The Discomfort Zone (7 page)

“Earl, I didn't touch it!”

“You did! Again!”

“I didn't think I even moved it, I just
looked
at it, I didn't mean to change it.”

“Again! You monkeyed with it again! I had it set where I wanted it. And you moved it down to seventy!”

“Well, if I did somehow change it, I'm sure I didn't mean to. You'd be hot, too, if you worked all day in the kitchen.”

“All I ask at the end of a long day at work is that the temperature be set in the Comfort Zone.”

“Earl, it is so hot in the kitchen. You don't know, because you're never
in
here, but it is
so
hot.”

“The
low end
of the Comfort Zone! Not even the middle! The low end! It is not too much to ask!”

And I wonder why “cartoonish” remains such a pejorative. It took me half my life to achieve seeing my parents as cartoons. And to become more perfectly a cartoon myself: what a victory that would be.

My father eventually applied technology to the problem of temperature. He bought a space heater to put behind his chair in the dining room, where he was bothered in winter by drafts from the bay window behind him. Like so many of his appliance purchases, the heater was a pathetically cheap little thing, a wattage hog with a stertorous fan and a grinning orange mouth which dimmed the lights and drowned out conversation and produced a burning smell every time it cycled on. When I was in high school, he bought a quieter, more expensive model. One evening my mother and I started reminiscing about the old model, caricaturing my father's temperature sensitivities, doing cartoons of the little heater's faults, the smoke and the buzzing, and my father got mad and left the table. He thought we were ganging up on him. He thought I was being cruel, and I was, but I was also forgiving him.

WE MET ON
Sundays at five-thirty. We chose partners and blindfolded them and led them down empty corridors at break-neck speeds, as an experiment in trust. We made collages about protecting the environment. We did skits about navigating the emotional crises of seventh and eighth grade. We sang along while advisors played songs by Cat Stevens. We wrote haikus on the theme of friendship and read them aloud:

My own contribution to this exercise—

—referred to certain realities at my junior high, not in the group. People in the group, even the people I didn't consider
friends, weren't allowed to laugh at you that way. This was one reason I'd joined in the first place.

The group was called Fellowship—no definite article, no modifier—and it was sponsored by the First Congregational Church, with some help from the Evangelical United Church of Christ down the street. Most of the kids in seventh- and eighth-grade Fellowship had come up together through Sunday school at First Congregational and knew each other in almost cousinlike ways. We'd seen each other in miniature sport coats and clip-on ties or in plaid jumpers with velveteen bows, and we'd spent long minutes sitting in pews and staring at each other's defenseless parents while they worshipped, and one morning in the church basement, during a spirited singing of “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” we'd all watched a little girl in white tights wet herself dramatically. Having been through these experiences together, we'd moved on into Fellowship with minimal social trauma.

The trouble began in ninth grade. Ninth-graders had their own separate Fellowship group, as if in recognition of the particular toxicity of ninth-grade adolescence, and the first few ninth-grade meetings, in September 1973, attracted rafts of newcomers who looked cooler and tougher and more experienced than most of us Congregational kids. There were girls with mouth-watering names like Julie Wolfrum and Brenda Pahmeier. There were guys with incipient beards and foot-long hair. There was a statuesque blond girl who incessantly practiced the guitar part to “The Needle and the Damage Done.” All these kids raised their hands when our advisors asked who was planning to participate in the group's first weekend country retreat, in October.

I raised my hand, too. I was a Fellowship veteran and I liked retreats. But I was small and squeaky and a lot more articulate than I was mature, and from this stressful vantage the upcoming retreat looked less like a Fellowship event than like the kind of party I was ordinarily not invited to.

Luckily, my parents were out of the country. They were in the middle of their second trip to Europe, letting themselves
be entertained by their Austrian business friends, at Austrian expense. I was spending the last three weeks of October as the ward of various neighbors, and it fell to one of them, Celeste Schwilck, to drive me down to First Congregational late on a Friday afternoon. In the passenger seat of the Schwilcks' burgundy Oldsmobile, I opened a letter that my mother had sent to me from London. The letter began with the word “Dearest,” which my mother never seemed to realize was a more invasive and less endearing word than “Dear.” Even if I'd been inclined to miss her, which I wasn't, the “Dearest” would have reminded me why I shouldn't. I put the letter, unread, into a paper bag with the dinner that Mrs. Schwilck had made me.

