All New People. Anne Lamott
or so before we went out to celebrate something at a fancy restaurant. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what was going on. He was not enlightened. He didn’t like the smell or taste of women’s bodies. “This is wonderful,” said the therapist I was seeing at the time, when I called for an emergency consultation. “You’ve always had this disgust toward your own body, and now you’ve found someone you can share that with.” She coached me on how to tell him, urged me to just get it over with, but God, it filled me with so much fear, fear that he would want me to go sleep outside in the hut until it had passed. And all through dinner at this fancy restaurant he made sexy little jokes about what he had in store for me later. I would laugh prettily and try to blurt out the news. I kept trying to tell myself that it was really no big deal, that it was okay to have periods, that it just meant I was a woman, and so on and so on, but I couldn’t get a word out. He insisted that we go home to his house, and we held hands in the car and I tried to blurt out the first few words and I couldn’t, until we were finally in his bedroom. “Oh,” I said. “There’s something I wanted to tell you.” He took off his cuff links and started to pull his shirt off over his head and said to me, “Wait, wait, I want to tell you something first!” I nodded and smiled, waiting.
“Good news!” he said. “Clean sheets!”
Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen. There is lots of sorrow and low self-esteem but I also remember it as having been a time when my family was particularly close: we all fought against Nixon and marched against the war and boycotted lettuce and tried to stem the tide of developers who were building homes for rich people, building shops for tourists. I see myself returning from my only year in college, knowing more then than I ever will again. I spent the year hanging out with other bleeding-heart liberals who worked for McGovern and who would never ever drink Gallo or Coors, unless there was absolutely nothing else around. In my struggle to find out who I am, I take only philosophy and literature courses, reading most of the required books so that I could say I had read them, or because a paper was due, and I develop some rather gross intellectual pretensions. For a while I affect a slight and artsy lisp, and then move on to a scholarly, William F. Buckley stammer. I see myself sitting at my parents’ dinner table telling them about the courses I was taking, and I see my hands near my mouth, gnarled with passion and emphasis, saying something like “The—thuhhh—thuhhh—theeeeee matrix through which we studied Thales of Miletus . . .” and my generous parents somehow manage to keep straight faces as I blather on and on; but after dinner when I’m headed upstairs, I hear them chuckle. I stop on the stairs and slowly turn toward the sound. My mother is saying softly, “The—thuhhh—thuhhh—theee uh matrix,” and I can hear that my father is laughing through his nose. “Dear God,” he says.
I see myself a year earlier, my senior year.
I go to a tiny private high school for rich hippies, although I am neither, and one night at dinner I announce, sighing with poignant resignation, that, after all, the unexamined life is not worth living. My parents smile nicely at me, the same way my cousin Lynnie smiles at me when I complainingly remark that all these cats on Market Street keep asking me for bread. She peers into my face and asks, “They do?”
I look at that girl, at me and my pretensions, and then I see another moment in my senior year.
It is one of those Northern California dappled dawns, pink-blue-gray, and I have taken the early commute ferry across San Francisco Bay. Every morning I stop to pick up my best friend at her apartment on California at Larkin, and we walk to our little hippie high school together. This morning I get into her elevator and am joined on the second floor by a sweet handsome man maybe ten years older than I, who has soft black curly Jewish hair. I think I have seen him before, I think I have had a crush on him many times, or else he just looks like the man who organizes the action at peace marches, who introduces the rock groups on weekends at Golden Gate Park, who performs with the improvisational comedy troupe we go to see every weekend, who taught us how to clean up the beach and shorebirds below Slide Ranch, near Stinson, after the oil spill, who taught us what to say when we manned the phones at Suicide Prevention. We say hello and the door closes and then something comes over him, pain in his face, and he leans against a wall, grimacing, and I see that his knee is in spasm. I ask, can I help, can I help, and he nods and begins to slump to the floor. “I’m having a seizure,” he whispers, and all I can think of doing is grabbing for his tongue so he doesn’t choke to death, but he says, “Sit on me and hold my shoulders down.” So I sit astride him and press his shoulders to the floor, and then he starts moaning and writhing, aroused and leering. “Ahhhhhh!” I shout and leap to my feet, nauseated with shame. I stare at the picture of this moment. I have never mentioned it to a soul.
Even years later I couldn’t bear to think of it, and couldn’t keep it out of my mind. It was one of the wormy memories that made up the House of Horrors ride in my head, where around every corner your cart goes flying into the mouth of the snake, or into the fire. But here I am watching it blithely. “Backwards, backwards,” he says softly and I hear the soft rubbery knock as he taps his pencil eraser on his desk.
I am sixteen and in love with an older man, and it is a cat-brown night in San Francisco. I have told my parents that I am staying overnight with my best friend, but I am at my lover’s apartment, and we have made hash brownies to eat the next day at Golden Gate Park, where Quicksilver and Santana will be playing. My lover is in bed and I am wrapping the brownies in foil, and nibbling at the corners and crumbs, just for the taste of the fudge. Everything is normal and lovely, and both of us fall asleep. Then I’m awake, the room is pitch black, and the cat is on my chest, and when I stroke it, its back is as long as a tunnel, my hand is going off into eternity. I bolt into a sitting position and turn on the light. The bed and the floor don’t exist or maybe they do somewhere way way down below; I’m sitting on an infinite expanse of solid white air. My mouth is so dry that my tongue comes off my palate like Velcro, and I can’t breathe. I’m having a heart attack! I shake my lover awake and try to explain that I’m dying, but I can’t talk right—I sound like an Australian talking through Novocain and Quaaludes.
He drives me to the hospital and we are walking toward the emergency ward. He is grouchy and worried, and finally I realize that I’m just stoned from the brownies. I drop back, and when he turns to find me, I am lurking in the corridor like an egret, and I have to tell him I made a mistake: I’m not really having a heart attack, we can go home. And he looks at me with a hatred bordering on horror. “Ferret them out,” the hypnotist coaches.
I am a sophomore at my hippie high school, where three of our students have died this semester, three out of a hundred and fifty, all three with socialite parents. One jumped from a window on Geary on acid, another walked into the sea, the third OD’d on smack in the student lounge. I am one of the few non-hippies, and my English teacher adores me; he is Bertrand Russell at forty, only funnier, and I live to please and astonish him. He assigned a difficult paper on Moby Dick, and several days later I learned that two of my eight classmates were using the Cliffs Notes, so I cleverly used the Monarch Notes and paraphrased its interpretation into an impassioned, possibly brilliant essay. Three days later, he read it out loud to the class, without saying who had written it, and my classmates cheered when he was done and I squirmed demurely, basking in glory and his approval until I saw him reach into his desk for a copy of the Monarch Notes, heard him read the passages from which I had cribbed my essay. I went brain dead. Rigor mortis set in. Class must have ended at some point because my teacher and I were alone, and he looked sad and guilty. I cannot see what happened next, I really can’t, and so after a minute I go backwards.
I see the day when the last train left town.
My junior high is on the grounds where the dairy farms used to be, and I hate seventh and eighth grade daily but especially the nights when there are dances. I see myself taking it all out on my mother. I see myself punish her with sullen, aggressive laziness. After dinner, when she asks me to take out the garbage or do the dishes, I look at her like she just must be out of her mind. I remain at the table after my brother has gone upstairs to study, and my parents to the living room to read, and I wearily cradle my forehead in the palm of my hand, cursing my fate. Then I get up and carry the dishes past her as if they are limestone blocks for her pyramid.
Seventh- and eighth-grade