Nancy came inside, threw off her coat again.
“Maybe she shouldn’t,” I said. “If she doesn’t want to.”
“But I already bought the tickets.”
We stood there on the front steps, stuck for a solution.
“Nancy,” I said. “Do you want Daddy to take another little girl? Would that make you happy?”
“Y-yes,” she replied.
“Then okay,” I said. “We’ll call Becky from next door and Daddy will go with Becky.”
“O-okay,” she said defiantly.
We went inside and I phoned our neighbors. Becky was sick and couldn’t go.
I told Nancy.
“Then I’ll g-g-go,” she said. She put on her coat and went out the door to the car, leaving Frank and me standing there in the entry hall, baffled.
He shook his head, followed her to the car. They got in and he started the engine. She started to scream again. This time he didn’t cut the engine—he let out the brake and began to back down the driveway.
She screamed even louder. “I d-don’t wanna g-go! It’s t-t-too far!”
He got as far as the street, then rammed the car into gear and roared back up the driveway to the garage. They got out, returned to the house. She threw off her coat and stormed into the living room.
“I absolutely do not know what to do,” Frank said, shaken. “I don’t know if she wants to go or she doesn’t want to go. I don’t know what to do.”
I went into the living room. She had turned the TV on.
“Nancy, Daddy’s going by himself,” I told her.
“O-okay.”
Frank was willing to try anything at this point. So he went out to the car by himself, got in, and started the engine. As soon as Nancy heard the car start she came running out of the living room, sobbing.
“I w-wanna g-go!”
I opened the door and waved to Frank. He waited for her. She got in and he backed down the driveway. She started to scream again. This time he didn’t stop. He drove away. I could see her through the car window, sobbing, tears streaming down her cheeks.
When they got back, Frank told me she’d been fine as soon as they got away from the house. They had had a wonderful time.
Then Frank looked down at the floor, cleared his throat. “About the guidance clinic …”
“What about it?” I said.
He took a deep breath, let it out. “Do whatever you want.”
“You think I should take her?”
“It … it seems like a good idea to go for some help.” Frank looked down at the floor again and swallowed, clearly pained by his unhappy realization. “Something is happening to her. I don’t know what.”
So glad to have his compliance, I went ahead immediately, fully confident that the professionals would find an easy answer to Nancy’s problems—easy and correctible.
The place I drove Nancy to for her first psychiatric evaluation was a child guidance center attached to one of Philadelphia’s major children’s hospitals. Nancy didn’t mind going. I told her we were just going to talk to a doctor. I promised she wouldn’t get any shots. She was a month shy of her fourth birthday.
Frank met us out front. It was a gray, shabby old building. We stared at each other grimly, then looked down at our eldest child. She stood there calmly and quietly. We hesitated, wondering if we were making too much of this.
Only one way to find out: We went inside.
We waited on a bench for a while and were finally admitted to the office of a psychiatric social worker. A young woman took Nancy down the hall to a playroom. She went willingly. Frank and I related to the psychiatric social worker what had brought us there. He made notes as we talked.
“We’ll have to evaluate her,” he advised us. “You’ll bring her back for a series of visits. We’ll give her some tests, and then we’ll see where we stand. Okay?”
We agreed. I took her there for an hour visit once every other week for six months. I hired a baby sitter to take care of Suzy and David while I was away, and paid her out of the following week’s grocery money. I was optimistic, sure the clinic would diagnose Nancy’s problem and give Frank and me the proper direction so she’d be all right.
Her visits to the clinic had an immediate effect. Her stuttering began to ease up. By the time her evaluation period was completed and the verdict was in, it had virtually disappeared.
Frank mentioned how pleased we were about this to the psychiatric social worker when we came in to hear the results.
“Well, she was an early-speaking child,” he advised. “Stuttering isn’t that unusual. She’s outgrown it.”
He opened a folder and related his findings.
On the Revised Stanford-Binet she had demonstrated an IQ of 134. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test yielded an IQ of 129. Both placed her in the category of very superior intelligence.
“Actually she has the functioning IQ of a seven-year-old,” he reported. “That pretty effectively rules out any sort of brain damage from her birth, which you mentioned you were concerned about.”
We were relieved to hear that.
“Now, we also found that Nancy’s motor-visual development is slightly behind her age level. Put together her unusually high IQ and her motor-visual deficiency and you arrive at, we think, her basic problem. She sets high goals for herself. If they’re motor-visual oriented, like learning to tie her own shoes or knit, she’s unable to perform at the level she’s set for herself.”
“You mean her head’s ahead of her hands?” asked Frank.
“Precisely. This causes her a severe level of frustration, and that’s where the tantrums come from. It’s an adjustment reaction.”
“What can we do?” I asked.
“My opinion is that she’ll outgrow her problem as she grows into her intellect.”
“That’s all?” Frank asked.
He looked over his report. “Yes. The only other area worth mentioning is that her fantasies aren’t as rich as they might be for a child her age. She constricts on the Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test. An average child may see fifty different things in a splotch. Nancy sees one. Always the same one.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A butterfly.”
