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Skin Game

St. Martin's Press

One February day in the seventh grade, I was apprehended in the girls' bathroom at school, trying to cut my arm with my Swiss Army knife. It is always February in the seventh grade, that terrible border year, that dangerous liminal interlude.

* * *

I was apprehended in the girls' bathroom, in the act — to be precise — of wearing at my arm with the saw blade of my Swiss Army knife.

Until the moment of my apprehension, I didn't once think, People will find this odd. How could they? Is there nothing more fascinating than our own blood? The scarlet beauty of it. The pulsing immediacy. The way it courses through its endless circuit of comings and goings, slipping and rushing and seeping down to the cells of us, the intimate insider that knows all the news, that's been down to the mailroom and up to the boardroom.

In Mr. Davidson's biology class, the air dry with winter heat and pricked by the smell of formaldehyde and decay, we had been peering at mounted samples of unknown origin pressed flat between glass slides — papery shreds of tissue and muddy blotches of long-dried blood. And I got the idea that it would be more interesting to examine my own blood under the microscope. Blood still wet, still rich with urgent color. I imagined lively, plump little corpuscles tumbling against each other like a miniature game of bumper cars.

Everything is perfectly clear when looked at in the right light; I chose the school bathroom for my theater of operations because if you want your blood to be fresh to the task, you have to be handy to the microscope when you bring it forth. I had brought my Swiss Army knife to school precisely for this purpose. It was recess. I would cut, and then I would quickstep down the hall to Mr. Davidson's classroom — with its shelves crowded with chunks of rock and skeletal remains and things floating pickled in Ball jars — and screw down the probing eye of 10× magnification onto the very essence of my own self.

I found this plan so compelling it blinded me to other thought. The idea of the blood beckoned to me, hypnotic and seductive. How often do we know the blood of our veins? It reveals itself to us only as the herald of bad news: the injury, the illness, the sudden slip of the paring knife or the prick of the doctor's needle. Why should we meet only in disaster?

It wasn't as big a leap as you might imagine. I'd never been blood squeamish. I proudly displayed my scabs and scars, vaguely envious of my older sister, who seemed to garner all the really good injuries, the satisfyingly dramatic ones that needed stitches, and constructions of gauze and splint and tape, and shots and salves to ward off deliciously hideous consequences: lockjaw, sepsis, gangrene.

* * *

The key to success is to envision the thing in your mind. Draw the bright chrome of the blade along the slender rope of vein wrapping sinuous around your left wrist, and everything parts obediently beneath your command, like the Red Sea before Moses.

Except it didn't. The knife blade was worn too dull, as dull as the dun walls of the bathroom where I stood. With my arm braced against the warm metal shelf over a radiator, I could see the veins meandering blue and purple and green like a road map beneath the thin cover of my flesh. Only the frailest membrane of tissue keeping self from self. Yet who would have thought that skin could have so much substance, so much resistance?

I attempted and discarded in quick succession the can opener, the leather punch, and the flathead screwdriver. I settled at length on the saw blade, an unhappy compromise. It scraped back and forth like a fiddler's bow against my arm, chafing the skin red and raw. Little white clumps of flesh gummed up the blade, and the stubborn shelter of my skin refused to give way.

The radiator clanked and hissed. The bathroom smelled of disinfectant and body functions. I stood there and sawed. I wasn't doing a very good job of it, because sawing on your arm hurts. It burns. Disappointingly clumsy and painful and blundering, it was nothing like the swift, precise operation I had imagined.

To compound matters, I gathered a tiresome audience of other girls. You know, the popular girls. The typecast antagonists of the after-school movie. The ones who have always found that life just happens to be in perfect agreement with their opinions.

"Eeeuhhh. What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to cut myself," I said.

"Why?"

"Because I want to."

"That's really disgusting," said one.

"She just wants attention," muttered another darkly.

But still they stood about, like rubberneckers at a train wreck. After so many years of recesses, after all, what excitements are left? You have fifteen minutes, and you have to kill them somehow.

"You're going to get in trouble for this," announced the ring-leader at last, rendering her verdict with a self-satisfied toss of her confident head, before guaranteeing the outcome by retreating to alert the authorities.

* * *

In the intricately nuanced grade-school hierarchy I wasn't one of those popular girls, the ones born to straight teeth and straight hair and genetically predetermined self-confidence. I wasn't one of the outcasts either — the pale kids with the weird health problems, or the ones who always said the wrong thing at the wrong time and didn't even know it, or the ones whose mothers made them liverwurst sandwiches for lunch. I had always occupied the shifting territory of the middle ground, sunk low by my hopeless ineptitude at all sports involving a ball, raised up by my standing as one of the smart kids.

