there she mouths prayers and drops off. Shelley makes herself a bed on the couch while I spread blankets on the floor. Headlights pass over the walls, springing me to vigilance, as do the purring and shuddering of the refrigerator, as does the heat’s steady breath, its abrupt inhalation and then silence each time it shuts off. Every tire against pavement is a knife slicing

The One that Got Away a screen, every ignition a stranger’s breath on the sill. Then a low, clogged sound lifts me, panicked, to my feet. Jean is snoring. “I’ll take care of it,” Shelley says groggily, reaching over to pinch Jean’s little toe. The snores die away. Thus, the night’s pattern is set. I leap up, alert, at every unidentified sound. Each time, something stirs in my brain’s darkened spaces, something vaguely important and perilous. Adrenaline surges, sweeping me right out of my body, floating me above it till danger passes. Periodically Shelley, awakened by my noise and activity, stretches out her hand to squeeze Jean’s toe. In the morning, I decide to move.

Nine people, including my parents and the four-year-old daughter of friends, assemble to help me load and transport boxes and furniture across town. At the new place, we hoist boxes, passing each other on the stairs; my friends mutter that my dad looks like Jason Robards and seems far more meek and passive than I’ve portrayed him. Things are too chaotic for me to think much about these comments. My new upstairs apartment has steel doors, security bars in the window track, a deadbolt, and chains. Inside, the four-yearold has converted the mattress sagging against the wall into a slide. She climbs it and tumbles down and announces that she wants a Happy Meal for lunch. I try to catch my dad’s eye; this little girl is so like my brother at that age. Dad’s glazed eyes will not meet mine. He follows me down to the street. He looks bewildered. “Where’s Mom?” he asks. “She stayed at the other apartment to clean, remember?” I say. “What’s the matter, Dad, getting senile?” A question I will later regret. It’s not till much later in the afternoon that I understand that something’s wrong. The realization dawns slowly, after my

35

36

After the Flashlight Man friends have gone and my parents and I have set to work organizing, unpacking, and assembling. Dad has been cross-legged on the bedroom floor for more than an hour, putting together the bed frame he bought me. I pass by as he sorts through little baggies of leftover screws and rereads the instructions. Squeezing shut one eye, peering with the other into the box, he shakes it. “What size is your bed?” he asks me. “I thought it was queen-sized,” I answer. He squints at the instruction sheet for a second, then concludes, “I think it’s standard.” “Well, I could be wrong.” It’s one of those inane dialogues that accompanies most human endeavors, certainly not normally memorable or even particularly interesting—until Dad starts sifting through the little baggies again, then rereads the instructions and rattles the box. He squeezes one eye shut as he peers into the box with the other, just like he did last time. “What size is your bed?” he asks. Instant replay, a time warp? “I thought it was queen-sized,” I answer, irritated. I think of riding my uncle’s pontoon, listening to my dad and his brothers converse. Been fishing yet this year? asks one, and the others stare out silently at the water until I have forgotten the question. Haven’t had much chance yet, answers another. The pontoon glides through the water, and maybe somebody grunts. A few miles later, one of the brothers asks, Is it mostly crappie down here? And so on: this endless slow-motion small talk. Now as Dad squints at the instruction sheet, I despair. “I think it’s standard,” Dad says. We live in completely different worlds if this passes for conversation, I think. Or maybe I’ve been so spaced lately, he’s repeating himself to guard against the strain of silence. I’m

The One that Got Away unwilling, unable to fathom that he’s not deliberately behaving strangely, that the situation is beyond all of our control. After all, Mom seems calm. She’s unpacking the towels I wadded into boxes, she’s busily refolding them neatly.

I have to escape. As I survey the living room and start emptying some book boxes, I’m suddenly vividly aware of how everything I trust has been yanked out from under me. Standing there in the middle of a strange apartment, I mourn my sense of safety and freedom, the way I used to take for granted that others might take charge and save me. Everything I own is crammed into boxes, piled against walls, my life has been labeled and tightly reined, I cannot find my way back to the refuge of memory and imagination. And now, on top of all this nebulous loss, my dad is acting as dislocated from his body as I’ve been feeling from mine. I take a deep breath and return to find Dad in the same position, cross-legged on the floor, scrutinizing the baggies and then the directions, then jostling the box while he peers in. He raises his head expectantly to me. “What size is your bed?” he asks. Mom drops a towel she has folded three times and fumbles to find the labels on the mattress. “I thought it was standard,” Dad says. “It is,” Mom says in a firm voice that should settle the matter. “Here, Bill, you’re right. It’s standard.” Dad fingers the baggies. Peruses the directions. Shakes the box. Same facial expressions, same slightly jerky movements. Looks up as if seeing me for the first time. “What size is your bed?” he asks me. “I don’t know how many times he’s shaken that box,” Mom says. “He doesn’t remember helping you pack last weekend, either.” “What size is your bed?” Dad asks. “You already asked me that,” I say. Before he can launch the

37

38

After the Flashlight Man whole routine again, I fling the baggies and the instruction sheet into the long box and run to hide it in the pantry. Out of sight, out of mind. I am shaking. Is there such a thing as sudden onset Alzheimer’s? I wonder. Or sudden onset obsessive-compulsive disorder? During the next thirty minutes, I make new discoveries about my own strength and speed, how quickly I can wedge a full file cabinet against the wall or whisk boxes of heavy dishes out of the way. Despite my best efforts, Dad becomes fixed in a new sequence: He worries aloud that the bed frame will scrape the wall, he squats to examine it, he rises and purposefully exits the room. Then he wanders back in, worrying aloud, squatting, scrutinizing. These odd calisthenics will continue for hours if I don’t stop them. “Should we go to the emergency room?” I ask. “Dad?” “Nothing is wrong with me,” Dad says, his tone a familiar, exasperated one. “You keep forgetting things.” I sound accusing. I feel like I’m the one acting crazy, as if I’m being insensitive, embarrassing him. Mom is no help. She holds herself rigid and shakes her head helplessly when I appeal to her. We’re used to Dad being the one who takes charge.

When he determines to transform part of my desk into a headboard and attach it to my bedframe, my alarm finally outstrips my caution. I order both my parents to their car, since mine is still full of boxes. Mom yields the keys without protesting. “There’s nothing the matter with me,” Dad says, but he complies with the air of a courteous but puzzled child, toting along his jacket in one fist. “Which hospital?” I ask. When Mom doesn’t answer, I try again. “Cox South or St. John’s?” Mom turns to me, watery eyes wide and defenseless.

The One that Got Away As I weave in and out of traffic with my meek and shrunken parents who cower in corners, I can hardly stand to look at their blank faces, the familiar faces of strangers in a world where everything has reversed from how it’s supposed to be. I think about my dad’s photographic negatives, which have always given me the creeps, the way faces and bodies fade to ghosts where they don’t become sharply planed and masked with shadows. Eyes and mouths turn to strange sunken hollows; smiles turn demonic. Often, I have failed to recognize people that I know. This car drives easier, smoother than mine: I brake too hard at lights and around corners. Aren’t you supposed to be bleeding to go to the emergency room? I keep wondering, worried that I am breaking some unspoken social code, abandoning my manners. Shouldn’t a bone have snapped, shouldn’t there be unbearable agony? Is it really appropriate to go because someone is repeating himself? In the rearview mirror, I catch sight of my dad’s blank blue eyes. In them I see how quickly a whole life can vanish, become a slate wiped clean. Who will mow the lawn? I think, absurdly. Who will remember me before I remember myself? My mother’s eyes are nearly as empty as my dad’s, as if thirty years of marriage have turned my parents so symbiotic that she will be permanently disoriented by his confusion. Weeks ago, a man in my bedroom at 3:30 a.m. illuminated the contents of my brain as if bringing to light all of my secrets. I think of all the darkened spaces my mind has created to cover those secrets again, to hide his muttered words. It’s as if that flashlight not only rearranged my life, but reached into the minds of my loved ones, too, scrambling us all. Jamming into park in the hospital’s circle drive, I race inside to ask directions. It’s starting to rain.

39

40

After the Flashlight Man

Dad seems as self-possessed as always, answering questions at the check-in station. He remembers the year and place of his birth and the name of his insurance carrier. In the waiting area, he clears his throat in his authoritative way as if preparing to say something wise and provocative; he sits as still as always, fidgetless, patient. Mom folds a tissue, which softens as she works it. After Dad is called and Mom leaves with him, I watch the rain fall outside the waiting room windows, recalling a day a sparrow flew down my chimney. All day, the bird flitted back and forth across the rooms, battering itself against panes. I, a city child, opened the front door and tried unsuccessfully to coax it outside. Dad arrived and, talking about something insignificant— the new stoplight at the corner, a favorite restaurant that had closed—he reached out in an offhand gesture and trapped the bird in his hands. He rambled on as he strolled across the room and freed the bird outside, shut the door, and finished his sentence, as if catching and freeing live things were as second nature as my mom’s tendency to fold things. Mom finds me an hour after we check in. Dad doesn’t remember the year or the president, she reports; the doctor says he has Transient Global Amnesia, that it’s not rare in men between forty and sixty. The cause is uncertain, maybe a glitch in circulation that blocks the flow of oxygen to the brain. Dad’s going for a CAT Scan now. “They want to keep him overnight,” Mom says. “I can get a bed here.” Although I haven’t spent a night alone since the Flashlight Man, I decide to just go back to my new apartment. I have to face being alone sometime. “Dad’s medication is at your old place,” Mom says. “He’s going to need it before tomorrow.”

Rain has started to freeze. Ice clicks against the glass. Windshield wiper shadows slash across my forearms. As I turn onto

The One that Got Away my old street, another car’s headlights blind me. Rain blurs all the streetlights. I haven’t been in the old apartment at night since the one Shelley spent with me. I know rationally just as I knew then that the Flashlight Man won’t be there waiting. I’ll go in quickly, leave quickly, and soon I’ll be safe in my own standard-sized bed in my own new upstairs apartment with steel doors and deadbolts and chains and window rods—my new apartment with oversized windows without curtains or blinds yet, all that dark glass opening my life up to the world. I won’t think about it, I won’t think at all. I stop at the end of my old driveway, just barely off the street, instead of nosing up under the dark carport. Switch off the car and my lights and listen to the sudden stillness, nothing but the gentle clatter of ice against the window. Gradually I adjust to lights of occasional cars rushing up behind me, the sounds of their tires passing over wet concrete. My old apartment is dark and still. I plan my movements: I’ll turn my key in the lock, step inside, snap on lights, scoop up the zippered blue pouch from among my parents’ luggage by the kitchen wall, and return to the car: a few seconds, a few steps, no big deal. After I deliver the pouch to the hospital, I can decide where to sleep tonight, whether to appear on the doorstep of friends one last time.

Nothing is wrong with me, says my dad’s insistent voice, an echo in my head like a catchy song you can’t forget. Another voice keeps crowding in, one that is too cheerful, too soothing, droning in a space between sleep and waking, in a blank moment void of memory or anticipation, a moment in which I don’t know my own name or have any face prepared for the world. I plunge out of the car. Ice comes rushing to bite my cheeks like those tiny fish in lakewater that go right for your ankles.

41

42

After the Flashlight Man Under the dark carport, in the abrupt shelter from wind and sleet, I fumble for my key. Inside the dark living room, I brush against the light switches, but they are already on. I’d left them on permanently, fanatical guardians against invasion, and now the bulbs have burned out. In the kitchen, two of the three bulbs come on before one pops and flashes off. Shadows press in. The illuminated countertop, the way that one bulb reflects off those islands in the shadows, seems so ineffectual; any second, the room could go dark, erased entirely. I know there is no one crouching outside in the bushes, or in here, in a closet, but the spaces and possibilities haunt me anyway, the idea that there is room in closets and behind bushes to hide a person, room in a brain to conceal memories. They can slip right through cracks and crevices to somewhere beyond the grasp—suddenly, without warning, in a glitch of circulation, a flash of light, pasts and personalities obliterated. I clutch the medicine pouch and run, knowing I’ll stay with friends tonight, out of the house leaving the last bulb on to burn out, too. —3—

At night in my new apartment, I pace, avoiding sleep and dreams that might spill out some memory I don’t want. My dad recovered his short-term memory a few hours after he lost it. Now, when he talks about that day, he says, “It’s like I saved it to a bad disk.” Nights in my new apartment, I think of this; I think of the ceramic fish that slipped into the shadows of my memory, sending only its small bubbles to the surface. Somewhere, with that fish, lies a whole store of experience I can no longer access. Shelley calls me one night after a news item: Back in April, a man entered a woman’s bedroom, pulled down the blanket,

The One that Got Away shined a light in her eyes, and told her he’d been watching her. He promised he wouldn’t touch her, then masturbated and said things she couldn’t remember. “He returned to the same woman last night,” Shelley says. “He couldn’t get in, so he shined his light from outside the window. Her boyfriend yelled and the Flashlight Man ran. The woman said that when he was there, outside the bedroom window, and that light was in her eyes, she suddenly remembered that he told her not to call the police, or he’d come back.” That night, memories dart frantically along the edge of my brain; they tease the edges, tickling and disappearing. Waking, I sit up, words surfacing. The cheerful, soothing voice of the Flashlight Man plays itself in my head, not promising or threatening so much as offering to come back some day when I am calmer, as if it’s a favor he’s doing me. All right, all right, we’ll leave her alone, the voice says. We’ll just come back later. That’s it? I think. Those are the words I haven’t wanted to remember? And yet, I am relieved, glad I moved, that some part of my memory protected me from sitting around waiting for another disruption. The next day, I report the Flashlight Man’s words to Jan, who isn’t surprised. “You told me that’s what he said. You told me that night,” she says. And in a newspaper article for which I was anonymously interviewed two weeks later, I quoted those same words. But in the intervening time, I’d willed myself not to think about them, and that was as good as forgetting.

At Waltzing Waters, we sit in an auditorium that has the chlorinated wet-cement smell of a swimming pool. On the stage, fountains grow from two feet to three stories tall and shrink again, change colors and shapes, and swirl and sway to a recording of the Boston Pops playing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” The water marches and frolics like a cross between fans

43

44

After the Flashlight Man of lawn sprinklers, a chorus line, and fireworks. Periodically, the fountains shrink to a row of small blue and green ones as a recording narrates the history of Waltzing Waters. “In this half hour, we are going to throw up,” the narrator says, and pauses just barely, “40,000 gallons of water into the air.” Water parades and capers. Next to me, Dad’s head nods in a pronounced tremble that didn’t used to be there. Still, his eyes are alert; he catches my ironic look and grimaces back. Not long ago, Dad started writing his own memories of being a bashful tow-headed boy not considered too bright. He writes about the first time he heard of indoor plumbing and what it was like to live without central heat or electricity. How no one thought to pump city water into the house, how it was instead piped where the well had been. How he pretended the petunias were parachutes and won June-bug-flying contests. How he and his grandfather gathered gunny sacks of coal for the stove along the railroad tracks. Now, as water dances to recordings of the Mighty Wurlitzer, I recall my dad at Silver Dollar City, how smug he seemed, asking, “Don’t you remember this?” Maybe, as a little girl, it was some prenatal tug I felt, staring at the waterwheel’s steady, soothing motion, a connection to my parents that I have spent my life trying to escape. “What is this song?” Mom leans over to ask Dad, and he listens a second, looking knowing then exasperated as a title fails him. Palms upturned, he shrugs. Both of them defer to me, but I don’t remember either. Once, I longed to be the star of stories in which I was the smart one, the independent one. I feel less comfortable now, understanding how such power relies on others’ weakness; who wants to be the lonely memory in the midst of forgetting? I am watching my dad’s hands, remembering the day he caught a bird so casually, memory turned to instinct stored in

The One that Got Away those hands. I recall how when he threw that bird outside, for a second it seemed borne by the momentum of his toss. “Wrap Up Your Troubles in a Glad Trash Bag,” I proclaim suddenly, and my parents give each other a look. Apparently before the commercial, before my time, this song had another name. “Was it an old kit bag?” Mom says. “An old mess kit?” I turn away while they hash it out, catching in the corner of my eye the slight tremble in my dad’s hands, remembering that day years ago, the way the bird’s wings took over where my dad’s hands left off, the way my heart lifted as that sparrow rose into its own memory of flight.

45

3 Ghostwriting

—1—

The winter before the Flashlight Man and my dad’s amnesia, I’d been writing like crazy, working late into the night. During the previous months, my life had undergone considerable change and turmoil: my divorce, completion of my master’s degree, the move to Springfield and my new teaching job, my ex-husband’s departure for Connecticut, my friends scattering to China, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Alaska. During the fall, I’d struggled, then finally broken through to a place where I felt peaceful and energetic and creative. Never mind that I was also slightly spacey and a little bit convinced that I was being assisted by my aunt’s ghost. Her ghost had made its first appearance years before, in 1984, on a dark stretch of highway between Wichita and Pratt. Through sheets of rain, I could barely see the road. My eyes ached from the strain. Rhythms lulled me: the gentle vibration of the engine, pattering rain, the windshield wipers rocking back and forth, back and forth. I imagined my warm, dry bed, miles away. I could almost feel the pillow against my cheek as 46

Ghostwriting I sank down, down, or maybe I was floating up, into the sky, toward two glittering stars, bright blobs of light— Nancy Grace, watch out. The words in my head woke me completely; the stars shrank to headlights bearing down on me. I swerved back into my own lane as the oncoming car shot past. I gunned it toward home as lightning flashed in the western sky, forked like the veins in my forearms. Not until later, after I had parked against the curb painted with green numbers, not until I had dashed through torrents of rain up steps that had become a waterfall, not until after my husband had met me with towels to rub my hair dry, not until then did I think Nancy Grace? No one had ever called me Nancy Grace but my aunt who died of lupus five years before. The week before Aunt Shirley died, I wrote a story about a girl whose aunt was dying. The aunt acted crazier as she got sicker, and no one in the family knew what to do. The aunt was paranoid and mean. The other adults were angry and tense. The aunt often telephoned the girl to ask who was talking about her and what they were saying. The other adults cornered the girl and stared at her and said, “Does your aunt make you uncomfortable?” The girl denied everything. The adults said to each other, “She’s not very perceptive.” It was a story I couldn’t get right, still can’t. When Aunt Shirley died less than a week after my first try, I felt guilty about trying to write about her at all. In the children’s books my mother and aunts passed on to my cousin and me, people died dignified, graceful deaths. I hid my story in the bottom of a drawer but resurrected it a year later. Rewrote it another year after that, scrapped it and started from scratch five years later, revised that version for two more years. It was early in this process that my ghost made her presence known, born from what I could make no sense of or resolve, formed in the tension between truth and the world I’d rather live in.

