The Bleeding Heart

by Marilyn French

  And maybe they would have been, except for the time—it was the late sixties when we moved, 1968 to be exact. The school was torn by racial strife, late-sixties rhetoric, even bomb scares. And riddled with drugs of all sorts. The bigotry of the school administration served to legitimate attacks on blacks by white kids, and it was difficult not to take sides. Within a week of starting school, Elspeth had changed. She’d given up the good girl, she found a group of friends, she was out all the time. Within a month, she was a different person, and I no longer knew her.

  She fell in with a group of youngsters I liked very much—they were racially mixed, smart, and had a kind of gentleness in their hearts. But they were also unhappy and protesting and used drugs. And their protest took other forms—they skipped school, they shoplifted, and they did dope and uppers and all the rest.

  Elspeth’s closest friend was a girl named Selene, a gorgeous girl with Asiatic blood who had been to school in Switzerland and England, had moved around the world with her professor father. She was very intelligent but extremely wary of adults. She looked at me always as if she were listening not to what I was saying but to what posture I was taking, as if she were preparing a posture that could encompass mine, could manipulate it. But I was never saying anything important to her, just asking about school or the movie or whatever they’d been doing. But I think she thought I was always checking up on where they’d been.

  Because there was some reason to. Elspeth had stopped, completely, helping around the house. She refused even to clean her room, and one weekend when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I went in to clean it myself. And I found … things. Stuffed under the bed, in the back of her closet, stuck in bureau drawers: things she couldn’t use, and couldn’t afford. Tens of packages of pantihose, packaged bras in sizes she couldn’t wear, lipsticks, blushers, mascara still in the plastic wrap, and magazines, tens of them, the glossy ones like Vogue that Els couldn’t afford on her two-dollar allowance. Except for the magazines, only a package of pantihose had been opened. Opened, and the hose stuffed back in the wrapping, because they were extra-longs, a size Els couldn’t use.

  I talked to Elspeth, of course. She didn’t deny the shoplifting, but she would not promise to stop. She shrugged when I told her the trouble she could get into. It was fun, she said, and Selene had been doing it for years and had never been caught. You would not get caught if you were clever, she said.

  It was obvious she wasn’t stealing things to use them, in fact her appropriation of the unusable seemed almost intentional. That way, perhaps she worked it out, she wasn’t stealing but going through a puberty rite that involved danger and risk. She listened to me wide-eyed when I warned her about it, but her face didn’t change. She was beginning to be as bland-faced as Selene.

  Also, she was doing poorly in school. Els had a 150 IQ, there was no reason for her to be failing, but she was. Her highest grade was in the seventies on her end-of-term report card, and some were in the thirties and forties. Again, we had a talk. Again, I encountered no opposition, but no acceptance. I told her she would someday want to go to college, would want to go to a good college, but would not be able to get in because of what she was doing now. She looked at me.

  In the spring, she was expelled from school, but didn’t tell me about it for a week. Her friend Connie had called the school pretending to be her father, trying to get her reinstated, but the school did not believe he was who he said he was. It was Connie—Constantine—who finally convinced her she should tell me. Why did she conceal it? Did she think I would beat her? I never had, I’d rarely even raised my voice. I’d been disapproving and firm and most of all, worried, but I’d never struck her.

  I asked her. She didn’t know, she said. And I believed her. I didn’t think she knew what she was doing in those years. I went down to school. Elspeth had said “Jesus!” out loud in gym class and the teacher had overheard it. That was the reason for the expulsion. Els had to apologize and I had to be present before they’d allow her to return to school. The gym teacher, Miss Fahey, a red-haired woman in her fifties, lowered her voice as she explained her actions to me. There were two black girls in the corner of her office, and she nodded towards them slightly. “We expect that sort of language from some people,” she said, “but not from nice girls like Elspeth.” Elspeth stared at her with cold hate, said the required “I’m sorry” like an automaton, then turned on her heel and left the room.

  That summer, I took the children and went to stay at my mother’s house on the Cape. I felt I had to get Els away from the environment that was making her destroy herself. She was listless all summer, but she got in no trouble. She read a lot. She wrote to Connie every day, and at the end of the summer, showed me the stack of letters she’d received from him. “See, you couldn’t break us up after all,” she said with angry challenge on her face.

  “What?”

  “Connie and me. I know that’s why you brought me out here.”

  “Els, Connie has dinner at our house at least twice a week. Why would you think I was trying to break you up?”

  “You wouldn’t let Connie come out here.”

  “You know why.”

  My mother was terrified of black men, and would have gone into hysterics if Connie had merely visited. Even though Con was only a boy. She had no bad feelings about women and children of any color, only the men.

  “So?” Els said archly. “It comes to the same thing, doesn’t it.”

  “If I wanted you to break up with Connie, I’d tell you so, Elspeth. You should know that.”

  She grimaced and stormed off.

  We returned to Cambridge.

