You’d think the president was coming to visit. The silence seems louder than normal as girls go about their morning chores anxiously, mysterious strangers scurry up and down the halls, and staff takes a sterner tone with us than normal.
Today is some seminar called Discovery, and a guy called David is running it. Just hearing his name terrifies those who went through Discovery with him before and “chose out,” which basically means they got booted. Seminars are strictly confidential, so we know absolutely nothing about them, but when we line up outside the dining room, I have the distinct feeling what awaits us inside isn’t Deepak Chopra and borscht. Suddenly, in one grand, sweeping motion, Miss Zuza and Sasha swing open the doors and usher us in to twinkling music.
The dining room has been transformed. Blackout material hangs over the curtains and two large easels stand in front of about thirty folding chairs. I get my first look at boys in months because seated on one side are about fifteen of them with shaved heads. They wear the same uniforms we do, which is unfortunate because blue jean sweatpants look ten times funnier on guys. Glenn, Steve, Sasha, Miss Zuza, and Mr. Peter sit at a table in back, hands folded, faces solemn.
Out of nowhere a voice booms, “Welcome to Discovery!” An enormous man with dark hair and pale skin walks up the aisle toward the front of the room. He introduces himselfand goes over the ground rules.
“If you feel you cannot agree to any of these, please stand.”
I scan the list. Maintain confidentiality, be seated by the time the music ends, wear your name tag in a visible location, no side talking, sit next to someone new after each break, follow the facilitator’s instructions. They’re straightforward enough, I stay seated and look around. No one stands.
“Well, that’s settled, let’s get down to work.”
He starts going over shit that sounds like what we hear on the tapes. I’m half bored and half relieved. You get 100 points, enough for Level 2, if you graduate, so I pay just enough attention to look interested.
He tells us that we all started out as magical children, unfettered, confident, clean. Then certain events happen that inhibit us and from these events we form self-limiting beliefs, things we choose to believe about ourselves that limit our actions. How profound, I can feel myself changing already.
We turn to a page in our packet with two columns, one that says “I am” and the other that says “I am not.” A list of adjectives is under each one. I scroll down the list, mentally circling a mess, dirty, and lazy under the “I am” column, and thin enough, good looking, and lovable under “I am not.” I feel like that some of the time, but I hate how this place tries to get you to say you hate yourself. Whatever, if they want me to say I’m the scum of the earth, I will, just so I can tak, tak kakao and salt.
After a lunch break, we walk back in to the slow intro of the song “Also Sprach Zarathustra” from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Remembering we have to be seated by the end of the song, we all scramble to find a seat.
“First things first, is there anyone with a broken agreement?” David asks.
When no one stands, he shouts, “I said, does anyone have a broken agreement?”
Lara stands. “I forgot my name tag. If I give myself a consequence, can I stay?”
David looks at her. “If I give myself a consequence, can I stay?” he repeats slowly. “Is that what you tried to do at home? Make a deal? I’ll stay grounded one extra day if I can just go to this one party tonight. Please, Mom, please?”
Lara laughs sheepishly.
“IT’S NOT FUNNY, YOUNG LADY.”
She looks up at him, shocked.
“I didn’t think it’d be that big of a deal.”
“Young lady, my experience of you is that you’ll go to any length to get your way. You wanted to make a deal and move on, problem solved. WRONG! Making a deal doesn’t allow you to look at the real problem—why you broke your word in the first place. This will be a more valuable lesson to you than anything I can offer you in this training. Lara, I’m inviting you back to the next Discovery. For your assignment I want one page, front and back, on why I broke my word and what I can do in the future to prevent myself from going unconscious.”
On her way out, Lara’s eye catches mine. There’s no enjoyment in the connection; if anything, she seems almost ashamed. Mr. Peter removes her chair from the group. Jesus, this guy’s a total asshole. I hate how they overanalyze everything here. Next thing you know, forgetting your notebook is actually projecting your subconscious fear of abandonment.
David turns to us, “Who else is just in here to slide by?!” he thunders, pacing back and forth and staring at us.
“Because I do NOT tolerate mediocrity. How you perform in here is a mirror of how you perform IN LIFE. You think it’s just three days, some extra points? How many of you still think everything was just fine back home? I can do drugs, quit school, I’ve got it all under control. Well, how many of you know people that have overdosed, been murdered, how many of you were raped or beaten? Still think it’s a joke? How many of you might be dead if you weren’t in this room right now?”
