A little later I went and opened the bathroom door. She was startled and guilty, she was swallowing something. I stood there in the doorway.
“Elspeth, what do you think I’d do if you died?”
Her eyes were large and scared. “I don’t know.”
“You think I’d die too, don’t you. Well, I just want to tell you that I wouldn’t. I’d grieve. I’d suffer. It would hurt me a lot. But I wouldn’t die. So if you think you can destroy me by destroying yourself, forget it.”
I walked away. She had stood there during my little speech, hunched over and scared looking, but she had said nothing. I thought maybe I’d bit a nerve, gotten through to her. But nothing changed. She was not at home very much. When she was, she wandered around the house. She’d pick up a magazine, study those deathly skinny models in their ridiculous makeup, then put it down. She’d play the piano, desultorily. She spent hours in front of a mirror, snipping off the dead split-ends of her hair. She seemed to me to be waiting for something, to be marking time. But I didn’t know what she was waiting for, and I didn’t think she did. She walked the way models walk on TV, floaty, as if they have no substance, no muscle, no bone, are simply air, leaves drifting, dust, sand, milkweed….
One Saturday night when Jack was there, Elspeth was home and we had an argument about something. She was back in school, and I was trying to oversee her. But how can you be sure a child has done her homework when you don’t know what her assignment is? We argued about homework, and she stalked off and went to her room. An hour later she came down and said I didn’t have to worry about her anymore because she’d just swallowed half a bottle of aspirin.
I should have respected my intimations. I was fairly sure she hadn’t taken half a bottle and my impulse was to say oh? and return to what I was doing. But because I was so angry with her so much of the time, I didn’t trust my own impulses towards her. I said oh? and went to my room and shut the door and telephoned her shrink. He said to take her to the hospital and have them pump out her stomach. I said I thought it was a phony, and I should treat it as such. He grew very pompous, very threatening: he had been treating her, he said, and he had to warn me that he would not take the responsibility if I did not follow his instructions. As if I gave a goddamn whether he took responsibility or not. I was worried about her life, not blaming somebody. But he frightened me: I thought he knew more about her psychological condition than I did.
Jack and I drove her to the emergency room. They didn’t pump her stomach, thank god, they gave her something to make her throw up. I watched from an outer room. She looked so small, so frail sitting there in a short hospital gown, her long hair falling over her face, her body bent, thin as it was, a child’s body, retching into a pan.
In fact she told me afterwards she’d taken only about five aspirin. The city sent a social worker around to the house a month later, and then again, some months after that, to talk to her, to talk to me. It was ridiculous. They were trying, of course, but why? They were using one well-meaning but utterly inexperienced recent graduate in social science, one pad and one pen to stem a flood, a volcano of emotion. As if turning what had happened into a statistic, a report to be filed in quintuplicate and later microfilmed and guarded in underground tombs full of paper and its shuffling guardians, could check or order or help or stem a flood of human misery, utter wretchedness.
Because there was no question that Elspeth was wretched. Why else would she do the things she did? But she would not admit that. She was fine, she said. If I wanted to worry about her, that was my business and she refused to be blamed for it. Because she was fine.
A
ND SO I GAVE
her up.
I thought: she will not allow me to control her, but she does not control herself. She does not need to control herself because I give her the illusion of control. There is always a home, a bed, food, affection to come home to, no matter what she does. I still gave her money, what I could afford as an allowance. She was in school (I thought) but was doing no work. She stayed away from the house for a day or two at a time.
She drifted in one Saturday morning as I was grading blue books. She hadn’t been home since Wednesday. Her hair was long and unwashed and uncombed and she had that floaty look that told me she’d been taking something. It was spring, coming up to her sixteenth birthday. She sauntered in and stood in the doorway. She wasn’t worried about my scolding. I’d stopped: it was wasted effort.
She was wearing dirty torn jeans, scuffed boots, and an army jacket. I didn’t know where she got most of her clothes. When I asked, she said she’d traded something of hers with someone else. Or that somebody had given her a jacket or a hat. It was probably true—she had hardly any of her own clothes left, lovely things I’d bought her for her birthday or Christmas. But for all I knew she might be stealing her clothes—they were selling that raggedy stuff in Cambridge in those days.
