Live Through This

by Debra Gwartney

  Until the summer after her nineteenth birthday, a nearly three-year period, Stephanie was a student at Eagle Rock. Each of the five or six times Barry and I drove over from Oregon to visit her, the tires of our car squealed through the hairpin turns leading to the ten-thousand-foot-elevation compound, and my head got dizzy as my heart beat harder. My mouth became sticky and dry, the moisture in my body wicked away by an altitudinal wind.

  In August 2001, Barry and I were at the school for the last time—we'd made a final trip to watch Stephanie graduate. Nine students would receive diplomas, making my daughter's graduating class the second largest in the school's history. A small group—yet I still wanted Steph to feel like the day was as big a deal as the graduations at schools that paraded five or six hundred students across the stage. I'd ordered announcements off the Internet, bundles of small cards with Stephanie's name printed on them in formal script, just like those from regular high schools. Before I mailed them, I tucked a picture of her, taken during her last visit home, into each envelope. Stephanie seemed happy enough about the graduation extras, the announcements and ad hoc senior photos, but maybe they didn't matter as much to her as they did to me. Maybe she went along with the trappings because she knew how attached I was to the unspoken message that went with them: See how normal we are after all? See how much she's over being a bad girl on a bad road?

  During her years at Eagle Rock, Stephanie threatened to quit at least a dozen times—plenty of nights I'd lie awake in my bed at home convinced that she wasn't going to finish, but instead to toss herself again into the raw tumble of the streets. But she didn't quit. And in the end, the final stretch of months before she graduated, she was among the students chosen for a weeklong class in politics in Washington, D.C., and for trips with teachers to national conventions where she spoke as one of the turned-toward-a-brighter-future kids. She was the Eagle Rock student selected by the staff to get the Rotary Club funds that allowed her to live in Thailand for a summer and teach kindergarten in a small village called Pha Lariet. She put in her required eight hundred hours of community service, cleaning and repairing forest service cabins, shoveling the snow from elderly folks' driveways, picking up garbage in the city's park. Stephanie had squeaked by in math and science classes, and she'd excelled in every art class she could get into. She'd finished glass-blowing workshops with enough glistening bowls and vases to line a bookcase, and she'd learned how to develop her own distinctively grainy photographs in the school darkroom. She wrote poetry and made books with artfully sewn bindings. She taught herself to play the accordion so she could pump out Tom Waits's "Closing Time," among other songs of his, and in the school's bulletin she dedicated her graduation not to me or her father but to her favorite singer, "the man who's gotten me through the worst of times."

  Stephanie did these things, made these changes, a thousand miles away from me. It was Robert and the other teachers at the school who got to look on at this young woman who'd come to charm them (who was once again the girl who adults loved to love). They saw her shed the Sno-Cone-colored hair and the dirty clothes and the plugs in her earlobes. The snarl on her face, the one she'd come back from Austin with, faded. Her skin settled into its former translucent glow. The anger and the need to run once molded to her skin—like a waxy rind on cheese—fell away during these Eagle Rock years. All those many miles from the rest of us, with adults other than me guiding her, she put an end to her time on the streets.

  Graduation weekend. We were all there—the three other girls, their father, my mother, Barry, and I—sitting in metal seats on a Friday afternoon while the girl wearing a silky spaghetti-strapped peach dress and a shine of pink on her lips gave her final senior presentation in the Eagle Rock gymnasium. After her last words and a squeaky sendoff from the school band, which consisted of about eight kids and Robert (on trombone), Barry and I wandered out to the grounds outside the gym. I stood in the afternoon air looking at the grayish mountains, still trying to adjust to the altitude's pinch across my forehead and waiting for Stephanie to come out and find us. She'd been surrounded by her sisters and by Tom—and teachers and friends—right after her talk, so Barry and I thought it best to step away. Robert, tall and ruddy-cheeked, with a spry patch of sand-colored hair on his head, came out the main doors with trombone case in hand and walked over—he knew Barry had to leave at dawn the next day, hours before the actual cap-and-gown ceremony took place, to catch a plane to an East Coast appointment. Robert quietly asked us now if we'd like to have a private showing of the slides he'd collected since these nine kids had arrived at Eagle Rock. Each teenager had been some version of war-torn and lost back at the beginning; many had been like Stephanie when she landed on the school's doorstep: still itching for a fight, daring the Eagle Rock adults to throw her out. She'd been exploding out of corners for so long by then, she didn't understand for years how to do anything but explode.

