Kissing Doorknobs (11 page)

Before I knew what was happening, I had placed all ten of my fingers on the doorknob in a little circle with the
exact
same pressure, the way I had done before when performing my street ritual …
but this time I brought those fingers to my lips.

Instantly and instinctively, I spread my lips out as wide as I could and touched all ten of my fingers to my lips with the
exact
same pressure. I don’t remember what I was thinking when I did it. It was involuntary and yet voluntary. It was natural and yet unnatural. It was the birth of a ritual that would be repeated many, many times. In fact, from that day on, I was compelled to perform that ritual almost any time I came in contact with my front door. It wasn’t easy. It was exacting.

If I slipped and applied more pressure with one finger than another, or if a finger fell off my lip, I’d have to do it all over again. Sometimes I’d have to stand there for a little while to get it perfect. It was hard to do.

My parents got pretty alarmed. Especially after I had been acting so normal for the past month.

“Why? Why? Why?” my mother asked over and over again, as if she was stuck on Replay.

“I don’t know.” And that was the truth. What I didn’t say was that I had to do it. That it made me feel better to do it, even though it made me feel worse. I also didn’t tell her that the big knot that used to be in my stomach was back and that the only way to untie it was to do the doorknob thing. I also didn’t tell her how scared I was … again. I couldn’t tell her that. The tyrants were back in control, and I couldn’t explain why.

My mother had an anxious look on her face again. And that always made her act weird herself.

“I’m going to make you remember that that is not a pleasant thing to do, Tara,” she said through gritted teeth. “You’ve been so much better. So much better! You
can’t
start this again. I won’t let you.”

Employing a sort of demented Pavlovian reasoning, my mother threatened to slap me every time I did the doorknob ritual so that I would associate it with pain instead of pleasure—as if there was any pleasure involved with any of this.

“Taraaa!”
she’d warn as I approached the door. But I couldn’t think about her. I could only think about what I had to do. Whether I wanted to or not. I looked at the doorknob. I made a finger circle with the
exact
same pressure.

“Tara, please. Stop here.” My mother’s voice was pitiful.

“Don’t kiss them. Please,” she moaned.

I
brought those fingers to my lips.

The slap hurt, but I didn’t react. I just continued, even though I knew I’d have to start over. A few seconds later I heard my mother run from the room. I was free to start over, counting to myself.
One. Two. Three. Four.
In the beginning I wasn’t sure where to stop, how many times was enough.

I heard my mother crying and throwing things in another room. I knew she was as scared and nervous as I was—and just as determined to follow her urges to stop me, no matter how much she didn’t want to hurt me.

Seeing me act this way drove her past all her control points. She felt she had to do something. So we were on a collision course with each other. And the rest of the family became both witnesses to and victims of our destructive and debilitating war of the urges.

But even with the slapping and the hollering, the pleading and the tears, I considered myself lucky. After all, my counting and praying had subsided almost completely. And I only had to do this doorknob thing at home. If I had had to do it with every door I passed through, I would have been humiliated. Not to mention the time it would have taken.

After a few weeks, my mother’s physical punishments were too much for her to endure.

“I can’t stand this!” she’d beg. “Why can’t you stop this?”
Slap. Slap.

One day, after a few halfhearted slaps, she changed her ultimatum.

“I’m finished slapping you,” she said in a shaky
voice. “The next time I see you doing it, I’m going to take you to the doctor—
another
doctor! Or maybe I’ll just have myself committed and let you do as much of this as you want.”

After her threat, I couldn’t pry myself away from that darn doorknob. I did my ritual again and again and again and again and again and again for up to a half hour at a time, with tears of fear streaming down my face.

As promised, my mother took me to a new doctor.

“You’ve given your mother quite a scare,” the new doc said to me in a kind tone of voice.

“Uh-huh,” I replied, even though what I was thinking was “You think
she’s
scared; try being
me.”

“Do you understand why your mother is scared?” she continued.

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s human nature. If we can’t figure out why other people act in a certain way or do or say certain things, then we get scared of them. And it’s fear that makes us do and say things we’re not proud of.”

Tell me about it
, was what I was thinking, but I just sat there as embarrassed as heck to be there in the first place. I began to count the floor tiles.

“I think that’s what happened to your mother. She slapped you because she was afraid,” she said solemnly.

I was not worried about my mother slapping me. This was not about child abuse. I was worried about my mind, my thoughts. Were they my thoughts? Or had aliens planted them in my brain?

The doctor gave me a pat on the back. I tallied up seventy-five tiles while she told me that I was a good kid and that my eczema didn’t look too bad.

I don’t know what she told my mother privately, but afterward my mother seemed hopeful that whatever was wrong with me would just go away. She bought me ice cream, new jeans and a great sweater from The Gap and hugged me forever when she saw how cute I looked in them.

I could see that my mother was in as much pain about my problem as I was. She
needed
to believe that the doctor was right. She
needed xo
believe I’d be cured. To help her out, I prayed it would go away. But I prayed silently, and that was a big improvement.

F
ortune-cookie crumbs sprayed the air. My family was finished eating and eagerly splitting the cookies to set their fortunes free.

“‘Problems have solutions but love does not,’” my mother read. “What does that mean?”

My dad, who had forgotten his new glasses, held his fortune about as far from his face as possible. If he ’d been able to stretch his arm to Ohio, his vision would have been 20/20. “‘You will receive important news from an unusual messenger.’”

The eagerness on their faces defined human hope. If aliens landed at the next table, they could easily have deduced that my family had been waiting their entire lives to receive the information hidden in those cookies.

