Imperfect Spiral (8 page)

Meanwhile, Becca had carried on. She chanted her part of the Torah and she gave her speech. When I came slinking back in and took a seat in the front row, she caught my eye from her place at the Torah table. She was reading something in Hebrew, but here's what I heard: “
Quelle horreur
!”

My mother told everyone that I'd gotten sick. I miraculously recovered in time for my little luncheon party an hour later and for Becca's party that night. In response to the inevitable questions, I rolled my eyes, looked embarrassed, and said something about never eating soft-boiled eggs again. I did tell Becca what really happened. And she really did say: “
Quelle horreur
!”

And so, for two years now, I have been unable to get up in front of people and speak. Yes, I know, other people get panic attacks, too. But I can't believe it's all that many people, because if it were, this country would come to a grinding halt. You cannot know the thumping terror of it, the total loss of control, the willingness to just die rather than keep going through it, unless you've lived through it.

My mother has tried to get me to see a therapist about this. I've refused. Just as I've refused to risk re-creating the experience: I will not give a presentation in class, no matter what this means for my grade. I will not raise my hand to be called on in
class. That I have tried. Here's what happens. The seconds after I stick my hand in the air, and before the teacher calls on me, turn into an eternity. During that eternity, my heart beats uncontrollably, my mouth goes into lockdown, my throat closes up—and I pull my hand back to my side. It is not worth it. Weirdly, though, if a teacher ambushes me—that is, if I am called on without having volunteered myself—I can get the words out. It must be the surprise and spontaneity of it. There's no time for the wave to build.

“Being a CIT would be the perfect baby step,” Becca said last winter when we talked about going back to camp. “Because you only have to be ‘on' in front of little kids who are going to love you no matter what. No pressure.”

But it's not about pressure. Pressure is beside the point. It really is like being possessed. And it really is a problem with no name, as Becca says in her text. You have to call it something, so people use words like stage fright, panic attack, social phobia—none of which really covers it. You might as well call it a dybbuk.

So:

No, I don't expect to be talking about that
particular problem.

What about following your dream?

My dream. That would be my half-formed idea of going to law school—so far into the future you can't even see it from here—and then becoming a lawyer who takes cases for people who have been discriminated against. Or who have been treated unfairly by big and powerful interests. Those important, public interest cases, like Erin Brockovich did in the movie. In the movie and in real life, I should say, since she was real.

Maybe I'll be the type of lawyer who doesn't argue cases in court.

Stubborn.

Hey, EB didn't speak in court.

Right. She wasn't the lawyer. But don't you want to be her boss?

To be honest, I'm really not thinking about my future as a lawyer right now. To be more honest, I'm never thinking of my future as a lawyer or anything else as much as Becca is. She has direction and drive. She wants to be a journalist. She wants to end up as a columnist and commentator. So she's already working on her plan. I think the two of us halfway just made up the idea that I want to be a lawyer, so that I wouldn't be left completely in the dust of her ambition.

I did have the fleeting fantasy, when I got the babysitting job with the Dankers, that Mr. Danker and I would have the chance to talk about being a lawyer, that he would see something in me that would cause him to encourage me, that he would invite me to the Supreme Court to watch him argue a case on one of my days off. I later learned that the Supreme Court doesn't hear cases during the summer months. And, of course, Mr. Danker saw nothing in me at all, except a nonentity that he occasionally called
Young Lady
.

Becca seems to give up, for now, on getting my commitment to the goal of becoming Erin Brockovich's boss.

What else r u doing?

Reading an article about how everyone but me takes the Red Cross babysitting class. So they will expect the unexpected and not let little kids run into streets.

Who says?

Some girl in the Observer.

???

An article about the accident.

Zut. Are you in it?

No not really. Although I was interviewed. The reporter asked a lot of questions. But I guess I gave the wrong answers because the only thing the article says about me is that I didn't take the R.C. course.

You told her that?

Afraid so.

Everyone does *not* take classes. I haven't.

They're free. Maybe you should.

Anyway, I meant what are you doing in general, not this minute.

What I'm doing is trying to figure out what I'm doing.

Je comprends.

And are you teaching the kids French?

Ha. Sure. In our arts and crafts class.

Why not? Monet. Manet. Cezanne.

Ha again. Arts and crafts. Not art history. Plus these kids are 7.

Eager young minds. They'll love your French expletives.

ZUT ALORS!

SACRE BLEU!

I mean ZUT ALORS I have to go.

OK bye.

You still haven't told me how you are.

To be continued.

I scroll up to the top of our text string. And then farther up, where I wrote “He was such a great kid” after Becca had already put her phone away.

I wish she had asked me about Humphrey. I wish anybody
would ask me about Humphrey. Not about me. Not about my emotional state. Not, Ms. Diana Tang, cub reporter, about the sickening sequence of events that everyone in Franklin Grove just calls The Tragedy. Ask me about Humphrey T. Danker, the highly interesting little person I hung out with this summer.

“We're drawing!” Humphrey exclaimed, breathlessly, as soon as he opened the door.

“Oh—goody!” I said. But Humphrey had already turned around to run toward the back of the house. It was Wednesday, my third week of babysitting.

“Come on!” he yelled over his shoulder.

It was raining hard. I left my umbrella outside, propped against the house next to the front door. My sneakers were wet; I slipped them off.

Humphrey and his mother were at the kitchen table, which was covered with pencils, crayons, colored pencils, erasers, rulers, a protractor, and sheets of copy paper. Humphrey was wearing his pajamas. Mrs. Danker was not.

