Isolation of Chaos

We’re driving too fast down a little back road in or around Fulton. I’m not sure exactly where. We keep passing tiny isolated farms, some well kept-up and others looking like they’re about to collapse. A few herds of cows, or the occasional lone horse, watches the little green car zip past. I’m sitting in the front seat watching the scenery intently, as I always do. Kristen talks to Heather, who’s sitting behind me, as she drives, and I chime in every so often.

We’re on our way to Missouri Girls Town, a home for girls with some kind of behavioral problem, and who have nowhere else to go. I pictured a bunch of homeless, desperate, even slightly crazy girls about 12 years old. I also remembered seeing the sign on the highway last year, and laughing with my mom about how it was at the same exit as the little town of Bachelor. I always kind of thought it must be a few strip-shows short of a redneck whore house. We're supposed to be teaching these victimized, deprived girls how to write creative nonfiction. Everyone else seems a little nervous, but I can't wait. It can't be too bad, can it? Famous last words.

About halfway there, we realize that we should have stuffed the “Getting to Know You” sheets into the girls’ folders. Heather and I form an assembly line to do that, and are still working as we pull in the gate.

Girls Town is a little cluster of low brown houses on the side of the highway. They all look the same, and are connected, or separated by, a maze of roads. We try going straight, and wander around for a while before spotting the other cars we came with at the top of a small hill to the left, next to one of the taller buildings that stands a little apart from the others.

We all crept inside uncertainly, and up the steps into a large room. The windows were huge, and the chairs were set up in an inviting way, but it just didn’t seem welcoming at all somehow. We hurriedly discussed the plan of action as we heard the racing footfalls and screaming voices charge up the stairs…

When I was about seven years old, my mom was very selective about my television viewing habits. I couldn’t watch too much, and it had to be educational. Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood held little interest for me. Reading Rainbow only had little kids’ books that looked boring, and I only liked a few episodes which were never on anyway.

I eventually learned that the cartoons my classmates were allowed to watch were on another channel. I developed a system of getting around my mom’s restrictions. When she was busy in the kitchen, upstairs, or at work, I would sneak into the living room and turn on Duck Tales or Garfield. Saturday mornings held a wealth of cartoons to choose from, and I would switch back and forth between channels during the commercials trying to watch them all at once. My mom hated it! A few times, she even went as far as to unplug the TV before she left for work early on Saturday morning. It stopped me for a few minutes, before I noticed the plug lying guiltily next to the outlet. I took vindictive pleasure in plugging it back in. I sometimes remembered to unplug it again so mom wouldn’t know what I had done. But I think she knew anyway.

I’m at an end-of-the-semester party for the foreign students in Japan, in December of my junior year of college, and already regretting only being able to spend a semester abroad. We’re just about to leave this great restaurant, “Asian Days,” to go get ice cream, and we stop in the bathroom on the way out. As usual, I let the others go before me, though I hate making people wait for me. I stand outside the stalls and wait.

After a moment, the door opens and I see a young woman and a little girl begin to walk in. The girl sees me and freezes. Her eye grow huge. She clutches her mother’s skirt and takes a shaky step back. The mother laughs nervously, glancing from me to her daughter, and says something. I’m sure she’s saying, “Don’t be afraid, it’s just a foreigner. I’ll protect you.”

The girl isn’t convinced. She doesn’t say anything, but she clings tighter to her mother’s legs. They back up and close the door. I’m just too scary for little kids.

I had a pet cockatiel once. I got her from a rich family who had to get rid of her for some reason. She was a beautiful mottled yellow and gray. I tried to take her out to play with for a while, but she wouldn’t stay with me, and kept trying to bite me. After a while I stopped letting her out. She died after a few years when she was unable to pass an infertile egg.

I had a pet dove for a few years. She was calmer and gentler than my cockatiel, but she didn’t like to be held or played with either. I liked to listen to her coo, though. She laid infertile eggs every so often, and after my cockatiel, I was afraid she would die like my last bird. But I found them on the floor of the cage every few months, and it wasn’t killing her. One day when I was a senior in high school, I found her sitting on the cage floor with her head flopped over at a strange angle. She was still alive, but her neck was broken. I think all her calcium had been going to her eggs instead of her all-too-fragile bones. I called in my mom.

“Oh… She’s in pain. You’re going to have to be put out of her misery. Dad’s hatchet is probably downstairs on the basement shelves,” she said. “Take her outside,” she said.

