When I think of you, I think of Angel first, which seems unfair, though who’s to blame for that I’m not sure. One of the most empowered female leads of your generation and the history of television up to then & your male love interest still gets the lime-light. You could blame Joss for relying on the love-triangle tradition to create lasting, to this day unresolved (though die-heard Season 8 fans might disagree) tension & drama when needed. Or perhaps the studio producers demanded brooding vampire love be on the menu as well as well-honed stakes & punch lines.
Mostly, I place the judgment for my Angel-prone memories squarely on my boney, unchipped teen shoulders. With no possible love interest in my life except for Pine, a gangly ginger with a slight stutter & a slew of siblings all named after trees (totally not to die for in every way)—watching Angel stalk & taunt you, smile that tingle-inducing half-smirk, wrap his black leather jacket around your bare shoulders—well, who could compete with that?
The night Angel stalked into your life, as he is creepily yet sexily wont to do, I fell in love with a vampire & his Slayer.
The Saturday before we told them we were leaving, we took the girls to the indoor playground on the upper floor of the campus gymnasium. In early March, with floor-to-ceiling windows and no central heating, the playroom was frigid—as long as you weren’t running, that is. So my husband started a game of ball-tag and soon high-pitched shrieks and laughs were bouncing off the plastic play-structure as fast and hard as the girls were until—everyone, stop!—a brief pause to work out a tearful misunderstanding—okay, 3-2-1, go! We ran them in circles for the next hour, aiming for the perfect level of pooped to ensure a calm evening at home without any crises, the fine yet unavoidable line we were paid to ride every day.
For two months we’d prayed, danced, and cried with these girls, administered medicine and counted fingers, taught them to shower, tucked them into bed, held them as they shrieked in exhaustion or anger or fear. I wouldn’t miss that line, but I’d miss the girls who walked it with us.
“I think I’m in love,” I told my half-hearted friend before a Wednesday high school assembly. I wasn’t joking. Every other weeknight I’d leave my brother-in-law’s apartment with my sister, my face streaked with tears because they wouldn’t let me watch another episode.
My parents never read us stories with odd creatures and ugly monsters, the unusual and grotesque kept out of sight, thus out of my young mind. The more grotesque a creature, the more out it was. No wild things. No Scissorhands. No corpse brides. No Ursulas. No ghosts. Definitely no werewolves, vampires, or demons.
I met Buffy when I was sixteen, the same age as she is when she transfers to Sunnydale High. My older sister and her husband invited me to a screening of the first two-part episode in their tiny one-bedroom apartment. They were still shopping for a couch, so we watched from the all-weather-carpeted floor, sliding slices of homemade pizza off their handmade turtle-shaped cutting board. And so my love affair began. One-hundred-forty-four episodes polka-dotted with original and remixed demons, an array of which I’d never envisioned, from spooky to sexy to gross to sweet—and I was free to feast my eyes or cover them as I pleased.
***
We drove up to the T-shaped home on a dry January day. We were excited newlyweds, each of us 25-going-on-26 moving into our first house, which would soon become our asylum (as in the insane, not the salubrious kind). The residential teachers’ rooms were known as “quarters,” a quaint naval term referring to a narrow strip of four carpeted rooms, including an entry room, a sliver of a study, a bedroom that fit exactly one Ikea dresser and a queen bed, and a bathroom. Our quarters were stationed in the east wing of the house and coveted by our coworker who, being single, had received the even quainter quarters in the west wing. Our quarters were our only fully-private space in the house and our only refuge during our time off, although the concept of time “off” would soon become a quaint hyperbole itself.
In a few weeks we’d be in full swing, working up to sixteen hours a day, five days a week.
Cooking, cleaning, and living with four at-risk six-year-old girls. Walking them to school every morning, tucking them into bed every night, hugging them goodnight but only if they asked us to and preferably if another adult was in the room. Unlike the Slayer’s life-saving, apocalypse-averting duties, this was exactly what we’d asked for.
Maybe I’m writing to you because I dreamed of Angel last night. Found him sitting in a theatre lobby, ragged & dirty, his pre-Buffy look. When it began to rain, I convinced the theatre ushers to let me take him to the Hilton next door for the night. At first, they refused & questioned me, doubting my safety & intentions with this strange man. I just smiled, said he really was my friend & we made off to the Hilton, where my dream abruptly ended.
