5
FAYE SITS ALONE, outside, after school, a book in her lap, her back pressed against the school’s warm, gritty wall, listening through the wall to musicians idly playing: a trumpet runs up a scale to its highest, loudest peak; a xylophone is plinked on its smallest bars; a trombone makes that splatty-fart noise only a trombone is capable of. The students of the school orchestra seem to be on a break right now, fooling around between numbers, and so Faye waits and reads. The book is a thin collection of poems by Allen Ginsberg, and she’s reading the one about sunflowers again, for maybe the hundredth time, each time becoming more convinced that the poem is about her. Well, not really. She knows the poem is really about Ginsberg sitting in the Berkeley hills, staring out at the water, feeling depressed. But the more she reads it, the more she sees herself in it. When Ginsberg writes about the “gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery,” he might as well be describing the ChemStar plant. The “oily water on the river” could easily be the Mississippi. And the sunflower field he describes could just as well be this Iowa cornfield in front of her, separated from the school by a rickety barbed-wire fence, the field recently tilled and planted, a rippled blanket of black, wet, slippery earth. By the time school resumes in the fall the field will be busy with big-shouldered plants, spine-straight, corn-armored, and ready, finally, to be hacked down, to crumple weakly where they’re chopped at the knees. Faye sits and waits for the orchestra to begin playing again and thinks about this—harvest—and how it always makes her sad, how the cornfields in November look like battlegrounds, the chopped-down plants blanched and bonelike, cornstalks like femurs half buried and poking sharply out of the ground. After that, the chilly approach of another Iowa winter—the late-autumn snow dusting, the first November frost, the desolate January tundra this place becomes. Faye imagines what a Chicago winter would be like, and she imagines it would be better, and warmer, heated by all that traffic and movement and concrete and electricity, by all those hot human bodies.
Through the wall she hears someone squawking on a reed, and she smiles at that noise, the memory of that noise. She had been a musician once—one of the woodwinds, one of those who crowed her reeds. It’s one of the things she gave up after the panic attacks began.
That’s what the doctors called them—panic attacks—which didn’t seem accurate to Faye. It didn’t feel like she was panicking; it felt more like she was being forcibly and methodically deactivated all over. Like a wall of televisions being turned off one by one—how the images on each TV shrank to pinholes before disappearing altogether. It felt like that, the narrowing of her vision when an attack began, how she could only really take in and focus on one small thing, a dot in the wider field, usually her shoes.
At first it seemed to happen only when she displeased her father, when she did something—like taking those boys to the bomb shelter—that angered him. But then later the attacks struck in moments when she might displease him, when she had the opportunity to fail in front of him, even if she had not yet failed.
Example: the concert.
She had joined the school orchestra after listening to a compelling recording of Peter and the Wolf. She had wanted to play the violin, maybe the cello, but the school had openings only in the woodwinds. They gave her an oboe—dull black, the color rubbed off in places, the keys once silver but now a flat brown, one long, deep scratch running down its entire length. Learning the oboe was a calamity of honks and squawks, missed notes, her pinkie fingers sliding off the keys because they couldn’t yet move independently of the rest of her hand. Yet she liked it. She liked that the oboe gave the tuning note at the beginning of rehearsal. She liked the constancy of that, the hard solid A she delivered that anchored the whole group. She liked the severe posture needed to play it, sitting up straight, holding it in front of her, elbows at right angles. She even enjoyed the rehearsals. The camaraderie. Everyone working toward a common goal. The general feeling of high artistry. The magnificent sound they could make together.
For their first concert, each musician would have a very small solo. She practiced hers for months, until the notes were inside her, until she could play her solo perfectly without even looking at the music. The night of the performance, she was all dressed up and she looked into the audience and saw her mother, who waved, and her father, who was reading the program. And there was something about his concentration, something about the humorless way he studied the program, the way he scrutinized it, that just terrified Faye.
A thought popped into her head: What if I screw up?
It was something she had never before considered. And suddenly whatever magic she summoned when she practiced could not be summoned now. She could not clear her mind, could not let go as she had let go in rehearsal. Her palms moistened and her fingers grew cold. By intermission she had a headache, a stomachache, dark patches of sweat under her arms. She felt the urgent need to pee, but once in the bathroom she found that she couldn’t. Then during the concert’s second half, she began to feel dizzy, her chest was tight. When the conductor pointed his baton to cue her solo, Faye couldn’t play. The air stopped in her throat. What she squeezed out was a small cry, a short and helpless wheeze. Now all the faces turned. Everyone was looking. She heard music coming from elsewhere, but it sounded far away, like being underwater. The light in the auditorium seemed to dim. She stared at her shoes. She tumbled out of her chair. She blacked out.
The doctors said nothing was wrong.
“Nothing medically,” they quickly added. They made her breathe into a brown paper bag and diagnosed her with a “chronic nervous condition.” Her father looked at her, mortified and stricken. “Why did you do that?” he said. “The whole town was watching!” Which ignited her nerves all over again, his disappointment about her panic attack combined with her anxiety about not having another one in front of him.
Then she began having panic attacks even in situations that had nothing to do with her father, in moments that seemed otherwise innocent and even-keeled and calm. She would be having a normal conversation and suddenly this toxic thought would, for no reason, appear: What if I screw up?
And whatever blithe thing Faye had been saying the moment before was suddenly elevated to catastrophic proportions: Was she being stupid, insensitive, dim-witted, boring? The conversation became a horrible test she could easily fail. She felt a sense of doom combined with those bodily fight-or-flight mechanisms—headaches, chills, blushing, sweating, hyperventilating, hairs standing on end—which made everything worse because the only thing more painful than a panic attack was someone else seeing it.
