Because I don’t want my parents to hear me. Because of gulping and of trembling and of my fingernails gnawed down to nubbins. Because I have to write down everything I will say before I say it in a notebook bound with dental floss, I take the telephone into the garage. Frostbite is no excuse. After I scuffle around a bit, experimenting with self-hypnosis and visualization, the harsh reality of life is illustrated by the fingers of my right hand, flat-out refusing to turn blue. It is the coldest day on November record but all limbs are accounted for; left hand gloved against the chill, right one still quite capable of plugging in the digits: 9-8-9-7-4-3-3.
In my notebook, I have written, Hello. This is Elizabeth Williams. I’m calling because I need to pick up some photos that I dropped off yesterday. Do you know when they might be ready? Thank you. (And then, further down the page): Breathe…Breathe… It doesn't matter.
Obviously, cold isn't the problem and cave crickets aren't, either. From time to time, I shift them in my mind, transferring rational, suburban fears for the Old Fears, pretending that I am normal. But the old ones have roots too deep to deny: crowds, loud noises…telephone calls. Assorted fears, wrapped each in its own, shiny paper, and complete with the universal cruelty that you never know exactly what you're going to get until you bite into it. My palm sweats into the receiver. I move it to the other hand and wipe my fingers on my pants. What if my hand were to slip and I pressed the wrong buttons? What if I ended up having to make conversation with…with someone important?
I am not shy. There is a distinct difference between shyness and insecurity, and the interchanging of the two nouns is inexcusable. Shy is wearing bangs and standing with your toes pointed inward. Depending on the situation, shy is okay. Like a quiet room with silent walls or something that doesn't laugh or cry but just lies pleasantly in your arms, shyness can be endearing. Eighth grade teachers would like to make it a rule.
Insecurity, on the other hand, is a sharp-toothed feeling, more familiar than hunger, that gnaws on our stomachs at inconvenient times. Insecurity is trembling at the thought of school. Quaking at the idea of coming face to face with your mom’s old employer at the grocery store and of calling the Graphics Photo Shop. I cannot define myself as merely “shy” because it seems too (as Grandma would call it) “pink.” “Pink” as in soft, as in sweet, as in little girl with big eyes and lopsided smile. Insecurity is more hard-edged. It is also not endearing to anyone. Ever.
“Hello” I whisper to myself. “Hello,” I say again, just testing. “This is Elizabeth Williams.” Testing to make sure that my voice box is settled correctly in my throat, I stitch together, with the threads of past encounters, an image of the person who will answer my call: “Graphics Photo! Can I help you?” he says. The voice is infuriatingly energetic, stressed and unstressed like a haiku. He has blond hair, lives in a house by the sea, fries fish each morning in a pit outside his garden and owns three pairs of L.L. Bean galoshes. Upon putting down the phone, he will turn to his colleague and say, “What an idiot. The girl who just called couldn’t even string a sentence together! Poor thing!” And the woman will laugh. And she will have red nails. These nails that weave windsocks for the county fair, that clutch her handbag as she flings her head back, shrieking laughter.
Reaching for the number “9,” I punch quickly. But then there is “8” and “9” and suddenly my finger won’t move. Stuck. Jammed gears. Breathe, Elizabeth…
I’ll do it in a moment.
In a moment when I’m stronger.
I just can’t do it yet.
Is it a medical condition, I wonder? Does telephoneaphobia exist? There is no doubt in my mind that the ADD-, AADD-, ABCD-hysterical pharmaceutical dynasty has a diagnosis for such a thing and the proper, high-dosage, life-time medication to cure it.
“But you don’t really need all those pills,” says Great-Aunt Bee.
“No. I don’t want to go numb,” I say softly.
Eyebrows raised, she asks, “But won’t numbness ease the pain, my darling?”
“But I’m happy.”
“Happy?”
I nod. “I don’t really know why I’m content.” Wiping sweaty hands on my jeans, drawing my eye to the place where the maple tree meets the lawn, finding clarity for once. “I just am.”
I used to think my optimism was a product of simple-mindedness. Tra la la la, daffodils and daisies…and aren’t most of the geniuses in this world clinically suicidal? This would also explain my forgetfulness, my uncanny ability to render useless in moments a broad array of electronic equipment and, of course, my reluctance to speak. But after a while I came to a new conclusion: Simple contentment despite instability can be attributed to one, simple thing—I am an artist.
“Artist” is quite a word, isn’t it? Not a quite amazing word. Not a quite confusing word. Just quite. A little abstract maybe, and almost arrogant. Artist (aar-tist) n. Someone who draws or plays music or writes or works in another creative field. I can use that title in a down-to-earth way because I am an oil painter by profession, but it is so much broader than that. Art enabled me to survive public school. Back Creek Elementary where I was so quiet (and pale) that my classmates thought I was Norwegian; middle school, sitting in the back of the classroom, fingers intertwined, blushing when called on, clinging to one, non-intimidating friend who was willing to speak for both of us when speaking was mandatory. And, of course, Pine Forest High, where all amount of unmentionable horrors squirmed down the back of my sweater. Art was my hiding place. It allowed me to create (if, at first, with trembling fingers) My World.