I turned around when she said hello. I told her to come in, to sit down. I wanted to talk to her. She sauntered in sighing, threw herself in a chair with her legs over the arm, lighted a cigarette and rolled her eyes up in her head: another lecture. “I thought you’d given up yelling, Mother,” she said.
“I have,” I answered, sitting facing her. I was trembling but I kept myself very controlled. I was through crying for her in front of her.
I summed up the events of the past three years. She watched me with a face that said (but who knew what was going on underneath?)
and so what?
I summarized her possibilities for the future. There weren’t many: finishing high school and going to work, quitting high school and going to work, or the remote possibility that she could bring her grades up and graduate decently and get into a college. I didn’t mention those other possibilities, pregnancy, drug addiction, flipping out totally.
“I guess you know, Elspeth, that I could have you institutionalized.”
She was jarred, she perked up. She hadn’t realized I had one piece of power left over her. “For what!”
“For your behavior. It can be done.”
“You mean for drugs. I am not a drug addict, M
OTHER
.”
I can’t tell you how she said that word,
Mother.
It was horrible to my ears.
“I can have you institutionalized, Elspeth. It doesn’t have to be for drugs. But I won’t do that. It’s terrible, and I won’t do it.”
She glared at me, but I could see she was relieved. She moved her little ass in the chair and wiggled her leg. She tamped out her cigarette and lighted another. She looked to heaven with a “when-is-this-woman-going-to-stop” look.
“What I am going to do is resign, Elspeth. I quit. I am not going to be
mother
anymore.”
She looked at me with a contempt and amusement that were supposed to convey: you cannot take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal.
“I am not going to worry about you anymore, I’m not going to wait up nights. I’m not going to cook meals that you don’t come home to eat, or lie to the school, or wash your clothes, or clean your room, or scold you or lecture you anymore. Nor am I going to support you anymore.
“You are on your own. You can go where you want, do what you want. But you can’t come here, can’t live here anymore unless you live by the rules of this house. That is, go to school, do your schoolwork, come in on time for meals, do your share in the house, keep yourself and your room decent, and sleep here at night.
“If you can’t do these things, you’ll have to find someplace else to live. That’s it.”
She’d stopped wiggling her legs awhile back, although she’d continued to blow smoke in great puffs towards the ceiling. When I finished, she yawned, loudly. She stood up. “Ummm. Well, me and Connie are going to California anyway.” And sashayed to her room.
I sat there for a while, trembling so hard I was afraid to stand up. I knew that now I’d said it, I had to do it. Had to. Or she’d never respect me again. But you know it was ludicrous. Who ever heard of resigning as a mother? It’s like resigning as a Jew, it can’t be done. I dragged myself up and went out into the hall. The bathroom door was closed and I heard the shower running. I went back to my desk and tried to return to correcting the exam I was reading, but the letters wiggled under my eyes. I was taut, tense. I knew I had to prepare for a long siege. She might figure I’d found finally the limits of her power, and agree to terms, but not keep them. It might be she’d go off somewhere, and who knows what would happen then? I sat there dying with the possibilities.
An hour or so later, Elspeth appeared in my doorway again. She said nothing, but I sensed her presence and turned. And gasped. She was a vision. Her face was pink and shiny and her hair was washed and combed and it was long and straight and red-gold and it shone. She was wearing a long white cotton dress that I’d bought her for her cousin’s wedding the year before. Afterwards I had washed and ironed it and packed it away in lavender, knowing she wouldn’t wear it. It was fresh and clean and smelled of lavender now. It had a round scoop neck and little sleeves and was trimmed with eyelet. She also had on a hat. I didn’t recognize it at first, but then I remembered it. It was an old one of mine, a wide-brimmed straw hat with a dusty-rose velvet band and a trailer hanging down the back. She was dewy and lovely as a child in an illustration. Except her feet were bare.
When she saw me turn, she shifted her body, she leaned one hand against the doorframe, and put the other on her hip. Her mouth was set in the ugly chagrined line she wore when she was angry with me.
“I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving now. I’m going to pose for Peter, he thinks he can get photographs of me in a magazine. I won’t be coming back, so you don’t have to bother yourself with worrying about me anymore.”
