My Dearest Friend

by Nancy Thayer

  By this time they had reached home and David was sitting silently, keeping the engine running, unsure whether Daphne would invite him in or ask him to leave so the two of them could carry on with their fight in privacy. He had been around them long enough by now to know that while usually Cynthia and Daphne were compatible, companionable, like the best of friends, there were times when Cynthia went berserk like this; he and Daphne had decided it had to be teenage hormones running amok and taking Cynthia with them. Daphne looked back at her daughter. She was still angry, so angry her head would start spinning around in circles any minute while bile exploded all over the car. This is what it’s like having a teenager around, friends told her, and we just have to put up with it, because our own parents went through the very same thing and let us live.

  “Come on in the house, Cynthia,” Daphne said. “David, why don’t I call you tomorrow? Thanks for coming, thanks for driving.”

  As they entered the house, Dickens came groveling and wagging up to meet them, drooling with joy to see them again. Fred Smith, their ancient stupid black male cat, was sitting in the corner of the living room, staring at the wall. He did not acknowledge their presence. Usually Cynthia bent to stroke and fondle Dickens, to smother him with baby talk, or at the least she would go over and stroke Fred Smith’s head and say, “Now, calm down, Fred, I’ll get you some Valium.” Usually after outings like this (which were getting fewer and fewer), when mother and daughter had been in a room with other people, they would collapse in chairs and gossip like friends, criticizing everything everyone wore, the way Mrs. Kasper’s teeth hung out—why didn’t she get braces!

  But tonight Cynthia went stiff-backed, without a word, up the stairs and into her bedroom.

  Daphne thought: I’m not sure I have the energy for this.

  But she went up the stairs and stood in her daughter’s doorway—Cynthia hadn’t shut her door; that was something.

  “Cyn,” she said, “Cyn, come on. Give me a break. I love you. I am so proud of you I could pop. I think you performed better than Tammy, and besides, you looked a million times more beautiful. You make her look like a lump.”

  Cynthia’s back was to Daphne; she was fussing with books and papers on her desk. Suddenly she turned to face Daphne, and her face was shining with tears.

  “Oh, you don’t have to say all those things. You don’t have to lie like that. I know what the truth is.”

  Daphne was dumbstruck. Her daughter was riven with misery, and where had it all come from? Why? What had she done?

  Was it only a year ago, two years ago, that Cynthia, at eleven and twelve, had rushed in the door after school to hug her and tell her every detail of her day? They used to sit together on the living-room sofa watching TV, and all at once Cynthia would cuddle up to her, giving her a rib-breaking hug. “My Moochie,” she would say. “My Coochie,” Daphne would answer, and they would go on that way, cuddling, Daphne stroking her daughter’s shining hair, the two of them saying infantile, nonsensical favorite phrases that they would never have spoken in front of others.

  “Cynthia,” Daphne said at last, going carefully. “You keep mentioning that you know the ‘truth.’ What is the ‘truth’? Would you please tell me?”

  Cynthia raised her head and looked at her mother, pride and anger and scorn radiating from her face. “The truth is,” she said, “that I’m not good enough for you. I’ll never be good enough for you. That’s why you don’t really love me.”

  “Cynthia,” Daphne said softly. “Honey. My Coochie. How can you say those things? You know I love you. You know I love you. Darling child. What’s wrong? Why are you so upset?”

  “You talked to Tammy before you talked to me, you told her she played beautifully before you said anything to me.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, I’m sorry I didn’t speak to you first. I’m sorry I told Tammy she played beautifully. If it’s any comfort, I did walk away from her, I walked around and past her, I practically walked over her.” She looked at Cynthia’s face to see if it had lightened any. It hadn’t. “Oh, honey, you’ve got to know how proud I am of you. I love you. I adore you. You are the light of my life. Don’t you know all that?”

  “No,” Cynthia said, and tears came flowing again. “I don’t know that. I know you used to love me. But now all you do is criticize me. And I can’t stand it! Don’t you think I know I’m not good enough for you, I’ll never be good enough, I’ll never be what you want me to be?”

