Loud in the House of Myself (13 page)

From that day forward, I was on the run. Nothing and nobody moved fast enough. If I didn’t keep moving, I’d break down. I went to class, but nothing made sense. In French I stared at the words with their twelve million silent vowels and for some reason the ones that ended in
eaux
made me laugh. I would sit there learning nothing and trying not to crack up at how the French spelled
Ø
.

One day my teacher called on me and I had to speak in front of everyone. I tried, but I couldn’t make any words. So I said something in Spanish:
cabeza de aire
, airhead. My Spanish teacher in high school had called me that once when he caught me writing a story instead of conjugating verbs.

Everyone started laughing except me. I started crying. Wailing. Like someone had just died. My professor looked alarmed. I ran from the room and never went back.

When I went to drop the class, it was too late. Not only did I have to remain in the class, my advisor informed me that I currently had a 3.4 GPA, needed a 3.5 to keep my scholarship for the following year, and that if I got anything less than a B in French I’d lose it.

How could anyone be so worthless?
shrieked my brain, which, interestingly, had taken on Jolene’s screeching Southern accent, the one I’d heard on Tommy’s answering machine.
How could anyone, so much, so very, very much, deserve to die?
Because it was all I knew to do, I went to my room, hid in the closet—making sure to sit on a pile of shoes—and covered my body with words in Sharpie marker: everything mean everybody had ever said to me. For good measure, I wrote the word
FAT
in every empty space.

Not surprisingly, I failed French, and I did indeed lose my scholarship. But I also lost weight, so none of those things mattered as much as they should have. On the last day of school, having had exactly enough of Jolene and the fundamentalist thing, I broke up with Tommy. I told him I wasn’t coming back, packed my stuff in my Mustang, called Phil Thornton in Fayetteville, scheduled an appointment for the following day, and drove off into the proverbial sunset, saying goodbye to another dream sacrificed to madness.

Interstate 40 goes on forever. You can drive it almost straight from Conway to Prairie Grove, where your parents, who are by this point justifiably afraid of you and your moods, may or may not be waiting. You can drive until there’s nothing on the radio but the Christian stations, and keep going until there’s nothing but static. Until even Jesus finally gets bored and bails.

Back in Prairie Grove, hopeless and depressed, I slept in a scrawny, weeping ball on my parents’ couch for two weeks. When I dragged myself to my appointment with Phil, he informed me gently but firmly that curling up and dying was not an option. He made me call him daily and report to him what I’d eaten, focusing more on the eating disorder than the attendant depression. He also talked me into getting a job—which I forced myself to do in order to please him—at a punk clothing store in Fayetteville. I liked the store and the people, and quickly developed a crush on a boy I met there, which, like so many loves before and since, instantly elevated my mood. Borderlines have a tendency to fall epically in and out of love on a regular basis, and to experience wild mood swings based upon the actions of the beloved. Lile Copeland wore a fedora, played the trumpet, and took black-and-white pictures with old, strange cameras, and as a result, the world that had been black the week before was suddenly shiny and new, and I the happiest girl alive.

In an expansive in-love display of impulsivity, when I went to enroll at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, I registered as a theater major. I’d been watching films starring Helen Mirren and thinking a lot about the plays I’d seen in London, and Lile had recently revealed a crush on Carole Lombard, so I figured I might as well pursue my sudden, intense passion for acting. (This was the second manic episode; one good indicator of oncoming mania, learned from going through it enough damn times: the number of sudden, intense new passions I feel I must immediately pursue.) But the desire to become an actress had more urgent and sinister underpinnings—after all, if you don’t have a self, you can at least stand onstage and pretend to be somebody else. It seemed the best option, the only option. I poured myself into acting, I poured acting into myself, I assured my parents I was fine, and of course I neglected to call Phil Thornton. I didn’t need therapy, after all. Who needs a shrink when she’s not depressed?