47

48

After the Flashlight Man

I was the youngest of the girls, nieces and eventually stepdaughters, who became substitutes for the daughters my aunt couldn’t have, but I never felt like enough of a girl to satisfy her. I refused to wear dresses, was impatient with my hair, and became silent, almost dazed, when a book moved me. My cousin, Jody, loved dolls, designing and sewing complicated three-tiered evening gowns for hers. She said the proper effusive things about books she loved and, unlike me, wasn’t too disgusted by the lisping dialogue in Little Men to get through it. She willingly sat still while Aunt Shirley braided or curled her thick hair. I first started writing when I was about eight as a game with Jody, something we did when we were together. Often we started writing in the morning, pausing only to read aloud to each other, or impatiently, for food, and then looked at the window to discover that the sun had set. Jody was two years older than I, and I envied her vocabulary. Her characters didn’t go to the bathroom, they went to the latrine and would have found discussions of such matters vulgar. I was so jealous of my cousin’s cleverness, I kept killing off all my characters to get revenge on them for not being as interesting as Jody’s. Jody rarely wrote when we weren’t together, but the need to write started to possess me. I silently narrated my life as I lived it: She opened the door and ran across the loose gravel, swinging her lunchbox, to board the bus. I tended to lose at Monopoly because I became so distracted by picturing the lives of the people who worked at B&O Railroad or resided on Baltic Avenue, I forgot to charge rent to those who landed on my property. Or I spaced out, imagining what a shoe and an iron would say to a dog while visiting it in jail, and I neglected to buy property altogether. After seeing the movie The Parent Trap, about identical twins who are separated as babies and discover each other years later, I wrote a story that Jody greatly admired. In it, identical quintu-

Ghostwriting plets are separated as infant shipwreck victims and coincidentally sent to the same boarding school shortly after their twelfth birthday. The first two discover that they’re twins, and then, in a riveting scene, the third appears, followed by a poignant reunion with the fourth. By then, I was so moved by my own work, I couldn’t go on, even though Jody wanted to know what happened next. Everything became writing material—stray scraps of paper, a stick and a puddle, the faint ink that could be rubbed from a flower. Details and words could set my blood racing. I loved the rough texture and inky smell of green and yellow and blue handbills from my parents’ short-lived double-knit fabric shops; Jody and I composed stories on the backs of these and kept them in fabric sample folders with rows of labeled swatches glued inside. I was fascinated by the mysterious sounds of the color names: raspberry, spumoni, willow, orchid kisses. She turned on Willow Street in her spumoni-colored car, I wrote. For me and maybe, at least briefly, for Jody, writing was a reprieve, an escape into another world, a spontaneous one free of any concept of error. My writing was, I always felt, the one thing about me of which Aunt Shirley wholeheartedly approved. She exclaimed over the stories I wrote and begged for copies. Sometimes my mother called her up and read her things I’d just written. I basked in her pride. Aunt Shirley was a fifth-grade teacher who kept up with children’s books, and I was a voracious reader. This provided another, though more uneasy, connection between us. Aunt Shirley made it a point to read those books nominated for the William Allen White award, given annually based on a vote by Kansas schoolchildren. Aunt Shirley impressed on me that I had a civic duty to vote. I read many of the same books she did and listened with awe to the strength of her opinions. Once, I felt a little guilty as I secretly voted for a book she hated.

49

50

After the Flashlight Man I frequently spied on my mother and her sisters together, fascinated by their loud laughter and tendency to talk at the same time, by the way they fell back into old roles when they forgot anyone else was watching. My mom became the responsible, slightly stern oldest daughter, Aunt Gena the alternately resentful and playful middle sister whose allegiances kept shifting, Aunt Shirley the sickly youngest child who wheedled and whined and demanded attention. The only girl among brothers, I found these interactions exotic.

My mother and her sisters had been little girls less than thirty miles from Rocky Ridge Farm during the years that Laura Ingalls Wilder was there writing her first books. We’d all practically memorized those books. Jody and I grew up re-enacting our favorite parts, making long skirts out of sheets and pretending that our beds were covered wagons. I was thirteen the last summer that Aunt Shirley was able to travel, the summer that she took Jody and me to the places Laura Ingalls Wilder lived and wrote about. I couldn’t believe my luck; most kids got stuck going to places like Disneyland. Our trip sounded much more magical and wonderful. The plans had to be revised several times. Aunt Shirley had grown heavy, moved slowly, needed help climbing stairs. Her fingers were often stiff, and she had trouble lifting things. Her face had swelled, turned moony from the drugs. Because she wasn’t sure how well she’d hold up, we forfeited the drive to Pepin, Wisconsin, site of the Little House in the Big Woods, and to nearby Caddie Woodlawn country. Caddie Woodlawn was another of our favorite literary heroines. We didn’t bother with Independence, Kansas, either; there was no marker there yet for the Little House on the Prairie, and on our way out of Kansas, we saw plenty of prairie.

Ghostwriting

Do you girls have on your seatbelts?” Aunt Shirley kept asking from the front seat as my silent, compliant uncle followed the map up to Walnut Grove, Minnesota, to the Banks of Plum Creek. Jody and I left our seatbelts unfastened and hid our crime with opened books facedown across our laps. At night, in motels, when ordered to bathe, Jody and I locked ourselves in the bathroom, ran water, and sat on the edge of the tub loudly wringing out washcloths and talking, in a conspiracy of children against adults. Then we put on our pajamas and reappeared, pretending to be clean. In the middle of Plum Creek, unmilked cows squatted, lowing in pain. The water was shallow and muddy, nothing like the sparkling stream surrounded by lush vegetation in the twoyear-old TV show. Even though Jody and I scorned the show for its inauthenticity, even though I didn’t expect anything to look like on TV, I was dismayed at how at odds the reality was with my own imagination. And Plum Creek was just the beginning. In South Dakota, Silver Lake had vanished, dried up and overtaken by weeds and trees. The museum in De Smet, South Dakota, the Little Town on the Prairie, displayed pictures of middle-aged, grim-faced members of the Ingalls family, as funny-looking as any of my relatives. On the way to Mansfield, Missouri, I felt glum; all of the magic of the books had drained away, as gradually but continuously as sand draining down an hourglass. Not only that, I was desperately jealous of the conspiracy forming between Aunt Shirley and Jody, who had started to take baths and fasten her seat belt. I was ready to go home. I trailed my aunt and cousin through the museum at Rocky Ridge Farm, listening as they exclaimed over the school tablets in which Laura had written. I lagged behind in the farmhouse, pausing before the narrow bed Laura slept in as an old woman and the low shelves of her library, concrete evidence of how small she’d been. From the photos and the furnishings, I put

51

52

After the Flashlight Man together a picture of a stiff, grouchy old woman, no one I wanted to know. As I stood gazing past red velvet ropes at the wide-armed chair where Laura had sat to write, my aunt came up beside me and said, “Makes writers seem pretty ordinary, doesn’t it?” The churning black clouds in my stomach broke. I swung the rope a little and stared at Laura’s chair. During the trip I’d had to readjust my image of Laura and of all the people in the books. Now, though, I found myself reassessing my idea of who writers were. Being a writer like Laura seemed suddenly within my reach. It would be a while before I could absorb that revelation. At lunch that day, the clouds of jealousy began to gather again. At a cafe with fly-specked windows, in the hot wind of fans, Aunt Shirley said to Jody, “You’re like me. We read books we love over and over.” “So do I,” I said. “I don’t know many people like that,” Aunt Shirley told Jody. “I can’t even count how many times I’ve read Little Women.” “Me neither,” Jody said. “I’ve read it twice,” I volunteered. “You didn’t like it, though.” Aunt Shirley dismissed me. “I did too,” I protested, but she and Jody shook their heads. I could not love the book as they did, own it as they did. I’d earned entrance to the Laura Ingalls Wilder fan club but felt mysteriously excluded from this one. “I’m going to start doll collections for you,” Aunt Shirley told us. She loved dolls. Antique ones stared from every surface of her living room: rag, porcelain, cornhusk. In a glass case there were two smiling china doll heads that gave me the creeps. “Have you seen the Madame Alexander Little Women dolls?” Aunt Shirley asked Jody. To me, she said, “You never liked dolls. You never played with them.” “I did too,” I said, but nobody was listening.

Ghostwriting

Before that summer, I’d read hundreds of pioneer stories and biographies like the Childhoods of Famous Americans series, orange-spined books with silhouette illustrations that told unambiguous stories about well-known people. No turmoil, no violent impulses, no knotted-up stomachs or cruel thoughts. These silhouetted people with obscured features seemed so much calmer and kinder than I was. Home from the trip, I read an adult biography of Helen Keller that shocked me. The famous people who’d been saintly in children’s biographies came across as complicated and unpredictable, egocentric even while they were self-sacrificing, torn between desire and duty. These people wouldn’t be above rabid jealousy of their cousins, either. That summer marked a turning point for me. Not only did being a writer seem more possible, but the reasons that I read began to shift. I no longer read, like my relatives, to simplify a disorderly world; I started reading instead to confirm that people were as complicated and weird as I’d always suspected, and to try to figure out why. Today, my relatives take in stride my attempts to debunk our myths, although I suspect that among themselves they shake their heads in fond amusement at my eccentricity. And, if she were still alive, I suspect that Aunt Shirley would be shaking her head right along with them. Still, I couldn’t restrain myself from spreading the rumor among my relatives that Louisa May Alcott scorned Little Women as sentimental and moralistic, that she was far more independent and unconventional than we’d been led to believe. I sent everyone copies of Michael Dorris’s essay on the disturbing portrayal of American Indians in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work. Futilely, I urged my relatives to at least read William Holtz’s biography of Rose Wilder Lane, Laura’s daughter. My relatives dismiss as absurd Holtz’s argument that Rose ghostwrote the books credited to Laura. I, on the other hand, am fascinated by the

53

54

After the Flashlight Man troubled, complex relationship Holtz describes behind the warm family stories. I’m relieved to topple our long-held belief that Laura just sat down and wrote her books, perfect the first time, in lined school tablets. I’m relieved that this writing process was as much work as any other. I’m comforted by what others in my family find unsettling: it enriches the books for me to see them as the product of love and frustration by a mother and daughter, agendas and memories grudgingly merged, entering the past to make imperfect sense of each other.

Christmas, 1976: As promised, Aunt Shirley gave us Madame Alexander Little Women dolls to start our collections. For Jody, Jo, the heroine, the writer, special-ordered because there had been none in stock. For me, Amy, the priggy little brat. I smothered Amy with tissue paper and thanked Aunt Shirley with a stiff smile. I hated her, hated Jody. I loved books and writing. Why did my aunt have so little faith in me? The next year we both got Marmee, the next year, Beth. One morning ten years later, I sat up in bed and said, “Amy?” My aunt had been dead for seven years, but I was as hurt as if she’d given me the Amy doll the day before. Jody said, “It was because I had brown hair, like Jo, and the same name. You were younger and blonde, like Amy.” Not long after, Aunt Gena presented me with a blue Madame Alexander box. “A wrong is being righted,” Jody said. I lifted out a Jo doll. “You were always a writer,” Jody and Aunt Gena told me. “We all knew that.” Up till that stretch of highway between Wichita and Pratt, my ghost’s activity had been limited to a few convenient coincidences, a little voice in my head that warned me away from danger, and a compulsion to write about my aunt. Now, my ghost’s presence took on new meaning, echoing Aunt Gena

Ghostwriting and Jody: Of course I had faith in you. Now write. Write about me. —2—

And so I did, that winter in Springfield, working on a new story about a woman and her aunt’s ghost. Every night I laid out clothes and each morning I found them torn or stained in subtle ways, so that I wasn’t sure whether the damage was the work of my ghost or something that I’d just never noticed. Nevertheless, I stopped laying out my clothes. My phone rang constantly. “Miss Grace? Miss Grace?” frantic voices said. My smug colleague Dave showed me in the phone book that a family named Grace previously had my number. He couldn’t understand that this didn’t make it any less supernatural. On Halloween, my phone lines crossed with another woman’s. All night, we answered each other’s phones and said, “This is really spooky.” Other days my phone was dead and the newspaper carrier forgot to come. I stayed up late, writing and writing. My colleague Dave kept asking if I really believed in this ghost stuff. All I knew was that every night, I wrote as if in a trance, remembering things I’d forgotten, discovering things I didn’t know I knew, existing in that free-flowing, inventive state that feels like possession. One night, my character decided on page 7 to go off the pill. On page 9, she ovulated. On page 10, she unexpectedly had sex with a former lover. And suddenly, on page 11, I thought, Oh, my God, she’s pregnant. I hadn’t planned it. It was like she’d slyly set up the whole thing on her own, fooling me into going along with it. I’d played right into the hands of my own character—or was it my ghost? What if my ghost wanted that kind of influence over my life? When I wasn’t writing, I missed my husband and my friends.

55

56

After the Flashlight Man Before dawn one morning, I woke too depressed to imagine ever getting out of bed. I turned over and closed my eyes. Nancy Grace. I rose to the surface of sleep, peered out at my life as through water at a blurred, dismal existence, and submerged myself in sleep again. Nancy Grace, I want what you have. What? Your life. I started to doze off. Christine Rossini. I burst awake. “Christine Rossini?” I said aloud. “You mean Christina Rossetti?” Then I went back to sleep.

Later that day, those words came back to me. Had my ghost really been conversing with me during those half-dreaming moments? Was she threatening to possess me, or just giving me one of those lectures enjoining me to appreciate what I had? And what about Christine Rossini? As far as I knew, I’d never read anything by the nineteenthcentury poet Christina Rossetti, but with two degrees in English, I figured she had to be in some book I had around the house. Sure enough, she appeared in the index of an English literature anthology I’d used in a Renaissance poetry class years before. Rapidly, I flipped to the first Rossetti poem, “Echo.” Come to me in the silence of the night Come in the speaking silence of a dream

I read, and chills lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. Yet come to me in dreams that I may live My very life again though cold in death . . .

I slammed the book, winter shadows pressing in on me,

Ghostwriting making the room feel chillier. My ghost had talked to me, in the night, in the speaking silence of a dream, had talked to me about wanting my life. I should get out of the house now, go stay with friends; I was clearly in trouble, clearly losing my grip on reality. But pleasure overtook fear. I had crossed some barrier, I could talk to ghosts, my thoughts raced, I had never felt so alive. Besides, my ghost would never do me harm. Maybe, I thought later, I should have followed my first instinct. Maybe I should have left, after all. Maybe she wanted me to leave, to protect me. One night, my mother dreamed that a man stood at the foot of her bed. She woke screaming. Did my ghost give up trying to get through to me and try to reach my mother instead? Are ghosts as ineffectual as people sometimes in helping loved ones? It was the night after my mother’s dream that I awoke to a real man near the foot of my bed, shining a light in my eyes so that I couldn’t see him. Despite my constricted throat, I managed some remnant of my mother’s scream, though my attempt was ragged, hoarse, pitiful; I screamed at this supernatural presence in my bedroom, this light and this voice that kept talking to me. Afterward, I felt vaguely as if a laser had probed my brain, slicing it open. When, only hours later, a man—the same one? someone else?—called and quoted from a story I’d written, it was as if a stranger had used a blinding beam to plunder my most intimate and foolish thoughts, quoting my words back to me. And then my dad lost his memory and my own brain seemed to come apart jaggedly, the way lingering lightning splits the sky open like a cracked egg. Suddenly, all the connections in my brain felt haywire. Had I somehow dreamed the last few months, conjuring up bizarre events by entering too deeply into the realm of the subconscious? Had I entered a darkness that left me fearing light?

57

58

After the Flashlight Man For weeks I winced at light. There was so much of it, I never noticed how much, lamplight, sunlight, the neon lights of stores. Lights and reflections of lights. Light pulled memory to the surface: a man’s voice tugging me from sleep, a voice that emerged from a ghostly world and threatened my safety and stole my words. After I moved into my tiny second-floor apartment with deadbolts and metal doors, I left all the closets open all the time. I fortified myself against invasion. No more writing. No more ghosts. No more weirdness. Words, then stories, struggled to surface. My ghost, if that’s what it was, seemed to hover at the fringes of my life. When I tried to write even a letter, a new presence, a stranger’s, peered over my shoulder, wormed into my mind. Nothing I wrote belonged to me anymore. And so I quit. I was no longer willing to pay the price of stories and of ghosts. Giving up the control that intuition and creation required meant giving up too much. But my ghost kept reminding me of her existence.

Kansas, 1990. A blizzard had delayed my trip home but finally, on Christmas Eve, I sailed along deserted highways through a brown and grey landscape. Nosing up behind another car, the first I’d seen in ages, I passed and went flying on. Seconds later, my engine threw a rod. I didn’t know that then, only that my car began to knock and shudder with terrifying violence. Miles from anywhere on a sub-zero evening, I pulled over. The car I’d passed went by and came to a stop on the shoulder a few feet ahead. The driver emerged and came jogging toward me. It was a man. Almost a year since the Flashlight Man, my heart could still pound as if it were gearing up to lift me like wings and float me away. With little provocation, I could still leave my body suddenly, adrenaline surges taking away all sensation for seconds at a time. I had to get a grip. Punch the locks. Reach for

Ghostwriting the mace in the glove compartment. “Nancy?” the man called. It was my cousin John. He and my Aunt Arlene and Uncle Jim saw me pass them and thought I was stopping to say hi. All the way to Wichita, we marveled at the good fortune that we should be on the same highway and that our paths should merge at precisely that moment. Later, my mom mentioned that when I was six months old and my big brother was hospitalized for several weeks, two aunts took care of me, passing me back and forth: Aunt Shirley and Aunt Arlene.

Think what you like, that I was bonkers or desperate or lonely, that my ghost was only my invention, that it’s really the memory of love, however ragged its edges, that saves us. Call it coincidence or synchronicity or supernatural, call it a human need to make sense of the senseless, but over the next few months, my ghost made me laugh, made me brave again. After a wrong turn on a trip, I found I’d accidentally taken a better route, and that reassured me that I’d never be permanently lost. On the day of a blue moon, a book fell out of my shelf and opened to a blurb from a review: “This is the kind of book that only comes along once in a blue moon.” And one day, after I’d trekked downtown through restaurants and stores, searching for the umbrella I’d lost the day before, the strangest moment of all: Giving up and heading home on a bus with only one other passenger, a stranger, I thought to ask the driver where an umbrella left on the bus might be. “I have your umbrella,” said the other passenger. She pulled from her bag my black Totes umbrella. She’d found it in a parking lot where I’d been the day before. The bus driver, the woman, and I stared at each other, ridiculous in open-mouthed astonishment.