  “Cynthia, what are you talking about? What do you mean? What do I want you to be?”

  Cynthia sprang up from the bed in one quick movement, all her layers of clothing frothing and flapping around her, as if she’d taken the bedsheets with her. She crossed the room to her desk to grab a handful of tissues. Her shoulders were shaking. “The best. That’s what you want me to be. The best. You’re always saying, ‘I want you to be the best you can be.’ Well, what if I can’t be the best? What if I’m not an A-plus person like you are, what if I’m just a B-minus person? Or even a C-minus person?”

  “Cynthia, Cynthia, calm down. What are you saying? I don’t grade people.” (That wasn’t true, and Cynthia knew it; they often compared and “graded” people.) “I certainly don’t grade you. Or if I do, I always give you an A-plus.”

  “No, you don’t! Or you shouldn’t! Because I’m not an A-plus. I don’t think I’m anything at all! Oh, Mommy, I know I can’t be a concert pianist. I’m not completely stupid. I have ears too. I hadn’t heard Tammy play before. She’s really good, she’s a trillion times better than me. No matter how hard I work, I’ll never be that good, and that’s the truth. And I can’t be a concert pianist, and I don’t think I’ll ever be anything! I thought maybe I could be a concert pianist, but now I know I can’t, and I don’t know what else to try to be.”

  “Well, that doesn’t matter!” Daphne exclaimed, relieved to have her child talking, sorrowed by her words. How had Cynthia come to be so hard on herself? “Oh, sweetie, that doesn’t matter. You can quit lessons if you want. I just wanted you to learn to play for pleasure. I never meant for you to be a concert pianist.”

  “No, but you want me to be something. Something special.”

  “No, no, no, I don’t care what you become. I think you already are something special.”

  “That’s not true! That’s not true, and you know it.” Cynthia was shouting now, crying again, and her nose was running and she was wringing one of her long cotton shirts in her hands. “How many times in my life have I heard about how different your life would have been if you had finished graduate school and gotten your doctorate and taught instead of marrying Dad? How many times have you said to me, ‘Cynthia, you’ve got to be something … Cynthia, you’re special, you’re the sort of person who could star in this world … Cynthia, I want to help you so you don’t end up like me’?”

  “Oh, honey,” Daphne began. For she had said all that, but she had meant it differently than Cynthia was taking it, she had meant it as praise, as help.

  “And I’m not even as smart as you were! I couldn’t even get into grad school! My science grades suck this term. My spelling is dragging down my English grades. And I can’t be a concert pianist. I can’t be anything!”

  “Cynthia, you’re thirteen years old,” Daphne said. “Give yourself time. No one expects you to be anything yet. And the time will come when you will find your special talent, your special quality. But I’ll love you no matter what—even if you become a … a gas-station attendant.” Desperate, Daphne flashed on an article she had read recently about unusual jobs. “Even if you become a worm farmer.”

  “A worm farmer?” Cynthia asked, her curiosity caught. So then it was all right. They were on the other side of the argument. Cynthia calmed down, Daphne soothed her, and they became friends again.

  But not constantly. After that night, which seemed to have been some kind of watershed in their lives, so that everything could be measured as “before” and “after,” Daphne knew that Cynthia h
ad moved beyond the bounds of her control. And what had happened was what always had to happen in life: Cynthia moved into the wider world where her mother could not arrange complete happiness. So of course she took her unhappinesses out on Daphne—whom else could she take them out on? Daphne watched as her child became more and more successful in her life: she was very popular, invited to all the right parties, she had several close girlfriends, and eventually a few handsome and awkwardly polite and endearing boyfriends. She was always lovely to look at, she was on the honor roll (but not high honors, because of her spelling). She was forever being asked to baby-sit, because children and parents alike adored her—and then, at fourteen, she started acting, in school productions and in the local theater productions, and it was obvious that so early in her life she had found her talent. To the outside world she looked like a golden girl, enviable, with everything, and she walked through that outside world radiating confidence. But when she was inside, in her own home, she was overcome with doubts and self-hatred and self-criticism, and because she was so young still, she couldn’t seem to understand how hard she was being on herself.