I went down numbly to look for the little axe. I sobbed down there, when I had trained myself not to cry years ago. Nothing could touch me, but this did. I went back upstairs.

“…Could you or Dad do it?”

“No, it’s really your bird…”

So I took the bird and the axe outside, and found a brick to lay the dove on. She didn’t have the strength to move. I knew I would have to swing hard, and that I couldn’t miss. I swung, and hit. But she had so many feathers there, I guess they blocked the blade. She twitched and my breath caught in my throat as I swung again, over and over, as fast as I could. I couldn’t sever the head. There were just too many feathers. But she stopped moving. I wiped my eyes on my arm. I don’t remember if I had dug a hole to bury her in before, or if I did it afterwards. But I buried her in the garden. Then I went inside and refused to look at my mom.

For a while I had parakeets. The green female died in the beginning of my first year of college, while I was gone. I’m not sure why. She bit the most, and I can’t say I mourned her passing too much. The blue and yellow male who was left was always my favorite. I tried to give him more attention while I was home over winter break. A few days before spring break, my mom sent me an e-mail to say that he had finally died. It hurt, but I accepted his death quietly. One less cage to clean out, I guess. Maybe I wasn’t meant to have pet birds. A couple of days later I went home, and saw the parakeet cage still hanging in the dining room. I thought that was awfully lazy of my mom, not to even put the cage away. Did she even clean it out? I wouldn’t put it past her not to. I looked in. There lay my bird, stiff on the floor. Mom thought I should take care of it.

“Why!? Why couldn’t you do it yourself?”

“Well honey, it’s your bird,” she told me. She thought I would want to do it myself.

I never got another bird after that.

My mom used to shout at me all the time, trying to force me to study, getting frustrated when I didn’t concentrate and didn’t do perfectly in school. SHE never had trouble with spelling because SHE would spend her nights studying. She didn’t watch TV. She didn’t have friends to distract her from her work. Or not many. Neither did I.

I had a spelling test every Friday. I hated Friday mornings, because my mom would test me on my spelling words on the way to school. I remember going along with it, under protest. One morning I wouldn’t. We were just across the street from our house, and she threw my spelling book down on the sidewalk. She screamed. She was crying. She screeched that I could walk to school by myself, and I was going to fail spelling, first grade, and all the rest of school. I would end up flipping burgers at McDonalds for the rest of my life. She stalked back to the house, still crying in frustration.

I stood sulking uncomfortably for a minute, not sure if I should go after her.

I picked up my spelling book and slunk off to school, wanting to cry too. I believed her when she said I would fail at life just because of a first grade spelling test. Worst of all, she was mad at me.

Over ten years later, when I was looking at foreign languages I could study in college, I thought Latin would be interesting. I mentioned it to my mom, to see what she thought of the idea.

“Oh, Latin! I barely passed that class. Hated it.”

HER? Doing badly in a class? She’s not perfect? This was news to me! Especially with a language I thought was so close to English. I hardly knew how to respond.

I never thought about Latin again. If she didn’t understand it easily, how could I ever pass the class?

I was waiting for the train home from Osaka one night in Japan, after a long day of walking and shopping. I had a bag in each hand, and stood on the platform waiting for the train. A little old lady shuffled up behind me and asked me something. I’m fairly sure she wanted to know what time it was. I turned to look at her, to give her my customary “Sumimasen, wakarimasen” (I’m sorry, I don’t understand). She looked blearily at my pale face and laughed in embarrassment, apologizing and walking away to ask someone else.

The woman’s eyesight must have been bad, to mistake me for a Japanese person even from behind. I don’t have the build, hair, or skin of a Japanese girl. I tried my hardest to fit in, and I did a better job than the louder, more obnoxious Americans, but I still got the customary stares of amazement everywhere I went. It was almost fun.

In grade school, I got used to the idea that no one liked me, because it was almost true. I had a couple of friends at school, but the rest of the class either ignored or tormented me. To this day, I’m not sure why. All I can think of is that I didn’t play sports and I wasn’t interested in fashion and things like that. No one understood me, I had no doubt about that. I learned not to show my hurt feelings or talk much so people would leave me alone. My best friend couldn’t do the same thing. She had to switch schools. She abandoned me at school, even though we still saw each other at least every other weekend. My remaining friend at school wasn’t interested in most of the things I was, but we talked at recess and shared our ostracism, so we were friends. I’m still friends with both of them, though the other two never liked each other, and I drifted away from both of them in high school.

