by John Brooks
Casey seemed to have anticipated a conversation over her grades and the letters from Redwood when Erika and I sat with her in a moment of calm in the kitchen one day after school.
“I know what you guys are going to say.” She covered her head with her hands in a gesture that could have been rehearsed. “I suck. I’m an idiot. You don’t have to remind me.”
I bit my lip. “Casey, honey, you know you’re none of those things. We just want to know if you need help.”
She rolled her eyes. “No, Dad. I can handle it!”
“We can get you a tutor,” Erika offered.
“Mo-om, I don’t need a tutor. I just have to hand in a paper for English and that’ll raise my grade from a D-plus to a B.”
Erika persisted. “Casey, we just want you to know that we can get you help if you want it.”
She hopped up from her stool, spun around, and shot off to her room, her arm outstretched and palm turned up to signal STOP as she mouthed, Thank you! Our attempt at a family meeting lasted all of three minutes.
But true to her word, Casey completed her paper and raised her English grade to a B. Still, she was perfectly capable of A-level work, and knowing how high she’d set her sights for college, she’d need to buckle down and get the work done for a chance at a top-notch school—if indeed that was what she wanted.
She complained about being bored at Redwood. The courses weren’t sufficiently challenging. She shunned extracurricular activities, griped that Redwood kids were too materialistic, shallow, and phony, and lamented that she had no friends there anymore. She pestered us constantly.
“I hate Redwood. Why can’t you send me to a private school?”
“Because we moved to Marin for its excellent school system, and if we send you to a private school we’ll have no money to send you to college.”
“I’ll pay my own way to college!”
Yeah, like you promised to walk Igor and pick up after him. As if.
She found a boarding school online in Massachusetts that had a unique hybrid curriculum of high school and college. Ever the shrewd negotiator, she tried to convince us of its practicality.
“Dad, if you send me to this school I can get my college degree in, like, three years and you’ll save money!”
“Casey, you’re fifteen. We’re not sending you across the country to a boarding school.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re too young and the schools here are perfectly good.”
“Da-ad. Puh-leze?”
In another attempt at compromise, Erika and I agreed to let her apply to Tamiscal—where a number of her friends were—even though we feared that its independent-study program would be a disaster, considering that she couldn’t seem to manage her time at Redwood. Besides, Tamiscal had a reputation, whether or not deserved, as a repository for slackers and stoners. But we recognized that Casey needed some control over her life and we left it to her to complete and submit the application. She never followed through.
There was an odd contradiction of sorts between her fragile self-image and the high standards she set for herself and everyone around her. She despised most Redwood teachers, calling them “stupid” or “lame,” yet beat herself mercilessly over seemingly minor mistakes in her assignments. She craved respect and recognition for her intelligence but it had to be genuine; she could smell a fake a mile away.
Despite her grumblings over Redwood, there was one teacher who’d won her over—Mr. DiStefano. He was a former Wall Street bond trader who had left his career and marriage behind in his forties to start a new life in California teaching Advanced Placement social studies and economics. His success in the business world impressed her and he became a mentor. He got her in that unique way teenagers need to feel appreciated and respected by an adult other than their parents. She talked about him constantly, agonized over her homework for him, and worried when he was out sick. Mr. DiStefano was probably a pivotal factor in Casey’s decision to stay at Redwood.
ELEVEN
One Saturday morning while Casey was at a sleepover, Erika and I sat outside on the patio with our coffee and newspaper, enjoying an unusually warm December day, dressed in our terry-cloth bathrobes. A hummingbird poked its long beak into a feeder hanging from the side of the house. Erika took a sip of coffee and cut short our moment of peace.
“There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“What?”
“One day I was standing outside Casey’s bathroom door when she was in there. It sounded like she was throwing up.” Erika paused, watching for my reaction. “She was gagging and spitting.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I knocked on the door and asked if she was all right. She said she just ate some canned olives on a pizza that made her sick. Then she took a shower.”