A large fish tank dominated the cluttered island in the kitchen. When my husband and I asked for their names, the girls shushed us emphatically, “We don’t name them anymore.” It was obvious from the algae stains that the glass hasn’t been cleaned recently. Another girl explained, “When we name them, they die.” Or, I thought to myself, because they’re fed too much or too little on a daily basis depending on the attention and mood in the home. “It’s true!” the resident teacher chuckled. Eight 10-year-old girls nodded earnestly in agreement before turning back to their homework at the kitchen table. They blamed no one, just the names. Unsure how to respond, my husband and I watched the remaining fish swim through the murky water, unidentified and alive.
Two weeks later, we each accepted a joint offer to live and work in the home adjacent to theirs. Two months later, we moved in.
***
Legs hanging off the chilly plastic-covered examination table, I watched the nurse prepare a needle. My husband waited for me in the lobby while I got the MMR shot required for our new jobs as resident family teachers. The nurse told me to relax my bicep because the needle will go right into the muscle. The metal tip poked my arm the way I imagine a wasp’s stinger would feel, deep and alien.
For her 18th birthday, the Watchers’ Council gives Buffy what every vampire slayer never wished for: a life-threatening rite of passage where her superhuman strength is drugged out of her and she’s trapped in a house with a hyped-up vampire she must defeat in order to gain the Council’s approval and continue being the Slayer. And she must stay alive, of course. After an eerie round of cat-and-mouse through an unlit labyrinthine house, Buffy outsmarts the vampire and tricks him into drinking holy water, burning him to ashes from the inside and passing the test.
I opened my eyes to five female faces in a semi-circle around me, two of the women holding my booted feet up, the others taking turns sighing, smiling, and telling me to keep my eyes open. They asked if I wanted my husband to come in. I could hardly answer, put off by the fact that they even had to ask. When he walked in, the nurses cleared out, telling him they’d rarely seen such a strong reaction before, but, good news, I don’t have to get another shot. I may have passed out, but I still passed the test. My husband fed me the crackers and juice that came free with the fainting and in half an hour we drove back to the residential campus, taking it slow on the turns.
In the days following our visit to the clinic, I couldn’t use my right arm in any capacity. The muscle in my bicep had surged so strongly in reaction to the shot that lifting my arm felt worse than a post-workout stretch; it bordered on pain. If I were the Slayer, I might have learned, as Buffy does in her test, that I don’t need physical strength to protect myself and my family. Maybe I would have gained extra super-strength in my right arm. Instead, by the end of the week, I’d simply returned from helpless to human.
Maybe I’m writing to you, Buffy, because you are the one he loves more than life itself & that was all I wanted in my own life.
Maybe I’m writing to you because I cannot separate you from my ideal self & thus you are my ideal self.
Maybe because I have yet to receive a response.
In college, my new friends and roommates (the ones who weren’t demons) quickly coalesced into our own Scooby Gang (the show’s nickname for Buffy’s friends), complete with an unswervingly sassy, Beatles-loving cellist; a Minnesota-accented percussionist, yah, sher, you-betcha, don’t-cha-know; two or three Californians, all blond; and a 6’5” opera-wielding philosopher who would call us forth from our respective rooms by standing in the middle of the dormitory courtyard and booming out, just once, “DINNER!”
Similar to Buffy’s gang, we soon learned we shouldn’t date each other, and that, by some unspoken rule, non-Scooby partners were only to be invited to certain formal events. Like the Scoobies’ meetings in the Sunnydale High library, our most relaxed gatherings were exclusive, limited to inner-circle members only. Unlike the Scoobies, though, we didn’t have a Buffy. There was no sun in our solar system. We were just a bunch of goofy stars hanging out in the same galaxy, laughing loudly when we collided.
By sophomore year, we were the cheerful, musical pack on campus—quite the opposite of the wolf-possessed bullies in the early Buffy episode “The Pack” (we’d sooner dine with our college president rather than on him). We’d also discovered a common interest, and I owned every season of it (not-entirely-legal DVDs burned by my brother-in-law back in the day). On a sticky Midwestern afternoon in late August, we initiated our three-year marathon—one season a semester, two a year—all of us reigning over the dorm basement from the flattened grayed-out L-couch beside the pool tables, our communal throne.
