Kissing Doorknobs (2 page)

I
t’s a warm, sunny summer day. My friends and I are happily playing outside my house. We’re chasing each other and laughing. We all feel safe and happy. Then, out of nowhere, a giant monster pops up from behind a white house a block away. It is huge and fearsome and blocks out most of the blue sky. It is so big that in one step it will not only be at my house, it will be on my house, possibly crushing us to death. My friends all scream and run. I can’t run. I can’t move!

I woke up screaming. I always woke up screaming from that nightmare, which I’d had over and over again, at least once a month, for as far back as I could remember. Usually, by the time I opened my eyes, my mother was already by my side, gently stroking my hair with her dry white hands and chipped nail polish. “I hate dream monsters too,” she said sweetly. “But that’s all they are. Dream monsters.”

Letting kindness get that near to pain is like giving a fire some oxygen. Each time it happened, I cried harder and harder and harder as my eczema secretly spread to my torso and made an appearance behind my knees. Eczema is a red, scaly rash that can crop up anywhere,
anytime, and itch so badly that you want to scratch it off with a chain saw. My eczema, like my worries, seemed to come and go regardless of nightmares or the terrible kindnesses.

To keep from tearing my skin off, I wore kneesocks on my arms day and night and refused to go to preschool. If I had put shoes on my hands and walked on all fours, I would have looked like a human spider with legs missing. Kids would have laughed. My mother let me stay home with her and my baby sister.

“Shhh. It was only a dream,” my mother would say calmly while pulling the kneesocks past my elbows.

“I know,” Td say, scratching my upper arms with a vengeance and sniffling like crazy. Then I’d say, “Tell me again.”

“It was only a bad dream.”

I’d look at my mother in a way that begged for more. “Three more times. Please!”

She complied. “It was only a bad dream. It was only a bad dream. It was only a bad dream.” It didn’t count. I still felt anxious. She sounded too impatient.

“Nicely,”
I begged.

Tired and beaten, she complied.

“It’s only a bad dream. It’s only a bad dream. It’s only a bad dream.”

I searched her face for reluctance or impatience. Anything other than total sincerity ruined it and I’d have to make her do it again. She seemed sincere. She smiled and kissed my forehead. I closed my eyes and waited for relief. It came. I exhaled and pointed to the closet door. Without a word, my mother got up and shut the door. She knew I had seen green monster eyes in there before. Eventually I’d fall asleep listening to the
squeak of el trains returning to the end of the line and thinking about people going home late at night. But I’d sleep so lightly I’d wake up startled from the little explosions whenever the furnace turned on. Each time I awoke, I wanted to go and sleep with my mother, but my parents didn’t like it when I woke them up in the night for no reason. Instead, I’d get up and put cold washcloths on top of my bloody arms, go and look at my baby sister sleeping. And then I’d scratch my arms until morning.

Until I hit kindergarten, my mother and I spent a lot of time together. My great-grandma’s cottage in Michigan was our favorite place to go before and after my sister was born. It was fun in all seasons, but summer was best.

My mom and I made sand castles in a wooden box and fed the neighbor’s peacocks and peahens. While my sister slept, we played croquet on freshly cut grass and drank Dr Pepper out of bottles. We were always together. And we were happy. Looking at clouds. Rocking on the swings. Lying in the sun. We loved being busy doing nothing.

After all that togetherness, it was hard to start school. I cried every day I had to be separated from my mother. Each time she dropped me off I doubted I’d ever see her again. I doubted she would be safe until she picked me up. And I doubted the rest of our family could survive without her. Tears streaming down my face and fists clenched, I’d run to the classroom door and stamp my feet. I wanted to make sand castles with her. I wanted to drink Dr Pepper in the sunshine. I wanted to hold her hand. I didn’t want to be abandoned.

Three girls in my class repeatedly hugged me when I
cried. Kristin, Keesha and Anna would eventually become my best friends, but it took me a long time to care about anyone but my mother. My eczema responded to my longing and showed up red and scaly in every crease of my skin. I scratched. I cried. I had nightmares. Then I scratched and cried some more. Kindergarten was hell.

