by Laurie Fox
“The books. You’ve read them, I suppose?”
This time she answered without skipping a beat. “Yes, Mu-Mu. I’ve digested the Puffin classic and devoured the Penguin volume with its scholarly preface, and gobbled up the Disney Books for Young Readers edition. I’ve consumed the illustrated and the annotated books, seen the play and the musical, and heard the sound track. Now isn’t that smart of me? I mean, that’s preparation. Nothing can surprise me now.”
Berry darted over to the sliding-glass doors and grinned as the menacing wind agitated the eucalyptus trees. “It’s all a bunch of bull, you know. I mean, come on, Mother. We’ve all peeked behind the curtain and seen the gears working. There’s no Neverland. It’s just a story. You write ’em, Daddy makes sound effects for ’em, and I watch ’em on the big screen. If you’ve taught me anything, it’s make up your own story ’cause no one else is gonna do it for you.”
I regarded my daughter, her arms folded over her chest like a train crossing that allows nothing to get through. She wasn’t a believer like the rest of us. In spite of her arty-farty parents and literary pedigree, she was a realist. A blasphemer in a family of believers.
“I mean, look at me, Mu-Mu.” She twirled like a contestant in a Junior Miss pageant. “Even if the story was true, no guy—not even the cutest apparition—would want me.”
“W-what?” I stuttered, dragging my fingers down hollow cheeks. “You’re—what makes you say such a thing? You’re amazing. You’re drop-dead gorgeous!”
“Yeah, with an emphasis on dead. I’m just a vision of loveliness in my mother’s eye. But the guys have other, let’s say, funkier, ideas. Listen to me—”
“No, you listen to me,” I said, instantly regretting the cliché. “In spite of everything your grandmother talks about—lucid dreaming and vision quests and Aboriginal Dreamtime—you think you have a handle on reality. But you don’t, you don’t.” I curled up on her chenille bedspread, which she’d recently dyed black, and sank my face in my palms.
“That’s true, Mu-Mu,” Berry conceded quietly. She crept over to the bed to make sure I was still breathing. “It’s just, your proof is so totally anecdotal. Hey, I’m not belittling your past or grand-mummy’s. But let’s get serious.”
“I am serious,” I said, lifting my face so she could make out the damage. “You’re denigrating us. You’re making a mockery of us.”
“So you’re saying I have to believe in a crock of shit to be in this family. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes,” I said. “You have to believe in a crock of shit.”
“Well, I don’t,” Berry said with quivering lips. “Sayonara, Mu-Mu.”
The funny thing is, I believed her the moment she said it. This wasn’t a feign on her part—Berry never feigned. She would be leaving us. At fourteen, at fifteen, at sixteen for keeps. On the eve of her initiation into adulthood, Berry appeared to turn her back on her birthright—the ferocious imagination that had always served her like a charm.
ALL rites of passage are paradoxical. On the one hand, there’s the opportunity for personal growth, the promise of transcendence. But there is terror and disintegration, too—deep blows to the ego. No wonder that the day a mother hands off her daughter to Pan is unquestionably her worst. Of course, events of this magnitude always occur at night: nothing of import happens in daylight anymore. Under a shroud of vapors and shadow, when you can hardly make out your own feet, major changes take place at the molecular level. What looks solid melts in your fingers and what appears liquid bruises your knees. Matter cannot be trusted; the laws of physics are not obeyed. Pan’s anarchy appeals to children and yet scares the bejesus out of adults (whose hairs stand on end, whose nails are bitten to the quick). How differently children see things. They are transported, literally. They titter when they should be screaming, swoon when they should be respectful, devout. From this moment on, they no longer look to you for comfort or protection; they no longer need your dinners, your allowances, the safe harbor of your embrace. From this moment on, they will fly on their own fuel and eat from the tree of imaginary fruit. They no longer need their mothers, all of whom have taken a bad fall and made their peace with gravity.
This is the way of the world according to Great-Nana. What a mother wants for her daughter will go unheeded, for no mother can compete with Pan. What he brings into a room is far more compelling than anything a mother can make up on the spot. And so imagination becomes the new parent: it is an irresistible force to be reckoned with, a teacher that doesn’t disappoint. It keeps a child energized well after Pan leaves the scene; it keeps her warm at night and feeds her. Too bad its power fades with the years. Too bad it leaves the daughter stranded on the ground, without the ability to lift off. I know of what I speak; for I was a daughter once too.