Four episodes into college, Buffy and the Scoobies look older and feel much more trapped than we ever felt in college. At a frat house Halloween party, the Slayer and her bosom buddies are swarmed by their worst fears, then blinded and separated by desperation. Ironically, the only Scooby not able to enter the dark house-turned-maze is a former demon dressed as her worst fear (a fluffy pink bunny) while the humans are trapped inside, fighting or running from their own demons. In the final scene, they all arrive in the attic only to find a six-inch fear-demon presiding over a rune painted on the floor. Without much ado, Buffy squashes his squeaky tirade, and that’s the end of their fears. And yet I always wondered who actually won the battle in that haunted house. And who were they fighting before they reached the attic?
***
When we arrived, the house was cold and empty. The basement had flooded the summer before, and the house had been shut down for the following nine months once the boys had moved into another house. Their old clothes were bagged and piled in the far end of the laundry room, their toys jumbled in the closet, spots of red and green goo hardened onto the living room carpet.
On our first day off during our three-week training, my husband tramped down to the basement while I withdrew to our quarters for a nap. I woke up an hour later, ready for my afternoon cup of tea and slightly surprised that he hadn’t surfaced yet. Wandering into the large kitchen with its peeling laminate floor tiles, metal fridge and freezer thermometers (checked and notated twice daily), and locked cupboard doors (cleaning products, the girls’ medicine, personal food, and candy), I heard a low banging sound coming from below.
Senses alert, I crept down to the chilly basement and peered around the corner to the closed laundry room door that, up until then, had been held open by a piece of dusty rope attached to a hook on the wall. My husband had been locked in the basement without cell service for almost an hour, eyed by dozens of black trash bags bulging with worn-out and outgrown boys’ clothes. The old doorknob couldn’t be turned from within, almost as if it had forgotten why it was put there in the first place.
Maybe I’m writing to you because I married an angel who carries his detachable wings in his hiking backpack.
Maybe because he is invincible in his own way & I love him more than I loved him.
Maybe because he was my first, but then again, so were you & Angel & I don’t know why we can’t be to each other what you were to me.
Maybe because I’m feeling lonely tonight.
There were always ghost-children outside the toddler home. Come snow or shine, the empty swings would be swaying back and forth, pairs of small invisible legs pumping out and in, out and in.
While my husband and I joked about the possibility of ghosts on campus, our coworker did not. Late one night, after each girl had finally forgotten that she was thirsty or homesick or scared of the dark and had drifted to sleep, she shared her sightings with us. We’d finished our duties for the evening: exterior doors, kitchen cabinets, and knife drawer locked (to be checked in a few hours by the night staff), all interior lights off, all exteriors on, the baby monitors on, dishwasher on, breakfast prepped for the morning, groceries ordered, laundry brought upstairs (to be folded by the girls during chores tomorrow), daily records typed up for each child, tomorrow’s schedule double-checked, and, lastly, a volunteer chosen (me) to wake Anne in an hour and take her to the bathroom without carrying her.
After listing her sightings and gossip, our coworker concluded with a nod, “I have no doubt the houses here are haunted,” and beat a quick retreat to her quarters. In minutes, my husband and I were curled up in our bed, the baby monitor tuned to a houseful of snores.
The next morning, the girls swear they saw a ghost floating in the hallway last night. It wasn’t that balloon from the carnival last Saturday? No, they assure us, it was definitely a ghost.
***
Once upon a time, a high school teacher and her student fell in love. She tried to break it off, and he threatened to shoot her if she didn’t say she loved him back. She wouldn’t say it, but of course he couldn’t shoot her, so he shot himself instead, and she ran off the balcony and died anyway. The End.
All in all, a relatively point-blank episode toward the end of Buffy Season 2, were it not for the fact that this couple actually lived decades ago and are haunting Sunnydale High until they can find peace together once more. And were it not for the fact that Angel has reverted to his soul-less self who goes by Angelus (either way, he can’t be killed by a bullet). And were it not for the fact that Buffy is still in high school, still mourning the loss of her sweet Angel, and is still being stalked by said lost lover. With their own circumstances reflecting the past and spurred on by the viewers’ wish to see them get it on again (which, needless to say, they do), Buffy and Angel are primed for possession.
