Somebody Somewhere (26 page)

T
he Millers invited the Mareks to tea (with some prompting and with me on the phone so it appeared to be my offer). I was anxious because it marked the acknowledgment that the Mareks were now personal friends but also because it was the most people I had eaten with (having company while eating, not just eating in the presence of bodies).

Sitting at the Millers's table, I spent forever tracing the tablecloth,
folding its corners, and straightening the tiniest creases. The doorbell rang. I wanted to “disappear.”

The Mareks came into the room. I had only known them in their house and it seemed like a comedy that they were here. I tried not to laugh and yet I wanted to tell them they didn't fit. But I knew not to so I just giggled to myself and thought how they didn't realize how odd it was that they were here.

Theo Marek wanted to take a photo. I hate photos. As much as I try to get one eye to pay attention, the other simply cannot obey me and off it goes, making me look like an idiot, or else I look away.

I felt people captured you with photos. They could keep you there on paper and look into your eyes to see if you were there. You are exposed and frozen in time on the paper. You cannot get away. What is worse is just because you are in a photo doesn't mean you own it. As far as I was concerned, if things had me in them, they belonged not to me but with me.

I never minded that others were captured like this. They were part of “the world,” and I had known that many things that disturbed me didn't worry them for whatever irrational reason there may be. Looking at their photos gave me a kind of power and control—a hit-and-run familiarity without consequences; the kind they seemed to take everyday without apology or second thought.

“Why do you want to take a photo?” I asked Theo Marek. “Because we are close to you,” he replied, as though the concept would make instant sense. The “my world” defensive part of me squirmed as the vines of closeness threatened to invade and wind around me like clammy tentacles. The “the world” part felt as vulnerable as brittle glass. Each wrestled with the other, abandoning me finally to an emotionally exhausted heap of indifference. I agreed to the photo.

On the way down the hall I put my hand up in front of Theo Marek's face, spreading my fingers out like a fan. I laughed quietly to myself at his being safely “behind bars.”

“What does that mean?” he asked. “The Donna Williams zoo,” I said. “Who is in the zoo, though,” he asked, “you or me?”

He was right, it was him I had put in a cage. But I did this so
openly only if I liked someone and was trying to reassure myself it was okay to relate. People can't discuss the walls and bars they cannot see. I had “put him in a cage” so openly because I could trust him.

I was concerned about where everyone would sit at the Millers's dinner table. I didn't want the seats too close and didn't want to be sitting somewhere where I would be looked at. Not a lot of choice. Everyone sat down and people did look at me. I felt like crawling under the table. “Well, what's going to happen to you, is your head going to fall off?” asked Dr. Marek. It made me laugh. No, my head would not fall off, I told myself. I would manage.

And they're off…Off they all fired into blah-blah-blah like horses leaving the starting gate. I tried to stay in tune but couldn't keep up. By the time I found something to say, it was generally to raise some linguistic peculiarity I had picked up in their words rather than a comment on the topic itself. With all the shifts from one speaker to the next and with others choosing the topics, I was a few sentences behind with each topic change.

Carol would have picked her own topic out of the blue and put on a performance to cover for the fact that she was not keeping up. She would have either tried to make them laugh so that she could at least be sure that they were not angry, or just entertained herself. But instead, I took it on faith they were enjoying themselves and just watched them quietly. I did not feel left out and did not feel threatened that my friends would know each other. I looked at them and was glad they were my friends. I felt a kind of security. I smiled to myself as they went on with their blah-blah-blah. A word struck me, and my mind lit up, and my feelings spread a smile wall to wall across my face. The word was “belonging.” I felt a sense of belonging.

I
t was the September holidays and my Australian publisher, Holly Hobbie, had asked me to use the break from my teaching course to fly interstate for my first face-to-face press interview about the book.

The journalist sat opposite Willie, interviewing him about his views on education. This was one of Willie's topics. He had collected clippings and read a lot of books on education and inequality.

Having survived for a year as an independent student in secondary school with no funding to survive on whatsoever, I had now, at the age of twenty-two, been given an award for voluntary work I had done and for academic achievement. The award was a check for $500. Willie could hardly stomach the hypocrisy and save-the-world martyr back-patting.

The interview was outdoors and Willie had already spoken to the journalist over the phone. He gave her three sentences she could quote him on (including one about seeing the check I had received as so hypocritical that he suggested using it most appropriately as toilet paper but had conceded to buy books with it instead). Willie was guarded and evasive. “You are the most evasive person I've ever had to interview,” said the journalist.

Willie thought he'd done brilliantly. He'd given her an earful of his armchair politics. The journalist got up from her chair and, without asking or giving warning, snapped a photo.

My father had seen it. “I could tell you were just about to ‘fly' her,” he said, recalling Willie's previolence expression.

This new journalist was here to talk to
me
about me. There were no characters to hide behind, no big speeches on well-rehearsed hoo-ha topics of social inequality or funding for the homeless or education policies that gave some of the disadvantaged little choice but to be factory fodder.

