Kissing Doorknobs (5 page)

“Why?” I begged.

“I don’t know why. I just can’t. Maybe I’m scared.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re making fun of me, and that isn’t very nice!”

“Prove it,” she said with a sickeningly sweet smile.

“Dammit!” I swore out loud for the first time. And I was going to have to go to confession for swearing
and she knew it.

“Don’t go cussing at me. It’s not my fault you’d rather count cracks than talk with me.”

I had an impure thought.
Keesha is an asshole.
And then I had another one for no reason that I could think of.
Sister Margaret is an asshole.
And then I had an unthinkable impure thought:
God is an
… I instantly broke out in a cold sweat.

“Tara?” I heard Keesha’s voice, but it seemed far away.

I was freaked out. Where did such terrible ideas come from? Did they come from God? Was God sending me terrible thoughts about Him? In tears I turned on my heels, away from our catechism class, and ran toward the church. I had a lot to confess.

T
o compensate for my new and frustrating sinful thoughts, I studied my catechism with a God-fearing piousness and memorized details about the fabulously self-mutilating saints. I scratched my eczema and waited for my calling to the convent from God. It never came. The only voice I heard in my head was my own, and it usually said:
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

Spiritually frustrated but energetic, I decided to save as many souls as I could in my own small way. From that moment on, anytime anyone swore or took the Lord’s name in vain, I said a prayer for their soul and punctuated my plea with the sign of the cross.

My family found my new quirk very irritating. Actually, my father tolerated it as another in my series of what he referred to as stages. My mother wasn’t so philosophical. And after a few months of it, she was pretty hostile whenever she saw me do it.

Like the time she kicked the car door shut because she had groceries in both arms and got her skirt stuck in the door. “Son of a bitch already!” she said in frustration. I instantly came to her aid.

“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name …”

“Cut it out!” she warned in a very sharp voice. And then she said, “Dammit.”

“Don’t say ’it,’” my sister, Greta, said hopefully, trying to deflect what she knew was coming.

“Okay,” my mother said emphatically. “Damn!”

I said another prayer. This time it was silent. But she saw me make the sign of the cross.

“I’m warning you,” she said, with murderous eyes.

I nodded, but I knew I would pray for her soul the first chance I got, which was right away.

Unpacking the groceries and already agitated, my mother caught me murmuring a Hail Mary.

“Cut it out, Tara.
Please”
she begged.

But I couldn’t. “…
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb …
” I made the sign of the cross.

She swatted a dishtowel toward my face.
“Cut it out, I said!”

I cut it out. Not because she asked me to but because I was finished. Satisfied, I began putting away the canned goods. Then I noticed that my mother had seated herself at the table, in the midst of a lot of groceries, and was doing nothing. I stopped and looked at her.

“If I see you doing that one more time,” she said without looking at me, “I’m going to punish you … severely …
Goddammit!”

By the time she said “God,” I was halfway through the sign of the cross and muttering an Our Father.

My mother was swearing like a marine and washing down aspirin with warm beer that we had just bought for a barbecue.

One day she pushed me up against the wall and pinned my hands at my sides. Her face, inches from mine, was a mask of terror, anger and hate. “Do you do this at school? Do you? Do the kids make fun of you? They do, don’t they? They’d have to.”

I closed my eyes and mumbled a prayer for my poor mother’s anguish. When she saw my lips moving, she put her head on my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t stop this.” At that moment, my father happened to walk into the room and pulled her off me. Her face was red and she was fighting tears as she fell into his arms.

“You’re grounded!” she screamed at me. “Now get the hell out of here.”

Did she have to say “hell”?

I crept off to my bedroom, threw myself on my bed and prayed for her. Then I repeated the prayers again and again as I listened to my parents fighting about me.

“She’s nuts!” my mother screamed. “And all that catechism is what’s doing it to her.”

“I don’t know,” said my father. “You’re not Catholic, and I couldn’t vouch for your sanity right now.”

As I finished a last prayer, my little sister came into my room. She had been standing in the doorway waiting for me to finish praying. She crawled into my bed next to me and looked into my eyes in this eerie, unblinking way of hers that made me think she saw into my soul, into my heart, into my pain.

“Am I nuts?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she answered without blinking. I felt chilled. Even
she
thought I might be nuts. I briefly wondered if it was my mother’s fault. If I acted like this because she had smoked marijuana before I was born.
After the chill of that fear passed, I realized how ridiculous the thought was, and for some reason, unlike so many other ridiculous fears, I was able to dismiss it.

“I’m grounded again,” I said.

She shrugged.

I continued. “She’ll never stick to it, though. She thinks I’m home too much as it is. Yesterday she told me if I watched any more television I’d grow a satellite dish out of my forehead.”

My sister burst out laughing. I loved it when she laughed. I loved her. A silent, messy little child, she lived in her head as much as I did in mine, except she seemed not to care. My mother’s voice came through the walls like a wail.

“Do you think it’s our fault?”

“I don’t know,” my dad answered.

“I could take the nightmares, the weird behavior and the fears … but I can’t take this praying shit! I really can’t … I can’t …” My mother’s voice trailed off into sobs.

“So, you can’t control yourself either?” It was a direct challenge.

“I’m afraid of what it’ll do to her. I’m afraid she’ll start seeing herself as … a nut.”

“If
you
keep calling her one, I don’t see how she can escape that feeling,” he answered.

My mother started sobbing. My father’s tone changed. “It’s a stage,” he said. “She’ll get over it.”

“Will she?” she asked hopefully.

