Authors: Susanna Kaysen
By my senior year I didn’t even bother with excuses, let alone explanations.
“Where is your term paper?” asked my history teacher.
“I didn’t write it. I have nothing to say on that topic.”
“You could have picked another topic.”
“I have nothing to say on any historical topic.”
One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.
Boyfriends and literature: How can you make a life out of those two things? As it turns out, I did; more literature than boyfriends lately, but I guess you can’t have everything (“a generally pessimistic outlook [is] observed”).
Back then I didn’t know that I—or anyone—could make a life out of boyfriends and literature. As far as I could see, life demanded skills I didn’t have. The result was chronic emptiness and boredom. There were more pernicious results as well: self-loathing, alternating with “inappropriately intense anger with frequent displays of temper …”
What would have been an appropriate level of intensity for my anger at feeling shut out of life? My classmates were spinning their fantasies for the future: lawyer, ethnobotanist, Buddhist monk (it was a very progressive high school). Even the dumb, uninteresting ones who were there to provide “balance” looked forward to their marriages and their children. I knew I wasn’t going to have any of this because I knew I didn’t want it. But did that mean I would have nothing?
I was the first person in the history of the school not to go to college. Of course, at least a third of my classmates never finished college. By 1968, people were dropping out daily.
Quite often now, people say to me, when I tell them I didn’t go to college, “Oh, how marvelous!” They wouldn’t have thought it was so marvelous back then. They didn’t; my classmates were just the sorts of people who now tell me how marvelous I am. In 1966, I was a pariah.
What was I going to do? a few of my classmates asked.
“I’m going to join the WACs,” I told one guy.
“Oh, yeah? That will be an interesting career.”
“Just kidding,” I said.
“Oh, uh, you mean you’re not, really?”
I was stunned. Who did they think I was?
I’m sure they didn’t think about me much. I was that one who wore black and—really, I’ve heard it from several people—slept with the English teacher. They were all seventeen and miserable, just like me. They didn’t have time to wonder why I was a little more miserable than most.
Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression.
Isn’t there some other way to look at this? After all, angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well fed, clothed, and housed to have time for this much self-pity. And the college business: My parents wanted me to go, I didn’t want to go, and I didn’t go. I got what I wanted. Those who don’t go to college have to get jobs. I agreed with all this. I told myself all this over and over. I even got a job—my job breaking au gratin dishes.
But the fact that I couldn’t hold my job was worrisome. I was probably crazy. I’d been skirting the idea of craziness for a year or two; now I was closing in on it.
Pull yourself together! I told myself. Stop indulging yourself. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re just wayward.
One of the great pleasures of mental health (whatever that is) is how much less time I have to spend thinking about myself.
I have a few more annotations to my diagnosis.
“The disorder is more commonly diagnosed in women.”
Note the construction of that sentence. They did not write, “The disorder is more common in women.” It would still be suspect, but they didn’t even bother trying to cover their tracks.
Many disorders, judging by the hospital population, were more commonly diagnosed in women. Take, for example, “compulsive promiscuity.”
How many girls do you think a seventeen-year-old boy would have to screw to earn the label “compulsively promiscuous”? Three? No, not enough. Six? Doubtful. Ten? That sounds more likely. Probably in the fifteen-to-twenty range, would be my guess—if they ever put that label on boys, which I don’t recall their doing.
And for seventeen-year-old girls, how many boys?
In the list of six “potentially self-damaging” activities favored by the borderline personality, three are commonly associated with women (shopping sprees, shoplifting, and eating binges) and one with men (reckless driving). One is not “gender-specific,” as they say these days (psychoactive substance abuse). And the definition of the other (casual sex) is in the eye of the beholder.
