A three-song Led Zeppelin medley struck next, thrusting me back to my first hit of marijuana, my first slow dance, those first gropings in the back of Joey Capistrani’s Trans Am. Adolescence, we were taught in biology class, was the time when we would break free from our parents and form our own separate identities. “Severing the cord,” our teacher had called it, but I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I’d always stood apart from my mother, for as far back as I could remember.
I turned off the New Paltz exit and onto a small road, where I took a left at the church, just barely visible in the twilight, and flipped on the windshield wipers against yet another new flurrying of snow. “Coming up,” said the DJ, “a blast from the past. But first, a real blast—of cold air, that is—from the present. We have a winter storm watch on for tonight, folks. Twelve to fourteen inches we’re expecting by 8:00 AM tomorrow. That’s twelve to fourteen inches, over the next few hours. So get out your shovels, throw another log onto the fire, and crank up that stereo. Because we’ve got a little sunshine to warm you up. Here’s one-hit-wonder Terry Jacks with his 1974 smash single, a cover of an old song by Jacques Brel . . .”
The lyrics began as I pulled into Astrid’s drive, a dirt road abutting the woods. “Goodbye to you, my trusted friend . . .” My first forty-five: the song I’d listened to, endlessly, back in 1974. Which would have been, I quickly calculated, two years after April died. Hadn’t it been her face I’d pictured every time I heard it? Those damned pink erasers, they could never erase all that well. Maybe I hadn’t forgotten her completely, like I’d told Dr. Rivers. The past was always leaking into the present, no matter how tightly one plugged the dike.
Dr. Rivers had asked why I felt losing April had been such a significant event. “You knew her for two months. Why the strong association with her disappearance?” she said. “What else was going on at the time?”
I’d sat there in that office, with its soothing eggshell walls and book-crammed shelves, and thought. My baby brother Josh had just been born. Nixon was running for reelection. Long-haired students were marching downtown, carrying peace signs. My mother had begun to retreat further into the sanctuary of her bedroom. Slight chaos, sure, but nothing unreasonable. “Nothing,” I’d said. “Nothing significant at all.”
But later that week, I reconsidered my answer. What else had been going on? Not nothing. Everything if you were six years old. Josh was not only born, he was born to much more fanfare than his older sisters. Nixon was not only running for reelection, he’d broken locks and laws and lied about it. The hippies had been carrying photos of napalmed children along with their peace signs, giving me nightmares for months afterwards. And my mother was not only retreating into her bedroom, her bathtub, anywhere on earth and in her head where we weren’t, she was also frequently becoming unhinged: losing her temper; hitting me with the kind of ferocity normally reserved for unruly inmates; digging her nails into the flesh of my arm until I bled.
April’s murder, I realized, coincided not only with the fraying of the social fabric, whose ragged edges even I, at that young age, could feel chafing, but with the moment when each of my childhood fantasies—and thus my childhood itself—was torn asunder. In a single year, at age six, everything I’d been taught, everything I’d held to be true, was revealed to me as a lie: friends last forever; girls are equal to boys; adults tell the truth; soldiers don’t target children; mothers nurture their young.
Some part of me even then must have known that those boys on the bus were right. That April’s mother, whose responsibility it was to take care of her, like all the other mammal mothers we’d been studying, had done the exact opposite. Which would have only served to underscore another truth I’d been figuring out in my own home: that a mother could exist but not always mother. That the noun could hold true without the verb.