This journalist was here to discuss the very images I had hidden behind all my life, the strategies I had used to appear as close to “normal” as one could achieve when one is actually not. This man was here to speak to me about the very threads and structure of “my world” and expose them for my own country to scrutinize (and the occasional person with heavy ego baggage to try to cash in on).

Stopping at another strange city on the way, I was about eight hundred miles away from the city where my next interview would be held. I walked around the city square waiting for my flight. I asked directions to the bus that would take me to the airport.

The woman I spoke to was old, cheerful, and a little too chatty, even if I did like her voice and its worn-away edges. “You're not from here,” she said. “You have to go to the art gallery before you leave.”

“I don't know how to get to there,” I said. She walked with me to the bus that was leaving for the art gallery. My plane was due for boarding in half an hour.

Sitting cheerily on the bus, I felt good with the sun coming through the window and warming my face. I had brought only a thin cardigan with me for this trip across two states and it was windy. I didn't mind so much. Even when physical sensation was present I was generally unable to tell cold from hunger or fear or needing to go to the toilet anyway. Generally they all felt the same, so I ignored the lot.

I realized I didn't know what bus stop to get off for the gallery. I had never been here so I didn't know what I was looking for. I saw some bright-colored flowers out of my window. “Is this a garden?” I asked the stranger behind me. “Yes,” she said, “it's a garden show.” “Is it far here from the gallery?” I asked. “Where do you want to go?” she asked me. “Well,” I explained, “I am going to the gallery and then catching a plane interstate.” “What time is your plane?” asked the woman. “I have fifteen minutes till check-in time,” I said, casually glancing at my watch and telling her the precise time I was expected to board the plane.

This woman looked like her pants had caught fire. “Look,” she said hurriedly, her voice climbing higher and higher as I tried hard to listen to the meaning of her words amid the chaos of her squealing intonation. “Get off this bus right now and catch a taxi straightaway.” She jumped to her feet, pulled the cord. “Let her off,” she ordered the driver. Then she pointed out the nearest possible telephone and told me where I was. I jumped off the bus and ran.

I knew I was in trouble. I ran to the phone as fast as I could. I looked for the number of the taxi and finally found it but then found I had no change. I managed to get some. The taxi arrived within minutes. He seemed not too confident that I would get to the airport in time for boarding.

I arrived at the airport fifteen minutes before take-off. The other
passengers had checked in, boarded, and were sitting on the plane. Holly Hobbie had neatly written out the check-in, boarding, and take-off times for me and was waiting patiently and confidently eight hundred miles away.

Then the plane was canceled due to mechanical failure. I couldn't believe it. It seemed everything was falling to pieces. I made a long-distance call and told Holly Hobbie I would be late.

I went to the toilet, splashed myself with water, and put my hair up, trying to cool down as I burned up with anxiety and frustration. It was too late. I was over the top. I took my bag with me and sat in the toilet cubicle silent-screaming in the Big Black Nothingness.

I came out of the toilets in time to be put on another plane. Holly Hobbie and her bright red hair were waiting at the arrival gate. She was a piece of familiarity amid the chaos. She was meaning after the void.

I had already spoken by phone and in writing to the journalist I was about to see. I felt reasonably understood and felt he was a “safe person.” I let this person see me without my armor and weaponry. I tried to help him make himself comprehensible and tried to stay connected to my words as I spoke them, even though I read them from a script. (I insisted that journalists give me their questions before the interview so I could take time to understand them and write out my answers.)

I didn't want to be deaf to my words this time. This was too important. This wasn't a defensive mind-games session of someone trying to work out who Donna was. This was Donna explaining who Donna was. This was not some voyeuristic exercise on the part of the interviewer. There was a reason why understanding how I
experienced
things might be useful. The interviewer was not interested in getting me on a stage and keeping me performing, or in winding me up to see how well I could fire on an intellectual topic. He was here to discuss who I was and how I worked.

There was none of the tight-lipped, legs-crossed, let's-play-psychiatrist stance Willie did so well. There was no impression of my mother (which even scared me), or the I'm-so-rugged toughie image
Willie had taken on from boys in secondary school. There was no mimicking of endless American sitcoms and “finding families” imagery played so well by Carol. Nor was there any of her larger-than-life, life-of-the-party, cartoon image stage performance modeled on her teenage friends. This man was not here to be entertained by two-bit images and neither was I.

It never occurred to me to question whether I wanted to be interviewed or that I should have understood and weighed the implications of becoming known. I merely accepted that I was to be interviewed, and set about trying to make the best of it.

I traced the pattern of the curtains too many times. I tried to sit down but got too restless and anxious to stay there. I found it too sensorially overwhelming, as my emotions, now without the numbing defense of putting on characters, climbed sky-high and my sensitivity to brightness and pitch climbed with it. I wasn't as impressive as I might have been as the characters. But I was trying to listen. I was trying to understand. I was trying to be there with my feelings intact and to remain aware of what I was saying instead of turning on the verbal tap and hoping it was sense and not verbal diarrhea that was flowing out.