Mary was on a nearby swing, pumping hard, toes aimed toward some perfect weekend clouds. After Mollie jumped down, satisfied by her display of monkey-bar prowess, she ran to the swing next to Mary's and was in an instant competition to see who could go higher. I walked across the sandpit, over the remnants of our chicken and potato salad meal on a blanket laid out on the grass, and toward the bench where my two oldest daughters sat glued together, the hoods of their black sweatshirts pulled up, hiding their faces. Concentrated as they were on a patch of skin above Aman da's kneecap, which she'd exposed by rolling up her canvas pants, they didn't notice me coming. A few steps away, I caught a glint of what Amanda had in her hand—an unbent paper clip, which she was using to carve into her leg, deep enough that beads of blood bobbed on the surface of her skin.
"What the hell?" I said, swooping in to grab the thin piece of metal but missing.
Stephanie looked up at me with black-lined eyes, ghoulish eyes, while Amanda hurried to roll down her pants as she tossed the paper clip in the grass. "What are you doing?" I said.
"Nothing," Amanda said, pulling herself deeper into her hood, into her sweatshirt, and into the shaded back of the bench.
I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe it was nothing. I would have liked to keep thinking it was no big deal when I spotted long, scabby lines on the inside of her forearm a few days later. I wanted to convince myself that this slicing of skin wasn't a sign of danger even after I'd dragged her to a therapist to talk about why she cut and cut and kept cutting. I sat in the tiny waiting room and fake-read Architectural Digest, stewing about what Amanda was saying to the middle-aged woman with expensive shoes and gleaming teeth. Complaining about me, that I had hardly any time for her, that I was often impatient? Or worse: saying she wanted to live with her father? I couldn't stand for her to want that.
After nearly an hour, the counselor called me in and had Amanda wait this time with the pile of tedious magazines. "It's not dangerous," the woman told me, her soft hand flitting through the air between us. "It's just something girls do when life feels too painful and something has to be released. Think of it like that, a release."
I might have eased into this line of reasoning, assuring myself that a little bit of cutting was getting the devil out of my angry daughter, but it didn't make sense. Amanda was getting more sullen the more she sliced her own skin and spilled her own blood, becoming a faint and frightening presence in our household—dark and sultry as a storm just over the mountain. I knew the cutting was more than a release. And yet I didn't seek out another ther apist, another expert, who might give me a different opinion or offer a solution. I simply told myself that my daughter would get past this soon. Then it was too late.
The questions that crowded my mind: Why was Amanda so angry? What had pushed her into a black corner that she couldn't or wouldn't emerge from? And why had Stephanie become her constant sidekick, her doppelgänger, giving up her own friends and perfect report cards and the gushing praise of her teachers to join her sister's budding rebellion?
Part of my daughters' fury and consternation stemmed from my divorce from their father, Tom, who'd remained in Arizona when the rest of us moved to Oregon. On the phone and, during the girls' visits to his house, in person, he often reminded them that I'd left him, that he'd wanted to work things out, keep the family together, but that the mother of the family had smashed the family apart. I could see on Amanda's and Stephanie's faces how hard it was: they loved their mom but at the same time hated me for hurting their dad. A quandary they couldn't work out. Easier to back away, get isolated, stay isolated.
Again, the accounting. Another nail of self-recrimination pounded in as I scramble for do-overs, the way I used to when I was a kid playing Horse in the driveway with my brother, who was the far better shot. I comb through what I could have done differently: this path instead of that path; these words instead of those words. How could I have moved away so soon, away from their father and to a town where I had not a single acquaintance? I shouldn't have taken a second job after we arrived in Eugene. I should have been less proud about asking for help. And yet what I did, I did. Worried myself sleepless trying to prove I could manage without their father and plowed ahead without measuring or assessing the damage behind us. During these first months, years, after the divorce, the strain across my face and in my voice and the weariness in my body must have upset all four of my children. Other parents have a way, it seems, of conveying that This stress you see in me has nothing to do with you. But in the early days after my divorce, I sent signals I didn't mean: that I was too depleted to fully love my daughters; that they had become a burden to single-mother me. That it was their responsibility to keep me upright and soothed. And, after such tension had eroded us for too long, maybe even that running away was the only thing left to do.
