A Room with a Darker View

by Claire Phillips

  In a feeble attempt to find some relief, I began regularly seeing the guidance counselor at school. I found it difficult to describe my troubled home to this proper-looking woman in the preppy garb of a pale-yellow Fair-Isle sweater and kelly-green headband. Even more off-putting was the family photograph displayed prominently on her desk, reflecting back to me my outsider status. In this photo, our guidance counselor appeared with the math teacher, a notoriously recalcitrant man, with their eight neatly groomed children, conjoined Brady Bunch-style into one household from previous marriages. How would I explain to this raging success of family life the torments that afflicted my own blood ties? How would she react to stories of my mother’s incandescent rage? The unrelenting accusations? Bouts of manic laughter? The sloth? Anti-social behavior? To my defensive maneuvers? What if she knew the truth of my family’s near disdain for material acquisition? At that tender age, I wanted the trappings of the happy suburban life. I knew better than to reveal our flaws to this stranger. Even so, I knew the overpowering feelings of hopelessness and despair that plagued me were not reasonable. They threatened to take me under. This counselor, however conservative, was the best hope I had for staying afloat.

  Winter & Spring trimesters, 1980

  A month or so after a number of meetings with my counselor, my father was called to come speak to her. My parents’s response to the school counselor’s request was both aggressive and unhappy. Living primarily in California, my father had either returned specifically to handle this mess, or had been ambushed by the call while on one of his monthly visits. He was not pleased, and this displeasure emanated from his tense grip on the steering wheel as he drove me to school that morning in his green Cutlass Supreme. Descending Morris Avenue for Summit, the trees almost in bloom, I was overcome with such anxiety that I experienced a gut-wrenching knot in my stomach so intense I had to slip out from the bucket seat down to the floor of the car, unable to maintain a seated position. I had never experienced pain like this before. What did I fear? A negative report on my academic performance? I was a difficult student in need of attention. I wasn’t sure what my counselor might say about me.

  My time with her had included a certain amount of test taking. At first she gave me a straightforward IQ test. Maybe she needed to eliminate the possibility that I was either a misunderstood genius or severely limited in my intellectual capacities. I received a score of 135, a number that I determined to be low, particularly when considering my family’s high expectations. During these hours together, she soon tried passing off the Rorschach inkblot test as another IQ test; the Rorschach, ironically enough, had originally been designed to help diagnose schizophrenia. I had no fear of the results, for I had made up my mind at a very young age, perhaps as early as five, that my mind would never become derailed in the same fashion as my mother’s. I believed I had a choice. I believed I could establish boundaries between mental realms that I planned never to cross. For this reason, I did not balk at the intrusive testing. Instead I welcomed the attention, the calm hours seated on the comfortable couch in her office.

  That dreaded day

  Dumb luck would place me in the downstairs hallway of the main building when my father left the counselor’s office. I was probably returning from the cafeteria when I caught sight of him on his way out. With his brown leather briefcase in hand, he looked angry, tense. This intervention, arranged on the part of my counselor, had clearly not gone well.

  When I returned home that evening, my father disclosed the conversation. My less-than-stellar academic performance was probably up for discussion, but I have no memory of this. What followed was a shared joke between my parents. Apparently, as my father relayed to my mother, the counselor’s main concern was that I didn’t think my mother loved me. My parents shared a hardy laugh over this. I had never considered my counselor to be particularly bright, and this remark was all the proof I needed.

  My mother had never expressed a pronounced ability to love. It made no sense to look to her for a show of emotional support or warmth. She was never demonstrative, effusive, beguiled by any one of us; therefore, I did not expect this kind of exchange from her. I simply sought relief from an ongoing hazard that I could not easily articulate.

  My father tried to cajole me into feeling better about my home life. He told me the problems I had at fifteen, that seemed so big and insurmountable, would later seem very insignificant indeed. I had an exaggerated view of my unhappiness, he explained to me. He was seated on the long brown plaid couch I had on more than one occasion lit a match to in order to witness the distressing sight of globby, melting manmade fibers.

  That night my mother and father were united in their good humor, a rarity. From that day forward, my mother added another caveat to her morning ritual. You mustn’t say anything to your teachers about us, she would shout through my closed bedroom door, before clacking down the polished wood stairs in low black heels for her white Chevy Vega, the train station, and whichever court she was due in that day.

  1980–1981

  I began to threaten my mother with anything I could get my hands on: long carving knives, a small plastic bottle of liquid plant fertilizer. I threatened to slit her throat, to lace her coffee with poison when her back was turned. I am going to kill you if you keep this up, I would threaten cruelly, knowing I could never exact such revenge against my mother.

  My mother kept up the melodrama, hiding the carving knives in plain sight in a cabinet high above the oven in an open bid to maintain her safety. She must have known I would not carry out my threats. My father would come home intermittently from his world travels and demand to know what happened to the carving knives whenever he was preparing a meal for the family, a duty my mother had long since given up. Joy, he would shout from downstairs, where are the knives?

  We would then hear our mother’s bedroom door open as she proceeded for the kitchen in a see-through nylon night-gown or something equally discomfiting, laughing mildly over the strained drama.

