Frank leaped out of bed, intercepted him before he’d gotten halfway up the stairs. Stephen was surprised to see him.
“Oh,” he said. “How ya doin’, man?”
“What do you think I am, some kind of stupid schmuck? Some asshole?”
“Look, don’t get, like hostile, man. No hassle. It was just like your daughter said I should come back. No hassle.”
“Get out! Now! Or so help me I’ll beat the living crap out of you!”
“Hey, like I said, you don’t have to get hostile. I’m splitting.”
He did. Frank slammed and bolted the door behind him. Nancy’s light was out when he came back upstairs, her unhinged door resting against the hallway wall.
“Your friend had to leave!” he shouted into the darkness. “I hope you don’t mind!”
She didn’t answer.
We went to bed.
This was not the end of the incident, though. In the morning we discovered that our cat, Sake, had disappeared. She’d gone out the door that Nancy had left wide open for Stephen.
And because of this incident, Suzy and David saw how irresponsible her behavior was, how intolerably inconsiderate she was. They understood why Frank had been so upset. They were upset, too.
They cooled toward Nancy.
For instance, when we were having dinner that night—breakfast for Nancy—she told Suzy to get her a cola. She often ordered Suzy around. Ordinarily Suzy obeyed. Not this time.
“Get it yourself,” she snapped.
Nancy was so surprised she had no retort. She got it herself.
Suzy did more than stop waiting on Nancy. She stopped emulating her. She stopped wearing jeans to school, began to wear a dress with stockings and heels. She got her hair done.
“Going to somebody’s sweet sixteen party, Jappy?” Nancy sneered at her when Suzy came home from school one day. “Jappy” was something of a family insult, deriving from “Jewish American Princess.”
Suzy just walked away.
Nancy laughed, turned to David. “Doesn’t she look ridiculous?”
“I think she looks very nice,” David replied.
Undaunted, Nancy turned to me. “Why is she dressing like such a JAP?”
“She dresses the way she wants,” I said.
Nancy shook her head, went up to her room, and closed the door.
When Nancy invited Suzy to a concert later that week, Suzy said she was busy.
David, meanwhile, avoided Nancy. He stopped hanging around the house. He never brought friends over anymore. If they did drop by, he didn’t introduce them to Nancy.
After a couple of days, miraculously, Sake came home. The cat’s return didn’t alter the way Suzy and David now felt about Nancy. They loved her as a sister, but they didn’t look up to her anymore, didn’t respect her opinions, didn’t want to be like her. If anything, Nancy now pushed them in the opposite direction. They became more considerate, more responsible. They stopped smoking marijuana.
Frank and I were very proud of them.
Like her involvement with drugs, Nancy’s becoming a rock groupie was a natural outgrowth of her troubled life. She was into the anger, the rebelliousness, the oversimplified, hard-edged morality, the sound of the music. Always had been. The only boyfriend she’d ever had had been Jeff, the musician. Otherwise, at age seventeen, she had proven herself unwilling and unable to handle the complex demands of a mature relationship—the intimacy, the sharing, the caring, the love.
In Nancy’s mind the best thing in the world that could happen to her would be to meet and get involved with a guy in a famous band. Someone who was a big deal. By becoming his lady, she herself would then be a big deal. I suppose most teenage girls have this fantasy for a little while, just as most teenage boys probably have the fantasy of being that famous musician. Most boys and girls outgrow it.
Not Nancy. Music was everything to her. There was nothing else in her universe that mattered. All she wanted was to belong to the music. All she wanted was a musician.
And her friend Randi provided her with a means to make her dream come true.
There was a big rock concert in Philadelphia once every four or six weeks, usually on a Saturday night. I think Nancy and Randi went to about half a dozen of them over the course of that spring and summer. For Nancy, each was a major event.
She spent hours getting ready, trying on and discarding practically every garment in her closet. Her outfits began to get totally outrageous—she looked like she bought her clothes at the same place Rod Stewart did. She wore skin-tight orange spandex pants, black satin scarves or a purple kimono in place of a top, immense multicolored platform heels. She wore lots and lots of makeup and silver or black nail polish.
She’d check herself out in the mirror. When she was sure she looked just right, she’d lift up one leg and do this little dance maneuver of hers, a form of the twist that for her was almost like revving up her engine. Her eyes would light up. She’d cry out “All riiiight!” and then head off to the train station.
Somehow she and Randi got backstage.
There’d usually be a party going on backstage before the concert, then another afterward. Later on the party would continue at the band’s hotel suite. Randi and Nancy would go along, often by black limousine.
One time a limousine dropped Nancy off at our house the next morning while Frank and I were having breakfast. The kids were upstairs getting dressed. In she stumbled, exhausted, disheveled. Her outfit seemed particularly preposterous next to our bathrobes.
“Where were you all night?” Frank demanded, stirring his coffee.
“Tell him,” Nancy said to me, “that it’s my business.”
Then she stood over him, glaring until he threw down his napkin in disgust and left the room. As soon as he was gone her mood changed completely. She erupted in girlish delight.
