Meanwhile, I felt fragmented, emotionally drained. If Nancy blew up on a particular evening, I’d wonder if I’d somehow shortchanged her that day by reserving this little space for myself. Nancy never actually said or did a thing to indicate that she was aware of my absences. She wasn’t—she was in school or with Frank when I saw the man. Still, I felt tremendous guilt. I felt that I had no right to take something for myself when she needed me so much.
What I really wanted was Frank. What had been wrong between us when the affair started was still wrong. We were not communicating. We were not resolving our problems. By having a secret life, I was certainly not helping matters.
Finally, after about a year, I did end it. I ended it for two reasons. One was that he started getting emotionally involved. We were having dinner downtown one night when he suddenly took my hands in his and said, “We’ve been seeing each other for a long while now, and I want you to know something I’ve realized.”
I smiled. “What’s that?”
“I love you.”
I stopped smiling. I didn’t want him to love me, didn’t want our relationship to threaten my home life. This wasn’t part of our “deal.”
As I lay in bed with Frank that night, thinking seriously about ending it, Nancy called for me from the darkness. She was having one of her nightmares. I went to her, sat with her, calmed her.
“My friend Cheryl hates me, Mommy,” she said. “Cheryl told me she’s gonna kill me. She said she’s gonna stick rat poison in my lunch and …”
Nancy needed me—all of me. She was the other reason why I had to end the affair. She was so desperately unhappy. By fragmenting myself, by reserving a small emotional oasis for myself, I was denying her what I had promised her. I had promised her a hundred percent. I wasn’t being fair to her.
So I ended it. I was reluctant to give up my special little world, but I did. He called me about once a month for two more years. I liked hearing from him, liked knowing my escape valve was still there. But I never saw him again. I missed my little world, missed our evenings out—more than I missed him.
I didn’t reveal my affair to Frank, at least not until about a year after it had ended. One evening when we went to bed I found him lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. He’d been very quiet all evening, distant and morose. We were still not getting along very well.
“Are you feeling okay?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer me.
“Frank?”
“I don’t want to be married anymore,” he said quietly. “I want to leave.”
“Why?” I asked, stunned.
“I’m not worthy of you. I’m a bad father, a bad husband. I’m a failure at everything I put my hands on.”
“That’s not true!”
“I can’t believe this is it.”
“This is what?”
“My life. This. This home. This job. These kids—”
“And this wife?” I demanded.
“It’s not you. It’s me. I shouldn’t be married. I can’t handle all this responsibility. I should get out. Try something else. Somewhere else.”
I had trouble catching my breath. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. “Look, honey, I know it hasn’t been great. I know that. But tell me what I can do to make you happy. I’ll do anything.”
“It’s not you, Deb. It’s me. I just don’t know why I’m here. We got married too damned young. We were a couple of dumb kids. I’ve never lived by myself. I’ve never had a chance to have any fun.”
“You think I have?”
“I know you didn’t, either.”
I saw myself in a flash—a divorcée with three kids, one of them impossible to deal with. Who would want me? Nobody. I’d have to go home to Mommy. Or hide. I’d spend the rest of my life in front of a TV set watching soap operas and getting fat.
I looked down at my husband, sprawled across the bed, an arm across his eyes. I had but one choice, and I’m not ashamed to say what it was. I begged him to stay.
“You’re not just going to get up and walk out of here,” I said. “You can’t. You just can’t. What will I do? What will the kids do?”
He shrugged.
“Frank, this is your life. We made it together. If it’s not working, we have to make it work. You can’t just turn your back on it. You can’t turn your back on us.”
“You’d be better off with somebody else.”
“I don’t want somebody else.”
He said nothing.
“Do you?” I asked. “Is that what this whole thing is about? Is that why you want to leave? Is it another woman?”
“No. There’s nobody else. Not anymore.”
It took a second to sink in.
“Not anymore?”
“There … there was someone. A while ago. A year, two years. But there’s no one now.”
“So you were seeing other women. I knew it!”
“You never believed me when I said I wasn’t—and I wasn’t—so I figured if you were already convinced I was fooling around, I may as well just go ahead and do it. You kept bugging me about it.”
“You’re saying it’s my fault?”
“No, I’m just trying to tell you I shouldn’t be married. I’m a rotten husband. Let me go.”
“Well, if you’re a rotten husband then I’m a rotten wife,” I snapped angrily.
He sat up abruptly. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I was seeing someone, too.”
He just stared at me, in total shock. After a moment his lips formed the word who but no sound came out.
I told him. I told him why I started it, why I had continued it, why I had ended it. I told him everything. He told me everything. We talked all night, poured out all of the unhappiness and pain we’d bottled up for years. It was our come-clean session.
Frank was scheduled to go to New York the next morning. He asked me to come with him. Fortunately Mother was able to come stay with the children.
We drove to New York, talked about where we’d gone wrong. We’d been going through the same sort of life crisis at the same time, not realizing it. Both of us felt cheated by life. But we agreed that if life was going to be better, we would make it better together. Seeing someone else was no answer.
