She came jangling into the bookstore out of the literal suburban blue, wearing a fulsome smile and looking like a Midwestern diner waitress in a gingham dress and white tennis shoes. Esther’s presence in that place, at that time in her life, baffled me from the start. According to her job application she was in her twenties, a recent college graduate with an impressive academic record. She presented herself as well read, worldly, and ambitious. She wasn’t what you would call pretty. She was small-headed and thick, not fat but abundant, fleshy beyond an ideal one could not help but imagine for her. Her nose was piggish and her teeth too small. But she was provocative. She carried herself with panache, flaunting her curves with low-cut blouses and thin, clinging fabrics. She was lively and chatty and stuffed with ideas, and all this made her seem out of place. By all convention Esther should have been in Manhattan or San Francisco or Los Angeles, rather than where she was, which was at the rump end of a strip mall midway along the Port Jefferson line of the Long Island Rail Road.
When Esther arrived I was fifteen, and I’d already been working at the bookstore for a year. It is not just because of her that I suspect my mind would be much healthier today if I’d somehow managed to halt my professional development just prior to that employment. I didn’t need the work. I already had a job at Foodtown, the cavernous, nipple-puckeringly cold supermarket at the opposite end of the strip mall. It was my first job. I worked as what is known as a “leveler.”
Levelers, for those unfamiliar with the term, are essentially debris clearers. They are the mass-retail equivalent of the stretcher bearers and ragpickers who would descend onto Civil War battlefields whenever there was a break in the carnage. After the housewife has picked through the yogurt cartons, searching for the freshest date; after the father has palpated the potato chip bags, deluded that any one is fuller than another; after the nanny has shoved aside the chicken broth up front, hoping to find a can with a lower price buried deep within the shelf . . . that’s when the leveler springs to work. He gathers the toppled merchandise; he rearranges the items in a neat stack, side by side, one on top of the other; he rotates them so that their bright labels face front. Then he waits, Sisyphus-like, for it all to happen again. Leveling is a repetitive, mindless, benumbing job, and it is only now, far too late, that I see how perfect it was for a person of my temperament. My father was a lawyer, and he used to half-joke that he should have become a housepainter instead. What he meant was that unlike lawyering, housepainting has soothingly clear and finite ends. Leveling is like that. There is never any confusion. There is never any ambiguity. There is just the discrete and achievable task, forever.
That I didn’t stay a leveler I blame on a book. In the ninth grade we were assigned Of Mice and Men and, self-sequestered in my grandmother’s bedroom in the moments before a Rosh Hashanah dinner, hunched with my back against her closet door, I read the famous climax, in which George, trembling with anticipated grief and regret, shoots big, dumb, rabbit-obsessed Lennie in the back of the head—blam!—murdering his best friend out of mercy. And for the first time in my reading life I wept. I wept for Lennie. I wept for George. I wept for the plight of itinerant ranchers in prewar northern California. I wept for humanity! When I emerged, red-nostriled and stinking of mothballs, I was in my heart no longer a leveler. After that, whenever I stood outside Foodtown after my shift, I would stare at the bookstore at the other end of the parking lot—past the deli and the drugstore and the framing shop and the stationer’s—as if it were some mirage, an oasis of literary sophistication.
It wasn’t. As the only game in town besides the library, the store attracted whatever bookish types happened to live in the area—solitary men and women who lingered broodingly in the poetry stacks for full afternoons. But the vast bulk of the store’s trade in books was off the best seller rack: the newest Grisham or Koontz or mass-market spiritual phenomenon. And the bulk of the store’s trade in general, it turned out, was off the comic-book rack. As much if not more than a bookshop, the store served as a kind of public square for dermatologically afflicted adolescents to congregate and compare notes on the anarchic universe of superheroes, atomic mutants, and demonic villains. They came in droves, these comic-book geeks, day after day, year after year, and in time a large number of them had made their way onto the payroll. By the time I started they were part of the inextricable DNA of the place. The store had philosophy. The store had history. The store had leather-bound first editions of nineteenth-century novels. But more than anything else the store was a boy’s club, as cliquish, restrictive, and leery of outsiders as the Vatican.
