The Stardust Lounge

by Deborah Digges

  “Don't worry—we'll figure it out. It'll be all right in the end,” I say, thinking to let this cup pass from them. They continue to write and call, voice their support, and offer help, but I become evasive.

  I am afraid. My identification with my son and my feelings of responsibility for his behavior are strong. I am ashamed.

  How can I tell my good sisters, with their young sweet children, about the things Stephen is doing? Daily I navigate by shame that carries me far away from my son and my family. Surely any child who behaves this way has a mother who has done something wrong. What wrong? Something, something very wrong.

  It's been years, anyway, since I've been home. I've lost touch with my family. I've been finishing graduate degrees, writing, divorcing, remarrying, moving my children with me across country, overseas to London, and back again. My life has taken a course different from my sisters'.

  I battle guilt from my smugness, personal and cultural, that confuses and paralyzes me: in my mother's and sisters’ eyes, certainly in my eyes, my son Charles has “turned out fine.” That was my doing, wasn't it? He is a good young man now in his first year of college, an excellent student with friends he is proud to bring home, wonderful, polite boys who call me “Mrs. Digges,” who carry my groceries from the car, open doors for me, boys whose company I thoroughly enjoy This is because of my good mothering of Charles, right?

  Then what about Stephen? Why is he so troubled? Why does he act out in this way? How can two sons of the same mother and father be so different? These are the questions that make me angry. I believe that Stephen is intentionally challenging me and I want him to stop. I want all this trouble to stop. I actually believe that he can stop it.

  After all. Look at all I've done for him. Think of how when he was tiny I carried him everywhere against my heart in a Snugli. How many nights I rocked him through his colic, slept with him next to me, forwent school and sports events with his brother because he was sick, or fussy, or tired?

  The time he was choking, just as he began to lose consciousness, I was the one who reached down his throat with my finger and pulled out that piece of a toy. And who built for him with my own hands skate ramps, read to him every night, coached his Little League team, who, who…

  I hate hearing myself say these things, but I say them, as if to abdicate, to place the blame where it belongs. I detest this vision of myself. I tell myself viciously that I am a walking cliche of the bad mother, a bad mother, bad mother. I am brutal with myself and a shrew to Stephen.

  I am someone I never imagined, an isolated, bitter, defensive mother navigating by shame the deep waters of her son's adolescence, a changeling so different from the woman with a baby on her hip, walking with her mother and sisters, older son, nieces, and nephews to fill bags full of cherries, bags that will be left in rental cars, in airports, or actually carried home, pitted, and made into a pie.

  Cherry juice stains the dress she will travel in, stains that, laughing, she shows to her sisters as the children hold up their hands, sticky with cherry juice and the rich sap from the tree. Carrying her Stephen, she is capable, happy. She is a good mother, like her sisters a fierce mother, and her children will therefore be good, smart, educated, caring, successful—better people, no doubt, than she.

  Fall, 1992

  The first week of the ninth grade in Amherst, Stephen is once again in trouble. Stan and I get the call around eleven on a Friday evening. We've been preparing to get in the car to go and look for Stephen, who was supposed to be home by ten. We've been lingering in the kitchen, hoping he might walk in.

  Stan's tired. He arrived in Amherst about dinnertime, having driven up from Maryland for the weekend.

  “Guess what.” He shakes his head as he hangs up the phone. “We ought to let him sit out the night in jail.” Stan picks up his car keys and heads out the door.

  Alone in the house for a few minutes I'm dizzy with disappointment. How can this be? I slide down the wall and put my head in my hands, thinking, searching the screens inside my head for an image, a mooring. When the car pulls in the driveway, I brace myself.

  The scene that is about to take place is predictable. I detest its familiarity, Stephen stonewalling Stan and me, me following Stephen up to his room, pleading, trying to make contact, Stephen turning with accusations and profanity. Then Stan, thinking to come to my rescue, getting between us, insisting, “You can't talk to your mother this way!”

