A Room with a Darker View

by Claire Phillips

  “I can’t believe it, Joy,” he would shout. “You are $7,000 into PACE again.”

  PACE, I came to learn, was the acronym for an account that extended my parents an automatic credit line once their checking account had a negative balance. My father was hopping mad, and my mother had no trouble laughing this off. She almost seemed to relish these moments.

  1970–1981

  As time passed, my mother grew more frantic. Her driving was terrible. Not that it had ever been passable. Earlier, when we lived in England, my father had tried teaching her to drive a stick shift to no avail. Those Saturday afternoons were spent in the back seat, with the car lurching suddenly, as my mother struggled to put the unspectacular green English sedan into gear. No matter the number of lessons, she never improved, until finally, they gave up on the whole enterprise. Her movements were then limited to, fortunate for her, the excellent British mass transit system.

  In America, when we were in grade school, she drove in a state of tense panic, slowly drifting to straddle the center lines of our hilly town’s small roads. Fearful of crashing her car, she maintained a speed well under the twenty-five-miles-per-hour limit, causing visible consternation on the part of the other drivers, our neighbors. Angry beeping was not out of the ordinary. My brother and I would duck down in the back seat, mortified, hoping to go unrecognized, while my mother steadily navigated her young wards in the direction of home. A town of under ten thousand inhabitants, nestled in the Watchung Mountains and just six or so square miles in area, there were thankfully few cars on the road.

  My mother’s morning commute began with the short two-mile drive to the downtown train station. She had to leave earlier than she would have wanted; the commute on the various train lines—the Morris-Essex train lines to Newark and PATH to New York City, the Erie L. from B.H. to Hoboken, trains to Brooklyn, back to Manhattan or to Jersey City, depending upon her schedule—had to be timed precisely. In the winter months, her commute was made even more grueling by the inclement weather and the many blizzards. My mother would often leave us behind on snow days, when she ruled it too dangerous for us to attend schools even as she hazarded the icy roads for the courtrooms of the city. Mornings were always difficult. Inevitably she would shout out in desperation, Where are my keys? or, I can’t find my comb! My brother would dutifully find them for her, always to my chagrin.

  “Why do you help her?” I would deride him for aiding and abetting “the enemy.” I had long since bowed out from participating in her wellbeing.

  “It’s easier to help than not,” my brother explained, expounding a brand of pragmatism I would not come to understand until much later. More than this, my mother treated her second-born with a little more gentle reserve. This would be to her great benefit as it was my brother who would, at the prompting of my mother’s father, take on the role of dutiful caregiver that her illness required.

  Singular solution

  One winter morning I recall my mother struggling with a typical adversity. The garage door, as a consequence of the fluctuating temperatures of the previous day, was frozen shut. The snow that melted had formed a powerful seal of ice between the mechanical garage door and the cement floor. My mother’s usual remedy was to heat water in a small pot on the stove and then pour it over the seal to help melt the ice. On this particular occasion she did not have time to heat a pot of water. She may not have expected the appearance of the ice. Or she may have been busy ironing creases out of her suit jacket or skirt that morning, leaving her less time to address the hindrance.

  For whatever reason, that day my mother determined a singular solution to her winter troubles. She got into the front seat of her subcompact car, running the engine before putting it into reverse, successfully barreling through the heavy wood garage door, splintering it into many pieces, all in an effort to get to the train station on time. Her determination to show up in court, to come through on behalf of her clients, clearly knew no bounds.

  Winter 1980

  Like my mother, I had trouble maintaining my morning schedule of travel on the N.J. transit Morris-Essex train line. Never leaving the house in time to walk the mile-and-a-half through the woods behind our house and down Plainfield Avenue to the train station, I was habitually late and found myself sprinting the final three blocks whenever I heard the whistle of an approaching train.

  Once, I inadvertently boarded the same train car as my mother. I had left the house a daring time-shaving two or three minutes later than usual and missed my regular train. I had looked forward to bantering and smoking with school friends during the short fifteen minutes between train stops. Worse than missing my train, however, I made the error of boarding an express train that did not stop in Summit. My mother must have been late to work that morning too, and for some reason, I had failed to see her on the platform. Perhaps she had been waiting in her car for the train, steeling herself from the freezing cold outside.

  Adding to my predicament, I had absconded with a blouse of my mother’s that I was expressly forbidden from wearing. Terrified of being caught, I fastened my coat tightly, and took the empty seat next to hers. My mother glanced in my direction momentarily, and then turned away as if I were a complete stranger, apparently more disturbed by my presence than I hers. This came as a small relief. However, after the train failed to stop in Summit and I discovered that I had boarded the express train for Newark, I found myself in need of my mother’s expertise. A privileged girl of the suburbs, I felt a certain trepidation approaching a city stereotyped for little more than a high crime rate. Except on school field trips to the Empire State Building or World Trade Center, at fifteen years old I had never ventured farther outside of my alarmingly white enclave other than to the moneyed suburbs of Bernardsville or Millburn. While I was of a less elite background than the wealthier set of girls who went on annual ski trips to Switzerland and Vail, and who summered in Martha’s Vineyard or belonged to The Lake Club, owned condos in Florida, or “showed” on $50,000 horses on weekends, I was still fairly insulated from life outside of anything other than middle class 1970s suburbia.