It was under these social conditions that Esther and I became friends. To be more precise: It was under these conditions that Esther chose to befriend me. She didn’t have many options. The staff, almost without exception (she was the only female employee), abhorred Esther. They thought her pushy, intrusive, untrustworthy, bizarre—the whole xenophobic litany. Pushy she indisputably was. Esther had the habit of ambushing customers as soon as they entered the store, so that she could steer them toward and sell them on her favorite books. When we ate lunch she would hover at our elbows, waiting for the moment we dabbed our lips to ask, “Mind if I have the rest of that?” If someone teased her about this she would plead shameless poverty, but the staff concluded that she was simply lazy—the type of person who grows fat on other people’s food. Then, perhaps most unnerving of all, there was the oddity and incongruity of Esther’s love life. She was married, to a slight, quiet young man she paraded into the store one morning. And yet she claimed, early on and often, that she was a lesbian. “I love my husband,” she would say. “We have a lot in common. But I only married him because I want a baby. I want to be a mommy.”
I was as unsettled by Esther as anyone, maybe more so. Later it would be Esther who would call forth the most powerful, private, physical symptom of my anxiety: a stab of sharp cold in the heart-side of my sternum, as if an icicle had been lodged there. I can remember now feeling the ghost of that sensation whenever she approached me in the store. A blossoming of frost. An inward recoiling. Yet of all the employees who must have had some version of this experience as far as Esther was concerned, I was the only one who didn’t reject her. I was the only one who made gestures of acceptance and goodwill, the only one who made her feel as if I liked her and was interested in what she had to say—even though I didn’t and wasn’t. Of a dozen people, I was the only one who acted charitably toward Esther. In doing so I opened myself up to her friendship and gratitude.
• • •
It was not a mistake to be kind to Esther, though for many years I was bitterly convinced it was. Esther made a fair show of ignoring the fact that she was shut out of the store’s camaraderie; she never for a moment let on that she knew she was disliked. But of course she did know, and the knowledge of her knowledge, coupled with her inexhaustible ability to act as if she fit in, gave off an odor of terrible sadness. Esther needed a friend. That I was the one who volunteered for the position has nonetheless always been a source of great confusion for me. Given all that shrinking, all that reflexive desire to turn away—my body itself shouting “No, thank you!”—why did I submit to the contrary impulse?
The salient concept here is the well-known “fight-or-flight” response. Whenever an animal—a Komodo dragon, a Labrador retriever, whatever—is presented with a threat or perceived threat, it has one of two choices. Either it can confront the danger head on or it can bolt. No matter what it chooses, its body responds to the threat by preparing—quickly, very quickly—for action. The sympathetic nervous system, the part associated with the really primitive and reptilian stages of evolution, kicks into gear. Here is a description of this process, drawn randomly from a library book about anxiety:
Activation of the SNS . . . leads to hyperarousal symptoms such as constriction of the peripheral vessels, increased strength of the skeletal muscles, increased heart rate and force of contraction, dilation of the lungs to increase oxygen supply, dilation of the pupils for possible improved vision, cessation of digestive activity, increase in basal metabolism, and increased secretion of epinephrine and norepinephrine from the adrenal medulla.
You know those stories of mothers lifting cars to save their babies? Those are sympathetic nervous system stories.
The problem of anxiety isn’t that the organism responds to threats by near-instantly powering up. That’s clearly a good thing, species-survival-wise. It’s that sometimes the organism starts seeing threats too readily. Same book as above: “Chronically anxious people exhibit a persistently elevated autonomic arousal level often in the absence of an anxiety-producing situation.” Never mind the debate about how much of this is due to faulty wiring and how much to the organism’s learning to think of harmless or not-very-dangerous things as potentially existence-threatening. The point is, anxiety is a neurological warning system, the sole purpose of which is to keep the organism safe and whole. Anxiety says one thing and one thing only. It says, “This right here? This right here is probably really bad for you. You should think seriously about taking off.”
And taking off, or some version of it, is exactly what anxious people do. Sometimes taking off means staying put. The anxious person looks at his car parked in the driveway and envisions accordioned metal, melted tires, burning flesh—and he doesn’t drive. He looks at a wedding invitation and envisions awkward conversations, drunken relatives, demands to join a conga line—and he sends his regrets. He looks at the gently undulating surf and he envisions jellyfish, riptides, stray hypodermic needles—and he sets up an umbrella and opens a magazine. At other times taking off means actually taking off: bailing on a date, ending a relationship, quitting a job, skipping town. But always it means the deeply felt impulse—the involuntary impulse—to escape. To avoid.
With Esther I felt this impulse and I ignored it. I was in the school choir. I had a glow-in-the-dark retainer. My favorite band was The Eagles. I had neither the mental equipment nor the wish to become the confidant of an impoverished married lesbian with a pregnancy fetish, particularly one I didn’t much like. I didn’t even need to articulate this to myself. My very being, my good old trusted, pre-cognitive, wisdom-of-the-body instincts, told me so—and I turned away. I plugged my ears and did the opposite.
