Was that woman reading my mind? Isn’t that what I was always thinking as I came out here and faced the Atlantic – the fact that there is a world beyond the one behind me now? When I looked out at the water my back was turned to all that was my life. I could dwell in the illusion of elsewhere.
But then there was the distinct bing of my cellphone, bringing me back to the here-and-now, telling me that someone had just sent me a text.
Immediately I was scrambling in my bag for my phone, as I was certain that the text was from my son Ben.
Ben is nineteen; a sophomore at the University of Maine in Farmington. He’s majoring in visual art there – a fact that drives my husband Dan just a little crazy. They’ve never been able to share much. We’re all products of the forces that shaped us, aren’t we? Dan was raised poor in Aroostook County; the son of a part-time lumberman who drank too much and never really knew how to spell the word r-e-s-p-o-n-s-i-b-i-l-i-t-y. But he also loved his son, even if he often thought nothing of lashing out at him while tanked. Dan grew up both adoring and fearing his dad – and always trying to be the tough outdoorsman that his father considered himself to be. The fact that Dan himself rarely touches alcohol – and looks askance at me if I dare to have a second glass of wine – speaks volumes about the lasting trauma of his dad’s considerable drink-fueled furies. He privately knows his own father was a weak, cowardly little man who, like all bullies, used brutality to mask his own self-loathing. As such, I’ve tried to talk to Dan on many occasions about the fact that he is a much better person than his father – and that he should extend his innate decency to his son, whatever about their polar differences. It’s not as if Dan is in any way cruel or hostile towards Ben. He shows only nominal interest in him, and refuses to explain to me why he treats his only son as a stranger.
Only recently, after Ben was written up in the Portland Phoenix as a young artist to watch – on the basis of a collage he had exhibited at the Portland Museum of Art, which turned ‘the deconstructed remnants’ of lobster pots into ‘a chilling vision of modern incarceration’ (or, at least, that’s what the critic in the Phoenix called it), Dan asked me if I thought Ben was, in any way, ‘disturbed’? I tried to mask my horror at this question, instead asking: ‘What on earth makes you think that?’
‘Well, just look at that damn collage which all those smarty-pants down in Portland think is so fantastic.’
‘People respond to the piece because it is provocative, and uses something indigenous to Maine – a lobster pot – as a way of—’
‘“Indigenous”,’ Dan said with a decided sneer. ‘You and your big words again.’
‘Why are you being so hurtful?’
‘I’m just voicing an opinion. But go on and tell me I’m shooting my mouth off again. And this is the reason I’m still out of work twenty-one months after—’
‘Unless you were keeping something from me, you didn’t lose your job for saying the sort of inappropriate things you’re saying now.’
‘So I’m also inappropriate, am I? Unlike our “brilliant” son. Maine’s next Picasso.’
Ever since he’d lost his job Dan had begun to increasingly display flashes of unkindness. Though an apology for this last harsh comment was immediately forthcoming (‘There I go again, and I really don’t know why you put up with me’) the effect was, yet again, corrosive. Even if these momentary lapses only arose twice a month, they were coupled with the way Dan was increasingly withdrawing into himself – and refusing to share any of the understandable anger he felt about being laid off. The result was that things just seemed askew at home. I can’t say ours was ever the most romantic or passionate of marriages (not that I had anything since my marriage to compare it to). But we had rubbed along for years in a reasonable, stable way. Until the lay-off that suddenly opened up a dark recess which seemed to grow larger with each ensuing month when Dan was stuck at home, wondering if his career would ever be resuscitated again.