I flinch when he says raped, but still think he’s being dramatic. He turns to write something on the easel and we all exchange glances. Roxanne puts her finger in her mouth like a gun and Sunny looks too scared to even smile. David turns around, lowers his voice, and addresses us.
“You guys have more hurt than you know how to deal with. I’m here to help you uncover some of that and move on. But you have to be real, you have to be open and committed to becoming your best self. So now, who wants to play a game?”
No one raises their hand. He laughs. “See, even big, mean men like me like to play games.”
He has us play one of those mind fuck games, the kind where the answer seems tricky but it’s actually very simple. A boy named Robbie launches into a complicated answer and halfway through, everyone’s lost. A cute blond kid named Jared patiently tries to explain Robbie’s convoluted theory and keep order. I think he’s their highest-level kid, though obviously not a Level 4 or he’d be back there with Sasha.
I laugh to myself, they’re doing exactly what one of my teachers said cocky people do, go for the hardest answer possible to look smart. I stand up and suggest we think of it more literally, that the answer’s probably simple. They ignore my advice. Halfway through the exercise I figure it out and write it down. Fuck ’em, if they didn’t even want to listen to my advice, they probably won’t believe the answer either.
After another twenty minutes of arguing, David calls time. He calls the staff team to the front. This can’t be good. They start giving us feedback about how quick we were to turn on each other, to act selfish and pushy. Sunny has acceptance issues, Roxanne’s a control freak and perfectionist, Jared has approval needs. They nail Katrina for flirting with the boys. I did notice that when the boys came over she practically gave herself whiplash trying to flip her hair back. Then Sasha asks me to stand up. Wunderbar.
“Mia, you gave great advice but when they didn’t listen, you gave up immediately and sat back the rest of the game. In my experience, this is typical, leaving if things don’t go your way. Look at how many times you ran away from home.”
Glenn stands. “Mia, I saw you write down the answer. By not sharing it, your group lost. All because you wanted to get back at them for not listening to you. Sound anything like what happened between you and Mom? Knowing things that others don’t makes you feel in control, powerful. You always have to be the one holding all the cards, laughing while others try to guess what’s in your hand.”
I want to say that’s ridiculous, but I’d be lying. Growing up with a mother who exercised her intellect for a living, I accepted the oncoming verbal onslaught before arguments even began. Leading a double life not only allowed me to do what I wanted without hurting my mother, it was also an opportunity to level the playing field—for once, I knew something she didn’t, something she couldn’t argue away from me. I learned to view withholding knowledge as power.
“You think making yourself unapproachable protects you,” Glenn continues. “But it just pushes people away.”
I feel my face flush, being exposed in front of everyone is humiliating. I feel like a fool, and a bitch. I’m sure my team hates me now. And my mom, well, she’s a whole other story.
“She didn’t know who they were, Claire.” Paul’s been trying to calm me down since I got home from Kinko’s and threw Mia’s diary in her room. I’m filled with fury, disgust, shame most of all. My daughter, a Jew.
“I don’t care! I hate her! You take care of her from now on.”
“Claire, you’ve got to forgive her. She’s your daughter. You know you don’t hate her.”
“Oh, yes, I do! I’m done forgiving her, this isn’t forgivable! I hope she runs and never comes back!”
She’s your child, she’s on drugs, she’s so unhappy. He begs on her behalf because we can’t both be in the same place at the same time, it’s always been that way. If I’m mad, he’s gentle with her. If he gets angry, I plead her case. If one of us cries, the other’s strong. But nothing will balance this, nothing he says, nothing anyone says.
I don’t want my own daughter.
When Sunny’s singing wakes me up, I feel hungover. I was up till one doing homework, journaling about how I ended up here and what my actions cost me.
We line up and when we hear 2001 start to play we perk up, rush to put on our name tags and find a seat, making mad-dash scrambles to switch seats if we sit next to someone we’ve sat next to before.
The group is considerably smaller and I wonder how many of us will make it through today. David begins predictably, with broken agreements. No one stands and, amazingly, Sasha doesn’t have anyone to rat out.
“Samantha!”
We all jump—what the hell did she do? She stands, slumping over twice as much as usual. David walks over to her—and then smiles.