Pan came for Berry that first night of her fifteenth year, at an hour when gale-force winds would blow him into her life without much effort on his part. He always was a lazy fellow. As it happened Berry had been sleeping lightly, waking repeatedly to check out the Joan Jett tee-shirt she wore for a nightie; she didn’t want her period to ruin it. She heard the mad clattering of trees, the skeletal branches scraping the glass doors. But she nursed no fear: she was a big fan of weather, the more ruinous the better.
As Berry would relate to me later at the hospital, she’d been sitting upright in bed reading a Spider-Man comic in the fuzzy glow of the back-porch light, when the sliding-glass doors skated open to reveal the silhouette of a young man. He cut a spry countercultural figure, she said: his long rock-star hair was blown to bits, his Levi’s so shrunken they clung to him like ballet tights. Despite the icy wind, he wore a holey tee with Bono’s face on it, which instantly revealed he was out of sync with my daughter’s taste in music.
As Peter crept towards the bed in—what else?—Doc Martens, Berry rested the comic book on her pillow and switched on the lamp at her nightstand. This cast a greenish light on the boy’s countenance, which made him look fake or simulated, Halloweenish. Berry coolly sized him up, a smile barely parting her lips. While she’d just spent most of the evening denying his existence, it turns out this had been a simple act of teenage rebellion: she’d pretty much counted on Pan to spirit her away from the fantasy realm that was Berkeley. That had been Plan A. If he didn’t come, and time was growing thin, she’d have to resort to Plan B, which involved leaving Berkeley on her own volition—with the help of razor blades or pills, perhaps even electricity. At the time I hadn’t a clue about either plan. I assumed my daughter was coping well enough with her inheritance, a darkness that refused to give way to the light. Besides, her morbid sensibility had given birth to some notable, if controversial, theater projects. At such a tender age she was getting recognition for her pain.
We Darlings have a tradition of putting our neuroses to good use. Berry had honored that tradition with a series of performance pieces that many considered unsuitable for junior high audiences, pieces wherein Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny were engulfed in depression and madness, or at least low self-esteem. While her cartoon voices were spot-on as always, the emotion they now tendered was deemed too raw for the children at the Waldorf school, where we most recently had moved her.
Doing her best now to control her nerves, Berry assessed the intruder who’d swept in with the storm. Not only was he not crying, he didn’t seem to be looking for his notoriously flimsy shadow. Instead he appeared casual, self-contained. This was not the picture of desperation she’d been expecting all her life.
“Well,” she hailed him, “if it isn’t the boy wonder. I don’t get it. Like, why aren’t you crying?”
“Don’t really fancy weepin’ right now,” he said with a sniff, raking his fingers through wet, matted hair.
“Oh yeah?” Berry challenged.
“Yeah,” he confirmed.
Now the two faced off. Berry stared down the young man—he was just as amazing as the books had promised, neither too pretty nor too rugged, but a generous fusion o
f feminine and masculine: ski-jump nose, vulpine eyes, dancer’s physique, spray of freckles, and a grin that mocked the heavens.
Bounding onto the mattress, he sent her comic book flying. “Hey, watch the merchandise,” she warned, which only encouraged him to snatch the book from her hands.
“This rubbish?” he said, flipping through the pages. “So tell me, what’s the deal with the spider-boy?”
“Spider-Man,” she corrected.
“Yeah, what’s so special about the arachnid?”
“Well, to begin with, he’s one of the coolest superheroes of all time.”
“I’m sorry, luv. But you’ve been royally hoodwinked. There are no superheroes, there’s just me. Pan.” He stuffed the comic in the waistband of his jeans, then beat on his chest like Tarzan. “I am the hero of every story!” he sang out, his voice pitched higher than what one storybook, in particular, had suggested.
“Give it back, dickhead!” Berry wrestled with Pan and the book until the latter ripped into two sheaves. “Oh great, that was a collectible,” she scolded. He just smiled and withdrew from his back pocket a white leather pouch from which he extracted a yo-yo; he executed a couple of round the worlds and one walk the dog. But Berry paid the boy no mind, so absorbed was she in restoring the comic. When he couldn’t stand being ignored another minute, Peter threw open every drawer of her bureau. “’Scuse me,” he said, “but I’ve come a right long way.”
