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Difficult Girl – Growing up, with help
By Lena Dunham
I am eight, and I am afraid of everything. The list of things that keep
me up at night includes but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid,
leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their
packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we
die together, homeless people, headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk,
the subway, sleep.
An assistant teacher comes to school with a cold sore. I am
convinced he’s infected with MRSA, a skin-eating staph infection. I
wait for my own flesh to erode. I stop touching my shoelaces (too
filthy) or hugging adults outside my family. In school, we are
learning about Hiroshima, so I read “Sadako and the Thousand
Paper Cranes,” and I know instantly that I have leukemia. A
symptom of leukemia is dizziness, and I have that, when I sit up too
fast or spin around in circles. So I quietly prepare to die in the next
year or so, depending on how fast the disease progresses.
My parents are getting worried. It’s hard enough to have a child,
much less a child who demands to inspect our groceries and
medicines for evidence that their protective seals have been
tampered with. I have only the vaguest memory of a life before fear.
Every morning when I wake up, there is one blissful second before I
look around the room and remember my many terrors. I wonder if
this is what it will always be like, forever, and I try to remember
moments I felt safe: In bed next to my mother one Sunday morning.
Playing with my friend Isabel’s puppy. Getting picked up from a
sleepover just before bedtime.
One night, my father becomes so frustrated by my behavior that he
takes a walk and doesn’t come back for three hours. While he’s
gone, I start to plan our life without him.
My fourth-grade teacher, Kathy, is my best friend at school. She’s a
plump, pretty woman with hair like yellow pipe cleaners. Her
clothes resemble the sheets at my grandma’s house, floral but
threadbare, and with mismatched buttons. She says I can ask her as
many questions as I want: about tidal waves, about my sinuses,
about nuclear war. She offers vague, reassuring answers. In
hindsight, they were tinged with religion, implied a faith in a
distinctly Christian God. She can tell when I’m getting squirrelly,
and she shoots me a look across the room that says, It’s O.K., Lena,
just give it a second.
When I’m not with Kathy, I’m with Chris Conta, our school nurse,
who has a perm and wears holiday sweaters all year round. She has
a no-nonsense approach to health that comforts me. She presents
me with hard facts (very few children develop Reye’s syndrome in
response to aspirin) and tells me that polio has been eradicated in
America. She takes me seriously when I explain that I’ve been
exposed to scarlet fever by a kid on the subway with a red face.
Sometimes she lets me lie on the top bunk in the back room, dark
and cool. I rest my cheek against the plastic mattress cover and
listen as she dispenses medication and condoms to high-school
kids. If I’m lucky, she doesn’t send me back to class.
No one likes the way things are going, so at some point therapy is
suggested. I am used to appointments: allergist, chiropractor, tutor.
All I want is to feel better, and that overrides the fear of something
new, something reserved for people who are crazy. Plus, both my
parents have therapists, and I feel more like my parents than like