What I sensed most unsettled Dan now about his son was the fact that he was, at the age of nineteen, already getting recognition for his work. To be chosen to exhibit in the Young Maine Artists show at the Portland Museum of Art, to be just one of two college students included in the exhibition, to have a critic call him innovative and a talent to watch . . . All right, I know my maternal pride is talking here. But still it’s quite an achievement. And Ben is such a thoughtful, considerate, and wonderfully quirky young man – and one who just wants his father’s love and approval. But Dan simply can’t see that. Instead, from hints dropped here and there, it’s clear that he’s quietly uncomfortable with the fact that the boy he always wrote off as different, weird, not the sort of son he expected, is very much coming into his own – and being publicly praised for that. I often tell myself that once Dan finds a good job again, all will be well. Just as I simultaneously think: If only an instant fix could change everything.
Bing.
More pips, informing me that this newly arrived text was demanding my attention. I now had the phone in my hand and was squinting at the screen, the sunlight blurring the message. Cupping my hand around it I could make out the following words:
Please call me now . . . Ben
Immediately I felt anxiety coursing everywhere within me. The same anxiety that now hits whenever Ben sends me one of these messages. My son is currently in a somewhat dark place. From the outside – if you just look objectively at the facts – it might seem like much ado about a silly romance. Nine months ago Ben met a young woman named Allison Fell. Like him she’s studying visual art at Farmington. Her father is a big-deal lawyer in Portland. They live in one of those big houses that hug the coast in Cape Elizabeth – the most exclusive suburb of the city. I gather that her parents were wildly disappointed when she didn’t get into a variety of ultra-prestigious colleges (‘I was never that into studying,’ she told me) and had to ‘make do’ with U Maine Farmington (which has actually become quite a respected liberal arts college, despite the State U tag). She’s relatively pretty and seriously bohemian; the sort of nineteen-year-old who dresses all the time in black, keeps her long nails also painted black, and wears her elbow-length black hair in an elaborate braid. I often think she targeted Ben because he was the most talented of the small group of young visual artists at Farmington and because he was so ‘cute and vulnerable’. For Ben, the fact that this very outgoing, very confident, very flamboyant, rather rich young woman wanted him . . . well, considering how in high school he was girlfriend-less and often considered himself ‘something of a freak’, he was just completely overwhelmed by Allison’s desire for him. Just as I’m pretty sure she also introduced him to the pleasures of sex.
All this started in January of this year – though Ben told me nothing about it until Easter when he was back from college. He asked if we could go out to Moody’s Diner for lunch. There, over grilled cheese sandwiches, he informed me, in such a shy, hesitating way, that he’d met someone. His difficulty in articulating this – the way he also said, ‘Please don’t tell Dad. I don’t think he’ll like her’ – filled my heart with such love and worry for him. Because I could see that he was in an unknown territory and rather deluged by it all.
‘What do you feel exactly for Allison?’ I asked him at the time.
‘I want to marry her,’ he blurted out, then blushed a deep red.
‘I see,’ I said, trying to sound as neutral as possible. ‘And does Allison want this?’
‘Absolutely. She said I am the love of her life.’
‘Well . . . that’s lovely. Truly lovely. But . . . you’ve been together how long?’
‘Ninety-one days.’
‘I see,’ I said again, thinking: Oh my God, he knows the exact number of days and maybe even the exact number of hours.
‘First love is always so . . . surprising,’ I said. ‘You really cannot believe it. And while I certainly don’t want to rain on your parade . . .’
Oh God, why did I use that cliché?
‘
. . . but . . . all I’m saying to you, is – how wonderful! Just give it all a little time.’
‘I love her, Mom . . . and she loves me.’
‘Well . . .’
There was so much I wanted to say . . . and so much I realized I couldn’t say. Except:
‘I’m so happy for you.’
We met Allison once. Poor Ben was so nervous, and Dan asked a lot of leading questions about how much seafrontage her parents had in Cape Elizabeth, and Allison was looking around our rather simple home and smiling to herself. Meanwhile I was trying to will everyone to relax and like each other, even if I knew this was downright impossible. I didn’t like the way she was so deliberately tactile with Ben, stroking his thigh with her hand at one point in full view of both Dan and myself, whispering things in his ear (she may think herself a Goth, but she behaves like an adolescent), and playing on his evident neediness. All right, maybe I was being far too maternal/cautious – but what worried me most here was that Ben was so in love with being in love. How could I explain to him that sometimes we project onto others that which our heart so wants. As such, we aren’t seeing the other person at all.