59

60

After the Flashlight Man “I believe in guardian angels,” the woman said. A month later, I accidentally left the umbrella in Jody’s car, and she conveniently discovered it some weeks later during a rainstorm. She probably still has it. My aunt always liked Jody better. Still, for the ways my aunt failed me, real and imagined, during her life and with her death, in the flesh and in memory, I forgave her. —3—

One day my mother lets herself into my apartment and finds all the closet doors closed. “That’s when I knew you were all right again,” Mom says.

I close the doors, allowing back into my life dark closed spaces where things can hide; I close the doors and began to write again, venturing back into those places that can conceal uncomfortable emotions, unsettling memories. Accepting the darkness, I can also love light again. My mind comes back together, in one piece, sure enough of its boundaries to let them blur. I have forgiven my aunt, so why does she still haunt me? Is it because no matter how many ways I write her story, I still can’t get it right, can’t answer questions that have plagued my mother for more than twenty years? Why, my mother asks, did my aunt change so much in her last years? Was it the disease’s attack on her central nervous system, was it the corticosteroids; or did those things simply lower inhibitions and allow my aunt to do the mean things she’d wished to do all along? I remember her youngest-child petulance simply as the way she was; I remember the vindictiveness that affected adults more than it did me, and I imagine how left out she felt as she became more confined and our lives went on without her. But

Ghostwriting still, I struggle. How can I tell her story? How can I ever get it right? Writing, I stumble across moments I think I’ve forgotten. At the age of eleven, I have started breaking out in hives in extreme temperatures. This, my aunt announces to a roomful of relatives, was one of the first symptoms of her disease. The room falls silent, turns tense, as if my aunt has just wished on me her illness, as if she has just condemned me to death. I look away, as if by ignoring her, I can keep her, her fate, from possessing me. And so it is not just my need to forgive or understand, not just a desire to remake the world or understand its complexity or find what exists in the gap between memories of pain and love that drives creativity. Finally, we collaborate with the past, with our ghosts, to be, ourselves, forgiven. And when I write about my aunt, I remember another time: There is naked envy on her face as she admires a rug I’ve made. Caught up in Bicentennial hype and a competition with my big brother, I produced this rya rug, a thirteen-star flag. All of my cousins have agreed that my brother’s flag punch rug is better, the flag design more distinct. Rya lends itself more easily to abstraction. I point out to my aunt how my stars are all blobs. She folds her arms, sighs tragically. So I labor for months, looping and knotting yarn through mind-numbing hours of repeating my failure. And when she unwraps that awful rug on Christmas, it’s as ugly as I warned her it would be, maybe uglier, more lumpy and scraggly and blobby, and yet she fights a smile, she smoothes the yarn lovingly, she hides her pleasure and pride behind mock scolding, but I can see that she is pleased, is bursting with pride, just because I have made something for her.

61

4 Leaving Sparta

In self-defense class, taught by a man named Binky in a Batman t-shirt, we focus on methods of escape. I learn how to free myself from bear hugs, full Nelsons, half Nelsons, arm bars. I learn the correct procedures for grabbing a knife, redirecting a gun barrel, breaking eardrums, and gouging out eyes. Binky shows us how to choke our attacker, demonstrating on his assistant Bill. Then we line up, single file, quietly civilized, to take turns choking Binky. Before this, we have kicked sheets of paper, pulled Bill’s hair, shoved Binky, and uttered primal-sounding grunts and yells, but we haven’t actually hurt anyone. Face to face with Binky, I lift my hand as if I am about to take an oath and look at it doubtfully. “Choke me,” Binky yells. I raise my hand again, stick out my index finger. “Choke me, choke me, choke me!” He dances around, throat exposed, all but walking right into my extended finger. “Your attacker’s not going to wait!” Binky yells. “You’re dead.” 62

Leaving Sparta My finger flies forward. Binky clutches his throat, coughing. “I’m sorry.” I peer anxiously to see if he is okay. “Do not apologize to your attacker,” Binky chokes out. “Run.” At night after this class, I feel agitated. My brain buzzes; I picture each movement, thinking that if I review often enough, when confronted with real danger, I will respond instinctively. My skin feels raw, bruised, from being grabbed and gripped, from the friction as I pretended to go with the flow of being yanked in one direction and then suddenly freed myself. Raised to fight, many men are comfortable with this roughness. I was raised to walk away, smooth things over, turn the other cheek. This is all foreign to me.

At the end of class, each woman takes a turn strolling around the room while Bill stalks her and Binky coaches from the sidelines. I hate that part, inching along, looking back over my shoulder, dread building with the uncertainty. Bill, a big, hairy, gentle guy, follows at a distance, pretending to be dangerous. My skin prickles, hair rising like little antennae, as if there is some real threat. Then Bill has me from behind. A full Nelson. I try to think. “I can’t look,” Binky moans, burying his face in his hands. “By now her neck is broken. Oh, my God, I can’t stand it. She’s a quadriplegic.” Then I remember. I steady my head with one arm and sink, throwing out both arms, flinging one leg behind Bill’s. Bill flies backward, sprawling to the ground. We stare at each other in surprise. “Watch out for that one,” Binky says with a respectful glance at me. I don’t really believe, of course, that I can knock over a 200pound man determined to hurt me. Still, I feel renewed confidence in my coordination and intuition.

63

64

After the Flashlight Man

I am relieved when the class ends. Still, at night before I sleep, I review each sequence of movements that would free me from an attacker. I am so unused to thinking about physically defending myself, these sequences feel more like dance routines than fighting: steady head, duck, throw out arms, fling one leg behind the attacker’s, kick, step-ball-change. Growing up, I never expected to face any situation where a sharply honed arsenal of girl-weapons wouldn’t be enough: caustic tones, barbed comments subtly designed to promote insecurity in others, well-planned silences, outright snubs. I think back to my own fights, civilized, subtle power struggles, never the all-out brutality of traditionally male activities like war or hunting. Nothing prepared me for the moment that I would be targeted by a light the way a poacher paralyzes a deer right before he shoots, the way the executioner floods the enemy with brightness right before giving the signal to the firing squad. The self-defense class was a relief, in a way, letting me think of danger as something simple and easily identified. But my current battle with fear is more complicated than that, my fears more difficult to pin down. They have something to do with growing up a girl, of treading across minefields of more ambiguous dangers.

In the early seventies, the Wichita public schools began a racial integration program. I was a student at Seltzer Elementary, a rapidly growing all-white country school whose mascot was the Spartan. As a Seltzer Spartan competing in three-legged races, I never wondered exactly what a Spartan was. Later, in high school, I learned about ancient Greek soldiers who served a city-state that valued bravery, discipline, thrift, patriotism, and martial arts abilities and discouraged individual thought or interest in the world outside Sparta. The world outside Seltzer began to intrude during my thirdgrade year, when a white classmate was sent to a black school

Leaving Sparta across town and four black children joined my class. Sandra made an immediate impression on me. I thought she was loud and mean. She stole my pencils and threatened to beat everyone up. I told my dad that I hated Sandra. He told me to imagine myself at a school where everyone was wary of me because of the color of my skin. I should be nice to Sandra, he said. I was skeptical.

That year, there were two girls in my class who seemed to me mysterious and powerful. Sandra was tough, brave, and threatening, hands quick to fist, voice always edged with contempt. “I’m going to beat you up,” she’d mutter when denied the cookies from your lunch or a chance to copy your math homework. Then she followed you on the playground and narrowed her eyes whenever you left the classroom to go to the bathroom. A part of me wished I could be like that. Another part of me dreaded the idea that my truest self was a loner who could never pull it off as well as Sandra did. I would never be able to imitate her independent swagger that made it clear that she didn’t need anyone, her tough talk that fended off stares. Instead, I worried constantly about pleasing the teacher and keeping my best friend, who got along a little too well with my second best friend. I was always having to write sentences and 500-word essays on the Atlantic Ocean or “What ‘To Be Quiet’ Means” because I got in trouble for talking so often. Because of that, I also admired Loretta, better known as the Girl Who Doesn’t Talk. From kindergarten on, Loretta remained mute. She guarded her silence throughout games of tag, jacks, and jumprope. Though she attended birthday parties and school concerts, she never talked or sang. Teachers kept trying to coax words out of her. “Your mom says you’re a chatterbox at home,” our secondgrade teacher announced frequently when she called on Loretta, who stared at her desk and refused to speak.

65

66

After the Flashlight Man By the third grade, I stood in awe of her, as did many of the other girls; it was a mark of prestige to be able to say you had heard Loretta’s voice since so few of us had. Only once in more than three years had I heard her slip up, calling, “You’re it,” during a game of tag. Loretta’s talent for silence struck me as evidence of ironclad determination and invulnerability. She never stuttered, blushed, or made a fool of herself. She was so self-contained that she needed no friends. I secretly lamented that I had not been the first to come up with the idea of public silence. At nine, I felt emotional and sloppy next to Loretta and Sandra. I too wanted to appear immune to the world around me, to wrong answers or humiliation, to best friends or betrayal.

When representatives from Girl Scouts and Campfire visited Seltzer to talk to the third-grade girls about Brownies and Bluebirds, no one wanted to be a Brownie. “She’s the Brownie,” said one of my white classmates, casting a glance toward Sandra. For the first time in Seltzer’s history, there was no Brownie troop. Sandra joined one in her home neighborhood. On meeting days she wore her uniform to school, the set of her shoulders announcing that being a Brownie had been her choice and was a clearly superior one to being a Bluebird. Her uniform proclaimed that she had another life, a whole set of friends somewhere else. She didn’t need us.

Finishing third grade as a Seltzer Spartan, toward the end of the Vietnam War, my birthday came up number ten in the busing lottery. My parents treated the whole thing like a big adventure. I didn’t learn until years later about the callers suggesting that my parents enroll me in a private school or move outside of Wichita as a protest, callers that turned hostile and threatening when my parents refused to cooperate. So I rode a bus thirty minutes every day into the heart of

Leaving Sparta Wichita’s black neighborhood to a school that most of the black kids had been bused out of. The result: classrooms full of displaced white kids without even our own birthdays to distinguish us and a handful of black kids whose old friends had all been bused away. It was a bother to make temporary friends, something undertaken only reluctantly. Even our teacher, a white woman named Miss Coker, hated it there. We stood outside the window at recess one day, watching her swear and kick over chairs. L’Ouverture School was a whole new world for me where I heard the word shit for the first time, learned how to cheat on math homework, and was called highwaters when my pants were deemed too short. Miss Coker brought in one of the first issues of Ms. and read us a story about a child whose parents kept its gender a secret. I was fascinated by the story and by popular music; it was at L’Ouverture that I discovered the radio and top-40 songs and watched my classmates dance to “Crocodile Rock” and “Cherokee Nation” on the reading corner carpet. Wistfully, we talked about the kids with whom we’d grown up, the friends we suspected were forgetting us. On meeting days, we wore Campfire and Girl Scout uniforms to school, announcing that we had other lives and friends back home. But when I attended meetings, it felt like a lie. My old friends talked about teachers and classmates and school projects as if they’d never noticed my absence.

Soon after Nixon was elected president, Jenny began to spread rumors that Polly was a liar. After that, no matter what Polly said, we all rolled our eyes and made faces and turned our backs. Polly became sad and silent. No one chose her for their team on the playground; no one would be her partner for games or class projects. None of us wanted to be there, so we all pretended that Polly wasn’t.

67

68

After the Flashlight Man Within two weeks, Polly had disappeared. Miss Coker said she’d transferred back to her old school. One by one, we pretended that our classmates didn’t exist. One by one, they just weren’t there anymore. The third or fourth time around, it was my turn. Ostracism has a kind of ancient power; silence and blind eyes passing over you become a kind of death. Everyone has forgotten your name. They whisper over math homework and quarrel and giggle and push each other; they sing songs from music class in low voices; they share paints and yell at recess as if in a magic circle of activity from which you are barred. On the playground, you sit alone on a swing while the empty seats around you sway in a light breeze, occupied by ghost children. You remember pumping into the sky, letting loose of the chains at the swing’s apex, soaring for just a second toward the sun before you land, on your two feet, making an impact on the earth. In class, you speak, but no face registers your voice, no pages stop turning, no feet cease their shuffling, everyone but the teacher continues as if you are the ghost child. The first night, I asked my mother if maybe I could transfer back to Seltzer. No, she said firmly; I had to stick out a year. That was the agreement. For a second day, I traveled through silence as if in my own little bubble. During a game of tag, I could dance in front of whomever was It, could hold out my hand, a willing victim, and It simply maneuvered around me and went after the other girls. Giving up, I sat alone on the steps of a portable classroom during recess, later read at my desk without looking up and blinked away tears while classmates danced on the reading room carpet and traded candy. I sat alone at a long lunch table while forks clattered against plastic trays, my classmates’ voices blurred together, and a dropped spoon rang like a bell on the concrete floor.

Leaving Sparta I had never suspected, in my ten years, that people were capable of such viciousness, that my existence could just be willfully erased. Up till now the world had seemed simple and just, kindness yielding kindness, hard work bringing rewards, good intentions begetting love and friendship. I had known that words and fists and guns could be weapons but not silence, not this thick, unbearable capsule of silence that turned me invisible. On day three, I poked through my sock drawer, tears springing into my eyes when I imagined another day of isolation. By the time my mother had yelled up the stairs three times for me to hurry up, the tears had overflowed uncontrollably. Coming to fetch me, my mother looked grim. I was the first fourth-grader who didn’t get to vanish from L’Ouverture School. We were still young enough, just barely, to be afraid of a teacher’s wrath and sorry when our unkindness cut deeper than we expected. It was the last year, when we were ten, that adult intervention would have any real sway. Miss Coker yelled at us about the way we were treating each other, and my repentant classmates lined up to say kind words and present me with gifts. The spring all the kids wore POW bracelets, I became the ringleader in turning on a girl named Shelly. The whole time I watched myself, this alien I had become, in wonder. How could I be so mean when I knew what it felt like? No matter how sick I felt afterward, I did it anyway. I told Shelly that Jenny, Debbie, and I were sisters and our parents owned a ranch. I laughed at her for believing me, then savagely ostracized her for doubting my word. And so the pattern continued: I was sugary sweet, waited for Shelly to trust me again, then turned on her, meaner each time.

Some of the POWs came home in April. School let out at the end of May. According to rumor, Miss Coker was fired. We

69

70

After the Flashlight Man white kids eagerly anticipated returning to our home schools. We were allowed to, unlike kids like Sandra, who would be sent into wary if not hostile groups of white kids her entire elementary school years. As a white fifth-grader returning home, I was occupied with my own anxiety. The song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” popular the year before, filled me with sadness. I was coming home; I’d done my time; but there were no yellow ribbons or oak trees. The teachers couldn’t remember my name. Some of my classmates since kindergarten regarded me as a new kid. I had faded somehow, become a ghost here as well. I never regained my footing in my old life. Suddenly paralyzed by shyness, I no longer got in trouble for talking. My admiration for Spartan virtues—discipline, toughness and stoicism—began to break down. Silence and shyness and feeling like an outsider were torture, not tidy and calm as I used to think when I watched Sandra and Loretta. Because I was silent in class, I no longer had a reputation for being smart. I clumsily navigated shifted loyalties, wishing for a new best friend, unable to imitate Loretta’s cool dignity. The muteness that had made her appear in control left me feeling helpless and invisible.

Our fifth-grade teacher had no patience with Loretta’s silence. Mrs. Huffmon would sit forever waiting for Loretta to answer questions. Loretta turned red and stared at her desk, and we’d all rush in to rescue her. “Loretta doesn’t talk,” we’d say. “She can talk perfectly fine.” Mrs. Huffmon folded her arms and tapped her foot. The clock ticked loudly until Loretta finally answered in a whispery voice that startled us each time, like the stark paleness of skin just out of a cast. Sandra had changed in my eyes, too. I kept out of her way, but I was less afraid of her.

Leaving Sparta One day in class, staring absently into space, I was startled when Sandra said in a menacing voice, “What are you staring at?” I hadn’t meant to stare at her. I wasn’t actually looking at her anyway. Now, surprised, I didn’t lower my eyes; instead, I stared a notch too long, then realized that looking away now would appear to be capitulation. I couldn’t stand to risk my dignity, so I kept staring. Sandra’s jaw tensed, her hands fisted, her shoulders went rigid. Once I would have seen that posture as dangerous, explosive, every molecule of her body drawn into her anger and coiled like a snake about to strike. Other girls began to rustle and nudge each other. Everyone was gazing up through lowered lashes, pretending to study. “I said, what are you staring at,” Sandra asked again in a low voice. And I heard my voice respond, my voice that had been silent through endless class discussions, that had felt like the voice of a ghost when I gave answers for the math homework or spelled words on command. My voice said boldly, as if of its own accord, “Not you. You’re too ugly.” The sixth grade gasped. Sandra’s eyes locked with mine and held. We stared with the unyielding firmness of true Spartans, each refusing to be the one to look away. Blood rushed to my face. What had I done? Why couldn’t I have been the coward I really was and turned away before getting in so deep? The air bristled around me, full of unspoken pleas for me to come to my senses and quit risking my life. Sandra blinked. Her fists tightened. And at that moment I understood how the tightening was less like a coiled snake, more like a turtle pulling into itself, hiding its tender parts inside a rigid shell. I could not have put it into words, but I saw beyond her rage to the fear and uncertainty that drove it. Sandra shifted her eyes away. She muttered something about

71

72

After the Flashlight Man beating me up, and then she bent over a figure she was suddenly absorbed in sketching on her desk. After school, on our way to the buses, other girls kept asking in low voices, “Aren’t you scared?” I wasn’t, and that surprised me as much as it did anyone. Sandra avoided me after that and never threatened my life again. I wasn’t surprised about that either, having seen in her something that I recognized: the core of terror that an outsider always carries, the center of uncertainty that every survivor hides. I didn’t have words for it at the age of twelve, but seeing through pretenses of power, I didn’t know whether I’d won something or lost it.