  After the graduation ceremony, which would culminate in the most sophisticated dinner the school kitchen could put together for the hundred or so of us on campus—aluminum vats of chicken and whipped potatoes and chocolate mousse for dessert—Robert planned to bring out the projector and, accompanied by a loop of sentimental pop music, flash before the onlookers the transformations of Stephanie and the eight other kids. Now he leaned toward Barry and me to ask again in a low voice: did we want to meet him in the administration building later for a preview so Barry could see the slides? I told him yes, we did, and I made note of the room and the hour, but even then—even in my eagerness to see evidence of my daughter growing out of what she had been and growing into what she had become—I wondered if I could handle being walloped with these images of what I'd missed, with all that had gone on without me, all I hadn't seen or heard or experienced because I'd sent Stephanie away to this school instead of sticking it out with her, instead of being the one who'd helped her forge her way to this change.

  At this same time, Amanda—who'd flown in for Stephanie's ceremony—was in the middle of her own metamorphosis. She was going to school at Prescott College in Arizona. She'd taken on big student loans to attend that private school, but she'd set her heart and mind on Prescott and now was there, allowed in with her GED scores and the offer of extra help from teachers to make up for lost high-school years. She was, for the first time since the age of fifteen, actually creating a future for herself rather than remaining stuck in the flattened possibility of each single day at a time.

  I'd traveled to Prescott with Amanda the summer before Stephanie's graduation, for a first visit of the school. Amanda, who was nineteen years old then, and I wandered around the town of Prescott and then drove to the campus to pick up paperwork and look at classrooms and eat at the small student café that served deep bowls of lentils and brown rice along with piles of organic kale and spinach. The student body was dressed, to a one it seemed to me, in earth-tone variations on the color brown. Sweaters and wool hats, Dickies or Carhartt's pants, and big work boots. Amanda would fit in with the no-makeup, tousled-hair crowd, with these mountain hikers and kayakers and bikes-not-cars drivers. She was still shaky in ways, and had just begun to separate herself from Billy. She felt ready, she told me, to leave Eugene behind for a few years. We'd gone to Prescott to see exactly how she might do that.

  All that day, as we met college folks here and there and saw the kinds of classes the school offered, I watched Amanda brighten, felt her lighten. In the middle of the day, it occurred to me that she was a steady young woman who'd finally left adolescence behind and not the person I'd made her out to be for too long: an ageless just-off-the-street waif.

  We stayed a few hours in Prescott, then drove back down the mountain to the valley to spend the night in an upscale Scottsdale resort, all dreamy pink architecture, translucent fountains, and manicured cacti. We'd live it up for a few hours; for the first time since she was a toddler, just Amanda and me for a whole night. Once in our room, we pulled the stiff polyester covers from our queen-size beds and lolled aro
und on the cool sheets and checked out cable television, which neither of us had back home. I decided that before having dinner in the hotel dining room we should each take advantage of one service from the resort's spa. I moved to Amanda's bed, sitting thigh to thigh with her, and together we read over the thick brochure I held in my hands. It described massages, manicures, mud baths, hot rocks, facials, the hour with a personal trainer, the class with a nutritionist. "Can people actually afford this?" I said, running my finger down the prices column, my nail scraping one hundred-dollar-plus charge after the other. Amanda giggled. Amanda fell backward on the covers.

