Blue Mercy: A Novel. (11 page)

Mrs O'Brien had only two lines, while Molly Dolly was the lead role and it had gone to Angelina Boyle, the prettiest girl in the class. I could see where Miss Rossi was coming from. At that time, you were about four inches taller than everyone else in her class. Dolly, you weren't.

"You said I was the best actress," you cried, making it my fault. "You said I was the
best
."

I held you tight while you sobbed, tried to soothe. When the storm eased a little, opening a space, I said, "Don't you want to be in the play, sweetheart?"

"Not" --
sniff
-- "if I'm not Molly Dolly."

"But won't you feel left out, watching all the others practice and perform if you're not in it?"

Your chin wobbled. You hadn't thought of that.

"Y'know, it's not how big or small your part is that counts, it's how you do it. Why don't you and I work together to make sure that your Mrs O'Brien is real memorable?"

"But I told Ms Rossi I didn't want it."

"Well why don't I ask her tomorrow to give it back to you?"

"Mommy, you can't." She frowned. "She won't."

"I'm sure she will, if I ask her."

"I hate Angelina Boyle."

Star got her part back and, for the following weeks, she and I ran through her two lines over and again, as if we were rehearsing Portia for the Royal Shakespeare Company. We used our neighbor, Mrs Quinn, as a model. We modified the script, putting an extra word or two into the bare sentences to make them unmistakably Irish. We experimented with clothes, accents and attitude and, by the time the great day arrived and the parents were taking their seats, Star could not wait to get backstage. I took my seat and watched while the curtain went back and each Mom or Dad scanned the stage until they found their own darling. Star wasn't there, her entrance came later.

Dolls and soldiers and teddy bears came and went around a bewildering plot centered on Molly Dolly's lost teddy and her refusal to do her homework or chores until he was found. But where was he? The action was interminable, designed in time-honored, school play tradition, to give a speaking part to all. Bored parents fanned themselves with their programs. When, three-quarters way through, Star burst onto the stage dressed not unlike a drag queen, in a lime green evening gown with matching high heels, I could feel the audience around me popping awake. Taller than the rest, she walked across the stage and with hands on her hips, delivered her line in a strong Irish brogue: "Now Molly Dolly, don't you be acting the rascal."

Her timing and delivery was perfect. The audience hooted into laughter. Molly said her piece and Star delivered Mrs O'Brien's second, final line. "Little girls have to be doing what they're told." Again laughter, not so much for what she was saying, but the look and bearing of her.

Molly said, "But I'm so sad," which was Star's cue to retreat and let Tommy Soldier step forward for his moment in the limelight, but she decided her appreciative spectators deserved more Mrs O'Brien than was scripted. She turned to the audience.

"Children these days," she said, throwing her eyes to heaven. "Begorrah!" At which point, the place broke up into a spontaneous burst of applause and cheers.

I cheered as long and loud as any of them. For the rest of the performance, she was on stage and my eyes could only look at her, no matter what else was going on. She held her character all through, except for one small moment where she slipped and let her rosy pleasure and pride surface.
 

That was my favorite moment of the night, better even than her accepting her due of compliments and praise afterwards backstage; or the drive home in the car with her sharing all her thoughts, the purr of the engine beneath her small, delighted voice; or even than tucking her into bed that night after cocoa and biscuits and receiving a special, solemn hug as I bent to kiss her goodnight, a hug full of gratitude and love and a thousand nameless things.

I can still see that evening, Star. I see it, here, now.

But still too I hear:

"Oh, Mommy, after you left this morning I dropped my lunch on the schoolyard ground and Mark Libovitz came over and he was going to jump on my sandwich except that Sabrina and Casey and Fred came around in a circle and stopped him and then we went in and we had Art first today, Mommy, instead of Science because Mrs Golightly wasn't in and Miss Cremona said my painting was good, except not as good as the one I did two weeks ago. Do you remember that one? Oh, look, there's a dog crossing the road. Be careful, Mommy. It was boring during English and I was thinking about that program that we saw last night, with the Monkees, do you remember, Mommy? It was good, wasn't it? Did you like it? I liked the sandwiches you gave me for lunch. I think that's my favorite now. Tuna fish. I used to prefer chicken but I think now I prefer tuna. What was I saying? Oh yes, after Art, what did we do then? Em... Oh, history, that's it. Miss Cremona came in and she..."