Later, in high school, I learned more about the children of ancient Sparta, how weaker infants were abandoned on mountainsides or tossed over cliffs. The children allowed to survive received an education that was primarily military and athletic, training in territory and warfare. Boys engaged in physical contests and mock battles. They learned to handle weapons and survive brutal conditions. Kindness and compassion were suppressed in favor of courage, discipline, and endurance. At twelve, again a Seltzer Spartan, I lay awake many nights, proud of my unexpected boldness but uneasy at how naturally I was able to yank the rug out from under someone else’s bravado. Was it cowardly or brave to stand up to someone when you could see through them, after all? Maybe I’d learned how really alike we all are, under our skin, but I’d also learned my own capacity for cruelty and deception, for using my knowledge against others who were weaker. The recognition shamed me. Lying there at night, staring at the dark window and then at the closed door with its thin line of light underneath, I resolved never to be intentionally mean. Never again. And at the age of twelve, despite my new wisdom, I still believed such resolutions were possible to keep.

Leaving Sparta

After Binky’s self-defense class, I talk a friend into practicing with me. “Grab me from behind,” I say. He does. I sink, kicking back a leg to trip him. He dodges and grips my wrist harder, his hand encircling it. “You’re not expecting me to do that,” I say. “You’re supposed to let go because you’re surprised.” “Are you going to tell an attacker that?” He snorts. Then he lets go, looking troubled. “I think they gave you false confidence,” he says. Lying in bed, reviewing the moves, I know that if in fact I ever need them, it will be years down the road, and by then I will have forgotten everything anyway. But defending myself from some future danger probably wasn’t really the point, anyway. The class was as much a way to prove my competence to myself and ward off uneasy memories as a way to protect myself in the future. Even the stranger in my bedroom seemed more ambiguously dangerous than Bill when he pretended to stalk me or Binky when he dragged me across the floor: the stranger in my bedroom wielded no direct force and then shrank away like a baffled rejected date. I was powerful and powerless in the same moment, as I was years ago with Sandra, courage and bravado and plain old witless instincts bleeding together as if they were one and the same. Maybe it was like that two years later, also, when I was fourteen, during the time I least want to recall. It all depends on how you cast it, which details you bring into what slant of light, which you leave in darkness.

73

5 Someday You Will Go to the Moon

The powder-blue Impala glided silent as a spaceship down long highways while I lay in the backseat, followed by the bright moon above. I was six, seven, eight. Not long before, a man landed on that moon. My dad took blurred black-andwhite photos of the black-and-white TV the day the Apollo 11 made its wobbly landing, the day the first man took his first small step. Now, the bubble seatcovers molded craters in my cheeks, and I thought about a picture book on my shelf at home, Someday You Will Go to the Moon, starring a blond boy who went on vacation to the colonized moon. I didn’t dream of romance, that young. I dreamed instead of a best friend I would have someday, someone who felt as much like an alien in this world as I did. I dreamed of a vague future and my own giant leaps for mankind. From the front seat, the voices of my parents sounded as if they were being transmitted from another planet. Someday, I thought, drowsy and secure, someday I will go to the moon. 74

Someday You Will Go to the Moon

Did you feel safe when you were a child?” I ask my friend Dana on long distance. I am training to be a rape crisis peer counselor, and I am obsessed with this issue. “I didn’t lie awake afraid anyone was going to murder me,” Dana says. “And I wasn’t really afraid that my father would physically hurt me. I was afraid of his temper, and I felt uncomfortable about the way he looked at me. But no, I didn’t feel unsafe.” Dana was my best friend in our teens. In our twenties, our friendship has become more sporadic and contentious for reasons I’ve had trouble remembering during the last few months. There are things Dana and I avoid talking about, but I think of her as my link to the past. She is the one who knows my history so that I never have to explain. I don’t tell her how something in me freezes when I’m reading my rape crisis training manual and come across the list of symptoms for post-traumatic stress syndrome. Withdrawal. Eating disorders. Self-blame. Nightmares. Refusal to wear shorts or sleeveless shirts even on the hottest days. I want to call Dana. I want to say, “I wasn’t just weird when I was a teenager. It’s a syndrome. Listen to this.” But I don’t, because this is a topic that Dana and I dance close to, circle, then avoid. I’m riveted by my training manual and the sessions I attend at the rape crisis center. In peer counseling, I learn, the goal is to help someone who has been victimized claim her sense of autonomy and control when it feels as if all control has been taken from her. I learn techniques for helping a survivor recast her experience, to focus not on the ways she was weak but the ways she was strong, the choices and decisions that enabled her to survive. When a woman on the line says, “But I should have taken my instincts more seriously,” or “I was such a wimp. I should have fought harder,” I hear echoes of my younger self. And as

75

76

After the Flashlight Man I encourage other women to go easier on themselves, my own memories start to shift, reshape themselves.

Dana is insulted by the message I’ve left on her machine: “What’s the world coming to when you can’t even count on a fellow introvert to be home on a Friday night?” I’ll have you know that I just went shopping for a little while, by myself,” she says. I top her: I never enter malls on weekends. She one-ups me: Malls really aren’t that busy on Friday night. And then we laugh. Competing to be World’s Greatest Introvert is infinitely preferable to back when we used to compete for those titles women compete for: Most Desirable Woman, Most Active Social Life, Most Impressive Career. Once upon a time, we bought into the idea that there was something wrong with being homebodies who enjoyed our own company and that introvert was a dirty word. If we didn’t have dates or at least plans with friends on weekends, we didn’t feel entirely worthwhile. Dana and I feel freed, admitting to each other how much we both value solitude. We no longer feel obliged to bow to cultural pressure that would have us lament our time alone. We settle in for a long, rambling conversation about love and men and mixed signals. Suddenly, Dana says, “Have you noticed that this is the exact same conversation we were having fifteen years ago?” Is it? I remember dissections of facial expressions, words, accidental touches, and flickers of eye contact across cafeterias and in halls. Haven’t I gotten anywhere in fifteen years? Maybe I’ve come full circle, but at least now I know how rare and wonderful it is to have a friend to tell my life to. We don’t talk about how Dana is my link to darker memories, but I see our renewed friendship as a stand we’ve taken

Someday You Will Go to the Moon against those memories. From fear and sadness sprouted this source of strength, I think. But we never talk about it.

When Dana comes for a visit, we start recalling songs from junior high choirs. I can sing, in their entirety, both soprano and alto parts of “Love Is a Song.” I can do the boys and girls on “Love is the Answer.” Dana, on the other hand, recalls every word of “Music, When Soft Voices Die,” a song that sounds like a dirge. We nearly wreck laughing at our memories of “The Syncopated Clock,” how we almost fell off the risers performing for the Lions Club. We dressed in overalls and played boys in the Tennessee Wig Walk dance that we performed downtown with the All-City choir. The newspaper review called us “cute and feisty.” Dana doesn’t remember this or the words to the “Tennessee Wig Walk.” Somehow, these useless things have left their mark on my brain; it’s almost embarrassing what I remember. But beyond that, the question nags at me: what else doesn’t Dana remember?

At twelve, we looped and knotted yarn through burlap in Mr. Kinney’s honors art class. My rya rug had a somewhat phallic design rendered in a vivid combination of red and hot pink that Mr. Kinney found excruciating. Dana’s used more tasteful earth tones. Lori Becker wrinkled her nose at our immaturity while Dana entertained me with songs composed for her cat Muey, short for Muffy, short for Muffin. Dana, daughter of a heart surgeon, was on the fringes of a well-groomed, well-off, visible, and enviable clique known as the “socials.” She belonged to a country-club swim team, took gymnastics, and had been placed in all honors classes after a stellar career in an accelerated elementary school. Cute boys regularly asked Dana to “go” with them. Dana’s best friend

77

78

After the Flashlight Man was Michelle, an obscenely tan cheerleader with bouncy dark hair. I was a weirdo who lived outside the city limits, wore mostly home-made clothing, and had also for some reason been placed in honors classes after being rejected from the accelerated school because of an alarmingly low IQ score. I was allowed to be Dana’s art table friend, but I remained an embarrassment in more public settings. Dana and Michelle strolled up to me before a choir performance and hit me with a series of questions—had I ever been to a mall? Had I been to a clothing store there? Had I considered buying my clothes there?

Our junior high school consisted of four round windowless buildings in the midst of blank prairie, like four flying saucers that had just landed and huddled together to form a colony. A Ouija board told me that I was from the planet Leshma, a great comfort to me when I so clearly did not belong on planet Earth. Eighth grade, the first year of co-ed gym: Each day the girls left the locker room and paraded, in loose blue and white striped shirts and blue polyester shorts, before the boys. I was tall, with long, too-pale legs. My white cable-stitched knee socks were all wrong, making me feel delicate and girly. The other girls wore boys’ tube socks with colored stripes around the top. My underarms dampened, my face felt hot each day, but pride held me back from buying boys’ socks. The other girls, the socials, would think I was trying to be one of them, and I didn’t want them to think that. I didn’t want to be one of them. I had witnessed their meanness, the way they flipped their hair in classes while they made loud, snide comments about the “pimply nerds” around them. The boys were learning to puff up their chests a little when they strutted around shirtless, their shorts riding low, sometimes a hint of pubic hair peeking above the waistbands. They had learned to berate anyone who made a mistake and to hurl

Someday You Will Go to the Moon their bodies like weapons. I employed a campaign of passive resistance. During games of Bombardment, when the balls flew hard and fast enough to leave red marks on the skin, I maneuvered into the path of a ball first thing. I was out. I exited the game to go daydream on the sidelines. During volleyball, fearing broken glasses and shoving teammates, I ducked away from the ball. You’re supposed to avoid the ball in Bombardment, the coach yelled at me. You’re supposed to go after the ball in volleyball. I had it backwards. Where was my fighting spirit? How did I expect to get by without a killer instinct? I listened politely and stuck to my abnormal ways. During baseball, when my team was up, I went to the end of the batting line, every time. It was never my turn to bat, giving me more time to daydream. But then a boy told on me, and the enraged coach ordered me, in front of forty eighth-graders, to come forward and bat three times. Reluctantly, I rounded the backstop and scooped up the bat. I watched pitches sail by, the ball almost making contact with the bat of its own accord. I watched it, this little planet whirling toward me. There was a hush over the whole field, a suspense like in the movies, as the ball went by again and again and I did not swing. The coach, red-faced, stomped toward me. I stared at him blankly. I thought of Gandhi. I thought of Anne Frank. I thought of the Salem Witch Trials. I had read lots of books, and admired over and over those who resisted, who remained dignified. “You will swing the bat,” the coach yelled, and some boys hissed at me, “Cheater!” I wondered if I would be stuck here eternally, holding that bat, while a pitcher and catcher tossed the ball back and forth. I’d been quiet for years, faded into the background, and suddenly, here I was, my teammates like wild animals rattling the

79

80

After the Flashlight Man chain links of the backstop and hissing, the outfielders shifting impatiently and throwing down their gloves in disgust. The coach was red and explosive with rage. Here I was, just a girl who didn’t want to play, and look at all the fuss. I felt sort of proud, just standing here, mounting my own little strike. Maybe only minutes went by or maybe it was hours that I’d inadvertently brought the game to a halt. Lots of boys and a couple of girls yelled at me to hurry up, and hisses of “Cheater!” licked out from all directions. And then, mercifully, from the school building, the bell shattered the air. Once sixth-grade scooter whiz, holder of several threelegged race titles and Ping-Pong championships, once a child who loved to dance and the fastest runner in my class, I laid the bat gently in the dust and walked away, away from the brutality of eighth-grade gym. I’d felt oddly calm, but suddenly, heading alone into the locker room, the pressure lifted and left me shaking.

Over the summer between seventh and eighth grades, Dana had developed breasts, along with a figure that would someday enable her to look sexy even in sweats or a ratty bathrobe, a figure that would drive other women to envy. Dana and I were two of five girls placed in an honors biology class with fifteen boys during what was perhaps the meanest year of their lives. We entered this terrorist atmosphere each day not knowing when we would hear every feature analyzed in loud and derogatory detail, when we would be cornered or groped. No girl was completely immune, but Dana and I drew particular attention—Dana because of her breasts that caused her to be widely known as “Silicon Sister,” and me, especially me, because I was so weird, in jeans that never fit properly because I was so tall and homemade shirts. I was less aware of the other factors

Someday You Will Go to the Moon that made me a target: my visible contempt for mean-spirited behavior, my shyness that prevented me from easily deflecting unwanted attention with humor. I had stood up to bullies before, I had resisted little tyrannies, but this felt different, unfamiliar. Dana made her last stab at being a “social,” best friend of the disdainful Michelle. But Dana’s quirky side was gaining ground. She was torn between spending our half-hour activity period with me, memorizing the Declaration of Independence, or going off with Michelle to practice gymnastics. We copied out the Declaration of Independence from an encyclopedia, tracing the drawing of an eagle that soared above it. Dana and I mastered half of the Declaration with the goal of having all of these big, mysterious words at our command should we ever need to win an argument through sheer intimidation. When a mob of boys swarmed around us hooting and shouting profanities, we stared at the wall and recited in monotonous unison, “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . .” This provoked the boys to new levels of fury. They tried to drown us out, and a guy named Mark pranced around with unzipped pants while the others hooted, but we soldiered on, soaring like that eagle, denouncing tyranny and declaring our independence.

Sometimes half the class left during activity period for play rehearsal or team practices, and those days it wasn’t so bad when Dana left too. The rest of us dismantled a mobile of Styrofoam and foil planets, one of several displays in the classroom and lab; we took down Venus and played volleyball over the neon lights that hung down from the ceiling. I was good at this game. My height was an advantage, and I was quick. My classmates seemed surprised by this. They wanted

81

82

After the Flashlight Man me on their team. I looked forward to the days that the loud boys and the social girls left and the rest of us played lightfixture volleyball. Whenever Dana went off to meet Michelle, she said to me, “Well, Michelle is my best friend,” despite my lack of objection. Frequently, she explained why the frog parts flying toward us in lab or Mark’s exposed genitals were, actually, my fault. “You should just ignore them,” she told me, which was exactly what I was doing, which was exactly what wasn’t working. Later you forget the progression of events that lead to a day whose details blur; you forget their faces, their voices, their words, your thoughts, the exact movements of their hands that grab at clothes and glasses so that everything becomes a blur, the way a penis looks emerging from a fly. You will remember only what it is to be at the center of that irrational rage, of all that noise, trying to shake off hands pinning you down, to try to blot out roaring like a den of angry beasts. What you don’t forget is the wire and foil solar system hanging above you, the sign saying that the typical junior high student would weigh two tons on the sun. You weigh two tons now, you will always ever after weigh two tons. Why don’t you leave, just walk out of that room? Why don’t you fight, kick, punch, pinch, something? And where is the teacher? At some point the boys are alerted of her return, they push you away and zip up pants and return to their classroom desks as if nothing happened, leaving you shaking and askew in the lab room with its long black tables meant for dissecting the delicate tissues and organs of what was once alive. A tone sounds and you walk stunned through halls bustling with people, on to the next class as if nothing has happened.

Mom,” I said. “There’s these boys who bother me.” That’s the only verb I could think of. She smiled. “Boys bother you when they like you,” she said.

Someday You Will Go to the Moon The next morning, I hesitated near the counselor’s office, but I didn’t want anyone to see me going in. I decided I’d wait till later. Kim slammed her tray down on the cafeteria table and tossed her long hair. “Mark is telling everyone that he raped you,” she said. “He says you’re going to go see your guidance counselor.” All of my friends laughed and looked impressed, as if it were an honor to be linked to Mark, the ringleader, in this way. “He did not,” I said. “I am not.” Now I couldn’t go to the counselor. If I did, if I let on that what had happened had affected me in any way, he would win. I would pretend it didn’t happen. I would be casual, nonchalant. But when I looked at him, at any of them, it would always be with contempt. Dana, who had been off with Michelle that day, was spending less and less time with her. Dana and I started leaving class during the activity period break and coming back late, one of the rare infractions our teacher actually noticed. She ordered us to write sentences: “I will not be late. I will not be late.” We liked writing sentences. It made us feel like rebels. We came back later and later each day, writing more and more sentences. Mrs. Johnson cracked down. She told us that we were no longer allowed to leave during the break. When we sneaked out during break the next day, Mrs. Johnson gave up on us. We would continue to be the sort of quiet, smart, clean girls who never got detained or suspended but who frequently maneuvered around rules that didn’t work in our favor. “You were always such a rebel,” Dana told me years later, and it surprised me that she thought I was the instigator. I always thought it was her. It is years before I recall the me that pushed the rules, refused to bat, resolved from the sixth grade on to never endorse meanness in any form. One day I tell a friend a sketchy version of

83

84

After the Flashlight Man what happened, and she answers, “My daughter is strong. That won’t happen to her.” And I will remember how strong I was, so that when Mark stopped me in the hall the day he was bragging about raping me, when he said, anxiously, “You won’t tell, will you?” I yanked away from him, I enjoyed one second of power over him, I focused on him all of my contempt, and then I didn’t tell. I didn’t need to tell; I would handle it alone, I was strong. It is years before I think about this part, remember anything but that paralyzed girl, staring up at Styrofoam planets dangling from the ceiling. Limp string hung down where Venus used to be; not long before, the foil had peeled away from Venus, and the Styrofoam crumbled in our hands during a game of light-fixture volleyball. And on the periphery of those yelling boys, just watching with cold eyes and moaning occasionally, was a boy who once set up Venus for me to slam, who once clapped me on the back and yelled, “Good one.” I focused on the remaining planets. I wanted to stretch up, touch Mars, as if touching it might transport me there.

