by Laurie Fox
OUR family continued to be rocked by Great-Nana’s demise. While she had expired, prosaically, in her sleep and not from the calamitous fall we’d always anticipated, we found little comfort in the details of her death. Her will, it turned out, was a certifiable mess, unfit for our eyes and even less suited for those of the lawyers. It happened that her wealth resided solely in her assortment of curios (shells, globes, marbles) and in her collection of Victorian children’s books—barely-glued-together tomes that were signed, first editions that dealers could hardly wait to get their gloves on. Great-Nana had had the volumes crated and put into storage when she checked into All-Saints Sanitarium, and no one had gazed upon the books in years. Strangely enough, her will made no mention of the collection, not one syllable about Berry or me inheriting a volume. Perhaps Nana felt that persons who make up stories have no need to actually own them.
Finally, after much shuffling through boxes, Mother succeeded in locating a letter composed in Nana’s endearing chicken scrawl; it maintained that her many objects of desire were to be divided among the residents of A.S.S. This should have put a lid on further discussion or rude outbursts, but we were Darlings, after all, and not easily dissuaded.
“Don’t I deserve, at minimum, one little book?” I argued one morning at the kitchen table, stabbing the soft wood with my fork. “And doesn’t Berry deserve more than a handful of dust? Yes, we all know that she loves dirt, but really. Berry’s been left empty-handed!”
“Berry can’t fit any more stuff in her room,” Freeman said, “and you have one of the best children’s book libraries in the country. Don’t you think it’s funny how one’s objectivity flies out the window when it comes to one’s inheritance?” He took the fork from my hand and returned it to my plate.
“No, one does not find it funny. I don’t know, Man. I expected to be totally fine with this. But our expectations expect so much of us! I thought I could share Nana with the world, but I can’t. It’s not the books I want, anyway, it’s her. I have nothing left of her.” I hunched over my plate of scrambled eggs and onions, and appeared to get stuck there.
“Now that is just not true.” Freeman pierced a ring of onion with his fork, and fed it to me.
I searched my husband’s cloudless face; in the presence of tragedy, he liked to point out several silver linings, when most people freely admitted there were none. “Come on, Wends,” he went on. “You’ll always have those bizarro adventures you shared with your nana—her dubious remarks, her lunatic gestures. That’s your inheritance.” With revolting self-satisfaction, he poured himself a cup of coffee from our spongeware pot. “And what about that lurid thing on your finger?”
It was true: after all this time I still wore Nana’s cocktail ring. Its dime-store tackiness charmed me like nothing else. Peering at the ring anew, I studied its facets, probing for fresh epiphanies. But there was no picture of the future or the past waiting for me, only my face fractured into Cubist bits. When my lower lip trembled, the picture blurred—the ring refused to reveal anything but its surface beauty.
With a thump, Berry lurched into the kitchen. She was dressed in safari togs from head to toe, a departure from her usual black-on-black couture. Freeman and I tried not to make anything of this, though as parents, we were genuinely startled. Our daughter looked as if all the evil had been drained from her and replaced with the marrow of an Eagle Scout.
“Hey,” said Freeman.
“Hey,” I said casually, after him. “Stalking the wild breakfast?”
Berry sank into her designated chair, a puppet too heavy for its strings. With the same debt to gravity, she poured herself a cup of coffee and slurped it without glancing up. The medication Dr. Song had prescribed seemed to be helping more than anything that I could do for her.
“Yessiree, get a load of me,” Berry said finally, glancing only at her father. “I don’t know what to make of it. I don’t know what to make of me.” She posed like a supermodel, then plowed into her scrambled eggs.
“Honey?” I said cautiously. “Are you, like, rehearsing a new performance piece?”
“Wends, it’s just Berry,” Freeman said. “No need for an explanation.”
“What? Can’t I be an interested party? Do I have to feign disinterest?”
“You have to give her room to tell us stuff,” Freeman said gently. “You’ve got to be patient with the mysteries.”