Frank chuckled. “That doesn’t sound too dangerous.”
“Not at all. It’s another area she’ll outgrow as she encounters new friends and situations. My feeling is that time and the structured environment of school will be the answer for Nancy. If you feel she needs therapy at any time, feel free to return.”
We shook hands, thanked him.
“Take her home and love her,” he said with a wink as we left.
We were relieved.
We found a nursery school for her, thinking that might help. It did. The teacher was sensitive and seemed to understand Nancy, who adored her. Nancy learned new skills and eagerly awaited going every day. The teacher reported to me that she was already doing first-grade work.
Kindergarten was next. Again Nancy had no problems—short of her inability to hold on to the friends she made. She’d hold on to friends, we reasoned, once she met some nice kids.
The main thing was that she was starting to get the stimulation and channeling she required. We felt certain that she would soon become like other kids.
She was going to be okay.
Chapter 4
On the Friday before Nancy started first grade, I took her to have her hair done and bought her a new dress and a pair of red boots that she wanted. She was almost giddy with excitement about starting school—until the night before, when I found her sobbing in her room.
“What’s wrong, Nancy?” I asked her.
“I can’t go to school tomorrow,” she wailed.
“Of course you can.” I sat down next to her on the bed. She moved away.
“I can’t,” she insisted.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know how to read and write yet.”
I laughed. “But N
ancy, sweetheart, that’s why you go to school. To learn those things.”
She began to scream. I tried explaining again, but to no avail. She sobbed and wailed and rolled around on her bed for several hours.
But she did go to school the next day and performed very well. In fact, she did so well in her first-grade classes that in the sixth week of the term the principal called Frank and me in to tell us he was moving her to a special first-grade class for intellectually gifted students.
We were very proud.
By the end of the second grade Nancy was doing fourth- and fifth-grade-level work in all areas except math (which frustrated her so much she would burst into tears) and penmanship. Her handwriting was a bit clumsy because of her motor-visual problem. Nancy’s second-grade teacher recommended on her report card that she skip third grade and go right into fourth. Her only reservation about Nancy, the teacher noted, was that she “was disruptive due to inappropriate laughter.” I went in and asked the teacher about this. I had never noticed this behavior in Nancy.
“She seems to laugh at her own little jokes,” the teacher explained. “She’s tuned in to her own private TV show and just starts giggling.”
She did skip third grade, though, and had no problem keeping up scholastically with the fourth graders, even though some were two years older than she was.
Socially, however, Nancy made no progress. She would be tight best friends with a little girl for a week, then they would become bitter enemies. No relationship lasted. Her first new school friend was a sweet, cute girl who lived down the block. Nancy brought her home three or four times to play, then stopped. I asked about the girl, but Nancy refused to answer me and just cried. A few days later I found a note from the girl in Nancy’s jeans when I was doing the laundry. It said: “I hate you and you stink and stay away from me forever or I’m going to kill you.” I immediately called the girl’s parents. They seemed unconcerned about the note, though they did feel it would be best all around if the two girls stopped seeing each other.
Unable to keep friends, Nancy began to take out her social frustration on Suzy and David. She was older, bigger, and smarter than they were and took advantage of it. She manipulated them, bullied them, tormented them, pitted them against each other and their own friends, often with ferocious meanness.
She particularly loved to make Suzy cry. One of her tricks was to exclude Suzy. If Suzy and David were, say, coloring happily on the living room floor, Nancy would come in, grab up all of the coloring books and crayons, and say “Come with me, David, we’ll go color in my room. Suzy, you can’t color with us. You smell.”
Off Nancy would go, little David in tow—leaving Suzy in tears.
Another of Nancy’s tricks was to borrow some of Suzy’s precious Barbie Doll clothes (Nancy actually had no use for dolls herself) and fail to return them. When Suzy asked for them, Nancy would deny she had ever borrowed them and accuse Suzy of trying to call her a thief and a liar.
If Suzy brought a friend home Nancy would convince the friend to play a board game with Suzy, then tell the other girl how to win so Suzy would lose and go running upstairs in tears. Suzy fought back by no longer bringing her friends home. But if one of them called on the phone Nancy would stand next to Suzy and scream and holler at her to get off because she was expecting a call—even though she had no friends of her own who might call.
Though Suzy was her main target, Nancy occasionally went after David, too. Violently. Once David was playing with slot cars in the basement with his friends and she went down and took his car and hurled it against the wall, breaking it into tiny pieces. Another time she sneaked into his bedroom when he was asleep—on this occasion a reluctant but thoroughly intimidated Suzy in cahoots with her—and bopped David on the head with a weighted, inflatable plastic whiskey bottle. He got quite a shiner from it.
As for Nancy’s tantrums, well, we were still living with them. In fact, our household had begun to form itself around her temper. Every Sunday, for example, the Spungen family took an outing. Sometimes we went to Independence Hall, sometimes to the Franklin Institute, sometimes for a drive in the country.
One Sunday we planned to go to a movie that Suzy wanted to see. Nancy flat out refused to go.
“I don’t wanna go to the movies,” she declared at breakfast.
“We’re going to the movies,” Frank stated firmly.
“I wanna go to the Franklin Institute,” Nancy countered.
“We went to the Franklin Institute last Sunday,” I said. “Now, Nancy, we went where you wanted to go last Sunday. This Sunday is Suzy’s turn. Be fair.”
“I don’t wanna go to the movies,” she repeated, dropping her spoon defiantly in her cereal bowl.
“We’re going to the movies,” Frank repeated with grim determination.
“Then I’m not going!” she screamed.
“Oh, yes, you are,” Frank replied.
She stood up abruptly, knocked her chair over. “You can’t make me!”
“Yes I can!”
She stuck out her jaw. “Then go ahead! Make me!”
“Nancy,” I said. “We’re going to the movies today.”
“I’m not going!” she repeated.
“You’re going,” Frank warned, “or it’s no TV privileges for one week!”
“I already lost them for two weeks,” she sneered. “Big deal!”
“Then no allowance!”
“That too! You can’t do a thing to me! I’ll just stay in my room. Starting right now. And you can’t do a thing!”
“Oh, yes, I can!” snapped Frank.
Out of sheer frustration he grabbed her and spanked her on the behind. It was always our own frustration that drove us to spank Nancy, since it had no impact on her except to make her angrier.
She screamed at the top of her lungs, outraged, then ran up the stairs to her room and slammed the door.
She would not come out until we backed down and agreed to go where she wanted to.
We wanted our family outing. We couldn’t leave Nancy in the house alone. Frank and I exchanged a resigned look. I turned to Suzy. She was already crying. She knew we weren’t going to see her movie.
It was this way with all things—Nancy’s way. When she wanted something, no matter how big or small, she hollered and screamed and backed us into a corner until we were the ones to back down. We gave in to her. Why? Because there was absolutely no peace in the house until she got what she wanted. And she was impossible to discipline. She was not afraid of us, had no respect for us. Traditional channels like shutting off her allowance were far too puny. Smacking her was pointless and accomplished nothing except to make us feel terrible for losing control of the situation—and to make that situation more intense. So we gave in to her demands, one by one. It was easier that way. Was it really worth enduring a major tantrum just because she wanted to watch a different show on TV than Suzy did? It wasn’t—believe me it wasn’t, not day in and day out.
And that’s how a seven-year-old ran our household. It was not pleasant. In fact, it was so unpleasant it took its toll on our marriage.
Frank’s work was beginning to take him to New York two days a week. He would stay over for the night at a hotel in midtown Manhattan, and he would have fun. An old pal of his named Harvey was a talent agent. Harvey often had free tickets to Broadway shows or passes to The Tonight Show. They would have dinner out. After the show they would go to a nightclub and listen to jazz. I cannot tell a lie—I deeply resented that Frank was allowed to do all of the things I wanted to do while I stayed home with the kids.
He always called me at six p.m. to see how the day had gone at home. One of the days had gone particularly badly. Nancy had a bronchial infection, David had an intestinal bug, and Suzy had let the bathtub overflow. The water had soaked through the bathroom floor and entry hall ceiling below, causing chunks of it to give way. By the time Frank called, it was raining in the hall and I was hating him for being gone. He was in a restaurant. I could
hear music and clinking glasses in the background.
“What’s new on Welsh Road?” he asked cheerfully.
“Fuck you,” I replied and hung up.
I immediately felt awful for having done that. I just felt so trapped, so lonesome. After the kids were in bed, I tried Frank at his hotel. He wasn’t in yet. It was about ten o’clock. I tried again at eleven. He was still out. At twelve, too.
I couldn’t sleep now. I phoned him on the hour. When he wasn’t there at one, I was afraid he’d been run over by a taxicab. At two, I was afraid he was out with another woman. At three, I was sure he was out with another woman. I thought about grabbing the next train for New York and waiting in his hotel lobby to see who he came in with. I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave the children. At four, he answered.
“Where were you?” I demanded.
“What are you doing up so late?” Frank asked, confused.
“Waiting up for you. What are you doing up so late?”
“I was out with Harvey. We went to a show, got something to eat.”
“Are you sure it was Harvey you were with?”
“Who else would it be?”
“How would I know?”
“Can’t I just go out and have a good time?”
“I’m home with the kids. I can’t.”
“Look, Deb, I’m sorry you’re stuck there by yourself. But I have to be here—it’s my job.”
Frank wasn’t sorry, though. I realized this a few weeks later. The morning after one of his nights in New York, I phoned his office in Philadelphia and asked his secretary to have him call me when he checked in from New York. I needed him for something.
“But he’s here,” she said.
“No, he’s not,” I corrected. “He’s going to be in New York all day.”
“He’s right here, Mrs. Spungen,” she said, embarrassed. “The boss called him yesterday. He had a meeting here first thing this morning. I’ll … I’ll connect you.”
I was mortified and humiliated. Frank could have come home the night before and been with me and had chosen instead to stay over in New York and drive back early in the morning. He had gone directly to the office. He preferred not to be home.
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) Page 7