  “I hid them from Claire,” she would say rising up on her tippy-toes, to retrieve the long, sharp utensils from the cabinet. Rooted to the dingy, flecked white linoleum floor, my father would watch wordlessly.

  What was he to make of this barbarous family of his?

  1980-January 1981

  With Ronald Reagan’s ascent to the presidency, I felt myself even more at odds with those in charge of my private school education. Having just finished reading in our junior year Richard Hofstadter’s The United States: The History of a Republic, with its clear delineation of the failure of Herbert Hoover’s “trickle-down” economic policy and the resulting 1929 Depression, it seemed more than obvious that Reagan’s widely lauded supply-side economic policy was a recipe for disaster. Weren’t we studying history to learn from our mistakes?

  Our teacher, Ms. J., was married to a Wall Street stockbroker and failed to draw any connection between the Depression, “the trickle-down theory,” and Reagan’s campaign platform. My questions along these lines were blankly dismissed.

  Expulsion

  When she wasn’t insisting the district attorney was hiding behind our house in the bushes spying on her, my mother was accusing me of taking the train into Manhattan on weekends to sell him her secrets. It was a powerful delusion over which I had no control. Inevitably, these flights of mania were followed by ceaseless bouts of laughter. My reckless behavior intensified in concert with her psychosis. We were always at odds, fighting over small things, like whether I could visit friends on the weekends, what have you. Meanwhile, I was breaking many rules at school, smoking, and engaging in other teenage nonsense.

  By the end of my junior year, I finally succeeded in loosening myself from my mother’s care. This came as a relief; I could not see a future for myself on the East Coast. Whenever I tried imagining myself living in a New Jersey suburb, the other half of a happy procreating couple, I would see myself falling from a map of the Eastern Seaboard into the Atlantic Ocean. After engineering an
ignoble departure, I went to live with my father in Pasadena. This much-needed outcome was precipitated by an exuberant amount of drinking during the Christmas Pageant, which resulted in my puking out one of the windows of our second-story Junior class lounge, streaking the white exterior of the faux Tudor building with chunks of partially digested pizza and debauching my hapless counselor’s air conditioner.

  5 Bell, Jacqueline. “Women See Another Year Of Slow Gains At Law Firms - Law360.” Law360 - The Newswire for Business Lawyers, Law360, July 2017. Web.

  6 Bowman, Cynthia Grant. “Women in the Legal Profession from the 1920s to the 1970s: What Can We Learn from Their Experience About Law and Social Change.” Cornell University Law School, Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository, 2009. Web.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Ibid.

  4

  and it was running thin

  The Techno ‘80s

  In Southern California, I was finally able to get some breathing room. I was no longer tethered to the 1970s and endless tributes to The Doors and Led Zeppelin. In Pasadena, home to surfer-friendly New Wave radio station KROQ, I not only stepped into the light, so to speak, but also into the present day. The techno ’80s.

  I imagine that the person who suffered most at this juncture was my brother. Alone in New Jersey, John had no choice but to keep my mother going, despite the worsening of her condition and her increasing symptoms. Less capable of doing things for herself, she knew my departure was a condemnation of some sort, an indication that something was indisputably wrong. She took my defection badly, and as punishment, tossed my small library of paperback books—literary classics, agit-prop, and supermarket pulps: Saul Bellow, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, V.C. Andrews, Stephen King, Asimov, Leon Uris, Ayn Rand, Herman Wouk—from my bedroom bookcase into the trash.

  While my father spent his time at CalTech completing the designs for the Mauna Kea submillimeter radio telescope, I attended Blair High School, one of California’s fabled, troubled institutions. Its open-air-plan, abutting the Arroyo Seco Parkway—considered the country’s first freeway, and a close neighbor of a hulking power plant—suffered from the lack of oversight and rampant neglect associated with white flight from the public school system that came along with mandatory busing and desegregation in the 1970s.

  Little was being taught in these classrooms. Whites were in the minority. Racial tensions ran high, but were especially pronounced between Latino and African-American students. The after-school “race wars” were legendary. On one side of Marengo Avenue, the young male Latino students would gather in the customary garb of chinos and white undershirts; the black students, similarly shirted but in jeans, lined up on the other side of the street with chains and fiberglass nunchucks, while the white kids—heirs to Spanish-style and Greene & Greene homes, with their San Marino girlfriends and other elite privileges—slipped safely out of the parking lot in Volkswagen Rabbits, Jeeps, vintage collectibles, sensible Toyotas, averting their eyes from the daily tensions that erupted between the gangs. Education being entirely stratified, AP classes were almost exclusively white but for one or two African-American or Asian students.

  Pasadena was, in short, a powerful microcosm of racial inequality in America. By the end of my senior year, reading Engels along with a like-minded friend, I had become a budding Marxist.

