Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  Things, in other words, were bad at our house, getting worse by the day. Just when I'd think the bar was set—This is as awful as it's ever going to get— I'd have to push it higher. This hopelessness, which I felt as a burned patch on my tongue and as pressure behind my eyes, was first stirred one night in October when Amanda and Stephanie didn't come home—the first time they'd flat-out failed to show up. Amanda, seemingly done with the idea of hurting herself, was now determined to go where the hurting could be done to her—and to Stephanie. That night, when they hadn't returned by the time we'd agreed they would—ten P.M.—every bad thing that could happen to teenage girls rolled one after another through my mind. Every horrible thing. I stared out the living room window at the rain, the phone silent in my hand. If their new friends had telephone numbers, I didn't know them. I waited until two A.M., until three, then started calling hospitals and police. No reports involving a fourteen- and twelve-year-old; no one offered a single idea about where my daughters might be.

  Early the next day, a Saturday, I got up after no sleep and drove Mollie to her horseback-riding lessons in the country, up the winding hills that rose from our lush, green valley, dappled sunlight trickling through the car's window and over us. The lesson, offered by the city for a low enough fee, was what Mollie most looked forward to every week. While she rode the tall paint horse who'd become her best pal, I waited in the car under a cluster of maple trees, unable to read the paper I'd brought along or swallow the hot coffee from my thermos, or even think. If I didn't move my arms and legs or take my eyes from the waving pasture grass in front of me, I could manage not to feel anything. I could stay that way until my sweaty and glowing youngest daughter slipped into the car and I had no choice but to shake myself from torpor and head back to town.

  How could my children not have come home? I knew they'd been skipping school—I'd had plenty of calls about that—and I figured that even though they told me they'd be at this girl's house or that girl's house, my daughters had been hanging around a certain pack of boys I'd seen lingering in our downtown mall; boys nearly through their teens, into their twenties, who wore skin-tight black pants and black T-shirts with anarchist A's painted on the front and jackets covered in patches and wooly hats on their heads; boys who no doubt gave the girls beer and drugs and showed them how to Dumpster-dive and beg for spare change, and who offered them a place to settle in and be part of the edgy coolness of the street scene. I was no competition for any of that.

  I drove toward home, Mollie quiet and worried about my worry in the seat next to me. I wondered what I would do if Amanda and Stephanie still weren't there. Wondered what I would do if they were there flopped in their beds in clothes stinking of beer and smoke—how I could impress on my own children how anguishing it was not to know where they were for a whole night? Mostly I wondered this: How do you get any kind of control back once it's utterly, totally gone?

  I rounded a sharp curve and looked off the edge of a cliff to the wide, flat valley floor, the long scratch of a river meandering through. It would have been so easy to miss the turn and drive straight—shift into neutral and fly my car into empty blue-morning space. That had to be simpler than figuring out how to keep my tattered family from falling apart any more than it already had.

  I thought that would be the worst day—the first time they didn't come home all night—but it wasn't. By that Christmas Day when I opened the tent from my sister, the girls had made a habit of spending the night elsewhere, away from our house. No matter how many times I told them that staying out without my permis sion was the most egregious of the broken rules, they kept it up and without concern, I guess, for any consequences I tried to dole out. Whatever they'd found out there on the streets was too good to miss, and the sound of my tinny and redundant proclamation that they had to come home at a decent hour—come home at all—was nothing but one more annoyance to ignore.

  A few minutes after the Christmas rolls were in the oven, as I was leaning against the hot door until I felt my thigh turn red, the phone rang. Mary ran into the kitchen to answer, and I quickly realized it was Tom on the other end. After she spoke to him, Mary headed into the living room to hand the mobile to Amanda or Stephanie, and that's when I felt the flicker of temptation to intercept her. Maybe I'd gamble on asking the girls' father to back me up on this one. I'd ask for his support on the curfew I'd laid down for these children barely into their teens. But then an old, heavy dread filled my gut and I held my tongue. There was no way to predict what he'd do with what I asked of him, or with what I told him. He'd guffaw on the other end, for sure, reminding me of all the times he'd said that raising four kids alone was beyond me, that I'd never be able to make it right. Too often Amanda or Stephanie had shot back to me words I'd spoken to him in confidence—Dad says that you said. . . As if I'd been gossiping to him about our children instead of soliciting his advice and help. As if he were their pal and I sure wasn't, which gave him permission to rat on me to girls I lived and dealt with every day.

