Not Fade Away: A Memoir of Senses Lost and Found Read Online Free
Author: Rebecca Alexander, Sascha Alper
were absurd, too, and totally unnecessary, but I always felt an overwhelming need to make myself seem better than I was.
In seventh grade I remember talking on the phone to a guy I liked and was trying to impress by telling him that I was related to Cindy Crawford, thinking somehow that this might make me worthy of him. It sounds absurd now and I can laugh about it, but at the time, I was desperate for approval. I just thought I needed something to make me seem better, cooler, different.
I told another guy whom I was trying to impress that I was going to be doing a photo shoot for
Seventeen
magazine and that I needed to choose a guy to be in it with me. I wrote down a list of questions to ask him about what he’d want to wear and how he’d want to be positioned in the shoot. I sat in the kitchen on the phone, twirling the phone cord as I actually wrote down his answers to these questions, nearly believing the ridiculous things that I was saying. I remember at one point a group of these boys called me and made fun of me for the lies I’d told. And just as I had when I was a little girl, I denied, denied, denied.
Perhaps this is part of why, when we found out that there was something wrong with my eyes, it didn’t surprise me as much as it might have. Instead, it confirmed what I already knew about myself. I wasn’t like other people. I had been right: I was deeply flawed, and I was never going to be perfect.
All of the lying was useful in one sense: It prepared me for the much bigger lies that were to come. I was well practiced by thetime I was hiding my hearing aids, hiding my vision problems, and still doing everything I could to try to be just like everyone else.
Then I started to steal. My friend Jamie and I took lipstick from the drugstore one day, and when we found a cigarette on the ground while walking home that afternoon, we hid under the deck in my backyard, smoking in our bright stolen lipstick. When I was a teenager I started stealing more, from stores like J.Crew and Victoria’s Secret. It was a release, a high, and I felt exhilarated every time I got away with it. There was a part of me that felt like the world owed me something. That was how I justified it as I got older. I was just evening the scales.
Of course, the world doesn’t owe me anything. It doesn’t owe any of us anything. It was me who owed the world, and myself, something: to be better than that. Though that’s a lesson that I couldn’t yet comprehend, one that I had to learn over and over again, until it finally stuck.
5
W hen I was a little girl I loved going to visit my mother’s mother, Grandma Etta, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I adore Grandma Etta, who is independent and free-spirited to this day, at ninety-two, still taking her morning swims in Lake Michigan and wearing beautiful Indian saris for festive occasions. When she would read to us she could do any accent and bring every character to life. My favorite was when Grandma would read me
Eloise
. She would capture her exuberant, naughty, childish voice perfectly, and I would sit, mesmerized, wishing she would go on forever.
I knew that we were getting close to Grandma’s house when I began to bounce gently in my seat to the sound of the tiny rocks under our tires, which meant we were at the beginning of her driveway. An insignificant sound, but one that I loved and can still remember so clearly.
We would often go at Christmastime, and even though we were Jewish, on Christmas Eve Mom would put up little stockings for us, letting us enjoy a few of the perks that our friends did.Then we would walk down the pebbled roads, where tea lights in white paper bags would be lined up on either side to celebrate the holiday, and down into the town, where the Native American women laid their jewelry out on blankets. They were in an array of vibrant colors: the gorgeous range of turquoise greens and blues, bracelets and barrettes intricately beaded in red and green and yellow. We watched
In seventh grade I remember talking on the phone to a guy I liked and was trying to impress by telling him that I was related to Cindy Crawford, thinking somehow that this might make me worthy of him. It sounds absurd now and I can laugh about it, but at the time, I was desperate for approval. I just thought I needed something to make me seem better, cooler, different.
I told another guy whom I was trying to impress that I was going to be doing a photo shoot for
Seventeen
magazine and that I needed to choose a guy to be in it with me. I wrote down a list of questions to ask him about what he’d want to wear and how he’d want to be positioned in the shoot. I sat in the kitchen on the phone, twirling the phone cord as I actually wrote down his answers to these questions, nearly believing the ridiculous things that I was saying. I remember at one point a group of these boys called me and made fun of me for the lies I’d told. And just as I had when I was a little girl, I denied, denied, denied.
Perhaps this is part of why, when we found out that there was something wrong with my eyes, it didn’t surprise me as much as it might have. Instead, it confirmed what I already knew about myself. I wasn’t like other people. I had been right: I was deeply flawed, and I was never going to be perfect.
All of the lying was useful in one sense: It prepared me for the much bigger lies that were to come. I was well practiced by thetime I was hiding my hearing aids, hiding my vision problems, and still doing everything I could to try to be just like everyone else.
Then I started to steal. My friend Jamie and I took lipstick from the drugstore one day, and when we found a cigarette on the ground while walking home that afternoon, we hid under the deck in my backyard, smoking in our bright stolen lipstick. When I was a teenager I started stealing more, from stores like J.Crew and Victoria’s Secret. It was a release, a high, and I felt exhilarated every time I got away with it. There was a part of me that felt like the world owed me something. That was how I justified it as I got older. I was just evening the scales.
Of course, the world doesn’t owe me anything. It doesn’t owe any of us anything. It was me who owed the world, and myself, something: to be better than that. Though that’s a lesson that I couldn’t yet comprehend, one that I had to learn over and over again, until it finally stuck.
5
W hen I was a little girl I loved going to visit my mother’s mother, Grandma Etta, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I adore Grandma Etta, who is independent and free-spirited to this day, at ninety-two, still taking her morning swims in Lake Michigan and wearing beautiful Indian saris for festive occasions. When she would read to us she could do any accent and bring every character to life. My favorite was when Grandma would read me
Eloise
. She would capture her exuberant, naughty, childish voice perfectly, and I would sit, mesmerized, wishing she would go on forever.
I knew that we were getting close to Grandma’s house when I began to bounce gently in my seat to the sound of the tiny rocks under our tires, which meant we were at the beginning of her driveway. An insignificant sound, but one that I loved and can still remember so clearly.
We would often go at Christmastime, and even though we were Jewish, on Christmas Eve Mom would put up little stockings for us, letting us enjoy a few of the perks that our friends did.Then we would walk down the pebbled roads, where tea lights in white paper bags would be lined up on either side to celebrate the holiday, and down into the town, where the Native American women laid their jewelry out on blankets. They were in an array of vibrant colors: the gorgeous range of turquoise greens and blues, bracelets and barrettes intricately beaded in red and green and yellow. We watched
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