Of course, I thought, nothing really bad had ever happened to me. After all, everyone at school laughed off the rumors. No one at home seemed to notice my silence although my mother occasionally got after me for being antisocial at church. And the other girls in science, the two who were still in the classroom during activity period that day I was cornered in the lab, they stayed at their desks minding their own business. If something really bad had happened, wouldn’t they tell someone? And besides, much worse things happened in the outside world. The BTK Strangler had been on the loose in east Wichita for three years now. He named himself in a letter. “I Bind them, Torture them, Kill them, B.T.K.,” he wrote. His first victims had been a family of four. There were no signs of

Someday You Will Go to the Moon forced entry, or of struggle, although the whole family had been trained in judo. The phone lines had been cut. The Wichita Eagle printed a composite sketch of a man neighbors had seen. In his twenties, between 5’2” and 5’6” tall, he had a slender build and shoulder-length dark bushy hair. The spring of my eighth-grade year, BTK struck again. Shirley Vian’s children reported that a paunchy dark-haired man in his late thirties or forties had locked them in the bathroom before he strangled their mother. I avoided the news stories. This kind of horror, this kind of violence, was far removed from my life. I was busy that spring trying to fool people into thinking I was a normal person. Somehow, boys could tell which were the good, wholesome girls they would someday marry, which were the bad girls they would make out with in backseats, and which were the freaks to be discarded altogether. Frantically trying to hide whatever abnormality at my center made me deserve my fate, I joined the choir and tried out for the eighth-grade operetta. “You won’t make it,” Mark said, but I did. I had few lines but did perform a stunt that never failed to draw gasps from the audience: a carefully choreographed fight over a chair that ended with me tumbling backwards into a back shoulder roll and landing within inches of the stage edge. Now during activity period, I was the one who left for rehearsals. By the last day of school, things had calmed down. The operetta had conferred on me an appearance of normality, I thought; I had felt increasingly safer, more confident, more protected as the weeks passed without incident. I thought I would be okay now. Something inside of me had hardened, like the core of an apple or a peach’s stone. I understood that there was a hard center in me that no one could ever touch. School was almost out for the summer, and I was home free, I thought, looking up from my book during activity period to find a circle of boys closing on me.

85

86

After the Flashlight Man They hooted and moaned but no one touched me. Still, I thought, panicked, this was not supposed to happen. I felt my center crumbling, as flimsy as the Styrofoam that had once been Venus. Tears welled up and escaped faster and faster, and oddly subdued, thrown off balance somehow, the boys scattered. Was that all it took, for them to see that I was human? Or were they just scared that now I really would tell?

In the fall, BTK killed his sixth victim, Nancy Fox. Her back window had been smashed, her hands and feet bound with nylon stockings. Witnesses later described a man they saw in the area: He was white, about six feet tall, with blondish hair. “After a thing like Fox,” BTK wrote in a letter to a local TV station, “I come home and go about life like anyone else.” This haunted me most: that BTK could be anyone, blond or dark-haired, paunchy or thin, tall or short, mustached or cleanshaven—any man on the street. He was just some man who went about life like anyone else. Because BTK always cut phone lines, when I was home alone, when my skin became prickly with fear in the creaky house, I picked up the phone to be reassured by the dial tone. It was a reminder of the ordinary, mundane world with which that phone could connect me, an announcement that all was as it should be, that as long as the phone hummed along, nothing could harm me. It was the sound of my connection to all of the phone wires that interlaced over streets, that followed each other between poles, sagging a little, stretching on to safety. I thought of staring up from a backseat, watching poles like mile markers fly by, as reliable as the broken yellow lines in the middle of the street, speed connecting the dots; I thought of lying in the backseat and looking at the wires barbed by blurred birds, wires that girded the moon.

Someday You Will Go to the Moon

When we were fifteen, Dana’s period ceased to correlate with Michelle’s and aligned itself with mine. We bonded over the miseries of cramps and pads and tampons, of leakage and embarrassment and ruined clothes. “I hate my father,” Dana confided to me. During activity period, we hid in the forbidden part of the gym behind stacks of mats, against the orders of our drill sergeant coach. We played Barry Manilow tapes and ate nacho cheese Doritos and ignored the boys who one day pitched rotten fruit at our hiding place. The coach didn’t bother us, though. I’d figured out that he was mystified by girls. Underneath his bluff manner, he was terrified of the unknown we represented. Years later, I would read the AAUW report How Schools Shortchange Girls, astonished at the discussion of harassment in schools and even more surprised to realize that what I experienced had something to do with being female and smart, had something to do with being a smart girl intruding on what was seen as male territory—in this case, an honors science class, and later, the boys’ gym. It wasn’t just me, that I was more disposable than other people because of some terrible defect. I would remember the uproar when, as office proctor, I’d delivered messages to the “men’s choir” room, tales I heard of girls being driven from shop classes. But that year, ninth grade, I was just relieved to be able to escape the worst. Now, when I had to deliver messages to all-male classes, at least if the boys started up their howling, I could leave. Given the behavior we regularly witnessed, Dana and I took some pride in our anti-social tendencies. Dana’s had become so pronounced that she no longer went to lunch. Every day, we lined up in typing class and filed down two flights of stairs, winding through circling halls to the cafeteria. Every day, Dana stepped out of line and slipped into the girls’ bathroom. No one dared question a girl’s need to go to the bathroom. No one ever noticed that Dana didn’t come back out. She

87

88

After the Flashlight Man spent the lunch hour doing leaps and back walkovers, drawing and reading, enjoying her solitude. This is the story I tell about her, years later, the one that encapsulates Dana for me: how she progressively withdrew, hiding in the bathroom every lunch hour, and then, the next year, transferred to a private Catholic school where her closest friends were her teachers. She wasn’t Catholic. Her main rationale for attending the school was that it was close enough to walk home during lunch. I remember how she used to get phone calls, rape threats, from someone who told her he knew her route to and from school. She was terrified but refused to tell any adults, afraid to have to give up her privacy and solitude. I admired her for guarding her space so vigilantly, for choosing to be different rather than being different because she had no choice, which is how I saw myself. Now, Dana tells me that she loves Thelma and Louise but would like to see a remake with Julia Roberts and Drew Barrymore.“Think of it,” she says. “A movie with ravishing, sexy young women who could have whatever they want but reject the norm.” I myself think Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are plenty ravishing, but surprise distracts me from responding. I’ve always thought of Dana as that kind of person she’s describing, one who strolled casually, shrugging, right out of the norm. And so her comment sobers me. Did she choose? Did I choose? Was I kicked out of the norm, or did I desert of my own free will?

Dana’s recurring story about me in high school is the one about the dressing room: “I knew you were thin, but I had no idea how thin. I was really scared. I could see every one of your ribs.” For years, when my life spins out of my control, I simply stop eating. No one but Dana has ever noticed the rapid plunges in weight or my tendency to be spacey and sleepy. It’s

Someday You Will Go to the Moon my secret until my late twenties, when a nurse who has completed some bloodwork says, “Is there a reason you’re fasting?” I panic. It’s bad enough that signs of damage might have ever been visible on my face or in my protruding bones, but now it’s becoming encoded in my blood. Was it our knowledge of damage that bonded us, Dana and me? But what I recall is joy and resistance. My school was the state football champion, and Dana and I were always going to football games that we never watched, instead talking and making up our own obnoxious cheers: “Let’s get a little bit dowdy,” we’d yell, “D-O-W-A-D-Y.” Or we’d watch, beyond the cartoon-bright field and cheering crowd, the moon making its slow way across the sky to tangle in the branches of some distant tree. We talked for hours on the phone, we engineered ways for me to be with my first love, we processed our first romances. On a day that I was feverish with sunburn, Dana asked me one too many times whether I’d come with her to get an abortion if she got pregnant. I picked her up and took her to Planned Parenthood for birth control pills.

Our second year of college: Dana was my disdainful bridesmaid, blowing cigarette smoke out the car window on the way to pick out dresses, refusing to eat the soup I’d made because she’d turned vegetarian and I’d used chicken stock. We competed for who had the highest grades, went to the best college, had the most considerate boyfriend. I became the conservative married friend, disapproving of Dana’s wild ways. Dana spent years in Wisconsin, then moved to Philadelphia and became a paralegal. I moved to a new state and started a new degree or job every few years. I became the divorced friend briefly flirting with my own wild ways. Dana went to a doctor who asked her how many sexual partners she’d had. “I don’t know, thirtyfive,” she said. His eyes bulged. “Thirty-five is normal, isn’t it?” Dana asked me, indignantly.

89

90

After the Flashlight Man

Some months into my work as a victim advocate and crisis counselor, I read Dana excerpts from my ten-year high school reunion booklet, which I purchased even though I didn’t attend the reunion. I read her the paragraph that Mark sent in, mentioning his recent business successes and raving at length and with many in-jokes about his high-school memories. “If I ran into him on the street,” Dana says in an unusually vehement voice, “I’d spit on him.” I take this as an expression of solidarity. In turn, I understand better Dana’s difficult relationship with her father, who treated her like a sex object long before the eighth grade, who left her with a desperation to please men, at any cost. I know that Dana’s father never touched her yet looked her up and down in that appraising way that men sometimes do, commenting on her body in ways that made her uncomfortable. I know that he once invited a single friend to dinner, asked Dana to wear something sexy, and seated her next to his friend. “I felt like my father was offering me as a gift, saying, here, take my daughter,” Dana says. “I was only sixteen.” I have other friends who survived incestuous acts, and Dana is no less damaged by her experience than they were by theirs. I come to see that Dana didn’t feel kicked out of some charmed circle of normality the way I did as a teenager, convinced that only talent or intelligence, never sexuality, never love, was going to save me; instead, she came to believe that her sexuality was the route to love and acceptance, that it was her talent. Dana turns over a new leaf with men. She calls me: she spent agonizing time writing a Christmas card to her unrequited beloved and then threw it away. “I realized I’d already wished him happy holidays at a church coffee hour,” she says. “What if he thinks I’m a slut or something, offering additional holiday greetings?” Dana and I are as inarticulate with those we have crushes on, and often even our lovers, as we were as teenagers, but at

Someday You Will Go to the Moon least now we can articulate our stupidity to each other. Together we come to terms with our choices, our decisions to stay single, our senses of inadequacy about not conforming to social expectations. Together we come to an appreciation of our passion for books and for our work, for language and solitude and good friends. We come back to a place where we were as teenagers, rejoicing in our weirdness, even seeing ourselves as lucky. Here is where I wish the story ended: Right before we go to a drag show in Savannah, we catch sight of ourselves in a mirror, two shy weirdoes from Kansas. We try messing up our hair and grimacing. In the pictures we take of each other, we look like two shy weirdoes from Kansas with messed up hair, trying to look tough. And later, as we walk on the beach, Dana regales me with a series of carols she has composed in honor of her cat, Beeber, short for Sleekit Beeber. Then she does cartwheels in the sand, legs still straight in the air. “I’ve changed so much since I lived in Kansas,” she says, and I hoot. “You’re the exact same person you were when you were twelve,” I say, as she peals with laughter, that laugh that has since those days of rya rugs at a seventh-grade art table made me want to laugh too.

Here’s where the story really ends: On a road trip months later, frictions build; Dana makes comment after comment about how proud she is to be white, how immature and unintelligent people from other cultures are, how women should accept boorish behavior from men as part of their nature, should even appreciate it. I can think back, through the years of comments that have made me uncomfortable, but I always gave her the benefit of the doubt, thought she couldn’t possibly mean what she was saying, she was too smart, maybe she didn’t know how it sounded. Now the comments are too blatant to ignore.

91

92

After the Flashlight Man And something stubborn in me kicks up. I don’t want to have the same conversation I had twenty years ago, focusing on men as if they are our only route to contentment. Maybe I’m just tired, I think. Maybe we’ve just spent too much time together and are getting on each other’s nerves because of it. I mention junior high, the memories that usually make us laugh. But Dana says thoughtfully, “I wish I hadn’t lost touch with Michelle. We used to have lots of fun.” “She was stuck up,” I say. I have always assumed that Dana chose me to be her best friend because she didn’t like Michelle’s snobbishness. Has Dana ever told me this, or have I just wanted to believe it? Did Dana drift away from Michelle, or did Michelle dump Dana? “That’s not fair,” Dana protests. “You didn’t really know her.” Dana has developed a habit of picking all the skin off her upper arms, goose bump by goose bump. I am shocked and worried: has Dana undergone a huge transformation, or have I ignored signs of trouble for a long time? “Michelle was always rude to me,” I say. “She was part of that whole mean group. Mark and them.” “Mark,” she says. “He was a really funny guy.” I stare at her, unable to answer. Have we ever really been united in anything? Did we really share any of the same trauma? Or did I invent her part in it, not wanting to be alone in my ordeal? I feel sick, and then just sad, wondering whether I remember anything accurately at all. Dana has her own story that may be nothing like mine, one that is apparently more wistful than I ever realized, about not being part of the charmed circle of popular kids. Maybe she is, after all, the exact same person she used to be, and I have never really known who that is. I remember Dana telling me, back in the eighth grade, that Mark and his friends wouldn’t pay so much attention to me if I’d just act different, respond differently, and I wonder if she

Someday You Will Go to the Moon ever stopped believing that what happened was somehow my fault. But of course she did. How could we have been friends so long if she really believed that I’d deserved to be harassed and assaulted? But why is it that we’ve never, ever talked about it? I don’t know what to think about us, about anything. Dana is staring out the window, whistling under her breath. I think the tune might be “Music When Soft Voices Die.” I wonder if Dana realizes that something irrevocable has occurred, that our friendship may have less than I thought to hold it together. But now she’s scolding me because I spoke up, politely, when her stepfather made a homophobic comment this morning. As a guest in his house, Dana says, I should have respected his right to make such comments. And then I see how separate our lives have been, really. I see the damage left over from her childhood will always make her yearn for a father, will always make her willing to sacrifice everything else for the approval of men. There is some deep damage my friendship can never heal, and the quarrel that’s brewing feels like something final. I am riding in the front seat of Dana’s car, staring out at the moon, just a sliver like a glimmer of a frown, a moon that my uncles would say doesn’t hold water. It holds nothing; partial, downturned, it spills out stars and darkness and memory, and I will never again be that giggling twelve-year-old at an art table, never be an eight-year-old in the back seat of a car borne safely through the stars while tires hum with possibility and whisper against the road: someday, someday, you will go to the moon.

93

6 Hanging On

My first rape crisis hospital call is a tiny, dark-haired, seventeenyear-old French exchange student with cats silk-screened on her white Keds. It’s a busy night in the emergency room, ambulances arriving from two car wrecks, paramedics bustling by with stretchers. A raucous group from a third wreck gathers before the mounted TV, watching themselves on the late news, waiting their turn to be examined. Marie and I laugh at this unusual party. Our laughter surprises me. I didn’t expect to laugh with someone who was just assaulted. But then, there’s a lot of things I didn’t expect. Marie’s poise and confidence, the ease of this exchange, the way my mere presence seems to comfort, how we chat like old friends. In jeans, slept-on hair, and no makeup, I am no one’s betrayed friend, no one’s judgmental teacher, no one’s pissed-off lover, just Nancy from rape crisis doing what I can. Passing the hours, Marie tells me stories. Like the one about her first evening in the United States, when her host mother offered her fried chicken. “I’m not very angry,” Marie kept saying, which only made her host mother anxious. 94

Hanging On “Why would you be angry?” she asked. “Tell me why you’re angry.” In fact, Marie wasn’t hungry. The words sounded alike to her: hungry, angry. “Now I’m angry,” she says. “Or is it hungry?” We peal with laughter, the kind that releases tension, seals connection. Hours later, I stay, at Marie’s request, through police questioning and then while a nurse takes blood, scrapes under Marie’s nails and clips them, photographs finger-shaped bruises on her upper arms, and plucks hairs from her head. Because Marie asks me to, I stay while the nurse combs and pulls pubic hairs for evidence and then while a brusque doctor examines her. After the doctor leaves, I find extra sheets to drape around Marie in the frigid room. Though I am exhausted, my instincts save me. It’s not a trick, as I feared, to know the right thing to do. I won’t personally connect with every woman I meet in emergency rooms in the middle of the night as I do with Marie, but still I will be driven to continue these nightly forays out of my own messy life. I will learn that everyone reacts differently to a rape but there are some constants: an eagerness to take back control of a life and reinhabit an identity and a heartening, often startling, glimpse of human courage and resilience. As I wait with Marie for pregnancy test results, her stomach rumbles. “I must be angry,” she says. We giggle, punchy with exhaustion. After six hours in the hospital, my ears ring, and in my foggy state, hunger and anger seem almost like the same thing, our hungers gaping holes of anger, angers borne of unfilled hungers. The pregnancy test comes back negative. We dance, exchange high fives, hug. Then Marie’s friend arrives to take her home, and I head down my own empty street, feeling peaceful, without any of the fear I imagined accompanying these solitary drives through the middle of the night. The lights sway in a

95

96

After the Flashlight Man breeze and flash from yellow to red to green again as if there were any traffic to guide.

Being awakened at midnight feels like being shot from a cannon: the phone explodes me right out of my dreams, but I stay disoriented, for a second soaring groggily through space. I swing out of bed and land on two feet. “This is Nancy.” I manage a calm and professional, if slightly bleary, voice after the answering service patches the caller through. “How can I help you?” I hope it will be easy, quick, that I can return to sleep soon. I feel guilty. I didn’t used to feel this way back in Springfield. Now I am living in Nebraska, where I have enrolled in a Ph.D. program and signed on with the local crisis center. On the phone line, a piano chord bangs, then another, and finally a melody hesitantly emerges. In time with the music, like a performance art piece, a gruff female voice says, “He’s watching me, he calls me hourly, he won’t leave me alone, he’s going to kill me.” The music crescendos. The voice lowers as the music slows, turns subdued. “Who?” I kick back sheets and cross the room to turn on the light. “He calls me fourteen times a day. He won’t leave me alone,” the woman recites to her accompaniment. My skin prickles. I fight a violent urge to hang up. I don’t want to be connected to this weird music, this voice. “I am a genius, I am retarded,” the woman says as chords crash around her. It’s mostly accident that has brought me from rape crisis advocacy work in one state to my current work in another: I thought I’d continue to deal with rape on this more general crisis line here when, it turns out, there are far more domestic violence callers. I feel helpful but like a bit of an imposter some of the time when I arrange shelter, provide a referral, or

Hanging On offer some human contact to a woman hiding out in a motel room. But often, the lines blur, things are less clear-cut, as if anger and hunger really are the same thing, two sides of a coin, phases of the same repeating cycle; women leave again and again and then go back. It is not always so easy to distinguish between the abuser and the abused. I constantly talk to callers who speak in barely audible whispers, callers who are drunk or high and immune to reason. I take obscene calls disguised as cries for help, cries for help disguised as obscene calls. I often have no idea which calls are legitimate, or if I make any impact at all. And like the current one, some calls are disturbing, weird; it’s impossible to know what to make of them. “He has killed me nine times,” she says. “When will I die?” Chills wash over me as the piano plays on. It takes a minute to gather my senses. Maybe this woman is crazy, or putting me on; maybe she is in danger. I call the shelter, pass the buck.