I didn’t fully understand this contrariness, or even much forgive myself for it, until I visited my mother in her office and she used a clinical term that none of my therapists had ever applied to me before, but that I immediately saw fit my brand of anxiety perfectly. The term was “counter-phobic,” and it refers, just as it sounds, to those instances in which an anxious person moves toward rather than away from an object of distress. He moves toward whatever he is afraid of or made uncomfortable by because . . . well, there are any number of reasons. It could be straight-up masochism. It could be, it often is, because the thing feared by one part of the mind is valued and cherished, even worshipped, by another. How many great religious lives have been characterized by the fruitful cohabitation of trembling and ecstasy? How many artistic lives? How many performers experience terror in the wings, experience terror just thinking about waiting in the wings, but still walk on stage when the curtain rises? These are counter-phobic responses, and just in the world of music there are countless examples. Pablo Casals said, “Nerves and stage fright before playing have never left me throughout the whole of my career.” The same is true of Arthur Rubinstein and Luciano Pavarotti. Yet none ever stopped performing. The first time Tchaikovsky conducted an opera he was so panic-stricken and disoriented he held onto his chin the whole time—so, he said, his head wouldn’t fall off. “Up to the age of forty-six, I regarded myself as hardly able to direct an orchestra,” he later told a reporter. “I suffered from stage fright, and couldn’t think of conducting without fear or trembling.” Recently, Paul McCartney confessed that he used to get so frightened before playing with The Beatles that he almost quit the band in 1963, before Help!, before Rubber Soul, before Sgt. Pepper’s, before Abbey Road. The Beatles without Paul. Think of it. It’s almost as horrifying as a headless Tchaikovsky.
The counter-phobic impulse keeps people going who might otherwise crumble. More than that, it drives people to seek out what is terrifying. As a stance toward life it’s a perversity, the higher mental functions flipping the bird to the lower mental functions. It’s also something of a gift, both to the counter-phobic person and to the world. Because who gains anything from playing it safe? Who wants to listen to instinct if what instinct has to say is “hide”? Where’s the fun in that? Courage, the writer Ambrose Redmoon said, “is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something is more important than fear.” The counter-phobic impulse is like that, and it’s responsible for any number of things the world would be demonstrably poorer without: the Freedom Riders, the Velvet Revolution, Jackie Robinson, Doctors Without Borders, Lenny Bruce.
And yet it’s worth pointing out that there are two pretty big flies in the heroic ointment. The first is that the impulse to disregard the anxiety signal is no more or less good by definition than the anxiety signal itself. In other words, just because it can be useful, productive, progressive, and noble to be counter-phobic doesn’t mean it’s always useful, productive, etc. Sometimes it’s just stupid. For every Evel Knievel there are fifty morons willing to drive a motorcycle off a cliff. It’s like the old saying about even the paranoid having enemies: Even the hopelessly neurotic have good reason to be anxious sometimes. The hard work, you discover over the years, is in learning to discern between correct and incorrect anxiety, between the anxiety that’s trying to warn you about a real danger and the anxiety that’s nothing more than a lying, sadistic, unrepentant bully in your head. The hard work is in learning to step back and analyze the data dispassionately.
In a sense, the counter-phobic stance would seem to be doing something like this. The counter-phobic person looks at his anxiety, judges it inhospitable to what he wants to achieve, and acts anyway. But in another sense, the counter-phobic stance is just that: a stance. It’s an attitude, not as deeply embedded as anxiety but not fully conscious either. So it can be dangerous, because it muddies analytic waters that are already muddy to begin with. It adds another layer of difficulty to the anxiety problem. Anxious people have to learn to distinguish between their correct and incorrect anxiety impulses. Counter-phobic anxious people have to learn to distinguish between their correct and incorrect anxiety impulses and their correct and incorrect counter-phobic impulses. They have double the work.
The second problem is that a counter-phobic attitude doesn’t mean an anti-phobic attitude. Just because you don’t allow anxiety to dictate your behavior doesn’t mean you’re going to reap any benefit from your intransigence, clinically speaking. A moral benefit, maybe. A creative benefit. Possibly a career and/or ego boost. But will it be therapeutic? Not necessarily. Maybe not at all. Paul McCartney doesn’t fret much before a concert anymore. But note again Casals’s “stage fright . . . never left me throughout the whole of my career.” When he said this he was seventy-seven. He started performing at six. That’s seventy-one years of unbroken anxiety.