Berry looked up in time to catch him pouting. “I know,” she answered with unexpected grace. “I’m more ready to leave the world than you can imagine.”
Resting the comic book on the lip of her nightstand, she hopped off the bed, stuck her head of newly grown-out curls underneath the bed frame, and tugged on something massive. An army-issue duffel bag, stuffed to the gills, was dragged across the floor and set before the sliding-glass doors. “There!” she said, breathing heavily. “Andiamo.”
“Eh?” Peter grunted.
“Let’s go,” she urged, signifying the outdoors with her eyebrows.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “You’re not the least bit afraid?”
“Fear is not an option,” she stated hypnotically.
Duffel bag slung over her shoulder and clad only in her oversized tee-shirt and panties, Berry slid the door open, inviting in a blast of frigid air and slanted rain. She stepped outside to the redwood deck that jutted out ten feet from the back of the house. At the end of the deck was a fringe of eucalyptus trees that gave way to a fern-and-ice-plant-covered slope. The deck was crowded with garden furniture, and she had to negotiate her way around her father’s potted plants.
Resting the duffel bag on the redwood planks, she caught her breath. “Hey,” she called to the boy, “so, like, hit me with the fairy sprinkles and let’s split.” Her calloused feet hopped up and down, awaiting their cue.
“Right, mate, we’ll be off in a sec!” Peter hollered from inside the house. “Just tell me one thing—”
“Yeah, yeah,” she interrupted. “I know stories.” She whistled boyishly into the wind. “More stories than Scheherazade. Greater tales than Grimm. More fabulous fables than Aesop.” She looked him in the eye as best she could with the hard sheet of rain slicing the air between them. “Is that good enough for you, ’cause I’m getting frigging cold out here.”
Peter scratched his head as boys are wont to do when thoroughly stumped. He adjusted his soaked clothing before deciding to go along with the girl, the strangest and toughest he’d encountered by far. She must have missed his leap onto the deck, for he stood before her now. “All right, sunshine. I believe you know the drill?”
“Sure do, fly boy. The happy-thoughts meditation thingy?”
“Right-o.” He laughed. “But it’s got to be true—you can’t fool Mother Nature.” He secured the sliding door with an emphatic shove.
“Mother Nature?” she said. “There’s nothing natural about mothers. They don’t have a clue. They’re all helpless, every last one of them, total zeroes.”
“Wendy,” he said, “just a tip? It’s best not to get too worked up right now.”
“My name is Berry. You know, like a berry? And I’m not worked up. I just don’t want to be reminded of the mothership.” She sat down on the edge of the deck and banged on her knees with her fists.
“But you have such a dish for a mum!” he blurted out, sitting down beside her. She tossed him a withering look. “Okay, your mum’s hardly a domestic goddess. She can’t sew to save her life and she can’t cook for beans. She can’t cook beans! Still, the stories she tells … why, they’re brill. Amazing, actually.” Berry raised an eyebrow. “All right, you win. A couple are rather pathetic.” He chuckled fondly. “Wendy’s stories have the most horrid endings. She doesn’t tie stuff up with a lovely bow like the other birds do—the stories end badly or just like that!” He snapped his fingers in her face and she flinched. “And they’re full of ludicrous talking rodents. I don’t know how she comes up with the stuff. It’s soppy and depressing at the same time.”
“Hey, don’t go there,” Berry warned, glancing up at him with smudged, raccoon eyes. “My mom makes a living with her stories. I mean, people actually buy them. Of course, she ran out of stories before I was ten. But we don’t mention that.”
“Is that why you don’t dig her?”
“I can’t really tell you that, can I? I mean, God. You’re the problem.” She sank her head between her knees.
“What the ...?” Peter cupped his dripping palms together and yelled in her ear: “What ’ave I got to do with anything?”
“Holy shit!” she cried, popping up. “Like you have everything to do with everything. You practically run this family. My dad has to keep his distance from my mom because she got screwed up by you when she was little. And guess what? This usually includes keeping his distance from me, too.”