Not once did it occur to us that Nancy was at the core of our unhappiness. It would be many years before we would realize that.
We had a very romantic supper that evening in New York.
“Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to you,” Frank said. “Maybe I took you for granted.”
“Maybe you did.”
“Maybe you did.”
“I never will again. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
“Is it okay if I stay?”
“Only if you want to.”
“I want to.”
“Then it’s okay.”
We went back to the hotel and made love. He was my husband again. What he had done was forgotten. What I had done was forgotten. We were together.
When we got back to Philadelphia, I had the birthmark between my eyes removed.
Chapter 5
After Nancy gave David the shiner, Frank and I talked about taking her back to the guidance clinic. We chose not to. We decided to believe that her difficult behavior around the house was caused by her inability to make friends at school. We blamed this on the city school system and the types of kids that went there. She was too bright for them, we decided. That was the problem.
We decided to move to the suburbs. The schools there were geared to the bright kids instead of the average ones. The classes were smaller, the curriculum more progressive. The suburbs were the answer, we knew.
We soon found our dream house in a new suburban development in a community called Huntingdon Valley. It was a two-story, four-bedroom colonial on a wide, quiet, gently curving street called Red Barn Lane. It had a big backyard, big enough to maybe even put in a pool someday. A lot of couples our age with young children were
moving into the development.
This time Nancy looked forward to moving. She saw it as a fresh start; she promised me she would make new friends and be happy in Huntingdon Valley. We all believed she would, but that proved to be a fantasy. Even so, for the first few months this fantasy of ours was a reality. Nancy did do well in her new school. She did make new friends. She even found an interest of her own.
On one of the weekends that Frank went to New York for business, I went with him, and we saw the new hit musical Hair. We enjoyed the show very much—especially the music—and bought the cast album. We always collected the cast albums of Broadway shows we’d seen and enjoyed, like The Music Man and My Fair Lady.
When I put on Hair, something magical happened. Nancy sat right next to the phonograph, totally absorbed by it. A dreamy, happy look crossed her face. The record seemed to be saying something to her. When the side was finished, she turned it over and played the other side. When that was finished, she turned it over again and listened to the entire album a second time. Then a third. From that day on she played Hair at least six times a day, over and over again. She played it so often she wore it out and we had to buy another. When we got a cat, she insisted we name it Aquarius.
At first Frank and I wondered if it was okay for Nancy to listen to this rock musical, which seemed to advocate free love, drugs, and war protest. She was only nine years old. But we let her listen because she loved it. It kept her occupied and happy. She got hysterical if I asked her to turn it off when the phone rang or it was time to eat.
We owned a few other rock albums and Nancy was immediately addicted to those, too. We liked the Beatles very much. She quickly became a fanatic for them, particularly the White Album, which she had wanted for Hanukkah that year. Frank and I also liked some of the softer, more folk-oriented performers like Joan Baez. Nancy didn’t care for folk. She liked the harder, acid rock—the harder the better. On Saturdays I took her to the record store. Every cent of her allowance went into albums. She bought albums by The Doors, Cream, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin.
She sat on the floor right in front of the living room phonograph, legs crossed, when she listened to her rock albums, the volume cranked up to full blast. It seemed to hypnotize her, pull her inside the stereo system with the music. The rock musicians were coming from where she wanted to be. She began to wear her chestnut-brown hair long and flowing. It grew to her waist. She dressed in blue jeans and peasant blouses. She looked like a pint-size hippie.
We bought her a guitar when she asked us for one, but she stopped trying to learn it after a few weeks, frustrated that she wasn’t yet as skilled as her idols.
We thought it was nice that Nancy had found an interest in something. Though she listened to her rock albums awfully loud, we understood this to be a typical complaint of parents with teenagers. We were happy she was doing something typical, typical aside from the fact that she wasn’t nearly a teenager yet.
She started reading Rolling Stone because it dealt with rock music, and quickly jumped to popular counterculture books I didn’t think she could possibly understand, but did. At ten she was devoted to Sylvia Plath’s poetry and her memoir, The Bell Jar. She devoured Kurt Vonnegut, Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, J. D. Salinger. She read and reread several times Tennessee Williams’ play The Glass Menagerie. F. Scott Fitzgerald was another of Nancy’s favorites—not only his novels but the numerous biographies about the author’s troubled life and turbulent marriage to Zelda.
On Sundays she read The New York Times. She was mostly interested in the Vietnam War coverage, particularly the coverage of the antiwar movement. She identified with the war protesters. They were on her wavelength. Frank and I supported the Vietnam protest, but not actively. We came from the uninvolved generation.
One day I came home from the market with a box of Saran Wrap, and she got furious.
“Mommy, I want you to take that back,” she demanded.
“Why?” I asked, confused.
“It’s made by Dow Chemical. They’re involved in napalm manufacturing.”
“Nancy, I’m not taking it back.” I put the Saran Wrap in the cupboard.
“You have to take it back, or the war will continue.”
She waited for me to respond. I didn’t.
“Okay,” she shrugged. “You had your chance.”
She went to the cookie jar, picked it up, and went in the living room with it.