  In this tiresome drama, how well we know our parts.

  Tonight there is one notable exception.

  As a rigid Stephen, rubbing his recently cuffed wrists, walks in the door, G.Q., our new English bulldog puppy, runs right over to him, jumps up on his leg, and wriggles and whines with happiness, G.Q., who couldn't care less about the events of the evening, about open and sealed records, lawyers, court dates.

  The puppy's joy interrupts the well-worn script we are each ready to play out. G. is so excited to see Stephen that he relents, stops the rubbing of his wrists and picks up the dog. We can't help but drop our guard a bit in surprise.

  “Still—” Stan's heavy brows are knit frighteningly “We've got to deal with this.”

  But GQ. is licking Stephen's face, slobbering with joy Stephen tries to stifle a grin. Holding the dog close to his chest he steers him—as a weapon, it might appear, or a shield. He turns his head from side to side, trying to avoid G's enormous wet tongue. Stephen and his dog make their way between Stan and me and head up to Stephen's room.

  “Follow him,” Stan urges, his voice tinged with helplessness.

  “Wait,” I say. “Let it go for tonight.”

  “But we've got to deal with this! We've got to deal with it now. He's out of control.”

  While Stan is yet excited, focused, intense, I feel an unstoppable draining of energy. Stan is trying to do the right thing, the way he knows, the way we know, though it fails us over and over.

  We believe that to do the right thing means to confront Stephen, make him understand what he's done wrong, and then resolve this episode as best we can.

  Then we must try like hell to regain our control.

  Control, yes, this is the modus operandi. We must regain control of this kid, where he goes, who he talks to, with whom, for how long, etc.

  We've already taken sanctions toward this end.

  Every night at ten o'clock Stephen must unplug the phone extension in his room and deliver it to us. This particular sanction was enacted when, getting up to let the puppy out one night about 5:00 A.M., I heard Stephen talking and laughing.

  Not only had he been on the phone all night, but when we received our first phone bill, it was clear Stephen was running up huge long-distance charges.

  We took control by putting a long-distance block on the line, demanding that Stephen unplug the phone in his room and deliver it to us every night at ten. Then we grounded Stephen for two weeks during which the three of us drove around the New England countryside, Stan and I ogling the scenery, Stephen in the backseat, his eyes closed, his Walkman leaking a hiss and rumble as he listened to rap.

  But soon we would learn that we had overlooked a few details regarding the phone. As they came to our attention, we corrected them too.

  We'd overlooked the fact that Stephen could—and did—borrow a substitute phone. Returning the official phone to us each night, he went back to his room, rooted out the contraband phone from its hiding place and plugged it in.

  And though we had put a block against outgoing longdistance calls—except when using a special numerical code that Stan and I, like spies, memorized and repeated back to each other in our locked car, promising never, ever to write the code down or breathe word of it, or dial it in Stephen's presence—we'd failed to block long-distance calls coming in.

  “That's a different kind of block,” the AT&T operator explained to us. “It's not included with a direct-dial block. They're two different blocks, each with a separate fee that will appear on your phone bill.”

 
; “If I were to choose one,” she continued, warming up to us when we didn't argue with her about the two fees, “I'd choose the collect-call block. Collect calls are more expensive than direct-dial, you know. Much more expensive.”

  “We know,” we answered, Stan on the downstairs extension, I on the upstairs. “We'll take both.”

  “So much for the honor system,” said Stan over the dead line, quoting the method of choice suggested to us by Stephen's former therapist.

  “Ha!” I punctuated as we hung up and met in the kitchen for celebratory drinks.

  But tonight we've lost our humor as we stand in the kitchen racking our brains for a course of action, “That will get this kid in line,” I say.

  “And keep him there.” Stan finishes my sentence.

  In light of the last few years, the recent phone scam, and the events of this night, we feel that we have every right to forgo Dr. Mike's advice of putting Stephen on the honor system.