That phase you went through of giving frantic monologues, reporting on everything that had happened to you that day, everything you had thought or felt or seen or heard, and whatever came into your mind while you were delivering your report.

On it would go, compulsively, breathlessly, ceaselessly into the afternoon and evening, exhausting us both.
 

"It's okay, Star. Let it go. It doesn't matter."

"But I have to tell you, Mommy."

"Not everything. Why?"

"Because I have to."

"But why? What would happen if you didn't? What's in your head now?"

"Bertie, Mr Malvich's dog and..."

"Okay." I put my finger against her lips. "Don't say the next thing."

She stopped.

"Do you know what you were going to say?"

She nodded, her two eyes thrust wide, my fingers pressing her into silence.

"Hold the thought. You got it?"

Another nod.

"So hold the thought and let it go without telling it."

"No, Mommy, I want to tell you. I have to. What I was thinking was --"

"No, no, wait a minute. You can tell me in a minute."

Four years since Joseph Plotkin and things were worse, not better. I had taken it to her teachers in the end, and then to the school psychologist, and then another private counsellor. Four years of nobody helping much, while the problem pretended to fade or disappear, but was really only hiding, to mutate and rear up again.

Her relationship with trash was not as intense as it had been, though she still clung to certain useless things with a strange anguish. That now seemed almost harmless next to this compulsive sharing of every single detail of her life. By bedtime, we were both exhausted by the torrent of her thoughts and she would be crying at the idea of going to sleep, because sleeping meant not being able to tell me what was on her mind.

It was clear that Star was trying desperately to hold on to what could not be held -- whether it be trash or the events of the day -- and I supposed it was down to the loss of her father. So...psychiatry. Not gentle-sounding counseling or therapy, but a doctor who had connections to a mental hospital, whose medicine bag included pills and injections and confinement and electro-convulsive therapy and other "cures" that I couldn't believe in, and could scarcely bear to contemplate, except that not to give them consideration meant doing nothing, leaving things the way they were before, or taking the wacko route: psychic healing or crystals.

Doctor Amanda Aintree -- in her nice professional way -- suggested that her father's absence alone did not account for how utterly unindividuated Star seemed to be. My daughter, for some other, unsepecified set of reasons, didn't seem to know where she stopped and I started.

What Dr Aintree set Star and me to do was simple but, as she said, far from easy. I was to give Star a list of all the things she could do to take herself to sleep and then let her go to bed without me. I was to encourage her to have friends and wave her off with them when they went out together, knowing nothing more than where they were going and an agreed time for her to be back. I was to encourage her to do as much as possible alone but also to keep her routine stable and settled. She would ensure Star was supported with a weekly session.

"So no drugs?"

"Not yet. Hopefully not at all, depending on how she responds."

We were lucky. Dr Aintree was an exceptional psychiatrist: kind, firm, knowledgeable, supportive, wise. We needed her to be every bit of that as each tiny change led Star into shrieking and sobbing fits of anger and me into a fear that I was beginning to see tipped towards paranoia.

It was exhausting. It left both of us wrung-out and wretched. Star was having her toddler tantrums now, the good doctor explained, and I was feeling classic separation anxiety.
 

Stay with it.

So we did. Not knowing what else to do, I followed instructions, gripping tight while the roller-coaster of emotions that didn't want us to be free, bucked and dipped.
 
And we were doing okay. To this day, I believe we would have been fine if only we had been left alone together.

