And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434)

by Spungen, Deborah

  The phenobarbital seemed to have no effect on her activity level, which was increasingly high. Technically, Nancy didn’t fall under the category of a hyperactive child. She had no learning disabilities. Far from it—she was tremendously bright and verbal at a very early age. She had a twelve-word vocabulary before her first birthday, including please, thank you, and airplane. Complete seven- and eight-word sentences quickly followed. Her first was “Fee-Fie-Foe-Fum, I smell the blood of an English muffin.” But she was restless. There was discomfort inside her. She was never content, never relaxed. She had an unbelievable amount of energy, most of which she consumed by crawling.

  Once she began to crawl, at six months, she crawled every waking moment. She hated confinement and refused to stay in her crib or playpen. She wanted to crawl. She crawled in and out of rooms. She crawled up onto furniture and down off it. Nothing stopped her, not even the heavy metal Dennis-Brown splint she had to start wearing to correct the angle of her legs, which were growing out abnormally. She just dragged the splint around behind her.

  When the weather became nice, I took Nancy to the playground across the street in her carriage. Five or six other mothers took their babies there regularly. They sat in a row on the park bench and talked about shades of lipstick, styles of clothing, and hair while their babies dozed contentedly in their carriages or played with little toys. I read a book while Nancy crawled furiously across the playground in her overalls, exploring, getting covered with wood chips.

  One time my friend Janet brought her new baby along and we went to the park together. Like the other babies there, Janet’s gurgled peacefully while Nancy crawled around like a demon.

  I went over to Nancy and picked her up. “Don’t you want to sit nice like the other boys and girls, Nancy?” I murmured in her ear.

  I began to carry her to her stroller. In response she screamed at me angrily, her face turning bright red. I cuddled her. She reacted by suddenly stiffening her body like a board, arms and legs thrust out straight, head thrown back. She screamed even louder. I tried to relax her limbs but she fought me.

  “Is something wrong with her?” gasped Janet.

  “I … I don’t know,” I replied, frightened.

  I tried to get her into her stroller—bend her in, really. She continued to fight me. I finally got her in, so stiff she was almost standing. The other mothers were looking at us now. Again I tried to cuddle her. Again she wouldn’t let me.

  “What should I do?” I asked Janet.

  She said she had no idea.

  I pulled Nancy out of the stroller and put her back down. She sped away instantly, blazing a path across the park. I watched her. So did the other mothers, clearly wondering what was wrong with her.

  This was my first awareness that possibly Nancy was different from other babies. I was concerned and bewildered. Her pediatrician, however, was not.

  “She is a very curious little girl, I’ll grant you that,” he admitted as he watched her crawl around on the floor of his examining room. “Very active. But not abnormally so.”

  “What about the way she stiffened up?” I asked. “She keeps doing it. She won’t let me hug her anymore. At all.”

  He shrugged. “That’s just her way. She’s not affectionate. Don’t take it personally.”

  Nor was he concerned about two physical symptoms from birth that were becoming more and more pronounced. One of her eyes was beginning to cross, and she seemed unable to keep her tongue in her mouth. He said that, taken together, they could suggest neurological impairment. But he said she was much too bright for us to worry about that. He said she would outgrow both, no problem.

  “How’s her sleeping?” he asked me. “Is she still having trouble? Screaming?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s increase her dosage then.”

  He gave me the instructions for how much phenobarbital to give her, and I left his office with the distinct impression that he thought I was exaggerating Nancy’s problems. I wondered if he was right. I certainly was the only one who was worried. Frank wasn’t. But Frank wasn’t with her all day like I was. He left her in the morning and didn’t come back until evening. She was always on her best behavior then, waiting anxiously for him on a chair by the window, watching the street. Whenever a bus stopped, she clapped her hands and looked for Frank. When he got off the bus, she crawled excitedly to the front door to wait for him. She sat like a little angel on his lap while he ate dinner. Afterward he played her folk songs on his guitar. She seemed to love music.

