the habit of being

I am oppressed by variables. I sit before the computer screen in the lab and the program jumbles. The language is Hebrew to me. Brackets versus braces. Vectors, matrices, cell arrays. I am sick and afraid. The headache approaches. A function and its arguments. Subroutines. My stomach tumbles. The length of time I’d like to sleep increases exponentially. But I only dream I am stuck in the command line and someone keeps pressing enter and getting an error and backspacing over me and retyping. This goes on for hours. Or else I am falling down a pit with tumbling numbers, and I wake up anxious. I do not want to go to work. This is not what I wanted to be doing at university.

* * *

Someone ought to warn about the real dangers of leaving school. There are, in fact, dangers greater than perhaps not getting a high-paying job. Being stuck as a little degree-less fish in the job market is not the greatest risk of abandoning academia. They should warn about the danger of forgetting how to concentrate, the danger of having no intellectual training to fall back on in an argument or even a simple conversation, the danger or not being able to caress an idea all night long if there’s no body available.

When your brain has gone limp for lack of study, and you cannot wrap your mind around anything for any length of time, you may become a silly girl, a girl who would rather wrap her legs around a man. But men fall asleep or go back home and what are you left with? You are not left to your work because you will have none. You are left with only yourself, your guilt, your unfulfilled potential. You are left with the idea that you ought to be heard, but have nothing to say anymore. You try to remember the last time you had an idea, the last time you really thought about something. You have a vague notion that you once Made A’s, but what did that mean? You have a vague notion that you once knew things, like the steps one must go through the clone a gene, like the constitutional amendments, like what a logarithm is, how to write a 20-page paper.. but you soon realize that having once known something isn’t much to be proud of.

What else is there? You ponder this long enough and one day it might occur to you that you ought to be Expensive. Not because of your smarts, but because of your stature, your thin-but-not-unhealthy shape, your grandmother’s diamond ring, which you pull off fantastically, the way you can be dressed up to look not only pretty but almost regal, as young as you are. And then there’s your experience In Bed - it’s not all good experience, but experience none the less. All these things suggest that you ought to be Expensive. You have not considered this before… maybe there is hope. This will be the beginning of the end.

* * *

After I escaped on the weekend, we went the wrong way (my fault) and turned around, and then we were right behind my boss - his curly hair, monster gut, suspenders, disaster of a brief case. I said “Denis?” and then there was a scene on 54th street, a hug-thing between us that didn’t seem awkward until I rethought it later. “This is my friend Mark,” I said. They shook. “This is my friend Silma,” he said. We shook. He said something to her about singing my praises. I said we were late for our lunch reservation. Mark said wait a minute and asked him about a play he’d seen the night before. Not as good as the London production.

Later Mark said I was really lucky to have someone so brilliant like me as much as Denis clearly does. I tried to explain how stupid Denis usually makes me feel, how I’m terrible at my job, how I don’t even remember basic math, how I’ve almost cried in front of him so many times. It’s clear he doesn’t believe me anymore, though he had until now.

* * *

Sometimes my roommate leaves her many papers and comes knocking at my door to tell me her sorrows. I try my best to offer advice, but at times I envy her even her problems, however genuine her tears. In order to hear her, I have to block everything out - her tiny shoulders, her Cleopatra eyes, they way she always looks better in my clothes than I do, her gorgeous academic records, her bigger vocabulary and more books read, her med school boyfriend, her fairy godmother with her generous checks, her teenage depression that was deeper than my own, her sentences, her wit, her long long hair, her diligence, the keys clicking until 3 am, the way she loved me when I was young - and listen only to the part of her that still feels like a failure, they part of her that feels like I feel.

I could name her virtues as quickly as she could name her flaws, but she is not mine anymore, and I wonder if that limits how much I can help. She has her boy lover and her best girlfriend isn’t me, and sometimes I’m afraid to hug her even when she cries. I don’t know if I’m allowed to. She points out that it’s been eight years with us, and it has, and somewhere I still feel like I fucked up four or five ago, that I failed her and she put my love for her in a black box and hid it under the bed with other things that could not be trusted. I failed her and didn’t make it up, and now I watch her live the life I might have lived if I hadn’t made so many mistakes. I watch her suffer through the pain of it, but ultimately get the work done, proceed. I offer my parents her accomplishments instead of my own - “as long as someone is considering law school” says my mother. Sometimes my jealousy is thicker than the wall that separates our bedrooms, and I wonder how it could be possible to miss someone I see everyday.

* * *

It’s all in your head. Just keep trying.

When I was a young child, I went to visit my grandparents in Wilmington, Delaware, every Christmas. My grandfather bought me a ticket and I flew alone. I had to wear a button that said I was an Unaccompanied Minor. The button had red and white stripes. I carried my Madeline doll with me on the plane and chewed gum to help with my ears. Stewardesses gave me pins with pilots’ wings, a touch I liked after I realized my initial terror that I was going to get real wings, as in grow them, was unfounded. I got to ride on carts that beeped down the terminals at the connecting airports, Atlanta or Charlotte. Once I even got to go to a special room with other Unaccompanied Minors while I waited for my second flight. After that trip, I just faked being 12 so they’d leave me alone.

Going to visit my grandparents seemed like a special treat to me. It actually snowed there. They spoiled me. We watched old movies on their huge TV until late at night. I got to pick the movies from a notebook my grandfather had put together listing them by Title, Star, or Year. My favorite was Cleopatra. I played The Oregon Trail on my grandfather’s computer for hours, I went swimming at the JCC (even though we weren’t Jewish), there were always special desserts, and I slept in my mother’s old room, which was blue.

It never occurred to me that the reason I went up there every year was because my (single) mother had to work. She couldn’t afford to take time off, so instead she worked double shifts on Christmas Day, a huge day for admissions at Willingway, drunks lining the halls. She’d try to call me and my grandfather would brag to her about all the nice presents he’d given me, the clothes from Nordstrom’s in California. Then there was the time I didn’t wait for everyone else to get up before opening my presents. He screamed at her about it for an hour. On Christmas.

Later, after my mother remarried and our finances allowed it, we all went up. My little brother was a baby. “I am a GOOD mother,” my mother yelled at her father, and ran up the stairs and slammed the door and cried.

After that, we spent more Christmases in Georgia. We always bought the tree on my mother’s birthday, December 20th, and left it up until mid-February, when we were absolutely sure there was no Christmas Tree Smell left, and the whole thing was brown. Our many cats broke our many ornaments.

On Christmas Eve, I started making my yearly appearance at the Tillmans’ party, perhaps the only time I’d see my father’s people all year. My other grandfather wore mismatched plaids and drank too much scotch. We usually prayed for my father, in another of his Bad Spells, as part of the blessing, and my older half-sister would start dabbing her eyes. Someone invariably jokingly offered me a glass of wine.

Back at home on Christmas morning, we all got up at 6 in the morning and I made the coffee for my parents. We opened our presents, went back to sleep, and then went off to visit my stepfather’s family, in front of whom my mother and I would try very hard to act normal.