  At this moment we both debunk all the child psychology nonsense we've been feeding on: the Erikson, even the Bettleheim, as we remember grueling, interminable therapy sessions we've sat through—a mute, sullen teenager on one hand and a pompous Dr. So-and-so on the other. We remember our hope following these sessions, how each time that hope set us up for disappointment.

  “I read a piece in the Times the other day,” Stan interrupts our silence. “It was about a father whose teenage daughter kept sneaking out to do drugs. Then she'd come home sick or out of it. She wouldn't go to school. One night she overdosed and he rushed her to the hospital.

  “The hospital staff and the police gave her a choice of rehabilitation or jail. She chose the former. While she was away the father prowled the streets at night looking for the dealer.”

  “Did he get him?” I ask.

  “No luck,” Stan continues. “But before the girl came home from the hospital he installed more locks, nailed her window shut, and put up bars.”

  “There you go.”

  “Wait—her first night home from rehab she wanted to go out. Said she was going and no one could stop her. The father got out some chains and a padlock he'd recently purchased and had been keeping in his closet. He chained the girl to the stove.”

  “How?” I ask. “Where did he chain her?”

  “Her ankles, I think.”

  “Like hobbling a horse,” I offer.

  “Yes, and then, I guess, to the stove. Then he moved her bed into the kitchen, all her books and school materials. The chain was long enough that she could move about pretty freely. She could even take a shower,” Stan adds, as if to hold up the father's excellent calculations of the length of the chain in deference to his daughter's needs.

  Stan watches as I imagine the scene—a girl dragging her chains into a shower stall, turning on the faucets. A girl in chains cooking supper, reading a book, doing math, or writing a paper. In chains, yes. Doing drugs. No.

  “Did it work?” I say.

  “He kept her from going out for more than a week. But one day he forgot to unplug the phone and put it out of reach and she called the police.”

  “Rats,” I say. “Busted.” We look at each other, then gaze, baffled, out into the dark.

  We are no longer surprised with ourselves for our mutual consent to behaviors such as the father's, or of any parents we hear of whose desperate attempts at control are meant to keep their children from harm.

  As we linger in our new kitchen, I'm noticing how thin Stan has become, his shirt and shorts loosely fitting his frame. Who could have told us, when we married seven years ago, that our lives would descend into this hell otherwise known as Stephen's adolescence, into one crisis after another with this child, at first just little things, complaints now and then from his teachers, his grades dropping in one subject, then another, then another.

  Then the move to the Park School, where at first he appeared to apply himself, renew his hope and pride in things as we renewed our hopes in him and in ourselves as parents, only to have them dashed as street gangs infiltrated our world, as charges were brought against him, restraining orders brought to our door, cops to our door, guns.

  When Stephen's own terror took hold of him now and again, when he wept in despair in our arms—just when we thought he might turn around now—he'd run away, disappear, come home, weep, threaten suicide, run again.

  Sweeping his hand through his hair, Stan leans against the sink. We can hear the cicadas in the back trees as the late September night smells drift in the kitchen—wet wood and the first downed leaves.

  Something in Stan has given up. I know it beyond my own dim sadness. As we move through the house now, shutting doors and turning off the lights, I try to remember the last time Stan woke me in the middle of the night to read me a poem he had just written, or I woke him to read a passage I'd just found in Keats's letters, or a passage from Hopkins or Akhmatova.

  What had we thought, anyway? What had we believed our lives would be like after our marriage? I suspect we thought, like many parents, that my sons would grow up under our enlightened care and everything would be fine.

  We believed that our parenting was superior, that we were, without a doubt, better parents than our own had been to us. We'd vowed not to make the mistakes they did, mistakes we often picked out and highlighted and discussed so rationally.

  And we believed that our lives as writers, lives punctuated by travel, by liberal, ecumenical notions of culture and society, by our moves to this or that university to teach, by our stays in Europe, the boys attending school there—that all these experiences would have positive effects on our children.