I was wearing my jeans and desert boots and wind-breaker, my antianxiety ensemble. In the church parking lot, thirty-five kids in denim were throwing Frisbees and tuning guitars, smoking cigarettes, swapping desserts, and jockeying for rides in cars driven by the more glamorous young advisors. We were going to Shannondale, a camp in the Ozarks three hours south of St. Louis. For a ride this long, it was imperative to avoid the car of Social Death, which was typically filled with girls in shapeless slacks and boys whose sense of humor was substandard. I had nothing against these kids except a desperate fear of being taken for one of them. I dropped my bags on a pile of luggage and ran to secure a place in a safe car with a mustached seminarian and some smart, quiet Congregationalists who liked to play Ghost.

It was the season in Missouri when dusk crept up on you. Returning for my bags, I couldn't find my dinner. Car doors were slamming, engines starting. I ran around canvassing the people who hadn't left yet. Had anybody seen my paper bag? Five minutes into the retreat, I was already losing my cool. And this wasn't even the worst of it, because it was possible that, even now, in one of the glamorous cars,
somebody was reading my mother's letter
. I felt like an Air Force officer who'd let a nuclear warhead go missing.

I ran back to my chosen car and reported, with ornate self-disgust, that I'd lost my dinner. But the mustached sem
inarian almost welcomed my loss. He said that each person in the car could give me a small piece of dinner, and nobody would be hungry, and everybody would be fed. In the gathering dark, as we drove south out of the city, girls kept handing me food. I could feel their fingers as I took it.

On my only Boy Scout weekend, two years earlier, the leaders of the Bison Patrol had left us Tenderfeet to pitch our tents in steady rain. The leaders hung out with their friends in better-organized patrols who had brought along steaks and sodas and paraffin fire starters and great quantities of dry, seasoned firewood. When we young Bisons stopped by to warm ourselves, our leaders ordered us back to our sodden campsite. Late in the evening, the Scoutmaster consoled us with Silly Sally jokes that the older Scouts didn't want to listen to anymore. (“One time when Silly Sally was in the woods, an old man said to her, ‘Silly Sally, I want you to take off all your clothes!' and Silly Sally said, ‘Why, that's silly, because I'm sure they won't fit you!'”) I came home from the weekend wet, hungry, tired, dirty, and furious. My father, hating all things military, was happy to excuse me from the Scouts, but he insisted that I participate in some activity, and my mother suggested Fellowship.

At Fellowship camps there were girls in halter tops and cutoffs. Each June, the seventh-and-eighth-grade group went down to Shannondale for five days and did maintenance for the church there, using scythes and paint rollers. The camp was near the Current River, a spring-fed, gravel-bottomed stream on which we took a float trip every year. My first summer, after the social discouragements of seventh grade, I wanted to toughen up my image and make myself more stupid, and I was trying to do this by continually exclaiming, “Son of a
bitch
!” Floating on the Current, I marveled at every green vista: “Son of a
bitch
!” This irritated my canoe mate, who, with each repetition, responded no less mechanically, “Yes, you certainly are one.”

Our canoe was a thigh-fryer, an aluminum reflector oven. The day after the float trip, I was redder than the red-haired seventh-grader Bean but not quite as red as the most popular
eighth-grade boy, Peppel, onto whose atrociously sunburned back Bean spilled an entire bowl of chicken-noodle soup that had just come off the boil. It was Bean's fate to make mistakes like this. He had a squawky voice and slide-rule sensibilities and an all-around rough time in Fellowship, where the prevailing ethic of honesty and personal growth licensed kids like Peppel to shout, “Jesus Christ! You're not just clumsy physically, you're clumsy with other people's feelings! You've got to learn how to watch out for other people!”

Bean, who was also in Boy Scouts, quit Fellowship soon after this, leaving me and my own clumsiness to become inviting targets for other people's honesty. In Shannondale the next summer, I was playing cards with the seventh-grader MacDonald, a feline-mannered girl whose granny glasses and Carole King frizz both attracted me and made me nervous, and in a moment of Beanish inspiration I decided it would be a funny joke to steal a look at MacDonald's cards while she was in the bathroom. But MacDonald failed to see the humor. Her skin was so clear that every emotion she experienced, no matter how mild, registered as some variety of blush. She began to call me “Cheater” even as I insisted, with a guilty smirk, that I hadn't seen her cards. She called me “Cheater” for the remainder of the trip. Leaving Shannondale, we all wrote farewell notes to each other, and MacDonald's note to me began
Dear Cheater
and concluded
I hope someday you'll learn there's more to life than cheating
.