My all-female high school couldn’t have been more different. I made a few friends who were quiet like me, and soon I had a whole group I could claim as my own. There were different sections of the group of course, but I could talk to any of them. One shared my love of animals and all things Japanese. Another declared herself God, and I was her archangel of Pestilence, because I had never pissed her off. Some I could joke around with, others I had known since my first few days at high school. They were all my friends, and they all accepted me and wanted to spend time with me. My mom told me that I had more of a social life in my senior year of high school than the rest of my life combined. It took me about that long to get used to the idea of really having friends.

In my first year of college I gained a smaller, more intimate group of friends and had the time of my life. All of them were male except my new roommate. I promptly made friends with the two guys my dad had seen on the first day and told me jokingly to avoid. My roommate had the only car in our group for a while, so every weekend we would go to Columbia for various adventures, usually to the mall. Almost every night we went to Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, or occasionally another place in town. It was amazing to be able to do these little bits of traveling so often, and I thrived that year. We also smuggled in a kitten, who was moved to my house after being caught, and a ferret, who had to move in with a friend of mine from high school when our suite-mates couldn’t stand her smell. My roommate and I signed up to live together again the following year, and I was excited, despite some irresponsible habits of hers I couldn’t stand.

Some time over the summer, I received a letter from Westminster, informing me of my roommate and room for the following year. The room was the same, but the roommate was some girl from Washington, Missouri. My first thought was, how could she!? My roommate left me! She didn’t even have the decency to tell me! I wrote her an angry e-mail. A few days later, she returned my e-mail saying that she didn’t know what happened, but it wasn’t her fault. Right. I didn’t believe that for a second. We went through room-pick, and they don’t just separate people like that. She had to have asked for it. And she couldn’t even tell me herself. She denied it, but I knew the truth. But she assured me that we’d still go out places all the time. That didn’t happen either. I went to her room sometimes because she couldn’t be bothered to come up the stairs to mine, and we watched a movie or talked for a few minutes… We went to Columbia once, maybe twice. She and her new friends helped me get ready for the SAE pledge auction dinner. She reluctantly took me to Sonic for lunch at the end of the year, only because she could bring someone else to talk to. The rest of my old friends were a little more friendly, but they had rarely been interested in doing things with just me. My new roommate moved across the hall, and I retreated to TV and the internet.

Our first night at Girls Town, I was excited to meet my group. My hopes for their accomplishments flew high, but lost some altitude when I saw many of the short attention spans and unwillingness to share that we were up against. Our schedule of three short papers and two revisions didn’t look so realistic anymore.

Three of our five girls were really enthusiastic about writing. They wrote about their pictures of families and friends, and were eager to share. One girl proceeded to color a latex glove blue.

The last girl was Lisa. She sat quietly in the corner stealing glances around every so often, but quickly lowering her eyes when someone else looked at her. She muttered through her “getting to know you” sheet, and I didn’t quite catch what vegetable she hated most, or her favorite TV show. When the rest of us started to write paragraphs about the photos we brought, she looked at hers for a minute and then got up and walked away to sit on the other side of the room. She wrote a couple of sentences, which she adamantly refused to share.

Lisa didn’t fit my picture of an ideal student for this class at all. I had been under the impression that these girls were here because they wanted to be. Could a person be more uncooperative, more unfriendly? I liked the others, but I didn’t know what to do with this quieter girl who refused to share her writing, if she did it at all.

And I wonder if my teachers have felt the same way about me, because I am exactly the same.

One early tactic I tried to get people to like me in grade-school was depression. I figured, I feel bad for people when they're sad, and that would make me be nicer, so maybe if I'm depressed, people will be nicer to me! So I tried it. Unfortunately, the only person I really talked to at that point was my best friend. She ignored it. And I couldn't keep it up for long.

I remember a saying I heard in high school, that self-pity is like a feather bed. I don’t remember why. I think it’s because it’s comfortable unless you use it too much. I think I must suffer from too much self-pity, or maybe I revel in it, because through my eyes, all the world is sweetness and light. Nothing is truly THAT bad.

I’ve wanted a dog ever since I can remember. I used to research different breeds for fun, and I still do sometimes.