In the course of my research into April’s story, I’d come across the work of Harry Harlow, who set out to prove that a mother’s love was developmentally important to a child’s welfare. This was in the late fifties, an era during which such an idea verged on blasphemy; when pediatricians and psychologists alike were telling new mothers not to hold their infants, not to pick them up when they cried, not to kiss them more than once a month and certainly never on the mouth. Harlow separated baby rhesus monkeys from their mothers and placed them in a cage with two inanimate surrogate mothers: one, made of wire mesh, who would dispense milk; the other, made of soft terry-cloth rags, who had no milk. While the infants would go to the wire mother for material sustenance, they ended up spending only one hour a day, on average, with that mother, while an average of seventeen hours was spent seeking emotional sustenance—love—by cuddling with the soft rag mother. Once the babies had become attached to the rag mothers, Harlow added a twist: he retrofitted the dolls with blunt spikes, which would spring out and injure the baby monkeys quite violently whenever the dolls were hugged. Even so, the babies kept trying to hug the so-called “evil” mother, kept trying to get back into her good graces, shunning peers and even food in the vain attempt to win back her love. When the spikes were removed, Harlow claimed, the baby monkeys acted as if the evil mother had never existed. They forgot the spikes altogether.
But what if they didn’t really forget? I now thought. What if every decision made from that moment on could be traced directly back to that early mistreatment? What if one day, half a lifetime later, one of those monkeys, now fully grown and a mother herself, happened to have seen a play or heard a song or witnessed a scene that suddenly triggered a memory of a friend whose mother had had so many spikes she wound up impaling both herself and her babies on them. Would that fully grown monkey, her memory thus jogged, suddenly recall, with searing clarity, her own mother’s spikes? Would the remembered dissonance between spike and rag send her darting around her cage, banging her head against the bars? To fear the object of love; to love the object of fear: it was enough to drive a monkey crazy.
“I hate her,” I’d finally announced to Dr. Rivers, remembering what it had felt like, year after year, to be pummeled for some minor infraction: a drop of pancake batter left behind on the kitchen table; a chair not pushed in; a wet towel found languishing on a floor. “I hate her!”
“Why, Lizzie? Tell me why.” Dr. Rivers had put her notepad down.
“Because she hit me. Often.”
“Okay, but take it one step further.”
“Further? That’s as far as I go.”
“I don’t believe that. Tell me why you’re angry at her.”
“Because . . .” I said, trying to form the feelings into words.
Dr. Rivers stared at me, waiting for my thoughts to gel.
“Because . . .” I finally said, “Because she stole my childhood. And I can never get it back.” I collapsed into a puddle of grief from all those years of mental solitude, of hiding the truth from everyone, even myself.
Dr. Rivers handed me a box of tissues and waited for me to compose myself. “But?” she finally said, waiting for me to fill in the blank.
“But what? That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.” I blew my nose as further punctuation.
“There is a but, Lizzie. Think about it. Think hard. She ‘stole your childhood,’ yes, that’s a perfectly acceptable way of phrasing it, but what didn’t she do?”
I now leaned my head against the steering wheel of Astrid’s Civic and began to weep again, feeling the absence of an arm around my shoulder not like an amputee remembering a lost limb, but rather like a person born without any appendages whatsoever.
“Mrs. Cassidy had one arm wrapped around each of her daughters. The two girls . . . were lying on pillows, their feet toward the tailgate. They were dressed in flannel pajamas.” She held them while she killed them. She loved them, even as she was suffocating them. But she must have hated herself more.
Down I fell, further and further into the void, the vortex growing deeper. Narrower. Colder. Darker. Until there was only ice.
“Mommy
, what’s wrong? Where are we going?” said Daisy, my wails having woken her and Tess, both of whom were looking around the car, disoriented.
I wiped my tears with the back of my wrist and feigned sanity. “Where do you want to go, pumpkin?” I said.
“Home,” said Tess. Her voice was tinier than I’d ever heard it.
“Home?” I said, not knowing what that meant anymore. “But look at the snow! Look at this place! This is Astrid’s cabin, remember Daisy? Tess, you were just a baby last time we were here, but look: these are Astrid’s woods! Her land! Isn’t it beautiful?”
The snow had started falling furiously now, blinding confetti dropping straight from the sky as we stepped out of the car into the elements.
“Yes,” said Daisy, grabbing Tess’s hand. Shivering. “It’s pretty. Can we go inside now?”
