My Life with the Panic Button

by Jasmine Odessa Rizer

There is a snapshot of me at age three or four, at what is presumably the petting zoo. In this picture, I am wearing some kind of little red-and-white sun dress, with matching white hair barrettes and red-and-white sneakers. (My mother must have coordinated this outfit, since three- and four-year-olds are not usually remarkable for their fashion sense.) My hair is in braids, and I am petting a goat.

The goat's head, if you count its horns, stands nearly as tall as my own four-year-old head. This may account for the fact that as I am petting the goat with one lily-white hand, I am also shrieking with apparent horror, my mouth so wide open that you can practically hear the high-pitched wail.

I wish I could remember that day. Did someone put me up to petting the goat, against my will, for the sake of a cute photograph? I very much doubt that. My mother flattened many a callous dentist and nurse during the course of my rather sickly youth. It's unlikely that she would have acquiesced to a cruel goat experiment. I think it more likely that I wanted to pet the goat, but then, when I got right down to the business of goat-petting, the excitement or maybe the goat's rough hair were too much for my nerves.

If that was what happened, then the pattern of last-minute panicking continued throughout my childhood and right on into my adult life. Take my first kiss, for instance. I didn't get my first kiss until I was eighteen or nineteen years old. But I gave my first kiss in elementary school. In both cases, I was sorry about it almost immediately afterwards.

At my elementary school, we had what was called the "Spring Fling." It was held in the elementary school gymnasium. You could get your face painted, and try to catch plastic fish out of a kiddy pool, and trade in a certain number of tickets for a grab bag--all a great deal of fun for kids growing up in the sticks. During the Spring Fling, the basketball hoops in the gym were covered up by enormous canvas tarpaulins, presumably to keep people from throwing basketballs into them. After all the fun was over, and our moms were helping to clean up, I chased my friend Kyle Morse under one of those tarps, where I kissed him on the cheek. Then I freaked out and said, "Don't tell anybody!"

I don't know what I thought would happen if he told anybody. We were about seven years old, so there wasn't any smoldering attraction going on that would have alarmed our parents into breaking up our friendship. I grew up in a pretty liberal household, and can't really imagine my mother screaming at me, "You kissed a boy! YOU KISSED A BOY! What are we going to do?" I just immediately felt that I had done something I had no business doing. I think, more than anything, that I was afraid I would be the laughingstock of the entire second grade if it got out that I had kissed a boy.

As far as I know, Kyle Morse actually didn't tell anybody. Thanks, Kyle.

My first real kiss, which happened when I was a freshman in college, was so disgusting that afterwards I thought I must be a lesbian, because I clearly hated kissing boys. I had spent many years in high school pining away for a boy, but now that I had the attention of one, I was just plain unsettled. After knowing me for two days, this boy had detained me outside of the building that housed the English Department and planted a wet, boring one on me. I went back to my dorm room and bounced furiously on my bed, while my roommate and I called the boy all kinds of bad names. I felt that he had cheated somehow, kissing me like that when I wasn't expecting him to. I spent a lot of time hiding out from him after that. I don't think I did him any lasting damage, though, because I think I spotted him walking around on campus just last year with a woman and child, presumably his own.

I'm betting that if I ever get married, the same thing will happen. I'll run around showing off my engagement ring for a month or so, and then the panic will set in. The stingy gal within will cry, "SIXTY DOLLARS?" (I'm planning on walking down the aisle in a lacy factory second from Stein Mart.) "FOR A DRESS I'M ONLY GONNA WEAR ONCE?"

My fiancé, who in my mind looks something like Alan Rickman, but who will probably look more like Mr. Magoo in real life, will try to calm me down by saying something like, "Well, honey, you could wear it again if you wanted to."

"Wear my wedding dress AGAIN?" I shall wail. "Are you CRAZY?"

And then, if he places any value at all on his own life and sanity, my fiancé will say, "No, honey, but YOU are," and leave me standing there in Stein Mart.

I only hope he has the sense to get his ring back.