Dawn Denham

One evening, I asked my students to write two secrets on slips of paper: one that was true and one invented. We folded our slips of paper and put them into Chuck’s thick winter hat. Chuck—tall and lanky, always grinning, face open as if to say, “Bring it on” because he was ready to let life in after everything that had happened, but I can’t tell you what happened. That’s one of his secrets.

We each pulled two secrets from Chuck’s hat. “Write the first thing that comes to mind,” I said. And they did, and I did, too. We only had time to write about three secrets. But something happened for me in those few minutes of writing. When I finished, my fragments were already connecting. I wanted more. I wanted more secrets.

I emailed my students the next morning asking them to send the secrets they’d pulled from the hat. I planned to read one secret at a time, and write for five minutes. Maybe I’d build something.

The secrets started trickling in. I opened the first email. “I am a millionaire.” Immediately I felt the urge. I didn’t always have time to write. I closed the emails without reading them. Put them in a folder titled Secrets. I felt supported by my students, as if with each email they were whispering between the lines, Do it. Write. See this through. They kept coming in like banking, making deposits, interest rising. I went to bed full of promise, excited by these gifts. Knowing I would have something to write every time I opened one of the emails.

The trouble is, I can’t keep a secret. Or I don’t want to. I mean, I try to be worthy of the tale told in a whisper, heads bent low and together. I want to be worthy. But it’s hard not to share what I learn. Not because it’s juicy. But because I hope to quench my own unending thirst by telling. I hope telling will make me look good, important, worthy in another’s eyes. “Blank told me This!” I will say zealously, but not because it’s a whopper. Because when I spill the secret, it’s all about me. I don’t recognize the significance of someone’s whisper, thinking instead of how telling someone else will make me feel.

This is what happens when you grow up needing assurance that you are here. When you ask and ask and ask and a father says, Why do you ask so many questions? When he places his hand across your forehead and says, Stop wrinkling your forehead! When a mother walks down the front stairs wearing your castaway blue jeans, saying, Look, Honey, these are the jeans you can’t wear anymore! When you strive and strive to be the best, do the best, and act the best. When your life depends on it. When all that is left is a busy achieving machine and the only way to tell you’re alive is through constant affirmation.

That’s why you gossip. Bring up stuff you shouldn’t, what someone else has just begged you yesterday not to tell anyone. Because in the end, you hope the telling will ease the need, salve the wound, heal you.

Nine days ago, someone I love and admire and respect told me a secret and asked me for help. I haven’t breathed a word of it to anyone. Not one word. Well, I kind of told my husband.

The private story, the personal, no matter the arc, only becomes a secret when spoken aloud (or written). Otherwise, it’s just a handful of details. A friend says, “Secrets are not always so pernicious. Secrets can also be about politeness and avoiding hurt and misunderstandings.” To which I say, a secret is a secret because of shame. The secret exists because of what it covers and what it says about its whisperers.

A friend living in Denver told me a few weeks ago, “We smoke pot every weekend.” She didn’t say this was a secret.

I’ve never smoked pot. I’ve never smoked tobacco. So how does a twenty-three-year-old singer of classical music who would never put fire in her mouth, try pot? I guess I will tell you a secret now. She eats brownies with her sister, a safe person. My brother-in-law, a born-and-bred rural West Virginia boy, a contractor with a long and unruly beard reminiscent of the days of the Civil War, mixed the stuff that went in our batch and set up the Trivial Pursuit board. My sister and I drove into town for pizza.

“I don’t feel anything!” I said, standing at the high counter with my sister.

“Give it time,” she said.

How much time passed before the three of us were at the kitchen table, my head jerking up as if I were coming to (but my eyes had been wide open), and my brother-in-law telling me to take my turn, to roll the dice? I looked at them in my palm as if they were foreign objects, as if I had no idea how they got there or what to do with them.

“Man,” he said, “I wish I could get a buzz like that.”

Oh. This was a buzz.

I played. I had to concentrate very hard on colors and spaces and little pie pieces. It went on forever.

I began to sweat. I could feel my heart beating outside of my chest. I kept rolling the dice around in my damp hand. Someone was talking. It was me, saying out loud, I can’t do this! I was terrified at the sudden two me’s: the inside me, wondering who I was and the outside me, laughing and clutching the wet dice, and remembering a memory of having the same sensation as a child. I remembered in those stretching seconds how afraid I’d been as we’d inched our way through the thinnest corridors of the excavated caverns at Mammoth Cave in Kentucky; afraid as we’d stood in the belly of the Jefferson Memorial on a regular Sunday afternoon buying trinkets in the gift shop and Dad saying, “We’re under water right now, you know?” Afraid and clutching Barbie in my sweaty palms in the auditorium at the National Museum of History where after church we’d watched boring films on ancient civilizations narrated by an old, British, white-haired guy in a suit and tie. I’d sat rotating my head left to right slowly, watching the red EXIT signs over the doors, wondering how we’d all get out of there if there were a fire.

My brother-in-law went to bed.

“Something’s wrong,” I shouted.

My sister moved me to the living room and then to the large glass sliding door leading out to a small deck. We stood side by side looking at a wall of darkness. She encouraged me to look up at the stars. I was aware of cool air.

“Will you please tuck me in?” I asked her. And when she did, I asked her to stay with me. Exhausted she lay down, pushing up against my stiff body on the single bed. Her breathing slowed, grew even.

“What if I don’t wake up?”

“You’re gonna wake up,” she mumbled.

I closed my eyes against sweeping red and black spirals, spinning endlessly. I thought, I’m Alice going down the hole.