Blue Mercy: A Novel.

by Ross, Orna

  I'm not providing an address, Mercy, and I won't write again. There's no going back for us, I do know that. I just wanted you to know that I'm at last able to hope that it worked out for you and your husband and your little girl, who I suppose is not so little any more.

  Be happy.

  Zach

  Not so little any more, no. And not in need of help any more either, so please, just leave her alone.

  I remember the morning I told Dr Aintree that Star was cured. She and Ginnie, her schoolfriend who lived next door, were in the kitchen, making flapjacks for the school fair. They were on the rim of adolescence, sometimes high or low or beside themselves with feeling, but a lot of the time still childlike, cocooned in a thought-free moment they were in.

  I had come into the dining room in stockinged feet, looking for my shoes, and I stopped for the joy of listening, liking the camaraderie of their voices around the joint effort, the ten-minute fuss over measuring the oats, the homely clunk of the baking utensils. Ginnie was complaining about her mother and making Star laugh with stories about her absent-mindedness.

  Then Star spoke about me. "At least she leaves you alone. When my mom gets cold," she said, and I could hear the roll of her eyes, "she puts a sweater on me."

  I was so shocked I gasped.

  "Mom? Is that you?"

  "Hi girls," I called up a breezy voice that implied, I hope not too emphatically, that I had heard nothing, nothing at all. "Just getting my shoes. I'm heading out for a walk."

  In a way, it was nothing. Only the sound of separation, of a child stepping away from a parent. Nothing was more everyday.

  I took my shock up the hill, towards Turner's Point, the highest outcrop on the coast near us, two miles from our house. Some yards west of the public viewing point, I found a small pathway, concealed and overgrown. I took it and follow its winding way through grasses and dry spiky shrubs to a flat shelf of rock jutting out over the ocean, a natural viewing bench. The sky made a high domed ceiling of blue and, ninety feet below me, the swoosh of the waves closed over a small beach. Over. And over.

  I sat and cried my freshest outburst of tears. Each bout had its own root and rhythm and today, it was out-loud sobbing in the outdoors, not silent weeping into my pillow, or salt swallowed and gagged while turned in towards a supermarket shelf. These tears held pride in Star, self-pity for me, and relief and loneliness all erupting into each other.

  The detachment in Star's voice was exactly what Dr Aintree and I had been working for. What I hadn't expected was that hearing it would be hard. I was going to be all alone. Why, why, why had I let Zach go? What, what, what might have been?

  After a time, I left my rocky perch, promising myself I'd come back again, and often, and retraced my steps back along the little pathway. As I walked, I cultivated my regrets. I turned into a conveyance of thought, dead to the day around me, full of brooding thoughts of where I had gone wrong. Until I caught myself, stopped in the middle of the pathway, remonstrating with Zach in my head. Telling him what he should have done to rescue us from me. Arguing against the arguments I was putting in his mouth.

  Pathetic. A crazy old biddy talking to herself: that was what I'd become. That was what lay ahead. Star was going to outgrow me, which was as it should be. Which was a good thing. And Mr Broken-Hearted had already outgrown me.

  I can't, I can't, I can't live without you, he'd wailed, in the car, forehead grinding into his hands. Yet, here he was, not just living but thriving. He wasn't in floods of tears on a rock. He was happy. He had enough happy left over to be grateful.

  Grateful: God, I could hate him for that.

  You will agree that my passage through life thus far has been chequered: an absent mother, a menacing father, a feckless husband, a dearly departed lover, a troubled child. It's not self-pity, I hope, to say any one of these events could be considered unfortunate, but I've come to know that everybody suffers, that if I didn't have all that big stuff to worry about, I would have fretted more over the small.

  Zach's letter did me a favor, making me finally sign up for a B.A. course at UCSP, availing of a funding program especially designed for single mothers that gave me a fees waiver and a small stipend. I had been drawn in by the English and American Literature course but had begun a Women's Studies component that was turning out to be far more significant for me. My literature lectures reminded me too much of my old biology class, with our teacher swinging her finger around with an eye on top, having just dissected a rabbit. Cutting up stories and poems made me feel faint, like something was being violated.