  Though Stephen's behaviors were hard on everyone, what was hardest on Stan and me these days was the fact that rationale and reason seemed trivial now, dizzyingly earnest. Our once sacred belief in the honor system had become a joke. Now, instead of judging our parents, certainly culture at large, for old-fashioned—indeed we'd often called them cruel—approaches to child rearing, we were looking to those approaches for answers.

  Neither of us raised an eyebrow when one or the other fell into the doomed cadences of that's the way my parents did it…

  As recently as two years ago Stan would likely not have paid much attention to the article in the Times, or if he had, he would have noticed it only to shake his head at what he thought to be a father's stupid brutality toward a daughter.

  The quality I loved best about Stan was his benevolence, his stand against oppression. During the Vietnam War he'd been a conscientious objector. During our courting he had written me, I'll do everything I can to befriend and father to your boys.

  I look down at my shabby T-shirt and jeans, my dirty bare feet. Stan falls onto our bed fully clothed, sighs, and closes his eyes. He is used up by the first weeks of intense teaching and the commutes from Maryland to Massachusetts, where he is greeted by an anxious mother and an angry stepson.

  “I'm sorry about this,” I say as I lie down next to him.

  “Sorry for what?” He stirs. “You didn't do anything.”

  “I know but—”

  “But what. You were going to say, ‘It's my kid.’ “

  “Uh-huh. Sorry,” I say again, this time for making the distinction.

  “Night,” he sighs.

  In the morning he wakes me with a note he has found from Stephen taped to the fridge. I'm leaving for good, it reads. Don't try to find me.

  Stan is fully dressed. He has showered and put on fresh clothes. I see his backpack stuffed and ready at the foot of the bed.

  “I can't do this anymore,” he says as I sit up and shake myself fully awake. “I'm sorry.”

  Stan hands me a mug of coffee and smooths my hair.

  “Take my advice and call the police and let them deal with him. When you do, let me know.

  “And by the way,” Stan adds as he readies to leave. “It seems Stephen took the dog with him, and a bag of dog food. And your car.”

  Stephen kissing G.Q.

  Fall, 1983
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br />   We're dancing. The boys take turns being my partner as we dance to the spinet organ playing “Shine on Harvest Moon,” and peppy versions of “Harbor Lights,” “I'll Remember You,” “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Stephen likes to plant his little feet on mine—we sidestep the maze of cables, hobble and sway across the cafe's bright linoleum.

  When thirteen-year-old Charles cuts in, he places his hand on my hip and concentrates on the floor. He has just outgrown me in height and we are startled by this new perspective that renders both of us a bit shy.

  His height surprises us and sadly reminds me that just now we are separated, Charles living with his father in Columbia, Stephen and I in Iowa City.

  I have to lean away from him because the brim of his Stetson keeps grazing my forehead. If I swing to the snare drum beat a little too enthusiastically, Charles looks panicked. So we step deliberately, meet each other's eyes, and smile.

  This Friday night, like so many others, we planned to meet at our usual spot halfway between Columbia and Iowa City—the Bloomfield, Iowa, town square—so that Stephen could spend time with his father, and Charles with me.

  But my Volkswagen threw a rod in Ottumwa, a town short of our destination. After calling a tow truck from a phone booth, calling Columbia regarding our situation, I carried six-year-old Stephen piggyback along the highway, our heads down against the November wind gusting off the fields on either side of us. We made our way toward the only establishment open now, toward the shuddering pink neon rainbow of the Stardust Lounge.

  The boys’ father occupies a table just off the dance floor. When we catch him looking at his watch again we wave. He throws us a resigned smile.

  The evening our car breaks down in Ottumwa, it is the last night of the town's bowling league tournament. Teams are gathering at the Stardust Lounge for a celebration.

  Sure enough, the boys’ young stepmother, Terri, had relayed my message to Charles and his father. They'd waited nearly an hour in Bloomfield, then phoned to discover we were marooned in Ottumwa and came ahead.