Supernormal. Мэг Джей
immersed in her homework. Maybe like it had been for Piaget, it was an orderly world that Mara escaped to now, and she kept her mother out of her mind by staying occupied with tests and term papers and calculating her grade point average. Not surprisingly, Mara made straight A’s.
Sometimes, to relax, she borrowed self-hypnosis tapes from the audiovisual section—those who are good at becoming absorbed in fantasies are usually quite skilled at self-hypnosis—and she pushed two square, padded, even-armed chairs together, making a little crib-like bed where she could curl up. Just as she had once trained her eyes to split her vision, Mara now trained her mind to do what the tapes said. One taught her to erase her thoughts like chalk on a chalkboard, and she would lie there, eyes closed, willing the eraser in her mind to be stronger and more persistent than the words that popped up in the blackness on the back of her eyelids. Her favorite tapes, though, helped her visualize who she might be one day; they were guided meditations in which she met up with her future self.
For many supernormals, the most wide-open place to escape to is the future. For the child with an average and expectable life, living in the present may represent being able to be carefree and spontaneous, while thinking about the future may feel scary and uncertain. For many supernormals, however, rather than being afraid of change, what they fear most is that life will stay the same. In looking ahead, in being bold, they have nothing to lose.
In this way, some resilient children and teens, like Mara, use fantasies about the future not just cathartically as a way of disengaging from the here and now but also proactively as a way of arming themselves for the there and then. And this is where emotion-focused coping can start to look a lot like problem-focused coping; where fight and flight begin to merge. Daring to have a vision of one’s future self furthers achievement, and this sort of autobiographical planning may be especially important for the resilient child. Studies of transcendent individuals, or those who overcome obstacles in their way, show that they tend to be self-determined, intentional, and future-oriented.
Up on her second-floor table, Mara pored over test prep books and college guides and maps of faraway places. She set her sights on a particular Ivy League school, not because she knew anyone who had been there but because she had heard of it and it sounded far away. The librarian printed out admissions information, and she toted those papers around in her backpack like a secret, elaborate getaway plan. A friend gave her a key chain with the school’s logo on it and she held on to it for years, like a talisman. “He was the only person who knew about my dream and, when he gave me that key chain, it was like he gave me permission to take my dream seriously,” Mara recalls. “Before that, I think it really was just a fantasy.”
When we fantasize about future selves, the more concrete and actionable a vision the better—and sometimes, the supernormal child begins by setting her sights simply on some specific thing. A particular job. A faraway city. A quiet home. A safe relationship. An apartment with a doorman. A red car. A school that looks good. For actor Alan Cumming, it was a set of plates he bought at a country fair that allowed him to imagine one day being free of his father: “They were my ticket out,” Cumming said of the treasured plates in his memoir, Not My Father’s Son. “I would be eating off them in a place where there were buses and taxis and where I would never have to wait in a public place for hours, cold and damp, wondering if my father had concluded his liaison, and if or when he would come for me.”
Ultimately, Mara’s ticket out would be her hard work in school, but it was her key chain and her college guides, too. They were proof that life existed elsewhere, that there were other places that she could escape to once and for all. Set up at her table on the second floor, watching the world turn below, she did not yet know that she would grow to be an adult who would travel far and wide, and who would ultimately do exactly as she planned—attend that Ivy League school and live her life far away from where she sat. For now, it was enough to feel like she was above it all, in an otherworldly place, as she plotted her tomorrows and decided where on Earth she was going to go next.
CHAPTER 6
Vigilance
I’ve got second sight and amazing powers of observation.
—Roger Waters, “Nobody Home”
When Jessie was very young, she thought her older sister might be Rosemary’s Baby. It was 1968. Roman Polanski’s horror film was newly released and much-whispered-about among the adults, so what other way to understand Charley? Charley did like to pull up the neighbor’s flowers, especially ones that seemed prized or carefully planted. She played mean tricks like putting buttermilk in Jessie’s glass and watching her gag in surprised disgust. She pinched and twisted Jessie’s skin to see what the welts would look like. And at night when they lay in their bed talking, Charley swore Jessie to secrecy and then whispered to her she was adopted. So convincing was she, Jessie looked through her mother’s desk in an attempt to find the legal papers. Maybe that would explain why Jessie’s mother did not protect her more.
Jessie was shy, and she was embarrassed by what Charley had done to the neighbor’s flowers, but to play with their dog, she would summon the courage to walk next door and ring the doorbell. She loved to run around the fenced yard that seemed a world away from home, the dog chasing her and licking her face when she fell down. With the cool grass and the soft fur against her skin, Jessie felt carefree, like a child, something she never felt when she was with her sister. Once when these neighbors went on vacation for a week and boarded their dog, Charley delighted in convincing Jessie they were all dead and gone.
Maybe stunts like this were supposed to be childish pranks, and that is usually how Jessie’s mother interpreted them. “Kids fight . . .” Jessie’s mother would say vaguely rather than authoritatively, her words drifting off as if she did not know what to do about it or how to finish her sentence. But by the way Charley enjoyed tormenting her, Jessie sensed something more sinister. She sometimes wondered if Charley were a devil child.
***
When Jessie came home from elementary school, Charley was always already there. The middle school bus made its way through the neighborhood first, which meant that by the time Jessie walked through the front door each day, she felt like she was tiptoeing into someone else’s home. Nearly six feet tall, Charley ruled the television, the food, the phone, and the house from where she sat in the center of the couch in the center of the den. If Jessie challenged her—“What happened to the potato chips?” or “I want to turn the channel”—then Charley would rise up off the couch and come after her—shoving her, hitting her, kicking her, or pulling her hair. Most days, Jessie just lay on the floor of the den, watching what Charley chose to watch on TV and eating bread and butter. She sometimes pretended—or felt like—she was a prisoner.
Of course there were times, even many times, when Jessie and Charley were good sisters. They shared meals and a bedroom and weekends and holidays, and Charley even stood up for Jessie if someone picked on her at the local ice rink. They united in the backseat singing silly songs during long car trips and had been raised to say “Good night, I love you” no matter what had happened during the day. That was the most confusing part. Jessie learned that you can never know what to expect from people, even people who say they love you. She learned that the good guys can be the bad guys, and that sometimes the bad guys live in your house.
One afternoon, Jessie balked at Charley’s telling her she could not go play with the dog next door. She walked, and then ran, to the kitchen to call their mother at work, but the rotary phone that hung on the wall took so long to dial, Jessie could only stand there, desperate and determined, waiting for the seven numbers to click around. Click-click-click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click-click, click-click-click-click-click-click-click, click-click-click . . .
Before Jessie could get through all the clicks, Charley had the phone out of her hand, hitting her in the head with the receiver—thud!—before letting it drop with a loud crack on the linoleum floor. The phone was left dangling off the hook so, for the rest of the day, no one could call in or out.
“I’m telling Mom!” Jessie screamed as she tore off toward their bedroom where, if she could beat her sister there