Susan Burton - Empty: A Memoir

August, a campsite in the Catskills. Dark, after dinner, tents pitched, bear bags hung. Ten freshmen and two upperclassmen in a circle around a fire pit. All of us dirty, after four days on this wilderness orientation trip, most of us bonded. Slips of paper are passed out and we are given the instruction, Write down what scares you about going to Yale. The slips are so small there is room for maybe one sentence. No names; the exercise is anonymous. I rest my slip on a rock and try not to press too hard with a ballpoint pen. We put our sentences in a baseball hat and then pass the hat around. You cant get your own fear, a counselor says, and when one boy picks his own slip he returns it to the hat. When the hat comes to me, I reach in, pull out a slip, unfold it, and am startled by the gravity of the words I read; and then I am selfishly anxious because it will be hard to find the right tone for this sentence, hard to deliver it.

The recitations begin. The girl from North Carolina reads my fear, which is somehow diminished by her mild accent: I am scared that I will not have good friends. We discuss this fear but the discussion does not touch me, because while this is not a false fear it is a lesser one. But what level of thing is okay to say? Because then it is my turn and I read the fear I drew: I am scared that I will go crazy.

There is a silence. I think I know whose fear this is. Nathan is pale even after all these days of sun. He wants to have deep talks. He is sensitive and perceptive and I am scared of what he has seen in me. The other day on the trail we ran into another orientation group. There were cries of delight and introductions, but for some reason I just couldnt do it, couldnt go forth and present myself to a whole new pack of freshmen. I climbed to the top of a high rock and started eating gorp very quickly, a lot of gorp. It was the only time on this trip Id been anything but totally controlled and relentlessly friendly. Later, when I was helping Nathan with a tent, he brought up the encounter. Yeah, I just couldnt deal, I said. Yes, I noticed, he said, and looked at me hard, like hed seen into me, hed seen everything. And that was it. Id been nice to Nathan before, but I shut him out then.

One of the counselors speaks first, mentioning the student-run crisis hotline and therapy at the university health service. I cant decide if Nathan is really scared of going crazy or if this is just a part he plays. I know this sounds callous. But when it comes to my own problems, I am reluctant to draw attention. My impulse is not to say.

I keep his slip of paper. I keep everything from this trip, like the sheet where people write nice things about you. On mine it says things like Beautiful energy and You could be named Joy. But months later when I look at the sheet in my dorm room, those seem like descriptions of another girl, one, even then, Id had to try really hard to be.

You cant get your own fear. But I did get mine, didnt I. I pulled my own fear out of the hat, and I delivered my own sentence.

ITS BAD RIGHT AWAY. Oh, not the first few nights, of pizza and pitchers and jukeboxes; of I have found my people joy in new friends; of smoking bud in the courtyard and zoning out in front of fractal screen savers in the bedroom and talking about our parents divorces at two A.M. But one morning I just break. I need to do it the way I do it, hovering, shoving, all alone. I leave my room and go across the street to Wall Food and buy a pint of Heath Bar Crunch and then walk down the sidewalk as if someone is tailing me: must go fast, must go fast, must go fast, but also be normal. I have no idea where I can go to eat this. Its a beautiful fall Saturday morning, the sky a coastal New England blue; a perfect morning, which I could not inhabit if I tried; a perfect morning, which I am ruining. Have already ruined, because being on the way to doing this is tantamount to having done it. A block down theres a parking lot, almost empty except for a dumpsterthereand I go behind the dumpster and eat the pint of ice cream with a spoon Ive taken from our room. The spoon belongs to one of my roommates, and it has a thin silver handle with flowers. The ice cream is deep-frozen, and when I drive into it, the spoons handle bends. When I finish the pint, I throw the carton in the dumpster (so convenient!) and then I look at the bent spoon, and I throw that away, too. Partly because its bent, but partly because I feel like Ive desecrated it. And then as soon as Ive tossed these things in the trash, I start walking again as if I have never stopped, as if I had been going in this direction all along. I feel exhausted relief but also disgust, as I continue under this bright sky, because is this where I will be? Crouching behind dumpsters while everyone is boarding buses for the Yale Bowl? Foraging while everyone else is tailgating? But these are still just questions; I havent yet accepted this as my certain end.

ITS NOT THE LAST of my roommates spoons that Ill throw away. Whenever I do it, I wonder if this is a piece from the familys old silverware, a spoon from the parents first set.

Most of the time I get a plastic spoon with the pint. The guy behind the counter at Wall Food is from Haiti and has a space between his two front teeth. Do you want a spoon? he always says, ready to open the drawer beneath his register, where the utensils are kept. Sometimes I pause before answering, as if I have to think about it. Sometimes I start to say no but then change to yes, as if Im so glad hes suggested it because I would have forgotten. Sometimes I say I need three spoons, as if I am about to go share the ice cream with others, even if its an improbable time for ice cream, ten-thirty A.M.

What I do here at college scares me more than what I did at home in Boulder. Away from my own kitchen, I thought, the impulse to eat like this would fade. Instead, Ive just found other places to do it. Soon I am spending about forty dollars every few days on food. This is money I should not be spending. I have a check from my grandfather for two thousand dollars, and I need it to cover the whole first semester, books, everything.