Part of our three-week training session involved methods for Crisis Prevention and safe child-holds for when the children would go into crisis or, in other words, out of instructional control. These crises were as close to possession as anything I’ve seen on celluloid: one minute all the girls are brushing their teeth and changing into pajamas; soon half of them are in bed, the others reading books about forest animals in the living room; suddenly, a sleepy sprite sprints out of bed, hardly standing straight yet determined not to go back. Lucky for her, she’s about to get her wish.
The next hour or so proceeds something like this:
- my husband tries to reason with the sleepy girl with pre-set phrases (as we were trained to do)
- I lock the hallway doors to the bedrooms where the other girls are planted on their beds (as they are trained to do), everyone fully awake now at 9:00pm on a school night
- the girl giggles maniacally and flits around the living room chucking toys at my husband as he continues talking to her calmly (as we were trained to do)
- I stand with one foot in the living room and one in the kitchen because two teachers must be in the room at all times during a crisis
- I call the on-call counselor to say we’re in crisis, please come soon (as they are trained to do)
- my husband attempts a child-control hold (add “Meeting with Admins” to this week’s schedule), getting whacked by her bare little fists and feet in the process
- the girl alternates between shrieks and tears once he’s pinned her arms against her chest (as we were trained to do)
- the counselor arrives and realizing she cannot calm the girl down by talking to her (as we were trained to do), proceeds to lull her with her cell phone (as we were not trained to do, but we’ve been up for almost sixteen hours and the girl is finally calm, so we let it go).
Fifteen minutes later, the little girl asks for a goodnight hug from each of us. The counselor leaves us slumped at the kitchen table, the fridge buzzing staunchly behind us. I sip reheated black tea from the mug our coworker gave me for my birthday last week, though the midnight-blue text doesn’t read as humorously tonight as it first did: TODAY’S GOAL: keep the tiny humans alive. My husband pulls a fresh incident report sheet from the manila folder on the counter.
Maybe, Buffy, I’m writing to you this evening because right now he is finishing his shift at the grocery store, washing so many dishes that when he comes home his soft hands will be chapped like slender pumice stones & even though I hold them against my warm cheeks, tuck them into bed against my warm breasts, I won’t be able to soften them again.
“Why does Gabriel have wings and you don’t?” Anne asks me at bedtime. Earlier that day, when my husband had retrieved the girls’ balloons from the ceiling, he’d pretended to attach wings to his back before jumping to grab the balloons. “Because Gabriel’s an angel,” I respond to her apparent satisfaction as she lays down and dutifully closes her eyes without another word.
Yes, I did marry an angel named Gabriel, in every sense of the word except the feathery wings and the halo (unless the sheen of smooth black Filipino hair counts). We met in college: I, a post-graduate intern still living on campus; he, a senior finishing his creative writing portfolio, sneaking through my floor-level dorm window to watch ‘90s sci-fi flicks while we cuddled in my sagging twin bed. Though he is unlike Buffy’s Angel in many obvious ways, I fell for him just as hard, and he doesn’t have to ask to be invited in. Except when he loses his keys.
A year after we’d completed all of Buffy together (my third full viewing), my husband was eager to start the Angel series, if only to stay in the Slayer’s world for a few more months. In our quarters, we’d cram in a few episodes on our nights off, trying to stay sane by leaping into an alternate-L.A. where rogue demon-hunters have sex with demon lawyers, and the Powers-That-Be can be destroyed. Caught in a polar vortex in the Midwest, living in a drafty house with four pseudo-foster daughters and a coworker with an unredeemable lack of imagination, anywhere seemed better than where we were, even if Anywhere was filled with more demons than morals.
One morning, after a night of back-to-back Angel episodes, Ashley recalled her dream at breakfast. She giggled at how scary it was, her new front tooth peeking through her top gum, her blond bangs shining in the shrill February sunlight, “Vampires were chasing me and they bit me on the neck!” My husband and I caught each other’s eyes over the kitchen table: her room shared a wall with ours. From then on, whether infuriated, despairing, or in the throes of passion, Angel only whispered his lines, my angel leaning close to the screen to make out what he was saying.