I'd slid by on smart. I'd made smart do in the place of industry and application. As far back as nursery school my teacher had noted on my report card that Caroline loves to volunteer information, but Her attention span is quite easily distracted and She has no incentive to accomplish a finished or well-done paper. I never took naturally to the linearity of school, the ordered progression of hours and ideas. My mind has always raced about with the distracted enthusiasm of a dog chasing squirrels, pursuing one idea, then whirling after another, and sometimes losing itself staring up along the endlessly branching pathways down which the last idea has fled. I stared out windows, daydreaming. I doodled. I read books tucked surreptitiously within the covers of whatever textbook we were meant to be following. I got by on last-minute efforts — and what's worse, I knew I could.

I got my comeuppance in sixth grade, when I was demoted to the slow-learning section for having what my school termed "a poor attitude." They didn't call it the slow-learning section, of course — B is what they called it, as distinguished from A, or, more direly, B — but we were none of us so slowwitted that we couldn't figure it out.

I remember feeling at the time of my demotion that some inevitable truth had at last come out. I come from a family of scholars and educators, and I think I've long suffered a sneaking suspicion that I've never quite measured up to the high standard of intellectual rigor valued above all else by my relations.

I can't remember a time, in fact, when I didn't think I was coming up short in one regard or another. Through no fault of her own my sister, two years older, had served as the measure by which my inadequacies were perpetually thrown into relief. She was better at sports, better at board games, better at drawing and painting and projects, more musical, more popular, and, of course, smarter.

"Oh, you're Julia's little sister," her former teachers would say to me, the first day I entered their classes at the beginning of a school year, and though I felt a swelling of pride by association, I could see already how there was no hope of proving adequate to all the expectations implied by that statement. In the first grade, according to the report by the administrator of an IQ test I took then, I kept repeating, "Oh, stupid me, that's wrong," and "I'm stupid and I can't do this."

The demotion to B had the quality, therefore, of a long-expected if dreaded inevitability. I even remember reassuring my parents, when the school informed us of my new class placement, that it was probably the best thing anyway.

For the better part of the day they sequestered us, the hopeless and the hapless of the B, in a subterranean cinder-block dungeon of a classroom, its walls painted a psychosis-inducing shade of dingy yellow, its only window a narrow slit high in the wall, through which we could see the occasional passage of a knee-socked leg on the playground above. Our teacher had tried to invest the room with some faint cheer by taping up those droll little posters of bedraggled kittens and antic orangutans, captioned "Don't bother me, I'm having a bad day" or "No more monkeying around."

We were all, always, having a bad day in B, or so it seemed. We snarled and sniped at each other, flinging invective, muttering mutinously. Every few weeks or so we were treated to a visit from the headmaster or the middle-school director, whose sole purpose in coming was to lecture us on our utter failure to live up to even the most nominal and rudimentary standards of decency and respectability, and the imminent likelihood that our entire school's reputation would be laid low by our sorry collective performance.

I have no memory at all of what we did to earn ourselves such administrative enmity, but I felt marooned in a savage land. Though mine was a small school, I swear I never saw or spoke again to any of my former comrades in A, and at the same time I felt as though my B classmates regarded me contemptuously as a fallen member of a corrupt aristocracy. I'd been exiled by the unforgiving academic caste system: a student without a country.

I'd managed to wear no more than a raw, angry, two-inch abrasion into my arm when, as forecast, I got in trouble. Mrs. Warren, the middle-school director, marched briskly into the bathroom, her heels tapping smartly on the gray ceramic tile.

"What are you doing!" she demanded in a low, ominous voice. Less a question than an indication of trouble to come.

What was I going to say? What I was actually doing was self-evident. She was asking, really, not what was I doing, but instead what was the meaning of what I was doing. And whatever the answer to that question might be, it was already obvious to me, in that instant, that no answer was going to constitute sufficient justification for my actions.

I flushed with guilt, as if I'd been caught in the act of some smutty gutter sin, feeling that panicky regret of childhood, when what you thought was a fantastic, a delightful idea goes suddenly wrong, and it occurs to you for the first time, like a revelation, that it was an idea the grownups would have been against from the get-go.

Because you know that when teachers ask, "What are you doing?," they don't really want an answer. They want you to skip right over the explication of the plot and get directly to the heartfelt confession of your sins. They only ask you what you're doing, after all, when you're doing something they think you ought not be doing.

So of course I ended up in the Office, the court of high crimes and misdemeanors alike. Be it discipline or disaster, when in doubt, marshal the forces in the Office.

