I LURK IN DARKNESS, or, ACCIDENTAL EVENINGS

There was the time that S_____ asked me to the Homecoming dance during the first week of Life Drawing class. Looking back, there was never even the feel of an attraction between us, besides the excitement of meeting a new friend; but S_____ was clearly very handsome, and I was eager to put the nail in the coffin of my awkward and lonely years. Somehow I knew to show up to his friend C_____'s room for cocktails before the dance; once there, I learned that S______ had asked another girl to the dance. It's long enough ago that I don't remember how explicit this revelation was. Did the others in the room know that I was the forgotten date? Did S_____ blurt out an apology for asking two girls to the dance? Did anyone know what I was doing there at all? Not only did I not know the other people in the room (except one or two by sight), I didn't know anything about their milieu. I was a public school veteran from down the road; they were prep school graduates from up North. Their vodka-gimlet conversation tossed nuances, references, and attitudes far over my head. No one was exactly nasty to me, I simply didn’t exist in their world. I remember I was busy trying to plot my way out of the room, out of the evening; I remember I was wearing a short black and white dress with huge shoulder pads; I remember that I was anchored in an armchair at one end of the room, with the couples sitting in two rows before me.

It was a small party in a small chamber; I didn't have the language (literally, the right phrase or two) that would allow me to leave the room with what I would have called dignity. I had to wait it out. My chance came when we all rose to walk across the foot-bridge to the dance. I faded into the night's darkness in the other direction, virtually without a sound.

This last image reminds me of a party I attended in high school, a "field party" as we called them. Field parties were less about wide open fields in the middle of nowhere and more about someone whose house had a large acreage of yard. This particular party was being held at a small house out in the rural, western end of the county (the county lines being the parameters of our world); the house sat at the bottom of a steep hill. The steep hill was flood-lit by a single light which guarded the front door like an evil eye; the light was so bright that it had the effect, in fact, of hiding the house from sight. Sharp shadows formed the edges of the party.

Sharp edges were drawn also around the "camp" that was holding the affair. This was a jock's party, and I wasn't. (In fact, I did play one sport, but was not part of the jock faction.) Some childhood friends of mine had taken me out this night--graduation night for the class ahead of us--and this was their scene, not mine. I was anxious and curious how the evening would play out. Here I was with old friends who knew me and cared about me, but they had brought me to the viper's nest of this crowd. I was anxious because of my past with these people, but curious because my present social situation was much different than it once had been. My life now included new friends and shared affinities. My interests had diverged so completely from those of this crowd tonight; what could we possibly have to say to each other? Did we exist for each other at all?

Before I could wonder too long and hard about it, the ground slid out from under me. I slipped far down the hill, which was long of uncut grass and slick of keg beer. I slipped so far that I fell out of the light that shone on the people, until I was inhabiting the darkness outside of the party. Once there, I couldn’t think of a good reason to reenter: the light, the party, the throngs. So I stood and watched. I waited, with relief, for the party to pass.

NOT UNLIKE THE DAY I FIRST READ ABOUT 'THE POTATO EATERS'

My friend Jude, who grew up in small-town Louisiana and small-city Texas, has often said that there are two kinds of towns in the South. One is the kind where everyone is as nice as your sweetest grandmother, offering genuine and pleasant banter at the counter, thinking nothing of helping the neighbor in need, always giving folks the benefit of the doubt. And the other is the kind of town where there is a meanness in everyone; the people wear hard faces, they brandish guns, they take pride in their bigotry, and they're always looking for a fight. Jude talks about how these two kinds of towns can be situated right next to each other, but still be night and day.

I wonder if whole towns can be infected with the same mysterious but undeniable poison that some families are. Do you remember? There were the friends' houses where everyone was always breaking into giggles, the meals were like banquets, and the family willingly spent time in the same room together, inventing games or doing nothing in particular. And there were the homes where each person was louder and meaner than the next, the father was a glassy-eyed terror and the mother's voice had no soft edges left; homes where each family member was ranked by the effectiveness of their insults; homes where sharp laughter always filled the air, and no one seemed to share it.

SMALL TOWN (IDENTITY) POLITICS

I grew up in a small town; a small town is a panopticon. A small town is a panopticon where all views leads to one identity—the identity the town decides you have. For some, this may feel, I suppose, holistic and integrating. Or perhaps just normal. For me it was clausterphobic, and I’ve spent my life since then climbing out of every identity box I (or others) have put me in.