“Nancy, where are you going with the cookie jar?” I asked, following her.
She rounded up Suzy and David, who were watching TV. “You,” she said to Suzy, all business. “I want you to get crayons and marking pens. Meet me out front.”
Suzy went off obediently on her mission.
“David, find some shirt cardboards,” Nancy ordered.
David nodded. “Mommy,” he said, “where are the shirt cardboards?”
“Under the sink in the basement, in a big bag,” I informed him. Off he went.
“Nancy, what’s going on?” I asked.
“We’re protesting you,” she replied. She patted the cookie jar.
“We’ll live on these for as long as we have to. For the duration, if necessary. We’re not coming back in this house until you take back that Saran Wrap. Are you taking it back?”
“No, I’m not.”
She went out the front door. Suzy and David met her out front a minute later with crayons and shirt cardboards. They wrote WE PROTEST MOMMY and DOWN WITH DEB on the cardboards and began to picket the house. I watched through a window. Sometimes they chanted “Down with Dow.” Our neighbors drove by occasionally and looked at them curiously. In response, Nancy gave them the peace sign.
After about an hour of this Suzy and David got tired and wanted to come back inside. Nancy wouldn’t let them. Instead, the three of them got in my car and ate the cookies.
At suppertime I ordered Suzy and David inside and they came in obediently. Nancy got very angry at them, branded them “Establishment pigs” and “sellouts,” but finally came in herself a little later.
Every week she had a new cause—whatever she read about in the newspaper. After one of her cousins drew a poor number in the draft lottery, she became insistent that we sneak him into Canada at once. There was something precocious about ten-year-old Nancy’s political activism, though she was so serious about it. Frank and I were concerned that she was getting too involved. But we felt that her heart was in the right place.
We just wished she could hold on to her friends. The Huntingdon Valley girls quickly turned on Nancy, just like the girls everywhere else we’d lived. One day I found a note stuck in the front door from her friend Helene: “Stay away from me, you witch.” Later that afternoon I saw Helene and two other girls staring at Nancy through our living room window while Nancy read on the sofa, oblivious. I chased them away.
Her relationship with Suzy also continued to be poor. We wanted Nancy and Suzy to be sisters, not enemies. In the hope of bringing them closer together, we suggested to them that they share one of the big bedrooms in the new house. When I was a girl I’d often wished I had a sister to tell secrets to and giggle with when the lights were out. The girls agreed. They picked out matching bedspreads, headboards, and jewelry boxes. They had fun fixing the room up. But they still didn’t get along well.
Then, a few months after we’d moved in, the roommate setup backfired. It was on a day that Nancy came home from school in tears. She refused to tell me why, just went up to the girls’ room and began to do her homework. Suzy was outside playing. She came inside for dinner, went upstairs, and came back down a minute later, sobbing.
“Look what she did!” Suzy wailed.
“Suzy, what happened?” I asked.
“Just look what she did!” Suzy cried. “Look what Nancy did!”
I went upstairs to the girls’ room. Nancy sat on her bed, arms and legs crossed. She stared straight ahead, a sullen pout on her face. He
r math book was on the floor next to her bed, the pages twisted and ripped out of frustration.
Suzy’s half of the bedroom was totally destroyed.
Nancy had pulled off Suzy’s bedspread and ripped it to shreds. Suzy’s clothes had been pulled out of Suzy’s side of the closet and strewn across Suzy’s side of the room, along with the contents of Suzy’s half of the dresser drawers. Suzy’s jewelry box was broken, the jewelry scattered among the ruined clothes, along with her box of hair rollers, her school supplies, her books.
The sheer precision of Nancy’s rampage was frightening.
“Nancy!” I cried.
She just sat there. She didn’t seem to hear me or see me.
I repeated her name several times but got no response. So I shook her by the shoulders. Finally I penetrated that vacant glaze.
“Why did you mess up Suzy’s things?” I demanded.
“Because,” she replied.
“I want you to put it back together right now. I’m very upset with you.”
“No!” she replied, suddenly petulant.
“Yes!” I declared.
“No!” she repeated.
I left the room, furious. There was no reasoning with her when she was like this. I went downstairs to calm Suzy. When I went back upstairs, Nancy hadn’t budged. She still sat on her bed, arms and legs crossed, that petulant pout on her face—a look we began to see often and quickly dubbed “That Look.”
I cleaned up the room.
Frank and I discussed the situation when he got home. We decided it was unfair to Suzy to ask her to share a bedroom with Nancy any longer. At dinner we announced that we were going to move Nancy into the fourth upstairs bedroom, which had been used as a den. Nancy promptly refused to make the move—unless we also agreed to give her her own choice of new wallpaper, her own double bed, and her own Princess phone for the calls that never came from the friends who didn’t exist. We agreed.
Again, we thought she was disturbed and should be getting some kind of treatment. Again, we wavered.
Until later that week, when I found Nancy standing at the top of the stairs, holding a brown paper bag over the bannister. She was about to drop it to the floor of the entry hall. Her eyes were glazed. She had That Look on her face.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 9
