Before we enter the auditorium, there is an inspection. Collars out, shirts buttoned to the neck, skirts unrolled, sweaters with hints of red removed. “Spit it out.” A teacher cups her hand underneath a girl’s chin to catch a wad of gum. There are no free passes on Tuesday mornings, when the entire school lines up by grade for prayers.
“Go, go, go,” the teacher prompts us when the first notes of Handel or Bach are played on the grand piano, and the auditorium doors swing open. Two by two, but with haste, we arrange ourselves in evenly distributed lines forming an aisle down the center of the room that leads to our headmistress at a podium on the stage, a column of wool pleats, buttons, and bone.
She nods at the music teacher to lay off the keys when she sees all six hundred of us have been organized inside the room.
“Good morning, girls.” She is old. Perceptibly, proudly, handsomely old. Not crouched, softened grandparent old, but old enough that it’s impossible to imagine what she looked like before she looked like this.
“Good morning,” we respond as one big, bobbling mass of girlhood.
There are five-year-olds in the front of the room in tunics, and eighteen-year-olds in the back in kilts.
On either side of the auditorium are scrolls with hand-scripted lyrics to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” which most of us know by heart at this point. I wonder if our headmistress, who calligraphs a message on each of our report cards, handwrote the lyrics herself or if there’s a store—some dusty back room in a West Side office building—where you can purchase your Episcopalian prep school hymnal scrolls.
Teachers stand along the sidewalls, facing us, eyeballing our posture, tsking any whispers, nodding at us to Sing! Sing!
After the fifth “Joy Divine,” we move on to reciting the Bible verses and close the morning with a breathy in-unison Lord’s Prayer. “You don’t have to say any of it,” my father had told me once, but some of the teachers look to see that your mouth is moving. They look at me, because they know what I am.
I wear a silver Tiffany lima bean around my neck, but it used to be a gold Jewish star my father had given me. I wore it twice before my mother suggested I save it for special occasions. “Too much of a statement for school,” she whispered, crinkling her nose.
Too Jewish. Not Jewish enough. The spectrum of belief has no midpoint, and still we’re expected to find one.
Screw that. I believe in one man. I mouth his words to the Bible verses during prayers and picture the framed photo of his naked upper half, arms outstretched on an invisible cross, above my bed. I wear his face on an oversize T-shirt when I come home from school, and nobody can make me take it off.
He gazes off in the distance, a wavy shadow in profile, silk-screened on a one-size-only black cotton shirt. Jim Morrison, 1943–1971.
But images don’t do him justice. It’s when he gasped for air between lyrics onstage, eyebrows helplessly upturned, screaming Yeaaaah, and dropping his head so that his hair tumbled over his face while his leather legs writhed. He was drowning in those moments, demonstrating his own fate. He knew he would die, and he wasn’t afraid. I want to trap and swallow him so I can be fearless, too.
In my room are shrines—behind a cabinet, a Case Logic cassette case dedicated solely to Doors material: all seven studio albums, two compilations, a live album, and a posthumous recording of Jim Morrison’s poetry set to jazzy background music. On a shelf above my desk is No One Here Gets Out Alive, the biography of Jim Morrison, along with Wilderness: The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison, and a thin poster-sized book of photographs of Jim Morrison with the Doors.
Beside it, I have placed a red candle shaped like a bear, a secret Santa gift my sister had received from a classmate. I carved Jim into the belly with a kitchen knife.
This “obsession,” as my mother calls it, began when I was twelve, before the movie came out, I swear. I saw the real Jim perform on a PBS documentary my dad was watching and bought the paperback biography of his life, which is better than the movie. It’s about how he grew up in a military family and had to be clean-shaven, stiff, and obedient. But one day he drove with his family past a Native American man dying on the side of a highway and was possessed by the man’s spirit. Then Jim moved to Venice, California, met Ray Manzarek, dropped out of school because nobody understood him, overcame his shyness, tripped in the desert, met his soulmate, became a rock legend and a bunch of other things. The whole time, you know he dies in the end, but you don’t believe it until the last few pages. And even then you feel that he is still alive, living inside you, just as the spirit of a Native American man lived inside him.
When I think of Jim living inside me, I feel free. I feel as though I’m walking through a dream he is having, and that his reality is more real than my own. Everything that’s expected of me, everything I’m failing at, is meaningless, because it’ll all go away when he wakes up and I disappear. This is what I think when I look at the poster of him hanging over my bed.
But there is another poster tucked underneath my bed, one I don’t want to see. In it, he is sitting in a car, staring dazedly out the window at his fans. I’m on his lap, in a white button-down shirt, lips over braces, age twelve, facing the camera. The black-and-white image is mounted onto cardboard and surrounded by colorful handwritten messages. Mazel tov!
A year ago, I stood on a podium in my sister’s black velvet Laura Ashley dress, safety-pinned at the chest with socks, and read Hebrew words I had already memorized from an unrolled scroll. Then we rode four blocks scrunched in a taxi to Maxim’s on Madison Avenue.
It was dark red inside the nightclub. The heels of my pumps sunk into the carpeting. The walls were the color of black cherries, affixed with pink petal sconces and mirrors shaped like partially blown bubbles.
My mother had something to show me before the guests arrived, and led me to the cocktail area, where two poster boards rested on easels. On one was a blown-up photograph of all four members of the Doors, and standing behind them, a superimposed image of me, taken the year before by a professional photographer my parents knew. On the other easel was the poster of Jim and me alone together.