“Hel-looo.” Berry waved. “Earth to alien parents. The person you’re discussing just happens to be here, in person. Or she was just a minute ago.” She shoveled some eggs in her mouth, which kept her busy for a time. Freeman and I exchanged generic looks of shame. I picked at my own meal, forgetting to taste it.
Breakfast conversation at a standstill, Berry decided to speak up. “Guys, let me give you some teenage intel: the duds mean nothing. Really. I’m just, like, hunting for a new personality. See? It’s a visual pun.” She jammed more eggs in her mouth, then downed them with coffee.
“And we support that, Berry pie,” said Freeman. “You know that.”
She raised her eyebrows and continued chewing.
“I suppose that you are tired of our support,” I observed wearily. It had only been two months since we’d left the hospital, and Berry and I were still a little awkward with each other. “I mean, I’ve read that some parents overdo it in the support department. We’re supposed to give you room to revolt, room to challenge our assumptions—to provide you with a roadblock you can run through at a hundred miles an hour. I just can’t think of anything to get all hot under the collar about. Can you help us out?” I asked politely.
Berry wrinkled her nose and curled her hands into claws, unaware of how seriously cute she looked. “Grrr!” she said.
“We mean it, sweetheart, do you have any ideas we could run with?”
“You guys want me to help you be bad-ass parents? God help us.” She shot up from the table and, carrying her plate and fork, padded through the kitchen, out the sliding-glass doors of the living room, and past the deck to the secluded hillside that had always been her sanctuary. Her safari clothes would serve her well, I thought.
“I’m a terrible mother,” I said to Freeman, more to keep him at the table than anything.
“Naw, you’re just a mother,” he said. “You’re going to get it coming or going. It comes with the job.”
“But not with your job? Are fathers exempt?”
“Fathers are, you know, recreational. We’re darn good entertainment.” He juggled the salt and pepper shakers. “But mothers? Nooo. Daughters think mothers are the source of everything that’s wrong with the world. Don’t get me wrong, mothers are appreciated later on in life. But most of all, mothers remind daughters that the world is made out of pain, out of icky intimacy and regret. In a word, Wends, they ain’t fun.” He missed the salt shaker on its way down—it hit the floor and broke. Grinning, he rose from his chair and set his plate in the sink, after which he stood over it, pecking at leftovers.
“So I’m not fun,” I said, standing.
“Hey, I think you’re a barrelful of monkeys. Or is it a bowlful of jelly?” He approached me from behind, and held me loosely at the waist.
My breath came shallow and I spun around inside his arms. “You want fun? I got fun right here, pal.” I pointed to my brain.
“What about right here?” he asked, planting a fragile kiss on my lips. “And here.” His mouth pulled on my right ear, then traveled to the taut skin at my neck. Redolent of eggs and coffee, he proceeded to cover my neck with a fresh crop of kisses, each one deeper, more serious. I surrendered just a little, hoping to renounce the ugly bits of malice towards everyone that I’d cultivated over the months.
Giving in to Freeman was a welcome change. Surely he deserved a wife who didn’t find him a fool, and Berry a mother who wasn’t deeply contemptuous of her. What I deserved, I did not know, for kisses have a way of disarming the mind. All too quickly I became enamored of the idea that things would be all right�
��if not immediately then sometime down the road. It’s not that I believed in happy endings; in fact I believed in endings most complicated and undermined, if I believed in endings at all. It was faith that kept me going. There was something else, too, something at the perimeter.
As Freeman kissed me up and down and sideways, a serene, equitable voice sounded in the hollows of my head: None of this is real, you know. Flustered and weak-kneed, I broke free of his embrace. It’s just an inner voice, I told myself—there’s nothing to be concerned about. I was taking daily walks, wasn’t I, and using my sunlamps regularly to ward off the blues. Perhaps I needed a full, twenty-four-hour program of sunlight? Despite my experience with phantasms, I wasn’t a fan of voices without bodies. I can’t imagine who would be.
Visibly concerned, Freeman asked me what was wrong, and like my daughter, I ran off to the backyard deck. I trained my eyes on the seagulls as they hurried east; a storm was coming in fast. Closing my eyes now, I positioned myself against the wind—all that pressure felt good. But the voice spoke again, this time of illusion and reality, of how I’d gotten it all wrong from the very beginning. Illusions are not what they seem, it said.