XENON TALKED, WHICH
made it the most terrifying and fascinating pinball game in the Land of Oz arcade in the Northwest Arkansas Mall. The back glass featured a blue woman’s face with huge red-and-yellow eyes, and when you walked up to the machine she said, “Welcome to Xenon.” The first time I saw it, at age eight, I ran screaming.

Years later, still haunted by the memory, I researched the game and found that the voice of Xenon was actually electronic musician Suzanne Ciani. In 1979, using computer chips the size of dominos, motherboards the size of floor tiles, and synthesizers with tangles of patch cables like ropes of red licorice, she sat at her monochromatic Texas Instruments computer and created a voice for a machine.

Of course once I knew this, being the mad science junkie I am, I had to have a Xenon tattoo. Her otherworldly blue face became part of the sleeve of female robots inked onto my left arm by Emma Porcupine. Inspired by a book I brought her about the now-defunct Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, she gave Xenon a phrenology helmet.

It fits her. And once again, something that scared me is exorcised, incorporated, with me forever.

Fall 1990 was a brief respite between mania and depression, the kind that get shorter and shorter the longer you leave bipolar disorder unattended, during which I found myself wearing a nun’s habit, singing “Ave Maria” in the dark. I felt like I would lose my breath, pee myself, pass out cold. I grabbed the black velvet curtain to steady myself and it gave off a great poof of dust. My face smelled like expired Ben Nye makeup, and the blood bag tucked beneath my armpit was sticky from sweat. Behind me Trudy Bennett cleared her throat, as if to remind me one last time that she was supposed to play Agnes of God for her thesis role and everyone knew I’d unfairly usurped it.

“Mother Miriam,” I said, and stepped onto the stage, raw and naked and brightly lit. I was an
actress
! My mission in life was to make everyone in the theater believe me, to make Burke White, the director, love me, and to keep the trick stigmata from going off before its time. And, of course, to show Trudy Bennett that I could by god do this, even though she was a grad student and I only a sophomore. I’d heard all the things she’d said about how terrible I was in the role—were theater majors ever not gossiping, or running off to report that gossip to the person it was about?—and I was deeply hurt and determined to prove her wrong.

But that night, at that moment, everything was sublime. I knew, for the first time in my life, exactly where I was and what I was supposed to be doing. I had a script. I had a costume. I was Agnes of God.

When I first met Burke White, I was dumping blue powdered Fresh Start laundry detergent into an industrial washing machine at Hogwash, the Laundromat just down the hill from the University of Arkansas. By the time I put my clothes in the dryer, his eyes were burning a hole in my back. I felt his gaze travel from my hair down my spine to my ass, and it was strangely warm and pleasant, like an oversized bath towel or a blow dryer or a hug. I shivered. I turned around.

“Hi,” I said, and he nodded.

He wore glasses and loafers and a sweater worthy of Bill Cosby, and his salt-and-pepper hair just brushed his eyebrows. He was distinguished in a professorly way, and I fell into a dirty-old-man-father-figure fantasy that left me tingling as I gathered my laundry and walked home.

The next time I saw him was at my first audition as a new theater student at the U of A. Again, it made me tingle when he looked at me. I tried out for the role of Thea in
Hedda Gabler,
doing a woefully mischosen monologue from
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
I stumbled around the black box, a fake-drunk nineteen-year-old Martha in a fluffy pink sweater.

When I finished my faux-drunken tirade, the room was largely silent. The professor directing
Hedda Gabler
blinked hard several times before saying “Thank you” in a tone that suggested what she actually meant was,
Please leave the theater. Not the building, the profession
. Mortified, I turned to run for the nearest bathroom, lock myself in a stall, and sob in abject humiliation. But the man from Hogwash was standing in the doorway. He had seen the entire thing. He had witnessed my flailing, my utter lack of sophistication.

“Do you sing?” he asked.

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Did he mean,
Do you sing as badly as you act?
Or did he mean that he had seen something in me, some hidden magic, that I didn’t see in myself, and if I sang that would make it complete? Better yet, perhaps he meant,
Will you sing show tunes while doing the dance of the seven veils at the foot of my bed after we make sweet love?

“Sure,” I said.

