To me the solution was simple. I could sleep with my friend Lamby The Lamp turned on. But my dad would have none of it.
My sneaky attempts to switch the light on after he had left my bedside fell to ruin as soon as he saw the bar of light beneath my door.
To calm me my father tried reading me a book full of Grimm fairy tales, but the stories were too filled with grotesque creatures to ease my fears. One night he heard my theatric sigh and glanced at me. I said, “I want to sleep with Lamby on. Please. Lamby makes me less scared.” I looked at the lamp, which had a lamp shade in the shape of a soft fleecy lamb with a pink nose.
My dad removed his bifocals and closed the glossy covers of the book together. “I think I have told you enough stories tonight, Lizzy,” he said. “Maybe it is time for you to tell me a story. Or better yet, I want you to imagine a place.”
I squirmed beneath his intense gaze. \”What kind of place?\”
“You are eight now, you have a lot of life ahead of you. You are going to see a lot of darkness in the years ahead. You will see it every night. Sometimes you will see it in people, and sometimes in yourself. In fact most of the universe is darkness. Stars are the rare exception. You will never escape the dark so you must learn to move through it, but it helps to imagine where you want to go. So tell me: What would it be like not to be afraid of the dark? What does it look like on the other side of fear?”
His question captivated me. “I know,” I said. “The other side of fear is a place full of sleepy cats. It has a pond with turtles, and a pretty garden that smells like peppermint, and it is always sunny and never night. Oh, and it has a fence that keeps big dogs out.”
My vision might sound silly, but my grandmother had an herb garden and a tiny pond with a fountain where turtles congregated. And cats were always bathing themselves or sleeping nearby. I liked it there.
My father smiled. “Do you really believe that?”
Did I? Did I really think getting over my fear of the dark would look like turtles and cats? \”No,” I said.
“Think it over,” he said, “and I will ask you again tomorrow night, and the next if I have to, I will keep asking you until you find an answer you can believe. And when you know, perhaps you will see something beautiful in the darkness, and your Lamby the Lamp can go graze.”
My father pulled the quilted covers to my chin, planted a warm kiss on my forehead, and turned out Lamby. I grasped the top of my cover tightly as the darkness fell over the room, but it was not the dark I feared so much as myself. It was what my imagination could do with darkness.
I could populate the void with incomprehensible horrors, but not monsters like most kids have in their nightmares. All of my haunts were people. In the twilight realm between waking and sleeping, they looked as real to me as my own hand. They spoke to each other, and snacked on crackers and munched raw broccoli and cheese.
I thought I could touch the ghouls if I dared. Sometimes they looked at me with eyes like ping pong balls.
But they were not quite zombies. They milled around in my room and gossiped once the lights went out. Some were well dressed, but their faces were expressionless, yet their hollow laughter rang through the night. They were also judgmental for zombies, and I heard them say my name often with frowns of disapproval as I tried to hide myself beneath the covers.
I had seen people like them at church socials and parties, people who smiled when it was time to smile and said the right words not because they meant them, but because they knew they had to say them. After my cousin died, many people at her funeral were like that, before my fear of the dark began.
Did I think they would hurt me? Absolutely. I was terrified they would offer me spinach dip and crackers and try to make me one of them. The life would drain from my eyes and I would have an irresistible urge to talk about weight loss plans and gossip and laugh raucously. My ghouls gave me many sleepless nights.
But the day after my father asked me the question, What does it look like on the other side of fear? I did as he asked and considered it. Sometimes the other side of fear was pain, as I learned once when I had “fearlessly” caught a wasp in my hands the way I did with lightening bugs.
But what about fear of darkness and the mannequin-like people that inhabited the dark? I drew pictures with my crayon, mostly pretty places with ponds, waterfalls, and animals.
After drawing many of those, I looked at them and something appeared wrong. I realized that the other side of fear might not be a tranquil painless place with turtles, but a turbulent prickly place you had to endure with gritted teeth.
I found illustrations of tough bosomy heroines in some of my comic books. They always looked angry. I wondered if rage played a role in courage. If I could get mad at the mannequin people for invading my room and disrupting my sleep, maybe they would go away. I drew myself looking determined and angry.
But anger was hard to summon on demand. Despite my efforts, at night after the light went off, nothing had changed. I saw them still, I even smelled them. They smelled like finger-paints and new vinyl, chemical, not life-like smells.
I was driven to the obvious and forbidden solution. What did it look like on the other side of fear?