My mom hates dogs. When she was growing up, her sister had every kind of pet you can imagine, including some dogs, so I suspect that’s where my mom’s dislike comes from.

I’ve always gone to the animal shelters with my aunt, my mom’s sister who had all the animals. She was always looking for big, shaggy, even strange-looking dogs. I always egged her on, and sometimes I even convinced her to bring a dog or cat home. I wished she would get ME a dog, but it was almost as good when she got one.

For a while, I wanted a small dog. I remember asking for a Pug for a year or so. Then for years, I wanted a Great Dane. It was as close as I could get to having a horse. More recently, I’m interested in smaller dogs again.

I did everything I could to convince my mom to let me have a dog. I did all the research I could, and took great care of the cat, bugs, snakes, fish, gerbils, and whatever else I had at the time. I promised I would take it for walks every day, even pay for it and all the food it would need. I drew pictures of me and a dog, reaching for each other and crying, separated by a table. Nothing worked. We lived on a corner, and didn’t have a fenced-in yard, and my mom wasn’t about to take care of such a high-maintenance pet, no matter how loving it might be. The answer was no. The answer is still no. To her, it always will be.

In Japan, I spent a few weekends with a native family. There was a girl around my age named Saki, who spoke English almost fluently. Her little brother was named Yuu, and he was very interested in learning English. He rushed to meet me at the door when I arrived, and spoke a few carefully practiced lines to me, which I praised him for. But beyond greetings, he wasn’t so confident. He would start to say, “Do you like…” then stop and whisper to Saki, or consult the dictionary for a few minutes. Saki would tell him he could ask for himself. Then he would blush and slowly ask me if I liked Japanese food, or Disney movies, or dogs.

Another time, I was cruising Osaka with a friend, and we sat down to rest in a rich neighborhood. A young couple came by with a son who looked about three years old. They walked past, then the father and son came back.

“May my son speak to you?” the man asked in lightly accented English. We nodded enthusiastically, waiting for a well-trained ‘hello’.

“Hello, what is your name? My name is Hiroshi (I really don’t remember his name). How are you?” The little boy spoke in perfect English, with no trace of an accent. My friend, who was in the level 4 Japanese class, told him her name and said he spoke perfect English (all in Japanese). I smiled, nodded, and told him my name too. They left soon after, so the mother could look in a store with Italian words like “Gucci” and “Armani” in it.

Maybe if I had been tutored in another language while I was learning to speak my own I would have looked more like an intelligent person, rather than a trained parrot.

After the first night at Girls Town, Lisa brought some of her writing almost every week. She always had a couple of hand-written pages which she would neatly place on her folder and cover with her arms while she sat just a bit outside the circle, silently watched the other girls laughing and reading their few paragraphs out loud. Brian would always ask her, “You want to read yours tonight”? And Lisa would always smile and shake her head. They were just joking. I asked very seriously and enthusiastically once, and her head shot up with a very clear “No.”

She would let Brian read her papers privately, though. Once she even let all the Westminster students read what she had written. It was about going to the mall with her sister and her dad. The spelling was bad, but it was quite well-written. She denied that, but we assured her that it was.

The week before spring break, everyone was too excited to concentrate, so we mainly ended up talking. We discussed spring break plans, and the girls talked a little about Girls Town, a subject we were never quite comfortable discussing. One girl, Mandy, was upset because she had nowhere to go, so she had to stay there over spring break. She didn’t even know if anyone else would be there.

Then Lisa jumped into the conversation, not sitting back quite as much as she usually did. She told Mandy that there were other people staying, and it wouldn’t be as bad as it was during school time. The conversation shifted to the subject of the different residential buildings they had on campus, with Lisa imparting her knowledge to the three younger girls. It sounded like she had lived there for years already. But she also sounded just like a big sister, sharing wisdom with the others. For once, she came out of her shell. And she made herself understood to her peers the way she didn’t think she could through her writing.

The next week, Lisa wouldn’t talk even when we asked her a question. If she had come out of her shell before, the shell had clamped over her tighter than ever over spring break. She didn’t bring any writing, and neither did the others, as usual. She rushed out of the room after class without a backward glance.

“Aww… You’re leaving us so soon?” I was only half joking. She smiled a little tensely. I reluctantly followed the group up the stairs, looking back at the door she left through. She’s going back where I long and fear to go, to isolation, where no one understands.