Think about this for a minute. It’s easy to applaud Casals’s confession as a testament to his fortitude, professionalism, grace under pressure, love of audience, and any number of other artistic virtues. Probably we should applaud. But then stop and think what the confession meant for Casals the man. Think about the enormous, awful conflict it suggests. Casals’s entire life was dedicated to playing the cello for the benefit of other people. Maybe the thing was pushed on him when he was a kid but after a certain point it became his choice; it became something he willed himself, that he decided, to do. Tens of thousands of practice hours, performances before queens and presidents and generals and aristocrats and more critics than you could count in a week. A fierce, monastic, lifelong dedication. And to what? To something that made his heart race like it was going to shoot blood out of his ears. To something that he dreaded so deep in the core of himself that not even seven decades of experience could ameliorate the sensation.
Think about how weird and self-destructive this is. Think about the mental contortions you’d have to go through, the thoughts you’d have to beat back, just to get up in the morning and keep doing what you’re doing, to not be totally frozen by the inarguable fact of the matter, which is that you have chosen a life for yourself that makes you, a whole lot of the time, want to vomit. Think about how much you might not want to think about this fact at all, ever. Finally, think about how it doesn’t really matter whether you are conscious of your counter-phobic attitude or not, that the very psychological perversity of your stance toward those things you dread is going to lead, either way, to more dread. Your temperamental refusal to submit to your anxiety is going to clash with your anxious temperament, and that clash is going to give off sparks. Because you haven’t really done anything about the problem. You’ve just contradicted it. After my mother taught me the term “counter-phobic,” I found an entry in the Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. There is, the entry reads, “a quality of desperation about the ‘enjoyment’ provided by counter-phobic actions. It is as if the individual is not really convinced of his mastery of his underlying anxiety.”
• • •
“You’re so mature! I keep having to remind myself you’re only fifteen.”
Esther was constantly saying things like this, and constantly confiding in me in a way that suggested she didn’t remind herself often enough. She would waylay me as I shelved books and tell me her life story—or parts of it, at least, the parts that spoke of old traumas and her continuing quest to transcend them.
When she was younger than I was, she told me, her parents discovered her kissing another girl. Her parents were devout Mormons. They kicked her out and wouldn’t let her come home until she renounced her blasphemous urges. Headstrong and self-possessed, Esther refused. For the remainder of high school she slept at friends’ houses. She managed, through sheer willpower, to get good grades and to get into a good college. She paid for school by waiting tables and doing various odd jobs. And all the while she developed a powerful urge to have a child of her own, to redress the crime that had been done to her. Her husband had no illusions about her sexual desire for him. Saintly and selfless, he knew everything and he accepted everything. She had been pregnant twice already, and she had miscarried twice, experiences she spoke of mournfully. They were trying again. At night, they curled up under the covers and read classic children’s literature to each other. “Then,” she said, “we make love.”
Another word on how alien all this was to me and how uneasy I felt hearing it—often while perched on a stepladder that rocked like a pendulum with the slightest shifting of my weight. For one thing, whenever Esther and I were together I had to keep a close watch on the rest of the staff so they wouldn’t catch me giving comfort to the enemy. For another, at fifteen I’d never before met a professed homosexual. I’d never met a Mormon, either. At the same time, it was flattering to be entrusted with this information. It felt ennobling to be thought wise enough to understand such adult difficulties and preoccupations. “You’re so mature!” observed Esther again and again, and I agreed. I wanted to agree. I still knew my anxiety as nothing more than the unnamed sum of my sensitivities. I felt so skinless at times! Things hit me so hard! It was a relief and an attraction to be informed that what felt for all the world like a handicap was actually a virtue. I wasn’t weak or oversensitive; I was precocious. I didn’t have a deficit of strength; I had a deficit of years.
