By age seven I realized that there was something wrong with me, and that most children didn’t hyperventilate and throw up when asked to leave the house. My mother called me “quirky.” My teachers whispered “neurotic.” But deep down I knew there was a better word for what I was. Doomed.
Doomed because every Christmas I would end up hiding under my aunt’s kitchen table from the sheer panic of being around so many people. Doomed because I couldn’t give a speech in class without breaking into uncontrollable hysterical laughter as the rest of my classmates looked on. Doomed because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that something horrible and nameless was going to happen and that I was helpless to stop it. And not just the normal terrible things that small children worry about, like your father waking you up with a bloody hand puppet. Things like nuclear holocaust. Or carbon monoxide poisoning. Or having to leave the house and interact with people who weren’t my mother. It was most likely something I was just born with, but I can’t help but suspect that at least some of my social anxiety could be traced back to a single episode.
WHEN I WAS in the third grade, my father rushed inside one night to tell us all to come out and look at what he had in the back of his pickup. I was young, but still well trained enough to know that nothing good could come of this.
My sister and I shared a wary look as my mother peered guardedly from the kitchen window to see whether anything large was moving in my father’s truck. It was. She gave us a look that my father always seemed to interpret as “How lucky you girls are to have such an adventurous father,” but which I always read as “One of you will probably not survive your father’s enthusiasm. Most likely it will be Lisa, since she’s smaller and can’t run as fast, but she is quite good at hiding in small spaces, so really it’s anyone’s game.” More likely, though, it was something like “Christ, why won’t someone hurry up and invent Xanax?”
Usually when my father wanted us to come outside to see what was in the bed of his truck, it was only because whatever was in there was either too bloody and/or vicious for him to carry inside, so we all stayed in the relative safety of our house and asked a series of questions designed to indicate the level of danger of whatever Daddy would be exposing us to. We’d learned to interpret his answers accordingly, and had invented what we would later refer to as “The Dangerous Thesaurus of My Father.”
An abridged version:
“You’re really going to like this.” = “I have no idea what children enjoy.”
“Put your dark coat on.” = “You’re probably going to get blood on you.”
“It’s not going to hurt you.” = “I hope you like Bactine.”
“It’s very excited.” = “It has rabies.”
“Now, don’t get too attached.” = “I got this monkey for free because it has a virus.”
“It likes you!” = “This wild boar is now your responsibility.”
“Now, this is really interesting.” = “You’ll still have nightmares about this when you’re thirty.”
“Don’t scream or you’ll scare it.” = “You should really be running now.”
“It just wants to give you a kiss.” = “It’s probably going to eat your face off.”
My father was perpetually disappointed by our lack of trust, but I reminded him that just last week he’d brought his own mother a box he’d filled with an angry live snake that he’d found on the road on the way to her house. He tried to defend himself, but my sister and I had both been there when my father laid the box on the front yard and called his mother out to see “a surprise.” Then he nudged the box open with his foot, the snake jumped out, and my grandmother and I ran inside. Lisa ran in the opposite direction and tried to jump into the bed of the truck, which was incredibly shortsighted, as that was exactly where my father stored the skinned, unidentifiable animals that he planned to boil down in order to study their bone structure. The bed of my father’s pickup truck was like something that would have ended up in Dante’s Inferno, if Dante had ever spent any time in rural Texas.