She looked at me without batting an eyelash and said, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a sex life. You have Jack.”
I knew Els had a crush on Jack. She was always more alive when he was there, giggling and caroling. She’d sit and talk to him for hours, listen to him as if he were telling her gospel whether they were talking about medicine or politics or god.
When she said that, I began to wonder, I began to watch, and I saw, within the next months, that she was always worst in her behavior when Jack was visiting. And I thought about breaking off with him. Not that he was doing anything to cause her behavior, but because she was acting as she was
for him
, or against me because of him. To prove she was adult, or to get even with me for having him. Something like that.
But I decided against it. In the first place, I loved him and loved his company. In the second place, I thought I could not allow Els to start dictating my behavior. Not that she consciously wanted me to break off. But if I had, then she would have felt free to call him herself. I felt if I did, for her, something I did not want to do, intensely did not want to do, I would be giving her a power too great for a child, and also that I would resent her, and find some way to take out my resentment. I didn’t want to turn her into a dictator, the way Anthony had been.
For it was Anthony that Els reminded me of. Those beautiful violet eyes, so like his blue ones, gazing at me openly, seeming to listen, but paying no attention at all. And she was only a child, but I could control her no more than I’d been able to control him. I couldn’t lock her in her room. I was terrified.
She was failing so badly that she had been put in remedial classes at school, which was, of course, ridiculous. I went down and talked to them, explained that she was having emotional problems, asked them to keep her in the advanced classes. They were nasty and unhelpful. She began to skip school more and more often. I didn’t know this at the time, although I could have predicted it. Then she was expelled again.
A group of girls had been smoking in the girls’ room and been caught. They were hauled to the principal, who asked which of them had been smoking. Only Elspeth held up her hand. Only Elspeth was expelled. Thus do we teach our children true values.
I liked her for that, but I didn’t know how to tell her anything anymore. I didn’t want to encourage her to get expelled, encourage her to smoke. I was, by now, rather beaten down. I sat down with her, I was tired, I told her she was ruining the future she would probably want. I ran through the whole thing. I pictured a variety of possible lives for her and asked her to choose one. She listened to me coolly, then said, “Are you through now, M
OTHER
?” Mother as she said it was a dirty word.
I was literally at my wits’ end: I simply didn’t know what to do. Jack said, “Beat her.” That’s the way he had been brought up, and he remained a little abject in the face of male authority, always. But I tell you I would have done it if I thought it would help. It wouldn’t, of course. You can’t just start beating a child at the age of fourteen. You have to train a child to fear; you have to get them young.
D
OLORES LOOKED AT VICTOR’S
face. It was intense, and the eyes had something strange in them: shock, it was. She was telling him a story from an alien world: these things didn’t happen in nice middle-class white families. It didn’t happen in families with proper father and mother, a two-parent household, as they said in the government surveys. No. The hell with him, she thought, but her heart hurt. It is so easy to look with distaste on the dirt and rust of another’s life; so easy to blame others for their lives. While you shake yourself like a wet dog, spraying water all over the room, ridding yourself of the waters in which others drowned. Not me. Not me.
She turned away from him and continued calmly, inexorably.
Things got worse. I still waited up for her. One night she came home late, it was a Saturday, and I was ironing, waiting for her. She came into the kitchen and sat down and I looked at her and her eyes looked funny.
“What have you taken?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve taken something, I can see it.” She said yes, she’d been smoking dope.
My heart sank. Things had been a little stable for a few weeks—as they occasionally were, always leading me to think that it was over, she had run it through her system, and was prepared to return to normality. What I thought of as normality. But always she found a way to try one new thing.
I was worried about pot because she was so young, because I knew that kids only a little older than she were on hard drugs and I thought that hanging out with kids who were on something could lead to getting on heroin.
I gave my usual understanding warning lecture, explaining perils and risks. She let me talk, but I was just dancing through a hoop for my own entertainment. Eventually she slammed out of the room and went to bed.
