The Social Animal (19 page)

But the biggest shock was the emphasis on behavior. The Academy started from the ground up. It taught its students to look at someone who was talking to them, how to sit up in class, how to nod to signal agreement, how to shake hands and say hello on first meeting. Erica and her classmates spent the entire first session of her music class learning how to file into the room and take their seats. During the first weeks of school, they were taught how to walk down the hall, how to carry their books, how to say, “Excuse me,” if they bumped into one another. The teachers told them that, if they did the small stuff right, the big stuff would be much easier to master later on. Middle-class kids may have learned these lessons automatically, but many of the kids at the Academy had to be taught.

Another big shock was the chanting. Every school day began with what they called “school-wide circle time.” Every student gathered in the gym and they performed raps and chants together. They had a Respect Chant. They had a Knowledge-Is-Power call-and-response. They had a College Chant, in which they screamed out the names of prominent universities and vowed to make it to one of them. At the end of each rally, a gym teacher asked them the Questions: Why are you here? To get an education! How do you get it? Hard work! What do you do? Work hard! What do you use? Self-discipline! Where are you going? College! Why? To be master of my own destiny! How are you going to get there? Earn it! What is earned? Everything is earned!

Each class had its own graduation date. But the year was not the year they would graduate from the Academy. It was the year they would graduate from college four years later. Each classroom had an identity, but it was not Room 215 or Room 111. It was the name of the college the teacher who taught in it had attended: Michigan, Claremont, Indiana, or Wellesley. College was the Promised Land. College was the elevated circle these students would someday join.

In class, Erica learned about things she had never even heard about—life in Thailand and ancient Babylon. She was tested and assessed every six weeks, and the tests were used to mark her progress. If she surpassed expectations, she earned Scholar Dollars, with which she could buy privileges like free time and field trips. Her favorite class was orchestra, where she was taught to read music and started to play the Brandenburg Concerto. She made the honor roll her second term, which meant she could wear a blue shirt to school, instead of the white ones that were the standard uniform. Putting on that shirt for the first time, at an assembly in front of the whole school, was the single proudest event of her life up until that moment.

After school, she played tennis. Erica had never played an organized sport before. She had never so much as picked up a racket. But a few years earlier, two African American tennis stars had come to the school and donated money to build four tennis courts out back. A coach came in every day to teach the game. Erica decided she wanted to be on the team.

Erica became a much more serious student at the Academy, but there was something ferocious about the way she took up tennis. She became obsessed by it. She spent hours every afternoon pounding a ball against the wall. She put tennis posters on the walls of her room at home. She learned the geography of the world by learning about where tennis stars were born and where the tournaments were held. During freshman and sophomore years, in particular, she organized her life around the little yellow ball.

Tennis was serving some larger cosmic purpose in her mind. Walter Lippmann once wrote that “above all the other necessities of human nature, above the satisfaction of any other need, above hunger, love, pleasure, fame—even life itself—what a man most needs is the conviction that he is contained within the discipline of an ordered existence.” For a few years tennis organized Erica’s identity.

Erica was strong and fast, and though she never admitted it to anyone, she became convinced, even for just these two years, that tennis could be her path to fortune and fame. She saw herself at Wimbledon. She saw herself at the French Open. She saw herself back at the school telling future students how it had all begun.

Her e-mail address was tennisgirl1. Her online passwords had to do with tennis. The doodles on her notebooks were about tennis. Day after day, she picked up tips from the coach, read the online tennis sites, and watched tennis on TV. And day after day, her tennis improved. But there was an anger in her game that scared everyone around her. She was a determined and somewhat serious person in most of the realms of her life, but not an angry one. On the court, she was driven by impatience for everyone and everything. She never talked on the court or bantered with her partners. When she was winning, people relaxed around her, but when she was losing, they kept out of her way. If she had a bad practice session on the court, it ruined the rest of her day, and she went home foul and cranky.

At first the coach called her Little Mac, since her attitude was like John McEnroe’s, but one day it got scary. It was the spring of her sophomore year, and her team was playing at an upper-middle-class school in the suburbs. By this point, Erica was the second-ranked girl on the team, playing a singles match late in the afternoon. Her coach watched her first service game from behind the fence and had a sinking sensation right away. Her first serve went long. Her second serve hit the bottom of the net. By the time she was down three games to zero, her form was in disarray. On volleys, her shoulder was flying open. On serves, her arm was dipping down, and she was practically serving sidearm, blasting the ball anywhere but into the other court.

Her coach told her to count to ten, relax, and regain her composure, but she looked at him like a feral animal, her brows furrowed with rage and frustration. Soon she was standing flatfooted awaiting the serve, paying more attention to her own frustration than to the ball. Her returns hit the net, went long or wide, and after each one she’d bark, “Fuck!” to herself.

The coach started peppering her with advice. Keep your shoulder in. Move your feet. Work on your toss. Rush the net. But she was stuck in some spiral of disorganization. She hit the ball as hard as possible, and each error seemed to vindicate some tide of self-hatred rising inside. For reasons that would never be clear, she began sabotaging her own game, hitting volleys deep into the fence behind the court, not even trying to return serves she could have made a try at. She stomped off the court during side changes and threw her racket on the ground beneath her chair. After one bad volley, she wheeled and threw her racket against the fence. Her coach lit into her: “Erica! Grow up or get out!”

Erica hit the next serve for an ace and glared at him. Her next serve was in, but was called out. “Are you fucking crazy?” Erica screamed. All games stopped. Erica slammed her racket to the ground. “Are you fucking crazy?” She stormed the net and looked like she was going to throttle anybody who got in her way. Her opponent, the line judge, her teammates—everybody physically recoiled. She was overflowing with steam and fury.