Dan told me after the dinner:
‘She’ll drop him like a hot potato the moment she’s decided he’s outlived his interest to her.’
‘Maybe you should have a talk with him about—’
‘About what? The kid never listens to me. And he finds me so damn conservative, so Republican . . .’
‘Just talk with him, Dan. He really needs your support.’
To my husband’s credit the next time Ben was home for a weekend from college they did spend much of the afternoon raking leaves in our garden and talking. Afterwards Ben said that his father seemed genuinely interested in knowing how he felt about Allison and just how serious it was. ‘And he didn’t lecture me about anything.’
Then, just six weeks ago, I got a phone call early one morning from the college. Ben had been found by a campus security officer in the middle of the night beneath a tree near his dormitory, oblivious to the pouring rain that had been cascading down for hours. He was brought to the college nurse, diagnosed with a bad chill (thank God it was only the tail end of August) and sent back to his dorm room. After that Ben refused to get out of bed, refused to speak with anyone. When this carried on for two days his roommate did the smart thing and alerted the college authorities. A doctor was called to Ben’s bedside. When he didn’t respond to the doctor’s entreaties to speak or even make eye contact with him Ben was transferred to the psychiatric wing of the local hospital.
That’s when Dan and I both rushed up to Farmington. When we reached the infirmary and Ben saw us, he turned away, hiding his head under a pillow, refusing to engage whatsoever with us, despite the nurse on duty asking him to at least acknowledge his parents’ presence in the room.
I was doing my best to keep my emotions in check, but Dan actually had to leave the ward he was so upset. I found him outside, smoking one of the three cigarettes he still smokes a day, his eyes welling up with tears, clearly so unsettled by the psychological state of his son. When I put my arms around him he briefly buried his head in my shoulder, then shrugged off my embrace, embarrassed by the outward sign of emotion. Rubbing his eyes, sucking in a deep lungful of smoke, he said:
‘I want to kill that little rich bitch.’
I said nothing. Except:
‘He’ll be OK, he’ll get through this.’
The psychiatrist on duty – a large, formidable woman named Dr Claire Allen – told us later that day:
‘I suppose you are aware of the fact that Ben’s girlfriend took up with someone else just a few days ago. My advice to you is to give him a little space right now. Let him start talking with me over the next few days. Let me help him find his way to an easier place – and then I’m certain he’ll want to talk to you both.’
To Dr Allen’s credit she phoned me every few days to update me on his progress – though she also informed me that the information she was providing me with was ‘very generalized’ so as not to breach patient/doctor confidentiality. As such she would never go into anything that was discussed during their sessions. To Dan’s credit he was eager to hear all the developments from Farmington and seemed relieved to discover that Ben was talking and ‘genuinely wants to get better’ (to quote Dr Allen’s direct words). He left the hospital after a week. But it was a full three weeks before Ben returned to classes and before Dr Allen gave us the all-clear to see him. On the day in question Dan had a first interview for that job in Augusta, so I went up on my own to the college. I met Dr Allen alone in her office. She pronounced herself pleased with Ben’s progress, telling me that, though still rather vulnerable, he seemed to have come to terms with what had befallen him and was having two sessions a week with her to ‘talk through a lot of things’.
‘I have to say that, without revealing too much of what Ben told me, he still does have a great deal to work through. I know all about him being chosen for that big exhibition in Portland. But like so many creative people he is also wracked by considerable doubt – especially when it comes to the issue of self-esteem. He has told me he is very close to you.’
‘I like to think that,’ I said, also noting her professional silence on the subject of his father.
‘There’s a sister, isn’t there?’
