“And as the bombshells of my daily fears explode, I try to trace them to my youth.”—Indigo Girls, Galileo
The hardwood floors in my childhood home were good for sliding. There was a slippery, bare strip between the edge of the living room rug and the wall just wide enough for my brother and me, pajama clad, to drag ourselves and sometimes each other, along the length of the room. I pretended it into a runway and modeled beach towel super hero capes and evening gowns in a Happy New Year tiara from 1988. More often, it became the stage for musical and dramatic productions, usually written and directed by and starring Emily Locke White.
There were impromptu productions, too. I don’t think I’ve ever been immune to stage fright, but improvised performances don’t make me so nervous.
So it was that, one evening before dinner, I called my mom out of the kitchen and set the stage: the widest patch of bare floor was a lake, and I was going to drown in it. She was to watch me from the carpet, as if it were a distant shore.
I wriggled along the slippery surface, pretending to splash and fight for air. As I flailed closer to her, she reached with both arms into the hazardous water, across the fourth wall, and pulled me out. I collapsed in her lap, my little feet still dangling over the edge. I tossed one arm across my forehead (where did I learn that?) and, legitimately exhausted, gasped out, “It’s too late; I’m dead.”
And, scene.
But my mom followed her own script, in which she was not the lone member of the audience but the mother of a drowning child. She shook me gently, but insistently, stage-wailed and began to act out resuscitation. On my back, across my mom’s knees, with her soft, pink cheek close to my hair, my imagination got the better of me and my game lurched to a halt. Something had gone terribly wrong. An invisible string knotted around the lump in my throat and yanked me forward on to my knees. I scrambled up and I stood across from my mother, folding my body in on itself. I wanted to be back in her arms, I wanted to press my face against her shoulder and breath in her familiar scent. But I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.
“I don’t want to play anymore.” Every time I have woken from a nightmare in the last fifteen years, every time I’ve had a dream so frightening that my ears burn around the edges and my feet turn to ice, I have felt the same chilled dread swell up between my lungs and creep across my abdomen just underneath my skin. Every time, the sting of cold sweat reminds me of the hardwood floors in my childhood home and my mom sitting on her knees in the living room and my own small voice saying, pleading, I don’t want to play anymore. I didn’t want my mother and me to lose each other and my imagination had brought me too close to the possibility. It was much to real to pretend.
I guess, in the most basic sense, it was the first time I was conscious of the widest boundaries of my own comfort zone. I had been afraid before, of course. I was shy around dogs and strangers. I didn’t like to go to the cold, dark laundry room by myself when the washer was running. Being on stage made me anxious. But I knew, instinctively, that I had tread into a different sort of fear, and I had to come to terms with it on my own. It’s one of my most vivid memories of that house; my first taste of fear.
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