“Guess who I met last night, Mom!”
“Who?”
“Guess!”
“I don’t know, Nancy.”
“Queen! Do you believe it? We went backstage and talked to ’em. Just, like, rapped about music. Do you believe it? Queen! And then there was like, there was like this all-night party!”
“That’s very nice, sweetheart,” I said halfheartedly. I had never heard of the group.
“Boy!” she cried. “Wait till I tell Suzy!” She kicked off her platform heels and ran upstairs to find her sister.
I stared at the misshapen shoes there on the kitchen floor and sighed. No, I’d never heard of the rock group. But I had heard of what reputedly went on at the sort of party Nancy said she’d just come from: drugs and sex in multiple variations. It was no secret.
Frank and I discussed Nancy’s newest social development at length. It seemed as if every week she got wilder, further and further from our control and our sense of right and wrong. Our morality meant zero to her. She would simply step over the line, draw a new one, and then step over that. We were also revolted. It was ugly and distasteful and we hated to see such a bright child throw her life away—trash it, really. But we were powerless to stop her. Nothing we could say or do would have any impact.
Actually, we were never really sure how much of the backstage scene Nancy was intimately involved in then. We still aren’t. She bragged about her sexual exploits to Suzy and Karen, providing them with all of the steamy details of her conquests. We never knew, however, how much of it was true.
She told Suzy, for instance, that her first band was Bad Company. The whole band. She ranked each member’s performance. She kept a Bad Company poster on the wall in her room to commemorate the occasion. It said, “Does your mother know you’ve been keeping Bad Company?”
Then there was Aerosmith. She told Karen that after she had taken on the whole group, two of the guys wanted to set her on fire and throw her out the hotel window. She was willing, she said. It sounded like a pretty great way to die, she said. Aerosmith chickened out, she said.
She told Karen and Suzy about her sexual invo
lvement with other bands—The Who, the Allman Brothers, J. Geils. How much of what she said went on actually did go on is a matter of conjecture.
Karen recently told me that she didn’t believe a lot of what Nancy was telling her at the time, and still doesn’t. She thinks Nancy was making it up to shock and impress her. Suzy says the same thing. I tend to agree. Obviously, as Nancy’s mother, it is preferable for me to have that point of view. I admit that. There’s no question in my mind that she’d have been involved in whatever drugs were going around. And I guess I think she was involved in some sex—she would, after all, try anything once—but not as much as she led Suzy and Karen to believe. Possibly she herself believed it.
The one firsthand indication I had that she was socializing with rock groups was when I came home from work one day to find two station wagons parked outside and an entire British band parked inside. There must have been seven or eight of them—all with long, stringy hair, bad teeth, sallow complexions, and high-heeled blue suede shoes. A couple of them were in the den drinking beer, eating last night’s leftovers, and watching television. A couple of them were frolicking in the swimming pool. I didn’t check to see if they had trunks on. I figured they didn’t take swimming trunks on tour with them. The rest of them were up in Nancy’s room with her, sprawled on the floor, smoking cigarettes and listening to her records, the stereo blaring. Suzy and David were in their rooms trying to do their homework, their doors closed.
“Hey, Mom,” yawned Nancy when I appeared in the doorway. “This is Pretty Things. They just rolled into town. Told ’em to look me up when they did. Guys, this is my mom.”
“Hello, Nancy’s mum,” they said almost in unison.
They left almost immediately. I told Nancy it was unfair to her brother and sister to have so many people over like that, to raise such a ruckus. She told me to “eat shit.”
What worried me most during this period was that Nancy would get pregnant, convince herself it was by some famous rock star, and then want to keep the baby. At one point she actually thought she was pregnant, though she refused to tell me by whom. She simply told me she hadn’t had her period in three months. I took her to my gynecologist. He gave her a lab test, which showed that she was not pregnant, but she refused to believe this. She insisted she was pregnant. To satisfy her, the doctor performed a D and C on Nancy at the hospital. The D and C also showed that she was not pregnant. Furthermore, the doctor advised me, Nancy’s uterus was so underdeveloped that if she ever did get pregnant, she would doubtless have a miscarriage in the second or third month. I never told her that, for fear of upsetting her.
Nancy would not accept the results of the D and C. Instead, she chose to believe she hadn’t had one at all, but rather an abortion. She mentioned her “abortion” several times over the remainder of her life.
We couldn’t live this way. We were desperately unhappy—stretched so taut we were ready to snap. We began to reach for crazy solutions, solutions that weren’t really there. One night in bed, Frank and I actually discussed changing all of the locks on the house after she went out one night. Our good sense got the best of us, though. We realized she’d simply break a ground-floor window to get back in. We also talked about renting her an apartment in Philadelphia. What was money if it meant we wouldn’t have to live with her anymore? But we decided that wouldn’t be a solution, either. She’d be too nearby, with ready access to us, to the kids, to the house.
But we couldn’t live this way.
We sent Suzy and David away to camp that summer. We felt they deserved the normal life Nancy’s presence in the house deprived them of. They were grateful to get away.