‘That’s right, Sally.’
‘They are rather different, aren’t they?’
Understatement of the year. If Ben is creative and withdrawn and tentative about himself, yet also given to thinking outside the box, then Sally is his diametric opposite. She is wildly outgoing, wildly confident. Dan adores her, as she adores her dad – though his testiness has been getting to her recently. My own relationship with Sally is a little more complicated. Part of this, I think, has to do with the usual stuff that adolescent girls (she’s seventeen) have with their moms. But the other part – the part that troubles me – stems from the fact that we are, in so many ways, such profoundly different people. Sally is Ms Popularity at her high school. She has worked hard at this role, as she truly cares about being liked. She is very all-American girl. Tall, clean-limbed, sandy-haired, always fresh-faced and well scrubbed, with great teeth. Her image means so much to her – to the point where she is already obsessively working out two hours a day and spends at least forty-five minutes every night ensuring that her face is blemish-free. She uses teeth-whitening strips to make certain that her smile is electrifying. No wonder she has half the football team chasing after her, though her current steady, Brad, is the school’s baseball star pitcher. He’s also something of a politician in the making who, I sense, sees Sally as nothing more than a very good-looking girl to have on his arm. Sally knows this too. When Brad was admitted early decision to Dartmouth a few weeks ago, I found her crying in our living room after school. In a rare moment, she confided in me:
‘He’ll be in that fancy Ivy League college in New Hampshire and I’ll be up in Orono at stupid U Maine.’
‘U Maine is where I went.’
‘Yeah, but you could have gone anywhere you wanted to.’
‘U Maine offered me a full scholarship. My parents didn’t have any money and—’
‘Well, if I had the grades to get into Dartmouth, would we have the money to—?’
‘We would find the money,’ I said, sounding a little tetchy on this subject, as Sally will sometimes bemoan the fact that we have to live so carefully right now – though, thankfully, she only targets me for these comments, as she knows it would devastate her father to hear his much-adored daughter going on about the lack of family capital. But she also chooses me to vent her frustration to about most things to do with her life – especially the fact that she wasn’t born into a family of Wall Street big shots. For Sally there are always points of comparison. Brad’s father made a lot of money opening a small chain of big box hardware stores around the state – but still decided to send his very ambitious youngest son to the local public sch
ool (I like that fact). Brad’s parents live in a big waterfront house with all sorts of deluxe fittings (a sauna, a jacuzzi, an indoor gym, an outdoor pool, plasma televisions in every room). They now also have a home in ‘an exclusive gated development’ (Sally’s exact words) near Tampa. She spent a week with Brad down at their Florida spread, and went out with Brad and his father on the family cabin cruiser. And Brad already has his very own ‘cool’ car: a Mini Cooper. And . . .
I truly love my daughter. I admire her optimism, her verve, her forward momentum. But I also wonder often what she’s driving towards.
‘I know Brad’s going to drop me as soon as we graduate next summer and we both head to college. Because he thinks of me as his high-school fun, nothing more. And he’s after somebody who can be a future senator’s wife.’
‘Is that what you want to be – a senator’s wife?’
‘Do I hear disappointment in your voice, Mom?’
‘You never disappoint me, Sally.’
‘I wish I could believe that.’
‘I don’t want you to be anything you don’t want to be.’
‘But you don’t like the fact that I want to marry a man like Brad.’
As opposed to specifically marrying Brad? Was that the underlying theme here – marrying a guy with money who has firmly planted himself on the career escalator marked ‘Up’?
‘Everyone has their own agenda, their own aspirations,’ I said.
‘And there you go again, putting me down.’
‘How is what I said putting you down?’
‘Because my aspirations strike you as small. Because I am not going to do anything fantastic with my life . . .’
‘You have many gifts, Sally.’
‘You consider me shallow and vacuous and someone who, unlike you, never picks up a book.’
‘You know that I think the world of you.’
Five Days Page 3
