One winter evening about a month into her time with us we sat, Mommee and I, before the set in the downstairs library, watching an early movie. It was an old one called Devotion, with Paul Heinreid and Ida Lupino, about the Brontë family, and in it death was depicted as a sinister figure on horseback, wearing a dark, swirling cape. The caped rider came closer and closer to its victim on the misted moor until, at the end, it swept her up in the cape and vanished. I had seen it as a child and it had frightened me half to death, but I did not think Mommee would take in enough of it to alarm her, and indeed, she did not appear to, clapping her hands and crowing with laughter when the cape made its final, fatal swirl.
But an hour later Glynn came home from a swim meet in her long, black, red-lined cape, a pretty but troublesome fad that her crowd affected that year, with her wet hair streaming down her back, and burst into the library swirling her cape dramatically, and Mommee began to scream.
“Death! Death!” she shrilled, pointing at Glynn, and became so hysterical that I had to take her upstairs and give her a Xanax and brush her hair until she fell asleep. When I came back down Glynn was sitting at the kitchen table staring out at the dark winter woods, fiddling with a half a bagel. The cape lay across a chair.
“The caped crusader strikes again,” she said mildly, not moving her eyes from the darkness. But I saw that her fingernails were digging into the bagel, and I went over and dropped a kiss on top of her damp, chlorine-smelling head.
“Sorry, Tink,” I said, using her father’s old nickname for her. When she was a child she flitted about with such restless grace that he called her Tinkerbell, after the fairy in Peter Pan. She disliked it now, so we seldom used it, but I sometimes forgot.
“I never should have let her watch that thing. It was the cape; you know she isn’t afraid of you. She’ll have forgotten in the morning.”
“No, she won’t,” Glynn said matter-of-factly, and put the bagel down and went up to her room.
And Mommee hadn’t. Glynn put the cape away at the back of her closet, but often, after that, Mommee would look at her and begin to wail, “Death! Death!” Since she didn’t always do it, I concluded that the image simply flickered into her mind at random intervals when she saw Glynn, borne on God knows what faulty synapse. But Glynn thought she did it, sometimes, on purpose.
“She’ll look and look at me, and get that funny sort of sly look on her face, and then she’ll start yelling,” she said once, after a death-screaming spell. This time it was Pom who took his mother upstairs to calm her. When he came back down it was Glynn’s bedtime, too late for him to help her with her science project as he had promised. She was fourteen then, going on fifteen.
“That’s ridiculous,” Pom said sharply. “Mommee isn’t devious. She’s old and she has Alzheimer’s. We’ve explained that to you.”
Glynn said nothing, but went upstairs to her bedroom and closed the door.
“She may be right, you know,” I said, when the sporadic spells continued. “It does seem to happen most often when you’re home and we’re all together. Look at the payoff. Mommee gets you all to herself, or me, or both of us, and Glynn is left by herself feeling like a pariah, or worse. It isn’t her fault; she gave the cape to Jessica, even though she loved it, and I didn’t even suggest it. She did it on her own. But she’s the one who has to sit down here by herself while we hover over Mommee. Even if Mommee isn’t doing it deliberately, it must feel like punishment to Glynn. Between the clinic and Mommee and the howling about death, she hardly ever sees you anymore, and it was going so well.”
“I’ll talk to her,” he said, and perhaps he did. Glynn never spoke of it.
Ever since Glynn’s flirtation with anorexia, Pom had, at the therapist’s suggestion, been making a real effort to spend more time with her, and, after a year, Glynn was very gradually adding a layer of becoming flesh to her elegant, long bones, and regaining color on the cheekbones that were a medieval refinement of mine. But since Mommee’s arrival and the onset of the death business, she had begun to draw away from us again, and spent more and more time in her room with the door closed. Glynn did not act out or give us trouble overtly. She never had, from her serene babyhood on. She simply withdrew into silence. She began staying away from Mommee. The cape was, must have been, long forgotten, but her face had lodged in Mommee’s roiling mind as that of a death’s head, and thus it stayed.
