 by I don't remember the first time I kissed. I was 18........I had never kissed a man........then I had. I don't remember the first time I had sex. I was 20........I had never had sex........then I had. The first time I cried, I was 4. I thought I'd lost my mother at a wedding........but then I found her. The second time I cried, I was 10. My mother had vanished and I knew I would die if I remembered her, so I forgot she ever existed........then she came back. The third time I cried, I was 18. My mother had shipped me off to another continent and the next time I cried, I was 36. __________ I don't remember the first time I had an anxiety attack. The doctor prescribed valium. He gave me back my mother. For years, I never left home without having that little pill stashed in my wallet. I had to use it only once........when I lost my brakes on Old Country Road in Mineola and almost crashed into a Wonderbread truck. Yesterday, I put a gin and tonic in my thermos so I'd be able to survive the meeting. I not only survived it, but I was peaceful and happy in spite of the fact that the person who was lecturing us expressed nothing but rage and the room we were sitting in was a nightmare filthy-kind-of-place where just about everything was broken or falling apart. In the garden, two dogs were alternately biting into each other's legs to inflict pain, then mounting in a sudden, sexual frenzy. When it got dark outside, we could hear the creepy sound of their paws banging against the plate-glass window, and their crazy way of being together seemed to mirror that of the man and the woman who lived in that house. I don't remember the first time my husband and I had a fight. He said he loved me. So I agreed to marry him. Then, for no other reason than that I had become his wife, he despised me. I had never been with any other man, so I thought that love was supposed to be that way. When I was 11 I painted a portrait of some famous movie star and everyone said it was great. I thought it kinda sucked, but I was glad to be admired, so I never contradicted them. When I was 12, they sent me to a Saturday art school. It was just a single room with a lot of fold-up drawing boards and narrow, wooden stools on which we sat while balancing those fold-up drawing boards on our knees. That's how we formed a circle around the model, who was usually an old man with lots of wrinkles that were easy to draw. The teacher gave us thin sticks of charcoal and replaced them whenever they broke........which they did........at the slightest amount of too much pressure. The room was completely silent except for those tiny explosions of charcoal sticks breaking, and in that perfect silence, I became an artist. Because it made me forget about the rest of the world. I can't remember when I first needed to forget. Was it when my older sister tortured me, placing the most lethal person on earth right there, in my childhood bedroom? Was it when I shivered while hiding in that broken-down, creaky barn so I could catch my husband with another woman? Or was it that shrink attacking me and me doing nothing to defend myself, because I was too desperate and too alone on earth? The miracle of valium is that it disconnects something in your brain that is too dangerous to be remembered. I want to write a book about evil. I want to say nothing at all. Because if I were to write about it, I'd have to remember it in every detail, and then I'd get anxious and that would destroy the peaceful silence of my life. The first time I cried again, back then when I was 36........another shrink held me in his arms while I sobbed non-stop for 50 minutes. "It's not my fault!!" I said, over and over and over again. But he never asked me to tell him what it was, that was not my fault and because I'd been told that he was ill and that he had threatened to commit suicide, I was grateful for what little he had nevertheless been able to offer me. Yet even now when I no longer take valium or any other pills, I still can't remember what I meant when I spoke those words. ___________ |