Every time I’m on call, I consider quitting. Back in Springfield, I had my moments of disillusionment, but they were different. I met a fourteen-year-old girl at the emergency room once who had been late arriving home for dinner and told her mother that she’d been abducted by two men in a van. They’d driven her around a while, she said, then set her free. The girl gave a detailed description of the van to police but said she couldn’t remember what had happened during the ride. The next thing she knew, she had been whisked to the hospital for a rape kit and I’d been called in. “Is it going to hurt?” she asked me right before the nurse drew blood, and I knew something was wrong. People react very differently to assault and violation, but rarely after a harrowing experience do they worry much about giving a blood sample. The next day, there was a story in the newspaper: Fearing

97

98

After the Flashlight Man getting in trouble with her parents for being late, the girl had lied to them and then to the police, medical personnel, and me. It was hard for me to be upset at being lied to; it seemed that coming up with such an elaborate story to avoid parental wrath was a cry for help. Even with the woman on welfare who accused her exhusband of rape and yet seemed more intent on getting back the car he’d taken from her, even in moments like the one where she told me that she’d been raped many times and really didn’t care about that nearly as much as she cared about losing her car, my sense of being of use outweighed my frustration. But so many of the calls I get in Nebraska are creepy, weird. A teenage girl tells me a long story about a man who pressured her to perform various sexual acts in a car. The girl speaks in a very soft, shy little voice, and frequently she asks me to repeat parts of the story to make sure I understand what she is telling me. She also keeps asking me to explain various sexual terms. “He asked me to suck it,” she says. “Do you know what I mean?” “Uh-huh,” I say. “What?” she asks. I oblige: “He wanted you to perform oral sex.” And so it goes. I’m pretty sure she’s putting me on, but always, there’s that nagging doubt: what if this really is a naïve teenage girl who needs the knowledge and reassurance that will enable her to make better choices in the future? And then there’s the guy who breathes funny while wanting to discuss rape, his gasps coming in series of threes, over and over, getting louder, receding, picking up again. And the woman who tells me about a man who stalks her and keeps sending clothes in her size, then calling her to instruct her on which ones she’s to wear on what days, threatening her if she doesn’t. This sounds to me like the plot of a bad TV movie. But I hesitate not to take anyone seriously. The calls that are jokes or games or chances to get off are

Hanging On mostly annoying; it’s the domestic violence calls that I find most difficult. I tell myself that I do not have the tools to understand the elaborate dances that hold abusive relationships together. I feel qualified to offer peer counseling to rape survivors. I know firsthand what it’s like to be wakened in the night by a stranger in my bedroom; I know firsthand what it’s like to be assaulted in a classroom. But what experience do I have with domestic violence, or its aftermath? My most frustrating callers are the chronic ones who have extricated themselves from abusive relationships yet remain frighteningly passive, waiting for rescue. Perhaps those who find a way to take some control of their lives no longer need to call. Sometimes the passivity makes me want to shake callers, throttle them; sometimes I feel my own violent impulses far from unencumbered compassion or objectivity.

It’s a guy named Bob on the phone. “My girlfriend just took a job with disabled people,” he says. “What thrill does she get out of fondling paraplegics?” At least this one is easy, if not pleasant. I don’t have to be nice or sympathetic. I suggest he seek counseling. I get off the phone. Near dawn, Bob drags me from sleep again. “I am shirtless on my front porch,” Bob says dreamily. “There’s a big, beautiful storm cloud with rays of light behind it. It is a cloud of my own creation.” “This is a crisis line,” I say wearily. “I need to hang up in case someone with a crisis is trying to get through.” “Did my girlfriend call you?” he demands. “I need to know what you told her. I think she’s twisting your advice so that she can dominate me.”

I am taking women’s studies classes, and in discussions, we talk of violence as if it’s something easily defined and apart

99

100

After the Flashlight Man from us. My own marriage was not a violent one, but once my husband smashed his fist through a door. At least once I wanted to shake or push him because he wouldn’t listen to me. I have trouble feeling completely detached from my own potential for violence, from this part of my humanity, even while I fail to connect with my callers. One caller tells me that she hit him first, but he hit her harder. Another blames herself: she said the things she knew would set him off. The situations seem quite different to me even though I assure both callers that they have the right not to be beaten up. And I fully believe this, but something nags at me: How can I say in the same way that I might to a rape victim, that it’s not her fault? Will she remain passive if she’s cast by our culture as just a victim, not someone who must take responsibility for her participation in an ongoing cycle? Am I blaming the victim? I ask these questions of fellow volunteers. They recommend books for me to read, books that put back in place that old dichotomy between the abuser and the abused.

Elaine’s a chronic caller who implies a complicated history of abuse before her husband left her. She’s been depressed ever since. She calls when she’s considering taking too many sleeping pills or adding alcohol to the pills she has already taken. She calls after she’s drunk the alcohol. Nothing anyone says makes any difference. “What can you do besides take more pills?” I ask the third time she calls during my shift. “I only wish I knew.” She seems limp, plaintive; I have interrupted her usual litany of metaphors for how depressed she is, her speculations about what death must be like. I hate to rush in with solutions rather than just listening compassionately, but when someone threatens suicide, how can I just sit back and be a good listener? I am beginning to suspect that

Hanging On she’s not really threatening as much as trying to manipulate me, to tyrannize me into listening, but who can be sure? “Tell me what I can do to help,” I try. There’s nothing you can do.” She reminds me suddenly of Bob, the caller from a few months before. He was more openly aggressive, but the same undercurrent of hostility is here, in Elaine, and I can hardly contain my impatience and frustration. “You go through this a lot,” I say. “Are you working with your counselor on finding strategies for dealing with these moods?” “You mean so I won’t have to call you anymore.” There’s an angry edge to her voice, and I panic: I’ve pissed off a depressed caller. Well, at least she’s not depressed anymore, I tell myself. But I’m a mere volunteer. This is dangerous, frightening territory; I should have tried harder to conceal my irritation, I think. “Ideally, I hope you develop resources so you don’t need a crisis line anymore,” I say. “You try living in isolation and see how quickly your resources dry up,” she answers.

On the first day of a women’s studies class, we are asked to make name tags with pictures or decorations that represent us. My classmates draw trees and flowers and the sun, husbands, boyfriends, dogs, and hamsters, clarinets, basketballs. I have never felt so isolated in my life. My own complicated past feels like a heavy load around these students who talk about issues like divorce and violence with both awe and academic detachment, as if they happen to other people. I don’t bother to mention the facts of my life. I’m sure any references to my adolescent experience or to the Flashlight Man would only result in awkward silences, funny looks. Even mentioning my divorce, I must either tolerate stereotypical assumptions of

101

102

After the Flashlight Man what divorce means, or resist them, constantly expending energy talking about how valuable my marriage was to me, how the difficult thing was not staying, but leaving, how it was a triumph to finally be able to do that and face an unknown future. Nobody ever beat me up, but I do know, from the inside, the cultural pressure for a woman to stay married, no matter what. I get tired of explaining, though, and so I stay silent. In classes when we talk about abuse and assault, I also either keep silent or risk the embarrassed silence of others; no one knows how to respond to someone willing to acknowledge that these issues affect her, not just others, and in the years since the Flashlight Man, I have realized that I will never go back to a place where I can erase from my memory the ways that violence was always a part of my experience. Sometimes I sit through classes wondering why we talk in such extremes, as if there is no middle ground between abuse and respect, illness and health, triumph and failure. For a moment in this new class, I contemplate drawing sharp, pointy objects. I consider a porcupine, or maybe an iceberg, something spiky, cold, submerged, and drifting. Instead, I leave my tag blank except for the block letters of my name.

At 5:00 a.m., I jerk awake, filmed with sweat. Stillness and darkness press in on me, filling my lungs. I cough, but it doesn’t release the tension, relieve the sense of suffocation. My head hurts. I can’t remember quite how to breathe or swallow, and I rise to my feet so fast I lose my balance. Stumbling down the dark hall to the bathroom, I lower myself to the edge of the tub. I coach myself to drag in air, then push it out. I talked myself through this sort of attack years ago, after a stranger disrupted my life. I’ve talked others through similar attacks. You lie down, tell each muscle to relax, your

Hanging On heartbeat to slow. You count slowly, trying to match your pulse to the count. You breathe deeply and talk to each body part, feet, ankles, calves, knees, thighs, telling them they are heavy, they are bricks. If you concentrate hard enough, narrow in on each part, soon you will melt to unconsciousness. This time, though, when I turn off the light again, blackness swirls in to suffocate me. My heart gallops back to its frantic pace. I leave the lights on, focus again, start to sink. Sirens whine in the distance, then scream through the open windows. They surge into the room. I wait for them to fade. Instead, they cut off. From my living room window, I watch more fire engines, police cars, and ambulances skitter down the street and swerve to stops, sliding as if on ice. Silenced, at odd angles, they eject figures that run toward the house two down. The air in my bedroom has turned acrid. Smoke drifts through the open window, stinging my eyes, making them tear. The other tenants of my building have already gathered on the porch. A man from the burning duplex stands on the sidewalk, wearing pajama bottoms and a blanket draped like a shawl in the cool September air. The couple from the other side of the duplex clutch bathrobes around them. At the edges of this scene, on porches, in the street, dark figures hover as firefighters uncoil hoses and dash about. Paramedics consult with them in low voices. Finally, silent and empty, ambulances pull away. A woman from the Red Cross arrives. She talks quietly to the duplex occupants and escorts them to her van. The police chaplain wanders among the neighbors. A woman was killed, she says. They think she was smoking in bed. We shake our heads. “You’d think people would know better,” we say. And, “At least the smoke probably killed her first.” All the things you say.

103

104

After the Flashlight Man It seems disrespectful to stand there gawking but disrespectful to return to bed. I wait with my neighbors until the coroner comes at dawn. We feel a little guilty joking, eating doughnuts. Finally I crawl into bed, under blankets in my now-chilly room. Just as warm sleep envelopes me, recognition startles me awake. A woman I didn’t know, had never seen, died last night in a bedroom a few yards from mine. And during the moments she was dying, I wandered, panicked, unable to breathe, irrationally convinced that I was dying.

Later I patch together a story from neighbors and newspaper accounts. The fire did start in the woman’s bed, but not from a cigarette. After she went to sleep, drugged by a heavy dose of antihistamines, someone poured kerosene on her and lit a match. The woman was partly blind. I wonder: did she wake, fight, feel anything? Within days, her boyfriend is arrested for murder. I don’t know if it’s the same old story: trips to the hospital with unexplained bruises, abandoned applications for restraining orders, calls to the police or a crisis line, an inability to act, to leave, a certainty that things will get better. All I know is that a woman was murdered two doors down. A woman I never met went up in flames, died in an agony I can’t imagine, and somehow, my bones, my ribs, my lungs responded. I feel guilty almost, and scared. What good was it, after all; what good did I do?

A woman I know vaguely, a student in my department, calls me. “I don’t know what to do,” says Lisa. “My husband is threatening to kill me.” Lisa tells me her story of constant ruptures and reconciliations, violence followed by periods of calm. Lisa has apparently been calling others in the department, some of whom may

Hanging On not have a clue how to respond. I’m not on the crisis line. I’m tired, and my patience is thin. Everything I’ve been holding back for the last few months bursts forth, all the things I’ve wanted to say on the line instead of the careful, tactful things I have said. I tell Lisa bluntly that she needs to get out, that as long as she puts up with the situation she’s contributing to it, allowing it, that she’s risking her life. I tell her that she is not to blame for the beginning of it, but she is to blame for sticking around and letting it continue. I know that this is probably the wrong thing to say. I know my colleagues at the crisis center would chastise me for blaming the victim. But I say it anyway. And when Lisa makes excuses, tells me all the reasons she can’t leave him, I don’t try to gently urge her to analyze each objection and discover for herself that there is, after all, a way around it; I violate all of my training and take control of the conversation, saying, “You can’t afford not to leave him.”

Later, browsing through Psychic Connections by Lois Duncan and William Roll, I am caught by the idea of the longbody, Roll’s “term for the concept of interlinked selves of both the living and dead. . . . a web of living connections with other members of the tribe,” a concept originated by the Iroquois Indians. “According to this concept, we are all bound mentally and physically to the people we care about, as though, in some way, we are part of a single organism,” I read. “At times this pain sensor may even reach out to people we don’t know personally, but who are part of our longbody link to all humanity.” I dream of houses, charred and gutted, stripped down to foundation, heaps of rubble, and webs of thinned and blackened fallen beams—a neighbor’s house that burned when I was twelve. I remember another frame, years later, another web of

105

106

After the Flashlight Man beams, those of fresh, unfinished wood near the Ninnescah River in Kansas. Crawling off the ladder into the loft of a cabin frame that shuddered in the wind, I felt so high in the air I was afraid to stand. My husband, swaying out precariously far from the ladder, laughed at the way I huddled on the floor, clinging to the frame. As he moved backward down the rungs, I worried that his feet would slip. When he started the saw to cut the siding, I worried that his hand would slip. My husband turned off the saw and climbed the ladder, balancing the siding on each rung above him until he could hand it up to me. My bony knees wobbling on the hard floor, I leaned down, eyes closed, and pulled the siding tight against the frame. I wished my husband wouldn’t hold nails pinched between his lips. He could swallow one and choke to death. I let go of the siding as the last nail rang under the hammer. Then, again, he pulled the tape measure from his belt and jotted down dimensions for the next piece of siding. Inches snaked out behind him in the wind; the frame shuddered. I tipped my head up at him, so unafraid, so capable. Little by little, a wall rose around the loft until I could no longer see the ground, strewn with scraps of siding and chunks of wood; then, the long grass dotted with yellow and purple wildflowers disappeared, and then, bit by bit, treetops and patches of sky. The wind no longer shook the loft. The sound of the saw became muted. In the kind of dream that occurs on the very edge of sleep, I was a princess in a tower, touched that my husband had gone to such lengths to protect me. I wince now at how nervous I was, how naïve. I wince at the burden of trust I put in someone else’s hands, not knowing yet that giving someone else the power to build the house is offering also the power to tear it down. In my work on the crisis line, I have resisted this earlier self who could be so passive, who handed over all responsibility and felt such terror at a life without my husband. If I connect with others experiencing

Hanging On this, will I lose my newfound strength? When a woman nearby was murdered, my bones knew what the rest of me was reluctant to accept: that whether I like it or not, whether I always know it or not, whatever I choose to do about it, I’m connected to these other women.

A few years later, I will be living in the South, working on this book, when a friend from Arkansas e-mails me: do I remember someone I knew in Nebraska named Lisa? A few weeks before, while touring a museum at an Ivy League college, my friend began chatting with the guide, whose name was Lisa. Somehow, through a complicated chain of conversation, they figured out that they both knew me. “Lisa wanted me to give you a message,” my friend writes. “She said, ‘Tell Nancy that I left my husband.’” I barely recall the conversation with Lisa, the advice I gave her. On the crisis line, I was mostly aware of the ways that I failed callers. Now I’m surprised and pleased; maybe, without knowing it, you sometimes construct the scaffolding that allows someone else to come up behind you and build the house. Somewhere in Kansas the house built by my ex-husband still stands, painted, insulated, shingled. In my memory, though, it remains those bare bones of raw wood that barely seemed to support my weight. It remains a glimpse of my own weakness, my longbody link to all humanity, my wide view over a Kansas prairie even while I clung alone, against a relentless wind, under a harsh sun, angry, hungry, hanging on.

107

7 One Mean Bad Kid

Driving right into the sunrise, I’m full of missionary zeal, fired up to convert kids to poetry. I plan to be the Johnny Appleseed of writing, hacking my way through wildernesses to scatter wisdom like seeds. I picture writing saving lives the way it sometimes feels like it has saved mine. Often on the crisis line, I used to ask panicked callers, “What have you done in the past that makes you feel better?” We talked about hot baths, hot milk, late-night TV, knitting. Write about it, I wanted to say. That’s what always gives me peace. So now, at 6:30 a.m., I’m headed to a school to show students how profoundly writing can change their lives. It’s amazing enough that I’m awake at this hour. I can’t be expected to also have a grip on reality. Reality gets its grip on me soon enough. When I arrive at the school at 8:30, no one is expecting me, despite my confirmation letter and phone call. The fifth-grade teachers assemble in the hall for a hurried consultation. They are trying to be polite. “What about Spanish?” they ask. “And we still have to finish our displays for the accreditation team.” 108

One Mean Bad Kid “But this is mandated by the district,” the arts coordinator keeps saying. Eventually, the teachers conclude they can only spare a halfhour each. I will start at 9:00 and finish by 10:30. Nevertheless, it feels like hours. The kids are unprepared and chaotic, their routine interrupted by some stranger charging in to talk about writing. I’ve agreed to serve as writer-in-residence for a few schools after ten years away from this kind of work. At the last school, I developed a drill sergeant tone and a periodic tendency to bellow “Atten-tion” when the roar of excited voices escalated beyond my ability to be heard. That doesn’t work with these kids. I feel like a commercial stuck in between spelling and math, a quick plug for poetry. Years ago, I wrote an article about being a writer in the schools. In it, I said that teaching writing is about helping kids see how accident can become intention, how mistakes can lead to discovery. I used the example of a girl who wrote about “betraded love,” a phrase that simultaneously captured her sense of betrayal and her indignation at her boyfriend trading her in for someone else. I mentioned the boy who, in between flirting with girls on either side of him, wrote, “the warmth of love engulps me,” expressing his feeling of being engulfed by love—and his fear that love might swallow him up. Now I’m remembering that in reality, teaching children feels completely haphazard, a constant process of trial and error— many trials, many errors. I wonder if these kids are really absorbing anything as I zip through some introductory standbys passed down through generations of writers team-teaching back in Arkansas—the poetry monster who emphasizes the importance of using the five senses and the word jail where we lock up abstract words, bailing them out by converting them to concrete images. I talk about comparisons and surprises. I read Theodore Roethke’s “Child on Top of a Greenhouse,” and

109

110

After the Flashlight Man Dudley Randall’s “Blackberry Sweet.” The kids can’t recall a single image after I finish, but then, intercom interruptions and messengers wandering in and out keep distracting us all. The kids raise their hands constantly even when they have nothing to say. When we work on generating images, students mention TV and Nintendo heroes. As soon as we make a little progress, I have to race off to the next class. By 10:30, I’m hoarse and exhausted, my hands and clothes streaked with neon green chalkdust. I’ve been standing in the blast from the vents of these overheated classrooms, then dashing from one building to another in the cold while flags whip in the wind and the flagpole jangles. I’ve been to so many schools like this, they’ve become as familiar and generic as McDonald’s or a mall. Classroom walls are galleries of posters: You can’t succeed until you try, says one, and A journey of 10,000 miles begins with one step. The campus itself seems to lack conscious design, buildings sprawling out from a central courtyard like the arms of an octopus, each new one tacked on as necessary. The school feels as randomly planned as my visit here. After rising in the middle of the night to make it here on time, then speed teaching my way through chaos, I’m ready to check into a hotel and sleep away the rest of the day. But I feel guilty at having only worked an hour and a half, so I offer to do more. The coordinator suggests two sixth-grade classes that last nearly an hour each, a difficult prospect now that I’m geared to half-hour sessions. After one more class, my voice has been scraped down to a rasp. I beg out of a fifth class. Too tired for lunch, feeling renewed respect for the stamina of public schoolteachers, I am sound asleep by 1:00 p.m.