  No, it was Women's Studies that was teaching me what I needed to know, awakening me to politics and economics as well as literature, bringing me to all of life and making sense of my own. For while my classmates, mostly - except for Marsha - fifteen years younger than me, enjoyed the camaraderie of UCSP's small campus, I had to juggle classes and assignments with work as Dining Manager at Honolulu.

  I'd overcome my scorn of managers now I was one myself and found that their life wasn't as easy as it looked when you were on the other side. And the increased wage, now called a salary and paid monthly instead of weekly, still wasn't enough to support me and Star. Without my scholarship, and the help of some friends, I couldn't have managed. When I read back my diaries of that time, I wonder how I did. I used to oscillate between gratitude and grief, knowing I was lucky to be able to do what I was doing, but forever running after myself in a perpetual time and money squeeze.

  I have a list in front of me that I drew up for my course, part of the personal development work that our Director of Studies deemed essential, the personal being political. I was to enumerate all the things I had in my life that I liked and made me proud. I started this exercise thinking it wasn't much to show for ten years in Santa Paola -- a modest three-bedroomed bungalow (two bath); a six-year-old car outside the door -- but instead of my usual standpoint of bemoaning what I didn't have, and trying to work out how I was going to get us what we needed, never mind what I would have wanted, my task was to stop and give myself credit for what I had achieved.

  So I listed them, all the things I was grateful for. The new Philips record player. My Remington typewriter. The rug on my easy chair in the hall, my favorite thing to wrap round me. The towers of books and records towers in rooms all over the house. My yard full of flowers. My vacations in Mexico, in a beachside hut lent by a friend. My friends. My daughter. It made me feel better. The people that most people took for granted -- father, mother, husband, love of my life -- might all have left me, but Star and I were doing okay.

  It was an important moment for me and it's an important memory. Golden. I look back on that short period in my life the way my father's generation used to look back on the years up to 1914. Suffused in sepia tones that shade out so much. Far from being a tranquil, rosy time, Edwardian Britain and Ireland boiled; the army mutinied; suffragettes starved and threw themselves under racehorses; labor unions learned the power of the strike and the House of Lords forced a constitutional crisis. You'd never know any of that to listen to the harker-backers.

  I refused to hark back. And I feared to look too far forward. Just the smallest while later, I would be remembering with wonder that me who sat so tentatively dispensing her pride upon the things she loved. She would seem so poignant, all unknowing of what lay just ahead, waiting in ambush.

  Star's Adolescence. Oh yes, capital A.

  It arrived sudden and complete, like a light switch turned off. One day, Star and I were on the same side, tackling her childhood problems together; the next, I was fumbling about, unable to help. Worse, I had somehow, suddenly, became the enemy.

  Photographs of Star as a young girl always show her with a golden tan, dressed in whites and blues and pinks but once we get to her teens, the photographs stopped. She forbade them. If allowed, they would have looked like pictures from the black-and-white days. She stopped growing at fourteen and, during that year, a tall, skinny, golden-fair child turned sho
rt, as her school-mates passed her out, and fat and dark. She dyed her hair the color of soot, and cut and gelled it so it stood up straight from the crown, except for bangs that were so low I wouldn't have been able to see her eyes, if it weren't for the kohl rim around them.

  She started wearing what was to effectively become her uniform: black lycra t-shirts with a wide elasticated belt pulled tight so her flesh bulged above and below, bulges that grew and shrank, multiplied and melted, depending on what stage she was on with her latest diet. A skirt not much wider than the belt. Chunky boots and pantyhose in -- what else? -- black. Clothes that simultaneously called for, and shunned, attention. A body that wanted to claim space and also to disappear.