  This loud train ride along thumping rails was to be the furthest I had ventured outside the rosy ring of leafy suburban privilege. My mother, however, declined to help me navigate the large and unfamiliar terrain of the Newark train station with its hefty number of tracks into which we pulled shortly after passing a long tract of foreboding tall brick tenements. Deboarding in Newark, awed by the array of train lines, I eventually managed to board the correct train for Summit, arriving at school over two hours late. Later that night I discovered the reason that my mother had ignored my presence on the train—I had made her appear “old.”

  1977–1979

  My mother’s struggles at work weren’t limited to shallow first impressions. She also suffered enormously over interpersonal communication. Whenever my professionally smooth-sailing father was home, my mother would take full advantage of his expertise and acumen. Bombarding my father nightly at the dinner table with her troubles, it became clear that something was wrong. She would often retell the same story in precise detail, asking him to divine for her the meaning of a reaction or response of a colleague or judge, for hours. What do you think he meant? she would repeatedly ask, never content with the response. Eventually my father would forgo reason or conjecture for a simple answer—I don’t know, Joy. I don’t know.

  In fact, she rarely sat down at the table with us unless it was to work him over on the subject of her professional angst. She didn’t partake in meals. She was on a perpetual diet, subsisting almost exclusively on snack-size Slim Jims, frozen meat patties, cottage cheese, and Tab. Low-calorie Kavli crackers with margarine were another source of sustenance. These fraught mealtime conversations would eventually end in loud shouting matches. On one occasion in a fit of rage, after he overturned the kitchen table, sending the dishes flying, my father stomped off into the garage to return to work. An hour later I found my father still in the garage, seated behind
the steering wheel of his car, gazing absently into the gloom.

  Illness and its demands

  An intense secrecy was integral to my mother’s survival. She knew better than to communicate her anxieties and fears to anyone outside the home. It had been years since she had eliminated frank conversation with neighbors or anyone else. Her immediate family was a safe place to unload her doubts, along with her fantastic renderings of the world-at-large. As the demands for secrecy grew more severe entering the spring trimester of my tenth grade, I started to suffer from overpowering feelings of hopelessness and despair. I was a disappointment to my parents and highly cynical about academic achievement.

  My father had done his best to cultivate a sense of family on the weekends when we were younger, but this became less tenable as the demands of his work intensified: the telescope being built in Hawaii, one of the very few in the world of its kind; the flying in NASA airplanes at Moffett Field in Northern California with delicate submillimeter radio instruments; and a new professorship at CalTech. We became less and less a family. And, as my mother’s chaos grew to consume our home—with law briefs stacked all about, expensive clothes strewn everywhere, hair dye splattered over the bathroom walls, and dirty dishes and mail left to mount—cleaning up after her began to feel like an all-consuming job.

  It also never ceased to amaze me how little sustenance she would provide my brother and me. Her shopping was geared almost entirely toward her needs. For us, there might be some frozen FoodTown pizzas, a bag of Mars chocolate bars, and maybe a few cans of Dinty More stew, Chef Boyardee ravioli, or Spaghetti-os. After cleaning all morning one Saturday, I took it upon myself to rail at her—a predictable tirade that did precious little to change our situation.

  In the 1970s, mental illness was rarely openly discussed. At a time when anorexia was euphemistically referred to as a “worm,” I had little in the way of cultural markers to define the trouble brewing in our home. Had there been complex representations of these illnesses on television as on those popular shows today—for example, Homeland’s Carrie, who has a bipolar condition, or Dr. Walter Bishop’s self-induced schizophrenia on Fringe—I might have been able to advocate for my mother and help her to obtain treatment. Instead, my family and I missed the very common hallmark signs of the disease. As it stealthily progressed, we grew used to its strange permutations, making odd justifications for its intensifying demands.

  Mrs. Harvilchuck

  At some point during my sophomore year, I started experimenting with pills, taking some variation on the fabled “black beauties” of a bygone era. Touted as a powerful amphetamine, in actuality these weak pills sold to privileged naïve teenagers were probably just ground caffeine pressed into small black gelatin capsules. I don’t recall where I got them, only that after taking them they offered a mild kick at best.

  That year in English class we were given a short creative assignment, and I decided to try my hand at confessional writing. I knew what I was doing, perhaps better than I do now with all of my adult commitments and material entrapments. I downed some pills, called a friend on the forbidden telephone, locked myself in the basement away from my mother’s paranoid surveillance, and became overwrought. I then scrawled onto lined paper my feelings of self-loathing and disadvantage, reflecting on the perks and privileges of the girls who appeared happier and more stable, whose family miseries were not yet on full display, and handed it in to our teacher, Mrs. Harvilchuck, who, with her impossibly high standards, routinely caused the less analytical among us to melt down.

  This same teacher who once humiliated me during class by demanding that I stop pretending to be stupid when I admitted feeling confounded in the face of eighteenth-century poetry, came to find me one afternoon in our student lounge, with the paper I had submitted folded vertically in half, like all of our graded papers. Passing it back to me, she said she wanted to publish it in the school paper.