“Sing something,” said Burke. My mouth opened and I stared into his eyes and belted out “I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper” from the
Clockwork Orange
soundtrack.

He stared at me.

“Hmmm,” he said.

The next morning, as if there was any hope, I slunk into the greenroom to read the cast lists.
Hedda Gabler
was, as expected, going on without me. The list for
Agnes of God
consisted only of the names of the actresses playing Mother Miriam and Dr. Livingstone. Trudy and her friends, including the icy Annie, who had been cast as Hedda, stood whispering among themselves.

“You’ll get it,” said Annie, laying her hand on Trudy’s shoulder. Trudy nodded and slammed a Diet Coke.

As I stood fantasizing about Burke fucking Agnes backstage with her habit over her head, my new friend Rob, a 250-pound bald drag queen who went by the name Sofonda Peters, walked up and invited me to lunch. We headed off for some chicken fingers with ranch dressing in the cafeteria, but as we passed Burke’s office, I once again saw him standing in the doorway, studying me. He caught my eye and nodded me inside. Everything stopped: my breath, my central nervous system, time.

He didn’t speak, or if he did, I didn’t hear him. The room smelled like Marlboros and textbooks baked in the sun. The metal wheels of his big leather chair sang the short roll toward his desk, and as he pulled open a wooden drawer, I half expected it to shoot forth a beam of glowing light and melt our faces like in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. He took out a script and slid it across the desk to me. He didn’t look up.

“First rehearsal’s Monday”—he lit a cigarette—“Agnes.” He gave me the smallest of grins.

I stood there mute until Sofonda smacked me.

There was a suspended sparkling hour that day when Sofonda and I sat at lunch together, when we were the only ones who knew, before Trudy found out. Everything about that day is frozen, still: the dead-leaf smell mingled with the cafeteria grease every time someone opened the door, the little brown crumbs, the chicken fingers left in the cups of thick white dressing, the too-loud cackling laugh of my large and sweaty companion, who mopped his blushing bald head with his napkin. I remember the smears on the dirty table, the way I folded up a piece of notebook paper to stick beneath its unstable leg. The pristine blue Dramatists script before me,
Agnes of God
in italics on its cover. The thrill of borrowing a highlighter and sweeping across my lines with fluorescent yellow. But most of all I remember how Burke looked when he first believed in me.

I kept that script beside my bed for a long time, long after rehearsals had ended and the play had closed, because I wrote every word Burke said on the grubby pages like gospel. I felt as though, having been granted the honor of his direction, I had joined a secret society that had formerly granted membership only to girls like Trudy and Annie. Burke had trademark sayings those who had been directed by him tossed back and forth among themselves, a shorthand the cool kids spoke, and now I knew their passwords. For example, if someone wasn’t performing up to par, wasn’t really “in character,” you could tell him or her to “try forestry,” because if you weren’t going to devote yourself completely to being an actor you might as well give up now and do something else. Or if a scene wasn’t going well, you would tell the actors to “bag it,” which was Burkespeak for “cut.” If your actors seemed lazy, you would yell, “BIGGER LOUDER FASTER!” But the best thing about Burke, the thing we all wanted to emulate most of all, was how dramatic and sexy he made chain-smoking and constant swearing.

We all worshiped him, everyone in the department, and we competed for his attention like Girl Scouts selling cookies to earn our way to camp. We all wanted to be able to say “Fuck!” in as many hilarious intonations as he did; we wanted to blow smoke out our nostrils for punctuation. During the day, I shared Burke with other people, but alone at night, I closed my eyes and conjured his face and kept him for myself. His words put their hands all over me.

I had exactly two female friends at the U of A. Dana, a dramatically pale, dramatically thin grad student with ice-blue eyes that bulged out of her head and skin so translucent you could almost see her bones, glanced at me across the greenroom one day, smiled, and walked up and introduced herself. She designed the lighting for all Burke’s shows, and she quickly became my older, wiser ally in the department. She was calm and unfazed, and no matter how much I freaked out, her presence always calmed me down. She liked me in spite of the fact that I was so frequently manic and terrified of whether or not other people found me smart or talented or beautiful or whatever. She had an actual Buddhist shrine in her apartment. I marveled at her ability to meditate, and occasionally wished that I, like she, had lupus, and could achieve her degree of otherworldly skinniness.