Moments when she failed in front of other people, or moments when she felt the potential to fail in front of people—these could trigger an attack. Not every time, but sometimes. Frequent enough that she had adopted a certain self-protective behavior: She became a person who never screwed up.
A person who never failed at anything.
It was easy: The more afraid Faye felt on the inside, the more perfect she was on the outside. She blunted any possible criticism by being beyond reproach. She remained in people’s good graces by being exactly who they wanted her to be. She aced every test. She won every academic award the school offered. When the teacher assigned a chapter from a book, Faye went ahead and read the whole book. Then read every book written by that author that was available at the town library. There was not a subject in which she did not excel. She was a model student, a model citizen, went to church, volunteered. Everyone said she had a good head on her shoulders. She was easily likable, a great listener, never demanding or critical. She was always smiling and nodding, always agreeable. It was difficult to dislike her, for there was nothing to dislike—she was accommodating, docile, self-effacing, compliant, easy to get along with. Her outward personality had no hard edges to bump into. Everyone agreed that she was really nice. To her teachers, Faye was the achiever, the quiet genius in the back of the room. They gushed about her at conferences, noting especially her discipline and drive.
It was, Faye knew, all an elaborate mental game. She knew that way down deep she was a phony, just your average normal girl. If it seemed like she had abilities that no one else did, it was only because she worked harder, she thought, and all it would take for the rest of the world to see the real Faye, the true Faye, was one failure. So she never failed. And the distance between the real Faye and the fake Faye, in her mind, kept widening, like a ship leaving the dock and slowly losing sight of home.
This was not without cost.
The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything. Faye, for example, gave up the oboe. It goes without saying that she never played sports. Theater was an obvious no. She declined almost all invitations to parties, socials, mixers, afternoons at the river, nights drinking around a bonfire in somebody’s backyard. She has to admit that now, as a result, she really has no close personal friends at all.
Applying to Circle was the first risky thing she’d done in living memory. And then dancing the way she danced at the prom. And going after Henry the way she did at the playground. Risky. And now she felt punished for it. How the town resented her, and how Henry had shamed her—such was the price for asserting herself.
What had changed? What had inspired this new boldness? It was a line from this very poem, actually, the Ginsberg sunflower poem, a line that seemed written exactly for her, a quick jolt that seemed to slap her awake. It summed up exactly how she felt about her life even before she knew she felt it:
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower?
When had she forgotten that she was capable of bold things? When had she forgotten that bold things bubbled constantly inside her? She flips to the back of the book and studies the author photo once again. There he is, this dashing young man, fresh-faced, his short hair lightly tousled, clean-shaven, wearing a baggy white shirt, tucked in, and round tortoiseshell glasses that look like Faye’s glasses. He’s standing on a rooftop somewhere in New York—behind him, the antennas of the city, and beyond those, the hazy shapes of skyscrapers.
When Faye discovered that Ginsberg would be a visiting professor at Circle this coming year, she applied to the school immediately.
She leans back against the brick wall. What would it be like to be in his presence, this man of such abundance? She worries about what she’d do in his class: freak out, probably. Have a panic attack right there on the spot. She would be like the desolate narrator of the sunflower poem: Unholy battered old thing.
But the orchestra is coming back now.
The musicians are assembling, and Faye can hear them warming up. She listens to the cacophony. She feels it through her spine where she leans against the wall. And as she turns to press her cheek against the warm brick, she sees movement at the far end of the building: Someone has just rounded the corner. A girl. Light blue cotton sweater, intricately styled blond hair. It is, Faye sees, Margaret Schwingle. She’s reaching into her purse, pulling out a cigarette, lighting it, blowing out that first drag with a delicate little phoo. She has not yet seen Faye, but she will, it’s only a matter of time, and Faye does not want to be caught doing what she’s doing. Slowly, so as not to disturb the bushes around her, Faye reaches into her bag and replaces the Ginsberg collection with the first book she feels: The Rise of the American Nation, their history textbook. On the cover is a bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson surrounded by a monochrome of bright teal. She does this so that when Margaret finally notices her, which she quickly does, and walks over to her and says “What are you doing?” Faye can respond “Homework.”
“Oh,” says Margaret, and this makes sense to her, since everyone knows Faye to be a studious, hardworking, brainy, scholarship-getting girl. And thus Faye does not have to explain her deeper motives, that she’s here reading questionable poetry and pretending to be an oboist.
“What homework?” says Margaret.
“History.”
“Jeez, Faye. Boring.”
“Yeah, it really is,” Faye says, though she does not find history boring at all.
“It’s all so boring,” Margaret says. “School is so boring.”
“It’s terrible,” Faye says, but she worries that she sounds insincere. Because of course she loves school. Or maybe more accurately she loves that she’s good at school.
“I cannot wait to be finished,” says Margaret. “I want to be done.”
“Yeah,” Faye says. “It won’t be long.” And this fact, the quickly coming end of the semester, has lately been filling her with dread. Because she loves the clarity that school brings: the single-minded purpose, the obvious expectations, how everyone knows you’re a good person if you study hard and score well on exams. The rest of your life, however, is not judged in this manner.
“Do you read here a lot?” Margaret asks. “Behind the building?”
“Sometimes.”
Margaret stares out at the black cornfield before them and seems to consider this. She puffs lightly on her cigarette. Faye follows her lead, stares blankly ahead and tries to act aloof.
“You know,” says Margaret, “I always knew I was a special kid. I always knew I had certain talents. That everyone liked me.”
Faye nods, to agree, maybe, or to show she’s listening, interested.
“And I knew I’d grow up to be a special woman. I always knew that.”
“Uh-huh.”