When I got up the morning after Pom’s party it was later than usual, and Pom had long since gone to the clinic. A note beside the coffeemaker said, “BB Bwanas impressed with T&A but I’ve seen better right here. Be home early.” Mommee was still asleep, and the guest room where Cookie had slept was empty and tidy. Cookie’s note, taped to Mommee’s closed door, said, “I gave her a pill because she had a real fit last night when Glynn came in and it was 3 A.M. before I got her settled. She should sleep till midmorning.”
Glynn was home, then. I had not expected her to return from the house party at her friend Jessica’s family vacation home at Big Canoe until tomorrow afternoon, Sunday. I wondered if anything was wrong. I pushed open her closed door slightly and saw the slight mound of her sheeted body sleeping deeply in the gloom. “Morning, pretty,” I whispered. I closed her door and tiptoed into Mommee’s room and looked down at her. She, too, was sleeping soundly. Her breath came light and regularly from between slightly parted lips.
In the morning gloom she looked young and very pretty, almost like a child; she had lost weight since the onset of the illness and seemed actually to have shrunk in her bones. The diffused light gave her face a nacreous cast, like the inside of a wet seashell, and she slept with her fists curled under her chin, childlike. She wore a long white cotton nightgown with a ruffle around the neck. Cookie had brushed the thin gilt-white hair before she left, and it floated over her forehead like a newly shampooed toddler’s. Pity and affection squeezed my heart. This was not a Mommee anyone often saw, transmuted into the tenderly loved small girl she must have been long ago.
I brushed the hair off her forehead with one finger.
“You didn’t choose to be like this, did you? Sometimes we forget,” I whispered.
When I went back down the hall I heard the shower in Glynn’s bathroom running, and I went in and sat down on her bed.
“You’re home early,” I shouted into the bathroom.
“Be out in a minute,” she called back.
She came out wrapped in Pom’s huge, white terry robe, which she had appropriated. It hung down to her ankles and drooped over her slender hands. Her hair was wrapped in a white terry turban. Lord, but she was lovely; the oval face under the towel looked, scrubbed clean and almost translucent, like that of a very young novice in a fifteenth-century convent. Siena, I thought, or Assisi. I could almost see the delicately veined, pearly lids dropped over her eyes and the long fingers clasped in prayer. She had not yet acquired her light summer tan and looked, damp and shining with body lotion, like she had been carved out of alabaster. She had my height and coltish slenderness and tawny hair, though hers hung thick and smooth, and Pom’s blue eyes, mine and my father’s chiseled cheekbones and Mommee’s tender mouth. Her coloring, or lack of it, was entirely her own. Her paleness could be mistaken for plainness, until you looked at her features one by one. Then she was extraordinary. But she was without real impact yet; that, I thought, would come later, when everything had coalesced into maturity. I hoped that day was still a long way away.
“Hi. What’re you doing home early?” I said.
“Oh…nothing, really. We all left last night. It wasn’t just me.”
“Why, sweetie? What happened? Is something the matter?”
“I don’t guess so, really. It just seemed like a good thing to do. Mr. and Mrs. Constable sort of had a fight, and it upset Jess so much that we all decided to just come on back. Marcia took her to her house.”
Once, I knew, Jessica would have come home with Glynn for succor. Poor Jess. Poor Glynn.
“What was the
fight about? Feel like talking about it?” I said casually. More and more often these days she did not bring her problems and hurts to me, but took them to Jessica. I knew, from Laura’s childhood, and later Chip and Jeff’s, that this was a normal stage of growing up and away from us, but it still hurt. This child was so vulnerable, so without armor.…But Jessica was across the river in the arms of another friend, and my daughter had come home to a house empty except for an old woman who howled of death. And there had been more trouble from that quarter. Who did she have left to talk with but me? I hoped desperately that she still felt that she could.
“I don’t think so,” she said noncommittally, and then she whirled to face me. Her face was miserable.