One question, twenty odd years into this experiment, is: What is it that actually evolves one’s identity? My boyfriend—who knew me at age 19, then didn’t know me for many years--sometimes says to me (teasing but serious), “You’re just a doctor’s daughter from the suburbs.” This usually sounds to my ear like someone saying to me, “You haven’t changed an ounce from what you were, and you never will.” But now that I’ve lived with him long enough to hear him differently, I wonder if he means--not that I haven’t changed at all--but that I have rebelled in the way that a doctor’s daughter from the suburbs would, revolved my life (identity) around THAT particular axis. Indeed, when he met me all those years ago at the southern university we both attended, he had a name for ‘my kind’ at our school: “Undergrad Type II.” He said, when pressed, that ‘Type I’ was the kind that came to school hopelessly preppie and left preppie, and rebelled by drinking copious amounts of keg beer and playing rowdy matches of rugby and turning up Zeppelin way too loud. Type IIs were the English majors who dressed in black, revered Hermann Hesse in high school and French criticism in college, listened to Robyn Hitchcock and Public Enemy and preferred scotch to beer; they thought they were rebelling philosophically. I’ll admit that back then the latter was indeed close to my definition of evolving my identity: reading things my parents had not, going places my classmates might never, opening my own mind as far as I could stretch it; part of the goal—or the method—being not to live with loose morals but to approach life without morals or prejudgements at all. But the ultimate goal being to outgrow the fearful and sheltered identity-cage I was once asked to stand in, once willingly stood in.

What are the uses of a stable identity, of an evolved identity? What is the ‘ideal’ identity generically- or specifically-speaking? If identity is achieved, what is desirable in a “final” identity? To my definition, an identity should always allow for growth and fluidity, but then, is it still called an identity? What makes the difference between growing up and growing older? Is it possible to ‘become different’? Is it possible to NOT become different?

Something that strikes me now, as I look back on what’s behind me, is that I constantly flipped everything over, everything that might stabilize an identity. (Nor did I change things out of indecision or fickleness, more out of post-passion exhaustion, the feeling that I’d used something up--mostly, my own identification with it.) I’ve inhabited 18 apartments in 20 years; I shared them with 41 roommates. I switched neighborhoods, jobs, lifestyles, lovers, whole sets of tight friends, artistic media, and sometimes cities. But as quickly as I was able to squirm out of each identity, I see a trend from the other end of the spectrum: in certain relationships, especially at work or in romance, I'd get stuck in the smallest pigeon holes. All it took was knowing that someone wanted me to be something I wasn't, and knowing that I could appear to be it, and suddenly I was stuck playing that role, weighed down with sorrow that the person wouldn’t accept me more freely. And I was good at this—this pretending, this mask-wearing, I could sustain it for a long time. Oddly, it was staying in an identity I ENJOYED that seemed to pose the challenge.

I woke today with a Carole King line in my head, but I had the wording wrong for a few hours before I noticed: My line was “Way over yonder, that’s where I’m found.” (Really it’s ‘bound.’) For I’ve noticed before this writing that I have a penchant for motion, for migration, for longing to be where I’m not. I take busses and trains to get places, rather than airplanes, which are too quick; I like the getting-there part; I like the being-not-here-nor-there part. I like the you-can’t-locate-me part.

I used to have the fear, the ultimate feminist nightmare, that to live with a man would mean that he’d always see me as inherently subordinate, or only as a sexual object. I no longer dwell on the male opinion of me so much, but I am aware that sharing a life and a home with one person means you are bound, to an extent, by his view of you. But that’s if the other person is merely a mirror to reflect you; and while I believe we are all that for each other, we are also people, which means we are dynamic. We are fluid in minute and grand ways, whether we want to be or not, and even when we are mirrors we are also kaleidoscopes, so the mirror, too, is changeable and changing. Sometimes it is not the mirror across from us that is so unbending but our own mind that is made rigid by fear and anxiety, fear of the reflection that once came back to us.

Maybe fear is the only identity cage.

FROM THE TOP ROW OF THE BLEACHERS

“T.F.” was the name he went by.

I remember him from gym class, Freshman year. He was a senior, not actually in my class which was all ninth graders but in the class that met in the same gym at the same time. The image I retain is of him and some friend next to him sitting in the top row of the bleachers, and T.F. grinning away. At me, or at everyone? I took it to be at me. It was a mischievous grin, and I think teasing came with it, the teasing was definitely specific to me, and it was of the affectionate and sexually flirtatious kind, not to be confused with the pernicious, mean-spirited, and/or psychosexual kind.

I know almost nothing about T.F. Bishop or his family. As I lived in a small town, this is significant, yet if I scratch my head, I can learn things by deduction. That I know little about T.F. Bishop means that he didn’t go to my church (Catholic, the only one in town), he didn’t live in my neighborhood (a large subdivision on what was once the outskirts of town), and he didn’t have younger siblings. It means he probably wasn’t in my class--he was either wealthy and possibly lived out in the country in some big old estate, or perhaps he was less well off than my family, and lived out in the country in some big old farmhouse.