***
After a day of CPR and First Aid lessons during our final week of training, our instructor pulled my husband and me aside to give us some advice: “Be sure you reserve enough time for yourselves and each other on your days off.” She told us when she and her husband first moved in years ago, the teenage boys in their home used to tease the young couple about being too loud at night. “There are some nice hotels in town,” she told us, no wink needed. Our house had thin walls, too.
When we heard there was a cabin by the lake on property available for resident teachers to stay overnight for free, we leapt at the chance for a weekend alone and out of our tiny all-windowed quarters. Our guiltless joy at getting away from our house was probably a sign that it was possessing us in some way we could only see clearly from a distance—about a quarter-mile, to be exact. We could have walked there, were it not for the bags of food, Angel DVD sets, blankets, and clothes we’d packed for the long weekend.
First thing after finessing the old door lock and kicking off our icy boots, we preheated the oven and slid in a tray of frozen barbeque chicken strips. While they cooked, we maneuvered the lumpy loveseat in front of the ancient TV but soon realized there wasn’t a composite video cable to connect either of the two dusty DVD players to the screen. Eager to watch Angel as loudly as we liked, my husband dove into the cold again to find a cable back at the house. I pumped up the air mattress in the other room.
Within fifteen minutes, he returned triumphant, red, white, and yellow connectors dangling from his hand. I finished preparing for dinner. The first kitchen cupboard opened to a collapsed shelf, dozens of hard-plastic camping mugs toppled on top of one another. I found plates in the second cupboard, silverware in a sticky drawer. I opened the oven door with the stained oven mitt to check on the chicken—slammed it closed again at the sight of red and orange. The oven was on fire.
At a Sunnydale University fraternity party (if Buffy’s taught me anything, it’s to never trust a frat party), freshman Buffy and Riley, her only fully-human boyfriend, have a whole lot of blurry slow-motion sex on his continent of a bed that sports only a set of sheets and their sweaty writhing limbs. While the athletic couple is cavorting, the rest of the Scoobies discover the frat house was originally a home for wayward children who were wrongly abused for being “dirty-minded.” Apparently, the ghost-children have returned to exact their revenge on the home—by making Buffy and Riley have sex until they die. The house catches on fire as the gang hacks through the murderous vines that have grown around Riley’s bedroom, and, for once, they save the day without Buffy’s help at all. Afterward, the Slayer and her boyfriend claim it was the supernatural force that kept them in bed, but I’m not sure even a house fire would have been enough to stop them.
Within the week, the lake cabin was shut down for internal structural issues. That night—our chicken burned beyond edible, the tap water undrinkable and stinking of rotten eggs, each Angel episode accompanied by a continuous piercing keen, and the air mattress too small to do much good—we did all we could do: play a round of Egyptian Rat Screw with the faded deck of cards we found and be swept into sleep by the freezing rain’s staccato lullaby.
I never asked for you, Buffy. For your life, your stories, your deaths. Yet here we are, fingernails shellacked, Claddagh rings riding crown-out, proclaiming to anyone who offers a handshake or hands us a milkshake or tries to destroy us : WE ARE IN LOVE. A love forged in heat, in delicious sex, a coming-together of hands & heart, yes & lips & calves & breastplates, among others. Only some of us get to feel another so intensely, so minutely, like the fingers of a tiny silver hand holding a tiny silver heart.
During the last three seasons, Buffy takes a third lover, her second soul-filled vampire—the ever-euphemistic, bleached-blond-and-greased William the Bloody, commonly known as Spike. In Season 7, Buffy and the Scoobies team up against The First Evil, an incorporeal presence that can only manifest itself in the form of people who have died. The First is the little voice in your head that whispers doubts and worries until your moral compass loses its sense of direction. By taking the form of Spike’s long-dead mother and humming the English folk song “Early One Morning” to the newly-reformed vampire, The First triggers the latent demon in Spike and uses him to kill innocent victims in Sunnydale. Afterward, Spike has no recollection of what he has done and who he has hurt, until Buffy discovers how The First is using him.
