Dark clouds moved into my otherwise clear sky around age eleven, nearly twelve. I was early in stages of change, hair sprouting here, a pimple sprouting there, taller, voice changing, and I began to see that Dad was paying me more attention, attempting to smooth out the cowlick on the right side of my head with his hand, looking me over head to toe in detail, like an X-ray focused on the outside. Still, I was surprised he’d brought me here. The office smelled like dusty books, and there was not an open space on the shelves lining the wall for another. Dr. Shirley, a professor at Ole Miss like Dad, invited me to get comfortable.
“Take a seat,” she said, pointing to a reclining chair, and I did, but the comfort was in doubt. I looked to the doorway, where Dad stood.
First, it was my teeth. Dad wanted me to have a handsome smile. That’s exactly how he said it. A handsome smile, and I was good with that, in concept, but not how we went about it. Dad didn’t do anything normal, in my assessment, making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the butt ends of the bread while most of my friends’ mothers made their sandwiches from the softest bread inside the loaf, or making my toothpaste from baking powder instead of buying Colgate from the store.
My top teeth were straight, picture perfect, Dad said, except for what he called an overbite and what I called buck teeth. With my mouth closed, I could insert my thumb between my front and bottom teeth, and Dad said that meant I needed braces—but I wasn’t getting braces, not the kind most teens get, anyway.
My friends saw Dr. Russell in town, a traditional orthodontist who put teeth into place with metal braces we called railroad tracks, meaning the girls who had them were constantly picking at them to make sure no leftover food particles remained in those tracks. But Dad took me to a doctor in Tupelo who preferred making devices himself, which spared what he called mouth brutality. Instead of railroad tracks, he gave me a homework assignment between appointments. “Mind over matter,” he explained.
I remember sitting at our kitchen counter—yellow Formica covered the bar and countertops, from when Mom did our onetime kitchen renovation. She went with a green oven, stained-brown cabinets, and a light in the middle of the island with fake stained glass, like a mini lighthouse and church got together for kitchen design. Beneath its glow, I wrote in the spiral notebook that Dad had purchased for me, doctor’s orders. I had a pen in my left hand, my writing hand, which bumped into the spiral, painting blue down the outside of my hand. I was used to how left was wrong as a preferred hand since the first grade, when the desks, notebooks, and pretty much everything we got in school was engineered for righties.
It got me started off on the wrong foot in school, like it was designed one way, under the assumption we were all the same, when some of us didn’t fit that way, yet were expected to meld, like raindrops into a fountain, when in fact it was more like raindrops on a repellant surface, and everyone, including me, pretended there was absorption, while deep down inside I felt as if I were rolling away.
“I will not lick my lips,” I wrote into the notebook, the spiral sticking out into the soft, fleshy outer side of my hand.
“I will not lick my lips.”
“I will not lick my lips.”
Over and over again I wrote, which was a problem, since my mouth got dry doing the work and all I could think about was licking my lips—so I wrote, and I licked, I wrote, and I licked, I licked, and wrote that I wouldn’t, worsening the very situation the assignment was supposed to solve.
I’d been told by Dr. Herrington, the orthodontist Dad took me to in nearby Tupelo, to write the sentence fifty times a day, seven days a week, until my appointment the following month. Dad said I had to do this or no allowance, because.
A handsome smile.
I wanted a nice smile, I did, but I couldn’t figure out how licking my lips gave me buck teeth in the first place. I remember thinking—but not saying—that the overbite was probably something inherited, like my gait and green eyes, neither of which matched those of my adopted parents. But Dad and this doctor acted like it was my fault, the buck teeth, some sort of laziness, licking my lips, pushing my teeth outward.
I started thinking not all smart people, Dad with his master’s degree and PhD and Dr. Herrington, the orthodontist, were as smart as they thought they were. I guessed they weren’t staring out the window in junior high school but could stand to get their heads up and look around now. It made me wonder why I was so intimidated by Dad and his degrees, but I figured it was how he positioned himself in our house as the smart one, so knowledgeable about everything, though I was seeing a flaw in that brain power related to my overbite. It was like the weather, which he took at face value from the report on the news, unable to factor in realities in front of his face. If the weatherman from Memphis, seventy miles to the north, said the mid-South might get accumulating snow, Dad would get his shovel and salt ready, while I knew the ground temperature in Oxford was too warm for it to stick beyond the tops of tall grasses, because it was sixty degrees and sunny the day before, while further north, the temperature didn’t get above fifty with clouds, meaning some salt but no shovel might be helpful.
———
First, my teeth; later, it was my mind, and another attempted solution that felt a little crazy.
When I made a couple of Bs and one C in the fall of the sixth grade, Dad contacted Dr. Shirley, his professor friend who dabbled in hypnosis, asking if she could try to get me under a spell to reveal whatever it was keeping an otherwise smart fella like me performing less than stellar in the easy-ish classes of the sixth grade. I won’t say I liked the idea of being hypnotized. It was a bit frightening, frankly. I remembered well the episode of Scooby-Doo when the gang got their minds controlled by ghost clowns and zombies, and another when Shaggy got hypnotized by Mr. Hubley, who back-and-forthed a giant gold watch in his face and said, “You are feeling very heavy.” Shaggy’s mind went zoinks, and Mr. Hubley forgot the code word to break the spell, leaving Shaggy and the gang in a frightening predicament.
I doubted the professor had the ability to do that to me, but I didn’t know, still learning and all as a sixth grader. I’d only agreed to the experiment because Dad insisted, and he was the only father I had, that I knew about, even if he did make me moldy toast for breakfast—“Nothing wrong with mold, it’s natural, good for you.” He did at least make me breakfast, which I gobbled up as if malnourished, starving for a provider, a protector. Starving for a father.
I assumed the hypnosis was more moldy toast, natural, good for me, but I’d agreed because I didn’t see a way out, and I was the one in the family expected to keep the calm, to agree to the unagreeable, since Eunice, my sister, didn’t much agree to anything.
I was always aiming to please, regardless of discomfort, which left me quite uncomfortable. Like, on the couch with a professor posing as professional hypnotizer.
I was embarrassed to be in the room with Dr. Shirley, thinking of Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, and Dad in the hall, wondering if he truly wanted to get to the bottom of my problem, but I sat quietly, obediently, hoping it would be quick, painless.
“Relax,” she said, “it doesn’t hurt. Don’t worry, you won’t lose control.”
Yeah, I thought, I’m not planning to lose anything. I’m just hoping to get out of here and back to school without any of the guys knowing, or without revealing any embarrassing secret.
She asked me to stare at the second hand of a clock. I remember watching, tick, tick, tick, hearing a voice that was fading. My eyes became heavy. Asleep, but not quite. She told me to imagine a sunny day, and I saw blue skies and birds sailing about, and it felt warm, like a bath. She told me to imagine a cloudy day, and I saw the thickening of a thunder top forming, and sensed an impending lightning strike.
“Imagine,” she said, “you are back at the adoption home. You are three days old. Your birth mother has left you. How do you feel?”
I was scared, in the eye of the storm.
“Don’t leave me,” I cried. “Take me with you.”
“Pretend you are speaking with her. What do you say?”
“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Find yourself in the classroom. The teacher is talking. What are you doing?”
“Looking for her.”
“Looking for who?”
“My mother,” I said.
We didn’t return to Dr. Shirley because there was nothing Dad could do, nothing I could do, nothing anyone could do. I’d been adopted in Louisiana, a closed-records state, and my birth certificate had been changed, making Mom and Dad my only legal parents. Still, I don’t think Dad would have wanted me under a truth-seeking spell anyway, since the taller I grew and the more hair that sprouted, the more Dad couldn’t look away, and, it seemed, he was often nearby to get more looks. It happened in a creeping sort of way, how a vine grows slowly but covers considerable ground before you know it. I was changing that way, as the vine grows, but fast, like it was summer, in the rainy season, and Dad couldn’t help but stare as I added inches and leaves, and the more he stared, the more it moved him closer, like a bug wanting to attach, and it felt uncomfortable, like a mosquito buzzing in my ear, but it was new, and I was young and fast-changing, not exactly sure what was happening, hoping it wasn’t, wondering if I was confused, if I was, you know, a little crazy.
Some moments around the time of early to mid-puberty, I remember clearly—Dad begging me to pull down my underpants so he could examine my pubic hair. Others are vague: opening my eyes to see one hand on my mouth, fingers across my lips, as if to softly seal, another somewhere else, I don’t know, I’m so sleepy, and a whispering, breathy voice of Shhhh, shhhh in my ear how you’d calm a baby, like, It’s time to get up, sleepyhead, but not quite yet.
I remember nights of Eunice calling Mom to her room, keeping her there for hours. I’d try to drown out her articulate anger, which permeated the wall like it was projected from a loudspeaker, her saying she wished he’d disappeared, and I didn’t know why, but also, neither was I compelled to call the police or run into the room, begging her silence. Instead, I’d roll over and think about girls in my class or the weather, or how I’d become a forecaster who could save the day, trying to change my queasy feeling, my uneasy feeling, until I could finally fall asleep. I’d wake up for school the next morning tired, no, exhausted, from sleep deprivation despite hours in bed that I could count on nearly all the fingers I had, save one thumb. I was restless, racing, unable to focus, and I felt tired enough that when a voice I’d never heard spoke up in my head—You are worthless, he said—I listened and believed, doubting that I belonged in class, questioning that I belonged much of anywhere. All I knew to show otherwise was a big smile on the outside while I tried to find somewhere else to go on the inside.