I got a promotion that summer to director of Mailgram sales for Western Union. I was delighted. It was nice to be considered good at something. It meant spending one, sometimes two nights a week at the headquarters in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, and doing some traveling as well. I didn’t mind. In fact, I liked it. It became for me what New York had been for Frank earlier in our marriage: an escape. Frustrated and unhappy at home, I was glad to get away and leave Frank in charge of Nancy. The irony of this role reversal was not lost on me.
As for Nancy, she had abandoned all notions of employment—unless it had something to do with music.
“I wanna do like sound mixing,” she said. “You know, studio stuff. Or maybe arranging gigs.”
“Have you tried looking for that kind of work?” I asked.
“There isn’t any here.” She shrugged. “There isn’t anything in this town. They don’t have any concerts even.”
“Where is it?”
“New York. London. L.A., but it’s really plastic in L.A.”
“How do you know it’s plastic? You’ve never been there.”
“Believe me. It’s plastic.”
As it happened, Frank needed some extra clerical help at his office that summer. We asked Nancy if she’d be interested.
“Would I, like, get paid?” she asked.
When Frank said yes, there would be money involved, she agreed to come to work for him. Transportation was no problem—she drove to and from work with Frank every day. The problem was getting her up in the morning at seven thirty. We bought her a clock with the loudest alarm in creation, but still she’d go right back to sleep. We had to keep rousing her, and she got nasty and abusive. It was not a pleasure to go through every morning.
Of course, there was also the communication problem between Nancy and Frank. She still would not engage in conversation with him. Their rides in the car were totally silent. At the office, however, she would willingly take orders from Frank and the other employees. But after a couple of months she flatly refused to get up in the morning, and quit.
With just the three of us around the house, her presence began to take its toll on our marriage again. Both Frank and I were upset about Nancy most of the time. In bed we were either tense about her being home—with company—or not being home. There was no time for gentleness. Romance seemed long ago and far away. Most of the time we existed in sadness.
It didn’t help that she was up to her old tricks of pitting us against each other.
One time she went through my purse in search of money (I never kept any in it for fear she’d take it to buy drugs with) and found a business letter I’d received from a male business acquaintance. As soon as Frank got home, she started in.
“Why don’t you tell him?” she sneered.
“Tell him what, Nancy?”
“That you have a letter in your purse. From a man. Why don’t you tell the asshole?”
Frank looked at me, concerned.
“Cut it out, Nancy,” I ordered. To Frank I explained, “It’s just a business letter. She’s just being impossible.”
But the seed of doubt was planted in his mind. After all, we had had our painful bout of infidelity years before—infidelity, I should point out, that none of the children knew anything about. By the time we got into bed that night, he was still stewing over it.
“You know,” he said seriously, “if you’re seeing someone again, Deb, well, I won’t get upset about it as long as you tell me the truth. I just want to be told the truth.”
“Frank, I did tell you the truth. I’m not seeing anyone. I wouldn’t see anyone. It was a business letter.”
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
I could see that he wanted to believe me, did believe me, but there was still the tiniest element of doubt. I got out of bed, went downstairs, brought up my purse, and gave him the letter to read. He did. Then he apologized and kissed me.
Nancy did this kind of thing constantly. She wanted to start trouble between us. She had it in for Frank. If he was away on a business trip and I was home with her, she’d keep hammering at me.
“What do you think he’s doing right now?”
“At this very moment?”
“At this very moment.”
“I’d say he’s probably sitting in the Portland airport, waiting for hi
s flight.”
“Do you really believe that’s what he’s doing? Don’t you know what he’s doing? He’s fucking some woman. He doesn’t love you. He told me. He never loved you. Why don’t you divorce him? Why don’t you dump the sonofabitch?”
We tried to ignore her attempts to drive a wedge between us. It was impossible. We grew farther apart.
The day Suzy and David were due back from summer camp, Frank and I sat Nancy down and made what I suppose you could call our last possible appeal. We told her she had not, thus far, been a very considerate sister to them; they deserved a peaceful night’s sleep free of nocturnal visitors to her room; they deserved a chance to discuss their schoolwork and activities at dinner without fear of their sister screaming and hurling dishes if someone looked at her “the wrong way”; they deserved a chance to be the people that they wanted to be, that we wanted them to be.
We had previously tried to appeal to Nancy on every conceivable level of decency and courtesy, to no avail. We appealed now for Suzy and David, hoping it would have some effect on her. It did. She went crazy.
“You don’t think I’m gonna take that kind of bullshit from you, do you? I’ll have you fucking killed. I have Mafia friends! Everybody I know is connected! I’ll have you fucking killed! Don’t think I won’t!”
She continued to scream death threats and obscenities at us for several minutes, then went upstairs and slammed her door.
When Suzy and David got home, she refused to come out and say hello to them. When I told her through the door that the four of us were about to go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner with my mother and that she was welcome to join us, she opened the door.
“Don’t expect the house to look the same when you get back!” she warned.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 25