  Since Amanda had returned from Tucson, Tom hadn't been in touch with her doctors or her counselors or her school, yet he'd become the one she went to if she needed to complain about me. Every few days, Amanda and then Stephanie put the phone to their mouths and made a case for my intolerance of their friends, for my need to control everything they did. They told him I wouldn't leave them alone about the way they dressed, where they went at night, how often they took a shower or washed their clothes and sheets. He listened, and, I'd later hear from one of the girls, he soothed, cajoled, and complained about me with them. "Dad says we don't have to put up with you," Amanda would say. "Dad says we can just leave if you start yelling. Dad says..."

  If I asked him now to back me up on a curfew, I figured he'd turn my words against me with a couple of coolly delivered sentences. In fact, that's what I decided he'd absolutely do as I wandered back into the living room and knotted myself angry in my chair. I couldn't trust him. The coffee dripped into the glass pot in the kitchen and ornaments tinkled from Mollie's rustling under the tree, and I resolved not to say a word to Tom and then to despise him for our lack of conversation, for leaving me alone with this problem, even though he had no idea what I'd just parsed in my mind.

  While Amanda and Stephanie talked on the phone from their musky-smelling bedroom, their giggles and hot whispers escaping from under the door, I thought about the exactly six presents each I'd bought for my daughters with money I'd saved all year—music I knew they wanted, and new sweatshirts and novels—and about the zero presents from their father under the tree. Another trip across the border when they went to Tucson for the second half of winter break was to be his gift, and the girls couldn't wait to head to their favorite Mexican beach, where they'd swim with porpoises and chase pelicans drifting across the water. During the weeks of Christmas planning, I'd let myself gloat again: I was the more thoughtful, the more careful parent—the one preserving tradition and ritual. But now I didn't know what I was. A fool. A fool for thinking that this was a game I could win—and an even bigger fool for making it a game in the first place.

  I was back in the kitchen prying the brown, doughy rolls out of the pan when Stephanie came in, still in her sleep T-shirt hanging to her knees and now with a new dog collar around her skinny neck, sharp silver spikes punched through a leather band. Amanda's gift to her. Stephanie had garnished the punkness of the neck gear with a caterpillar's thickness of eyeliner across each lid. When she came closer, I saw that her tear ducts were full of fat sleepy-seeds and that her bottom lip was a little crusty from sleep—she hadn't quite succeeded in erasing the little girl who still lived under all that thick makeup and metal jewelry.

  "Dad told us how much child support you get," she said, and she splayed her hands—chipped black nail polish and chewed cuticles—across the red counter. My own hand wrapped tight around the spatula.

  "Did he?" I said without turning toward her voice. This cold block rising inside me was an early inkling that child
support would be a main theme of our endless battles as the girls whipped themselves into the fevered belief that the money was theirs—that they'd been robbed because I used the monthly payment on food and mortgage and the heat that piped out of the vent in their room. Their dad's opinion, or so they reported, was that the funds came from his paycheck so he should be able to decide how it was spent, and he'd decided (the girls informed me) that they were old enough to use the dollars any way they wished, on whatever they wanted, and by God, Amanda said now as she came into the room, that's what they would do.

  "If you get six hundred a month," Amanda said from behind Stephanie, "that's a hundred and fifty dollars each. We want it."

  "It's our money," Stephanie added. She leaned into Amanda's side, clutching her sister around the waist and digging a couple of those silver spikes from the dog collar into Amanda's upper arm. Amanda pressed against her, ignoring the metal's prick to her flesh.