I could not control what she did. I worked, I had classes and office hours three days a week, and I’d been put on a demanding committee that took up another full day. That was my first year at Emmings, and I felt I had to prove myself.
But even if I’d been home, what could I do? Walk her to school and meet her at the school gate every afternoon? Even if I’d done that there was nothing to prevent her from leaving by the back door as soon as I left. She was out of my bodily control, and since my word had no authority with her, she was out of my control completely.
Which would have been all right had she been in her
own
control, but she wasn’t.
Sometimes things were fine, sometimes we still had fun and sat around talking. Jack talked with her too. But nothing made any difference. I always laugh when I see another pious newspaper or magazine article by some psychologist or psychiatrist urging
communication.
Communication, hah! Now we’ll all sit down and have a nice little talk and tell each other what we really feel and really
communicate
and then we’ll work things out, we will build a good
relationship
so that we can have
fulfilling mature
lives! Christ!
And of course, in addition to Els, there were the other kids, who were now in high school or junior high, and who weren’t acting so hot either. Tony had withdrawn inside himself, and sat in the house watching TV all the time when he wasn’t in school. Sydney was still a child, but she was never home, never. She spent her afternoons at her girlfriends’ houses, doing homework, she said. She ate there, she slept there, she came home only to change her clothes. I began to feel like some kind of monster, but why? I was always kind to the children, always concerned about them. But the problems with Els did have me utterly miserable, I probably littered depression around me like body odor. I probably neglected them, I certainly didn’t pay much attention to them. I was falling apart.
It was just like Anthony, all over again. Sometimes I’d invite some friends over for an evening, and the kids would be there, I liked them to join us if they wanted to, and Els would come into the room, but then she’d sit there glaring at me from her corner, I could feel her hate crawling on my skin from across the room. Just the way Anthony used to when he was jealous. Or she’d come home, high, and come into the room sort of silly and dazed, and curl up in a ball in a chair while around her people talked and laughed, and if I went to see how she was, her eyes would roll around in her head and she would barely answer me, she acted catatonic.
I took her to a clinic, which recommended a psychiatrist who specialized, they said, in adolescent disorders. She went once a week, dutifully, trotted over to Brookline, having to change twice, a long trip. He did nothing. I kept asking her about him because I could see no progress, but she didn’t want to talk about him. She said she liked him, that was all. So I left her alone. He asked me to come and talk to him, once, and I went. He told me solemnly, the asshole, that the problem was that I did not communicate with her.
In fact, on those nights when she felt friendly towards me, or perhaps had some glimmering that she was living in a strange way, we would still talk. And then we’d talk all night, until five in the morning, and I’d have to go in and teach the next morning. I was probably stupid, I should probably have stuck to a strict regimen and not let her do that. But I was desperate, I grabbed any chance I was offered to reach her. Nothing, nothing in the world was more important than Elspeth in those years. Even my other children, because unhappy as they seemed, they were not heading for destruction, and she was.
She would say that she hated this materialistic, capitalistic culture. She didn’t understand why we had big meals, we should just live on fruit and nuts. She couldn’t abide pretensions and didn’t care if she went to college. What she really loved was her black friends. They had the good way of life. They all loved each other and they spoke and acted with each other in a natural warm way that white people never did understand, certainly never showed. Easy, without pretense, pretension, snobbery; they weren’t judgmental. Without trying to prove anything: they were all just niggers together. She wanted to live like that.
She wanted to screw Connie, and just drift through life with him. She didn’t care about the other woman in his life. I told her about pregnancy, I said she was too young. She listened to me about that for a long time. But one night she told me she’d gone to bed with Connie, at least begun to, but his mother had walked in. Then I took her for birth control pills.
