by Laurie Fox
“Oh, really?” I said. “What’s the title?”
“Well, it’s my most elementary title yet. I don’t want to alienate readers.”
“You? Never,” I said. “So, spill it. What’s the title?”
“Well, if you must force it out of me, it’s Mothers, Daughters.”
“Oh. Oh, shit, Mummy. Carolyn See already used that title and her book is a classic. Why don’t you just reverse the order? You know, Daughters, Mothers?”
“God, no. That wouldn’t be right. Mothers must come first.”
“Of course,” I said, and bade her good night. With the edge of my barrette I nicked at the word Darling until it was unrecognizable. AS Freeman began to take more time out from his duties at Sky-walker and Fantasy to spend with the family, I’m afraid I met him less than halfway. Privately I blamed my aloofness on the voice, whose catchphrases continued to consume me and undermine my every thought: You are not under attack. Your feelings of dread are illusions. I could hardly focus on a husband. When he swooped down upon me like an amiable Count Dracula, I waved him away with a dish towel; when he climbed into bed at night for small talk or a snuggle, I stuttered appreciatively, then turned out the light. You could call this lack of interest a spiritual crisis, or, more economically, a depression, but I preferred to see it as a calling, for something was surely calling me away.
Berry took Freeman’s presence in the house for what it was—charity—and she exploited the attention in the way adolescents often do, holing up in her room or hanging with a small group of friends. Even in my fog, I saw that these friends held more fascination for her than parents ever could. First, they were flaming weirdos. And second, they were into the latest music and books and clothes and drugs.
Ever since Berry had taken her fall and then muffled the effects with medication, she’d been hell-bent on discovering an altered state that was good to her. For this I couldn’t fault her; I was even a tad jealous. So when she began showing up at the dinner table glassy-eyed and leaden, though I should have blown the whistle, I held back. Yes, I was concerned, perhaps even anguished, but I was tired of playing the heavy. And I was desperate to get back into her good graces. Besides, Berry had never been so relaxed. Didn’t she deserve a vacation from her four-alarm self?
They say that pleasant drugs lead to unpleasant ones. But I didn’t feel qualified to demand that Berry “just say no”—not as long as I entertained voices. That didn’t seem fair. Instead I watched my daughter from a remove. She seemed happier than she’d been in years, if a little fuzzy around the edges. I’m sure it was just pot; I wanted to be sure.
Freeman, on the other hand, was furious. Given that his range of emotions ran from genial to ecstatic, I wasn’t accustomed to fury and wondered now if he might implode or, more practically, compose a frenzied piece on the electric guitar. Instead he took to sulking, staring holes in Berry’s forehead, and, presumedly, her resolve. At times I fooled myself into believing that steam rose from his ears and mouth, and imagined his jaw getting stuck as it jutted out like a shelf. When his sulking failed to get a rise out of Berry, Freeman began to lecture her, talking mostly to himself. The more he pressed her to “lose faith in other people’s drugs and believe in your own creativity”—as though creativity could save her like some old-time religion—the more she set her own course of action. She began to stay out late at clubs on the flatlands of Berkeley, returning home only after we’d gone to bed. She’d always had the outlaw clothes and attitude, but now she had the joints to go with them, and a couple of friends who had driver’s licenses.
One friend in particular, a girl named Cody, proved particularly galling. She’d been in and out of the hospital much like Berry, but with far less imagination; in fact, she fully expected to make return visits as a badge of her coolness. The soup of drugs that Cody had legally acquired, she used to cement friendships, and so it was that Berry became a recipient of Cody’s “kindness.” Berry liked Cody well enough, though they had little in common besides mental illness (which Berry preferred to downplay). The thing was, Berry rightly picked up on Cody’s need to be sicker than the others in their group, and let her do her thing. The two hung out together on a very slender premise: that the hurt they felt so keenly inside pretty much defined everything about life. Nothing more need be said.
Cody was a shaggy thing. Her haircut was a relic, a real seventies shag, and the centerpiece of her wardrobe was a sixties suede jacket a.k.a. “a mangy mass of fringe I inherited from my mother.” What she considered hip appeared to my eyes as sad, almost desperate. Even so, Cody was a girl of obvious intelligence who’d decided to dress herself in bitterness and conceit—to the extent that not even my Berry could keep up with her.