“Samantha, I’d like you to wear a headband the rest of this training to keep your hair out of your eyes. You up to that?”
Samantha looks at him for a second and then a miracle happens. She smiles and shakes her head yes. We give her the same feedback and she chews half her finger off. Go figure.
“Great,” he says to her. He’s actually starting to sound like a normal person. Until he explains the next process—we have to go up to every single person in the room and hear feedback about ourselves, namely what behaviors they notice in us that hold us back. Four miserable hours later, he calls stop and walks up front.
“You’ve all heard some pretty powerful feedback in the last twenty-four hours. There’s a lot that’s not working for you kids. How long has it been like this? Can you remember the last time you felt really happy? Truly carefree? You kids are in so much pain it immobilizes you, it’s so obvious, yet you try so hard to stuff it down, drug it away. When’s the last time you hugged your dad? Or yelled at him, pushed him away?”
As he speaks, the lights dim and a song begins to play. He asks us to sit on the floor, apart from each other. Staff scurries around us in the dark, dropping something beside us.
“Bring to mind a picture of your dad. Picture how he must have looked when he first saw you in the hospital, how it looked during a favorite memory of yours…Now bring to mind a picture of his face in a particularly painful memory. Maybe he looks hurt because he caught you drinking or in a lie, maybe he looks mad because he’s drunk, maybe he’s about to hit you. Whatever that painful memory is, bring it up.”
I think of the night Paul pinned me to the kitchen floor when I had the screwdriver, that combination of confusion, fury, and pain.
Then I think about my old dad. He’s a blank, a mannequin head with no features. All I can picture is the nightmares, the clown wig, the needles poking. This makes me madder than anything. Mad in a way that I want to cry. Almost. I can always almost cry.
David’s voice is escalating now. “Picture his face during those painful moments, picture how he looked, what he said…Now reach down. There’s a rolled up towel next to you. Sitting cross-legged or on your knees, grab that towel and hit the floor with it, hit it as hard as you feel like hitting it. It’s time to let go of all that pain and anger.”
Some kids have started crying, and before he’s even finished speaking, thuds can be heard across the room. In no time, it grows to loud, thundering thwacks accompanied by yells and cries. He’s talking over them, urging them to let go of it all, of all the anger, all the pain.
I don’t feel the urge to do anything, cry, scream, hit. Numbness has become so familiar that any sort of feeling seems like a virus my body immediately rejects. Back home I did anything to make myself feel alive—fight, use, cut. Nothing ever worked for more than a few hours.
As David keeps coaching, sounds start echoing that don’t even sound human. It reminds me of watching Derek go through withdrawal. I haven’t thought about Derek in so long. I guess when it comes down to it, all men just want sex. Shit, my own father did.
I pick up the towel next to me, kneading it between my palms. What gets me the most about my old dad, even more than the molestation itself, is that he didn’t go to therapy, that he just gave me up. But only a sick fuck would do that, so what does that make me for wishing he had stayed in my life?
After awhile, the energy in the room dies down; everyone’s exhausted themselves. Sensing the change of mood, David softens his voice and a song comes on. People collapse on the floor, some stay on their knees, heads bent over their knees. Looking at them makes me feel sad. That they can feel that intensely and I can’t. That they have a father to cry over and I don’t.
He goes through the exercise again, this time with our mothers. When he asks us to bring to mind a particularly painful moment, I don’t even have to think about it. Her face after seeing me in the bathroom with the razor. I’ve never felt like such a freak in my whole life. Everything I had worried about was confirmed. I was a monster.
I pick up the towel again. The first couple whacks are weak, soft flicks of my wrist that hardly make a sound. I try it again, harder. It makes a satisfying thud that echoes up through my wrist and into my arm. I do it again, harder, and then harder still. Before I know it, a long-sedated voice comes out of me that makes me hit and hit and scream and hit. All the times she looked at me with disgust, all those times she would explode when she was having a bad day, it all tumbles out of me.
But then I start thinking of the life we had before I started distancing myself, before my model horses started collecting dust and my mom became too intrusive a presence. And I miss them, really miss them. I miss how close we used to be.
And then, in spite of promising not to, I cry. I cry for all the times I couldn’t or wouldn’t, for all the times I cried without sound. I cry for what my dad did to me and for what I did to myself. I cry for waking up naked and confused on the Wilkinson sofa. I cry for myself and I cry for my mom, for all the pain he caused her, and then everything I put her through. I want to cry away all the fights, all the drugs. I’m sorry Mommy, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry.