Then there is the question of “premature death” from suicide. Luckily, I avoided it, but I thought about suicide a lot. I’d think about it and make myself sad over my premature death, and then I’d feel better. The idea of suicide worked on me like a purgative or a cathartic. For some people it’s different—Daisy, for instance. But was her death really “premature”? Ought she to have sat in her eat-in kitchen with her chicken and her anger for another fifty years? I’m assuming she wasn’t going to change, and I may be wrong. She certainly made that assumption, and she may also have been wrong. And if she’d sat there for only thirty years, and killed herself at forty-nine instead of at nineteen, would her death still be “premature”?
I got better and Daisy didn’t and I can’t explain why. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and my classmates. I wasn’t convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I’m not sure that’s true. I still think about it. I’ll always have to think about it.
I often ask myself if I’m crazy. I ask other people too.
“Is this a crazy thing to say?” I’ll ask before saying something that probably isn’t crazy.
I start a lot of sentences with “Maybe I’m totally nuts,” or “Maybe I’ve gone ’round the bend.”
If I do something out of the ordinary—take two baths in one day, for example—I say to myself: Are you crazy?
It’s a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again.
Farther on, Down the Road, You Will Accompany Me
Most of us got out eventually. Georgina and I kept in touch.
For a while she lived in a women’s commune in north Cambridge. She came over to my apartment one day and terrorized my upstairs neighbor, who was making bread.
“You’re doing that wrong!” Georgina said. She and I were having a cup of tea upstairs while my neighbor kneaded the dough.
“Let me show you,” said Georgina. She pushed my neighbor out of the way and started flinging the dough around on the counter.
My neighbor was a mild-mannered woman who never did anything graceless or rude. Consequently, most people were polite to her.
“You really have to beat it up,” said Georgina, doing so.
“Oh,” said my neighbor. She was about ten years older than Georgina and I, and she’d been making bread for all those years.
After she’d given the bread a good beating, Georgina said she had to leave.
“I have never been treated that way,” said my neighbor. She seemed more astonished than angry.
Then Georgina got involved in a consciousness-raising group. She pestered me to come. “You’ll love it,” she said.
The women made me feel inadequate. They knew how to disassemble car engines and climb mountains. I was the only married one. I could see that Georgina had a certain cachet because of her craziness; somehow, this cachet did not apply to me. But I went often enough to become suspicious of marriage, and of my husband in particular. I picked stupid fights with him. It was hard to find something to fight about. He did the cooking and the shopping, and he did a fair amount of cleaning too. I spent most of my time reading and painting watercolors.
Luckily, Georgina got herself a husband as well and dropped out of the group before I could pick a really destructive fight.
Then we had to go visit their farm in western Massachusetts.
Georgina’s husband was pale and slight and unmemorable. But she had also gotten a goat. Georgina, the husband, and the goat lived in a barn on a few acres of scrub land at the foot of a small mountain. The day we visited was cold, though it was May, and they were busy fitting glazing into their windows. They had six-over-six window frames, so this was quite a chore.
We watched while they puttied and fitted. The goat stood in her room near the door and watched as well. Finally, Georgina said it was time for lunch. She made a pressure cooker full of sweet potatoes. That was lunch. There was some maple syrup for topping. The goat had bananas.
After lunch, Georgina said, “Want to see the goat dance?”
The goat’s name was Darling. She was the color of ginger and had long hairy ears.
Georgina held a sweet potato up in the air. “Dance, Darling,” she said.
The goat stood on her hind legs and chased after the sweet potato, which Georgina kept moving away from her. Her long ears swayed as she hopped, and she pawed the air with her front legs. Her hooves were black and sharp; they looked as though they could do a lot of damage. Indeed, when she lost her footing, which she did a few times, and a hoof grazed the edge of the kitchen counter, it cut a groove in the wood.
“Give it to her,” I said. Something about the goat dancing made me want to cry.
They moved west, to Colorado, where the land was better. Georgina called once or twice from a pay phone. They had no telephone of their own. I don’t know what happened to the goat.
A few years after Georgina went west, I ran into Lisa in Harvard Square. She had a little toast-colored boy with her, about three years old.
I hugged her. “Lisa,” I said, “I’m so happy to see you.”
“This is my kid,” she said. “Isn’t it crazy that I have a kid?” She laughed. “Aaron, say hello.” He didn’t; he put his face behind her leg.
She looked exactly the same: skinny, yellow, cheerful.
“What have you been doing?” I asked.
“The kid,” she said. “That’s all you can do.”
“What about the father?”
“Later for him. I got rid of him.” She put her hand on the boy’s head. “We don’t need him, do we?”
“Where are you living?” I wanted to know everything about her.
“You won’t believe this.” Lisa pulled out a Kool and lit up. “I’m living in Brookline. I’m a suburban matron in Brookline. I’ve got the kid, I take the kid to nursery school, I’ve got an apartment, I’ve got furniture. Fridays we go to temple.”
“Temple!” This amazed me. “Why?”
“I want—” Lisa faltered. I’d never before seen her at a loss for words. “I want us to be a real family, with furniture, and all that. I want him to have a real life. And temple helps. I don’t know why, but it helps.”
I stared at Lisa, trying to imagine her in temple with her dark-skinned son. I noticed she was wearing some jewelry—a ring with two sapphires, a gold chain around her neck.
“What’s with the jewelry?” I asked.
“Presents from Grandma, right?” She addressed this to the kid. “Everything changes when you have children,” she told me.
I didn’t know what to say to that. I’d decided not to have any. And it didn’t look like my marriage was going to last, either.
We were standing in the middle of Harvard Square in front of the subway entrance. Suddenly, Lisa leaned close to me and said, “Wanna see something fantastic?” Her voice had the old quiver of mischief in it. I nodded.
She pulled up her shirt, a T-shirt advertising a bagel shop in Brookline, and grabbed hold of the flesh of her abdomen. Then she pulled. Her skin was like an accordion; it kept expanding, more and more, until she was holding the flap of skin a foot away from her body. She let go and it subsided, somewhat wrinkled at first but then settling back on her bones, looking perfectly normal.
“Wow!” I said.
“Kids,” said Lisa. “That’s what happens.” She laughed. “Say good-bye, Aaron.”
“Bye,” he said, surprising me.
They were going back to Brookline on the subway. At the top of the stairs Lisa turned around toward me again.
“You ever think of those days in there, in that place?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “I do think of them.”
“Me too.” She shook her head. “Oh, well,” she said rather jauntily. Then the two of them went down the stairs, underground.
Girl, Interrupted
The Vermeer in the Frick is one of three, but I didn’t notice the other two the first time I went there. I was seventeen and in New York with my English teacher, who hadn’t yet kissed me. I was thinking of that future kiss, which I knew was coming, as I left the Fragonards behind and walked into the hall leading to the courtyard—that dim corridor where the Vermeers gleam against the wall.
Besides the kiss, I was thinking of whether I could graduate from high school if for the second year in a row I failed biology. I was surprised to be failing it, because I loved it, I’d loved it the first time I failed it too. My favorite part was gene-recession charts. I liked working out the sequence of blue eyes in families that had no characteristics except blue eyes and brown eyes. My family had a lot of characteristics—achievements, ambitions, talents, expectations—that all seemed to be recessive in me.
I walked past the lady in yellow robes and the maid bringing her a letter, past the soldier with a magnificent hat and the girl smiling at him, thinking of warm lips, brown eyes, blue eyes. Her brown eyes stopped me.
It’s the painting from whose frame a girl looks out, ignoring her beefy music teacher, whose proprietary hand rests on her chair. The light is muted, winter light, but her face is bright.
I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled. She was warning me of something—she had looked up from her work to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me, “Don’t!”
I moved backward, trying to get beyond the range of her urgency. But her urgency filled the corridor. “Wait,” she was saying, “wait! Don’t go!”