I wanted them to understand how the abuse had changed me. How I had nightmares. How I woke up sweating and screaming. How lost I’d been feeling. How alone and rudderless. How I wanted a family, but not this kind. There had to be a way to make them understand that there was no excuse for hurting a child, for having hurt me. I needed them to take responsibility.
But they hedged and defended and blamed and made excuses.
After a while the three of us started to lose our voices.
“I should have gotten a divorce,” my mother eventually admitted, sighing her saddest, most exhausted sigh. Finally.
Perhaps she still could leave? she suggested. Maybe she could come live with me?
I tried to imagine sharing an apartment in the city with her now. We could take care of each other like I’d hoped we would back when my father and brothers went to Boy Scout camp. Did I owe her that? Then I came to my senses. No. I was a grown woman and finally free. Besides, she wanted to be with him. We all knew there was no longer any point in her leaving him for my sake.
Fuck. My interviews. I called my college friend Natalie. Broken and shaky from the day, I asked if I could please stay with her. She and her husband were splitting up, and she’d very recently kicked him out, but she invited me to spend the week anyway.
* * *
I hadn’t planned on never speaking to my parents again, not when I stupidly agreed to let them drive me to Natalie’s apartment in Manhattan rather than take the train with my suitcase. Not when we got stuck in Sunday-night back-from-the-Hamptons traffic, me crying in the backseat, with R.E.M.’s “Don’t Go Back to Rockville” blasting on my headphones like a teenager. Not when I hugged them goodbye outside the car and told them that I loved them.
Not even right after that, when we realized my mother had accidentally locked the keys in the car and my father screamed for me to get him some goddamn wire hangers. And when, instead of staying to help them, I ran into Natalie’s building.
Natalie had a father in real estate, a job at a magazine, and a loft apartment in the Flatiron District with a gourmet kitchen and his-and-hers bathrooms. Her wedding had been featured in a bridal magazine.
“Lock the door,” I directed when she let me in. Her apartment was better than the one on Friends. She was giving me a tour when my father started buzzing her doorbell.
“Don’t answer that,” I pleaded. “Please!” Natalie backed away from the intercom, startled. She hadn’t realized my father was this crazy. Should we maybe call the police?
We moved to the far end of the apartment, where an enormous wall was lined with windows, and watched the action on the street below like it was a movie of someone else’s life.
My father had found some sort of a crowbar and shattered the driver’s-side window of his Subaru so that he wouldn’t have to prolong that horrible day for one minute more. The broken glass on the street looked oddly beautiful against the asphalt, like shards of diamond.
“Don’t call me” was what I’d said to my parents back when we were standing on the street saying goodbye. We had yelled and screamed and cried, and I had confronted him. But we’d done those things, to one degree or another, many times before. At least he hadn’t hit me. And my mother had taken my side. That was something. Progress, it felt like. I’d give myself a week. Maybe two. A breather. I wanted space, perspective. I needed to get through my job interviews.
That night I couldn’t stop crying. Would my father come back for me? I felt frail and frightened and unsafe. How would I make it in the world without them? I had no money, no job, and I had moved out of Martha’s to spend the summer with Neil. We were in love, but the relationship was very new, and we’d already broken up once.
Natalie filled the bathtub, lit an aromatherapy candle, and ordered takeout. She had a doorman, she reminded me. We’d be fine. Maybe she gave me something to help me sleep. Eventually I did.
I saw my mother the next morning. A coda on a street corner in Manhattan, a detail of the story I like to push away. Earlier that weekend my parents had taken me clothes shopping and bought me two interview outfits: a long skirt and matching top at Ann Taylor, and a black petite Tahari pantsuit that was on sale at a mall department store. The suit fit fine, but the Ann Taylor skirt needed hemming. It was at the tailor in Rockville Centre, which was closed on Sundays. My mother called early Monday morning and said she would bring me the skirt. No matter what had happened between us, she still worried about my looking nice for my interviews. She still loved me.
We met on lower Fifth Avenue. My mother hadn’t found a proper parking space and didn’t turn the engine off. The skirt, wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic, hung on a hook in the backseat of her car. She was a hoarse mess; so was I. Anxious and angry, I less than halfheartedly thanked her for coming. Part of me was grateful. Part of me hated her.
“You’d better call your father,” she said.
I took the parcel and slammed the car door shut.
I never saw either of my parents again.
FIFTEEN
AFTER MY INTERVIEWS, I flew back to Madison to pack my stuff and sell my (their) car, my one source of cash. See? I could hear my parents saying, Money does matter. I’d spent the summer after graduation living at Neil’s while I applied for jobs. He was writing his dissertation with plans to teach there in the fall, but had no idea where he’d end up once he got a tenure-track job, and we hadn’t discussed the idea of my waiting around to find out. But now everything had changed. The idea of my moving to New York by myself, given my current state, was ludicrous. I was an inconsolable wreck. I wanted to scratch my insides out, wanted to die, wanted to take a knife and slice open my wrists and lie in a bath and watch myself submerge in lukewarm blood just like I used to fantasize about as a girl. Sunlight hurt my eyes, and I refused to go outside into the August heat. But inside the apartment, I couldn’t stop shivering. I begged Neil to check me into a psychiatric institution. I dreamed of sturdy, starched white sheets and a smoking lounge. Something out of Girl, Interrupted. Neil suggested I phone my old therapist. It was late August—I was lucky she was around to return my call. We talked over the hum of Neil’s central air. I decided not to see or speak to my parents, at least not for the time being.
They were devastated. We had been close, if in a dysfunctional, totally screwed-up sort of way. But we were family, and there was all that history. My mother teaching me how to read while I was in nursery school, my father buying me ballet slippers and winter coats. Now, out of nowhere, it seemed, I’d abandoned them. My mother kept calling. When I was still at Natalie’s, it was several times a day, then every few days. For weeks, when I was back in Madison, she left me pleading phone messages. “Call home, come home.” Come to your senses. A message from her sent me to bed, made me doubt everything, made my skin crawl.
I let the answering machine pick up. Her voice was still hoarse and gravelly, so I could only imagine what things were like back home. She sounded desperate, which alarmed me. But I was also angry that she seemed more shaken, and had more of a sense of urgency, about our break than she’d ever had about the abuse. I knew I couldn’t take on her grief and sorrow and rage. After a month or two, the calls stopped. In their place, a muddy stream of gut-wrenching cards and letters came in the mail. Could I forgive her? Could I be reasonable? She was suicidal, she said—not knowing that I was, too. I’d done that to her. I didn’t return her calls.
My father didn’t call. Eventually he sent a letter of his own. He was sorry. He loved me and realized that he had a bad temper problem, reminding me that his own father had hit him and admitting that he’d repeated those mistakes. But he wished I could see that we were both to blame. I had been a difficult child. I’d gotten under his skin and made things worse. Even so, he loved me. He wanted to see me. His hurt was plain. I was his favorite, didn’t I realize?
I was their daughter. To not have me in their life, to have me excise them from mine, was unnatural, unthinkable. My mother couldn’t bear to go
on. I’d inflicted a double sentence: the private, immeasurably painful loss of their daughter, and then the public humiliation caused by my absence. (What would my mother tell her teacher friends?) I felt ashamed and very guilty, but a part of me took satisfaction in this act of vengeance, in having the upper hand at last. I couldn’t change them, or make them sorry enough, but I could punish them with my silence. I could forgive, yes. For my own psychological well-being, I had to, but from a distance. I wrote and explained that I was continuing to process and come to terms with all of it—our relationship, my childhood. I said that I forgave my father, that if they could take full responsibility, then maybe one day we could reconcile.
Neil drove me to New York, where I’d been offered a job at NYU. Neil decided to give up his apartment in Madison and move in with me. He’d fly back and forth, staying on a friend’s couch while he taught in Wisconsin that semester. It was a financially preposterous plan and completely unrealistic when it came to the academic job market, but we were in love. And I needed him.
Josh was the only person left in my family I was on speaking terms with. Which was strange, because he was the one I’d been the least close to growing up. He and Rachel had moved to Westchester with their young daughter. We’d never had much in common; he’d embraced the suburban lifestyle of our youth, while I’d automatically rejected anything that struck me as mainstream. But we were family. And Josh had never hit me. He was also a social, friendly, and generally good-natured guy, a natural salesman who wanted people to get along. More than anything, he wanted to have a normal, close all-American family. He set out to be the peacemaker, to smooth things over, to revise the collective memory of our childhoods. From where he stood, no matter what, I had to start talking to our parents again. I had to reunite the family. He asked me to please stop talking about the abuse, to call my parents and make up. I was making everyone’s lives impossible, he explained. He seemed embarrassed. He seemed humiliated, even. As for the abuse? It wasn’t that bad, he tried to convince me. Forget about it.
One weekend that fall, Josh and Rachel drove to Brooklyn to see me. Neil was in Madison, finishing up there before he’d start teaching a class at Barnard in January. When Josh and Rachel walked into our floor-through one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone with the farmhouse table from Pottery Barn and the new overstuffed couch heaped with colorful pillows, they started questioning my relationship with Neil. We’d bought the furniture with money from the sale of his parents’ house. Rachel and Josh disapproved of our living together without being engaged—Neil paying half the rent, for the new furniture, all of it. Rachel wondered aloud how a Wisconsin graduate student could possibly afford (or need) an apartment in Park Slope. “What are you going to do when you break up?” Rachel asked. Given my dating history, it was a good question. I didn’t know how to explain that Neil was different, that I was different, too, and that we wouldn’t be breaking up.
The last time we saw one another was at their house. I’d brought Neil with me this time. Josh left the game playing on the television in the family room. Rachel was in and out, wearing furry house slippers and sweatpants, looking softer than I’d seen her. Their daughter crawled around a play area. I’d wanted to see my niece and try to keep these last relationships going. But I was so nervous and on edge, being there, that I was trembling. I must have made Josh and Rachel tense, too.
I knew I wasn’t strong enough to endure more visits like that. He stopped calling me or I stopped returning his calls. I don’t remember my last conversation with my brother. Maybe it was that afternoon in his driveway, Josh giving us directions back to the highway.
* * *
In the weeks and months that followed, I tried to tell myself I was doing the right thing by not calling or seeing my parents, but I was more of a wreck than ever, filled with guilt and shame for making the break. Neil felt certain about my decision, and Kathy thought I was doing the right thing, but not many of my other friends understood. Not right away. Would I go back to an abusive husband? I asked myself. No, of course not. But the guilt surrounded me like a shroud.
Who are we without a family? Who was I? What was I supposed to do every year on Thanksgiving? On my birthday? On their birthdays? Would I fast on Yom Kippur and make a seder on Passover? Maybe those parts of my life were over, too. Did I still care about being successful? Or thin and pretty? Or about any of the things my mother had taught me were important? Despite all the bad memories made there, I couldn’t believe I’d never again see the inside of my childhood home, have even five minutes to gather keepsakes from my bedroom. There would be no more newspaper clippings sent from my father or shopping trips with my mother. It was as if my entire family had died. What was I supposed to do when I missed them?
With Neil in New York, our apartment in Brooklyn, and my job as a public policy researcher at NYU, I had just what I’d hoped for. But I couldn’t appreciate my new life. Without a family, it felt like I had nothing. It became harder and harder simply to get out of bed in the mornings. I wasted workdays on the Internet, reading about yoga teacher trainings and meditation retreats, looking for an escape. The only time I felt halfway good about myself, the only time I felt alive, was during yoga class. But afterward I stuffed myself with cheesy pasta or greasy takeout that I couldn’t even taste. By the end of that winter, I’d gained twenty-five pounds. I hated my mother and father, but I hated myself, too. Not talking to my parents was in some ways more painful than talking to them. I wondered if I was a horrible, immoral person, a monster, even, for not giving in. It didn’t escape me that I’d discovered the courage to walk away from them now that I was in love with a man who’d promised to take care of me. Was I the Jewish-American princess they’d always said I was? Clearly, I was a bad daughter. Maybe I was a bad person, too.
I read that psychiatric patients who enter treatment often get worse before they get better. Several months in, I quit my NYU job. My boss, a high-powered dean who had handpicked and trained me, was livid and told me I had a problem with authority (which of course I did). She came from city government and had connections with nonprofits throughout the city. She said I would never work in New York again. I didn’t care. I was relieved to be able to stay in bed. Each new round of depression felt deeper, the effects cumulative. Meanwhile, we were burning through Neil’s parents’ house money. I drank and ate takeout and cried all day and contemplated ways to commit suicide. I knew I had to leave New York and go someplace cheap where I could get better.
* * *
Slowly, over the accumulating no-parent days and weeks and months that followed, something in me switched, clicked. My parents had contaminated the first half of my life. I couldn’t let them ruin the second. Even through the fog of my depression, I’d seen glimpses of the person I could perhaps become without them. I couldn’t keep accepting their craziness. Not all at once, but as time passed, I stopped feeling guilty.
For my twenty-ninth birthday that May, my mother wrote me a last long letter, sending it along with a sterling-silver charm bracelet in a blue Tiffany box. The bracelet held a bean, a circle, a teardrop, a starfish, and a heart. I knew this was meant to say how much she wished things had been different. I tried it on, simultaneously saddened and moved. Though I understood her intentions, the gift left me feeling empty and misunderstood. I forced myself to read her letter. I could tell how hard she’d worked on crafting it and how many times she’d discussed the wording with her therapist. I imagined her copying down the final version from a second or third draft onto the cream stationery with her name engraved on top. She’d written To My Beloved Daughter on the envelope. In swirls of cursive, she talked of insight. She was sorry, in her way. She said she’d failed me. She admitted her lack of courage.
Why couldn’t I forgive her? What more did I want her to say? Maybe it didn’t matter what she said. It was too late. I put the letter aside; I didn’t believe a word. After wearing the bracelet once to the corner coffee place, and being told by the barista how much it
cost—hundreds of dollars, by far the most expensive present my mother had ever given me—I stowed it in the back of my underwear drawer and never put it on again.
* * *
Spring was usually my favorite season in New York, but that year I could hardly get myself outside. Around that time, I got a phone call.
“Jessica? It’s Ellen.”
Ellen was a rabbi, a feminist, and a progressive activist with a congregation in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We’d worked together years before at the 14th Street Y, and I’d admired and looked up to her. Neil and I had gone to her synagogue for High Holy Day services that year, sitting among the hundreds there for the annual rite. On Yom Kippur, tears had run down my face as I’d recounted my sins. I wondered why she was getting in touch.
“This is awkward,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind my calling like this. But your mother—”
Oh.
“Your mother,” she continued, “called me, very upset. I don’t want to get in the middle, to go where it’s not my place, but she asked me if I could reach out to you. She said you haven’t spoken in months.”
I collapsed in tears. Eventually, after a few minutes of sobbing into the receiver, I mumbled something about my father and the abuse and that I really was okay now, that this was the best thing.
I ran into the rabbi some weeks later at an ATM on Seventh Avenue, near Key Food. I tried to be brighter, more cheerful. I didn’t want her stressing out about me. I wanted to seem like I had it together.
“How are you?” I said, accepting a hug, and then letting myself break down.
* * *
My mother had dreamed of, and worried over, my getting married since I was a girl. Would I find the right man? Would he be smart and kind and a go-getter? And Jewish? And what would we do for the wedding? I knew she’d have wanted to be there for each ritual, from engagement party to dress shopping to bridal shower to wedding day. My father would have cried, walking me down the aisle. (How ironic that my parents would have thoroughly approved of Neil, though he wouldn’t have been able to stand them.)
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