“Mr. and Mrs. Constable are getting a divorce,” she said, her voice treble and childish. I had not heard that voice in a long time; it was the voice of small Glynn, when she was frightened and angry.
“Oh, sweetie. How do you know?”
“Because they had this awful yelling match last night, after dinner, when they thought we were all asleep. I think they were both drunk. They drank an awful lot of wine with dinner, and after. You couldn’t help but hear what they were saying, and it was just awful, just gross. Poor Jess finally ran out there screaming for them to stop, and then her mother cried and Jess cried and everybody else cried, too, and her father slammed out of the house and went down to the boathouse. Her mother took off after him. And Jess just got hysterical. So we left. We took her mother’s Blazer. He’s been going around with some woman at his office. I think Mrs. Constable just found out last night, and I know Jess did. I hated it, Mom!”
“Oh, love I’m so sorry,” I said, putting my arms around her and drawing her close. She lay slackly against me for a moment, and then stiffened and pulled away.
“And when I came in—” she said.
“I know. Mommee. Cookie left a note. What was it, the death thing again?”
“Yeah. Mom, sometimes I think…I just wish she wasn’t here! I wish Daddy was home more! What’s the matter with everybody?”
It was a wail of pain and impotence. I felt tears sting my eyes.
“I think you’re just running head-on into adulthood,” I said, wishing she was still within arm’s reach. I wanted, suddenly, to march into Mommee’s room and shake her and shout, “You leave my little girl alone! You’ve had your life! You stay out of hers!”
“You come on home and stay home,” I wanted to yell at Pom.
“Well, then, adulthood sucks and I don’t want anything to do with it,” she said, her voice wobbling on the edge of tears.
“I don’t blame you. It ain’t what it’s cracked up to be,” I said, trying to keep my voice light. “But I don’t think you’ve got a lot of choice in the matter. Don’t worry, baby. You don’t have to take on the whole world yet. That’s what we’re around for. By the time you do, you’ll be able to handle it. You’re a strong person and a very good and dear one. You’ll know the right thing to do and you’ll do it.”
“So are you, and so do you, but things aren’t all that red-hot good for you, are they?” she muttered, not looking at me. “I mean, you’ve still got Mommee on your neck. And Aunt Laura. And me and all my hang-ups, and you had the boys…I mean, what kind of life is it for you? It doesn’t look to me like being strong and good matters diddly-squat.”
“I have you, and that’s the shiningest thing in my life,” I said. “And I have your dad, and that’s the next shiningest. I have everything I want.” I hated it when the pain of the world bore in on my vulnerable child, though I knew very well that it must.
“Do you have Daddy, really? Do we really have him? Are you sure, do you promise? I know Jess thought she had her dad, too…”
So that was it. More than pain at her friend’s grief, more than the betraying craziness of her grandmother, she was feeling the cold wind of loss and emptiness herself, where none had ever existed before. Well, I knew about that, didn’t I? Thanks to Sweetie Cokesbury, I had felt, for a moment, the breath of that awful, empty wind.
I got up and went to her and put my arms around her.
“I’m sure of that. I promise that. Your daddy isn’t going to leave us, ever. Not of his own will. We’re at the very center of his heart, you and me. Don’t you ever doubt that.”
“Sometimes you can’t tell,” she whispered against my shoulder, but I could feel her body relax slightly. I could also feel her ribs, sharp and separate, even under the thick, swaddling terry cloth. I went very still, resisting the impulse to feel all over her body with my hands. It would, I knew, be a terrible violation.
“He won’t always have to work so hard,” I said. “Mommee won’t be with us much longer. She just can’t be. Things will get better. I’m heartbroken for Jess, but that’s not going to happen to your father and me.”
“I thought for a minute she was going to die,” Glynn whispered.
“Whatever happens, she won’t do that,” I said. “She’ll have you and all her other friends, and maybe what you heard wasn’t as bad as it sounded—”
“It was.”
