Read Online Skin Game: A Memoir by Caroline Kettlewell - Free Book Online
Authors: Caroline Kettlewell
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Caroline.
Was it this dissociation that caused me a terrible, itching, twitching restless unease, like the too-familiar hug from a relative I didn’t care for? Or was it the classic, irresolvable conflict between desire and duty that left me so anxious, so weighed down with dread? Or was it just my mind itself, coming undone of its own accord, on its own preordained schedule, drowning all my thoughts in a sea of static like the background crackle of an overseas telephone call, where a thousand frantic conversations are carried on just beyond the edge of intelligibility?
It felt physical, this oppressive tension, like something crawling on my flesh, and I wanted to shake it from my skin the way a horse shakes flies. I sat on my bed, digging my fingernails into my face, wanting to tear the skin away. What do you do with a want like that?
In the woods behind my house, on a still winter morning, I smashed a bottle on a rock, a green ginger ale bottle, holding it by the neck with both hands and bringing it down against the smooth face of weathered stone like an ax, a baseball bat, a club. It shattered in a rain of green shards and the fragmented chord of breaking glass, and right in that instant of its shattering came a flash of some release, like a brief rush of cool, fresh air into drowning lungs. Then it was gone again, and I was left with a scattered field of debris and a wash of self-recrimination for the excess of the gesture. I gathered the glass in a sudden worry that one of our cats would step on it and be injured. Then I slunk in the kitchen door with the chunks and slivers of bright green glass heaped in a pouch made by folding the hem of my sweatshirt up to my chest, and buried the evidence of my crime under a layer of garbage in the can.
At night, I danced wildly around in my room in darkness lit only by the yellow glow from the family’s old console stereo, which I’d commandeered for my bedroom, the cheap needle scratching out “Helter Skelter” until my father banged on my closed door, demanding, “Do you have to play that music so loud?”
One Sunday afternoon, my mother stunned me with the casual announcement at lunch that we would all be heading into Charlottesville for the rest of the day to visit with family friends. When I HAD OTHER PLANS! Plans I wasn’t supposed to have, of course—since they involved time spent in the company of boys I was expected to be spending less time with—and therefore plans that I couldn’t raise as an objection and counterpoint to my mother’s.
I sat at the table, staring hatefully at the roast beef and gravy on my plate, deaf to the dining room’s clatter of cutlery and rumble of voices and the whap-whap of the swinging wooden exit doors, hearing only my own frantic dismay. This was the final outrage, I thought. I can’t bear it.
I bolted out of the dining room, banging through the swinging doors, even as my Narrator was counseling, This is stupid. What do you think this is going to do for you? I ran all the way down the academic building’s hall, and shoved through the door, and ran across the lawn, and onto the road that crossed the campus, past the lake, my lungs burning, jumped a fence, cut across a field, raced up the driveway past our house, my feet slipping in the loose gravel. I ran into the woods, slapping at thin branches, my Narrator jollying along going, Well, my goodness, a runaway scene, and what are you going to do now, stay away forever?
I already felt stupid. What was I going to do now? I could see that I was just going to end up plodding embarrassed out of the woods in some utter anticlimax.
I threw myself down on my back on the forest floor, still gasping for breath. The damp and the chill crept through the thin flannel of my shirt, and I lay there wondering if there was some way simply never to get up, to lie there until the thin winter air and the wet leaves beneath me had emptied me of all concern, all
Was it this dissociation that caused me a terrible, itching, twitching restless unease, like the too-familiar hug from a relative I didn’t care for? Or was it the classic, irresolvable conflict between desire and duty that left me so anxious, so weighed down with dread? Or was it just my mind itself, coming undone of its own accord, on its own preordained schedule, drowning all my thoughts in a sea of static like the background crackle of an overseas telephone call, where a thousand frantic conversations are carried on just beyond the edge of intelligibility?
It felt physical, this oppressive tension, like something crawling on my flesh, and I wanted to shake it from my skin the way a horse shakes flies. I sat on my bed, digging my fingernails into my face, wanting to tear the skin away. What do you do with a want like that?
In the woods behind my house, on a still winter morning, I smashed a bottle on a rock, a green ginger ale bottle, holding it by the neck with both hands and bringing it down against the smooth face of weathered stone like an ax, a baseball bat, a club. It shattered in a rain of green shards and the fragmented chord of breaking glass, and right in that instant of its shattering came a flash of some release, like a brief rush of cool, fresh air into drowning lungs. Then it was gone again, and I was left with a scattered field of debris and a wash of self-recrimination for the excess of the gesture. I gathered the glass in a sudden worry that one of our cats would step on it and be injured. Then I slunk in the kitchen door with the chunks and slivers of bright green glass heaped in a pouch made by folding the hem of my sweatshirt up to my chest, and buried the evidence of my crime under a layer of garbage in the can.
At night, I danced wildly around in my room in darkness lit only by the yellow glow from the family’s old console stereo, which I’d commandeered for my bedroom, the cheap needle scratching out “Helter Skelter” until my father banged on my closed door, demanding, “Do you have to play that music so loud?”
One Sunday afternoon, my mother stunned me with the casual announcement at lunch that we would all be heading into Charlottesville for the rest of the day to visit with family friends. When I HAD OTHER PLANS! Plans I wasn’t supposed to have, of course—since they involved time spent in the company of boys I was expected to be spending less time with—and therefore plans that I couldn’t raise as an objection and counterpoint to my mother’s.
I sat at the table, staring hatefully at the roast beef and gravy on my plate, deaf to the dining room’s clatter of cutlery and rumble of voices and the whap-whap of the swinging wooden exit doors, hearing only my own frantic dismay. This was the final outrage, I thought. I can’t bear it.
I bolted out of the dining room, banging through the swinging doors, even as my Narrator was counseling, This is stupid. What do you think this is going to do for you? I ran all the way down the academic building’s hall, and shoved through the door, and ran across the lawn, and onto the road that crossed the campus, past the lake, my lungs burning, jumped a fence, cut across a field, raced up the driveway past our house, my feet slipping in the loose gravel. I ran into the woods, slapping at thin branches, my Narrator jollying along going, Well, my goodness, a runaway scene, and what are you going to do now, stay away forever?
I already felt stupid. What was I going to do now? I could see that I was just going to end up plodding embarrassed out of the woods in some utter anticlimax.
I threw myself down on my back on the forest floor, still gasping for breath. The damp and the chill crept through the thin flannel of my shirt, and I lay there wondering if there was some way simply never to get up, to lie there until the thin winter air and the wet leaves beneath me had emptied me of all concern, all
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