Why, a brightly lit lamp covered in fleece, of course. Lamby. What else? I had been right, my father wrong. And I wondered about the cause of his stubbornness. I had often heard him complaining about the outrageously high power bill.
I went to the stack of bills on the dining table and rummaged through them. I saw the bill from the power company among them. I did not know how much electricity a single lamp consumed during an eight hour period but I thought it could not be more than 2 per cent. I calculated 2 per cent of $153.00 and broke into my porcelain piggy bank.
In it I kept coins and bundled dollar bills, accumulated from birthdays and chores. Most any amount of money would be worth avoiding the darkness filled with humanoid ghouls coughed up from the maw of hell. Anything would be worth sleeping peacefully and waking refreshed to the sunlight shining through my window.
When that night my father came and sat on the bedside chair, I pushed a bundle of cash at him. He looked down at my coins and dollar bills, perplexed. “My share of the electric bill,” I said, “if the lights can stay on.” I pleaded with him with my eyes.
“You are bribing me?” He looked at me with baffled tenderness and handed the money back. “This is yours.” He sighed. “I only wanted you to answer my question.”
“I don’t know what the other side of fear looks like,” moisture coated my eyes. “The question, it makes no sense.”
His blue eyes were liquid pools of concern. “Look, the electricity your lamp uses is barely a dime. You have missed my point. Perhaps I should have been more clear. I know I asked you a strange question. Maybe there is no single answer. So I will try to clarify to you what I mean.”
He leaned toward me, anchored his elbow to the bed, and propped his chin in his palm. “Sometimes fear is good. Being afraid of jumping from a mountain top is a good fear. If you set that fear aside, the other side of fear could be death. But sometimes fear is an illusion. When you see dangers where none exist, fear can make you unhappy and limit your freedom.
\”Remember the first time I put you in a swimming pool? You were three and when I carried you in, you clung to me, your arms wrapped around my neck, even though I had put safety floats on your arms. When I tried pulling you away from me, you screamed with a red face and began to cry.
“What did you think would happen? That you would go down and never come up again? I finally was able to pry your hands away and set you free and floating on the water. At first you just cried more, but after a minute, your face changed. You looked curious and flapped your hands on the water. Finally you broke into a laugh.” He smiled at the memory.
I remembered it too. I remembered the relief, the cool buoyancy of the water, and how the light reflected on the surface. I had felt like I was floating on a cold bath of sunbeams.
“Sometimes,” my father went on, “the other side of fear is relief. It is freedom and discovery. Can you picture that? That you could ever enjoy the dark the way you enjoyed the pool? The dark has nice things in it: the moon, stars, crickets, owls. Maybe you could go to sleep at night listening to the music of owls rather than lying awake worrying about unreal monsters. That, I believe, is the other side of fear; what it would look like; what it would sound like; what it would feel like.”
The image of relief my father presented was compelling. Enjoy the dark? Listen to the owls? Look at the stars? I wanted it badly, but then I remembered the mannequin monsters with their spinach dip. How could I know they were an illusion? If I walked among them freely would I feel relief? What my father had described did not seem to apply to the haunts that ruled my nights.
“You seem skeptical,” my father sighed. “I thought you might be, so I brought you something.” He reached into a paper bag and pulled out a blanket. I recognized it, a soft quilted rectangle that I had loved when I was three, but which had been taken from me.
\”You used to think this blanket protected you,\” my father said. “Maybe you over-depended on it a little, but maybe it will help you feel safe while you are getting over this hump.”
I stared at the blanket, wondering if I should be insulted. I was not three anymore, far from it. But seeing old childhood relics creates a sense of history, of time having miraculously passed. I gathered the blanket in my arms.
My father took my hand. Tonight you are going to sleep the best you have in weeks,” he said, “because you know what the other side of fear looks like, and because you have your Blanket of Fortitude to protect you.” He smiled.
“Okay,” I shrugged. As always he leaned over, kissed me on the forehead and turned out the light. Then he walked away, and shut the door behind him.
Protect you. What my father said had given me an idea. By the light of the moon, I rose with my blanket and tiptoed to the door. I dropped my blanket on the floor and knelt, and began stuffing the crack beneath with the soft fluid folds of fabric. Then I stood, crept across the wood floor to my bed, crawled under the sheets, and switched Lamby on, which poured forth a pool of warmth on the bed stand. The question my father had asked was a good one, but I had found the other side of fear long ago, and it was light.
“Good night Lamby.” I thought I heard an owl cry as I drifted off to sleep.
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