She removed her hand from the doorframe and let her arms hang down at her sides. She looked straight and slight and very young.
“And one more thing: I know what you’re doing. You’re getting rid of me the way you got rid of Daddy. It’s very convenient, Mommy.”
First time she’d called me Mommy in months.
“You seem to think I’m trying to kill
you.
Well, I just want to tell you you can’t kill
me
the way you killed Daddy.”
She whirled and disappeared.
I sat there feeling disembodied. I heard noises downstairs. I walked to my front window and looked down. There was a group of kids down there waiting for her. Her friends, I guess. These days her friends changed from day to day. Connie wasn’t there. The kids looked pretty raunchy, but all kids looked raunchy in those days. They all wowed and heyed as she came out, and she turned in a circle for them, swinging out her skirt. She was grinning from ear to ear, a little-girl grin. She set off with them looking like a beautiful girl in a fashion ad, lifted off the earth as she runs to meet her lover, wearing immaculate white cotton and a straw hat, her bare feet symbols of her openness, her innocence.
She kept her word. She didn’t come back. Two days later she had not returned. I was sick, I couldn’t keep food in my stomach. But she’d been gone for two days at a time before this. She’d be back one of these days, because otherwise, how would she live? She’d be back shamefaced but stubborn-mouthed, and try to bargain with me, set her own conditions, to save her face. And I’d let her set a few, to save her face.
Or else, or else, she wouldn’t come back. She’d go off and try to make it on her own. And she was smart and tough in some ways and maybe she would, she could, I had to believe she could. I had said abide by the rules or I toss you out of the nest into the pool, you have to sink or swim on your own, and she’d said, I’ll toss myself, thank you. She would swim. She had to.
Oh, I knew the tales of those who didn’t. Seemed to be a lot of them in those years, kids who OD’d, kids who simply vanished into the great mob of street folk and had never been heard from again. One child was found murdered, thrown from a building in the village. One child had become infected from a dirty needle and had lost several of his fingers. I pushed those stories away.
I gave myself reasons to hope. The clean hair, the fresh dress, the happiness of that grin. Peter, photographs for a magazine; that sounded substantial, something to hold on to.
Four days, and she had not returned. I thought of calling Connie, Starr, Peter, or the other friends I knew. But I didn’t. I had said she was on her own, and I meant it.
“Oh, god!” Dolores cried softly, and began to sob. Her fingers were grabbing her hair as if they would pull it out. She was crying in retching sobs that seemed to come from the bottom of her body. Victor watched her, his face covered with scratches. Her head was down, her body hunched, she looked like an etching of a penitent in an eighteenth-century prison.
He rose, taking their glasses, and in a while she calmed down and blew her nose. He handed her a fresh brandy and a new cigar. She sipped the brandy, she laughed a little, shakily.
“I think booze and tobacco are your answers to pain.”
“You know any better ones?”
“Valium?”
“Much worse.”
She sat back. She smiled, ghostly, like the specter of someone long dead who has returned to bring a message from the beyond. From the dim small room that was her pain, she gazed out at him. The shock on his face had deepened into horror, but he wasn’t separating himself from her anymore. He was experiencing with her, not putting her into her niche: failure as a mother.
He leaned towards her, his face covered with cuts. He took her hand. “Go on,” he said.
I sat there trying to grade blue books. I went to class and walked through the halls amazed at my body, that carried me, and my mind, that sent out words through my mouth. I lectured, I advised, I went home and smoked. And smoked. My stomach was in terrible shape.
I’d sit there … well it wasn’t exactly
thinking
… or
feeling.
It was some of both, but neither, exactly. I had this sense … as if life was this huge thing like a balloon, and it swelled and shrank, it changed its shape, and as soon as I’d made out what it was, it became something else. And it was
my
life, my balloon, but I’d lost hold of the string, and I was running, chasing it, the string was just a little above my hand but I couldn’t grasp it. It was floating higher and higher, and it was turning huger and ugly, malformed, and I was earthbound, chasing it, yelling to it, but nothing did any good. It floated higher and higher and I called out: “Elspeth! Elspeth!”