  1981–1982

  School seemed less and less important. I ditched class with friends whenever I could, cruising in my best friend’s 1970s red Mustang along the Linda Vista neighborhood’s wide avenues lined with orange trees, lounging about in houses that were mid-century modern, or Spanish-style adobe, bingeing on fast food or beer. When it rained, we would drive into the foothills of Altadena for the snow-topped San Gabriel Mountains on a seventy-five-degree day in January to haul back the frozen rewards of nature, in order to peg the hot waspy guys with snowballs. I always marveled at these entitled, polo shirt-wearing surfers. What had they done to deprive themselves of the elite private school education almost all middle-class aspirants opted for? What infractions might they have committed? Perhaps their parents had simply chosen expensive cars over children’s educations, as one friend would report.

  Meanwhile, my mother’s condition continued to deteriorate, to the point that she could no longer determine her child’s identity. Suffering from Capgras syndrome, a delusionary psychological state, she would call to tell me she thought my brother was an imposter: I don’t think John is John anymore, she would confide in a worn, tired voice. He has hair on his legs. Or she would surprise me by announcing how she saw me on television that day. Was that you on Channel Seven? she would ask.

  It soon became apparent to my father that he needed to help my brother move out to California. No sooner did he begin to help my brother, then my mother decided that she was ready to move to California, too. This came as a surprise. No one expected her to give up her law practice, ever. But she might have sensed that without my brother’s close presence, she would not be able to cope. The work had clearly become too much for her, the untreated illness an insurmountable burden. She might have also sensed that she was on the brink of an annihilating abandonment. Without her family to confide in about her delusions and hallucinations, how would she survive? Her family was her anchor, if nothing else. It was not clear to me why no one tried to get her help.

  Years later, my father would confide in me that it was too difficult to have anyone committed then against his or her will, particularly a capable lawyer. Without her consent, treatment would have been impossible.

  Battle of the sexes

  What mattered to me then was protecting my father and myself from further misery. He had a girlfriend he was serious about, and I was convinced that I would not survive another moment of this misshapen parental union. When the news hit of my mother’s impending move to California, I demanded that my father consider his options seriously.

  “You cannot live with her again. You will be miserable,” I argued, adding the following caveat: “You won’t be able to continue on with your life as it is now.”

  It was clear to me that my father had moved on, in all senses of the word. Like me, my father had been the target of my mother’s harangues, particularly as she suffered greater and crueler frustrations at work. I didn’t see why my mother, whom I deemed to be neurotic and spiteful, should heap more misery upon us. Tragically, I had yet to understand that she suffered from a condition that required treatment. All I knew was that I needed at least one fairly happy, functioning parent to ensure my own survival. My father was an excellent provider in the sense that he was on a firm, assured path. While I fought bitterly with my father—disappointed in not having won his easy approval—the worsening of my mother’s condition, the gendered competition, and her angry bouts of paranoia rendered her unredeemable in my eyes.

  At seventeen years old, I wanted a life of my own. I wanted a home to return to from college where the battle lines drawn between the sexes were not paramount. My mother’s presence would make that impossible. Like many adolescent girls, I saw my father in more glowing light than I did my mother, who, unlike my father, did not jet to foreign lands on special assignment, bestowing upon me, his besotted little girl, glittering objects from airport terminal stores. My father, I believed, lacked backbone when it came to his strident and unpredictable wife. He needed to stand up for himself and his right to a loving home. He needed to assert himself not just for his own sake, but for my brother’s and mine too.

  Summer 1982

  When it was decided that I would be going to San Francisco State University, my father deemed my ruin complete.

  “My poor Claire,” he said, as he embraced me.

  This response amounted to self-fulfilling prophecy. I had the proof I had been looking for all along. Academic success would be the one and only measure of my worth. Early on, I had determined my parents’s workaholic habits and my mother’s strange strictures as inhumane. I could not comprehend her lack of social contac
t and disinterest in even the most minimal aspects of homemaking. But I was too young to appreciate the complexities facing the many women who had the dual hopes of caring for a family while meaningfully taking part in the outside world. My mother’s mother had spent her every moment tending to the needs of a husband whose ceaseless work as a doctor, teacher, writer, and editor in his field of subtropical medicine kept them both exceedingly busy and for the most part, in an academic limelight. What did her mother have to teach her about a professional life? Or balancing that professional life with parental duties?

  Even though my mother’s undiagnosed behavior stirred in me feelings of rebelliousness, she was not the sole cause of my disaffection; she worked hard on my behalf when she believed I had taken my rebellion too far. In middle school, when my truant behavior became excessive, she demanded that my father send me to private school. Later when my PSAT scores turned out to be less than impressive, my mother signed me up for a weekend SAT study course, extraordinary then, common now among competitive elites. My ultimately reasonable scores, coupled with my disastrously low grade-point average, made it possible for me to attend what was declared by the Yale Book of Colleges to be the best state school in California.

  At $333 a semester, my undergraduate education at San Francisco State University was an incredible bargain. My father knew I might not have the same opportunities as he did with an Oxford education, but he also knew better than to slag on the fabled city. When my father took me to San Francisco to find housing that August, I insisted he pay for my best friend, Gari, to come with me, as support. I could count on Gari, the oldest of three and another transplant from Berkeley Heights, New Jersey to So Cal, to manage the details, even if she was only eighteen years old.