  But Elspeth was still miserable. Over the summer, Connie had gotten involved with another girl, and although he remained her best friend, was no longer available all the time. This was, of course, my fault. She was over thirteen now, and began to go out at night, to dances. I gave her a deadline of 1:00 A.M., which she observed the first time, but not the second, and never again. The first time she stayed out late, it got to be three thirty and she still wasn’t home and I was sick. I called Selene, who was home. Her parents were annoyed at the late call, and Selene said she didn’t know where Els was, that she’d been home for hours, had left Els walking home. Oh, I went mad! I saw her raped and murdered lying under a bush somewhere. Jack was there that night and together we scoured the city, driving to the YMCA where the dance was held, driving down every street she might have taken to walk home from it.

  We got back about four thirty. Elspeth was sitting in the kitchen. “Where were you!” I screamed, and I did scream then. Calmly, quietly, she said she’d been in the yard the whole time, making out. “With whom?” His name, she thought, was Walter. She thought.

  I told her she could not go out again at night for a month. And she abided by that. Then. But the next time she went out, she stayed out late again. I went through the old routine: she was too young for this, she didn’t know these boys, she didn’t know what they might do, there were dangers, diseases, and besides, I was worried sick, my stomach was so bad I was drinking a quart of milk a day, I couldn’t stand it.

  She looked at me without batting an eyelash and said, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t have a sex life. You have Jack.”

  I knew Els had a crush on Jack. She was always more alive when he was there, giggling and caroling. She’d sit and talk to him for hours, listen to him as if he were telling her gospel whether they were talking about medicine or politics or god.

  When she said that, I began to wonder, I began to watch, and I saw, within the next months, that she was always worst in her behavior when Jack was visiting. And I thought about breaking off with him. Not that he was doing anything to cause her behavior, but because she was acting as she was for him, or against me because of him. To prove she was adult, or to get even with me for having him. Something like that.

  But I decided against it. In the first place, I loved him and loved his company. In the second place, I thought I could n
ot allow Els to start dictating my behavior. Not that she consciously wanted me to break off. But if I had, then she would have felt free to call him herself. I felt if I did, for her, something I did not want to do, intensely did not want to do, I would be giving her a power too great for a child, and also that I would resent her, and find some way to take out my resentment. I didn’t want to turn her into a dictator, the way Anthony had been.

  For it was Anthony that Els reminded me of. Those beautiful violet eyes, so like his blue ones, gazing at me openly, seeming to listen, but paying no attention at all. And she was only a child, but I could control her no more than I’d been able to control him. I couldn’t lock her in her room. I was terrified.

  She was failing so badly that she had been put in remedial classes at school, which was, of course, ridiculous. I went down and talked to them, explained that she was having emotional problems, asked them to keep her in the advanced classes. They were nasty and unhelpful. She began to skip school more and more often. I didn’t know this at the time, although I could have predicted it. Then she was expelled again.

  A group of girls had been smoking in the girls’ room and been caught. They were hauled to the principal, who asked which of them had been smoking. Only Elspeth held up her hand. Only Elspeth was expelled. Thus do we teach our children true values.

  I liked her for that, but I didn’t know how to tell her anything anymore. I didn’t want to encourage her to get expelled, encourage her to smoke. I was, by now, rather beaten down. I sat down with her, I was tired, I told her she was ruining the future she would probably want. I ran through the whole thing. I pictured a variety of possible lives for her and asked her to choose one. She listened to me coolly, then said, “Are you through now, MOTHER?” Mother as she said it was a dirty word.

  I was literally at my wits’ end: I simply didn’t know what to do. Jack said, “Beat her.” That’s the way he had been brought up, and he remained a little abject in the face of male authority, always. But I tell you I would have done it if I thought it would help. It wouldn’t, of course. You can’t just start beating a child at the age of fourteen. You have to train a child to fear; you have to get them young.

  6

  DOLORES LOOKED AT VICTOR’S face. It was intense, and the eyes had something strange in them: shock, it was. She was telling him a story from an alien world: these things didn’t happen in nice middle-class white families. It didn’t happen in families with proper father and mother, a two-parent household, as they said in the government surveys. No. The hell with him, she thought, but her heart hurt. It is so easy to look with distaste on the dirt and rust of another’s life; so easy to blame others for their lives. While you shake yourself like a wet dog, spraying water all over the room, ridding yourself of the waters in which others drowned. Not me. Not me.

  She turned away from him and continued calmly, inexorably.

  Things got worse. I still waited up for her. One night she came home late, it was a Saturday, and I was ironing, waiting for her. She came into the kitchen and sat down and I looked at her and her eyes looked funny.

  “What have you taken?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve taken something, I can see it.” She said yes, she’d been smoking dope.

  My heart sank. Things had been a little stable for a few weeks—as they occasionally were, always leading me to think that it was over, she had run it through her system, and was prepared to return to normality. What I thought of as normality. But always she found a way to try one new thing.

  I was worried about pot because she was so young, because I knew that kids only a little older than she were on hard drugs and I thought that hanging out with kids who were on something could lead to getting on heroin.