“So, what do you know? I’m the villain of a story.” He took a moment to process the news. “If I’m such a bad bloke, then why’re you so anxious to come off with me, eh?” He nudged her shoulder—actually touched her.
Berry pulled back, stretching her tee-shirt over shivering knees. “None of your beeswax,” she said. Then, still hunched over, she lifted her face. “Maybe because . . . I’m a bad guy too.” She had his full attention now. “You see, my mom and dad are so good it makes me barf. They, like, think I’m good, but I’m not. I’m completely rancid but nobody knows.”
Peter’s unfailing cheerfulness now gave way to a weird solemnity. “Aw, Berry. Things can’t be that bad. You look good to me.”
He lowered his eyes to her stocky legs, caught a glimpse of cotton panties dotted with spiral galaxies. Wanting to wipe the rain from her cheeks, he suspended his hand in the air between them. Then, feeling self-conscious, he withdrew it.
“Now the trick is,” Peter continued, “you gotta concentrate on the luvvy-jubby stuff or you won’t make the journey”—he eyed her bulging duffel bag—“and it looks like a journey is something you’ve been banking on for quite some time.” She nodded in earnest. “So, listen up. Close your eyes, relax, and think of something so cool that nothing uncool can muck it up.”
“Sorry, my cupboard of cool stuff is empty,” she said. Standing, she shook off the excess rain like a waterlogged dog.
“I don’t buy that,” he said. “Surely there’s something you fancy?” She looked at him blankly. “How ’bout the Queen Mum.” She wrinkled her nose. “Princess Di?” She crossed her eyes. “Right, let me guess. A blinding pair of Air Jordans?”
“No,” she whispered, “nothing.”
“Mate, there’s gotta be something that wets your whistle. Knickerbocker glories? Hot-fudge sundaes? Or some tasty bloke like, I dunno, Johnny Depp?”
“Oh please, I’m not into food or guys.”
“Right. Well, how ’bout Julia Roberts? Meg Ryan?”
She smiled coyly, then covered her eyes with her hands. “There is one thing.”
“Yeah?” He lit up li
ke a pinball machine.
“You know the movie Alien? Like, the original? Well, it makes me feel all tingly.”
“Brilliant,” he said. “Well, whatever. Let’s get on with it.”
She watched as he scaled a nearby eucalyptus and, on what appeared to be a flimsy branch, began a warm-up session for the imminent flight: corny hamstring stretches, ankle rotations.
“Hel-looo.” She waved. “The dust? I need the dust.” She shot him a baleful look.
“Like I told your mum, there’s really no need.”
“Sorry, but I definitely gotta have the dust. Consider me old-fashioned.”
“Consider me inflexible,” he said, crossing his arms like a genie. “Oh, fair enough,” he said when her face muscles took a break. “If you close yer eyes, pet, I’ll give you Pan’s full-service treatment.”
He vaulted from the tree to the ground and scrambled furtively around the hillside. Then, with both hands, he scooped up some dry soil from under the deck.
While Pan dusted her head and shoulders, Berry hopped up and down on one foot, her eyes screwed shut. The “pixie dust” was redolent of the earth, she noted; it gave off the rich perfume of clay and chocolate.
“Now do yer own thing,” he suggested. “Follow your bliss.”
Immune to clichés, Berry remained as land-bound as a boulder. Unfazed, he encouraged her to smile: “C’mon Ber, try for a teensy bit of happiness. Show us them bicuspids.”
Another no-go. Instead, Berry scowled and managed to sink an inch deeper in the earth. Conceding defeat, she opened her eyes. “I don’t know bliss. Can you give me a little help here?”
“Piece of cake,” he said. “Think beebee guns, baseball, Babe Ruth, Barney. Those always work for me. And that’s only the Bs.”
Again she squinted and hopped, flapping her arms like a duck. And once more she remained mired in the mud. Her head began to pound, her vision clouded over. “Can’t you see I need magic? Don’t just stand there, be magical!”
Peter let out an unfortunate burp. “Sorry, luv, but you’re the one in the driver’s seat. You gotta use your own petrol to get out of here.” When she refused to look up, he said, “Listen, some kids just have more fuel. If you like, I’ll blow on you to get you started.” His cheeks swelled up like a puffer fish, and an impressive amount of air blasted the brown hairs on her arms.