  Perhaps the problem had been that Cynthia had never had her father around to dote on her. Perhaps it had been a deep and tangled Freudian thing. Now Daphne shifted on her bed in her dim bedroom, where the sound of rain was lessening, coming in gentle patters as if little frogs were hopping against the house and windows. Cynthia had left in late June, as soon as school was out. Daphne still expected her to appear any moment, asking something like, “What’s that word that means it doesn’t last, passing away quickly, oh, you know. I need it for my homework.” “Transience?” Daphne would offer. “Oh, yeah, right,” Cynthia would respond, wandering back to her room.

  But Cynthia had no room in this house. Cynthia was in California with her father, and Daphne didn’t know when she would ever see her daughter again.

  Jack had had a rotten day. Hudson Jennings, the head of the English department, Jack’s former professor, now his boss, had dropped by Jack’s office to see how he was settling in.

  “What is that?” Hudson had said.

  Jack knew what Hudson was asking about—an almost life-size cardboard stand-up of Prince and his purple motorcycle. Jack had a friend who ran a record store and got stuff like this as publicity gimmicks; the friend knew how Jack felt about Prince and had given him the stand-up. It wasn’t obscene or even provocative (well, maybe provocative); Prince had all his clothes on for once, in fact he had on elaborate clothes, a purple satin suit, thigh-high black boots, an Edwardian white shirt, and white lace gloves. Very fine. He looked dangerous and ready to break all the rules, and his motorcycle was three times as big as he was, and that was the wonderful thing about Prince, who was, after all, a little man, even a tiny man. He swaggered and flaunted and wouldn’t let anything make him look small.

  “It’s a stand-up of Prince. The musician,” Jack said.

  “Oh, yes. I know who he is,” Hudson said. “But what is it doing in your office?”

  “My wife won’t let me keep it at home.” Jack caught his boss’s expression. “Just kidding.”

  “I must say it occurs to me to wonder whether the office of a professor of English literature is the place for it.”

  Jack swallowed. He couldn’t believe this. Was this Russia? “Well, I thought it might make me more … accessible to the students.”

  “I believe the point of college is to raise the students to our level, not to sink to theirs,” Hudson said.

  Jack looked at Hudson. Hudson looked levelly back at Jack. When Jack had been an undergraduate at Westhampton in the seventies, he had admired the hell out of Hudson. No, he had worshiped Hudson. He had wanted to be Hudson. One of the main reasons he had wanted to teach at Westhampton College was Hudson Jennings.

  “Would you like me to remove it?” Jack asked, letting his bafflement show on his face, trying to say in that way: I didn’t realize you’d gotten so inflexible.

  “I think so, yes,” Hudson said, smiling now. (Was he amused by Jack?) “By the way, I dropped by to tell you that we hope we’ll see you and your charming wife at the faculty picnic next Friday evening. At the faculty club. It will be a cookout unless it rains.”

  “Great!” Jack said. “We’ll be there. I know Carey Ann’s eager to meet some of the other wives.”

  Hudson went on down the hall then, and now here Jack was, driving home with Prince and his motorcycle jammed in the backseat of his car. He felt that Hudson had been uptight and dictatorial and that he himself had been a wimp. Prince wouldn’t have given in to Hudson so fast. But what could he have done? Jumped up and poured out his soul? “Well, you see, sir, I think this big stand-up of Prince that few other people have kind of helps out my image; it’s sort of like my mascot, especially now that I have to teach this neoclassic crap, which is so cut-and-dried. Jesus Christ, Alexander Pope! Prince has more poetry in his left sideburn than all of the neoclassicists put together. But you’ve hired me to teach the stuff, and I will, and I’ll do a good job of it. I’ll lie about it and pretend I like it, but God, at least let me let my students know that I’m not like that, that I’m modern, alive, I don’t like a cold, closed, rigid literature.”