  I gave my usual understanding warning lecture, explaining perils and risks. She let me talk, but I was just dancing through a hoop for my own entertainment. Eventually she slammed out of the room and went to bed.

  I could not control what she did. I worked, I had classes and office hours three days a week, and I’d been put on a demanding committee that took up another full day. That was my first year at Emmings, and I felt I had to prove myself.

  But even if I’d been home, what could I do? Walk her to school and meet her at the school gate every afternoon? Even if I’d done that there was nothing to prevent her from leaving by the back door as soon as I left. She was out of my bodily control, and since my word had no authority with her, she was out of my control completely.

  Which would have been all right had she been in her own control, but she wasn’t.

  Sometimes things were fine, sometimes we still had fun and sat around talking. Jack talked with her too. But nothing made any difference. I always laugh when I see another pious newspaper or magazine article by some psychologist or psychiatrist urging communication. Communication, hah! Now we’ll all sit down and have a nice little talk and tell each other what we really feel and really communicate and then we’ll work things out, we will build a good relationship so that we can have fulfilling mature lives! Christ!

  And of course, in addition to Els, there were the other kids, who were now in high school or junior high, and who weren’t acting so hot either. Tony had withdrawn inside himself, and sat in the house watching TV all the time when he wasn’t in school. Sydney was still a child, but she was never home, never. She spent her afternoons at her girlfriends’ houses, doing homework, she said. She ate there, she slept there, she came home only to change her clothes. I began to feel like some kind of monster, but why? I was always kind to the children, always concerned about them. But the problems with Els did have me utterly miserable, I probably littered depression around me like body odor. I probably neglected them, I certainly didn’t pay much attention to them. I was falling apart.

  It was just like Anthony, all over again. Sometimes I’d invite some friends over for an evening, and the kids would be there, I liked them to join us if they wanted to, and Els would come into the room, but then she’d sit there glaring at me from her corner, I could feel her hate crawling on my skin from across the room. Just the way Anthony used to when he was jealous. Or she’d come home, high, and come into the room sort of silly and dazed, and curl up in a ball in a chair while around her people talked and laughed, and if I went to see how she was, her eyes would roll around in her head and she would barely answer me, she acted catatonic.

  I took her to a clinic, which recommended a psychiatrist who specialized, they said, in adolescent disorders. She went once a week, dutifully, trotted over to Brookline, having to change twice, a long trip. He did nothing. I kept asking her about him because I could see no progress, but she didn’t want to talk about him. She said she liked him, that was all. So I left her alone. He asked me to come and talk to him, once, and I went. He told me solemnly, the asshole, that the problem was that I did not communicate with her.

  In fact, on those nights when she felt friendly towards me, or perhaps had some glimmering that she was living in a strange way, we would still talk. And then we’d talk all night, until five in the morning, and I’d have to go in and teach the next morning. I was probably stupid, I should probably have stuck to a strict regimen and not let her do that. But I was desperate, I grabbed any chance I was offered to reach her. Nothing, nothing in the world was more important than Elspeth in those years. Even my other children, because unhappy as they seemed, they were not heading for destruction, and she was.

  She would say that she hated this materialistic, capitalistic culture. She didn’t understand why we had big meals, we should just live on fruit and nuts. She couldn’t abide pretensions and didn’t care if she went to college. What she really loved was her black friends. They had the good way of life. They all loved each other and they spoke and acted with each other in a natural warm way that white people never did understand, certainly never showed. Easy, without pretense, pretension, snobbery; they weren’t judgmental. Without trying to prove anything: they were all just niggers
together. She wanted to live like that.

  She wanted to screw Connie, and just drift through life with him. She didn’t care about the other woman in his life. I told her about pregnancy, I said she was too young. She listened to me about that for a long time. But one night she told me she’d gone to bed with Connie, at least begun to, but his mother had walked in. Then I took her for birth control pills.

  Oh, I suppose I was your classic permissive parent, suffering classic punishment. But after all, I’d been permissive all their lives. I’m not sure I would have been quite so liberal if I hadn’t always had to offset Anthony’s influence. If I’d been their only parent, I think I would have been a little less on their side in every situation. But you can’t change a pattern you’ve developed over a decade or more. Nor did I really want to. I tried, with Elspeth, to become more and more firm, but it didn’t matter what I did. If I was firm, she rebelled hostilely; if I was easy, she took advantage of my easiness. She had me beat no matter what I did, and she didn’t seem to realize that I wasn’t someone who ought to have been beat, that I was thinking of her, not of myself.

  Well, it went on that way. It’s amazing how life can just go on that way, how you can live with hell just around the corner and you know it, yet you live, day after day, and find something to smile about, something to make you laugh. Jack was there and listened to me with sweet patience, tried to cheer me up. Tony and Sydney were disgusted with Elspeth the way younger children are with a sibling whose behavior they don’t understand, when they see—much more clearly than the problem child does—the anguish and suffering it is causing.