  "Dad says," Amanda went on, "that we're not kids anymore. We can take care of ourselves."

  I picked up a knife and scraped at the sides of the pan so that the hardened sugar would give way. I distracted myself with this noisy task for a second so my voice wouldn't shake with contempt, or with exhaustion, or with resignation—who knew what tone was about to come out of my mouth—when I answered them. I could have gone to my own bedroom right then to call Tom and get square with him about the advice he'd given, or not given, to these daughters, but I didn't even consider such an amicable move. I don't remember why I couldn't take one of those deep breaths that helps put everything into perspective, why I didn't pull my daughters in close with a let's-talk-about-this calm. My blood was too close to boiling to be that easily cooled. I was embroiled in the fight, caught up in the dark thrill of polarization, ready to defend myself to the teeth.

  "Tell it to the judge," I said to these girls, my head down so they couldn't see my trembling face. "He gave the money to me, not you."

  "I knew she'd be that way," Amanda said to Stephanie, her arms crossed over her chest, her knobby ninth-grade knees sticking out from her pajama pants. They turned in a mutual huff. Amanda called backward as she stormed from the room: "Dad says it's pretty sick how you keep hanging on to us. He says you just can't stand to let us go."

  I was a sophomore in high school the afternoon I tossed my books and leather-fringed purse onto my bed and heard Cindy, my eighth-grader sister, come into our basement bedroom behind me.

  "What's that?" she said, pointing to our room's one small window, high on the exterior wall.

  "I don't know," I said.

  We both walked closer, climbed on her bed to get a better look. Cindy slid open the glass and I stuck my hand between two thick wires that blocked the passage to the outside world. It seemed that sometime that day while we were away at school someone had attached metal to our bedroom's window frame.

  A while later, upstairs, I heard my mother telling a friend on the telephone that our father had put in this barrier because he suspected my sister and I were sneaking out at night. Sneaking out? I went back downstairs to find Cindy. I hadn't even thought of such a thing. Had she? She shook her head. "Where does he think we're going?" she said, and we hopped up on the bed again in our stocking feet. She slid open the window once more, and this time I wrapped my hands around a wire and shook it, its cold soaking into my palm.

  My father was sixteen when I was born—barely finished with his sophomore year of high school—while my mother was seventeen. Maybe he believed I was certain to become a throbbing mass of raw hormones now that I was nearly that age myself. If temptation dangled juicily outside, he might have thought I couldn't help but pursue it—with Cindy not long after me, and our brother Ron, whose room was on the other side of the basement—also soon climbing out the narrow portal into the delights of the night.

  Cindy and I didn't talk about the window after that afternoon's discovery; it was too strange for discussion. Sometimes at the dinner table Dad would chew us out over some undone chore or a less-than-great report card—our mother having filled him in about our transgressions—but otherwise I remember him mostly in the backyard throwing a baseball or football with Ron or in the front driveway shooting hoops with that brother, not all that much said to the girl members of the family (our dad once took us to a nearby park to teach us how to swing at baseballs, but I was lousy at it, and he never asked again). Many Saturday nights, my parents would go to a friend's house or out to a restaurant, but first Dad drove over to the nearby Big Bun or Red Steer to buy his four kids dinner. While my mother put on her lipstick and finished her hair, he went around the table to take one bite from everyone's hamburger—he stopped at Cindy's place at the table, at Ron's, at Becky's, and a quarter of my burger disappeared into his mouth when he finally got to me. I both fumed and marveled at this hunger, at his desire for this simple fare and not the meal that was ahead of him at whatever party or event they were attending. I wanted to give him my food while at the same time silently resenting the way he demanded it. If one of us moaned about how much he was taking, our father would grab the burger, dripping with ketchup and greasy cheese, and thrust it toward his mouth like he was going to gobble the whole thing. Then, laughing, he'd set it back on its crackly paper. "You can't spare your dad a lousy bite?"