Jesus, I thought, that’s awfully helpful. And then I whispered into the fierce air: “Mummy, I’m scared.” I didn’t want to entertain voices. I wanted to be like other women: confident, clear-headed.
The next morning, as Freeman showered me with more sweet kisses, the voice was tougher, more insistent: Your feelings of doubt are illusions. Shock waves rolled through me. I wasn’t aware of any illusions I had about my feelings. My feelings were my feelings, not really open to interpretation. Yes, they were ephemeral, but their authenticity could not be challenged. My feelings, no matter how upsetting or uncooperative, belonged to me alone. I wanted the voice to go away.
The voice defied analysis—insinuating and precise, I could not identify it. As it was neither male nor female, I couldn’t implicate Jason Hook or ascribe it to some advice-giving ghost of Great-Nana. This left me nowhere. After a lifetime of considering and then fending off the idea that I was bonkers, I had to concede that hearing voices capped it. A common symptom of schizophrenia, auditory hallucinations were not to be taken lightly. Thankfully, no smell or taste accompanied the voice. But I became agitated even as it told me: You are not under attack. You are not under attack.
I reported these episodes to no one. Daddy had spent a small fortune treating the spurious ills of the Darlings, and for the first time in years we were endeavoring to cope without the services of specialists or gurus. Mummy had canceled an exorbitant round of something called feminology therapy, opting instead for a monthly freebie from Dr. Pease, really a date with therapeutic pretensions. The two of them spent their one night out a month at the Punch Line comedy club in the city, after which they’d hit the bars.
As outpatients of Herrick, Berry and I were still obligated to see Dr. Song on a biweekly basis. When I’d explained that Daddy was no longer splurging on our psyches, Song had offered us a two-for-one deal in “the true spirit of family pathology.” We should have been grateful, I knew, but Berry and I were beginning to tire of our own stories.
During my private sessions with Song, I opened up only as much as I deemed prudent. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about “the voice” for fear of being interned in the hospital again. Song knew that I hadn’t fully recovered from my breakdown—who ever does?—but she was giving me the benefit of a very substantial doubt, and I didn’t want to disappoint.
The voice persisted. It’s not that it grew louder over the weeks; rather it started to make a kind of sense. Or perhaps I began to allow its logic to take hold. By now you know that I’d spent my childhood imprisoned in a tower of extremely fluffy ideas; and by ideas I don’t mean the island or the boy, but the notion that I’d been deserted, that my life was postponed until a certain somebody dropped by (or my father decided he wanted me). This notion had not served me well, but I’d clung to it like a raft and it had rewarded me with a great deal of uncertainty, not to mention an overblown sense of entitlement. Like most children, I told myself I was special. Never mind that this flew in the face of the facts: an AWOL father, a preoccupied mother, a mirage for a boyfriend. But specialness, the very concept, functions like food; it keeps boys and girls going long after they’ve been stranded. Plus, it’s an adjunct to the second most popular notion: that children are left alone because they’re not special. These two feelings—specialness and worthlessness—can feed a whole life. I know because I’ve had my fill of both.
The voice worked overtime to get my attention. I was genuinely stumped: if one’s feelings are only illusions, what does a person hold on to? My feelings had always been my compass, my one sure way to determine direction. Now if that compass was on the fritz, this left only objectivity (and everybody knows how dangerous that is). I couldn’t steer a course with objectivity. Could I?
My thoughts turned to Mother. I’d never understood why she’d turned against men when it was her mother, not her father, who had deserted her. Instead she’d spent a lifetime protecting the very idea of females—in her estimation they were sacred. Margaret had placed her own mother, Jane, in a golden circle of immunity to ward off any attack Mummy might mount on her own. And while Mother railed against men in her self-help books, reducing them to amoebas or bricks, she dated them serially.
