I only wanted to be a girl because I thought fathers left you alone then.
And mine looked at me, everything new again between us, new and awful. He looked at me as if for the first time realizing that I wasn’t something from his loins after all, rather something he’d excreted in a moment of illness.
My father turned back to the road then, started smoking with renewed need. He no longer bothered blowing it out the window, and I rode the rest of the way home in the choking clouds.
*
Even before the weatherman snuffed his life out on the tarmac and made me realize how uncreative I was, I didn’t really consider myself suicidal. It’s just that I’d been weighing options lately, and there was something about turning out all the lights that I’d begun to find very sensible.
A few days before, one weekend morning, all six of us in the house had managed to straggle awake at the same time, and we sat around the breakfast table talking about all the things we didn’t want to be, and all the things we’d love to do but that would’ve still left us penniless urchins, old enough to know better, that the world wasn’t that accommodating. Most of us had earned our college degrees in the past year or two, but by choice or by dire curricular miscalculation were still marking time before doing anything real.
There was a lot of bitter laughter in the kitchen that morning. I happened to remark that, as career options went, medical school cadaver was looking better and better.
Later, Megan came up to me where I sat in the back, looking over a lawn that had earned us the enmity of our neighbors. She sat down and drank most of a Tab in silence before looking at me, quizzical and maybe worried, and saying, “You were kind of serious this morning, weren’t you?”
To me, the creepy thing was, I immediately knew what she was talking about. I told her I was, come to think of it.
“Nobody else around here catches shit like that. Sometimes I really hate being the sensitive one.” Then her worried look gave way to one of nervousness. “You’re not going to … act on it, are you?”
“Wrong time of year,” I said, and she didn’t understand that at all, so I had to explain. “If it was winter, I might have to go over to Lake Michigan. Find an ice floe and chip away at it, until I could float off into the haze, like a toothless old Eskimo. I heard they do that when they realize their lives are useless.”
“You are not useless,” then Megan started laughing. “You pay one-sixth of the rent and utilities.”
“Anybody who answers an ad can do that.”
“That’s true. But you do it on time.”
Of those under our roof I liked Megan best, with a rare and true affection that left me terrified at the notion of sleeping with her, because of what it probably would’ve destroyed. Among the little archipelagos that were all our lives, I think Megan and I sat closest together.
There were Syd and Brendan, grad students and hypochondriacs who worked themselves into weekly frenzies over what they might’ve contracted. I was convinced they remained in school mainly for the health benefits. They went to Student Health Services so much that the rest of us had taken to calling them the Socialist Patients Kollective — unwieldy, but it gave us a great sense of personal vindictiveness.
Then there were Pam and Camilla, who were trying very hard to be lesbians because it was the correct thing to do, but they just didn’t seem very good at it, and the time Pam slipped up and slept with a guy at a party, it triggered a screaming match that lasted a week. When I came to Pam’s defense, it seemed to mend the rift because finally they had a new target, womyn together, and they spent the next week deciding to hate me for being patronizing. I then understood why so many police officers are attacked at domestic disputes.
I was very suspect in Camilla’s eyes anyway, because when she first moved in and we were getting the obligatory personal trivia out of the way, I told her mine, that I printed T-shirts for a living, but that I had a journalism degree, although what I really wanted to do was write fiction.
“I despise modern fiction,” she said, suddenly frosty. “The only reason people read it is because it makes them feel better once they’ve assured themselves that everybody else’s lives are just as vapid as their own.”
It was then I learned that Camilla took refuge in nineteenth-century literature. Jane Eyre was, I think, more real to her than I was. And I hadn’t written a word since she had leveled what I’d finally come to believe was my reason for existence.
Naturally this led to the realization that my conception and birth were tragic mistakes. This was no exaggeration. I’d had the temerity to be born indecisive in an age when we’re all defined by what we do, our titles and our job descriptions. Once I’d taken a good look back at everything I’d ever really wanted to be, things became very clear.
When I was eight I wanted to be a cop. TV had a lot to do with that one, I suspect. In my early teens I argued so much that my mother told me I’d make a fine lawyer, and I actually took this to heart, because there had to be truth in anything that caused her so much spite. Later, by default more than anything, I settled into courses in journalism, because being a reporter seemed one of the more non-committal directions I could take.
In looking back, I realize that everything I used to think I wanted to be when I grew up, it’s turned out that people scorn them now. Thanks to Camilla’s critique, even my dreams were vapid.
Medical school cadaver. It had possibilities.
*
Early in my college career, my father grew loudly exasperated by my inability to declare a major. By this time he and my mother were divorced, each of them militantly, bitterly opposed to being subsumed by the memory and loss of the other. They spent lots of money and made themselves miserable, each conspicuously trying to prove to the other just how happy they were to be free.
If someone had sent me to the encyclopedia to look up Hell, I just knew I’d find a flow-chart of their relationship.
And there I was, the boy who didn’t know what he wanted to be, only that he’d once wanted to do it with breasts. I’m sure to my father I was the world’s great blemish on the Y-chromosome.
“Aw, christ, why don’t you be a meteorologist?” he suggested in disgust. “There’ll always be weather. You’ll always have a job.”
Security was terribly important to him.
I thought this over, but just couldn’t get past what I’d been hearing from scientists, all this dire talk of a coming Ice Age. I worried that I’d be on TV and that everyone would start to hate me, because there I’d be, standing before a chromakey display that read Tomorrow’s Forecast, and I’d have to look them all in the eye and say, “I’m sorry … umm … more ice.”
So it’s just as well.
I guess my father didn’t lie to me — there really is always weather — but then, that still wasn’t enough for the weatherman, was it?
Dad always could get off on a technicality.
*
So that suicide thing was working at me, like a Rubik’s Cube, or the pretty rock paperweight you pick up and turn over and over in your hand when there’s nothing better to do.
I became a student of methodology whenever I saw some sort of mention in the paper, but few of the guaranteed, no-miss techniques appealed to me, because mostly they were very messy without the redeeming grandeur of the weatherman’s nosedive. Most of my housemates I didn’t want to burden with the grim task of cleanup, and there was no way of insuring that it fell to Camilla alone. That I could’ve lived with.