Ding-dong.
I was preparing dinner behind that kitchen counter when our doorbell rang. One of the things I didn't like about myself at that time was that I always experienced the doorbell ringing as an intrusion. Maybe it's because a double-jobbing single mother is always busy and always has a plan for the coming minutes or hours. That evening, it was the usual routine: dinner, Star's homework, TV, bedtime, Lauren's arrival, go to work. Zach was gone, back to college, sending almost daily letters. He would be home for Thanksgiving. I had a calendar, like a schoolgirl or a prisoner, marking off the days.
 

In the meantime, I was busier than ever. If he was going to be taking a college education, it seemed like maybe I should too. I had started to read again, to entertain notions of what I might do. I had written to UCSP for their prospectus, and then to the English Literature Department and to College Administration about second chance degrees.

I had started to swim in a sea of words. When I wasn't working or looking after the house or Star, I was reading. A great wave was breaking across North America and it was heady: the civil rights movement had been quickly followed by women's liberation, its bastard child. Unplanned and unwanted by its parent, it was sweeping into kitchens and schools and community halls, finding me and women like me, and giving us what we had never had: the understanding that what felt like private, individual problems were, in fact, socially constructed and widely experienced and so malleable. We could change them. We could change ourselves.

It was handing me a whole new way of looking at my life, spinning connections I was only beginning to grasp.
 

That's why I resented the doorbell. I had been hoping to grab a half-hour reading time between getting Star to sleep, and having to go to work. If Star hadn't been watching, I wouldn't have answered the bell.
 
I still wonder what would have happened if I hadn't.

Later, I used to play the same game with Zach, imagining what would have happened if he hadn't turned up at Honolulu our first night. What if I had been on my break? What if I hadn't run out after him or if he'd
 
got fed up waiting and left? We might have missed each other forever. Imagine. I would shiver at the imagining, though we were snug under his duvet, enveloped in body heat. It all seemed so random, so accidental.
 

"I don't believe in accidents," he said.

"Well they happen, whether Zach Coleman believes in them or not."

"Nope, no accidents." He shook his head. "No coincidence or happenstance, no such thing. No freaks or misfits, either. Just things that we don't understand."

"Oh, Zach." He was so sweetly intense.
 

That was the day I gave him the Yeats, for our two month anniversary.

He was delighted. "
The Collected Poems
," he read, taking off the wrapper.

"That Irish poet I told you about."

"I know. I haven't forgotten." He kissed me. "Thank you."

"You don't have to be nice about it. You think you're not interested but you will be, trust me."

"Read me something. Read me your favorite."

"I don't have a favorite. It's more like I have different poems for different days. I know exactly what I'm going to read to you, but first you have to get into the right place to receive it."

"Huh?"

"Think of it as watching somebody dance, okay?"

"Dance?"

"Poetry is language dancing. That's the way you have to take it in. Like you were watching a dance."

"Okay, I'll try."

"I'm going to start with the early stuff. His early poems are childlike in their belief in another world, less intellectual and formal than his later stuff, but for me they're magic. The lines and phrases make me feel like I've fallen into a dream... Anyway... Here goes."

I began with
The Song of The Happy Shepherd
, the poem that I've turned to again and again over the years to keep me writing. "The wandering earth herself may be/ Only a sudden flaming word,/ In clanging space a moment heard,/ Troubling the endless reverie..." I looked up at him as I finished the last line -- "Dream, dream, for this is also sooth" -- and smiled to see how his eyes were shining.
 

He got it.
 

I knew he would.

I moved on to
The Cloths of Heaven
and
When You Are Old
,
and told him all about the poet's hopeless, unrequited love for Maud Gonne and his multiple proposals and rejections.

"That's enough for today," I said as I finished
The Two Trees
. "It's like a drug, you can overdo it and then you kill the pleasure."

Nineteen years old Zach Coleman might be, but I was living the whole love thing with him, smiling and glowing through my days. At the time, I thought it was because of what I was receiving, the attentions of this kind and handsome (young) man. Now I know it was the giving that had me feeling so good. When you're in love, you're so willing to amuse, to gratify, to charm, to pleasure... Later in a relationship, you get grudging again, but at the beginning, you give of you.