High Anxiety
Fran Schumer
Word Count 1595
In eighth grade, our class was scheduled to take a two-day series of tests called The Iowa Tests. I was nervous but not too nervous. I had always done well on tests, though I was prone to anxiety.
The Iowa Tests were the start of a new technology, our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Kalb, explained. Instead of marking an ‘X’ in a box or circling the right answer in a booklet that would be marked by hand, we would now have to darken ovals, or “eggs, ” on the answer sheet, called a grid, which a computer would grade. Repeatedly, she warned us to be very careful that the number next to the oval matched the number of the question in our test booklet; otherwise, all our answers would be marked wrong. I looked at the thousands of eggs on the answer sheet and felt my head spin.
My special No. 2 pencil in hand (Mrs. Kalb had impressed upon us the need to fill in each oval with a dark, heavy stroke), I began reading the questions on the first test. None seemed difficult. The subject was Social Studies Skills. After 40 minutes, Mrs. Kalb said, "pencils down" and students, having rustled and sighed in the brief intermission allowed us, proceeded on to test number two: Quantitative Analysis, or math. I whizzed through the first three questions but at question four, felt confused. The problem didn’t seem to provide enough information. I read it again. Still, I had no idea what to do. I looked at the grid and felt dizzy, all those eggs. Around me, students anxiously scribbled. My idleness frightened me -- time was passing -- but what could I do? This feeling of having utterly no idea how to proceed was strange to me. I had felt scared before, but of something. Here, I suddenly felt as if I were losing my mind. Already panicking, I moved on to the next problem, but even before I finished reading it, I knew the same thing would happen. I’d have no idea how to proceed. Distressed now more by my rising panic than anything else, I picked up my head and looked around the room. All heads were bent; all eyes focused on the question books. This was only happening to me.
I went back to the first question that had thrown me, question four, and tried again to figure out a solution, but none came. Questions five, six -- all seemed equally impenetrable. Seven, eight. At nine, I thought I could at least begin to do some calculations, but my answer didn't match any on the grid. Blindly, crazily, I started filling in ovals, randomly, for surely that was better than not filling in any at all. When I looked at the time, I saw that only twenty minutes had gone. Forty minutes to go. How would I ever endure them?
Making no progress, I decided to step out for a break. Mrs. Kalb, puzzled as to why anyone would want to leave at this stage, nonetheless let me go. Through the silent halls, I wandered toward the bathroom. In the cool, tiled room, someone had raised the window just an inch. The frosted pane felt heavenly on my heated brow. Outside, I saw a woman lift groceries out of a station wagon. I wished more than anything to be out there helping her. Often, I accompanied my mother on her weekly trips to Waldbaum's. Quick and efficient, my mother moved the bags from car to kitchen floor, from kitchen floor to counter. Can by can, I helped her unpack. To be with my mother in the kitchen now seemed the most wonderful thing I could imagine, but I was being tested. I had to go back. And yet I knew, as I walked down the hall, that nothing would change. I would return to the classroom and stare blankly, dumbly, at the same imponderable test.
Gradually, I became calm enough to figure out a few answers, but my fingers felt weak. By the time Mrs. Kalb wrote "11:00" on the board and issued her quiet but fatal "pencils down," I was only mildly relieved. What I had experienced was so distressing that having it behind me offered solace of only the most fleeting kind. The point was that it had happened. What had happened? I didn't understand.
The panic haunted me sporadically on the next test, even though the field was social science, a subject I liked. At question twenty-three, I noticed that the egg I was darkening was adjacent to answer twenty-four. Scanning the answer sheet, I realized I had done the terrible thing: skipped a space on the grid. Frantically, I began erasing all my answers. Now time, which had dragged so painfully during the last test, seemed to fly. I'd never have enough to go back and figure out the answers again. Moving the eraser, I ripped an egg. What if the computer, so sensitive according to Mrs. Kalb, simply malfunctioned and rejected my entire test? Visions of a massive computer breakdown gripped me. I began to re-do all the questions. By the time Mrs. Kalb uttered "pencils down," I wasn’t even halfway through.