I was hustled down the hall, past clumps of middle-schoolers doing a bad job of pretending not to be watching, and into Mrs. Warren's office, where the principal and the school nurse and my homeroom teacher sat in attendance. They ranged themselves in a semicircle of leather seats worn with age, which creaked and crackled with every movement. I perched uncomfortably in an armchair before them, my arms and legs twisted into pretzels of self-consciousness. If they had meant to suggest solicitous concern, to invite my halting confidences, they missed their mark. All the scene would have required was a fierce light blinding my eyes to resemble the interrogation sequence in a thriller.

The grilling commenced, a long afternoon of judicial inquiry in which I was meant to serve at once as both the star witness and the chief suspect, whose job it was to help identify the crime, illuminate the motive, and elicit the confession, all before the bell rang to signal the end of the school day. My confiscated knife — Exhibit A — passed from hand to hand. Heads were shaken in dismay. Questions probed me like insinuating fingers.

"Would you like to tell us about this?" they asked.

* * *

I found myself in a delicate position. I've always been a sucker for an audience, any audience. While the present situation was uncomfortable and even nerve-racking with its disciplinary overtones, still there was no denying I had myself an audience, four adults gazing at me with rapt anticipation. And I could feel the almost irresistible temptation to offer them something worth their while. Not to fabricate, precisely, but to nip and tuck at the details until I had made for them something more compelling than the truth.

The plain fact of it was that I was miserable — though my misery wasn't so much sadness as it was a shrieking unease, a gnawing despair, which I had been trying that morning to cut out of myself.

I knew how I felt, but I couldn't come up with a good enough reason why I should feel that way. I believed unhappiness was something you had to earn through a suitable measure of suffering, the way the characters in my favorite books struggled with blindness, polio, Nazis, shipwreck, blizzards — unspeakable adversities through which, damaged but undefeated, they endured. And what had I ever suffered? Not one damn thing. No poetic privations or romantic diseases. The way I saw it, my life — with its twelve-year-old particulars of tuna sandwiches and math homework and watching The Waltons on Thursday nights — was way too mundane for suffering.

I'll admit that suffering, or rather, the dramatic interest of being One Who Suffered, appealed to me. I could see myself tragic and tortured, wasted by some suitably novel madness or malaise that would leave me wanly luminous, a brave inspiration to friends and family gathered about my bedside. (Against all professional predictions I'd make a spirited and miraculous recovery in time for the final commercial break.)

Life had cast me, however, for another role. I was the contract player, the antic sidekick, the supporting chorus, and it was only the lead players whose troubles counted in the plot. I'd be the quirky best friend in a movie, but never the love interest; I'd be Sally in The Dick Van Dyke Show, but never Laura Petrie. When parts were handed out, my sister was called as the ingenue — emotionally delicate, quixotic, and temperamental — while I'd been cued as a Falstaff, forever bumbling about on the sidelines.

Whether we'd chosen those roles, or whether we'd fallen into them by chance, or whether I was the only one who ever even saw them that way, to me these positions seemed as inevitable and inalterable as time itself. My sister might falter under the burden of troubles I couldn't hope to understand, but unhappiness would never be written into my character sketch.

What I was feeling, anyway — it wasn't nearly interesting enough to be true and tragic unhappiness. It felt neither romantic nor dramatic nor poetic, but rather grinding and unpleasant, like a sore throat. I was highly suspicious of it, thinking it might, after all, be nothing more than a self-indulgent pettishness, just another way I was trying to copy my sister, like the way I'd taken up the flute after she did.

My situation appeared to me like the continuous, twisting loop of a Möbius strip: I wanted to be tragic in order to justify simply being unhappy, but knowing that I wanted to be tragic made me suspect the very legitimacy of that unhappiness. My unhappiness was a guilty secret, and I thought if I confessed to it I would be roundly denounced, as though I'd cribbed from someone else's test or stolen from my sister's closet.

"What right have you to pretend to unhappiness?" they would demand, and I would have no answer.

If someone in authority, however, someone who had the power to grant such things, might allow my unhappiness, then it would at last bear the stamp of legitimacy, and I would be free to believe in it. Only — and here the Möbius strip carried me back again to the beginning — I couldn't imagine convincing the Authorities of my unhappiness without having some real and substantive cause to point to, and I had no such cause, so wouldn't that mean that if they believed me, then I had succeeded only in perpetrating a fraud?

I had been mulling over this conundrum for months, ever since this wretchedness had insinuated itself into my life like a poisonous mold, putting out little creeping tentacles until all of me was taken over with it. Now, confronted finally with an opportunity to tell all, I knew I wouldn't have the courage to try. I couldn't bear to face their disappointment in me for being so ridiculous and fanciful and self-indulgent as to imagine I could ever be truly unhappy.

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Excerpted from Skin Game by Caroline Kettlewell. Copyright © 1999 Caroline Kettlewell. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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