I want to feel her brushing my hair, hugging me tight. I want my mommy. It’s amazing, I’m fifteen and I’m sitting in a room full of kids all crying for their parents, the ones we had before we became cool.
At some point the rage and sadness drains out of me and I collapse and curl up in a ball. A pair of arms encircles me and I open my eyes and look up into Sasha’s. I lean against her and we just rock and rock and rock.
David tells us softly to close our eyes and picture ourselves as children. A photograph comes to mind of me at age four, smiling in my pink dress that Bubbie made, with food all over my face and my eyes squinted up with laughter. Even in the photo you can almost hear the childish giggles. My little self jumps down from the chair and I take her hand and walk her to a forest, the kind I pictured when I still believed in unicorns.
I see myself galloping in Agnews meadow, at my first day at Hopkins when I was still excited about this new private school, swimming in the ocean waves, rubbing my pierced finger against my cousin Rosie’s to become blood sisters, building forts and picking blackberries. Suddenly, I become conscious of light, joyous music playing.
As it gets louder, the lights brighten and I notice for the first time everyone around me, blinking hard as they uncurl from the fetal position like newborns. We all stare at each other as though for the first time and smile. Not polite, cool smiles but big baby ones. We start laughing and hugging and dancing around the room. Jared and I hold hands and spin until we’re dizzy. I roll into Sunny and we giggle and then giggle at our giggling.
David gently tells us to crawl to our small groups. Every time I look over at Samantha we both start laughing again. I can’t remember the last time I felt this happy. I stand up and start sharing with my group before David even gives us any instruction.
“I had no idea I had that much pent up inside of me! No wonder I felt dead all the time, I was only allowing a tiny, dark fraction of myself room to breathe.”
I listen to the room become a chorus of “I didn’t know I could feel this good,” and it occurs to me how little we truly know people, even those we live with. We go through the motions during the day and return each night to our own private hell.
When I crawl into bed tonight, I think about how last night I was the same person in this same bed but in twenty-four hours something’s changed. I think of us all romping around and try to imagine that happening in the real world. It’s sad but I can’t.
And that worries me. That what’s created here can never fully translate into the real world. I push those thoughts out, I can worry about all that later. For now, I just want to fall asleep while I can still hear the laughter and giggles of twenty toddlers trapped in teenagers’ bodies.
“Claire, it’s not working,” my producer says with both regret and frustration.
He’s back from Europe, and we’re sitting in his dining room.
“You know I love your work, but you keep getting behind, this thing with your daughter.”
He’s right. First Mia’s diary, now my job. Losing this project isn’t just a blow emotionally, but financially. I’ll lose the remaining sixty thousand dollars of my contract. And I’m in no shape to look for another job at this point.
I hit Sunset and follow its green curves to the ocean. As populated as LA is, large stretches of beach are always empty. A perfect place to feel completely unmoored.
I’ve managed to cover half of George Polti’s “Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations” all in one lifetime: Erroneous Judgment, an Enemy Loved, Falling Prey to Cruelty or Misfortune, Self-sacrifice for a Kindred, Disaster, Pursuit, Recovery of a Lost One, Deliverance, Discovery of the Dishonor of a Loved One, and, finally, Conflict with a God…
What exactly do you have to say for yourself now, God?
I’m a writer to the bone. I make sense of the world narratively. There is always an overarching design, with recurring motifs, underlying motivations, opposing forces, fallen heroes, and fitting ends. A dramatic structure. Mine has unfolded thus:
Our cheeky heroine meets the unexpected, she suffers trials and tribulations, she wrestles the beast and rescues her only child! A period of calm ensues before calamity strikes again, but she’s up to it! She pulls her from disaster’s door, not a moment too soon! Happiness is on the horizon once again, but wait, wait! There’s a major reversal, A Twist, oh, you clever scenarist! Just as the limo pulls up to paradise, the child, the one our heroine risked all for, the child herself becomes the beast! A changeling who vanquishes our gal with two swift blows! Oh, what a world what a world, all was for naught, the forces of evil have triumphed!
PAN across an expanse of beach as the sun disappears. To the lone figure seated at the water’s edge. MOVING IN we see it’s a WOMAN, with her head on her knees.