Free Kissing Doorknobs by Terry Spencer Hesser

crazy. I loved her very much but wasn’t showing it in any way she could understand. Or I could understand. I couldn’t help myself, though. I really couldn’t.
    My mother must have felt really guilty about the carnival incident, because in the months that followed she tried very hard to ignore my rituals.
    Unfortunately, that didn’t help to alleviate my anxiety either. I began to fear the dark. I hated wind and was terrified of being alone. Even the nightly squeak of el trains returning to the end of the line that had once seemed comforting in its rhythmic regularity cut a metal slash through my nervous system. I felt sick but wasn’t sure of what.
    And so I did what I had always done. I clung tighter and tighter to my mother. I became a ball and chain around her neck. I could sense her reluctance, feel her urge to pull away from me. I didn’t care. I clung harder and tighter than ever.
    One horrible afternoon, while I was watching my mother smiling at me from her NordicTrack, our separateness hit me like a bolt of lightning. I doubled over with anxiety and tried not to think about puking.
    “Are you all right?” She didn’t miss a swoosh of her NordicTrack.
    I looked up at her expression of passive fortitude and suddenly realized that she could outwardly show me patience, affection, love and concern …
    “Tara? Are you okay?”
    … while she was with someone else in her mind. I couldn’t control her thoughts, I couldn’t be sure that I’d ever really know what they were. That I’d ever known what they were. Was this possible? Did I know her at all? Was it all a facade? Was her fury the only thing that cracked the mask of her personality? Was anger the only emotion I could ever be sure she was feeling? Did she have to be out of control to be authentic? Did everyone?
    In an instant, I understood that I had a problem I would never be able to overcome. From then on, I knew I would never be able to fully trust my mother. I suspected she was always thinking things that were different from what she said.
    Good morning./
I hate you.
    How was school?/
I’m packing my bags and leaving.
    Don’t I get a kiss?/
If you touch me, I’ll go mad.
    My heart was beating so fast I could barely breathe. My mother had left her NordicTrack and was holding my head and saying something, but I couldn’t concentrate on her words.
    My mother, father, sister, friends, teachers—they could all think something about me that they weren’t telling me. They could pretend. My mother could be pretending she loved my father. She could run off and leave him, and us. Leave us! I could marry someone someday who didn’t love me or who stopped loving mewithout telling me. Who still smiled at me and ate with me and slept with me. And no matter how much any of us loved anyone else, it would never be enough to ensure that the other person felt the same way. Trust was out of the question.
    “Are you okay?” my mother asked.
    ’Tm kinda … dizzy,” I said.
    “You sure
are!”
She laughed and got back on her NordicTrack. “But at least you’re not praying.”
    Ironically, although I desperately wanted to control and monitor my mother’s thoughts, I couldn’t control my own thoughts at all. They just jumped into my head and took over.
    I needed to be alone. I wanted to be alone. To think. To try not to feel. After months of remora-like proximity, suddenly I couldn’t stand to be near my mother. Or my father. And the spring rain scared me. So did wind, convertibles, electric can openers and the color red. I didn’t know why. I was totally miserable.

11
Donna
    I met Donna, or rather was accosted by her, while walking home from church one rainy Sunday in July.
    Trying to stay dry, she was standing underneath a garage frame just inside an alley. I knew who she was. I’d just seen her at Mass. I’d seen her for years. She went to St. Francis School. Like me, she was thirteen and going into eighth grade. She was lovely, with dark hair and