It wasn’t entirely Cody’s fault. Her mother, a Greenpeace activist, had graced the headlines repeatedly with her virtuous piracy on the open seas. Cody’s father, a professor of biology at Stanford, was even more notorious: a distinguished AIDS researcher with a theory so creative and unpopular that his department had shuttled him off to Paris. While both parents’ work was admirable, even Nobel Prize–worthy, their actions took them far away from their daughter. In response, Cody, who must have recognized that she was Stanford material herself, took to the streets of Berkeley, where, like so many young people, she could get support for her worldview. She called this view “dystopian” but I recognized it right away as supremely pissed off. Hers was as universal a conviction as there ever was.
Berry’s other main accomplice was Drew, a gentle “Goth” who wore a black velvet cape, enjoyed Broadway show tunes, and collected neglected teddy bears. Unlike most Goths, who tend towards the skeletal, Drew was a portly boy—“You don’t have to be a waif to have a dark soul,” he told me. Surprisingly free of irony, Drew smiled easily, his lips outlined in ice-blue lipstick. But he boiled over at the slightest provocation. Aware of his short temper, Berry and Cody pressed every button they could find, and even invented some new ones. I confess that I didn’t understand this infighting—why create problems, I asked. The girls just snickered and said they were “un-shackling Drew from society’s expectations of jolly heavy people.” A euphemism for being mean, I thought, but kept my mouth shut.
In an effort to keep Berry home one night in August, we invited Cody and Drew over for al fresco dining on the backyard deck. Though Berry called the ploy “obvious and lame,” she participated in a big way, even coming up with the menu. On hand were tofu burgers, which she’d shaped earlier in the day into the initials of her friends and one massive patty that took the form of a well-endowed woman. This wasn’t sexist, she pointed out, as long as a girl had created it. I raised one eyebrow and Freeman raised two, but when it came time to eat, we both wrangled for the zaftig burger. On the menu, too, were a mesclun salad poignantly dressed with yellow wildflowers and a pineapple Jell-O mold with floating candy corn. Apparently “mellow yellow” was the evening’s theme, a fact that didn’t register until dessert, when Berry brought out banana splits for everyone. Each banana was accompanied by two scoops of mango sherbet, not on top, but placed strategically on each side in a phallic arrangement that drew helpless titters from Cody and Drew. I would have laughed too, if Berry’s scream hadn’t cut into the gaiety like a scythe.
She stood fixed at the edge of the deck, staring up at the black helmet of a sky that was punctured by a sole, winking star.
“What is it?” I said. “What now?” The “now” was involuntary and thus regrettable.
Berry turned around to face the picnic table, then ran at me full bore, her hands reaching out to strangle something. Freeman had to act fast to draw her off me, but she continued howling and clawing at the air.
At this Cody issued tinny, birdlike screeches and Drew clutched himself like a pillow. “You’re not helping,” I told them. But it was obvious that an alarm had sounded in their heads and I didn’t have the means to turn it off. My body shook badly. I know I had hurt my own mother and now, it seemed, my daughter wanted to
hurt me; a couple of her nails had even scored my neck and it was bleeding.
Freeman continued to restrain Berry, whispering assurances in her ear. Once her breathing stabilized, she tried opening her mouth, but nothing came out.
“Ber, please,” I said, maintaining my distance. “What did you see? What did you hear?”
“That’s just it,” she said finally, addressing only her friends. “I don’t see anything. I don’t hear anything. My parents are so fucking creative that they’ve sucked up every image and idea there is. There’s nothing left.” She pointed to the unilluminated sky. “See? Null and void.”
Cody, whose screeches had been in competition with Berry’s, now ran to her friend and grabbed her arm. “It’s cool, B. Let’s go home.”
“She is home,” Freeman said, and pushed Cody away. Drew remained silent, holding his belly and rocking in place.
“Time to say good night, Cody,” I said, hand still protecting my neck.
“B, listen to me,” Cody pleaded. “Your mother’s right. It’s time to book.”