“So she had a bout of food poisoning.” I looked up at the sky, listening to a distant foghorn from the bay near the Golden Gate Bridge.
Erika fixed a disapproving gaze on me. “I’ve noticed her doing that pretty frequently lately. She may be purging, like she’s bulimic.”
Erika had begun snooping through Casey’s computer, her suspicions aroused by this latest round of disturbing behavior. Whereas my parents respected my privacy as a teen, Erika grew up in a home where parental intrusions into her private life were routine. She’d seen that Casey had visited websites dealing with depression, anorexia, bulimia, and cutting, and suspected that she could have gotten into this as early as middle school.
I pursed my lips. “Ay-ai-ai.”
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “I’ve noticed Casey wearing these fabric elastic bracelets around her wrists all the time when she isn’t wearing a long-sleeved shirt.” She waited for me to react. “Whenever I asked her about them or tried to touch them she’d wave me off and wouldn’t let me get near them.”
“Yeah?”
Erika wrinkled up her mouth as if she’d tasted something sour. “I think she’s been cutting too.”
I let out a quiet moan. “This child will be the death of me.”
Erika took another sip of coffee and pressed me. “I think we need to get her back into therapy.”
I was still grappling with Casey’s wobbly academic record.
“Do you think this could be a phase?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What about the cutting? Have you ever seen what’s under those wristbands?”
“No.”
“Maybe she’s not cutting,” I said, almost as a question. “You know she doesn’t like us fussing with her clothes. Hell, I didn’t like my parents touching me either when I was her age.”
“Well, I think her behavior is very suspicious.” Erika kept her gaze on me, apparently waiting for my reaction.
There was a part of me that didn’t want to know what was under those wristbands. If I didn’t know what was there then maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with it. As everyone said, Casey was just a bit high strung. This was just a phase. It would pass. I wanted to believe that Erika blew everything out of proportion, but I also knew how observant she was, always digging. I remained in denial. Out of fatigue, I just wanted things to go away. It was too much. Why couldn’t Casey be like the other kids so that I could focus on my own life?
I gave Erika a pleading look. “Honey, this is a lot to take on all at once. You know how Casey is. It’ll be hard enough just confronting her about school.” Erika arched her eyebrows, looking apprehensive as I made my case. “Maybe she’ll get over this stuff. She’d go ballistic if we were wrong about the purging and cutting.”
“O-kay.” Erika sounded unconvinced.
Later that afternoon, Casey blew through the front door. Erika and I were sitting in the living room, where Erika repaired a necklace for a friend while I worked on a crossword puzzle.
“Hel-looo!”
She dumped her sleeping bag, pillow, and backpack in a heap by the front door. “Don’t worry, I’ll pick it up!” She rushed to
the bathroom. “I had a good time at Caroline’s!” She was wearing her prized ripped jeans, Astro Boy boots, and a black tank top that showed a hint of cleavage. The fabric elastic bracelets were wrapped around her wrists. She was in a good mood.
When she came back into the living room, I took a long breath and spoke up. “Casey, we need to talk to you for a minute. Could you sit down, please?”
She put her hands up as if to shield herself from our bad vibe as she hurried past us to her room. “I’m not talking to you right now. Not when you use that tone of voice,” she said. “Please leave me alone. I don’t want you to spoil my good mood.”
My voice remained firm. “Casey, you don’t get to choose. This is about sch—” Her door slammed and the lock clicked. God damn her. We got up from the sofa and walked to her door. I gave it a knock.
“Ca-sey, open the door, please.” I jiggled the doorknob. Erika’s voice rose. “Casey, open this door!” Silence. Erika handed me a screwdriver. I popped the lock open and we stepped in. Casey lay on her bed, her dirty boots on the comforter, glaring at us.
I started in. “We need to talk about your schoolwork. We gave you a chance to turn this around yourself but it isn’t working. We’re still getting letters from school.”