Amanda and Stephanie remembered their parents' marriage better than the younger girls did, and they longed for the family of six—for their father—years after the two of us were finished with each other. Stephanie wrapped Tom's picture in the soft clothes of her underwear drawer. Amanda wore one of his old college T-shirts to bed. I loathed my ex-husband for promising to call the girls and then forgetting; I hated him for using the calls he did make to complain that I'd robbed him of his children, even though he'd made no move to stop me from going and in fact had agreed that Oregon was a good place for them to grow up. I condemned him for coaxing our girls to side with him, while I somehow ignored the fact that I was doing the same: to speak about him in our house brought a stern look from me; their mentioning his name caused me to grow stiff and silent. I waged my own campaign to win the girls' loyalty—mostly I pushed them to see the five of us as family and him as interloper. When he remarried and had another child and withdrew further from his first four daughters, well, that fit my projections nicely. And, lost in my own transformation to single woman, I missed my children's heartache over being shoved to the periphery, hardly noticed by their dad.
In the last months of the marriage, in Tucson, I kept the girls busy enough that they didn't notice (I told myself) the first dust and crumble of the coming dissolution. Starting with Amanda. One Saturday that spring, she, ten years old then, and I stood in a long, hot line in a parking lot outside a downtown performance hall; black asphalt stuck to the bottoms of my sandals and the day's heat frying a hole in the top of my head. I'd read in the paper a few days earlier that a traveling acting company from New York was coming to town to put on eight days of performances of Annie, and they were looking for local girls to play the orphans. I'd talked Amanda into trying out, since she'd always wanted to be in a play; it had seemed like a great idea until we were sixty-seventh in line for the audition and I realized I had three hungry kids at home with a father who often forgot about lunch and about checking regularly on the whereabouts of the younger ones. Besides, every dressed-up-pretty and sweetly curled child in Tucson, most of whom held professional glossy photos and blue folders of sheet music, twittered around us. I'd dragged my daughter into something that could end up embarrassing her—that was my worry. I should have figured out that Amanda herself was ambivalent about getting into the play, and that part of her buoyant pleasure at the moment was simply this chance to spend time alone with me without a sister or two along. A whole afternoon. (I'd often promise myself that I'd make time for each daughter alone—a lunch, a walk, a shopping trip—but then I'd quickly revert into my old pattern of taking the whole set of them, or at least half, to whatever function we had to attend or on some errand or grocery trip.) I'd tucked away in my purse the two snapshots of Amanda that we'd taken in the backyard, and I reached over now and then to clean dirt off the bottom of her chin with my shirt. That morning, before we'd left, she and Stephanie had crawled around in our big cactus garden, as they often did, searching for scorpions and spiders. Amanda hadn't swept the mud off her knees or pulled all the twigs from her hair. But no matter. I took another swig of water and passed the bottle on to her, draping my
arm across her bony shoulders. We'd get inside, Amanda would sing her audition song, the people in charge would thank her for coming, I'd tell her how proud I was of her for trying, and we'd go home.
But Amanda made the first cut. And the next cut, that evening, nine hours after we'd arrived. The third came Sunday afternoon: she was in the final group of almost-orphans. Late Sunday night, I was drying the last of our dinner dishes when Tom picked up the ringing phone. I could tell by his grin, his flash of glee in my direction, that Amanda had made it. He hung up to tell me that she'd been cast in the role of Pepper, the rascally, tomboyish, ill tempered orphan, the one most longing for love and acceptance who hid her quivering need behind a scowl.