Berry released herself mechanically into her friend’s arms and together they stumbled into the living room and out the front door. Drew, whose cream-colored Volvo was parked in the driveway, emerged from his protective trance and began shuffling through the house in the direction of the girls. At the door he turned around to face us and, with the most impeccable manners, said: “Thank you, Mr. Ullman and Ms. Darling. I had a really good time. And the meal was excellent.”
When Freeman offered to drive them all somewhere, Drew assured us that he was “all there” and pointed to his head. Then he joined the girls in the car, and they sped off. Freeman and I were left at the door with no words to say to each other and no idea of where to begin. If this wasn’t being under attack, I don’t know what is.
IN the weeks that followed, Berry began humming a cold, discordant tune, one that spirited her away from us and onto the streets, far from the comforts of home. I found this unacceptable—she belonged to us and with us. Wasn’t that obvious?
Freeman and I had always been unsettled by the waves of unwashed children squatting on the avenues. Only now we understood that these “disposable” children were our daughters and our sons, and not all of them have been slapped or abused—in spite of their parents’ shortcomings, many have been loved to pieces. Alas, it’s the pieces that haven’t come together, and time is running out.
Berry soon discovered that the street gave her unlimited power, or so she believed. Again, I don’t think there’s anything that Freeman and I could have done differently. While, in the early years, we might have focused more exclusively on Berry or, God knows, been a tad less permissive, I believe that she came into the world ready to raise hell. I also believe that love was hers to uncover, again and again, whenever she went looking for it.
This isn’t to say that Freeman didn’t blame me—just a little. While he was a man with a formidable imagination, he just couldn’t imagine that he’d had a hand in this; on the contrary, he made me out to be some sort of wacko who’d sent our daughter packing.
My entire life, I had never been much of a drinker, choosing not to truck with realities that were alternative to the island; but if ever there was a time to pick up a new habit, now looked good. A margarita or two each night seemed harmless in light of what had happened to my life. As a countermeasure, Freeman began to retreat, as was his habit, into a world of reverb and timbre, suggesting that my drinking was proof of my guilt. “My life is proof of my guilt!” I screamed over the phone one night when he was working late. After a long pause and the crunching of corn chips, he said: “Go write yourself a little story, Wends. One that ends well. No, let me rephrase that: one that ends.”
You might think that talk like this was cruel, but I knew he was right.
The first time that Berry left us, she stayed away a week. The night of our outdoor dinner, Freeman and I spotted her on Telegraph Avenue, sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk with a group of young people in various states of decomposing denim; two of them cuddled large cats in their laps. We waved from our car and made all sorts of vague promises: “We’ll be good! We’ll be better! No more therapy!” But it was not to be and we went home empty-handed. Frantic, we began making morning, noon, and nighttime drive-bys, if only to ensure that our daughter was eating and taking her prescription medication. On each occasion, we called out to Berry, solicitations that too quickly turned shrill. Invariably we were met with the clinking of coins in metal cups that the kids shook in our faces. “Pay for your sins!” one severe boy cried. After five days of increasingly desperate entreaties to get our daughter back, I sent Mummy out on reconnaissance. While she was famously unstable herself, we thought her eccentricity might buy entrée into more extreme social circles. Like me, Mummy recognized the street urchins as urban cousins of the Lost Boys and accorded them a nobility that evaded most adults.
The first time Margaret Darling showed up on the Avenue, Berry shooed her away, insisting that she was “mega cool.” When Mummy showed up a second time with a tray of cappuccinos, she was invited to hover with the gang in front of Moe’s Books. In a matter of minutes, Mother was regarded by the group as something of an elder freak, a matriarch who demanded respect. She gave out chewable vitamin Cs and zinc tablets to anyone who held out his or her hand; lip glosses were awarded the young women who crowded around her. Emboldened, Mummy took the opportunity to read from The Pan Pathology, ingratiating herself with the females of the tribe. When she arrived at the Darling chestnut, “Males don’t mature, they just get worn out,” one of the older boys grabbed the book from her hands and began ripping out its pages. “We’re gonna use this thing for tampons and snot rags,” he proclaimed, proving at least part of her point.
