I’ll never understand people who fork over good money to skydive out of planes, swim with sharks, or entertain themselves with a $15 matinée that will invite a serial killer into their psyche. Especially since we all know monsters tend to resurface with a boo at 2am and surge you with adrenaline until four. Frankly, with a nervous system like mine, I get the same “thrill” when I assume my husband is out in the garage and discover him on the toilet instead.
So hardwired for survival am I that I often wonder if they should autopsy my brain once I die of very natural causes. Lord knows my cause of death won’t be at the hands of actual nature since I have an arrangement with bears, snakes, and mountain lions that I shall stay off their dirt trails should they stay off the politely paved suburban streets I stroll.
This lens on peril allows me to spot potential sources of danger with paranoid precision. Take, for example, the time my husband surprised me with a re-do of our engagement since he had failed so epically the first time, 23 years prior. Perhaps he grew tired of hearing about my disappointment over having been robbed of a good story for lo those 8,395 days. The man redeemed himself in spades by wrapping a large white box with a red ribbon and asking a friend to deliver it to the beach and place it on our path. What my husband did not account for was my avid reading of current events, which that morning had warned me and the rest of the fearful public of portable meth labs that were being discovered in backpacks left inside public restrooms.
As Russ guided me toward the box resting unattended on a towel in the sand, he declared with great cheer, “Oh, I wonder what that could be?”
I stopped in my tracks, stiff arming him as he tried to lead me toward it. Don’t items like this require a call to the bomb squad when discovered at airports? “Russ, no, we don’t know what that is. We know it isn’t ours. It might be one of those meth labs.”
“Shana, it’s for you,” he pleaded with only a hint of exasperation before dropping to one knee in front of the mystery box that held a sparkly necklace inside.
Romance and terror, you see, are in the eye of the beholder.
All this to say that I wonder, so tightly wound am I, if a coroner would find my nerves to be like one of those rootbound plants that have outgrown their plastic container over at the hardware store.
To declare that I come by this reactivity naturally is an understatement. If I were self-indulgent enough to run the potted plant metaphor into the ground, I would say that, relatively, my roots are confined to a single cell of a six pack of petunias. My mom’s, on the other hand, consumed every square inch of a 25-gallon Ginko. But instead of avoiding scenarios and content that might trigger her fear, she pursued them. For pleasure.
This meant that she encouraged me, her beloved child, to summon spirits with her on an Ouija board and accompany her to the movie Carrie at age 9 and the first film in the Halloween franchise at 11. The night she dragged me to see Poltergeist in the theaters she even hid one of the clowns from her creepy collection on my pillow so that I’d see it the moment I opened my eyes.
She created a dynamic that made me want to seek revenge. One day, I decided to hide in the alcove of our linen closet and pop out to scare her. Only she screamed so loudly and for so long that I was sure there was more to fear than her young daughter in front of her, so I joined her in a screech that rose to the levels of a tsunami siren. My dad, bless him, was so victimized by our shrieks that he often shouted, “Jesus, I can’t walk in my own house.”
Our only public spectacle took place on a family vacation on a quiet little island called Balboa off the coast of Newport Beach in southern California. The island is famous for its frozen bananas dipped in chocolate and there are two rival shops that sell them, separated by only a few other stores between them. Mom and I were partial to the peanut butter frozen yogurt they sold at one of them, so we indulged in this treat all seven days of our trip.
On this particular day, we were double dipping. We ate one for lunch, but when the family walked over to the shop in the evening, we decided, hell, let’s have another. What we didn’t expect was for the shopkeeper to shame us by declaring for all to hear, “Weren’t you two already here earlier today?” I was thinking, uh ma’am, you of all people should support our gluttony. But instead of offering her a sassy reply, we shuffled away licking our cones sheepishly while averting the eyes of the long line of other tourists waiting their turn.
Walking back to our beach rental, we giggled while we regaled our family members with our public shaming. Mid story, as we approached the fluorescent glow of the rival shop with its own long line of tourists awaiting their frozen bananas and Balboa bars dipped in sprinkles, a young prankster leaped out from behind a bush. Making monster hands and bellowing ahhhh, he landed squarely in front of the two women who would guarantee that he would never ever pull such a stunt again. In Dolby Stereo, we screamed like Freddy Kruger himself had us by the hair.
Once we assessed that the threat had been neutralized by – hmmmm – reality, we cackled like phlegmy lunatics high on fear and dairy. The crowd of onlookers gawked at us with a blend of relief and disgust as many of them aborted their phone calls to 9-1-1.
In case you’re wondering, yes, it is exhausting to be such a doozy, but I like to say that my mom taught me to enjoy a natural high. I need not seek a single thrill when my own imagination scares the hell right out of me.