But I didn’t want to go inside the cabin just yet. I wanted to be out in the woods, wandering through the frigid air, feeling the snowflakes on my skin, the icy branches crunching underneath me, the black ink of darkness enveloping my body. I wanted my shell to feel like my innards: damp, and blind, and lost, and cold. “Fine, you can go inside. But I’m staying out here.”
“But you’ll freeze,” said Tess.
I had to restrain myself from telling her to shut up. I held my face up to the falling snow, each flake a tiny prick of welcome numbness. “No I won’t. Look! I’m not cold at all!” I tossed off my down jacket to prove the point, then the hat, the scarf, the gloves, until I was wearing only my flannel pajama bottoms and a cotton tank top. “See?” I said. “No problem. Come on, let’s go exploring. My mother never took me on adventures. Grab those flashlights on the floor of the car. Let’s all go!”
Tess studied me as if examining one of her found creatures. “You should put your jacket back on, Mommy,” she said.
“I’m not cold,” I said. I was growing frustrated, restless. “I don’t need a jacket. Are you coming with me or not?” The question was rhetorical. Of course they would come with me. How unnatural it was to be a human child, to depend on another for so long, so completely. “See?” I said, leading them toward the woods. “Aren’t you happy? Isn’t this fun?” I shook a sapling for added emphasis and watched its snow scatter into the wind.
Daisy gripped her sister’s hand. “Yes, Mom,” she said, ever the obedient first child. “We’re having fun.”
“It’s cold,” Tess said, hugging herself.
Sighing, I gripped my flashlight between my thighs and rubbed my palms up and down Tess’s bony shoulders to create friction. “Is that better, pumpkin?”
“Sort of,” she said.
“Good,” I said. “Come on, let’s go dig up some worms. Do you like worms?”
The girls looked at one another.
“Well, do you?” I said.
“Yes, Mommy,” said Daisy, shushing Tess, who was trying to whisper into her ear.
“It’s snowing,” said Tess.
“I know,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful?” One hand on the flashlight, the other held up in front of my face for protection, I led our little threesome into the tangled woods, the space between trees growing narrower, such that even with my hand held up as a shield, stray branches strafed my cheeks, the inside of my wrist, my goose-pimpled shoulders, until one of them gouged an actual hole. I sat down on a felled log to assess the damage, the cold dampness of the wood seeping its way into my pajama bottoms. I started to shiver. “Shit,” I said, shining the light on the inside of my wrist, which was now bleeding. I held the torn skin up to my mouth and sucked on it, comforted in some perverse way by the warm, metallic gush.
“Mommy,” said Daisy. She was hopping up and down on the balls of her feet to stay warm. “Are you okay?”
“Of course I am,” I said. “It’s just a little blood.” And as I sat there, half-naked on the frozen log, sucking on my blood, my body growing colder and wetter by the second, until I could hardly feel anything, inside or out, I realized how easy it would be for us to sit there, in that precise spot, keeping our bodies very still, the snow covering us until we disappeared. How easy it would be to fade away.
I thought of what Astrid had once explained to me, what she was trying to get at in her dissertation: how the act of suicide, which contains both pain and pain’s outlet simultaneously, could be compared with . . . with what? I couldn’t remember. She’d shown me the passage in the poem itself, a passage she’d memorized along with the rest of the canto, where the two poets meet Pier della Vigne, whose fall from political grace provoked his suicide. Dante both identifies with and feels so much compassion for della Vigne that it “chokes” his heart and renders him speechless. Pier, with Virgil’s prodding, tells the poets that the soul of someone, like him, who has committed suicide falls into the woods, takes root, and becomes a tree who can only speak when pecked by Harpies.
I’d imagined myself a tree when she read it, stuck forever in Suicide Wood. How bad would that be, really? It hardly seemed like a real punishment. Much less harsh than some of the other sinners’ fates, like having your face devoured by serpents, or carrying your own severed head around like a lantern, or picking scabs off the putrid body of a neighbor. “But don’t you see?” Astrid had said. “They can only speak when the Harpies peck them. They can only communicate—release their pain—through the infliction of pain upon themselves.”
“I see,” I said, but only in the literal sense.
But now, sitting there with my shivering daughters, our bodies growing progressively more numb, her words finally sank in. Pain and pain’s outlet. Simultaneously.
“So what if you do not have yet all the facts of the story,” Renzo had said. “You think you need facts to write truth? You think that making a documentary is truth? This is bullshit, mon Eliza, and you know it . . . Write the story of one mother who do not make it, who was pushed—how you say?—over the ledge . . .”
“There is a but there, Lizzie,” Dr. Rivers had said. “Think about it. Think hard.”
But what? I’d wondered, walking out of her office, completely confused. Wasn’t it enough to have finally spoken the words out loud, to have finally found release for the long-buried emotions?
“But . . .” I now whispered, sitting there on my log, and the revelation suddenly entered my body and shot straight up my spine, like the sliding weight to the bell after the anvil falls. “But . . .” And now I saw it, clearly. So clearly, I could hardly believe it had never occurred to me before. “But she didn’t kill me,” I said.
Sometimes I remember having simply imagined the words, my mother’s face, not having spoken them out loud, though I know this can’t be true, because the next several minutes of my life are seared, second by second, into my head: Tess, shivering, sniffling, her lips indigo, saying, “Who didn’t kill you, Mommy? What are you talking about? Are you okay?”; Daisy, hugging her sister to her; me, staring at the blue of my daughters’ lips, the red of my wrist, the white of the snow, seeing myself and the neglect I was capable of committing finally, wholly, through their petrified eyes.
“Oh my god,” I said, leaping up from the log, suddenly horrified by my selfishness, my stupidity, how close I’d just pushed all three of us to the ledge, edge, catastrophic event, hell it didn’t matter, did it? because it all led to the same place: numbness; eternal darkness; the end of all pain, but the end of life, too. I scooped a daughter into each arm, the sorrys tumbling out of my mouth as fast as they could form, and began to run out of the woods, Tess on my left hip, Daisy on my right, the weight of their bodies counterbalanced by adrenaline, my forward propulsion fueled by sheer fumes of will. “Hold on,” I said. “Cover your faces with your hands!”
Tess looked bad, as if she were succumbing to hypothermia. “I’m . . . so . . . cold . . .” she said. Her body was becoming leaden.
I could see the outline of Astrid’s cabin through the thicket of trunks. “We’re almost there,” I said. “Look, there’s the cabin! Come on Tessie, just a few more minut
es. Count backwards with me from one hundred. Come on! One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . .” As Tess struggled to utter the numbers, I commanded Daisy to rub her sister’s shoulders, while I blew tiny puffs of warm breath onto her neck.
“Wake up, Tess,” said Daisy, holding her sister’s hands in her own. Kissing them. And it nearly felled me just then, the magnitude of what I’d nearly thrown away. “Let’s think of another game. And you don’t have to carry me anymore. I can walk.” She wiggled out of my arms, as she would pretty much do from then on, and advanced slightly ahead of us, clearing branches so I could use both arms to hold Tess.
“Okay, another game . . .” I said, trying to think. License plate ABCs? I Spy? God it was cold. I couldn’t think.
“How about the love game?” said Daisy.
“Perfect,” I said. “Go ahead, Daisy. You start.” The love game was something Mark had initiated one night to ease Tess off to sleep, when nothing else had been working: a way of naming and appreciating the opposite of the dark—all the people she loved—to face her fear of it. He knew it would work because he used to play the same game himself when he was a kid. Until he ran out of names with which to play it.
“Daddy!” said Daisy. “Because he’s funny. Your turn, Tess.”
Tess looked slightly disoriented, lost. But then she finally muttered, through chattering teeth, “Mommy. Because she takes me out for hot chocolate.”
“Oh, peanut,” I said, squeezing her even more tightly to me. “Okay, my turn. Daisy, because she’s the best big sister in the whole wide world.”
“My turn!” said Tess, and Daisy didn’t even argue that her turn had been skipped. “Grandma! Because she’s the best grandma in the whole wide world.”
Between Here and April Page 20