When it came time for Mother to cart Berry home in her Ford Galaxie, Berry wouldn’t budge. “Hell, no, I won’t go!” Berry chanted. Mother explained how vulgar that sounded, that certain protests are practically holy. “What’s vulgar is you making out like a teenager,” Berry snorted, which sent chills up Mother’s spine. Of course Berry was right: Mummy was no longer a member of this club, not since she’d left the Boys of The Neverland for those on the Mainland. “You stinker,” was all Mother could say; she wasn’t referring to Berry’s hygiene but it was too late. Berry spit on the ground and told her grandmother to “please fuck off.”
The next morning we asked the Berkeley Police Department to pick up our daughter, with instructions “not to humiliate.” By 4 P.M., Berry was returned to us like a UPS package, a little bent and waterlogged, but with all the parts there. For the rest of the day she sequestered her thinning body in her bedroom, refusing to speak. But she didn’t object to the take-out chicken salad and coleslaw we set at her door. Or to the video of Alien.
DURING Berry’s age of homelessness—how I wish I could call it a phase—the voice that followed me around like a dog suddenly went silent. As a source of wisdom the voice had already failed me, for my feelings no longer seemed illusory in the least: I was panicked about losing my daughter and nothing could change that. The more gradual loss of my husband troubled me, too, but I’d grown accustomed to Freeman’s relaxed sense of time and obligation, and had learned to chew quietly on my regret.
My indifference to his kisses didn’t help—as I have noted, kisses had always worked in the past when Freeman couldn’t find the words to make things right, or good. He wondered now if I was sick in an old-fashioned way (cancer, heart disease, consumption) or perhaps in a newfangled one (chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, lupus). Despite being surrounded by head cases, he never had had a feel for the psychological, the mental. He was a sensate guy through and through.
At a loss for how to live in the world of problems, Freeman fell back on what had always worked for him. On a balmy Monday afternoon I found him parading around our redwood deck, shirtless, barefoot, bandana tied round his forehead, and sporting his lowest slung jeans. He was wailing away on his Stratocaster, his amp blastin
g the sound all the way to Marin County. I recognized the song as one of Hendrix’s—“The Wind Cries Mary.” The noise was deafening; I wish I could tell you it was beautiful.
With all the decibels shattering the air I couldn’t concentrate on my writing; some new parable about a rabbit’s swift decline had been circling in the sink of my mind for days. I tried listening to some of my own music with the volume turned up, but the Hendrix rocketed through the walls of the house. I tried wearing headphones. I tried eating foods that fortified me: Grape-Nuts doused with half-and-half, a whole wheel of smoked Gouda. But Freeman’s guitar-playing had become all-powerful—it peeled the paint off the walls, it scraped the very bones of my head.
Wendy, hold on, I told myself. You know you love his music. But my love couldn’t change the tyranny of the sound. Furious now about having to look after two children, I stomped into the walk-in closet we called the library, and scanned the shelves for some novel that would transport me. Oddly, it was a nonfiction book that called to me, a book of Mummy’s. I pulled it from the shelf and held it up to the light like a rare gem.
The Pan Pathology, Margaret Darling’s first effort and the book that had put her on the map, had also received the most ridicule. While lauded for dissecting “the problem of the puer aeternus,” the book had been criticized for failing to offer a solution. Yet the readers who flocked to it had recognized themselves writ large in its pages and felt confirmed, felt seen. It’s a big deal being seen, and Mother had helped a whole generation of women cope with their growth-arrested partners. While, through the years, I’d heard her talk animatedly about this book, I had never read a single page. To do so seemed criminal. I would have to admit that men were problems, and I had never been ready for that. To my mind, men were beautiful enigmas, not something to be solved.
I carried the book to our breakfast table and with the chords of “Foxy Lady” underscoring each paragraph, I read from Mummy’s most scandalous work. I had to admit she was a marvelous writer—each sentence packed a punch and was elegant to boot. Her outrage and her humor were one and the same, and I felt a kinship with the writing and the writer. Occasionally Mummy went too far: “Men may be lovable turds, but in the end they must be flushed.” More often, though, she made fun of her own lack of subtlety. I found it interesting that Mummy was an absolutist whereas I was seduced by doubt, and wondered if Mummy’s certainty had somehow drained my own confidence. And then I chanced upon a page that was empty, save for one sentence in boldface:
