The Lost Girls

by Laurie Fox

  We sat on the bench in an unfriendly row—Pease, Mother, Freeman, with me on the far end, as though I were being pushed off. Under such tight conditions, we were forced to look straight ahead instead of at each other, and I wondered if this was all part of Pease’s plan.

  After his ritual hemming and hawing, and exaltations about “how far-out the day is,” Pease clapped his hands once and said, “Now then.”

  Mother cried, “Out with it!” but she sounded almost cheerful. I noticed her sizing up the lanky doctor as she fooled with her sherry-colored locks.

  Pease cleared his throat for effect and without further stalling did come out with it, the most hackneyed bunk I’d heard in years: “All right, people, here goes. Our Wendy suffers from a massive propensity for the theatrical, the artificial, the staged. To my mind, and I really have great insight into this sort of disorder, she could use—no, she requires—an extra-strong dose of reality: a job in a factory, a stint as an inner-city schoolteacher, or, dare we allow ourselves to imagine it, a tour of duty in the military.

  “Instead, she takes refuge in a tenuous children’s book career, which only promotes her ‘problem’ and does nothing to counter her superstitions, her apparitions, her phantasms. On the contrary, her writing encourages her suffering. Not a real shocker to you folks. If it were up to me, if I were her boyfriend or her mother, I would urge her to stop the notebook scribbling and put an end to the contemplative, self-obsessed life. I would get her out in the world, pronto! Wendy needs to participate in real life close-up, not from the foggy distance of her dreams. There, I said it. Any reactions? Comebacks? Put-downs?”

  Pease let go with a sad, rheumy laugh. Fixing his gaze at the electric-blue sky, he placed a hand on Mother’s shoulder to console her. A whistle issued from his nose.

  Mother was visibly outraged. In what Dr. Pease might have called a “staged, theatrical” fit, she flailed at him with her tiny hands, which were encased in rainbow-striped Guatemalan mittens, and proceeded to stamp out a young rosebush with her hiking boots. “You must be mad, Doctor. I mean, tell us something new. Tell us something we can work with.” She snapped off a prize-winning Lili Marlene and jabbed the air with it.

  “Put the weapon down, Margaret.” Pease spoke in a steady, unruffled manner.

  “Not on your life, Doctor.”

  “Then on your daughter’s life. For her sake, I’m asking you.”

  Mother tucked the rose behind her right ear and grinned militantly.

  “That’s better,” Pease said. “Now, you were saying?”

  “I was saying, I’ve paid good money to find out that my daughter has a fantasy life that scares the living daylights out of you? That, in your expert, well-seasoned opinion she should become Rosie the Riveter on the swing shift? I should shoot rivets into your head, Pease.”

  For the first time since I’d met the man, he let go with a belly laugh; he really appeared happy in a sloppy, carefree way.

  Leaving Mother and Pease alone, Freeman took my hand and led me down the terraced steps to the lowest level of the garden. I stumbled along, feebleminded. Despite the teeming beauty, I was heading into a tailspin. I’d just spent six weeks with a shrink as depressed as I, albeit with half the creative juices, and wondered what it all added up to. I hadn’t made a bit of progress in calming my mind; in that department Mummy’s tea had outperformed Pease. True, I’d gathered a little literary momentum as my children’s stories took on semihappy endings (a failed attempt to appease Pease). But if I had to choose between weathering preposterous problems in a suspect dimension and good old depression in this one, the answer was as clear as the Mermaids’ Lagoon, where once I splashed blithely like an otter: the lunatic fringe was my motherland. It was where I belonged.

  THE day at the Rose Garden wasn’t a total loss. It appears that, after their initial flare-up, Mother and Pease got on like a house afire. This wasn’t altogether unexpected, as Mother tended to take the Hepburn-Tracy approach to relationships: an early round of adversarial sniping followed by a lukewarm détente and the laying down of spears (in this case, thorns), and for the big finish, a plunge into the other person’s arms with abandon, or what psychologists might call a lack of self-esteem. What Mother saw in Pease escaped me. But I believe the idea of a man whipping out his penis at a comedy club had sparked her initial interest and then served to maintain it over the run of several months.

