The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [71]
I can’t look at her face, or my own face in the mirror. I can’t sleep; thoughts come too quickly, one on another. If I were a machine, I’d be a ticker-tape printing. I wonder if I am a ticker-tape; if everything about me, everything I thought I knew, is false. My life a pretense, an evasion—thoughts tick away, too fast—me as I want to be, not as I am. I get up, turn on a light, but don’t dare go outside. I sit at the card table we use for meals. I sit, holding on. I know that if I let go, even once, I will go to the balcony and jump to my death. I don’t know why this should be so, but it is so. I sit for hours.
When it grows light outside, I get up and go to the bathroom, clinging to the walls, still afraid to let go. I imagine that I am on a space walk, and my tether must not break. I am afraid to wake my roommate, afraid that she’ll be angry. I lie down in bed but am afraid to sleep. Later, she wakes up and wonders if she should take me to a hospital. No, I say. She cuts a grapefruit and hands half of it to me. I begin to cry, because I think she hates me, but now she wants to feed me. Not like the Jimmy Cagney movie, I say, where he grinds the grapefruit into a woman’s face, and I am crying. It’s a bad trip, she says. And I say, I guess so, and for the rest of the day she mothers me, watching me and feeding me and not going out, because she’s afraid to leave me alone. All that Saturday, we watch old movies. She makes popcorn and hot chocolate. We watch Kirk Douglas in Ulysses, which I think is the story of Jesus.
On Sunday I am better, but still shaky. You have to pull yourself together, she tells me. You can do it. We had planned to walk to a friend’s apartment, a horn player who lives with a woman named Barbara, a Rockette. As frightened as I am, I am not going to pass up the chance to meet a Rockette. The windows of the building across the street from her apartment are blind eyes that spark with malice; watching us, and mocking. It is difficult to be with people; the words they use, everything they do, has too much meaning; inside the poem of their lives, I can’t keep track of my own. I want to sleep. I am a graceless guest. I spill half a plate of food on the floor. No matter, she says. Barbara is a cheerful woman, and a good cook. She fills my plate again and says something that makes me smile for the first time in days. Happy Easter, she says. On Monday I am afraid to put on a pair of shoes. I stare at the shoes in my closet and am afraid of them all. I have to force myself to get dressed and take the bus to work. It is weeks before I can ride the subway without an offhand temptation to throw myself on the tracks. I write to a friend, “I think I need to live better, but I have to do things step by step. It is the journey of the embryo.”
I am working for the South Dakota Arts Council in a junior high school. An irrepressible seventh-grade boy who has for days been writing passionate poems about motorcycles and TransAms says to me during last period on Friday afternoon: “This is the best week we ever had in school. You’re here. At noon on Tuesday in the gym we had a guy from the L.A. Lakers. And on Thursday some convicts from the State Pen came to talk to us. And next week we’re off, for Easter.”
One bright Sunday morning, my husband and I are awakened by a knock on our bedroom door. It’s a small town, and sometimes we wake to find a friend sound asleep on the living room sofa, having wandered in after the bars closed. But it’s unusual for anyone