Sometimes I’m surprised at how small and harmless the kids are in these classrooms I visit. Once I looked around at a group of eighth-graders and thought, was it really little boys like this

One Mean Bad Kid who made my life miserable? Now that I’m the teacher, can I overlook damage being wrought right in front of me? One eighth-grade boy kept writing poems about how much he loved a girl sitting across the aisle from him. He also kept making polite comments about how beautiful she was, the kinds of comments that make adolescent girls feel not beautiful, but ugly and self-conscious, aware of their every misplaced hair, every blemish. The girl sat there, impassive, dignified. I raised my eyebrows at the teacher. “He’s always trying to embarrass her.” The teacher shrugged. I didn’t want to call any more attention to the girl, so I let it go. I hoped that girl would strike back with her own poems. I hoped she would remember her calm and dignity with pride. I knew that she and all these kids would have to discover for themselves how to heal themselves through the shifts in perspective that writing and being in classrooms give me. But I know that I am only one of hundreds of people passing through their lives, planting seeds.

I wake in the morning faintly hoping I’ll be hit by a truck before I can get to the school. But when I arrive, kids rush up to hug me. “Hi, Miss Nancy,” they chorus in the halls. “Hi, Dr. Nancy.” “Hi, Miss Poet Lady.” I am surprised to realize that almost none of them are white. There are so many gradations in skin color that my paleness and the darkness of some of the kids seem just like ends of a wide spectrum rather than different races. We review the elements of poetry. “Courage,” says one boy. “Well, okay.” I write it up. The more I think about it, the more I realize what a good answer it is. Sometimes when I sit down to write, I feel like I should put on a seat belt, like I’m about to do something dangerous at high speeds. He looks sheepish. “I mean comparisons,” he says. “And courage,” I assure him. “Courage more than anything.”

111

112

After the Flashlight Man They’ve written poems since yesterday, converting abstract emotions to concrete images. They read aloud poems called “Sadness,” “Love,” and “The Killer Instinct.” We read some riddle poems; May Swenson’s “Southbound on the Freeway,” Charles Simic’s “Watermelon,” Duane Ackerson’s “Umbrella.” We talk about Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors,” which stumps them for a while. We walk through the pregnancy images: an elephant, a ponderous house, a melon strolling on two tendrils, a rising loaf of bread. “Have you ever seen bread rise?” I ask the kids. “Yeah, when it comes up out of the toaster,” a girl answers. The kids get into figuring out the poems and writing their own, and they groan when I have to leave. It’s all very gratifying until the last class. When I slip into the back of the room before the bell, four girls are practicing an African dance, shuffling and jiggling and spinning and gesturing in unison. They quit as soon as the scrawny boys crash in, flinging down backpacks, letting books fall to desktops with gunshot crashes, throwing them at each other like Frisbees, the air charged like loud rock music thumping in a room that was previously silent. The girls, who tower over the boys, huddle in their seats, folding their arms over emerging breasts. The boys beat intricate rhythms on their desks, spontaneously burst into song, and leap up out of their desks at random intervals. One rises and runs in place, slow, fluid steps that make you think you’re watching a slow motion film of someone running. I watch this, thinking how closely tied together dance and music and writing have become for me—how dancing leaves me with the same supple, satisfied feeling in my muscles that writing leaves in my bones, how the rhythms of music often loosen up my sentences, propel them forward. This is something I can’t demonstrate, articulate, communicate to these kids, even though doing so might be a way to reach them.

One Mean Bad Kid I wish I’d known I was going to teach sixth-graders. I wish I’d brought some accessible poems about taboo subjects, sex and drugs, some poems with stronger rhythms. These kids, on the brink of adolescence, on the edge of tumultuous discoveries, stare blankly at me, another adult who they can’t imagine ever having had passions and conflicts resembling theirs, or anything relevant to say. And I start to doubt myself: do I have anything of relevance to offer them? Anyway, I was supposed to be working with fourth-graders, and all I have after I finish the riddles is Rose Rauter’s “Peach” and Lisel Mueller’s “Talking to Helen.” I try Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool,” but their attention strays after the first line. I switch to Mueller. One boy sneaks on a pair of sunglasses and flicks his fingers in the air, becoming a smart-ass Helen Keller. He does a surprisingly convincing reenactment of Helen discovering language as water pours from the pump. His face lights up, his mouth an exaggerated startled O. The teacher scolds him. Still, I can’t help but think, in this restless class, that he’s the only one who heard the poem.

All afternoon, as I search unsuccessfully for a library or bookstore, then leaf through all the books I brought, I wonder what to do with this class. I remember the last school—four responsive classes, a fifth where I was pretty sure all the kids had Tourette’s Syndrome. They squirmed, pounded on their desks, and compulsively emitted animal sounds. If I paused and just sat staring at them, many continued squirming, pounding, and barking without registering the shift. One day, a piano made its way into a class poem, and I prompted them for some specific piano details. “Keys,” said a belligerent white kid, evidently the class bully who couldn’t decide whether to cooperate or make my life miserable. “What color?” I asked.

113

114

After the Flashlight Man “Blanco y negro,” yelled a resistant Hispanic kid. I wrote it on the board: “Blanco y negro.” The room fell silent. “You know Spanish?” asked the white bully in a hushed voice, as if I’d just revealed the key to a long-forgotten language of ancient Egypt or something. Suddenly, all the Hispanic kids were sitting absolutely still, their full attention on me. “Negro?” said a black girl in an injured tone, as if I’d called her something forbidden and insulting, and her attention waned. Maybe you stumble on something that works, maybe not. Maybe in the act of winning one kid you lose another. And what works beautifully with one group is often a dismal failure with the next. And I know, of course, that all I can really hope for is to awaken one weird child to a life that needs to be written down and to help him find the tools for doing so, or help her recognize that if you need to write, it’s like needing to breathe. You take in observations and events like oxygen, but if you hold them in you’ll turn blue in the face and pass out. You won’t die. You’ll just spend most of your life unconscious. In other words, I have no clue what to do with the sixthgraders.

Day three: The first two groups of fifth-graders participate enthusiastically in the “if” exercise. The first class draws the words hope and spinach, and comes up with lines like, If hope were spinach, doctors on the TV show Chicago Spinach would perform open leaf surgery.

The second class gets love and glue. I ask them what songs they know about love, and they all join in on one by Patti Labelle:

One Mean Bad Kid

115

Love, love, love, when you talk about love, you talk about me.

We finish a goofy poem about sniffing love to get high and about marriages sticking longer. As I leave, the entire class serenades me: Glue, glue, glue, when you talk about glue you talk about me.

The third class ends up with the word love, too. The teacher says, “If anyone gives you trouble, write up their names.” Then she hastens out the door before I can protest. How am I supposed to write up their names? I don’t know their names. In my confirmation letter, I made it clear that I expect teachers to remain in the room at all times. Of course, none of the teachers have read my letter. We start brainstorming about love. Kids keep popping up out of their seats and tiptoeing in the aisles as if their silence will render them invisible. I fix stares on them and order them to sit, which they do—until I look elsewhere. “What about love?” I ask. “Fornication,” says one girl. All eyes follow me, waiting for a reaction. “Okay, what about it?” I ask. “Fornication,” she says louder, and everyone starts buzzing. “Yeah,” I say. “What about it?” “The S word,” says another. They all scream. I write sex on the board. Voices rise to a din. “What other kinds of love are there?” I try. “Fornication!” they all yell. “Sex sex sex!” Then they roar with laughter at their cleverness. We have so little time left, we’re not going to get a poem

116

After the Flashlight Man started, and I’m weary of plowing through the yelling and screaming. Hey, I think suddenly. I’m an independent contractor. I represent no one but myself. I shrug and say, “If you don’t want to talk about poetry, I have other things to do.” And, seeing the teacher coming down the hall, I take my leave.

The sixth-grade boys storm into their classroom, shoving around desks, heaving down backpacks, looking grim. “I hate this school,” one boy mutters. “Someday I’m going to bomb it and everyone in it.” Three of the girls attempt poems. The fourth girl draws a row of hearts with names inside. None of the boys will write anything, although they sing and beat on their desks quite impressively.

All afternoon, I despair. If I were a teacher in a movie, I’d pull out all the stops, I’d stun the sixth graders with my knowledge of rap music and my karate ability, I’d rip the pages out of books and have kids saluting me and calling me “Oh Captain my Captain.” If I were a teacher in a movie, I’d leave students with lives forever altered by the power of language. Of course it won’t work that way. Maybe one kid will remember one line from a poem or one thing she thought I said, and maybe, years later, that one thing will enter the mix of her life and come out meaningful. What that one thing will be is probably outside of my control. There are always the things you regret: the resistance you resisted instead of finding a way to channel it; the mistakes that should have been opportunities for exploration, not correction. Years ago at an Arkansas school, I passed out National Enquirer headlines and instructed the kids to imagine a story that could have appeared under each headline, then write a poem from the point of view of someone in that story. “He needs a new card.” The classroom teacher, lips pressed

One Mean Bad Kid bloodlessly, hovered over a boy. “We don’t use language like that here.” “Terrified parents held hostage by their hell-bent ten-yearold,” the headline said. I’d forgotten that hell was considered a bad word in elementary schools. I figured that a lot of these kids heard preachers talk about hellfire, and would therefore understand the gravity, the recklessness, of a hell-bent ten-year-old. I covered hell-bent with my finger. “Why don’t you just leave out this word?” I suggested. The boy looked troubled, but he nodded and set to work. Pretty soon, he handed me a poem. It was titled, “Terrified parents held hostage by their bent ten-year-old.” I’ve always wished we’d talked about that poor bent tenyear-old. Was she born without a spine or abdominal muscles? Did she have a habit of sleeping doubled over in the kitchen sink? I worry that what that boy remembers is the weirdness of adults, not the possibilities of imagination. But after all, I wonder, can you really teach those possibilities, those joys: how a concrete image can ground you, how the right metaphor can lift you out of yourself and give you perspective. How a metaphor, like a semi-colon, can forge new links and make you feel less alone in the world. How the vast possibilities, the arrangements and rearrangements of words, make the world around you feel at once more and less substantial, more intricate but less weighty, so that one good paragraph gives you courage. How writing can be like deep-sea diving, plunging down to a deep part of yourself where there is wreckage but also jewels to be retrieved, to be pulled back to the calm surface so that the next day you go around grinning foolishly, feeling a weird secret joy.

It’s the Thursday before a long weekend. Half of the first class has to leave after fifteen minutes. Yesterday I pasted Weekly

117

118

After the Flashlight Man World News headlines to cards: “Farmer cuts out his own gallstone,” “Health nut gives up veggies when sliced onion screams in pain.” After reading aloud their poems, some of the kids hug me goodbye and want to know when I’ll be back. The last class looks so apathetic, I don’t bother with the headlines. Instead, I just start reading poems, watching for any spark of interest. The wordplay in a Nikki Giovanni poem leaves them staring blankly. A few kids perk up at Lillian Morrison’s “The Sidewalk Racer.” I usually steer away from rhyme because it has a tendency to take over meaning in their writing, but I’m desperate. I write out “The Sidewalk Racer” on the board. I call on a couple of kids to read it. Both stumble over most of the words. Can I do it like a rap song?” asks one kid. He stands up and starts, but he can’t read fast enough to achieve the effect he imagined. He trips on even simple words, then gives up, discouraged. I try some more poems with strong rhythms, which gets the boys banging on their desks with pencils, but pretty soon, they are completely out of sync with the poems, nearly drowning me out. With obvious reluctance on their part, we read the skateboard poem all at the same time. They gather steam and shout out the ending: I’m the one and only single engine human auto mobile.

On that note, they’ve had enough. They get up and stretch and meander around and start conversations. The teacher looks at me apologetically and shrugs. I gather my things; I’ve had enough, too. Escaping, I feel like I’ve failed; still, I’m relieved to be done. For the first ten miles, I think of all the questions I should have

One Mean Bad Kid

119

asked. I figure out how I should have approached the skateboarding poem. I figure out what I’ll do next time. I think back to the last school, where a fifth-grader wrote a poem introducing himself to me: I’m mean and bad and sad and glad.

It quickly became evident that he was the class bad kid, the one the teacher was always yelling at to straighten up. At the end of the last day, the kid planted himself beside me, standing his ground while other children crowded around to say goodbye. “What are you doing?” I asked him. “I’m trying to hug you,” he said, making no move to do so. Now as I remind myself of the middle grounds and gray areas between right and wrong, correctness and mistakes, success and failure, I think of that blank-faced kid, the class’s biggest behavior problem, who I hugged awkwardly, saying, “Stay mean and bad.” He stepped back and regarded me gravely. “And sad and glad,” he reminded me. If I were a teacher in a movie, fireworks would explode at the end of every visit, music would swell, and the power of language would burn a path through hormones, poverty, racism, and illiteracy, through alcoholic parents and divorce and Nintendo. Once I wrote that teaching kids was about helping them see how accident can become intention. Despite my best intentions, it’s only by some magical accident that I reach anyone at all. On the long highway home, I remember that kid, whose eyes flickered with a flint and steel that might someday blaze up into a love for language, a passion for metaphors and stories. On the long highway home, as the miles put distance be-

120

After the Flashlight Man tween me and that feeling of failure, as I start to figure out what I’ll do differently next time, I remind myself how, at least every now and then, you run into that one mean and bad kid who wants you to know that he’s also sad and glad.

8 The Art of Being Human

Saturday morning, we arrive early for meditation training. The weekend is Level I, for beginners; it’s called “The Art of Being Human.” The Shambhala Center is a small, trim house, nondescript as a double-wide trailer. Not far from a busy Atlanta strip, the center is buried back among rickety buildings—car repair shops and empty warehouses with red and black For Rent signs. I’ve driven from South Carolina with Claire and Rosa: Claire, always seeking answers to intense, searching questions; Rosa who has established a meditation practice she wishes to refine. Then there’s me. Claire tells me I’m the Reality Check. So here we are in the sitting room, low ceilinged and paneled and empty except for neat lines of red cushions. It’s way too early for me, but I’ve resolved to have a good attitude. The first instruction is about posture. Janet, the leader, demonstrates the proper way to sit. From my place in the row of steel chairs in back, I wonder if it would be irreverent to prop my feet on a meditation cushion to keep from straining my 121

122

After the Flashlight Man back. Finally, cautiously, I scoot a cushion under my feet. No one glares at me for desecrating a sacred object, so I concentrate on sitting straight, hands loosely arranged on my thighs. We practice our posture for ten minutes. On the floor below me, more adventurous beginners perch in rows, legs folded before them. So. I can handle this. My mind wanders. The idea, I heard some Level III people say earlier, over a bagel breakfast, is to experience the egoless mind, the self stripped of personality. Others talked about how centered and grounded meditation practice made them feel. They talked about learning to be kinder and gentler with themselves and others, about reserving judgment and experiencing goodness and feeling a strange joy from plumbing their depths. I listened, awestruck. A long time ago, during those difficult months after the Flashlight Man and my dad’s amnesia, as I struggled to confront my ghosts, I led a quiet life, going to exercise classes in the evening then coming home to write. At first, I was seeking calm, escape. And then the routine caught on. It made me feel oddly buoyant, unexpectedly compassionate, and, the next day, more resilient. I have feared this feeling, feared that I was becoming smug and obnoxious and addictive, too proud of myself and dependent on that transcendent feeling. Now, these people have given a name to—an explanation for—my experience. In my own way, maybe I’ve been meditating all along. But now, struggling to sit still in this silent room, I think of the other times I have felt stripped, egoless, times I felt endangered or violated. Combating those experiences once brought me to a room like this, low-ceilinged and nearly empty, Binky’s self-defense class back in Springfield. I barely remember anything except when Binky used to grab us and drag us across the floor. He showed us how to pretend to go along, to go with the motion the same way you don’t resist the slide of a car on a slick road, how you wait to gently pull away. Resis-

The Art of Being Human tance, I understand, has been my lifelong problem and my lifelong salvation.

The leader rings a gong, and it’s time for the next meditation technique, the unfocused gaze. We stare straight ahead, letting the room blur. And so we gaze without focus for another ten minutes. I’m starting to get bored. “Cool,” my colleagues said when I told them how I planned to spend the weekend. I imagined strolling reverently along a lush nature trail. I pictured sitting in a room while soothing voices washed over me, evoking images of flowing brooks. I envisioned chanting and swaying to new-age music involving bird calls and ocean waves. I expected to absorb wise, philosophical ideas that would change my life. I never fully realized how rarely I sit still, how much I hate it. Years ago, I developed patellar tendinitis, also known as Jumper’s Knee, and could barely walk for days. “Here comes Stellar Tenderthighs,” said my friends when I limped into rooms, gritting my teeth in frustration at my new limitations. You’d think I’d be more patient after years of restraint and self-consciousness, years of ignoring my longing for motion. As a child, I loved to dance and begged for ballet and tap lessons. But then somewhere along the way I learned to be aloof, I forgot what my body knew, forgot how to listen to its signals, even, and quit eating for days at a time. One evening in an upstairs studio at a Lincoln, Nebraska community center I fully reinhabited the body I’d abandoned. Shuffling and sliding through a choreographed exercise class, I suddenly recalled the soft pats of leather against a wood floor, the feel of a wooden barre to my fisted hands, the way my pulse raced at the smell of unscuffed ballet shoes nestled in a shoebox’s tissue paper. The night I became aware of those memories that remained as sensations not words, I couldn’t stop dancing. It awed me what the body remembered. At home on a pale low-pile carpet

123

124

After the Flashlight Man that briefly held the memory of each piece of furniture and recorded every footstep, my feet leapt and turned of their own accord. Each night the carpet muffled my thuds and creaks, each night my footsteps rubbed the carpet against its nap, each night I ate properly, eager for the energy and joy of being fully in my body, of leaving the ghost of every dance matted into the carpet.