It was the greatest gift my mother had ever given me. After a year of trying to break the spell of my infatuation, she had given in and reversed course. She brought Jim and me together. My mother was the best mother.
Guests started to trickle in, and she went to make the rounds while I stayed by the easels and waited for my friends. The room filled with relatives, my father’s clients. The men wore tuxedoes, the women wore velvet dresses or silk pantsuits or sequined two-piece numbers with shoulder pads and pumps. “Do you remember me?” an old lady said, holding a cocktail napkin and a toothpick. “I’m your so-and-so’s so-and-so.” An aunt gave me a wet kiss, then licked her thumb and rubbed it along my cheek. Everyone’s breath smelled of temple, that parched devotion, mixed with hot-dog burps and stale lipstick. A woman in a pink suit whom I’d never seen before stopped in front of one easel and then looked at me. “Is that you?” she asked, throwing her head back in a cackle. I wanted to shove her mouth full of pigs in blankets until she choked.
When the girls from my grade arrived, I led them to my easels, and after they’d all signed them, we huddled together so I could run down the list of boys who’d RSVP’d. Most were from out of town, camp friends I’d invited to up the male head count. A few were from Hebrew school and an all-boys school on the Upper West Side—many of whom I’d frantically invited in a last-minute effort to even the ratio.
“When are the boys coming?” all the girls kept asking.
“When are they going to play ‘Me So Horny’?”
“When are they going to play ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’?”
The band played Billy Joel, so much Billy Joel, and sequins slow-danced with silk tuxedoes while we snatched abandoned cocktails off tables.
We made music videos at the make-your-own-music-video station, until the woman who laughed at my poster announced that it was “adult time” and kicked us out.
“Are more boys coming?” Bianca asked. There were seat cards in front of untouched plates with boys’ names written on them. “When are the boys coming?”
In my left shoe were two Benadryl; in my right was a third. I went into the bathroom and dug them out, then hid in a stall until my sister came in to say the band was calling my name. A brass-based “Let’s Get Physical” transitioned into “We Are Family,” which meant it was time to light the candles on the cake and call up my relatives one by one, while holding a microphone in one hand and a wild flame in the other. Applause. Percussion. An expanded accordion of awwws.
The night blurred with cherrywood and fire. My father gave a speech. He said I was his favorite. My sister cried in a bathroom stall. My mother fumed. I danced with my father to “Wonderful Tonight” and wished everyone else in the world would go away.
At the end of the night, when the guests had cleared, my sister and I stood in the lobby holding bags of silver Tiffany pens and envelopes stuffed with checks. The two poster boards of Jim and me, now covered in writing, leaned against my leg as we waited for my father to settle the bill.
My mother stood a few feet away from us, talking to a friend of my father's. He was the photographer who took the pictures of me they used for the posters.
“When she’s a little older, she’s going to have to get that fixed,” he said, nodding in my direction.
“I know,” said my mother.
In the cab home, I asked her what he meant and she told me. She said she saw it right when I came out of her, when the doctors placed me in her arms, and my newborn skin was still translucent. There was this twisted bone inside my nose, the same as my father’s and my grandmother’s. She knew then I’d have to have work done when I was older. “A man can get away with it. It’s harder for a girl.”
I want to peel off my face. Something is wrong with it.
“When you’re fifteen, when your face stops growing, that’s when we’ll fix it,” my mother says.
“So I was always like this?” I ask her.
“It wasn’t so noticeable when you were younger,” she says, looking at me, but not at my eyes. She sees that something is wrong with me, but she is looking in the wrong place.
“Don’t worry,” she says, “we’ll fix it.”
But I don’t want to be fixed. I want to be dead.
When I turn sad for no reason, my mother says it’s because I’m moody. “Got the blues again?” she asks. I don’t know what I have or don’t have. I only know of dangling my feet out the window seven flights above the concrete, imagining what it will feel like when I land.
I bet you don’t feel it when you’ve hit the ground. It’s the falling you have to worry about. All that time to reconsider, to remember, to paddle through the air and change direction, to remember some more.
I hope to remember that when I smile, my nose twists, that they want to shave it off me, and that it will only make the ugliness burrow deeper inside.
It’s in me—I am the twisted bone through and through. It isn’t the blues I have, it’s something else.
Tantrums boil up and sprout coils at my temples. When I can’t contain them, I write them down, hoping to relieve the pressure. Pressing her arteries between my hands, squeezing all the blood out from her neck. My mother found my most violent notebook. She knew it was about her. “You left it out for me to find,” she screamed. Maybe so.
I’m an airtight jar of carbonated steam. Throw me out the window and watch me burst—all crystal spit and heat.
Inside a drawer is my suicide note. It is written in pencil on white stationery framed in lilac vines and addressed to my parents. The last line reads, “I’ll be watching you from above,” a lyric from an Escape Club song that made me think of sitting on a cloud looking down and shaking my head at mortal failings. It’s outdated. My handwriting, along with my position on the afterlife, has changed now that I’m fourteen. I used to want to die to punish my parents; now I want to die to punish myself. I need a new note.
Here’s what it will say: I am ugly. I am selfish. I am lucky and ungrateful. Nobody will ever love me. The only person who could love me is dead.