It was then I realized that I’d been so obsessed with Mummy’s behavior, I’d never stopped to consider the hurt that drove it. All my life, I had struggled to separate my antipathy for Margaret Darling from my admiration for her. Surely her success in the absence of a mother was impressive: she’d transformed her hurt into something bigger than pain, something that inspired thousands of women. It wasn’t her fault that she’d failed to inspire me.
It’s the oldest story, a lonely child churning in the wake of a parent’s narcissism—a child in the wrong place at all times. But I wasn’t a mistake: Dr. Song had told me that daughters are meant to live out the drama of their mothers’ subconscious, to implement their dreams. Whether we can wriggle free of this responsibility—that’s what I’m asking. Somewhere in the cracks of Margaret Darling’s ego—between the books and the men—I do believe she loved me. I also believe I terrified her.
One late evening Mummy telephoned in a snit; she’d meditated for hours, she reported, but couldn’t purge her mind of “what had gone down” earlier that day. I was not in the mood for this: I’d just limped through the door after attending a marathon Berkeley City Council session. After five hours they’d issued a proclamation making our little community a “Nuclear-Free Zone.” Appointed to the Nomenclature Committee, I’d proposed the phrase “nuclear-clear,” but no one had noticed the redundancy or found it remotely funny. I’d had my own snit about “why they engage a writer’s services if they don’t want wit, if they don’t want elegance?”
Making light of my fatigue with a directive to “drink some Red Zinger, dear,” Mother explained that she’d spoken at noon to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco—the chosen topic, cherishment. The panel discussion had been taped by C-SPAN, and transcripts were available by mail order. Sharing the panel with Mother had been another self-anointed savant in the self-help field, as well as a truly world-class psychologist—it was the latter who’d brought up a study of Japanese children, the results of which showed they harbor an unusually high expectation to be adored. The psychologist maintained that this expectation was the right of all children. “Bollocks!” Mother had exploded on the dais, then failed to explain why. All worked up and fanning her papers, she added: “If anything, children expect to be ignored.”
“I notice your own daughter is absent today,” the esteemed psychologist said, smiling at the audience.
“My daughter is an adult,” Mummy shot back. “She has her own life.”
“Of course she does,” he assured her.
“So, is it true?” Mummy asked me now. I could hear the click of her stiletto-heeled boot
s as she paced in her studio apartment. “Is that why you didn’t come to hear me?”
“Well,” I said, rationing my words, “it’s true I have my own life.”
“I knew it!” Mother cried out.
“But it’s also true I didn’t have the slightest inkling you were speaking today.”
“It was in the papers, dearest,” Mother said. “You had only to look.”
“And the purpose of this call is?” I asked mock-sweetly.
“If you don’t come, Wends, they’ll think we have problems.”
“We do have problems, Mummy.” I poured myself a glass of water.
“I mean, they’ll think I’m a sad excuse for a mother. They never even wonder if the daughters are sad excuses!”
“What are you saying, Mother? Because I really have to go. I have my own delusions to attend to.” I was pacing now with the water glass, sloshing water on the blue floor tiles.
“Your own delusions. Very funny, Wends. Do you hear me laughing?” She paused to take in air. “I’m saying that daughters have a responsibility to cherish their mothers, too.”
“But I do,” I said, suppressing a shiver. “Believe me, Mummy, I do.”
“Well, I didn’t,” she snapped. “And look what happened to me.”
In the silence following this bombshell, I took a seat at the kitchen table. Did Mummy have something to do with her mother Jane’s disappearance? The thought had never occurred to me. Removing the barrette that held back my hair, I used it to scratch my full name—Wendy Amelia Darling Braverman Ullman—in the soft, worn wood of the table. I could hear Mother scratching too, perhaps taking notes on a pad of paper. Desperate to move on to a new subject, I began debating with her the merits of ER versus Chicago Hope. Mother reluctantly went along with this distraction. After five minutes of mildly heated rhetoric, we established that she preferred ER with its main squeeze George Clooney and I preferred Chicago Hope with its manic-in-residence Mandy Patinkin. She thanked me for the phone call and suggested that its contents would show up in a future chapter of a future book.