She knew at that very moment she was doing wrong, but it felt so good. She wanted to punch someone and see a face explode in a flash of blood. She felt some surge of power and domination as she looked at the people drawing back nervously around her. She was looking for somebody to humiliate.

For several long seconds, nobody approached. Eventually, she stormed off the court and sat in her chair, looking down. She blamed everybody but herself. The assholes of the world, the ball, the racket, her opponent. Finally, her coach came over, as furious as she was. He grabbed her arm and barked, “You’re outta here. Let’s go.”

She yanked it away. “Don’t you fucking touch me!” But she got up and started walking toward the bus, three strides ahead of him. She slammed her fist against the metal side of the bus as she stepped on, and stomped on down the aisle. She threw her gear against the wall, and herself onto the back bench. She sat there for an hour and a half, while the rest of the matches finished, and then stewed silently as they all rode back to school.

THERE
WAS
NO
REACHING
her that afternoon. She had no remorse. No fear of getting into trouble at the Academy or at home. She was stubborn, unyielding, and harsh when anybody tried to talk with her.

By the time the team got back to school, everybody was talking about how Erica had gone crazy on the court. The next day they stopped the school, which is what the administrators did when something terrible had happened. Classes were cancelled, and every student and teacher gathered for an hour in the gym for an assembly on sportsmanship. They never mentioned Erica’s name, but everybody knew she had caused it. Teachers and administrators pulled her aside that day—some harsh, some soft—but none of what they said registered.

By the next evening, though, the whole episode was beginning to look different. Erica cried into her pillow. She felt a wave of humiliation and shame.

By this age, her mother, Amy, was no match for Erica. Her personality wasn’t as strong. But she knew what it was like to behave in ways that were inexplicable to yourself. She wondered if she’d simply passed these genes on to her daughter, and all Erica’s fine qualities were about to be overshadowed by the dark ones inherited from dear old Mom.

She also wondered if these were just the storms of Erica’s adolescence, or whether this would be her life now and forever. All human beings have inherited from the distant past an automatic ability to respond to surprises and stress, the so-called fight-or-flight response. Some people, even from the earliest age, seem to flee from stress and pain. Some, like Erica, fight.

Some newborns startle more easily than others. Their heart rate shoots up more than others when confronted with strange situations, and their blood pressure rises. Their bodies react more vividly. In 1979 psychologist Jerome Kagan and his colleagues presented five hundred infants with a series of unfamiliar stimuli. About 20 percent of the babies cried vigorously and were labeled “high reactive.” Another 40 percent showed little response and were labeled “low reactive.” The rest were in between.

A decade or so later, Kagan ran the same children through a battery of experiences that were designed to induce performance anxiety. About a fifth of those who had been labeled “high reactive” still responded sharply to stress. A third of the “low reactives” still maintained their sense of calm. Most of the kids had matured and were now in the middle range. Very few of the kids had jumped from the high reactive to low reactive or vice versa.

In other words, kids are born with a certain temperament. That temperament is not a track that will guide them through life. It is, as E. O. Wilson has argued, a leash. Erica, like all kids, was born with a certain disposition, whether to be high strung or preternaturally calm, whether to be naturally sunny or naturally morose. Her disposition would evolve over the course of her life, depending on how experience wired her brain, but the range of this evolution would have limits. She might grow from high strung to moderately tempered, but her personality would probably not flip from one extreme to another. And once that basic home state was established, her moods would oscillate around that mean. She might win the lottery and be delighted for a few weeks, but after a time she would return to that home state and her life would be no happier than if she’d never won it. On the other hand, she might lose a husband or a friend, but she would, after some period of grief and agony, return to that home state.

Amy was worried. Erica had some dangerous fire inside. Even early on, it was clear that Erica’s moods oscillated more wildly than most. She seemed to startle intensely when something unexpected happened (people who startle easily experience more anxiety and dread through life). Some researchers distinguish between dandelion children and orchid children. Dandelion kids are more even-tempered and hardier. They’ll do pretty well wherever you put them. Orchid children are more variable. They can bloom spectacularly in the right setting or wither pitifully in the wrong one. Erica was an orchid, perched dangerously between success and catastrophe.

As Amy sat there, wondering blankly about Erica’s future, she was experiencing that pervasive depth of worry that the parents of adolescents all know. She herself had been one of those kids who became overly defensive at the first sign of perceived frustration, who misinterpret normal situations as menacing ones, who perceive anger when it isn’t there, feel slights that aren’t intended, who are victim to an imagined inner world, which is more dangerous than the outer world they actually inhabit.

People who live with that sort of chronic stress suffer cell loss in their hippocampus, and with it loss of memory, especially the memory of good things that have happened to them. Their immune systems weaken. They have fewer minerals in their bones. They accumulate body fat more easily, especially around the middle. They live with long-term debilitating deficits. A study of engineers who worked up to ninety hours a week for six months on an extremely stressful project had higher levels of cortisol and epinephrine, two chemicals associated with stress, for up to eighteen months later, even though all of them had taken four- to five-week vacations after the project was over. The effects of stress can be long lasting and corrosive.

That night, a full thirty hours after the tennis meltdown, Amy still wasn’t sure how much she could ease her daughter’s stress and shame. So she just sat there with her hand on Erica’s back, and rather pitifully helped her cope. After about fifteen minutes, they were both a little restless, and they got up and started making dinner. Erica made a salad. Amy got the pasta out from the pantry. She and Erica were doing something together. They were doing something that calmed their minds and restored their equilibrium. Somehow, Erica was seeing the world calmly again. At one point while she was slicing tomatoes, Erica looked up and asked her, “Why am I a person I can’t control?”