“Do you like to draw?” Humphrey asked me.

“Sure,” I said, lowering myself into an empty chair.

“Here,” he said, pushing paper and pencils my way. “You can join our marathon.”

“Your
marathon
,” I said.

“Our marathon is about drawing twenty-six drawings,” Humphrey said. “They have to be good drawings. Not just scribble-scrabble.”

“Wow, twenty-six pictures,” I said.

“
Drawings
, not pictures,” Humphrey corrected.

“Got it,” I said.

“Humphrey, sweetheart, Mommy has to go now,” said Mrs. Danker. “I'll see you a little later, okay?”

“Okay,” Humphrey said.

“Danielle, there's a nice watercolor set and painting easel that Humphrey's daddy set up in the basement,” Mrs. Danker said. “Maybe Humphrey will want to do some painting after he gets tired of drawing.”

“I never get tired of drawing!” Humphrey said.

The completed drawings were spread out on the kitchen table. They were all in pencil and colored pencil; no crayons. Some of them resembled—roughly—architectural or engineering drawings; others looked more like maps with lots of landmarks.

“Wow, Humpty Dumpty,” I said. “These look cool. Want to tell me about them?”

“Wait,” he murmured, barely audible, not looking up
from the sheet in front of him. “I'm in the middle of a very important …” He trailed off, his pencil moving furiously.

After a minute or two, Humphrey sighed heavily. “It's getting harder,” he said, still not looking up.

“Want to show me?” I asked.

“No! I want to crumple it up and throw it away. I want to throw them all away!” But he didn't.

“Maybe you just need a break,” I said. “Every artist needs a break sometimes.”

“I'm not an artist,” Humphrey said. “These aren't pictures. They're drawings. They're supposed to be for inventions. Inventions for space exploration.”

“Show me.”

He was too busy.

“Do the space-cars park outside?” Humphrey said, bending over the papers. “But then how do the people get inside? Or do they drive right into the space station, like into a garage? But then it has to be so giant. That's not how it would be in real life. A space station can't be so huge. But then why'd I draw all these space-cars driving there? There's no room for them. My ideas aren't good! I hate this!”

I had no experience with whining kids. A minute ago, he'd been all happy and excited:
We're drawing! I love this!
Now, five minutes later—
I hate this!

“But these are amazing, Humphrey,” I said.

“No, they're not,” he said. “They're stupid.” He laid his head down on the table.

“Only if it's Opposite Day,” I said. “If you catch my drift.”

It was as if you could see the gears turning in Humphrey's head. Opposite Day.

“Look at the sun shining out there!” he said, pointing toward the window.

“It's a beautiful day for playing outdoors,” I said.

Pause. Gear shift. Then: “I got dressed as soon as I woke up this morning,” Humphrey said.

“And look at me,” I countered. “I walked out of my house still in my pajamas.”

“I had chicken for breakfast,” Humphrey said.

Hmm. “Is that an opposite? I mean, what would be the opposite of that?”

“I had chicken for dinner!” Humphrey said.

“Not—I had cereal for breakfast?”

Click, click went the gears. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope and seeing all the tiny shapes fall into place. Did all little kids have brains that were so—clickable?

Humphrey agreed to get dressed. Afterward, in the kitchen again, he gave me a tour of his drawings. They most certainly were not just pictures, I agreed. They were designs for a wondrous exploration.

“So, is the idea to build a city on the moon,” I asked, “or to build a space-station city?”

“Silly, that's not the moon!” Humphrey said. “Do you think that looks like the moon?”

“Uh—yeah, no,” I said. Last week we'd agreed that “yeah,
no” was the perfect thing to say when you didn't know what to say.

“It's Thrumble-Boo, silly!” Humphrey said.

The rain didn't let up. After a while, when I could tell Humphrey was running out of steam, I suggested a nap.

“You know I don't take naps,” Humphrey said after we climbed the stairs.

“How about breaking into those watercolors your mom mentioned?”

“Too messy,” Humphrey said.

“And you're such a neat person?” I said. I gestured around. We were in Humphrey's room, which was, as usual, in a state of confusion.

He explained. He didn't mind the kind of mess his room was in. It was the messy mess of painting he didn't like.

“This is a clean mess,” he said. “Painting is a dirty mess.” He looked at me. “If
you
catch my
drift
.”

“So you're
fastidious
,” I said, “but not
fussy
.” I waited for Humphrey to say that yes, indeed, he knew the meaning of “fastidious,” and, by the way, here are sixteen other interesting
f
words his father had recently mentioned.

“Okay, let's paint,” he said.

I was surprised. We went to the basement and painted. Humphrey's paintings were uninspired and unplanned—the opposite of his drawings—just random brushstrokes on the page.

“This is fun,” he said. “Look at my beautiful pictures.” His voice was listless.

I figured I should encourage him. “It is fun,” I said. “I don't even mind the mess, do you?”

“No,” he said. “I love it.”

“Humphrey?”

“I love it if it's Opposite Day,” he said.

We heard the front door open and close.

“Shall we go say hello?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Let's say good-bye.” He put down his brush and started toward the stairs.

It was Mr. Danker.

“Are these your shoes?” Mr. Danker said to me.

“Oh—yes.” My shoes had been on the hall rug since that morning.

“Let's move them out of the way next time,” Mr. Danker said. “I almost tripped on them.”