I don't know how much my daughters had sensed by that soft April night about the slow dismantling of their parents' marriage, which we'd not yet spoken to them about but which was in every molecule of air between us. I pushed away the issue constantly on my mind, to leave him or to stay, as Tom and I climbed the stairs to wake Amanda. We sat on either side of her twin bed to tell her the news about the play, Stephanie resting on her elbow in the other bed to listen in. I remember the glow on Amanda's face and Stephanie's shriek as she leaped over my lap to crawl under her sister's covers. The four of us squeezed together in celebration of this strange acting thing that would soon pull our daughter into its center. The break soon to come—Tom's and mine—wasn't part of anything that night. All of us realized that the months of rehearsals and costume fittings and cast parties, and then the eight-night run of a show that would put Amanda in front of three thousand people at a time, were going to bind us like nothing had for a long time. For me, it was a temporary fix, the marriage too far gone by then, but now I understand: every day Amanda clung to the show as a way to save her family.
The evening of the final performance that warm summer, with Amanda in her lemon yellow dress and black saddle shoes, cheeks pink from makeup and with the flush of this night's fame, signing autographs in the greenroom where Mary and Mollie slept on our pile of coats under a table topped with ice sculptures and bowls of cold prawns—I saw it then. The firm line of her jaw and the taut muscles of her neck. The all-engulfing run of performances was over. Done. Now her sisters would stop the hundred-times-a-day rendition of the "Hard-Knock Life" dance and the "You're Never Fully Dressed without a Smile" song. Now her parents wouldn't have this daughterly activity around which to be united. Annie was finished and we were finished.
The August night Tom and I sat in the living room of the house where we all still lived together to tell our daughters about "the separation," not yet "the divorce," Amanda was the one most wiped out by the news and flattened by what she, more than others, had known was coming. It was Stephanie who actually cried the hardest and the longest, though, wailing as she could as a child, a sound to pierce the heart, and holding her father's arm as if he'd float away if she let him go. Just out of the shower, Stephanie had a blue towel wrapped around her shoulders, her arms and legs the warm color of cinnamon popping out from a terry-cloth robe. Her long blond hair dripped down her back. The second I'd said the words—Dad and I are going to live apart— to our daughters, who were scattered around the room, Stephanie had flown to Tom's lap and stayed there, her arms gripping the towel to her chest, her lips and face wilting. When I said, We're going to live in different houses, but you'll see both of us as much as you want, Amanda turned her face to the horsehair couch's scratchy fabric and refused to turn back. Mary and Mollie were six and four years old. They pressed themselves into my lap, crying too, dampening the front of my shirt, though I could tell neither knew what was happening except that a sadness had washed through their family like the flash floods from monsoon rain that filled the arroyos at their father's family ranch in the hills above the city.
I'd said what had to be said. I held Mollie to my chest with one hand and rubbed Mary's back with the other, waiting for the sobbing around me to pass. I couldn't afford to enter this weeping with the rest of my family. Someone needed to get the little ones to bed, finish the dishes, fold the laundry. Move on. Suck it up, get going, don't look back. I had no idea how to make this change, this reconfiguration of my daughters' lives, better for them. Since I couldn't make it hurt less, I made myself still and silent and withdrawn.
Then Stephanie's nose started to bleed. First a bulb of red at one nostril, then a gush from both. I stood up, leaving the little girls on the seat without me, and stepped to the edge of Tom's chair. He'd tipped Stephanie's head back and held the bridge of her nose; his neck and the front of his shirt were covered by a bloom of blood. His bloody hand stuck to her bloody cheek.
"I'll get a washcloth," I said and rushed down the narrow hall to our one bathroom at the back of the house. Once in the little space, I stopped rushing. Without flipping on the overhead light, I turned on the sink's tap and laid a square washcloth in the cool dip of the basin and sat on the toilet to watch the water soak into the green cotton fabric. From the other end of the hall, I heard Tom's mutterings to the girls, though not his words. I stretched out my leg and nudged the door closed so I'd hear nothing at all.
Balanced there with my knees against the edge of the tub, I thought about a dinner we'd had at Tom's family ranch, forty miles into the Catalinas, a few weeks earlier. As we'd passed platters of enchiladas and bowls of black beans and rice around the table, Tom's mother had—out of nowhere, if I remember—told us a story about her husband arriving home hours late one evening from his work as an engineer. She was irate, she said, about having been left with the evening chores for their children, several saucy teenage girls and three wild, uncontainable boys.
