An American Childhood - Annie Dillard [95]
When rage or boredom reappeared, each seemed never to have left. Each so filled me with so many years’ intolerable accumulation it jammed the space behind my eyes, so I couldn’t see. There was no room left even on my surface to live. My rib cage was so taut I couldn’t breathe. Every cubic centimeter of atmosphere above my shoulders and head was heaped with last straws. Black hatred clogged my very blood. I couldn’t peep, I couldn’t wiggle or blink; my blood was too mad to flow.
For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn’t remember how to forget myself. I didn’t want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else—but swerve as I might, I couldn’t avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn’t hush.
So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet—inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at last their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted.
Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?
I QUIT THE CHURCH. I wrote the minister a fierce letter. The assistant minister, kindly Dr. James H. Blackwood, called me for an appointment. My mother happened to take the call.
“Why,” she asked, “would he be calling you?” I was in the kitchen after school. Mother was leaning against the pantry door, drying a crystal bowl.
“What, Mama? Oh. Probably,” I said, “because I wrote him a letter and quit the church.”
“You—what?” She began to slither down the doorway, weak-kneed, like Lucille Ball. I believe her whole life passed before her eyes.
As I climbed the stairs after dinner I heard her moan to Father, “She wrote the minister a letter and quit the church.”
“She—what?”
Father knocked on the door of my room. I was the only person in the house with her own room. Father ducked under the doorway, entered, and put his hands in his khakis’ pockets. “Hi, Daddy.” Actually, it drove me nuts when people came in my room. Mother had come in just last week. My room was getting to be quite the public arena. Pretty soon they’d put it on the streetcar routes. Why not hold the U.S. Open here? I was on the bed, in uniform, trying to read a book. I sat up and folded my hands in my lap.
I knew that Mother had made him come—“She listens to you.” He had undoubtedly been trying to read a book, too.
Father looked around, but there wasn’t much to see. My rock collection was no longer in evidence. A framed tiger swallowtail, spread and only slightly askew on white cotton, hung on a yellowish wall. On the mirror I’d taped a pencil portrait of Rupert Brooke; he was looking off softly. Balanced on top of the mirror were some yellow-and-black FALLOUT SHELTER signs, big aluminum ones, which Judy had collected as part of her antiwar effort. On the pale maple desk there were, among other books and papers, an orange thesaurus, a blue three-ring binder with a boy’s name written all over it in every typeface, a green assignment notebook, and Emerson’s Essays.
Father began, with some vigor: “What was it you said in this brilliant letter?” He went on: But didn’t I see? That people did these things—quietly? Just—quietly? No fuss? No flamboyant gestures. No uncalled-for letters. He was forced to conclude that I was deliberately setting