“Dad! Can’t you see how hard I’m working! I’m up late every night!”
Erika joined in. “Casey, you’re up late on iChat! You got a D in Algebra and your B in English is now down to a C-minus! How’re you going to get into college with those kinds of grades?”
“Shut up, Mom! You didn’t even finish college!” She tested our limits.
Erika looked as if she would slap her, but I stepped in. “How dare you talk that way to your mother! Look, missed assignments, tardies, absences. That’s unacceptable. Remember the deal about therapy?”
Casey started crying. “Okay, I know I suck! Don’t you think I already feel like SHIT?”
“Please don’t curse.” I hated her cursing; our attempts to model appropriate self-expression seemed useless. “Now, what are we going to do about this?”
She curled up in a ball on her bed, burying her face in her hands, weeping. “I was going to tell you if you’d listen to me that I was going to see my teachers after school to work on this. They said that would help get my grades back up.”
Her crying usually wore us down, but this time Erika’s voice was shrill. “Casey, stop that crying! We know you’re faking it!”
Casey sat up on her bed, looking straight at Erika. “SHUT UP, YOU! YOU SUCK! YOU MAKE ME CRAZY!”
Erika lost it. “NO, YOU SHUT UP! You’re the one who drives everybody crazy! And by the way, what are those bracelets for!”
Shit!
We weren’t going to bring this up. Casey screamed at the top of her lungs. “GET OUT!” Erika lunged at her, grabbing the bracelets. “I know you’re purging in the bathroom too!”
I stepped in between them but Casey scratched me and tried to bite my arm. I raised my hand impulsively to hit her, catching myself, but it was too late. She looked at me with sheer contempt. “Oh, good one, Dad! Now you’re going to hit me! GET . . . OUT!”
I tried damage control. “Casey, wait . . .”
“GET OUT!” She collapsed in a lump on her bed. I pulled Erika away to keep her from getting kicked by Casey’s flailing feet and pushed her out the bedroom door.
“LEAVE! I HATE YOU!”
I stood in the doorway, my face hot from shame and anger. The moment I backed out of her room, the door slammed shut, rattling on hinges that had loosened from years of abuse. She pounded on it with her fists and feet, dissolving into an hour-long fit.
I retreated to the relative quiet of the kitchen, where I found Erika ransacking the refrigerator. She had the trash can propped against the refrigerator door as she reached in and hauled out containers of milk and orange juice, packaged cheese and salami, lettuce and apples, all of which she hurled into the trash. This was perfectly good food. I found myself caught between two women having meltdowns.
“She doesn’t want to eat? Fine! I’ll throw out all her food!”
“Honey! Hey! Stop!” I had to physically restrain her in a bear hug until she settled down.
“God damn her! I hate her!” she cried.
“No you don’t. You hate her behavior.”
“Little bitch. Look what she made me do,” she mumbled, wiping away tears as she reached into the trash to retrieve the food. I guided her to the counter stools, where we sat down, exhausted and defeated, praying that the neighbors hadn’t heard the commotion.
Fortunately, Casey’s meltdowns wore her out. She’d be calm the next day after exorcizing whatever demons lurked inside and tormented her. Still, I was afraid she’d hold this incident against me forever, another excuse to hate my guts.
This wasn’t the father I wanted to be, despised by my own child. I just wanted to be a normal dad with a normal child, whatever “normal” was. I loved her but didn’t know if she loved me.
Later that night, I wrote her a note in a move toward détente.
Dear Casey. Sorry I lost my temper. You know how much I love you. Love, Dad.
I affixed my smiley face at the end, went to her room, and tried the door, but it was locked. So I slipped the note underneath.
By eleven o’clock I was lying in bed, watching the local news. Erika was asleep but I wanted to stay awake for Saturday Night Live. Jack Black was hosting and Neil Young was the musical guest. Our bedroom was dark except for the flitting TV. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure standing in the doorway, silent like a ghost. It was Casey.