“‘A little kindness is worth more than a little gold,’” read my sister. “What crap.”

While they happily examined their fortunes, I continued straightening my rice and rearranging the contents of an eggroll into an acceptable pattern for consumption. That is, acceptable to me. That is, orderly, with the cabbage stretched out and the other ingredients lying neatly beside it. I didn’t want to
eat any mystery ingredients hidden by another unappealing wad of food. As a result, I hadn’t taken one bite, and we’d been eating for almost an hour. My parents were doing their best to ignore my newest quirk.

I was getting testy, though. It took me so long to arrange and eat my meals that it had been weeks since I had eaten any dessert at all. It wasn’t that I cared that much about desserts. I didn’t like them as a rule. There were too many ingredients in them. And too many of those ingredients (like partially hydrogenated soybean oil and propylene glycol monoesters) didn’t seem like things that should be eaten. Desserts, like Chinese food, were as a rule too complicated to dissect. More like science than sustenance. But still, I was hungry.

“Uh-oh!” Greta knocked over her Coke. “Whoops.” Our plates were floating in ugly brown rivers of cola that streamed over the edges of the table and into our laps. As my parents shrugged and blotted the tablecloth and my sister grinned sheepishly, I felt a volcanic anger rising up inside of me.

Ignoring the complete disaster she’d just created, my sister grabbed the extra cookie. “Can I have yours?” she asked me.

“No,” I said, just to be mean. “It’s mine!”

“Okay,” she said with a sly smile. She handed me the cookie, but before I could tell her for the thousandth time that I don’t like people touching my food, she said, “Do you think the ink from the paper might have contaminated the cookie?”

She’d won. “Take it!” I snapped. “Go ahead. It’s all yours. Eat it!”

My mother gave Greta a stern look. My sister just smiled at her and said, “Hey, you should thank me. By the time she gets to dessert I’ll have gray hair and you’ll be in a nursing home!”

My father must have agreed. “Come on, Tara,” he said without looking at me, “eat something so that we can get out of here before the second coming of Christ, okay?” My dad was always impatient with my food arrangements after he had finished eating. The waitress returned and looked at the reformatted but uneaten food on my plate.

“Uh-oh!” she said sternly. “I hope you’re not ambidextrous!”

The word hung in the air like a neon sign. Ambidextrous! She meant anorexic! My mother laughed first, but the three of us were quick to follow her lead. It was just what we all needed to break the tension that came from living with what I had.

“She is sorta ambidextrous,” screamed Greta. “She doesn’t eat with
either
hand!”

Walking home from the restaurant, I watched my sister’s peaceful face. She was lost in her own thoughts and I realized that I’d been so self-involved that I’d never really gotten to know all that much about her.

“Mwa … hahaha!” My mother laughed at something my father said. A chill went through my spine. What if she died? What would life be like without her? Before I could recover from the chill I was counting frantically.

“One … two … three … four … five …”

My sister groaned softly. I didn’t look at my parents or my sister, but I could imagine their faces. If only they understood that I was doing this for all of us.

“Tara,” my sister whispered.

“Thirty-two … thirty-three …” I ignored her even though I could feel her at my right side and see her foot near mine.

“Your fortune cookie. I just opened it.”

I ignored her. “Forty.”

“
’Good things are coming to you soon!’ ”
She said it enthusiastically and without sarcasm. I managed to smile without losing count or having to start over. Of course, I doubted that good things were coming soon no matter who the cookie was meant for.

“Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three …” My mother had stopped laughing. They were all watching me. “Fifty, fifty-one.”

Life had become hell for all of us, and I wasn’t even fifteen yet.

The next doctor’s gaze was invasive. It made me feel as if I was getting an X ray. I think she must have treated a lot of girls my age with eating disorders, because she wanted to talk about food all the time.

“Tell me about the rice.”

“I like to line it up before I eat it. Make it neat.”

“That must take a lot of time.”

“Chinese food is a problem.”

“Do you and your family eat out much?”

“Too much.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, for one thing, the idea of some strange person I’ve never seen touching my food in another room is
enough to make me dizzy. And I hate using public bathrooms because of the sign that says
ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH THEIR HANDS
. I mean, why is that sign necessary? Who doesn’t automatically wash their hands after going to the bathroom? Especially if they’re going to touch food? Especially—
especially
if they’re going to touch
my
food!”

I was really worked up. The shrink, however, was as cool as if I had just recited the alphabet. I suspected that she wasn’t listening. I wondered whether she had an attention deficit disorder.

“That’s a good point, Tara. Go on.”

“And then, I also don’t eat out much because I have to rearrange my food before I eat it and that takes a lot of time.” As I was talking, I was tapping my fingers against the underside of my chair. Three times to the right … then three times to the left … then again three times to the left … and three times to the right. I didn’t know if she noticed. I did it pretty stealthily. So stealthily that it took me a while to notice what I was doing. When I did notice, I talked a lot more enthusiastically to distract her, because I’d much rather talk about messy food than my fear of tipping over from being unbalanced.

I went on. “Chinese food is pure hell. Stir-fries look like the aftermath of a hurricane. Strings of vegetables blown off their course and tangled around something that looks like—but might not be—meat.”

“You’re suspicious about the meat, then.”

“I’m worried. About everything. But even if I wasn’t, messes like that are not meals, if you ask me. And chop suey! Fried rice! It takes forever to sort those
things out properly. Do you agree with me or do you think I’m nuts?”