I survived the two more tests that morning and the three scheduled for the afternoon, but in the intervening night, away from grids and eggs and pencils, I lived with the horror of what I had done. Exhausted by all of it, I slept soundly and returned for the second day of tests, the panic down to a low, queasy rumble in my stomach. When the tests were over, I made a few timid inquiries. I learned that no one had experienced the nightmare that I had. My friend Carla laughed over the eggs and joked about seeing them all night in her dreams.
One day in spring, Mrs. Kalb, the homeroom teacher, announced that the Iowa results were back, and she would distribute them that afternoon. After lunch, my classmates and I returned hastily to our seats. "Carla Resnick," Mrs. Kalb called. Carla went up and took the little strip of white paper. Beneath each of the twelve test titles on the strip was a number, the percentile in which the score placed the student. At the end of the row was an overall percentile. "Ninety-two," Carla said in response to the many questions when she returned to her seat. "Stanley Kerr, Richard Goldberg, Sally Prager." "Oooh," I heard Carla say when Sally returned to her seat. "Sally got a ninety-nine," Carla whispered. "Lisa Bachman, Sarah Lieber, Ezra Kane." "Nice Ezra," Mrs. Kalb said. I watched Carla crane to see Ezra's score but at that moment, my name was called. Mrs. Kalb said nothing as I marched up to fetch my slip. My overall score, eighty-six, wasn’t so bad, but then, scanning the strip, I saw the number beneath Quantitative Analysis: forty, my score, my shame, an ignominy I could hide from her classmates but not from myself. I quickly scanned the other figures. There was a sixty-three on the test in which I'd skipped an egg but most of the other numbers were in the nineties.
Gingerly, I participated in the dominant class activity, post-test, of finding out who got what score. Sally and Lisa, not Ezra or even the boys whom everyone considered so smart, were the only two in the class to receive ninety-nines, all the more impressive since both of them, artistic and dreamy, doodled all day in their memo pads and never paid much attention in class. I hoped to find students who had done worse than I had done, but the only one I could find was my friend, Skippy Stein, who never did well on tests, but even Skippy didn’t have any grades as bad as mine in math.
As a result of the tests, my view of myself changed. I saw that I was not like the other students, or even other people. I had lost control of not just my body but of my mind, which was scarier, and I would have to remain hypervigilant about math, about everything. I continued to study and do well on most tests and by the end of middle school, the period cramps I’d suffered from were largely gone. The pain now existed only in my head.
Decades later, I learned that what I had experienced was called a panic attack. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), the handbook put out by the American Psychiatric Association, defined it as a period of intense fear or discomfort accompanied by symptoms such as palpitations, sweating, trembling, and worse, the existential ones, a fear of losing control, of going crazy, even dying. This last symptom isn’t an exaggeration. In some primal sense, I felt that doing poorly on so simple a test would cause me to lose the love of the people I needed and loved most, my family and my peers. Naturally, I panicked.
Could a therapist have helped my 12-year-old self? Possibly, but therapy was not in my family’s vocabulary. It took me years to even realize the indelible mark the experience had left. Only when I wrote a short story in which the incident figured into the life of a main character did I realize how deeply the event lived inside me. The memory still set off an inner trembling. I know because when I decided to rewrite the story as it really happened, it took me forever to change the “she” to an “I.”
Fran’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the co-writer of the New York Times bestselling Powerplay (Simon and Schuster) and the author of Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). Her poetry chapbook, Weight, was published in 2022. She wrote the Underground Gourmet column for New York Magazine, and the restaurant reviews for the New Jersey Section of the New York Times. Her mother, 94, and confined to a wheelchair, eats one Haagen Dazs ice cream bar a night. Sometimes two.