“Hi, honey.” I was happy to see her. Maybe she wanted to talk.
She’d composed herself. “You know, you never just talk to me,” she said. “You have no idea who I am.”
My heart sank. I was desperate to reach her. What did she mean, I had no idea who she was? Casey, who are you? Tell me. What am I doing wrong?
“Honey, you won’t let me in. You know how much we love you.” Maybe that was a crack in her armor, a chance to connect. “Casey, please sit down for a sec.” But she was like a frightened deer wary of human contact and turned away. My words didn’t come fast enough.
She was gone.
What if I’d found the right words, calmed her down and coaxed her into talking with me? Perhaps she would have peeled back her suit of armor and revealed a bit more, shared with me who she really was, fighting, crying, and screaming on the other side of that battered door, the one that I was never allowed to open, someone just a foot away.
She could have told me that I was foolish to try to love her, an abandoned piece of human wreckage. Was that what she wanted to say? Was she terrified to tell me for fear that she’d be abandoned again? But there was no amount of hate she could spew at me to drive me away. I’d never let that happen. Even when she used the weapon “You’re not my real parents,” my response was “Tough. You’re stuck with us and we’re not going anywhere.”
If only I could have convinced her that Erika and I loved her unconditionally. Our fights were just reactions to her outbursts, not her. We just needed her to help us help her.
TWELVE
Casey and I passed through Sacramento on I-80 heading north toward Lake Tahoe. It was February 2006—Presidents’ Day weekend—and we’d planned to go skiing for a few days in Squaw Valley over her winter break.
Vacations together had become increasingly rare, as Casey, a soon-to-be sixteen-year-old, preferred the company of her friends. She hated being seen with us in public, sometimes going to extremes to avoid being spotted by her friends. She’d slump down in the car or insist we walk ten paces behind her at the mall, as if she were in a witness-protection program.
We took advantage of this trip to Tahoe to be together while we still had a chance. Unfortunately, just before leaving, Erika came down with the flu, and it looked as though the trip would be off. But to my amazement, Casey insisted that she still wanted to go alone with me. I was flattered but
also worried that we’d run out of things to talk about. Erika had no such problem and could always be counted on to fill awkward dead air with conversation.
On the road I felt comfortable with long stretches of Zen-like, meditative silence. Casey sat in the passenger seat next to me wearing one of her favorite outfits—a tomato-colored, quilt-patterned hoodie, her ripped jeans, and a rose-colored T-shirt with the label FCUK from the French Connection U.K. store in New York. She loved the edgy wordplay and the connection to New York, where she hoped to live someday. Her beat-up Converse All Stars lay in a heap on the floor, my prerequisite for allowing her to use the dashboard as a footrest while she listened to her iPod.
Since our last major blowup, Erika and I had done nothing to follow up on our threat of therapy over Casey’s schoolwork. There had been no discussion of Erika’s suspicion about cutting and purging. Sometimes our fights with Casey were like boxing matches where we retreated, bloodied, to our corners after a particularly bruising round.
It was easy to be lulled back into complacency on the good days and put off the uncomfortable responsibilities of parenting. Our failure to take action and our tendency to postpone threats of consequence hung over me like a dank cloak.
In the heat of her profanity-laced rages, I sometimes forgot that there was so much good between us, the “normalness” that we craved. When she was three, Casey danced around our living room in Simsbury insisting that she’d marry me and we’d name our child Casey. At seven—when being together with Dad was a treat rather than a burden—Erika dolled her up in a little black dress, purple stockings, party shoes, and a dab of lipstick and mascara so that we could go to the Father-Daughter dance together. At thirteen, we went on an early-morning walking marathon through lower Manhattan searching for a coveted pocketbook she’d found on the Internet. That same year, she blew my mind by giving me an expensive watch for Christmas (with a little help from Mom), and I began to understand her attitude toward gift giving. If you were going to give, give big, otherwise don’t bother.