***
By our last week, our youngest girl had been going into crisis almost every day for the past week or so. This Friday morning was no exception. The girls were already used to her piercing cries and the crash of chairs and toys being thrown. Once our coworker counted her to a 2, the other girls promptly grabbed their toy boxes, ran down the hallway, and sat on their beds to wait out the storm. My husband nodded to me to go with them. The door locked behind me. In a matter of seconds, I heard our coworker say, “You’re on a 3,” officially transitioning the girl into crisis. Without warning, as though triggered by an evil force, the girl started screaming. The hallway doorknob rattled several times. She shrieked when our coworker pulled her away, still talking calmly to the girl the way we’d practiced months before in training.
After we got the other girls to school and were changing into dry clothes in our quarters, my husband told me there had been blood. The girl had been punching herself in the face, trying to break her own nose. The head counselor drove over, dashing through the rain to the back door. They didn’t have to take her to the Calming Room that day, but it was a close call—and all because she didn’t want to wear her rainboots to school.
After these daily crises, most of the other girls would ignore her or roll their eyes when she said something silly, but Anne was always kind to her, no matter the time or circumstance. She would help the small girl into her jacket or point out the geese flying in a V in the sky on the way to school. She didn’t see the demon inside the girl. Buffy may have prepared me for the emotional maze of relationships, the quagmires of sex, and the world of monsters and ghosts, both real and figurative. But I could never be prepared for these young girls with their uninhibited trust and compassion (although these often slipped when family visits or piano lessons were on the schedule). They were the magical ones, not us. They knew exactly what it means to slay a demon and how to love those who have lost their souls.
***
“We are not magical, we are experienced,” the director of the children’s homes on campus declared to our cohort of five new employees, one returning teacher, and a shy college intern on our first day of training in mid-January. According to our coworkers’ stories, this non-magical “experience” would be gained through literal sweat, blood, and tears, particularly the last two. Two months later, for the sake of preserving our emotional well-being and bodily fluids, my husband and I decided to move on to our next life, to a place where experience isn’t the only alternative to magic.
In our last three days, my husband and I tried our best to do the opposite of the director’s advice—to be magical instead of experienced. We cooked and cleaned with the greatest of care for these girls who asked to use our fingers to complete simple subtraction problems—four trusting children who were unaware that their two new guardians would be moving out in less than a handful of days.
In the playground on our last weekend, away from the frenetic energy of the group, Anne started picking up the soft primary-colored balls strewn about the floor and tossing them into the basket. I watched her cartwheel over two balls, grab one in each hand while she was upside down, still in motion, then swing her legs over to stand up in one smooth arc. She stood up focused and precise, like a Slayer.
***
If Buffy has taught me anything, it’s that the Present cannot be returned, even with a receipt. I was the same age as the Slayer when my brother-in-law introduced me to her. More than a decade later, I’m on my fourth run-through of the series, but this time I’m taking my time. And I’m watching the episodes randomly, according to two red (obviously), white-numbered dice: 8-sided for the season, 20-sided for the episode, saving the season finales (episodes 21-22) for une finale grande. Watching seven years of the Scoobies’ lives based entirely on dice rolls has invigorated the original narrative, bringing in new juxtapositions, parallels, and meanings that span minutes, episodes, seasons, years. Turns out, once its self-imposed sense of linearity is broken, even Time has the potential to escape itself.
During our first week my husband found an old Atari—along with a dozen dented Hotwheels and a ten-inch green T. Rex drowning in a sharp ocean of Legos—in a box of leftover “boys” toys. After training ended for the weekend, we plopped down crisscross-applesauce on the flowered rug in the living room and mazed our way through the color-changing rooms to find the green key for the green door, then the yellow key for the yellow door, then the red key for the red door, and on and on, until we couldn’t see this going anywhere else. Our coworker walked in on us an hour later, grinding through a dungeon, dodging pixels and restarting when we died.
When I was rereading my journal from those months & I came across this entry: “Tonight, the evening ritual of point total-ups & correction role-plays, homework & showers, meds & bedtimes, was pushed back by half an hour, a crucial thirty minutes in an altogether hectic evening. By the time the girls were in bed, quiet if not yet asleep, my husband & I were both near tears, exhausted & overwhelmed by the previous four hours—only four hours! Like a vampire, they lasted an eternity yet turned to dust in the blink of an eye.”
I thought you might appreciate that metaphor.
Always,
J.