After a long silence, my father spoke. I could barely hear him. “Do
you
think it’s our fault?” he whispered. His anguished voice sent shock waves through the house. Something fell. There were footsteps. A door
slammed. And then it was quiet. Too quiet. I felt sick. I shut my eyes and prayed. My sister hugged my arm. Suddenly pain ripped through my abdomen. I pulled my legs up and lay in the fetal position. I was afraid of the pain and afraid of acknowledging the pain.

“What?” my sister asked.

“My stomach hurts,” I said.

“Maybe it’s just your nerves again,” she said.

I didn’t know. I was afraid. “I’m afraid they’ll get divorced because of me,” I croaked.

“Nah,” she said quietly. “As long as they’ve got you to think about, they don’t have to think about other stuff.”

Something crashed to the floor in my parents’ room.

I started to pray.

“Want me to beat ’em both up for you?” Greta asked. We both cracked up laughing. Then I finished my prayers, which included a prayer for Greta. I hadn’t walked to or from school with her either, and she never complained. Maybe she didn’t want to walk with me. I thanked God.

A few days later, my parents sent me to the family internist, who poked me everywhere. I had enemas, X rays and more poking. Baffled, the doctor sent me to a specialist. The specialist couldn’t find anything wrong with me either. He suggested I see a shrink. Odd when you think about it. I’d been counting cracks for almost a year, but it was the praying that I couldn’t conceal and that couldn’t be tolerated.

The psychiatric evaluation was painless. I didn’t even know the guy was a psychiatrist. I thought he was a
guidance counselor with a bad wig and long fingernails. His office was neat and I liked that. But his nose was crooked and I didn’t like that. It was also too long, so I suspected that he was like Pinocchio and told lies.

“What are you thinking, Tara?”

“I’m … I’m thinking about … Pinocchio.”

“Do you like marionettes?”

“No.”

“Do you feel like someone is pulling your strings?”

I had to think about that one, but I didn’t really have an answer. Some
one? Like God or the Devil?
“I don’t think so.”

“What do
you
feel like talking about, Tara? Right now.”

“I feel like …” I concentrated on his nose. “I feel like lying about something. Right now.”

In addition to that Pinocchio conversation, we played games, looked at pictures and talked about my family, my fears, the fire drills and the troll dolls. He asked me to finish the sentence “People think I’m …”

I told him I really didn’t know for sure what other people thought.

“Okay,” he said. “What do you think you are?”

“Hmmm … odd, I guess.”

“Odd? That’s it?” he asked while trying to wiggle a piece of dirt out from under his fingernail with a paper clip.

“Isn’t odd enough for you?” I asked.

He thought about it. “Yes,” he finally admitted. “One more question. Please finish the following sentence. ‘I am scared of …’”

“Being,”
I answered. The dirt wedge flew from under
his fingernail and landed somewhere in the carpet. It made me kind of sick.

The meeting with the shrink ended, and aside from the revolting black fingernail trajectory, it hadn’t been all that unpleasant.

Diagnosis: Insecurities and self-esteem problems.

Because my mother and father were ambivalent about the experience and fearful of being found insufficient as parents, it was the first and last time I ever saw that doctor, though I thought about his fingernail
schmutz
for a long time.

I
knew if I tried to control the praying by making a huge effort to pray
inside
my head most of the time, my parents would continue to try to act as if I was normal, and the memory of the shrink’s diagnosis would fade. During the summer between fifth and sixth grade, my life seemed to return to almost normal. I still counted and prayed and worried about stuff, but I also went to summer school at the museum, hung out with Keesha, Anna and Kristin and enjoyed sleepovers, movies and a lot of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.

I never
went
anywhere with my friends, though. I always met them at our destination so that I was free to count as much or as little as I needed.

In the fall, when I started sixth grade, I left home very early so that I could avoid people I knew while counting the cracks. After school, however, it was nearly impossible not to be noticed. Even though my friends had become tolerant of my counting, my worries and my fears, I was constantly at risk for ridicule.

Not long after school started, a new girl in my class stepped into my path on the way home and began to make fun of me because of the way I walked with my
head down counting the cracks. I say “began” because before she could enjoy her own performance, my sister appeared from out of nowhere, punched her in the face, knocked her down and sat on her stomach. “You still interested in how she walks? You? Who can’t even get up? Come on. Say something … say anything about her ever again
… I want to kill you.
I really do.” Two years younger and thirty years tougher, with a lot of unused hostility, my sister might not have had much to say, but when she talked to people they generally listened. Afterward, when the principal called her into his office and told her she would be suspended, she replied sweetly, “Cool,” and felt she had been rewarded for her loyalty.

My parents didn’t see her suspension as a reward, but they didn’t punish her for it.

The second, and more life-altering, incident was with Paulo, the bad boy at my school who followed me down the street with some of his friends. I knew they had been behind me for blocks but I just kept my head down and kept counting.

“Say, Jordan … Michael Jordan, whatcha countin’, Jordan? I know it’s not baskets.”

“Leave me alone!” I blurted out. I was instantly furious with myself for the interruption from my counting but I didn’t lose count and I didn’t go back.

“I heard you’ve got …
urges,”
he said, so menacingly that my blood turned to ice. I was mute. I lost count. I stopped walking. He pushed me into the mouth of an alley and I fell against a garage door. “I’ve got urges too,” he said. A couple of his friends stood behind him and laughed.

I didn’t try to defend myself. Instead of screaming or
running, I just stood there, terrified. Paulo put an arm around my neck and grabbed at my crotch while the other boys watched. I twisted my body out of his grasp and fell to the ground.