My other friend, Polly, was Dana’s total opposite, a wiry aspiring playwright who stayed up late into the night doing shots of Jack Daniel’s, chain-smoking the generic cigarettes that already smelled like stale butts while they were still burning, and tapping out endless revisions of her masterwork about the last hours of River Phoenix.

Shortly after I met Polly, we became roommates, moving into a ramshackle rental house. Our dark brown carpet was matted from the feet of too many tenants, the whole place smelled like smoke and mildew, and the curtains were made of black fabric printed with Jim Beam bottles, except in the living room where the drafty window was blocked by a pilled beige blanket with a picture of a bear eating a fish. It was $200 a month, and it was an entire house all to ourselves, which made it luxurious in our eyes.

“I think the parallels between River and the Virgin Mary are striking,” Polly would holler boozily from her room when I woke up to pee. She’d lure me in for “just one cigarette, come on,” and then expound at length about how the set was going to look like the
Pietà
.

One night, shortly after I was cast as Agnes, Dana came over for whiskey and beers and a game of Risk. As we downed our second six-pack, she revealed the riveting information that Burke was her M.F.A. thesis chair and she went to his house for their meetings.

“You’ve been in his
house
?” I whispered, incredulous.

“Oh sure,” she said.

“What does it
look
like?”

“Well, there are pictures of his dead wife everywhere.”

“Dead WIFE?”
I gasped. My god, Burke became a more tragic and romantic figure by the minute.

“Yeah, she died of cancer five years ago.”

“What was her name?”

“Jillian.”

Jillian White. Jillian Mrs. Burke White. Mrs. Wife of Burke.

The job opening for the position of Burke’s wife inspired the bulk of my sexual fantasies throughout the rehearsal of
Agnes
. I ate, slept, and breathed my lines. I attended two Catholic church services in hopes of more authentic characterization, coming away with little more than bruised kneecaps and the smell of incense in my coat. I sang hymns naked in front of my mirror, running my hands over my body. At rehearsals, when Burke gave us notes, I gazed at him with an expression I hoped conveyed the dual sentiments of
I’m listening very carefully to everything you say,
and
Take me, I’m yours.

I sat on Polly’s bed in the middle of the night with a joint in one hand and a cigarette in the other and detailed for her my obsessive repertoire of Burke and Jillian White fairy tales. She half listened while scribbling notes about the striking similarities among River Phoenix, Dracula, and Gandhi, occasionally reminding me to pass the joint. Eventually the conversation would degenerate into silence and we’d end up sitting in front of the TV watching late-night movies and eating Cool Whip out of the tub, and these were the fantasies that got us through the night.

Being an actress was intoxicating and sensual, and I confused it with sex, which seemed the only experience comparable in intensity. Being onstage, like being in bed, consumed all my attention and provided an outlet for the boundless manic energy that had, by that point, seated me shotgun in the race car of my psyche. Putting on my costume was a divine ritual; when I looked in the mirror and saw myself as a nun, I could almost believe I was holy. Burke was God, and I was his supplicant marionette.

For once, people approved of what I did. Every night, for six divine nights, I walked out for the curtain call covered in corn-syrup blood for the world to see, and sometimes my audience stood up and clapped until I bowed again, and again, and again. Polly and Dana carried roses to the foot of the stage and offered them up to me, and I leaned over the footlights to take them. I pulled off a rosebud and broke the barrier between my fake church and the secular house, tossing petals over the threshold to rain down on my laughing friends’ heads. After the show Burke hugged me, and he leaned into my ear and, in a reference to the habit I wore, whispered in his low sweet voice, “Nice work, little penguin.” I lived for those hugs, every night until the show closed, six treasured embraces, six times folded into his healing blanket arms.