The gong again, and it’s time for a new meditation technique: breathing. We are to sit and be with our breathing, to notice our exhalations and inhalations. Not exaggerate them, just attend to them. We resume our postures and our unfocused gazes. The minutes tick by as we breathe. “Don’t forget to breathe,” my former aerobics teacher Charly used to say, and I’d raise my eyebrows at her. How could I forget to breathe? Now, though, I’m afraid I will forget how. Paying too much attention makes my breathing ragged, labored. When you die, I wonder, is it more likely to be on the inbreath or the outbreath? I remember how, back during the difficult spring of 1990, I’d sit up in bed at night, thinking, “I don’t want to die.” Fear simmers, boils up to terror, overflows into panic and then despair. Minutes plod along, each second an inbreath and an outbreath long, each minute consisting of sixty breaths. My breath is a train chugging into a station. My panic and despair hop aboard and take the outbound breath. They forget to get off. Here they come, back into the station. Despair is that one spotted horse no one will ride on the merry-go-round, nodding by again every revolution. Despair is the one unclaimed suitcase on the airport luggage belt, reappearing through the fringed flaps and coursing slowly by, and each time you think maybe, maybe this time it’s a different suitcase, the one you’re waiting for. Despair is a cat staring at the door meowing to be let out. It

The Art of Being Human is a cat planted on the porch meowing to be let back in. I breathe, I imagine fear dissolving with my breath on the air. Beyond terror, there is something else: not exactly calm, just brief reprieves from terror.

At last: the gong. I’m not sure I can do this much longer. One more technique, the leader says: We will label our thinking. Each time a thought arrives, we are to observe it dispassionately, without judgement, to label it thinking. So I sit, my gaze unfocused, and I breathe and think. Thinking, thinking, I think. I am so bored I think I will lose my mind, I think I will die. Panicking, panicking, I think. I count to one hundred. I count backward to one. In my head, I sing “One Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” I count breaths and heartbeats. Counting, counting, I think. Death must be like this, this nothing. Despairing, despairing, I think. Not long ago, I came back to my body, back to life, and now I fiercely resist giving it up again. The fear I once felt so intensely has drained away. Recently, someone removed the screen from the kitchen window of my South Carolina apartment, and I felt only irritation. I’m thinking of moving soon to a house that will be all one floor. I think I am finally ready, after ten years, to sleep downstairs again. And now, sitting still like this feels like repeating a paralysis I thought I’d shed. Sitting, I choreograph dances in my head; my index fingers start kicking up from my thighs. Once I applied for a job at a church-affiliated school that sent back a list of oaths required of its faculty. I could imagine avoiding alcohol and drugs, but the third requirement sent the whole thing into the trash: faculty had to promise not to participate in any dancing that wasn’t choreographed. I imagined being brought up before the Board of Conduct for breaking out dancing in the hall, compounding my crime by swearing that I’d choreographed the dance the night before.

125

126

After the Flashlight Man My first year in the job I did take, another new equallystressed-out colleague and I put on African drum music one Friday afternoon and leapt through the deserted hall of our historic building. “What was that?” a first floor colleague asked the next week. “The whole building was vibrating on Friday.” Doing something I love but am not very good at, I can forget myself and any desire to impress, can abandon ego and concentrate on each moment, each step, knowing if I miss that the chance will come again. Believing that makes everything easier: breathing, dancing, writing, living.

After the Flashlight Man, after leaping into a relationship mostly out of fear of being alone, I used to walk over to the clubhouse at my apartment complex, obsessing over the lover due to show up in a couple of hours. When we were together, I could feel him drifting from me; I didn’t know what to do with the grief and anger and yearning of loss. In the clubhouse, the class plied, stretched, curtain pulled back to reveal no night outside the black glass door, just shadowy ghosts of ourselves: Dottie, 76, in Batman spandex, Brianna, 15, in high tops with chains, Charly, who teased us and counted in eights, Angela, Mrs. Lu, and me. Once we got going, permanence and stability felt less important than energy, flexibility, resilience. “My heart’s going to sweat right out of me,” Charly said, wringing water from her ponytail. I liked the thought: my heart detached, there before me on the floor, something I could view dispassionately. I imagined trampolining across my heart, grapevining over misfortunes, boxstepping around grief, landing back where I started every time. Each time I got comfortable, Charly clapped and changed directions. Later, with flexed feet, then pointed toes, we stretched toward our real lives, our paradoxes, our slow losses. I had been fully in my body, and now felt prepared to be fully in my heart

The Art of Being Human and mind. We closed the curtain, erasing ghosts. But my specter would follow me home in memories of occasional grace, of raising my pulse without anyone’s touch, and the next day show me by pain muscles I didn’t know I had.

We’ve been sitting for a few forevers. Every time the leader shifts, breathes visibly, blinks, I will her to strike the gong. Set us free, I order her telepathically. Strike the gong. Serene in the center of my tumultuous thought waves, she breathes on, her unfocused gaze avoiding my quite focused one. Ringitringitringit, I think. No response. You are a sadist, I silently accuse her. You are a control freak, a power-hungry tyrant. How often in my life have I done this, seen my women friends do this, hand over control of our lives to someone else? After all, if I get up and walk out, who’s going to arrest me, fire me, shoot me, who’s going to even care? The tiny sound of the gong quivers on the air. Release. We all rustle to life, stretch, yawn. Next is walking meditation. There are no nature trails. We hug the outer edges of the room, circling. I examine the satin banners decorated with the swirly outlines of mythic-looking creatures. In the corner closest to the parking lot, I hear gravel crunch and scatter under tires, a sound a little like rain. A train on the elevated track a few feet away rumbles by and the floor beneath my feet vibrates just a little. Listening, listening, I think. My senses rejoice that there is something to hear. My feet meet the floor, toes to ball to sole to heel. My calves pull with each step. I catch myself from tripping over the woman in front of me. I want to move faster, but I try to match the pace of the rest of the group. I remember a class where dancing in opposing lines was a little like driving on ice: you might know what you were doing, but you couldn’t be sure about anyone else. Defensive dancing. A basket on a little table holds colorful flowers and what looks like a cabbage, what Rosa will later insist is an arti-

127

128

After the Flashlight Man choke. A faint smell of incense hangs over the room, throbbing in my sinuses. I count pillars: counting, counting. The gong sounds. We sit. I concentrate on my inbreaths and outbreaths, imagine hours ahead, a lifetime of sitting and thinking and labelling my thinking and breathing and being with my breathing. Surely there will be something new to do; we have meditated now for a good two hours.

These last few years, after the slow process of coming out of a kind of paralysis, back to movement and engagement in books and writing and people, it felt like my blood had started circulating again. Now, time without those things becomes a glitch in circulation, deprives my brain of oxygen, impedes my memory. I signed up for classes, jazzercize and tap and country dancing. Driving, dancing, writing, walking, the landscape, the steps, the words keep changing, you bear with difficult thoughts and then let them go, come to trust that what’s important will return, that towns will be where the map says. Once I thought I had to keep painful memories alive so that I wouldn’t be doomed to repeat the same experiences. Now, gradually, I’ve learned to let the past be present but not central. There are moments I’ve wanted to be in: jazzy stalking and pouncing to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” in Sarah’s class, making smiles with my feet in Charly’s class. “So are these frowns?” I asked as we moved our feet in the opposite direction. “We’re supposed to use happy terms,” Charly said, snickering. “These are rainbows.” My muscles stretched and flexible, I’d write for hours and feel accumulated layers peel away, like an onion maybe, but I hate that metaphor, the implication that there is nothing to an onion finally but peel, as if its shimmering translucence is just the wrapping for some gift that doesn’t exist rather than the gift itself. Like a snake, I left behind my brittle skin, finding

The Art of Being Human beneath a supple, vivid one, thin, maybe, but tougher than I knew existed. I want to be in the moment. Just not these slow, empty ones.

After lunch, reluctant to waste my workshop fee and miss more instruction, I grudgingly sit again. There is no more instruction, though. Instead, it becomes apparent that we are going to meditate for some indeterminate amount of time. I bought two books on my way to Claire’s yesterday. Now, I am crazed with longing for the feel of pages turning, the smell of type and the miracle of its decipherable squiggles. So why am I sitting here? What is this good girl thing that keeps me from leaving? I leap to my feet. “I’m going to go read,” I tell Joe, the startled assistant, outside the door. “Let me know when it’s time for the small groups.” In the living room, I plop down on an overstuffed couch bursting with pillows. What a luxury it is to hold a book in my hand, to be at once in my brain and outside of it. Reading, reading, I think, content. Joe rushes past, looking pale and serious. Soon the head teacher, Chuck, appears from the hall and plants himself gravely before me. “May I speak to you?” he says. “Sure.” I follow him to his office. He closes the door. “I hear you don’t want to sit.” I cheerfully explain that I’m not criticizing anyone, not denigrating anything, not intending to be disruptive. I’m just bored and I want to read. “I guess you’re kind of stuck here,” he says. I assure him I don’t mind. I’ve brought plenty to do. To my relief, he doesn’t protest, though he does ask me to sit in the back room so I won’t disturb people passing through for their interviews. I’m a little irritated. What am I going to do? Heckle them? Trip them? Make persuasive subversive faces? The chair in the back room is less comfortable; I yearn for

129

130

After the Flashlight Man the couch. Still, I’m happy to be reading. One by one, Joe escorts my fellow Level Oners to Chuck’s office to consult about their meditation progress. They each disappear inside and emerge a little later. Sometimes they glance into the back room, and I feel like a kid in detention. Tea is supposed to be at 3:30, and I decide to sit again at 3:20, to give it one more shot. Okay, so I’m cheating a little, knowing it’s only ten more minutes. I slip into the sitting room as if into a time warp: no one seems to have moved at all during the two hours I’ve been gone. I admire the patience and dedication of all of these meditators, but I do not covet it. Ten minutes stretches to twenty, thirty, forty. Clearly, we aren’t on a very strict time schedule here. Reading literature about prisoners, I have felt horrified at the idea of doing nothing day after day, no sensory or intellectual stimulation, only the alphabet and stray poems learned from childhood to occupy the mind. Reading Dante last winter, I decided that my circle of hell, the most horrible punishment I could imagine, would be being deprived of all activity for eternity. My head throbs. I feel nauseated. At 4:00, I escape again into the cool air of the hall lined with shoes and bags. This time, I feel resolute in rejecting meditation for myself once and for all, final as the body rejecting someone else’s transplanted heart. Tea starts soon after. I down lots of aspirin with water while a Level III trainee, someone who has mastered the art of being human and now is on the path to becoming a Warrior in the World, asks me how the meditation is going. “I’m giving up on it,” I say. “I think I’m just going to have to accept that I have other ways of getting centered.” She purses her lips. “We’re not doing this to be more centered,” she says. “It’s more to see what state you’re in.” “I know what state I’m in,” I say. I’m feeling woozy from the headache, like the room is start-

The Art of Being Human ing to whirl, like I might throw up. The woman turns her back on me and starts up a conversation with a more cooperative trainee. I feel too ill to care much, although I do grumpily wonder if we’re a culture so lacking in self-awareness that we can’t believe anyone has any. When everyone files back to meditate, I lie down on one of the couches, too sick to worry about disapproval. I’m not judging anyone or disrupting anything; I’m willing to entertain myself so that Claire and Rosa can meditate. I am going to be kind and gentle to myself. I am not budging from this couch.

At six, the aides murmur among themselves. “The Dharma is going to talk,” they say reverently. I tag after the aides and the Level III Warriors back to the sitting room to hear what Chuck has to say. The topic of Chuck’s talk is sloth. We must not let lazy habits take over. We must sit with our doubts and our headaches. I breathe in his words and on the outbreath I watch them dissolve into the air. Maybe these words aren’t directed at me at all. Even if they are, what does it matter? I know my own heart. I let them go. Dinner: Claire rapid-fires questions at Chuck and Janet. How can we all be basically good? What about the sin of Christian doctrine? Shouldn’t we be self-critical, shouldn’t we try to improve? How can anyone argue that Hitler had basic goodness? Chuck and Janet are good-natured and a lively conversation develops. I find myself warming to them. Rosa picks out the peanuts from her Thai noodles. I worry that the oil has already soaked right through them. Sure enough, Rosa wakes in the night with a migraine. The South Carolina women are dropping like flies.

Sunday morning: I read, walk, visit Rosa who is sleeping out in the car under gloomy skies. When I station myself on the

131

132

After the Flashlight Man couch, everyone asks how I’m doing, how Rosa is doing, whether I’d like tea, what I’m reading. No one treats me like a deficient, unevolved creature. I sit in on a small group discussion. “My thoughts are bubbles,” says one woman. “I poke at them and watch them explode into little bits of soap residue.” “My thoughts are clouds,” says another, “and being in the moment, just breathing, is the sun shining through.” “I’m slothful,” says a serious man whose breath smelled faintly of pot the day before. “I can’t stop thinking. I’m lazy. I want to follow my thoughts.” This self-criticism makes my stomach contract. Why should anyone apologize for thinking? Before my indignation can form itself into words, a woman named Rebecca protests too. “Thinking is part of being human,” she says. “We have to be kind to ourselves. The idea is to accept our thoughts, not judge them.”

After lunch, Rosa feels better and, wimping out on our planned trip to the mall, returns to meditating. Trainees seek me out for ibuprofen and tampons. Aides ask me for help identifying and fetching trainees for their interviews. I feel absorbed into the community. Late in the afternoon over tea, Rosa tells me she likes her own form of meditation better. She uses visualization, but in her interview, Chuck suggested that she avoid it and anything that stands in the way of being mindful, in the moment. After tea, Rosa returns to meditate, to rebel and picture ocean waves. Aides pass through, cleaning up the tea things, sweeping the kitchen, running a vacuum over carpet and furniture. Water gushes and dishes clank in the kitchen. Every now and then, a trainee stumbles out of the sitting room, a shell-shocked veteran blinking in the sunlight of a nearly-forgotten hometown, then stumbles back. I finish one book and start another, pause

The Art of Being Human to rest my eyes and like Rosa picture water, the beach, where, in my most tense moments, I visualize living in a house with huge windows. Last summer, when I worked in Florida for a week, at night I prowled the beach, mesmerized like only someone from Kansas can be by the black expanse of sea. If I’d grown up with this, would I be wiser, I wonder, more able to understand the ebb and flow of love, better able to balance on the sand that pulls away under my feet, more aware of my powerlessness in the face of nature and thus more accepting of what I cannot change? Did the isolation of the prairie and my awareness of tornadoes make me someone who hangs on too tight, thinking I can bolt everything down? One night, a guy in the bandshell in chest-high white pants and a black shirt sang Louis Armstrong’s “It’s a Wonderful World.” I felt chills, sitting with a man I had a crush on— someone totally inappropriate. We walked on the beach later, and he recited Robert Frost. We kicked through the surf, past crabbers with buckets knee-deep in water, past a father and son up the beach setting off Roman candles. Rock music throbbed from the pier, and a crowd on the boardwalk roared; legs dangled from cars on bungee cords that flipped between poles. Fireworks like colored stars fell toward us, like something I could touch. When my companion left, I had no impulse to follow, to give up being in this moment to yearn for what I couldn’t have any more than I yearned to still the tide. It’s moments like this, standing alone in wet sand, that I’ve most understood how all I can do is inhale and exhale. I’ve come to understand that over and over in my work, first as a crisis counselor, later as a writer in the schools, to trust what little I can offer and let the rest go. It’s taken longer to come to terms with this in my relationships with friends and lovers. I breathed the ocean air, knowing that there were no greater heights to aspire to, no successive levels of inhalation and exhalation. The tide came in, went out. I remember tasting the

133

134

After the Flashlight Man salty air that coated my glasses with a thin film and knowing that it was enough to breathe out for every breath I took in.

Are we getting wings tonight?” one aide asks another. I picture a solemn ceremony in which all the Level I trainees receive pins shaped like wings. “I pronounce you fully human and on the path to enlightenment,” Chuck will say to each one, all but me, the meditation dropout. I wonder why those who have mastered the art of being human will receive little gold-plated wing-shaped pins— why not elbows, or ankles, or knees, or noses with delicately carved nostrils, something artfully human? Then I realize that the aides are talking about chicken wings for the reception following the training. A stern-looking woman, no doubt one who has completed Level IV: Awakened Heart and Level V: Open Sky, begins to question me. Why aren’t I meditating? All day I’ve felt firm and secure in my decision, but now I don’t know what to say. It comes down to this: I want to be among the clatter and hum of people cleaning, or outside listening to someone in an abandoned warehouse practice his drums. “Because I was bored,” I say, feeling like a lunkhead complacent in my unexamined life. “You will be reincarnated as a dog,” the woman says. “Well,” I answer, “as long as I’m not a cockroach. Or a blade of grass.” She sighs and looks grim, but her mouth quirks a little.

So you hit Level Negative II,” my friends Andrea and Todd summarize my experience later. We talk about our own ways of being in the moment. How they prefer walks in the woods to treadmills, how Andrea and I prefer writing to sitting. How I prefer intricate footwork, steps it takes my slow feet and brain

The Art of Being Human time to master, how bored I am by the current exercise trend of using bands, tubes, plastic steps with risers, and two kinds of weights instead of our brains, our feet, and the resistance of our own bodies in space. Todd recalls hiking in Europe carrying a book called Meditation in Action that he yielded to an acquaintance seeking something to read. The next time I ran into him was in Afghanistan,” Todd says. “He was ripping pages out of the book to feed the fire.” “Words turned to energy,” Andrea says. “Now that’s meditation in action,” Todd and I say at the same time.

In the final talk of the meditation training, Chuck acknowledges that there are many paths to enlightenment. The important thing, he says, is that a cow never questions the proper way to chew its cud, does not agonize over its unattractive spots or seek to dye them to look like everyone else’s. A cow is a cow, accepting itself, its own being; it does not question its essential goodness. And so we leave, after a dinner of chicken wings, Claire and Rosa and I, still human, pretty good at it really, on the road to South Carolina. Rosa has decided to stick to her own practice. Claire might come back for Level II: Birth of a Warrior. I am thinking how one moment in a life can become like a stone in a pool, ripples spreading outward like the concentric circles of a flashlight beam or the beam of these headlights. How we can leave our bodies, our lives, and if we’re lucky, come back to them. That this is grace: some glimmer inside of us that lets us know we are where we need to be, no matter what anyone else says. I dream of the house I’m going to move to, leaving my windows wide open on autumn nights. We drive down a long dark highway, following our own lights.

135