by Amanda Stern
It’s not just that she drops things or loses glasses and rings, it’s also that she believes everything everyone tells her—like that Eddie broke his arm walking into a wall—which means one day, she might get hurt. She’s always asking people what to do, or what to think or say, and whenever I ask her anything she says either “It just is,” or “It just won’t,” or “I can’t explain it,” which means she doesn’t know. I worry she’ll forget I love her, which is why when she says she loves me, I say, “I love you more.” Now she’s started saying, “No, I love you more,” and I’m worried she thinks I don’t love her enough, which is worse than her not loving me enough. I need to be home; I need to make sure she can see me, can feel my love. Otherwise, she might forget. She forgets important things. She forgot the sleepover code.
Margaux is always asking me to sleep over. I don’t want to be scared, because it makes life harder. So a few months ago I decided that the next time Margaux asked, I’d say yes and push myself to try. But still I worried.
“What if I say yes to a sleepover but then decide later that I need to come home?” I asked my mom.
“We can have a code,” she said. “If you want to sleep at Margaux’s house, when you call, you ask, ‘Mom, can I sleep at Margaux’s house?’ Otherwise, you should ask, ‘Mom, Margaux wants to know if I can sleep over.’ When you say their name first, I’ll know that means you don’t want to. Got it?”
I smiled. My mother is not only very beautiful, she’s also a brilliant genius. “I get it.”
A few days later, when I was at Margaux’s and it was almost dinnertime, she asked if I wanted to sleep over. Although I’d felt ready a few days ago, it wasn’t true anymore, but now I had a code to get out of things like this.
“Let me call and ask,” I said.
Margaux stood next to me as I dialed home.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mom. Margaux wants to know if I can sleep over,” I said. I hoped I didn’t sound so obvious that Margaux would figure out our code.
“Okay, that’s fine,” she said.
I held the phone, paralyzed. “No, Mom. I said Margaux wants to know if I can sleep over!”
“Manda, I just said it’s fine.”
“What’s she saying?” Margaux asked. I didn’t like how close her ear was to the receiver.
I looked around the kitchen. It made me sick to imagine all the lights of this house turning out for the night. I turned my back to Margaux, covered the receiver with my hand, and spoke directly into the pinpricks.
“But Mom…,” I tried again.
“Manda, I have something in the oven. I said yes; yes, you can sleep over at Margaux’s!”
“Code, Mom! Code!” I whispered hard into the phone.
“Oh! I completely forgot! No, you may not sleep at Margaux’s!”
I hung up and looked at Margaux with the saddest face I could manage. “She says I can’t.”
“Why?” Margaux asked.
But the only thing I could think to say was, “I can’t explain it.”
A few hours later, when I was safely back in my own house, it sank in. If my mom couldn’t remember a code she invented, and I had to remember it for her, then it really wasn’t safe for me to leave her. What else was she forgetting?
Rules always change on me when they aren’t supposed to because I’m right about the world—the things that people say won’t happen do happen. Nothing stays the same. It feels like every time I try to get past my worries, my tries get erased. So now it’s back to how it was.
On the street she’s not careful either. Just the other day, at the corner, she started to cross without looking at the red light. I yanked her back, and my lungs burned like in breaststroke. Now I know for sure she can’t be left alone. She doesn’t even know how to properly cross the street without me.
“You can cross if no cars are coming,” she said. Now, how on earth do I keep someone like that safe?
My mom always talks about “the right thing to do.” She never makes mistakes and doesn’t like when other people make mistakes either, which is why I am always trying my hardest. But crossing the street when the light is red is not the right thing to do, and I don’t know why she doesn’t know that.
Sometimes I wish my mom would trade places with the lady on the corner. That way I’d know where she was all the time, and that she was standing still. John, one of my babysitters, takes me to school and picks me up. He takes me to activities and doctors’ appointments. When I’m with my babysitter I don’t know where my mom is, but if she stood on the corner, I’d always know. At night, I would bring her back home for dinner and then bed.
My siblings don’t mind separating, not the way I do. Our mother spits on her finger to wipe our faces, and we always smell like her saliva. “I don’t want to smell your mouth on me!” one of them complains, stomping to the sink to scrub her away. When she eats some of Kara’s apple: “Now every bite will taste like lipstick!” Or when she takes a sip of Eddie’s water: “I can taste your bad breath!” But if she wants, I’ll let her lick my entire face.
Why don’t they want to be that close, and why do they cheerfully look forward to visiting our father every other weekend when it means leaving our mother? Why don’t they want to smell her stale, airless breath in the middle of the night, to spend every last second with her?
Sometimes I feel like the world and I are the same. Like I am part of its feelings and it’s breathing me. All the days that lie ahead of me are filled with each of these exact hours, and I worry this sadness will always wait for me, no matter how old I get or where I live. Every time the sun goes, it tells me about all the days I’ve lost, and the one I’m losing now, even though I’m not finished living it.
The sky can see and feel everything, and I feel everything, too, even things I know aren’t mine. I know when my mom is upset. I know when my mom is sad. Sometimes, when I hear her cry, I barrel toward her bedroom where she’s lying on her bed, and I hold her hand and ask her if she misses her mom, which makes her cry harder, but always she says yes, and always I understand.
People make mean comments about the lady on the corner. They want her to stand somewhere else. They don’t understand, but I do. She spooks me, too, but not for the same reason. She scares me because I know that her waiting means it never goes away. The worrying, the waiting for something terrible to happen, the dread. Sometimes it gets worse as you grow up, so bad you find yourself at age forty-five standing on the corner still worried about your mom. Your hair’s gone gray, your skin’s loosened, you’ve got no job, no kids or family of your own, because all this time you’ve paid attention to only one thing: your mom. This is what forever looks like.
Intelligence Test: Picture Completion
“I am going to show you a picture that has something wrong with it. Here is the first card. Can you tell me what is wrong with this picture?”
“The man is using a comb, but he has no hair.”
“Here’s another picture. Can you tell me what’s funny about this picture? What’s silly about it?”
I look at the picture. There is too much to take in. It’s not like the first picture, which was simple; this one is busy. Look at the picture. She’s timing you. The sand is running out. Focus. Girl. Tree. Grass. Okay, now I can see the picture. This is a trick question because there are lots of things wrong. For instance, it’s windy and the girl isn’t wearing a warm enough jacket. Two, the girl is too young to be out without a grown-up. Three, the girl should have worn darker socks to match her outfit. She doesn’t look neat and put-together. Four, the wind is going in the opposite direction from the way her hair is blowing; and five, the shadow on the ground looks wrong.
Dr. Rivka shifts.
“Just one funny thing?” I ask.
“Just one.”
“Could it be the trees?” I ask. “That they’re blowing a different way from her hair? Maybe that’s it?”
I look at the girl in the picture again and then over to
the doctor.
“Is that a question, or your answer?”
“It’s a question,” I say, hoping she’ll just say I’m right so I can say the answer and know I’m right.
“I need just an answer,” she says.
I do not want to be wrong. What if she yells at me? I feel myself separate from my body so that it can answer her without me, in case I’m wrong.
“It’s the trees?” I say. “That they’re blowing a different way from her hair?”
“What about this picture, Amanda? Can you tell me what’s foolish about it, what’s silly?”
She’s not saying whether I’m right or wrong. Was it her jacket, or that she was outside without a grown-up? I stare at the card. I stare at the dog. I stare at the man. I will never know anything.
The man has footprints and the dog doesn’t, but maybe the dog is walking on a sidewalk and not in the snow. It’s hard to tell. Looking closer, it seems the man isn’t wearing shoes, and walking through the snow barefoot is funny, and wrong, as well as foolish and silly. But there’s the matter of the dog not being on a leash. Also, the dog isn’t wearing a collar. The man has his hands in fists, so he must be cold, which means he forgot his gloves. Not to mention the world is missing.
The sand timer is draining. What if the card is supposed to be in color and my answer is about the footprints? What if the man isn’t dressed warmly and my answer is that the card is black and white? What if the dog is supposed to be a cat, the man a woman, the dog a child, the man a dog? What if I can’t see the exact same things she sees?
“Don’t overthink it, Amanda. Just say the first thing that comes to your mind.”
“Is it that the dog has no footprints but the man does?” I ask.
I wait for her to say, “Very good,” or “Right on!” or even “Good job, kiddo!” but she just puts another card in front of me.
“Amanda, there is something missing from the pictures I am going to show you. You have to tell me what is missing. Here is the first picture. Can you tell me what is missing?”
I sigh. “Is it the dad’s glasses? The nose part? Is that right?”
“What about this picture?”
I will never know whether or not I’m ever right.
“What’s missing? Amanda?”
“The baby.”
“Anything else?”
“The mom.”
The System of the World
I am not married. I have never been married. I am single and childless and thirty-nine years old. It’s 2009 and I’m still looking for someone I won’t lose. For now, though, my life is just me. Me and no one. Me and no one at a dinner party. Me and no one at a wedding. Me and no one at a funeral. People ask why I’m not married, tell me I should get married, or say how lucky I am that I never married. All strange things to say to a person with no one to marry, not only because it’s predicated on the idea that I’m deficient as I am, but because it suggests marriage is a product, an item on eBay I neglected to bid on. I’m not against marriage; marriage would be nice. At the very least, it would give me a reason to list someone other than my mother as my emergency contact. A family, I think, is what I’m after.
My siblings, friends, and acquaintances seem to have effortlessly found their right someones. But for me, finding love, and the family that follows, feels like the NYC housing lottery. Every time I go to fill out an application, I’ve missed the deadline by a day.
I’ve had plenty of horrible boyfriends and have twice escaped marrying those bad choices. Yet, despite not making the mistake of marrying the wrong person, single people are still looked down upon, even by the unhappily wed.
* * *
People who were once single right alongside me have now coupled off away from me, as though they’ve suddenly realized I’m contagious. Now they’re on the other side of the divide: inadvertently making single people feel ashamed, egging me on to entertain them with dating stories, the bad ones especially, because it’s been so long. Thing is, they mean well, which is why I don’t tell them how much it hurts. The longest relationship I’ve ever had is with my therapist.
I want a child. I want a family. I want to be like everyone else. I thought I’d have that with Peter the Literary Agent; at one point I even thought it about Caleb the Clown, whom I followed to Europe when he was cast in the Cirque du Soleil. All I’ve ever wanted is to feel like I belong to this world. I want to raise a child who feels like she belongs here, too, a child who doesn’t worry I’ll die or disappear, who trusts I know how to take care of her because she sees I know how to take care of myself, who knows I can teach her to manage her fears, push her to face and conquer reality, and to rely not on me, but on herself. The longer I remain without a family, the more I feel I don’t belong anywhere, and I’ve grown so tired of that feeling.
People tell me, “If you really want a family, you’ll get a family,” and that “it happens when you’re ready, when you least expect it, when you love yourself.” I disagree with that point of view, but the world has a fixed timeline, and I’m incompatible with its system; just like the growth charts of my childhood, there’s no space left for me to be plotted.
While I’ve been close to marriage, anxiety makes losing harder than loving, and I’ve lost more than I’ve been able to love. I haven’t let go when I should have; I’ve pushed when I should have pulled, and I waited when I knew to run, and I’ve always known, right from the start, whether or not a particular guy is the one. But once I’m connected, separation feels too harrowing, even if all my love has turned sour. Somewhere early on I learned that attachment meant love, and now I can’t find my way out.
I want something I don’t even remember having—a family I can trust to stay. I am trying to return to a place I can’t recall and I’m being driven by memories I don’t have—by unconscious urges so ancient they crumble at my touch. All my efforts to make a family fail. I’m inadequate, and I’m afraid. My anxiety is so deeply embedded, I’m scared I’ll never be free.
I worry anxiety has been keeping me from the pieces of my life lying in wait underneath me. Have I been allowing the happiness that should have been mine to move on to someone else? What if all this time I’ve accidentally been donating the life I’ve been too afraid to live to someone less frightened?
June 1981
Dr. Rivka Golod
General Observation and Behavior
Amanda is small for her age and of slight build. I found Amanda to be a gentle, sweet, and winsome child. She seemed quite anxious about the testing, and while overwhelmed by the content of the questions, taking some very literally, she was eager to please and cooperative. Rapport with me was easily established and I felt I was able to ease her anxiety. By the second visit Amanda appeared more relaxed and easy about the evaluation.
Nevertheless, it was soon evident that Amanda equates performance with acceptability. This, I think, is a critical factor feeding into her anxiety around tests and, possibly, resistance around risking herself when challenged intellectually and academically. That is, my impression was that Amanda may be so fearful of failing and so anxious about not being liked and accepted that she’d rather choose the safe alternative and not learn so that less will be expected of her.
Countdown to Karen Silkwood
My parents live on either side of Manhattan, uptown and downtown. By cab my dad is twenty minutes away, but that’s time, and time doesn’t work for me. I like being downtown always; I like when it’s just the four of us: my mom, Kara, Eddie, and me. But Kara and Eddie don’t mind leaving downtown. They remember when we lived together with my dad as a family, but I don’t. I don’t even know how old I was when they divorced because my parents tell me different ages—and when I ask why they divorced, my mom says it’s none of my business, which means I’m the reason.
Even though I know he’s my dad, he always feels new to me.
I try to get my mom to let me stay home, and I can tell she doesn’t want me to leave, but no matter what organ hurt
s, or how hard I cry and beg and plead, I still have to go. When I was in preschool, my teachers told my parents I was too young to be leaving my mom. They said I was saying and doing things that meant leaving was not good for me, but my dad got really mad and insulted and said too bad, and that was that. My mom says, “What was I supposed to do?” When I was five, my dad married Sallie and I thought we wouldn’t have to visit him anymore, but my mom said that’s not how marriage works. I guess I’m glad, in case Mom ever marries Jimmy.
I want someone to either make my feelings go away, to make me feel okay about going uptown like Kara and Eddie do, or let me stay with my mom. Instead, everyone just repeats the same things over and over, like “You’ll be back before you know it,” and “It’ll be over in the blink of an eye.” But what about before it’s over? What about the part that means “during,” the part that means “being away”? That’s what scares me most, but everyone skips over during. Everyone ignores the things I can’t, and I don’t know why.
When people try to explain that uptown is not far, or that a weekend isn’t long, it makes me feel worse, more afraid that my worries are right, and that the world I live in is different from the world everyone else lives in. That means I’m different, something I don’t want other people to figure out about me. Something is wrong inside me; I’ve always known that, but I don’t want anyone to ever see that I’m not the same as they are. If they find out, I’ll feel humiliated and want to leave the world. Still, I don’t know if I can pretend for my entire life. What if someone unsafe sees through me? I think my dad already knows—he is always telling me I was hatched, not born. I don’t miss my dad when I’m not with him.
We are not supposed to be our downtown selves uptown, so I don’t feel like myself when I’m there, which means I’m separated not only from my mom, home, garden, and the Village, but from the me of me. My uptown self can’t keep track of all the rules, and I am always afraid to make a mistake. I don’t like making mistakes because then my dad gets mad. My mom and dad are alike in that way. Also, nothing is good enough. If we get a silver medal, he wants to know why we didn’t get gold. He makes us compete, and I hate competing. Uptown, I feel confused all the time, like a baton someone suddenly dropped.