Four months later, I certainly hadn't learned this lesson. The well-being I felt in returning to Shannondale as a ninth-grader, in wearing jeans and racing through the woods at night, was acquired mainly by fraud. I had to pretend to be a kid who naturally said “shit” a lot, a kid who hadn't written a book-length report on plant physiology, a kid who didn't enjoy calculating absolute stellar magnitudes on his new six-function Texas Instruments calculator, or else I might find myself exposed the way I'd been exposed not long ago in English class, where an athlete had accused me of preferring
the dictionary to any other book, and my old friend Manley, whom I'd turned to for refutation of this devastating slander, had smiled at me and quietly confirmed, “He's right, Jon.” Storming into the Shannondale boys' barn, identifying luggage from the Social Death car and claiming a bunk as far as I could get from it, I relied on the fact that my Fellowship friends went to different junior high schools and didn't know that I was Social Death myself.

Outside, I could hear tight cliques in desert boots crunching along on the Ozark flint gravel. Up by the Shannondale community center, in a cluster of Fellowship girls with wavy album-art hair and personalities that were sweet the way bruises on a peach are sweet, two unfamiliar tough guys in army jackets were calling and responding in high, femmy voices. One guy had lank hair and sufficient hormones for a downy Fu Manchu. He called out, “Dearest Jonathan!” The other guy, who was so fair he seemed not to have eyebrows or eyelashes, responded, “Oh, dearest Jonathan!”

“Heh heh heh. Dearest Jonathan.”

“Dearest Jonathan!”

I turned on my heel and ran back into the woods, veered off into tree litter, and cowered in the dark. The retreat was now officially a disaster. It was some consolation, however, that people in Fellowship called me Jon, never Jonathan. As far as the tough guys knew, Dearest Jonathan might be anybody. Dearest Jonathan might still be up in Webster Groves, looking for his paper bag. If I could somehow avoid the two thieves all weekend, they might never figure out whose dinner they'd eaten.

The thieves made my task a little easier, as the group assembled in the community center, by sticking together and sitting down outside the Fellowship circle. I entered the room late, with my head low, and crowded into the antipodal portion of the circle, where I had friends.

“If you want to be part of this group,” the youth minister, Bob Mutton, told the thieves, “join the circle.”

Mutton was unafraid of tough guys. He wore an army
jacket and talked like a pissed-off tough guy himself. You made yourself look childish, not cool, if you defied him. Mutton oversaw the entire Fellowship operation, with its 250 kids and several dozen advisors, and he looked rather scarily like Jesus—not the Renaissance Jesus, with the long Hellenic nose, but the more tormented Jesus of the northern Gothic. Mutton's eyes were blue and set close together below mournfully knitted eyebrows. He had coarse tangles of chestnut hair that hung over his collar and fell across his forehead in a canted mass; his goatee was a thick reddish bush into which he liked to insert Hauptmann's cigars. When he wasn't smoking or chewing on a Hauptmann's, he held a rolled-up magazine or a fireplace tool or a stick or a pointer and slapped his opposite palm with it. Talking to him, you could never be sure if he was going to laugh and nod and agree with you, or whether he was going to nail you with his favorite judgment: “That is…
such bullshit
.”

Since every word out of my mouth was arguably bullshit, I was trying to steer clear of Mutton. Fellowship was a class I was never going to be the best student in; I was content to pull down B's and C's in honesty and openness. For the night's first exercise, in which each of us divulged how we hoped to grow on this retreat, I offered the bland goal of “developing new relationships.” (My actual goal was to avoid certain new relationships.) Then the group split into a series of dyads and small groups for sensitivity training. The advisors tried to shuffle us, to break down cliques and force new interactions, but I was practiced at picking out and quickly nabbing partners who were neither Deathly nor good friends, and I brought my techniques to bear on the task of avoiding the thieves. I sat facing a schoolteacher's kid, a nice boy with an unfortunate penchant for talking about Gandalf, and closed my eyes and felt his face with my fingertips and let him feel mine. We formed five-person groups and inter-locked our bodies to create machines. We regrouped as a plenum and lay down in a zigzagging circle, our heads on our neighbors' bellies, and laughed collectively.

I was relieved to see the thieves participating in these ex
ercises. Once you let a stranger palpate your face, even if you did it with a smirk or a sneer, you became implicated in the group and were less likely to ridicule it on Monday. I had an inkling, too, that the exercises cost the thieves more than they cost me: that people who stole sack dinners were in a far unhappier place than I was. Although they were obviously my enemies, I envied them their long hair and their rebellious clothes, which I wasn't allowed to have, and I half admired the purity of their adolescent anger, which contrasted with my own muddle of self-consciousness and silliness and posturing. Part of why kids like this scared me was that they seemed authentic.