BEANSTALK and other shorts

Secret Lives

Cathy sometimes wondered about the lives she might have had. Everyone has plenty of might-have-beens, she supposed. But hers all divided cleanly into two waves, where they frothed up on the rock of her inherited mental illness. Sometimes she thought of her condition as if it were a shark, its fin cleaving the surface, its wide mouth swallowing all other possible futures like less aggressive fish. They were still in her stomach, somewhere, swimming around like guppies, goggling at her through the curved glass sides.

There was the fish labeled Preacher’s Wife. That one had been pretty easy to let go of. It’s true she’d wanted desperately to marry Billy: he was a saintly, handsome man. But she wouldn’t have stayed happy in the church of her childhood; and anyway, he had picked Connie.  Connie! With the oversized hips!At the time she had cried in the closet; but probably Billy had saved her a messy divorce.

She did sometimes regret her abandoned dreams of being an English professor. A life in academia would have suited her. She liked chalkboards, and books, and reading until her eyes burned and her extremities were numb. She loved slicing sentences to find the living heart of a good metaphor; or chasing a word back to its most primitive ancestors. She liked the atmosphere of colleges, well-groomed and tended, with a mix of liberal values and tense sturdy deadlines in the air. She liked learning. She liked men with goatees and tweed jackets with patches on the elbows; she liked the snatches of profanity and popular music that floated around the cafeteria, mixed with triple-jointed words that students tossed off with self-conscious ease. How simple, what a good fit, it would have been.

But in real life, she never finished her AA. None of the certificates and top grades in High School had prepared her for the strain of living on her own, policing her own study habits and bedtimes and chores and commitments. Without her parents there to distract her with their posturing and rule-making and drama, she fell down the dark well that had been waiting for her all along. She couldn’t sleep; she couldn’t wake up; she couldn’t turn in her work on time or even go to class regularly. She was far too busy looking at the ceiling over her bed, trying to think of any reason to roll over and put her feet on the floor. Just that. What for? So she could stand under the ten thousandth shower, eat the twenty thousandth bowl of cereal, go bouncing in her silent cold bubble to the 100 thousandth lecture on things she knew already? Why? What was the point of proving herself? For whom was she doing all this?

Cathy had started  this adventure just to get away from home. Now that she had a life, she couldn’t remember what she had planned to do with it. So how could she move in any direction?

To get out of bed each morning was to reinvent the Universe from scratch. It was all too exhausting. And nobody was cheering. She had never been taught to value her own opinion. And there was no one else to please any more. So one day she stopped. Just stopped. It was peaceful.

But the world gets very upset with people who STOP. Eventually they came looking for her. They dragged her around and shouted and pumped her with food and drugs and screeched and cried. But Cathy stayed STOPPED. Stayed peaceful. She had finally found the answer, and the answer was: I won’t.

In the end they put her with all the others who say “I won’t” to life. Some of them said it by rioting, screaming and kicking and setting things on fire. These ones had the staff running after them, poking, reporting, administering more drugs and more hysterical therapies. Cathy sat quietly slumped against the wall with her legs splayed out, and watched. It was very interesting. She didn’t have to do anything, they did it all. They dressed her and fed her and occasionally combed her hair. She gazed on with a vague smile.

If nothing was happening, she daydreamed with her eyes open, and her smile exactly the same. She daydreamt about how nice it would have been to be an English professor. She would have liked that. She would have been a good one. If it hadn’t been so  hard. If she hadn’t had to reinvent the Universe, every single day, out of Nothing. If there hadn’t been no one to live for, not even her.