  Well, of course he couldn’t have said all that. But perhaps he should have tried harder. Not given in so easily. Saying what? “If you’ll look closely, sir, you’ll see that Prince’s clothing is not unlike the clothing of the lords and bards of the neoclassic age. My instincts are that when my students see this cutout, they will subconsciously become more receptive to the work of the eighteenth century because it will be linked in their minds with this ‘poet’ of the twentieth century.” That would have been good, that sounded pretty reasonable, he should have tried that. After all, what if Hudson had only been testing him to see how much of a yes-man he was, or if he had the guts to stand up for what was right?

  He was getting paranoid. Hudson wasn’t doing that. Hudson hated that stand-up of Prince; it was as simple as that. Now Jack didn’t know where he’d put it. He wanted it somewhere visible to him daily, as an antidote to his life, which was so bound up by rules.

  Oh, God, how awful, to be thirty-one and already as stuck in life as if both feet were sunk in cement! He couldn’t change now, he couldn’t take risks now; he had a family to support. Although that was not fair, not fair to Carey Ann and Alexandra; he hadn’t been an adventurer before marriage; he’d never been an adventurer at all. He had always been so careful that, looking back, he saw that he had been just short of cowardly. It was his parents’ fault, probably (he loved both his parents and knew if he accused them of this, they’d agree): they had been happy, in a mundane way (although, a voice in the back of his mind argued, don’t you know enough by now to know that happiness is never mundane?). They were both college professors in Boston—his father taught English literature, his mother taught in the history department. They had married just out of college and had two children, a boy and a girl, and their lives had been neatly packaged and scheduled by the college’s calendar, and really it had been a very fine way to live. And so safe. The parents taught during the day and the children went to school (until they went off to prep school, which was also scheduled and safe). The parents read or worked on their courses in the evenings and the children did their homework. The entire family went together to the college’s celebrations of Christmas and graduation and then for two weeks in the summer to the same rented wooden seaside house on Cape Cod; oh, they had lived a repetitive life of harmony and balance and serenity—my God, Alexander Pope would have loved it. Jack had lived a neoclassic life!

  He hadn’t even fought very much with his sister. Diana was two years younger than he was and they had always been chums. Still were. He had always liked having Diana around with her stuffed animals and baby dolls and later with her nail polish and hair rollers, in the same way he had liked having Carey Ann around during the first year of their marriage: women seemed to be so much more optimistic about the
ir control over the world than men. They seemed always so certain that they could arrange things to their satisfaction. If nature—fate—gave them straight hair, they could make it curly. If nature gave them curly hair, they could make it straight. They could paint their fingernails or not, and have babies or not, they could go into a room and put the furniture where they liked it and then they’d call friends on the phone to tell them what they’d just done or were planning to do and the entire world settled down and fit its bulging boisterous bulk into the delineated limits the women painted with their polish and their plans. Men were supposed to go out and fight the world, explore it, poke at it, but women got to soothe and tame and restrain it, and then sit down and relax in it. There was no use talking about “women’s lib,” “men’s lib”; that’s the way it really was. When it came right down to it, the truth of the matter was that Carey Ann was not responsible for getting the money that paid for the food and the mortgage and the heat. Jack was. The truth of the matter was that Carey Ann didn’t have to arrange her home to please anyone else, but Jack had to arrange his office to suit his boss, and he had to do it in the right way, so that he wouldn’t anger the man who had the power eventually to give him tenure or not. He could not have said some brilliant rebellious obscenity and stalked, Prince-like, out of the office and onto his motorcycle and off into the sunset, because he was responsible for his family. Although this was the life that, after all, he had chosen. Not only chosen, it was the life he had craved all through his childhood. He couldn’t help it, he was by nature, if not by fantasy, a family man.