  Though it had seemed like a good idea when I'd suggested the treatments, five minutes after pondering the brochure I wasn't so certain. Suddenly I was picturing myself in a strange room naked except for a stranger's sheet, facedown in one of those doughnut pillows with soft music humming overhead and a stick of incense burning in the corner, and I wanted nothing more than to talk Amanda into staying put in our room. She wouldn't be surprised by my sudden switch, my mild panic. She'd seen me act this way when I got around people I didn't know. The parent meetings at the middle school, for instance, where I sat in the back believing that every whisper and glance in my direction had to do with me and my bad-girl daughters. I'd wander to the perimeter of the room during punch-and-cookies time, pretending to read the book titles on a teacher's shelf or look at the art on the wall, and I'd hurry to the parking lot as soon as possible once the meeting was finished, before someone could say, Aren't you Amanda's mother? And Stephanie's? Over a seven-year period I showed up regularly at the school that all four of my daughters eventually attended, but I never bothered to learn one other mother's name.

  I felt acutely out of place at this resort, as much—or more—than I did at the girls' schools or at the few parties and social affairs I'd been unable to skip after my daughters had started running off. While they were gone, I avoided others' scrutiny, avoided others in general, not yet understanding that I was only deepening the girls' alienation by hiding away from people myself.

  The brochure, printed on thick adobe-colored paper and embossed on the front with the hotel's insignia, grew heavy in my hands. The spa was beyond me—and, I thought, beyond Amanda. We couldn't show up in this locker room in our old jeans shorts and T-shirts and worn sandals and undress with the wealthy guests of the desert. I didn't see how it would be good for us to squirm in discomfort in a place we didn't fit.

  I was on the verge of saying that we should stay in and watch movies, order room service, and forget about the other half of our plan as well, which was to get dressed up for dinner in the resort's restaurant—but before I could say much of anything, Amanda started to push. Sweetly push.

  "When are we going to have another chance?" she asked, sitting up and taking the brochure out of my hands. "Let's just do one thing each. It'll be fun." She linked her arm with mine. "You deserve it, Mom," she said, smiling and bumping her shoulder against my shoulder.

  A few minutes later, I picked up the phone to order our treatments—moving back into a world alongside my daughters; yes, I could try that. I decided I'd have a plain massage, the standard fifty-minute type that might get out some of the potato-size knots that had formed in my shoulder muscles in the wake of Stephanie's return, and Amanda would get her long, thick hair cut for the first time in over a year.

  ***

  By the time I'd finished my treatment in the jasmine-scented room and then enjoyed the fifteen minutes in the sauna I was allowed as a bonus, twilight had fallen. The blue sky was dusky now out the high windows in the women's locker room. I pulled on old sweats that were rough against my tingling legs, my skin hot and hair wet against my neck. Out in the hallway—where the salon had for some reason shut down early, its shades drawn and a CLOSED sign in the window—I looked around for Amanda, a damp towel and my swimsuit rolled up under my arm. After a few minutes of wandering, I found her outside. She was sitting on a concrete bench, legs crossed, smoking a cigarette under the golden arc of the exterior light. Her hair was shoulder length now, with a gently curved bounce at the perfectly snipped ends. I reached out to touch those soft locks.

  "Wow," I said. "You look good."

  But when she glanced up at me, her face was dark, closed down. Since the time we'd gone our separate ways, about an hour earlier, she'd retreated inside herself, and I had no idea why.

  "What's going on?" I said, heart sinking already. "What happened?"

  Amanda shrugged and stood up, twisting the bottom of her flip-flop on the cigarette butt to put it out. "Nothing," she said. "No big deal."

  We started back to the hotel room in silence, and only after we were away from any other people on the path and walking in dusk's dimness did she let me in on the scene with the hairdresser. Amanda's hair had been washed and trimmed, and the woman was starting to blow it dry—running a fine-tooth comb through the wet strands and using a sharp pair of scissors to catch any stray hairs—when she found first one nit, then another, then a bunch of them at the base of Amanda's skull. Tiny lice eggs that had no doubt been passed to her from one of the children she watched every morning and every afternoon.

  I felt my own face turn beet red as she told the story. Every fall the four girls had come home from school with the itchy bugs in their hair—damp western Oregon turned out to be a perfect breed ing ground for the crawling parasites, and a classroom the ideal place to encourage their spread. But a resort in Scottsdale, Arizona, is not the place anyone would expect to find even a single shiny white lice egg, and I writhed in discomfort for my daughter.