I was silent. It probably had been. Then I said, “Tell you what. Since we’ve got a free Saturday, why don’t we go over to Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza and buy you a whole raft of new summer clothes and then treat ourselves to lunch somewhere fancy? Your choice. Spare no expense.”
After a moment she smiled reluctantly, and I felt a great stab of love at the way her face bloomed into life.
“Anywhere I want? The Brasserie? The Tavern?”
“You call it.”
“A black spandex miniskirt?”
“Oh, Lord, Glynn…we’ll see.”
“Yessss!” my daughter exulted and slapped me a high five, and disappeared into her walk-in closet, restored, for the moment, into childhood and safety.
“You know we have to talk about it. You know we do,” I said.
“I know,” Glynn said, staring into the banana split she’d ordered for dessert. She had managed the hamburger and some of the french fries, but I knew that the sweet mess pooling in the glass boat before her was making her physically sick.
“And you don’t have to eat that,” I said, smiling so that she would not catch the fear under my words. “I don’t insist that you eat stevedore’s meals. I just want you to eat something substantial consistently.”
“I know. I’m going to do better with it. I was going to start up at Big Canoe, and I did…I ate real well until we…you know, came home. After that I just couldn’t.”
“You know I’m not trying to bully you or spy on you, don’t you? I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “I wasn’t peeking at you. I saw you in the mirror beside the door when I was leaving, when you were trying on the bikini. It scared me. Glynn, if you could really once see yourself with other eyes and not the eyes of this illness—”
“I know it must be pretty gross. Everybody up at Big Canoe said I looked like a skeleton when I put on my bathing suit. I thought I looked great. I know it’s like last time, and I know I promised I’d tell you if it started again. But you all have been so upset about Mommee, and I thought I could handle it this time. And I was, except for last night—”
“When did it start, baby?” I said.
She looked around the leather banquette. In the dimness of the Tavern, the shopping bags holding her new clothes gleamed with gilt letters and logos like the plunder of an emir, and she looked, in their midst, like a young princess with her smooth hair and her loose, silky, new ivory tunic. But I knew that under the tunic her young bones thrust like spears. I had indeed seen her nearly naked in the betraying dressing-room mirror and lost my breath in terror. In the unforgiving, greenish fluorescent wash she looked worse than she ever had, literally starved. Somehow bruised, maimed. How could I not have seen?
“I’m not sure,” she said, pushing aside the melting dessert. “It hasn’t been all that long. I really haven’t lost all that much weight. I’ve been overdoing the swimming, maybe—”
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“Are you running again?”
During her first bout with anorexia she had run constantly, for miles along the river or on the track at school. Since it was winter then, she ran in sweatclothes, and we did not notice the increasing thinness. I did worry sometimes that she was overdoing it; she must have run five or six miles a day, and more on weekends. But Pom was pleased.
“She’s got a runner’s build, and it’s a good habit to get into,” he said. “She’ll be active all her life. I’m glad she’s not a couch potato. I can’t stand fat women.”
When the illness surfaced both her therapist and internist forbade the running and limited her to swimming, and she agreed. But I know that she missed it.
“Some,” she said, turning her head away. “A little, after swim practice. I know. I promised. I’ll stop that, too.”
I reached over and took both her hands and tugged them, and she looked back with tears standing in her eyes. They swam like liquid blue light in the gloom.
“You can’t stop by yourself, Glynn,” I said. “That’s what this is all about. You remember what Dr. Flint said, that anorexia is about control and the control gets to be such an obsession that it starts to control you? This is not a calamity; you remember Dr. Flint saying that it would probably crop up a few more times till you got a handle on it, and that the important thing was to catch it early. So I really do have to know how long it’s been going on. We can help you, but we have to know that.”
“Mama, not we, please! You, I’ll tell you, but please don’t let Daddy know yet—”
“Okay, all right,” I said. “Not yet. Tell me. I’m not going to fuss at you.”
“I guess maybe a year or so—”
“A year!”
Fault Lines Page 8
