Kristin Hersh - Rat Girl

A couple of girls with clipboards post themselves in front of me and begin stopping people on their way to class to discuss some issue. I turn away from them. Betty switches to her I-don’t-have-time-for-you voice. “You sure you’re feeling well?”

“Everything’s fine. I finally have my head on straight.” She says nothing. “Could you please go to school with me? We go to school at the beach, remember? The beach, Betty.”

“I know where we go to school, sweetie, but I can’t take any more of your classes. Do you know they’re making us dissect cats?”

I loved dissecting cats. “They’re dead cats. Cat cadavers.” I look up at the bulletin board next to me, read a roommate-wanted ad, one asking for a ride to New York and one that just says, “Help, I need help,” with a phone number attached. Help, I need help?

“I’m planning a headache for that day.” Poor Betty. It takes weeks to dissect a cat. She says something muffled to a person in the room with her. I watch a spider walk up the stem of the dusty plant while I wait for Betty to talk to me again. The spider catches me watching it and freezes.

I can’t believe she doesn’t even care that I’m here. She was supposed to be happy. I’ll just explain to her that there aren’t any dead cats in this class. “Hey, Betty, the seminar is Art Therapy. Get it? Isn’t that funny? ’Cause art is the opposite of therapy! It makes you crazy!”

Betty sighs again. “You don’t talk that way around other people, right?” She sounds like I’m making her tired. “I have to go, honey, but tell me—do you really think your record’s going badly?”

Shit, I think she’s blowing me off . “I don’t know. Probably. The English people took out all the fun songs.”

“You don’t have any fun songs,” she says distractedly. I roll my eyes. I guess it was presumptuous, thinking she’d have nothing to do on a Saturday morning. She’s probably got a date with a priest. “I talked to a Hollywood friend about you and he says you need a single .”

“Do you know what a single is, Betty?” I ask, annoyed. “It’s a dumb song, a bad song. Bad enough to get played on the radio. That’s just public humiliation—what’s the point? I’d rather be good in private than bad in public.”

“Well, maybe just some up-tempo numbers, then.”

“We’re plenty ‘up-tempo,’ we’re just not in the right—” I can tell she isn’t listening. “Never mind.”

In a singsongy way she asks, “Do you like living in the recording studio? I loved recording studios.”

“Well, this one’s a rich-people farm. They cook for us and stuff; we don’t get it. It’s too sterile. Hey, wanna go to school? School is important, remember?”

She drops the singsongy thing. “I do go to school, Krissy. I didn’t quit.” Ow. “You know what I think? I think you’re under a lot of pressure, with the baby coming and making your first record. Maybe it makes you want to go back to a time before you had these stresses in your life.”

She is blowing me off. “So you’re a psychology major after all.”

She doesn’t laugh. “I’m going to give you some advice now.” No shit. “Don’t ever run away from your commitments. You’ll have more options open to you if you don’t run away. Does that make sense?”

I say nothing. I shouldn’t have said that I ran away. I should have put it differently. ‘I’ve come to a decision’ or something dramatic like that. Then she’d be on my side, welcoming me back, not lecturing me.

“We all have a snake,” Betty continues, “and right now you need to—”

“What?” It’s like she slapped me.

“I said we all have a snake and yours is—”

“We all have a what ?” My head’s pounding along with my heart.

“I don’t mean it literally. I’m just trying to say that if you don’t face—”

“Did you say we all have snakes ? Why did you say that?”

She sighs. “Krissy, if you’d let me finish, I could tell you.” I sit, stunned. I never told her about the snake. “I have a snake and you have a snake. We all have to face our demons some day, sweetheart, and that day’ll be the scariest you ever lived. Then you’ll wake up the next morning and realize your snake is still there, that you have to face your demons again. But it won’t be so scary this time. Once you see your shadow, you’ll realize that the rest of your life will be spent staring it down, but you know what?”

“What?”

“You can do it.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Betty.” Christ.

“Krissy, you have a calling, so make this record. If you hate it, you never have to make another record again.”

She doesn’t understand. I slide to the floor. The issue girls turn around to stare at me, their clipboards at their sides. “Promise?” I ask.

“I promise,” says Betty. “If this record’s as bad as you think it is,” she says cheerfully, “you won’t be allowed to make another one!”

I laugh uncertainly. “Not ‘bad’ exactly, just hard.”

She’s talking to somebody else again. I’m losing her. “Go back to work, sweetie.” Now she’s gonna go dancing off with some priest and leave me here alone.

“I gotta take this seminar anyway, Betty. I mean, it’s a ‘commitment’ and all. Why don’t you just sit in?” I’m getting desperate. “Please?” Help, I need help. The lounge begins to fill with students talking and buying styrofoam cups of coffee between classes. They look happy. I miss my life.

“You’re gonna be great, sweetheart,” says Betty. “It’s a new chapter! I love you. You’re super. Fall in love!” and she hangs up. Bummer . I lean against the dusty plant where the spider is still frozen in terror.

“Miss you, Betty,” I say to the dial tone.

My aunts-—Lily White, Frank, Sister, Tony and Weeza-—are sitting around a table, slicing strawberries and shelling pecans for pie. They talk and laugh, their hands moving expertly. Frank looks out the window. “It’s getting dark,” she says.

Lily White, the youngest, knows what this means to children. She smiles at me, her fingers pink with strawberry juice. “When the stars come out, they’re telling you it’s their turn to play,” she says. “They help us say goodbye to one day so we can see a new one tomorrow.”

I wanna go back to the ocean or sit under the fairy tree. The buzzing fluorescents are gross and the other students don’t look promising.

The first thing the teacher asks us to do is lie on the floor. What is it with college professors and lying on the floor? This time, though, I have the opposite experience from my deep relaxation freak-out in Dude’s class. I could no more jog around the room than… I don’t know, stay awake .

So while the teacher drones on about swaying trees and gentle breezes, I don’t stay awake; I just pass out. ’Cause I’m not me anymore, I’m pregnant .

I wake up as the other students are shuffling around, grabbing art supplies and moving desks into groups. Crap. I slept through the assignment. Following a woman with blond ponytails and glasses over to the art supply cabinet, I copy everything she does, taking a gigantic piece of paper, some colored pencils, charcoal and a drawing pen from the cabinet, and scooting a desk over to her group. Surreptitiously peeking over some shoulders to see what “art” we’re supposed to do, I notice the other students are all drawing animals. Okay… I can draw an animal.