  No, Frank wasn’t worried about her.

  I decided that the problem was with me. I was fretting unnecessarily because I was bored. I had no activities except for cooking and cleaning and following Nancy around. Everything I did was in response to what she wanted. I needed intellectual stimulation. The only adults I saw all day were those mothers at the park. Suddenly I desperately wanted to get out of the house. I was cut out to do more than this. I decided I would go back to school and get my master’s degree. That was the answer.

  The trouble was that we couldn’t afford a baby sitter. My mother was only working part-time then and still lived near Penn, so I asked her if she’d mind taking care of Nancy if I went back to school. I could drop her off on my way to class. She said she wouldn’t mind at all—she was anxious for me to resume my career plans.

  Since I had never left Nancy with anyone, I thought a test visit was in order. So I dropped Nancy off at Mother’s apartment one afternoon while I picked up some catalogs and applications on campus. I left her there for an hour. Returning, I was still half a block away from the house when I heard her hysterical screaming.

  Nancy was squirming in my mother’s arms, yelling like I’d never heard her before; there was an animal-like intensity to it. Her body shook. To this day I’ve never seen another baby cry with such ferocity.

  “When did this start?” I gasped at Mother.

  “As soon as you left,” she replied, shaken.

  I took Nancy in my arms and tried to comfort her, but it was no use—she didn’t seem to recognize me.

  “Mommy’s here, Nancy!” I cried. “It’s Mommy!”

  But she didn’t stop.

  I held her close to my face. “It’s Mommy, Nancy!” Still she didn’t stop. In desperation I took her to the hallway mirror and pressed her face to mine, in the mirror right before us.

  “It’s Mommy, Nancy! Mommy’s here! Mommy’s holding you!” I repeated the sentence over and over again. After five minutes she finally seemed to realize I was there. She started to calm down, but wouldn’t let me put her down.

  I took her straight home, holding her in my lap as I drove. After a few blocks she began to doze. When I got her home, she immediately began to crawl around on the living room floor, the incident forgotten.

  I stood there watching her, realizing with a sense of sinking despair that I was not, in the near future, going to be able to leave her alone, to go back to school, to achieve my career goals. All of that was going to have to wait. Nancy was my priority now. My life was built around her. Not that I didn’t want this to be the case—I loved her. But it struck me at this moment that if I wanted my career it was going to be much, much harder than I’d imagined—that it was going to be in spite of her.

  Or maybe it was simply never going to happen.

  I began to watch soap operas on television during the day. I began to feel trapped, a prisoner. Something had to change.

  It did.

  I got pregnant again.

  Chapter 3

  I was an only child. Frank had one sister, but she was six years older than he was. We both wanted a lot of kids, and we wanted them to be close together in age so all of us could enjoy the kind of family life Frank and I felt we’d missed out on.

  I had so terribly wanted a brother or sister when I was growing up. It seemed as if I was always with adults. I felt very alone. My friends had large families. When I went to their houses, the rooms spilled over with kids and
noise and activity, sharing and loving. They seemed so happy and alive. My house seemed so quiet.

  Having a brother or sister meant companionship. It also meant a distribution of the burden. Since I was the only child, I was expected to do it all—be smart and pretty and popular and good. If you had brothers and sisters, I thought, you didn’t have to accomplish it all. You needn’t be perfect.

  Frank, meanwhile, loved kids. When we had first started dating, he mentioned several times how much he wanted to have a big family someday. He loved being an uncle to his older sister’s toddlers, Dean and Ellen. In fact, the first time Frank brought me home to meet his parents, he made sure Dean and Ellen were there, too. He even taught them a poem to recite for me and hovered proudly over them while they performed.

  We both thought Dean and Ellen were adorable and agreed that someday we would like to have two or four of our own just like them. Never three or five. You weren’t supposed to have an odd number, everyone advised in those days. One of them would feel left out or ganged-up on.