Oh, I suppose I was your classic permissive parent, suffering classic punishment. But after all, I’d been permissive all their lives. I’m not sure I would have been quite so liberal if I hadn’t always had to offset Anthony’s influence. If I’d been their only parent, I think I would have been a little less
on their side
in every situation. But you can’t change a pattern you’ve developed over a decade or more. Nor did I really want to. I tried, with Elspeth, to become more and more firm, but it didn’t matter what I did. If I was firm, she rebelled hostilely; if I was easy, she took advantage of my easiness. She had me beat no matter what I did, and she didn’t seem to realize that I wasn’t someone who
ought
to have been beat, that I was thinking of her, not of myself.
Well, it went on that way. It’s amazing how life can just go on that way, how you can live with hell just around the corner and you know it, yet you live, day after day, and find something to smile about, something to make you laugh. Jack was there and listened to me with sweet patience, tried to cheer me up. Tony and Sydney were disgusted with Elspeth the way younger children are with a sibling whose behavior they don’t understand, when they see—much more clearly than the problem child does—the anguish and suffering it is causing.
And through it all, I was working. That probably saved my sanity in those years. I worked well, maybe because it was such a relief to have my brain filled with something besides Elspeth. I published my first book, began research for the second. Teaching was fun, and besides it got me out of the house. This house had begun to feel like the house in Newton, filled with poisoned air, walls that reverberate with the same hell happening over and over and over. Voices hang in the hallways, a coffee cup left on a table reminds you of her and what she said and what she did….
Elspeth began to grow very thin. She would drift past me, her beautiful big violet eyes empty and blank. Connie would come for dinner and she’d sit there silent, gazing at him, then she’d get up and sit in his lap. At least, until I forbade such behavior at the dinner table. She spoke little when he was around. She lost herself in him. That wasn’t his fault, he was a sweet guy and bright, but not at all domineering. It was the way she felt—she wanted to lose herself in something, someone. In drugs, in love. She wanted oblivion.
She was fifteen, and had been suspended from school because of her continued failures. I didn’t know it, though, she hadn’t told me. She hung out around the streets, with the other kids like herself, most of them male, most of them black. She was on pills now, all sorts. She looked glazed most of the time. There was no point in lecturing her: her mind wasn’t working.
One day she just didn’t come home. I was frantic, I called all her friends, but no one knew where she was. I went to the school the next day, and that’s how I found out she’d been suspended. I canceled all my classes, I scurried around Cambridge, I went to all the places I knew she sometimes went. I couldn’t find her. That day I saw grey hairs in my head and thought that the old saw was true: your hair can turn grey overnight. Mine had.
She came home late the second day. She said she’d been lying down in the middle of Prospect Street waiting for a car to run over her. She was wild-eyed and very dirty. It could have been true. She had slept in an empty store she knew about, slept alone, on the floor.
I said: You see what you are doing to me. You see I am distraught, nearly crazy with worry about you. You say you don’t care about your future, but don’t you care about me? I don’t know what to do, Elspeth, tell me what you want me to do.
She did care about me, I knew. Why else did she take all my things? She’d “borrow” odds and ends from me—a nail file, a blouse, a pair of gloves. Although she had perfectly fine things of her own that she never wore. She’d take mine and they’d disappear into the rat’s nest under her bed or in the back of her closet. Sometimes I thought she was trying to steal me, to become me through theft.
Other times I thought she was trying to kill me, destroy me. That it was a real war and she was willing to die in it if that would kill me too. Like Anthony. But I thought that she’d win this one, because she was stronger than I was: she didn’t care about either of us, and I did.
She began to stay out of the house overnight. She’d tell me where she’d been afterwards, but she never told me she wouldn’t be coming home. Sometimes she’d be gone two days.
She came in one day when I was sick, bent double with my stomach, sick because she hadn’t been home in two days, and I didn’t know where she was. I yelled at her, ordered her to her room, told her she couldn’t go out anymore. She said something nasty and flip, like, “What are you going to do, Mother, lock me up?” or something, and I reached out and slapped her, right across the face. “You stop that! You stop it!” she shrieked, and her eyes were terrified, little-girl terrified. She pulled away from me, she shrank into herself, she looked scared, like a child who’s used to being beaten. I almost cried, but I sat down instead. I was exhausted. She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.