LITMIR.BIZ

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a year. Thanksgiving is spent at school. Parents can come visit you. There are no rules, just customs. Every senior makes a speech at graduation. I am given a collection of last year’s graduation speeches to take home with me at my interview. My mother is impressed with how self-assured the students seem. I’m not. The speeches are all the same: Before I came to Buxton I was selfish and now I’m not. Or subtitled , I Was Lost and Now I Am Found. All that impressed me was their policy about leaving. You can’t.

      I didn’t bring the right clothes. My roommates laugh at me every time I walk through the door. I figured the dress code was L.L.Bean, Levi’s, turtlenecks, flannel shirts, work boots—in other words, basic country, but it’s not. It’s charge a bunch of cowlneck sweaters and gauchos at Bloomingdale’s with your parents’ credit card and complain when the ice and salt ruin your new high-heeled boots. I dream every night that my mother is burning up in a white clapboard house. I want to rescue her, to save her, but I leave the house empty-handed every time, shaking with fear as red and gold flames leap up and devour it. I stand on the dark street, flanked by the Rocky Mountains, sobbing. Then, as if someone flipped all the lights on at once, the sky turns white. I am blinded by the light and there was no fire at all. Strangers walk past me not understanding why I made such a big deal over a house that wasn’t even burning.

      I am not allowed to go home for another eight weeks. In the meantime my mother sends me an extra blanket because I am freezing. The box arrives bent and one side is ripped open. The blanket is black and gummy from where it was pressed into the floor of the mail truck and God knows what else. There is no note.

      

      There is a list posted every Tuesday right before they ring the bell for dinner. If the faculty thinks you are emotionally well adjusted there is a gold star next to your name, which means you can study in your room during day- and nighttime study halls. This is not a reward. This is not a popularity contest. This is a custom. I wait by the bulletin board, like a starving animal, ravenous for affirmation. Even though I always have a star I still feel like nothing.

      The school wants me to see a psychiatrist. I prepare myself for what my mother will say because I’ve heard it my whole life: “You know what my mother always said to me? She said, ‘Where is it written you have to be happy. Show me where that is written.’ You know what a real problem is, Cathy? Cancer. That is a real problem. Stu Weiner has cancer. That is a real problem.” But she surprises me. “Well,” she says. “I have real problems, Cathy, I have to get a new secretary.”

      There are a lot more customs than they let on about: Don’t drink or get high. Don’t go in the opposite sex’s dorm. Be happy and well adjusted. It is easy to be happy about all the customs because if you are not happy about the customs it means you do not have enough school spirit, which means you are a menace to the community. Which means you won’t get a star next to your name and you might have to be removed from the school community, in the middle of the night if necessary, like my last roommate, Theresa, or be held back a year in broad daylight, like Oscar. Oscar’s mother committed suicide when he was five and his father is a very busy Broadway producer. They live in the Dakota. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are his neighbors, but he hardly gets to see them anymore because he is away at school. Oscar has been a sophomore twice and is on his way to being a junior for the second time in a row. Oscar hardly ever has a star next to his name.

      Another custom is that it is not against the customs to smoke cigarettes. This is a good custom.

      

      A taxi picks me up Thursday afternoons and drives me to my psychiatrist’s red barn house. It feels like a house where a family eats dinner together and laughs so much peas and carrots come out of their noses. It looks like a house people can’t wait to come home to. I wish I lived in this house. “So why don’t we begin with your childhood,” she says warmly.

      I talk for forty-five minutes. When I’m done she says, “Do you have a mother?”

      “Do I have a mother?” I laugh out loud.

      “Oh,” she says, “because you didn’t mention her once.” Our time is up.

      

      My first weekend home my mother makes my favorite meal: shrimp ragout with green noodles. My sister, who is back from Colorado, is there and so are some of my mother’s friends. My mother says, “Well, Catherine, I think you are in terrific shape. I think that school is fabulous for you. Doesn’t Cathy seem like she is in great shape? Here’s to Buxton.” Everyone toasts me. I am beaming.

      My sister follows me to the bathroom. As I pee she says, “I just had a fight with Mom.” My adrenaline is pumping. My mother has always liked my sister better. She is the one consulted on family matters, the one my mother talks to, the one my mother acknowledges as an equal. She is the one holding the map in the front seat, like an adult at fifteen, navigating our way across long car trips through France. I am the four-year-old sitting in the backseat bored out of my mind pretending to be a cat. Maybe my sister will finally move over in my mother’s mind and there will be room for me. “I told her she was going to lose you if she didn’t start giving you credit,” my sister continues. “It is so typical of her to give Bux-ton all the credit for how great you are.” She rips off a wad of toilet paper and hands it to me.

      “But is that what she meant?” I ask, wiping myself. As usual everything has a deeper meaning to my sister and it went right over my head.

      “ Of course it is,” she explains as she pees before letting me flush. “She never gets it. She has no boundaries. I told her, she better start paying attention or you will run away so far, so fast, she will never find you.” None of this ever occurred to me. But two days later, as I sit with my head pressed against the bus window on my way back to school, it is all I think about. I watch the black pavement accumulate into miles. The rhythmic pounding of the road under the wheels lulls me to sleep. I am gently traveling farther and farther away.

      Almost half my life has passed without a father. The implications of this idea get bigger and bigger while my actual memories get smaller and smaller, until they just turn to dust and disperse in the atmosphere. I remember nothing that is not captured and secured firmly in place by a camera. I have a picture of my father and me fishing in Aspen that my sister took. We carry fishing poles and are wearing windbreakers. He has wading boots that go all the way up to his thighs. I don’t remember anything else about that day. Everything beyond the white borders of photographs is gone.

      I am so desperate for memories, pictures I’m not even in become events in my life: my parents on a yacht traveling the Greek islands, the two of them in a restaurant in Europe smiling patiently as a waiter prepares something tableside. What my father smelled like, what his voice sounded like, what his hands felt like on my back—it is all gone. I walk through my life numb, barely feeling what is happening because it will all disappear anyway. I believe it is manipulative to miss him. He died a long time ago. It isn’t important anymore. I don’t tell anyone what I am feeling. I am fine. One Saturday night I see Interiors at the local movie theater. It is the best movie I have ever seen. It is everything I am inside. I start pretending I am being filmed. During filming I am not alone, which is good and I feel good because I am serving a purpose for the human race. I love the characters in depressing movies. I want to repay the favor.

      I have a dream that I am alone. Everyone is gone and I am walking through an empty city. The psychiatrist interprets it as being about my father. She is so literal. It annoys me. I interrupt her and say, “Oh please spare me all the psychobabble mumbo jumbo. My father’s death had absolutely no effect on me.” I skip my next appointment.

      I can devour Anna Karenina, Emma, Howards End, and War and Peace but I can’t find Czechoslovakia on a map. I remember concepts; ideas but not specifics. The SAT is my new enemy. I score badly enough to seem dumb but not badly enough for anyone to realize that I am just a person who tests badly. Multiple-choice test taking is a skill I don’t have. People much dumber than me score beautifully. I manage to get 300 more points than the 250 points they give you just for knowing how to fill in your name and social security number. A tutor is hired so I can get into a good college. At this point, getting into

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