  During our courtship we often took long walks and talked about what we wanted out of life. Each of us wanted a career. It was important to me to accomplish something on my own. Frank was all for it. We wanted to move to New York and be successes. We wanted not so much to accumulate things as to do things. We wanted to find cozy French restaurants nobody else knew about. We wanted to read the newest books, see the most talked about plays, find the truest, smokiest jazz clubs. We wanted to go to Europe.

  We wavered about when to have kids, since we did want them and they did tie you down. At first we talked about having them right away. Then, one evening while we were engaged, we were invited to a dinner at a professor’s house. He and his wife had just had a baby. She was cute as a button but she cried during dinner. Frank kept making funny faces and noises to cheer her up, but to no avail. He asked the professor’s wife if he could pick the baby up. She said yes. He hoisted the tot out of her high chair, bounced her on his knee, and she spit up all over his good tie.

  “Let’s wait five years,” he said to me on the way home.

  I agreed.

  Then Nancy came along, and the life we wanted had to be put on the back burner. So it made perfect sense to have another child right away. I already had to be at home with Nancy. Why not be home with Nancy and her little brother or sister, too?

  Her little sister, it turned out. Susan was born September 21, 1959, when Nancy was a week short of nineteen months old. Susan was a beautiful, pink, eight-pound baby. Mrs. Taylor came and stayed with Nancy while I was in the hospital. She reported that Nancy was difficult.

  Frank carried Susan into the house. I came in separately from the new baby so as not to confuse or threaten Nancy. The baby books all said to do that.

  Nancy began screaming the second she saw me. I almost cried at that moment. Seeing and hearing her reminded me of how much time and energy she demanded. I honestly wasn’t sure I’d have enough strength and love for another child.

  On the first day Nancy totally ignored her baby sister until it was time for me to feed Susan. Nancy was walking now. She came over to stand right next to me, watching intently. Suzy’s little fist was curled around my finger. Nancy calmly reached over, uncurled the fingers, and removed them. Then she walked away. I gazed after her, chilled inwardly. Nancy’s action didn’t seem, well, right. It gave me the creeps.

  Susan was so different from her older sister. She liked to be held and she cuddled into me instead of squirming and protesting. She was calm. She didn’t wake with a start if you dropped something or turned off a light. But she didn’t seem as bright as Nancy had been during her first few months. She wasn’t as responsive to her environment.

  Whereas Susan seemed to occupy a middle ground, Nancy was all extremes. We began to think of her as the little girl in the nursery rhyme:

  There was a little girl who had a little curl

  Right in the middle of her forehead,

  And when she was good she was very, very good,

  But when she was bad she was horrid.

  Nancy was two when we decided to move to a bigger place. We bought this time—a semi-detached house with four small bedrooms and a finished basement that would be a nice playroom. It was on Welsh Road in greater northeast Philadelphia, a newer neighborhood with a school nearby and lots of kids on the block. My mother loaned us the money for the down payment.

  She also had to help us make our mortgage payments for a few months because right after we got our loan, Frank’s accounting firm decided to close its Philadelphia office. He was offered a job in the New York office, but that was out of the question now. He quickly got another accounting job in Philadelphia, but that firm went bankrupt and we were soon on unemployment.

  Frank wasn’t happy in accounting, never had been. He liked people, not paperwork. He wanted to get out from behind a desk, get out on his own two feet and prove what he could do. So rather than take another unfulfilling job, he decided to make a change. He took a sales position with a paper distributor. The pay was a bit lower than he’d been getting in accounting, but he felt it was something he could really dig his teeth into and someday be a success at. Finding something challenging was very important to Frank. So was working toward being financially secure enough so we would never have to borrow money from my mother again.

  Now that Frank’s employment situation was settled, we faced another obstacle: Nancy decided she didn’t want to move. I couldn’t figure out why, but she was very determined about staying. I would pack a carton, she would unpack it. At first I thought she was playing, but she wasn’t. I found out how serious she was when the telephone man came to disconnect our phones.