  “You must come for a conference. We should discuss this.”

  I never did seek out that meeting, nor did I vie for that publication.

  Bernardsville

  Visits to a friend’s nineteenth-century English rural stone house in Bernardsville, a former summer colony for Gilded Age industrialists and financiers, were the highlight of my high school years. Here, my friend and I rode horses, swam in the neighbor’s pool, and on occasion visited other school friends at the nearby “Lake Club.” We would drink apple-flavored whiskey and swim in the cool lake, then climb back into the light blue Volkswagen Rabbit to return to the house, where my friend’s mother would have spent the day gardening before preparing a delicious Waldorf salad for us.

  The tenor of life in this home could not have been more opposite to mine. The overstuffed furniture, decorated in bright yellow and green floral patterns, reeked of old money. The floors were a rich oak, the cold stone of the walls so different from the hollow drywall of my home. From iron casement windows throughout the long narrow home, the views were of rolling fields and elegant mature oaks. Antique wood vanities and dressers graced the corners of each of the small bedrooms. When my teenage companion was in trouble, it was for something inarguable and concrete. You used my sewing scissors to cut flowers. How could you? my friend’s mom might charge. An infraction so light and frivolous it seemed almost a compliment.

  Even more exciting were the times when the Kirklands went away for the weekend and we would invite teenage boys over and drink. These occasional forays edging into sexual intimacy were fraught with peril. No one asked to visit me at home, but what would happen if I established stronger ties with a boy from another school? How would I explain my chaotic home life to someone who grew up in an eighteenth-century stone mansion? I knew better than to entertain rescue fantasies. After dabbling some, I drew strong boundaries. Inevitably, flirtations remained in the nascent stages of desire.

  Southern California, 1978

  The summer before tenth grade, my brother and I spent a couple of weeks with our father in California, where he had rented a two-bedroom in a featureless stucco apartment building on South Wilson Avenue in Pasadena, which was walking distance from his job. While Dad worked in a nondescript building on California Boulevard, we could be found across the street at the palm lined CalTech pool, basking in an unfamiliar calm.

  California was as sunny as it was purported to be. Each morning I woke up to a relentlessly blue sky. I was as shocked by the climate as I was stunned by the abundance of luxury vehicles darting between freeway lanes. Apparently, everyone here was rich or at least eager to appear that way. Pasadena was nothing like the East Coast. Large Mission-style and Greene & Greene houses were set unimaginably close to the sidewalk and hardly a distance apart in Pasadena. No one owned a mansion or even a large house in northern New Jersey unless it was set on six acres or more of property. And in New Jersey, before the explosion of Wall Street in the 1990s, the wealthy typically cloaked their money driving modest cars like Volkswagen Rabbits or mid-sized Volvos. Here in Los Angeles people zipped about in the latest top of the line Mercedes or BMW.

  I wasn’t convinced at first that I liked California more than the East, but I certainly welcomed the change.

  Sex Education

  As summer dragged on, my mother persevered in publishing and winning multiple appeals. She would often have me read them out loud to her so she could contemplate her outpourings. These appeals were written by hand on long sheets of yellow legal paper. As I recall, the writing was severely repetitious, as if the copy and paste of the personal computer age had already been invented. This early exposure to the writing of appeals cured me of any interest in pursuing a career in law. This and the hardships my mother endured.

  Of these repetitious tomes, two of her appeals made a lasting impression. One was the rape appeal that I was expressly forbidden to read. Naturally I availed myself of this murky, disturbing read right away. It was hardly the best introduction to sex. But I can’t say it was in any way worse an introduction than the reading of The
Fan Club, a pulp novel by Irvine Wallace, that I found among my father’s books in the spare room, detailing the kidnapping and somewhat sickening gang rape of a “famous actress,” who eventually secures her own release through the preposterous telegraphing of her signature body measurements: 36-24-34. The other appeal gave me insight into social inequalities hinged upon racial profiling. The defendant was of Arab descent, and the incriminating evidence of this liquor store robbery included a brown paper bag and a screwdriver. The main argument of the appeal rested on an unwarranted search. Despite the fact that my mother had stopped sleeping almost entirely, she was completely capable of performing on behalf of her clients.

  While my mother continued to strive, my own ambition for success was nothing short of anemic. I wanted nothing more than the swift passage of time so that I might leave my family for college, any college. Course work didn’t interest me. All that mattered was that I could get away.

  Guidance counselor

  The rift between my mother and I intensified as the accusations escalated. On an almost weekly basis, I was accused of being a tart, of being on an official police list of prostitutes, of desiring my father sexually. This wasn’t entirely new. From the time I was eight or nine, my mother would often say alarming things to me apropos of nothing. Without your eyes or hair, you have nothing, she would exhort. Years after this, her mantra changed: Never let a boy stick himself inside of you. She had no filter. The dark, painful thoughts that plagued her were ascribed to anyone and everyone without mediation. She demanded that my father and I not sit so closely together on the couch. Any contact I had with him was suspect, and I was routinely humiliated by her accusations when he would return home for markedly briefer and briefer periods.