  And beneath, a devouring drive that I called "It". She wanted to eat but she didn't want to eat but she wanted to eat but she didn't want to eat but she wanted to eat but she didn't want to eat but... The fatter she got, the more comfort she needed, and so the more she was driven to eat and the more she needed to stop herself. It would not give her rest, I felt, until she was entirely consumed.

  At first, I stifled my knowing. I told myself it was classic teenager stuff -- bad crowd, drinking, smoking, overeating -- and I was being the classic worry-mom. Hadn't I done all this myself in my own way, learned and grown from it? Wasn't this sort of self-fracturing essential for a child to crack open and mutate into a functioning adult? Hadn't we already come through tough stuff? If I stayed vigilant in the wings, doling her enough love and care and attention of the right kind, she'd be okay. Sooner or later, she'd be back in a shape that fitted.

  Underneath, I was frightened. Food, the staff of life, had become a dangerous substance for Star. To see her standing at the kitchen counter -- throwing down four or five slices of buttered bread while waiting for the toaster to pop -- was frightening. To find her picking something out of the trashcan that she had earlier tossed away in self-disgust was frightening. To see a suitcase crammed full of empty biscuit wrappers and potato-chip packets felt like finding an empty syringe.

  And when she was out with her friends, was there drugs too? Food was the home habit, but out of the house, she was vacuuming up great quantities of cigarettes and alcohol and, I suspected, speed or worse. In the sixties, drugs had been about exploring our psyches and our perceptions. For Star and her friends, it was the opposite: they just wanted to get "out of their minds".

  At night, I'd lie in bed and hear her stumble in, the unsteady fall of her feet so like her father's.

  By this time, she was only bringing one friend home: none of the others were willing to abide by my house rules of no drugs, no alcohol. Ginnie was clean (an alcoholic mother) and she and Star were linked by music, being two members of a four-girl band called Vixen. Ginnie's stage name was Venom and she wanted Star to take one too.

  "Something anarchic, something frenzied, girl, instead of that hippie-dippie handle."

  Star refused, saying two names were enough for anyone. Ginnie had also grown large in adolescence but she was softer than Star. Her approach to adults was to find a theme and keep up a running riff on it. With me, it was scoffing at my generation's music. Pleased to be communicating at any level with somebody who was important to Star, I held up my side.

  "You kids are still listening to our songs," I'd say. "Can't see that happening with any of your lot."

  "Wait and see, Mrs M. It's only the best from any era that lasts."

  "So who will that be, Ginnie?"

  "Venom."

  " The Cloquettes? I can't see it, somehow."

  "Yeah, I've heard that when you get to a certain age, you don't see too good."

  Star snorted.

  "All I'm hearing in your music, G... Venom, is the same note, over and over," I said. "Anger, anger, anger."

  "Anger is the energy, Mrs M. It's the only sound that makes the bastards sit up and listen."

  "Yeah, Mom." Star curled her blackened lip. "Don't talk about things you don't understand. Go listen to some" -- she looked at Ginnie and they simultaneously spat out their grossest insult -- "disco!"

  Then they collapsed into giggles at the line they'd obviously prepared to use against me. Not only was I held responsible for the musical and political shortcomings of my own generation, but also those that were following, crumbling our sixties' idealism into glitter-dust. Our generation had done its best to change the world -- a lot more than the Vixens seemed set to do -- but we hadn't understand what we were up against. We thought we were on an inexorable move forward, a rising graph that would one day deliver us all to the land of equality and freedom. Instead, we were discovering how action brings about the opposite reaction.

  Tit for tat, ebb and flow, lash and backlash...

  By that time, my mind was knotted with such thoughts. As I read and worked on my Women's Studies assignments, a fuzziness I had always carried about the workings of the world cleared for me. I saw how my experiences -- of sex, of work, of money -- had been determined by an invisible weave of beliefs. I saw how these beliefs had been as binding of me as any law of the land. I saw the potential for my own transformation if I could unpick them. I saw the potential for social transformation in understanding that what was true of me was true for many, if the many could be brought to its truth.