That I know little about him likely means that his family was old Virginia or old Loudoun County--because we seemed to know most of the transplants, the newcomers to town. When we moved there in 1978, we moved into the newest neighborhood in town, whose quarter-acre lots and aluminum-siding homes were only a few years into existence, replacing a sprawling old farm. Most of the inhabitants, our neighbors, were just in from Ohio, New Jersey, or New England. Any number of new neighborhoods cropped up in town between our arrival and my entrance into high school, but still it always seemed easier for out of towners to co-mingle.

(Nor is this formula cut and dry. I remember homes before this one, in Oregon and Massachusetts; so, I was an out of towner. My younger brothers don’t remember anything before Virginia; they befriended Virginians; consequently they have a Virginia drawl that I lack. I identified with my parents’ relatives from Massachusetts and New Jersey, and in college was always mistaken for a New Yorker.)

T.F. was a brave one if it’s true he was publicly giving me the eye. In ninth grade, I was not out of the awkward years: I had braces, bones that stuck out everywhere, a nose too big for my face, a height I wasn’t yet proud of, a bad short haircut I didn’t know what to do with. (I had managed to ditch my glasses and was pretending to wear contact lenses but in reality was letting my right eye slide into near-uselessness so that I’m now a bespectacled cyclops.) More to the point, I had a stigma on me, I had the picked-on nerd curse, and in that gym class in particular I was always the last left standing when kids chose teams.

These memories seem to exist in parallel, in fact. Ninth grade was like the waning of my victim-nerd career. Everyone who was going to traumatize me probably already had; now we were just going through the motions, numbly playing our roles. I was there in gym class, in high school, steeling myself to the social environs over which I had no choice, and alternatively hoping for the best.

Meanwhile, T.F. Bishop, smiling sexual approval down on me from his bleacher heights was the first dude in school to do so. And so his smile exists in parallel--it had nothing to do with “me.” There was nothing to do with it. Somehow, I couldn’t take that affection into me and let it touch me--”I” was an Untouchable. I had to store T.F.’s smile somewhere in my brain for understanding later. T.F. was left smiling at the sexual girl I wasn’t yet ready to be, at a face I couldn’t bear to look at (I would brush my teeth in the dark for a few more years), at a person in a body I hadn’t yet begun to inhabit.

T.F., who had never known me before that year, was looking at 14 year old me--while a big chunk of me was stuck in time, busy protecting my 11-12-13 year old selves from my vicious classmates who were also stuck in time. We were all so stuck in time that I never dated anyone who knew me “before”--my boyfriends in high school were the newest of newcomers, who would meet me at 16, 17.

Time is funny. T.F.’s smiling face now gets crosswired in my brain with Thomas’ high school face as I’ve seen it in pictures--the same handsome jaw, the same curious blue eyes, the same high-bridged nose, but especially the same boyish grin. Thomas who I wouldn’t meet for six more years, then a fourteen year gap, then an unforeseen reunion. Thomas who is sitting next to me on the train as I write this, on a together-train trip which I have been dreaming of for sixteen years.

Time is funny. I was driving back home from Beverly’s house, two summers after high school. Beverly lived on North 15 and I lived off South 15, with our town in between us; at night this was an 8-minute drive. But this particular night, a tractor trailer plowed into me, just in front of Safeway, making a wide right turn; and my life flashed before my eyes. “My life flashed before my eyes”--I always thought this was a turn of phrase, but that’s what happened. For a moment, I was still driving my mother’s car forward towards my own death, except that I happened to brake just in time for the truck to crunch my hood and fender and not my door and me behind it; and something in arresting that momentum (in coming that close to the draw of death) made scenes that I knew to be “my life” blur past my mind’s eye. Regret was in there, too, somewhere in that short moment I felt deep regret for the life I hadn’t yet lived, and the greediest part of me screamed out “I WANT TO KEEP GOING!” Was that the very moment that I applied the brakes?

This occurred at midnight, which soon turned into my next thought. I had dutifully limped my car into the Safeway parking lot after the offending tractor trailer, but suddenly remembered I was a young woman alone and didn’t trust this driver a whit. I was scared to leave my car. I probably said a Hail Mary.

Five minutes hadn’t passed when a police car pulled up. The officer got out, walked over to my window, and calmly and professionally explained that someone across the street had phoned in an accident.

The policeman didn’t recognize me, but I was never happier to see him. It was T.F. Bishop.