  I was in the kitchen, packing, while he worked on the bedroom phone. Suddenly I heard him yell, “Lady, get her the hell off me!”

  I dashed to the bedroom. Nancy was attached to one of the man’s legs and was pounding at him with both fists, enraged.

  “P-p-put my ph-phone back!” she screamed—she was starting to stutter now. “Put it b-b-back!”

  “Nancy!” I cried. “We’ll get another phone!”

  She didn’t hear me. She continued to attack his leg, frenzied. He tried to shake her off but she absolutely would not let go.

  “I’ll get her off,” I assured him.

  “Thanks,” he said, eyes wide with fear. Clearly, he had never been attacked by a ferocious two-year-old or met any human being who cared so much about her telephone.

  I had to pry her off his leg, first one hand, then the other, then her legs, which continued to kick wildly in midair when I pulled her away. And she continued to scream, “P-p-ut it b-b-back!”

  He hurriedly finished his job and left. But it was at least an hour before Nancy calmed down. I had never seen such intense anger in her before. In anyone. It frightened me. I told Frank about it as soon as he got home, but it didn’t make much of an impression on him. He hadn’t seen the incident, couldn’t fathom Nancy’s ferocity, couldn’t believe it. Besides, Frank reasoned, her reaction—however severe—was doubtless a product of her being upset about moving. All kids, he said, have trouble adjusting to it. He felt certain she’d calm down once we were settled. Frank’s view made sense to me. I agreed with him.

  Nancy had simply overreacted a bit.

  Right from the start she didn’t get along with the other kids in our new neighborhood. She fought with them. She’d go outside to play in our joint backyards and within ten minutes would be back, sobbing and stammering that one of the children had hit her or taken one of her toys. There was definitely something about Nancy that alienated them. Most of them were two years older than she was. While she was on a par with them verbally and intellectually, none of them were still in diapers. At first I thought perhaps they were taunting her about that. She did, too. Previously she had resisted all of my efforts to toilet train her. But on one of those days that she came running in, crying, she ripped off her diapers, threw them in the trash can, and claimed, “
I w-w-want big girl p-pants now.”

  She was completely toilet trained from that day on.

  But that wasn’t why she didn’t get along. She continued to get into fights. Unable to deal with the frustration outside, she started to spend more and more time inside. But there was frustration inside, too, and Nancy simply could not handle it.

  I found this out one afternoon when I was making dinner. Nancy was sitting at the kitchen table eating a banana. It broke.

  “F-f-fix it, Mommy!” she demanded.

  “Nancy, you can’t put a banana back together.”

  “F-fix it!” she repeated.

  “Look at it this way—now you have two bananas.”

  “Fix it!”

  “I can’t!”

  She began to cry and pound the table with her fists.

  “Now, Nancy,” I explained, calmly as possible, “there’s no point in getting upset about this.”

  “B-but it isn’t fair!”

  “What isn’t fair, sweetheart?”

  “It isn’t fair!”

  And with that she threw herself to the floor and began to scream, “It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair!” over and over again, legs and arms pounding the floor with tremendous force. Soon she was just screaming—no words—and her face was scarlet.

  “Nancy!” I cried, horrified.

  No response from her. She didn’t see me. She rolled over onto her back and began to beat herself repeatedly in the face.

  I tried to pick her up. I couldn’t get hold of her; she kept whipping around on the floor so violently that a chair fell over. I tried again. She fought me, screaming and sobbing. Finally I managed to gather all of her limbs in my arms and picked her up.

  I carried my wild, thrashing two-year-old up the stairs to her room and put her on the bed. She immediately hurled herself off the bed onto the floor and began flopping around like a fish, screaming and sobbing, eyes ablaze.

  I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to call the doctor but I was afraid to leave her. So I just stood there, feeling totally helpless, trying futilely to calm her. After about twenty minutes she started to hyperventilate, then stopped. She passed out.