After a few months, I got over my separation anxiety. But other things started to bother me. For instance, throughout first, second, third and fourth grades I lived in dread of fire drills and emergency evacuation practices, which my school took very seriously.

Without warning, we were periodically blasted out of our rooms by a horrible noise and taught to either huddle in the halls with our arms over our heads as protection or to march single file out of the possibly burning building.

Although the other kids performed the drills in a joyous, snickering, happy-to-be-interrupted-in-school way, I was inconsolable.

Kristin, Keesha or Anna held my hand in an attempt to calm my fears.

“Don’ be ascared, Tara,” said Kristin sweetly. “This can save our lifes.”

“It’s not real!” said Anna.

Keesha shook her head apprehensively.

We were being trained for various disasters the adults believed might befall us, like a war, a fire, a hurricane or a hostage crisis. My worst fears and gloomiest thoughts were being substantiated. The worst could happen while I was at school, separated from my family. I’d be alone. Dying, suffering, suffocating … by myself.

“Tara Sullivan! Don’t cry, honey,” said myriad kind-faced
teachers who, I believed, thought of teaching as a mission, a calling or at least a room to go to where they could be the boss. “Come on, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

I didn’t look up. I didn’t stop crying. Like a terrified animal, I froze in place.

“Tara! Look. No one else is crying. It’s just practice. It’s not real.”

Practice.
I wondered when we would use this ability to crouch on the floor with our hands over our heads. Tomorrow? In fifth grade? In high school? What were they thinking? I kept crying and worrying, worrying and crying.

There were a lot of parent-teacher and parent-counselor meetings about my fears, but no one seemed to feel confident about what to do. Everyone hoped I’d grow out of my “constant fretting,” or “worrywarting,” as my mother called it. As I grew older, though, my fears got worse. And so, unable to rely on any of the adults in my life to save me from my terrors about this world, I turned my attention to God and the next world.

Although my mother was not religious, my father was Irish and very Catholic. They had split the difference by sending me to public school enhanced by weekly catechism lessons starting in first grade. I’m sure neither of them could have guessed how seriously I would take my Catholicism.

From the first class, I worried about original sin, which comes from being born a human after Adam and Eve screwed up in the Garden of Eden. According to my catechism, only baptism could erase original sin. But I reasoned that if that was true, zillions of good but
unbaptized people might not get into heaven. How could that be fair?

I also worried about unbaptized babies who had died. Then I worried about abortions. I wanted to collect all the aborted fetuses in the world and have them baptized to make sure the little souls got into heaven even though their fully formed bodies never made it to earth. By fourth grade, I didn’t care about prochoice or prolife, but I was extremely proafterlife.

I worried about death and heaven and Judgment Day. I worried about shame, wretchedness, paralysis, disease and accidents.

I didn’t like passing by the giant crucifix looming above the altar of our big old dimly lit church. It made me scared and sad. Furthermore, since we’d been taught that Christ died for our sins, I was afraid I had had some hand in his pain. Even if Christ was crucified thousands of years before I was born, I still felt queasy about my role in his terrible suffering.

It was just as hard to look at the statues of the Blessed Virgin and Joseph: I could never meet their gazes. You just can’t crucify a child and then hang out with the parents—even if they are statues.

I hated the confessionals. Three dark little coffin-sized closets nailed together and hooded with dusty velvet curtains standing along each side of the pews. Not very inviting. Not very … forgiving.

Inside the two side cubicles, there was enough room for one person to kneel. In the middle there was enough room for a priest to sit without a lot of discomfort—assuming that he wasn’t claustrophobic. There were tiny screened doors cut into the partitions between the priest and each penitent.

Once I was inside the confessional, dread danced a jig in my nervous system. My entire soul cringed with fear. The darkness and stale air were stifling. I kept my terror in check by listening to the muffled murmurs of somebody else’s sins.