It was dizzying to experience this revulsion and attraction simultaneously, and it was dizzying when, about six months into Esther’s tenure, she came to tell me some important news and I whipsawed between the two. Esther found me at the back of the store, alphabetizing the Harlequins. She took my hand and pulled me behind the plastic accordion screen that separated the back room from the store proper. There was exhilaration in her eyes. “I’m pregnant,” she said. She pulled me toward her and locked her arms around my back. I had to mumble my congratulations into the damp skin of her neck. I heard muffled words: “I just had to tell you. I couldn’t wait. It’s everything I wanted.” The pregnancy was early. She didn’t want anyone else to know yet. Anyway, no one else deserved to know. “I want this to be our little secret,” she said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
There was something inordinately unsettling about this little conspiracy. Something about the present-tense reality of the data, about its physicality, both the sheer fact of it—a baby! a human baby!—and the way Esther imparted it, made me start scanning the store’s perimeter for the fire exits. At the moment she held me, Esther’s almost novelistic allure—her sudden, mysterious appearance, her outré sexuality, her exotic poverty—and all the flattery of her attention took on the spiky surface of unfortunate, unwanted reality. I’d never before felt so fifteen.
Then something extraordinary happened. A few weeks later I was back in the stacks, now on to the fantasy and sci-fi alphabetization, when Esther called the store looking for me. She was gasping and frantic. She said she was in the emergency room. I couldn’t understand anything else. She begged me to come over. I pumped the pedals of my bike furiously. In the hospital, Esther was lying on a gurney in a tiled hallway, her face flushed and her stout body draped with a paper gown. She was calmer now. She told me what had happened. It was terrible. A cluster of cysts had formed in her uterus, little distended balloons of flesh surrounding her unsexed fetus like bubble wrap. Then they’d started to pop. Pop pop pop pop pop. The muted explosions going off inside her even as I held her clammy hand and mopped her clammy brow, making her double over and groan, pushing her baby out of her months before it was ready.
Where was her husband? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. What amazed me was where I was, which was a state of serene confidence.
It was the most remarkable thing. I still didn’t like Esther all that much. I still felt uncomfortable with and about her. I was still my petty, brooding, easily disequilibriumed self. But in the heat of emergency that all was temporarily blocked from consciousness, sealed off from mind and body. In the heat of emergency I became something better than I’d ever known. I became doubtless. All apprehensions and anxieties evaporated in the fire of What Needed to Be Done.
I would experience this phenomenon many times in the years to follow. It would lead to a somewhat melodramatic sensibility as well as some wrenching confusions—a hunger for the dire and the tragic, and therefore a detachment from some important emotional realities. I was twenty, for example, when my father was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, and listening to the doctor deliver the news I felt, above a rivulet of doom and grief, a great cataract of excitement. Awful as it sounds—awful as it felt—I was grateful. A sick father was an excuse, a valid, inarguable excuse, to rise up from my mundane life, where anxieties teemed like mosquito larvae. It had urgency, his disease. It was like a magnetic field that slammed all other concerns to the periphery, creating a wide and clarifying corridor in the mind.
This kind of snapping-to of priorities is a familiar part of grave situations, of course. Something comes along to foreground mortality, be it cancer or a car crash, and we are expected to lay down our everyday concerns. We are expected to become less anxious, since anxieties are essentially big reactions to small, false, or inflated things, and death is so large, so true, and so solid that it demands all our attention or (here’s the superstition, but who’s prepared to sniff at it?) death will feel disrespected and attack. That’s why it’s so absurd—monstrous or comic, depending on how you look at it—when a guest at a funeral starts complaining about, say, her bunions. She’s showing herself insensible to the triviality-stripping dignity of the situation.
This isn’t what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about something a lot less customary and a lot less useful, almost definitely a lot less healthy. I’m talking about an attitude toward emergencies that obliterates anxiety and awareness. When my father was diagnosed, and when he died, the rush of excitement I felt wasn’t because the situation was going to be a portal out of the niggling everyday and into the ultimate. It was because it was going to be a portal out of the niggling everyday and into . . . nothing. It was a ticket to leave my worries behind for a while, that’s all. A narcotic. Only unlike a narcotic, an emergency doesn’t dull the senses; it sharpens them. It telescopes the vision so that you can concentrate on whatever the emergency demands, or on getting out of the way whatever tasks and obligations you have to get out of the way so that you can get back to the emergency. It’s like Ritalin. It’s like magic.
Sitting in a molded plastic chair in the emergency room of a Long Island hospital is where I first made this discovery. For four hours Esther cried and cringed and moaned her grief at her body having failed her yet again, and all the while I held her hand and nodded my sympathies, feeling calm and able—feeling, finally, as mature as she imagined I was. Sometime after nightfall I called my mother to pick me up. I had a quiz in the morning.
Within a month, Esther quit. I don’t know where she went or what she did next. I don’t even remember her saying good-bye. I only remember feeling, now that the emergency had passed, relieved—as relieved as all of the other nostalgia-minded, nationalistic denizens of the store—that things would finally be getting back to normal.