  "She freaked out," Amanda went on. "She called the other woman over and they started throwing the brushes and combs and everything else in the sink and pouring disinfectant all over them. Then they told me I had to get out of there."

  The hairdresser had yanked the plastic covering from around Amanda's neck and hustled her to the front door. Once Amanda was on the other side, the woman flipped the lock, pulled down the shades, and slapped up the sign to close the place down.

  "I'm so sorry," I said, reaching over to touch her. She veered away from me, clasping her arms tight to her chest.

  "I don't care. It's nothing. I'll never see them again," she said, shrugging her shoulders, but everything about her body—the way her back bent slightly as she walked under the path lights, the set of her jaw, as she'd held herself in the old days—were sure signs that it did matter. I pressed the damp towel in my arms against my own chest, frustrated and silent.

  We put our few things away in the room and I picked up my purse and the keys to our rental car. With Amanda in the passenger seat, I drove out of the resort and into the more residential part of town, where we fairly soon found a strip mall full of ordinary shops. At a chain drugstore, I bought a container of lice shampoo nearly identical to the dozens of others I'd purchased since my children had started school. Back in our room, we took the sheets off Amanda's bed and the cases off her pillows and wadded up any towel and washcloth she might have used, shoving the bundle under the bathroom counter. Amanda knelt on the floor and hung her head into the bathtub, and I scrubbed the thick gray liquid through her freshly washed and cut hair, the long strands of it smooth between my fingers. The water from the bathtub faucet roared, steam wafted around my wrists, and a familiar medicinal smell rose in the air—the sting of insecticide—that devoured the dainty scents of Amanda's new shampoo and rinse and of the rich oils a masseuse had rubbed into my skin. I wrapped Amanda's soapy hair in a clean towel and we went out to watch television for the few minutes the chemicals needed to sit on her head, to soak in and do their killing. Then we did the rinse.

  By eight o'clock I was finishing the treatment—she in the desk chair, me standing behind her working through small sections of wet hair with the metal comb included in the box with the shampoo. I scraped the teeth against each area of her scalp, raking out the dead nits, dead lice, wiping the comb clean with tissue, and starting again. Drips of water traveled down t
he sides of her face and fell off the edge of her chin and now and then she'd reach up to wipe one away—but she didn't say anything. She didn't make any sound. She didn't complain about the rough metal against her head or the harsh chemicals on her recently softened hair. Mostly, she didn't say a word about being embarrassed or humiliated or hurt.

  A short while later, Amanda and I made our way to the outdoor Jacuzzi in the middle of the hotel grounds, next to the long, blue, and very still pool. We'd decided to sit in the hot water and relax for a bit, then go back to the room and order hamburgers from room service and watch a movie on cable television. She and I were the only ones around the water and for that I was thankful—the other guests in for the night, or busy with other plans. I took off my sandals, tossed my towel across the back of a webbed patio chair, and slipped into the bubbly hot water, Amanda coming in after me, her damp hair bunched in a knot on top of her head.

  The stars—even competing with the hectic lights of Phoenix—were brilliant, popping into the black cloth of the sky one after the other. The air was a perfect temperature, not too hot, and I pressed into the jets of water that kneaded the muscles of my back. I closed my eyes and listened to Amanda sigh next to me. We floated in the absolute quiet of the evening for a few minutes, until the sound of a man's voice boomed out over a loudspeaker. I sat up and looked through rows of cultivated saguaro and strands of ocotillo cactus bursting with orange blossoms toward the hotel's ballroom, trying to figure out what was going on. Earlier, when we'd returned from the store, Amanda had noticed the parking lot jammed full; we'd spotted gaggles of teenagers and their parents dressed to the hilt—tuxedos and formal gowns and glittery tiaras nestled into piles of hair—sweeping into the hotel's lobby. We figured it was a prom, but now, as the loudspeaker man began his introductions, I realized he was announcing a debutante ball.