It turned out that her husband and a few friends from work had stopped at a carnival in one of the small towns they'd traveled to that day, and while they were walking among the neon-lit rides and game booths, my husband's father gave in to a whim—he stepped behind a curtain and let a palm reader tell his future. Once home with his wife, he sat on the living room sofa and, under soft lamplight, showed her the lifeline that the fortuneteller had suggested was shorter than most. There wouldn't be all that much time left, the woman had told him. He should live it up. He'd pulled his hand back from his wife's and laughed at the story, standing up to pour his evening toddy. But my mother-in-law hadn't taken it as a joke. Thirty years later, fork in hand at our family dinner, she trembled a little over the memory of that long-ago conversation with her husband. She took a sip of her wine and gave me a long stare. Or I felt her stare was directed at me, anyway—that night, I probably couldn't have imagined it pointed anywhere else. I sat at the far end of the table with Mary in my lap—my six-year-old's earache (which she heard back then as ear-egg and couldn't understand why I didn't reach in and pull out the offending egg) had made her feverish and fussy, her heat pouring into my chest. Now my own face turned red. Tom's family had, no doubt, picked up on my un-happiness, which I'd made quite a show of that night with drooped shoulders and something of an overproduction in the care of my sick child.
At the table, Tom's mother went on with the story about her husband's palm. She said that every time she'd felt fed up with him—the man who'd died suddenly of a heart attack in his early seventies—during the five decades they spent as a couple, she'd remembered that short lifeline and forgave him.
An hour later, I sat on the closed toilet lid in the upstairs bathroom of my mother-in-law's house with Mary still in my lap. I was taking her temperature—my excuse for stepping away from the dinner and from my drunk husband, who'd already pulled one of his favorite late-night family stunts. Just after dinner, and more wine, he'd jumped on his chair and stripped down to nothing, then leaped off the seat, leaving a rumpled pile of jeans and shirt and boxer shorts, to run white-bare-assed through the living room, out the front door, and into the pool while his sisters and brothers scattered chairs across the tile floor and tittered with laughter and while the group of child cousins who'd been playing in front of the fireplace, our daughters included, stopped what the
y were doing and watched, stock-still and stunned. We moved from the table, the group of us, though I straggled behind the others with Mary in my arms and Mollie wrapped around one leg. The adults and the children all peered out the giant picture windows in the living room that faced the unlit swimming pool, trying to see Tom rise and fall through the dark water. A sister-in-law, the oldest, wandered in close to me, as if to challenge my moodiness. "Isn't he just so much fun?" she said into my neck.
I closed my eyes, wondering why I felt no joy about my husband anymore, no surge of humor over his boyishness and revelry. I'd known he was this way since the day I met him—but at that moment I resented the hell out of Tom for the one attribute I was always claiming I wanted more of from him: consistency.
In the bathroom, the thermometer sagged at the corner of my daughter's pink mouth. I held it to make sure it stayed inside her gums and under her tongue. Mary's eyes were closed and her cheek rested against my sweat-soaked arm. A minute later, I pulled it out—101 degrees. Now I could insist we go home. I could load her up with baby Tylenol and wrap her in blankets, pack the car with the rest of our kids and our things, and leave this ranch—Tom's most beloved place, where he could be as wild as he desired—behind.
I recapped the thermometer and set it on the countertop, but before I got up, I readjusted my daughter so I could take a quick look at the flat terrain of my hand. I held my right palm still beneath the bathroom light. I knew my mother-in-law's story was supposed to have stirred in me compassion for my husband, but it was my own skin I peered at. My outstretched palm had a series of intersections and grids and crevices, its own mysterious geography; I looked for the lifeline, whichever one that was. I was thirty-three years old and figured in this moment that if a prophetic indentation in my skin suggested I had decades and decades to live, maybe I should force a few more years of making do with my marriage for our children's sake. Except maybe the short line in the middle, the one starting between my first two fingers and swooping below my pinkie, was telling me to hurry up and get out before I'd damned near wasted my life.
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