  Somewhere in our closet there was an 8mm movie of Cindy and me sitting on the Salmon High School bleachers—I was two and she a six-month-old in a baby chair—while our father strolled by us in cap and gown on his way to graduate. I don't remember him in those first years of my life beyond those brief images, and that's a movie-induced memory, not a real one. Shortly after he finished high school, we moved to another town so my parents could enroll in college. Dad got up at four A.M. to deliver milk, went to classes until late afternoon, and then worked in a service station down the street from our trailer park until after we were asleep. Sometimes our mother pulled us to the station in the red wagon, where we'd play with the windshield-wiper display, and then our father would set Cindy and me in whatever car he was fixing on the steel lift, yanking a lever that rode us up and down in the oil-scented garage bay.

  At home, Cindy and I shared the bed in the trailer's small back bedroom; Ron soon joined us in that room, and, a year and a half after that, our sister Becky was in the crib against the opposite wall. My parents slept in the other bedroom, hardly any larger, their bed neatly made by the time we got up, not even an inch of sheet peeping from under the smooth spread. After we had our fill of dairy products in my mother's tidy kitchen—my dad got the outdated cream and cottage cheese and ice cream off his milk truck—Cindy and I went outside to play while our mom tended to babies.

  I recall that on one of those play mornings, Cindy slung her three-year-old self into the loop of our one swing, its metal chains hanging from an ancient tube structure covered with chipping green paint, and began to pump, higher and higher—feet thrust straight out as she swung forward, then legs tucked tight as she flew back. I sat at the edge of the gravel drive and used a stick to swirl the sticky colors—deep reds and purples—in a small puddle of oil and water that had collected between the rocks. After a few minutes, one hollow side post of our old swing set started thumping—bam, bam, bam into the baked earth—and then the whole thing toppled, pitching Cindy into the air midswing. I watched her fly over me, a wingless bird, and fall hard on the sparse grass in our patch of yard. She picked herself up and wiped the dirt from her playsuit, and I went over to try to help her pull the set back in place, a futile effort, before my mother ran outside, anxious over the noise she'd just heard, worried about us, and before our tired father came home late that night to stand in the middle of the yard and yell at our mother about letting the goddamn kids have the run of the place.

  During one of those shouting-match nights, I lay on the edge of the bed turned away from Ron's stinking diaper, my skin cool because of the fall air and the shouting outside—maybe it was a night when my parents were jamming the swing-set legs back into thei
r holes and packing in more mud and concrete, which never seemed to work for long. I was maybe four and a half years old, and already was promising myself to avoid such voices whenever I could—to do what was necessary to make sure that whenever anger came out of my father, it wasn't directed at me.

  A few days after the wires went up in our teenage-girl bedroom, they were suddenly gone. Without a word of explanation. Cindy and I figured that it had dawned on our parents that there would be no way for us to get out in case of a fire, so Dad must have cut the metal away and rebuilt the wood frame around the window. A window barely large enough to fit our long and narrow bodies.

  Not too many weeks later, I found myself at that unbarred opening. Cindy was off to spend that Saturday with a friend, and I'd gotten up in the dead of the night to slip on jeans and a sweatshirt. I'd stood on my sister's bed in my bare feet and opened the window as wide as it would go. I squeezed the sides of the screen until it popped out. Late autumn air rushed in, as did the jangle of the leaves of the maple tree in our backyard and the clinks of metal chains against the poles of my three-year-old brother's (he was born when I was thirteen) swing set. With one good jump off the bed, I wormed my way out the hole, twisting my midsection across the hard metal lip and sliding my legs over its sharp edge. I scrambled into the ankle-deep grass, blades of it sticking between my toes. The yard was wet enough that moisture wicked up my jeans and made me shiver. I didn't have much of a plan except to follow my breathless crush on a boy who lived on the street behind ours; this, more than anything else, had driven me out into the dark. The intimacy of staring at his house, his window, in the middle of the night had charged my pulsing blood.