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The best thing about creating your own world is that it almost always is a dictatorship. In this place, I am an empress. In my school days, I lived as a pirate princess, folded small between the lines of a poem. Books as my portal, I would sometimes get so wound up in fantasy that I’d forget who I was for entire days, pacing the back yard, discussing politics with imaginary poets, directing legions of pharaohs from one side of the lawn to the other. At a bazaar I visited on diplomatic visit, I bought a mirror from a one-eyed Madagascan. When I looked into it, the stringy girl with a too-big nose and a too-flat chest fell away (with just enough similar features to assure me that it wasn’t a painting) to reveal a dark-eyed goddess, a blue sun-spot marking my third eye. I was Mashadike, tragic slave of Famina. I was Allison Saint Beth, Flora, and Foily, the swimming champion from Maine whose parents were abroad working for the CIA and who, at a tender age, raised herself in the Mongolian district of New York, working as an aardvark trainer.
“But what do you want?” my sister asked me when I dropped out of college. Snow falls. January goes belly up and leaves its inheritance to February. I have hardly ventured from the house for three months and the distinct feeling is growing on me that it’s time to stop pretending to live and to actually do it. “What do you want out of life?”
I take a deep breath and screw my eyes up tight.
Meghan swings herself onto the chair. She squints across at me with the sort of seriousness only a 17-year-old can pull off, and says again, “What do you want out of your life?”
“Everything,” I say.
She raises an eyebrow. “Everything?”
Sun moves in through the bedroom curtain, clutching at the desks, the floor, the scattered clothes. The fan whirs. Steadily. Methodically.
“I want sand I guess,” I say finally, falling back onto my bed. “Lots of it.”
“Sand?”
“Yes. I…I want to walk out into it and smell the salt on the banks of the Nile. I want to rest against a pyramid and feel the Sun God around me as the dunes shift and to go to a party where I can wear velvet and my hair in a long, thin braid, like the ones Mary used to wear. You remember? I want to dance. I want to stir ruby wine in crystal glasses and to linger in the brightest spaces of the darkest room. And…and then I want someone strong to sweep me around the dance floor. I want him to let me fall low, almost to the ground and when the music rises, to press me close. I want to gasp when this happens. I want to giggle, too. I want to laugh wild and rich and to fling a scarf across my shoulder when I leave. I want to feel moonlight on my bare arms in Alabama. I want to feel Spanish moss on my collarbone. I want to walk those streets all alone on a sultry night when the cicadas are screaming opposition to a U2 rendition of dancing queen. I want to see a shipyard, to sleep in a cabin where breadcrumbs get stale on wood-slab tables.
“I want to sing in spicy places. To feel dry dust catch in my eyelashes as I string up netting against a lemonade sun. An apricot sun. A butterscotch candy sun. And I want to whisper Hindi and dip my fingers into baskets of lentils, running, headlong, down a cobbled street to a store that sells lutes and only lutes and has a photograph of a singing baboon over the cash register.
“I want to scream dirty words.
“I want to scream everything.
“I want to see the clouds, their hands, wrapping around the mountains while the rain tiptoes across the sky. I want cave slime to get under my fingernails. I want to sleep in a swamp for twelve days with the promise of candlelight and tapestries and a hot meal. I want to be a tribal woman, scraping odd things off of animal skins as a hurricane blows across my neck. I want to die in my lover’s arms. And I want to be beautiful.
“I am only nineteen. So I have time. I am an artist. So I can do all these things.”
Perhaps I really am insane. I wonder if I’ll be put away some day, wrapped in a soft robe, wheeled on a lawn as green as garden snakes? It might be kind of romantic.
Why am I even writing this piece? I wonder, suddenly, doubt breathing in my ear. Who is it for? I suppose it’s partly for myself. To sort out things, and as a reassurance that I’m not a complete loser for never having made that phone call, for persuading my mom to go and pick up those photographs a couple of days later. Partly for some other people, as an apology for my weirdness. If I am so insecure then why am I flinging my soul in the faces of some editorial department? I guess I just want someone to understand me…us. The ones who watch. The ones who are afraid.
Tonight I have to go to a ceremony at my sister’s high school. I am prepared to sweat. My breathing will be shallow. I will mumble and stutter my way through answers to questions, short and kindly put. Will they talk about me, these gatherings of teenagers in pink T-shirts, of faculty in apple sweaters? Will they talk about the poor, shy girl? Will the angels of the Five Heavens (the gold heaven and the silver heaven, the old, front-porch heaven, the one for cats, and the especially wonderful one for garbage-collectors) shake their heads at me? I hope someday they will learn not to pity us. We too have vivid lives; we just express ourselves in different ways. Don’t look for me when you shake my hand, but I do exist between the lines of this story. I do not belong to the real world, so I have to keep creating to keep myself alive.
Glance at my paintings if you have the time. I work on a large scale—five feet tall. I use red against orange. Green against gold. The figures I paint have warrior bones and in their posture you can recognize my confidence. Look into their eyes and see my laughter. Through their faces, I am smiling at you.