  But now here was my daughter and her friend -- two intelligent, educated and anti-establishment young women -- belittling all that, writing us out of the record already.

  "Do you honestly think they didn't listen to us in the sixties? We had far more political impact that you guys are having."

  "Political impact!" sneered Star. "Ugh! Pretensho!"

  This was their word to deflate anything that might be more serious than sex or drugs or rock 'n' roll.

  "At the beginning, maybe. But all that peace and love?" She stuck two fingers in her mouth and made a vomiting gesture.

  "Yeah, Mrs M. You can't win a fight against anyone, especially not the establishment, with peace and lurve."

  "Ah, girls," I said. "You can't win anything worth having without them."

  When Star and I were alone together, of course I tried to help her.

  "Darling, should you..."

  "I don't think you..."

  "Can't you..."

  "Why do you always..."

  I organized a nutritionist. A gym. A personal trainer. Each time she got slim, though never as slim as she was the time before. Then, after a while, she got fat again. Fatter than before, fatter than ever. Naturally, I turned to my Women's Studies course for answers.

  I read books that told me food was a language, and fat a metaphor, a message to be interpreted: the desire for protection, maybe. The desire to remain unseen, the desire to rebel against imprisoning social ideals.

  I read books that urged girls and women to stop dieting and instead seek to understand the patriarchal culture that wanted them thin.

  I read books that explained, graphically and eloquently, how the body has been used as a form of social control through the ages and how a mature economy can only achieve growth by making us feel abject, hungry and isolated from ourselves and each other. Making us hate ourselves from the inside out ensures we will overspend, over-consume and over-indulge...

  I came to hate how everything gets junked in America: the food processed and adulterated with sugar and fat; the clothes cheapened; the TV dumbed down; the sex commodified. So that no matter how much we're given, we never feel sated, we're always craving. I came to see how we're addicted to addiction.

  All of which drew Star's complete scorn if I ever tried to tease it out with her. "It's a candy bar, Mom, not the disintegration of society as we know it."

  I tried not to preach; tried to appreciate that it had taken me thirty-three years of living to be ready to hear this stuff but all the understanding I could muster didn't stop my eyeballs from wanting to roll whenever I saw her reach for another biscuit, didn't stop my foot from itching to kick the refrigerator closed when she opened it, didn't stop my hand from wanting to reach acr
oss the table and close itself across her insatiable mouth.

  "Whatever happened to 'mother knows best'?" I said one day to Marsha Blinche, a new friend and one of the most articulate women in my class.

  "Forget that. A mother's place is in the wrong."

  I laughed. "How many do you have?"

  "Three."

  "I couldn't do this twice."

  "Oh, you can set one against the other."

  We laughed together this time. Marsha was another single mom who had come into our course on the same program as me but her children -- Dan, Larry and Kirsty -- were all in their twenties, all grown up, so she now was on "me time". In truth, Marsha was one of those people who have time for everything, who manage to squeeze their days full but never seem hurried. She adopted all the younger women in our class, doling out care and attention and advice -- and delicious, home-made cakes. She proofread my dissertation before I submitted it and also the revised version that I turned into A Child Dancing before I put it forward for possible publication.

  "So well written," she told the others in the class, until I squirmed in my chair. I was embarrassed but it also warmed me, I admit it, to have this intelligent woman pressing my vanity buttons. I had never had a true friend before and had always put it down to not having enough time but here I was, busier than ever with work and writing and essays and a dissertation and the home front, still able to meet Marsha for coffee, or have her over for dinner.

  I wasn't somebody who blurted in the Californian way but nobody could be with Marsha even for the length of a cup of coffee without spilling a secret or two. So, somehow, a few months into that summer after we'd completed our papers and exams, I found myself one morning at her kitchen table hearing her story of having been raped by an uncle when she was seven and then -- astonished at the sound of my own voice coming in at my ears -- telling her some stuff about my father.