When the priest finally slid open the shoebox-sized door and let me know he was ready for me, I moved my lips closer to the screen.

“B-Bless me, F-Father, for I have sinned …,” I stammered. My heart was pounding and I felt dizzy. I was terrified.

For most Catholics, confession is a way of getting their problems off their chests, a way of apologizing to God through a priest and being forgiven. In my mind, the loop never closed that neatly.

“It’s been a week since my last confession and in that time I … um … I had a nightmare.…,” I croaked.

“As far as I know, child, bad dreams are not a sin,” the priest responded in a near whisper, probably thinking about his own bad dreams.

“But
after
the bad dream, the nightmare, I got out of bed, crept into my parents’ room and silently lay down on the rug next to their bed. I didn’t crawl into their bed because they don’t like me coming in their bed all the time … even if I need to. So anyway, I must have rolled under their bed after I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew my parents were running around the house calling my name. My mother was almost crying and my dad sounded scared too.”

“I see,” he said, trying too hard to sound sympathetic.

“The thing is, when I heard how worried they were, I didn’t come out. I stayed under the bed for a while longer. I
liked
that they were scared. I felt they needed to be punished for not letting me sleep with them when … when I get scared.”

“So you just stayed under the bed listening to their terror?”

“Until I heard them calling the police. Then I came out.

“Hmmm.”

“They were both really, really mad at me.”

“Understandably. Is that all, child?”

“Um. No. Not at all,” I said. I wanted to confess everything.
Everything.
I wanted to make absolutely
certain
that when I walked out of that box and finished my penance, my soul would be radiant and I’d be ready to die and go to heaven. Or at least not be doomed to hell.

“There’s a lot more,” I said. I felt the walls shake as the priest made himself comfortable while muttering something inaudible.

“What’s that, Father?”

“Nothing. Go on, child. I’m still relatively young.”

My confessions always took a lot of time. As a result, the lines outside my box often turned into an angry mob of impatient penitents. Once, the confessor on the other side of the priest passed out from kneeling and waiting so long in the heat. When I heard what had happened, I tried to get back into the box to confess my guilt in the situation, but it was almost impossible. Everyone, grown-ups included, started cutting in line in front of me. And they weren’t even polite about it.

“Sorry, honey, I don’t have all day,” they’d mutter without looking at me. Even my friends started to cut in.

“Sorry, I’ve got to be home before I’m an adult,” said Keesha with a smirk as she stepped in front of me.

Although the priests tried to be patient, they realized that I was more compulsive than penitent in my desire to tell everything. Every sin, every sinful thought. Occasionally they’d even try to end my confession by saying something like “You can sum this up, you know.” But I’d never let them do that to my soul.

“Oh, no, Father!” I’d moan. “I want to tell you
everything.”
I’m sure hearing me say
everything
sent a shiver down the spine of every priest who ever heard my confession.
Everything
meant they’d be in that box for a long, long time. First with me, then with a lot of others.
Everything
had lifelong Catholic priests wishing they were Buddhists.

F
ifth grade started out as the best year of my life. For no reason that I could identify, my nightmares stopped, my worries lessened, my eczema was better and I was even used to the stupid drills at my school. So with all that bad stuff gone, I was suddenly feeling a lot of good things. Like love. I
loved
my family, God, my teacher Mrs. Prack; and my three best friends, Keesha, Kristin and Anna, like never before. It was as if this really good feeling had replaced all my bad ones. I felt great. Open. Present. Alive. I hadn’t felt that good since feeding the peacocks in Michigan with my mother so many years before.

I learned a lot about my friends at that time. We slept at each other’s houses and talked on the phone every night. It was comforting to discover that they had problems they were dealing with too. I guess I’d been assuming I was the only one in the world with problems.

Kristin was blond and lived next door to me. She was weird because she always worried about her weight even though she wasn’t even close to being overweight.
She analyzed the fat grams of everything she put into her mouth.

Keesha was black and full of theatrical attitude. Her parents and grandparents had been part of the civil rights movement and, as she told us frequently: