Cracks in Plaster

character (kar’ik ter). n.

12. A person represented in a drama, story, etc.

14. A part or role, as in a play, motion picture or the like.

            “It wasn’t the actors’ fault – they did the best they could – but between the ridiculous plot turns and horrible dialogue, the movie was a complete flop. Positively no realistic character development.” My next-door neighbor, walking down the stairs to the lobby, says this to her boyfriend. His footsteps move in slow even thuds, the metronome around which her voice weaves and bobs.

If he replies, I don’t hear it. I am walking up the stairs, away from their clomping feet, and into the silence of my apartment.

Heraclitus said, “A man’s character is his fate.” I learned this in the tenth grade in Mr. Thomas’ classics literature class. Ronald Reagan said "You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jelly beans.” I learned that from a high school friend who feared her sugar addiction would send her over to the Republican Party.

I don’t believe in fate. I’m not sure about the believability of character.

I believe in eternity. The dragon eats its own tail. Sisyphus pushes the rock uphill until it falls again. Repetition is our punishment.

2. one such feature or trait; characteristic.

“It’s like that saying, ‘comparing apples to oranges.’ Now I understand that it is supposed to mean that you’re comparing unequal things. But see, here is my thing: it all seems sort of the same to me. Sure, it’s apples and oranges. But my point is, they’re both fruit. They both come off a tree. They both have vitamin C. It’s hard to work up any enthusiasm for varying shades of gray.”

“You see the world as all basically the same?”

“Yep. In your business, they call it flattened affect, right? I mean, I’ve read the books: Psych 101, Abnormal Psych. I know I’m not supposed to be this way, that it’s supposed to be different, that I’m supposed to be able to see the distinctions. Maybe it was different before, but it all seems the same now.”

“Before what?”

“Before…I don’t know. Today. Where I am right now.”

“So how are you supposed to be?”

“Oh, that’s easy. Happy-go-lucky. Chipper. Motivated. Head cheerleader of the Go Life team. Rah rah sis boom bah and all.”

“And you don’t feel very sis boom bah?”

“I don’t feel much of anything. Like the world is made of dry paste. In the scheme of things, this is not so bad.”

I walk out of the office with an official diagnosis, a packet of trial medication and a very large bill all jammed in my pocket. So here we go. Fun with home chemistry. Just add one brain.

I stop at the McDonalds for some fries on the way home. I’m not supposed to take the Serzone on an empty stomach. It occurs to me that the light-headed feeling comes from low blood sugar. I may not have eaten today.

I stand in line reviewing what I will say when I get to the front of the line. As long as I prepare, I can speak without crumbling. When the woman behind the counter looks up at me, I say my rehearsed line, “Water and french-fries please.”

She pauses with her hand over the register and says, “What size fries?”

I fumble for a minute, blushing and then say “Medium. Medium please.” She nods, tells me the cost. I hand her the money in my hand, she hands me the change and says, looking through me, “Next in line.” I move to the side and wait. A man behind the counter hands me the bag. After picking up three packets of salt, I walk to the back of the restaurant.

I sit in a booth, avoiding the pool of ketchup and napkins on the far side. I pour the packets of salt on my fries and begin eating them, methodically, one at a time, chewing each one down to mush. I like the salt, but I have trouble tasting much else. I’ve had trouble swallowing lately. Things catch in the back of my throat. I can’t seem to use my tongue properly to shuffle food down the hatch. But this is fine. I use it as an excuse to eat more ice cream. In my freezer at home, I have three half gallons: breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I sip water from the cup. I think about the DC water supply and gag slightly.

After I finish the fries, I take the Serzone out of my pocket and push one of the pills through the foil packaging. The tablet is sky blue, and brings to mind a day in college when the sky was clear and bright and blue and I made some bad choices.

My dosage starts at ½ tablet. I break the pill in half. I pop the half in my mouth, gag a bit, wash it down with water, think about amoebas and fecal matter and the water supply but swallow hard anyway.

I’m a good little girl. I follow the doctor’s instructions. This is what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to get better, be better. Rah rah rah. Sis boom bah.

11. Informal, an odd or eccentric person.

When I have walked ten blocks and am riding the escalator down to the Metro rail, it’s dawning on me that something is probably wrong. Tingling chills and warmth are running from the back of my throat down my arms. I’m shaking with cold, although I am wearing a sweater and it is 75 degrees outside today. For the last two blocks, I’ve also been humming a Beatles song to myself a bit too loudly. In the cavern of the Metro and its eerie acoustics, this singing is starting to attract a certain amount of attention. I am clean, young, female, non-descript. I look orderly, excepting perhaps the chronic need to comb my hair. People like me don’t sing to themselves on the Metro, not at this volume. There is something amiss. I can feel the worry in their eyes as their glances skate over me.

Underground, color is turning brighter and deeper and bleeding away at the edges like the halos around streetlights. The Beatles song plays on and I skip two steps before I stop myself. Whee! I hop from foot to foot, shifting my weight subtly to an internal tune. I want to dance, but I mustn’t be obvious about it. The tingling spreads down from my throat to drift down my spinal column and warm my lower back. It’s not an unpleasant sensation. I continue to shake, frozen on the outside, but my veins are heated from within.

When the train arrives with a blast of noise and wind, and the doors whoosh open, I clamp my mouth shut and turn off the Beatles. But the smile persists on my face and makes my cheeks ache. My hands shake at a low vibration with occasional pulses of spasm. My fingers feel cold when I bring them up to my cheeks to massage my face and cover my smiling.

I am thinking: so this is how it starts, the road to homelessness and soapboxing on street corners on the evils of man, the fabulous final decline. This is how it could go for me. How interesting.

By the time I get home, the tingling has settled into an internal warming, like a sunburn turned inside out. I walk into my apartment, lock the door and lean against it. For ten minutes, I let my eyes lose focus and let each element of the room exist in my vision with equal attention, no focal point, no periphery. I move when the shaking of my hand knocks my ring against the metal of the door. The tinny clink snaps my vision back and sends me forward into the room. I wander into the murky green tile of the bathroom and am momentarily blinded when I flick on the overhead light. I stare at my eyes in the mirror. Where my irises should be, I find instead the extra-wide pupils of a junkie. I think about pupils, how the name implies a thing, but really it is just a hole, an opening, an absence in space, like the hole in a donut through which you can see what’s on the other side. My pupils are large and black and glassy, empty.

I walk out of the bathroom and sit on the side of the bed. I pull the packet of medication out of my bag and try to read the information on side effects, but all I find are precautions about following the recommended dosage. There are more words, but I have trouble following them. I stopped reading full paragraphs some weeks ago. I switched to crossword puzzles instead. It is easier for me to concentrate on the little pieces and neatly slot each letter in place. Sentences tend to swim away now, each in different directions, so I can’t follow the current.

I lie down on the bed and gaze up through the ceiling. I listen to my heart beat. It may be racing, but for several weeks now, I have often noticed it pulsing out of my chest, so it’s hard to say if this beating is different or not. The ceiling has cracks in the plaster that have been repaired. There is a water stain over the dresser that looks like an enormous spider, except it has twelve legs. The itsy-bitsy spider crawled up the waterspout.

I close my black eyes and pretend that I can sleep. But the tingling of my throat, back, arms grows stronger without my eyes to hold the world in balance. Gravity shifts around in a circular, centrifugal force that pushes me back into the mattress. My stomach begins to leap and roil, so I open my eyes again. Gravity tilts forward as if the side of bed suddenly rose to slide me off, but then the world tips back and settles back into the standard horizon.

The Serzone? The DC water supply? The french-fries? All of them in combination? It’s hard to say. It will pass. Or not. Doesn’t matter that much, one way or another. Six of one, half dozen of the other. Apples and oranges. I roll on my side and turn on the television and watch General Hospital. I cannot believe Luke still exists as a character. Some things never change. He is the Sisyphus of soap operas.

When the credits for General Hospital start rolling, their plots leak out of my head and I sit up. I walk toward the phone.

4.      qualities of honesty, courage or the like; integrity: It takes character to stand up to a bully like that.

I pull the bill out of my pocket and dial my psychiatrist’s number. I get the answering service. I try to leave a message describing my symptoms. The answering service lady sounds annoyed that I am leaving medical details. She interrupts me. She just wants my phone number. In the end, that’s all I’m sure I’ve communicated to her.

A half hour later, Dr. Dresden (affectionately known, behind her back, as Mrs. Freud) calls me back. I explain about the eyes and the chills and the spider over my dresser. Her verdict: not the french-fries, but the Serzone. While we speak, I turn the packet of medication over and over in my hand, as if by handling it often and with gentleness, it will release me. Dr. Dresden says that tomorrow I should try taking it with a glass of milk instead. Tonight, I should gargle with salt water, then drink milk. The allergic reaction is based in my throat, she says. If I coat my throat, it will be better.

I think, hey, legal drugs. Rock on, dude.

My throat: this is the problem. The gagging. The food. This tiny hole through which we are supposed to gain sustenance and release our words.

6.        good repute.

I take the half pill with milk the next day. No tingling. No pupils dilating. I watch General Hospital. Luke is still on. I look out the window and watch the tops of trees sway in the wind. I go to bed at nine at night and sleep through until ten the next morning.

After three weeks, Mrs. Freud ups the dosage to a full pill. I no longer have to take it with milk, as the pill coating is sufficient.

After four weeks, I run out of crossword puzzles in my book. That day, I walk to the grocery store. The sun shines, the sky is blue and the air smells of exhaust and flowers. I buy the newspaper that day, and every day thereafter. I walk the five blocks and begin to memorize the houses along the way, the dented mailbox on the corner, the way the lights are out on part of the S on the Safeway sign, the cat that sleeps leaned up against the glass of an apartment window. Every day, I walk home and read the comics and my horoscope before settling into the crossword puzzle. I am careful to avoid the dense writing on the front page.

Today, my horoscope says: “Change is just around the corner. People you meet today may influence your career. Enjoy the perks of your charm.” It is a four star day.

I eat popcorn for dinner. The crunching is loud. I chew carefully and swallow.

On a Tuesday, my mother calls. She tells me about my sister and asks me about my job hunt. She fills me in on family gossip. I make sure to laugh frequently. She asks, “So how are you feeling? You’re better now?”

I say, “Fine. I’m fine. Definitely, I’m getting better. More plugged in.” I tell her I started jogging again. She congratulates me, excessively, as if I’ve discovered a new planet or the cure to cancer or the meaning of life. Her fear and affection pull at me like tiny hooks that dangle from my skin.

I hang up the phone and begin a new crossword puzzle. When the puzzle is complete, I walk over and dig in the bottom of my closet until I find my running shoes, unused now for the last seven months. I scrape a small bit of mud off the toe of a shoe. I leave the shoes out by the front door of my apartment. When the rain stops, I say. I look out the window and watch the trail of one drop as it falls down the glass, merging with a larger river until it splits off again. It pools at the bottom of the window.

7.      an account of the qualities or peculiarities of a person or thing.

Now I am sitting next to a woman on the bus. She tells me about the book she is reading about UFOs. She says she believes in alien abductions. I say that I believe that she does believe in those abductions. I don’t move the muscles in my face. She stops smiling then and returns to reading. Neither of us is homeless.

The landscape in this part of the city has grown lush over the summer. Sweaty people walk, jog, drive down Connecticut Avenue. The bus passes the coffee shop where Chip Carson used to work. I knew him in high school. We had the same English class. He tipped his chair back on two legs and made jokes from the back of the room. Good jokes -- he was actually funny. Last week, I heard he had stopped by Ellie’s house and Mr. Davies’ office too. He wanted to borrow money. They said he looked too thin and he blinked too fast. Neither one gave him money. Ellie left a message with his parents, but they never returned the call. No one is sure where he is living now. He may be at home. He may be elsewhere.

I get off at my stop and walk toward Dr. Dresden’s new office. The new waiting room lacks any plants as of yet, and feels sterile despite the muted impressionist art. She smiles as she ushers me into the office and I know that I can come back here again.

3.        moral or ethical quality.

I am running down a dirt path through the woods. For two weeks, every other day, I have carefully double-knotted the laces of my shoes, stretched my hamstrings, and run down the stairs of my building, out the front door, down two blocks, sprinting as fast as I can, until I reach the entrance to the park woods. Under the canopy of green trees, the illusion of shade makes the heat bearable as the sweat begins to pour off me. I fall into a steady rhythm. After fifteen minutes, I reach the bridge over the creek. I listen to the clomp of my feet over the creaking boards and turn when I reach the end of the wide, flat rock on the other bank. I jog back to the beginning of the path. When I come out from under the trees, I stop for a moment before I enter the street and the sun and the sound of traffic rushing by. I stretch, first one calf and then the other. I walk home, listen to the quieting of my breath and revel in the warmth of my skin.

8.      a formal statement from an employer concerning the qualities and habits of a former servant or employee; reference.

I have added Dear Abby and the classified ads to my reading list. I use a red pen to circle the ads that seem possible: administrative assistant, word processor, secretary. I put an X through any job with receptionist duties. On Sundays, the process takes most of the day. I wonder what a phlebotomist does and how one comes to specialize in it.

The find a copy of my resume and read it through. I drag my old typewriter out of the closet, roll paper into it, and begin to type using an article in the paper as a guide. My fingers fly over the keys as long as I keep from thinking about the motion and the complicated series of thoughts and messages and muscle movements that allows my finger to land on the correct key. I stop when I come to the end of the page and re-read my work, circling the errors with the red pen. I roll another piece of paper into the typewriter and type my name and address, the name and address of Starr Personnel, and the words “Dear Sir or Madam.” When I read it over, there are no errors.

The next day, on the way to buy my newspaper, I drop the finished letter in the mailbox, sending it off into the world.

1.      the aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing.

I am sitting at a metal table in the Coffee Connection, listening to Ellie explain the ever shifting requirements of her job. Since the HR Director left, her workload has doubled. She complains of the burden, but also seems to enjoy the responsibility. Ellie thrives on a challenge. And wisely, her company has rewarded her with praise and a salary increase.

I haven’t seen Ellie, in person, for several months, so I am surprised by the length of her hair, a new pair of glasses, the ring on her pinky finger. But the tone of her voice flows over me like water, sparkling but familiar, bathing me in something I had forgotten.

She pauses mid-sentence and looks at me. “Why the sly smile? Are you here with me?”

I smile wider, nod and say, “Yes, I’m here. I’m just happy to see you. I’ve missed this.” I gesture vaguely, including Ellie, the easy tide of conversation, the sun coming through the windows, the earthy smell of hazelnut coffee, gathering it all up in the sweep of my hand.

Ellie smiles too. “I’m glad you’re back.”

15.  Genetics. any trait, function, structure or substance of an organism resulting from the effect of one or more genes as modified by the environment.

On Thursday, I sprained my ankle. I went down to the track at the University as dusk was falling, with the new watch my mother sent me. It has a lap timer. I began jogging in a slow circle to warm up. Then I sprinted for a lap until my chest under my heart began to cramp. I slowed and fell into 4-1 pace, four laps at pace, one lap faster. I ran in that oval in that pattern for 5 miles. My legs felt long and lean and strong. My feet hit the ground. My breath came in and out, strong and clean. When I stopped running, I walked for two laps. I thought about cooking dinner. I was hungry. Flushed and sweaty, warmth floated through my blood. Sweat dripped down the side of my face and into the hollows above my collarbone.

I tripped on the bleacher stairs as I was leaving for home. My toes caught on the suddenly sticking ground and pitched me forward. I reached my arms out in front of me, but before my hands could find support, my body weight collapsed onto the side of my foot. The muscles thrummed with new music.

16.    A significant visual mark or symbol.

Now my ankle has swollen and turned purple and green and blue like the plumage of a rare tropical bird. It was Icarus and his wax wings that tumbled down to earth when he came too close to the sun. Sisyphus had to push the rock because he compared himself to the gods. The Greeks knew our weaknesses draw us in toward the ground with a force like gravity.

I sit in my apartment and hold my bandaged ankle in my hands. I roll my foot in a circle and explore the range of motion and the limits of pain.