  No doubt they had loads in common. While Pease was a bona fide shrink, Mummy, the layperson, had achieved popular success with her self-help tomes, The Pan Pathology and, more recently, Happy Harpies: Women Who Sound Off & Get Even. In a calculated move, Pease took to poring over her books as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls, often reciting passages out loud to make Mummy blush. Surprisingly, he enjoyed being dominated by her personality as well as her intelligence. They both loved talking about behavior more than anything in the world. And I have to believe that Pease whipped out his punch line often enough to satisfy Mother’s sexual hunger, or else the whole thing would have been doomed from the start.

  That afternoon in the Rose Garden, Freeman and I also got a bonus. Stopping at a footbridge so we could take in the sound of Codornices Creek—“It burbles like a baby, Wends”—Freeman made a startling admission. During the six weeks when I’d been preoccupied with the hokum from Pease’s therapy sessions, it so happened that Freeman read every word of a book by Great-Nana’s friend. He’d curled up with a lavish edition of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, illustrated by Arthur Rackham, that he’d found in Mummy’s library, shelved among other mainstays like A Room of One’s Own and How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was dumbfounded, at a rare loss for words. And I feared our future anew.

  “So?” was all I could manage to say.

  “So now I love you even more. Does that help?”

  “Well, it’s a good place to start,” I conceded, rubbing moist eyes. I peered over the rail into the creek and began nervously looking for fish hooks. What else could I do under the circumstances?

  “And I think it’s a great story,” Freeman said. “I know it’s a classic and all, but it seems absolutely modern, really cutting-edge.”

  “Oh, it is! It is!” I said, trying to get beyond the fact he’d called it a story. Perhaps it was my own fault: I’d only recently revealed my early indoctrination at Great-Nana’s hand; I still referred to my experiences as “really powerful hallucinations.”

  “I can see how this fairy tale has had such a strong influence on your family,” Freeman continued. “Why you’ve all borrowed it as your anthem. It’s very, uh, cool. And no wonder you’re having this Hook guy make personal appearances in your dreams—he’s a creepy bastard. I’d dream about him, too, if my family had talked about him my whole life. I mean, it’s totally natural that you’ve fixated on this thing. It’s got so many levels. It’s intense, compelling stuff—I’m even inspired to write music about it.”

  “Oh?” I said limply.

  “Yeah, I’ve already begun a piece called ‘Pan the Refusenik. ’You know, how Peter flatly refuses to grow up? I’m throwing a Russian melody into the mix.”

  “You’re completely confusing things,” I said. “A refusenik is a Soviet citizen who is refused permission to emigrate.” He looked at me like I was the one who was confused. Growing increasingly anxious, I rapped my knuckles on the pendulous rail that ran along the footbridge.

  “Hold on, Wends,” Freeman said, fearing I might jump down all of four feet into three inches of water. He restrained me with his delicate musician’s hands, then shook me like a snow globe. “I won’t let you do it!”

  “Man, you have no right to read that book,” I chided him. “It’s private.”

  “You have got to be kidding,” he said. “It’s in every library in America. Are you, like, into censorship now?”

  “No. I’m into respect. Respect for the living.” When he screwed up his nose, I realized how shaky that sounded. “It’s just, I wish to respect the privacy o
f the people in the story. They deserve to be given a wide berth.”

  Freeman took my left hand and guided me away from the bridge; he didn’t care for the possibilities it inspired. “Next time, we go with a therapist I choose. Someone really happy with his life. Is there such a thing as a happy doctor?”

  “Oh yeah,” I answered solemnly. “The kind that delivers babies. They understand miracles better than anybody.”

  “Are you telling me you need to see an obstetrician?” he asked.

  “I’m telling you I need a miracle.”

  VII

  AN obstetrician came in handy, for I was pregnant before you could say “Prepare for landing.”

  Berry was not an accident: for years I had dreamed of a young child who looked like Mummy (petite, with burgundy curls) and behaved like Daddy (capricious, mad with ideas). In these dreams, the child would run circles around me until she made butter out of air, a shameless steal from The Story of Little Black Sambo. Then I’d swallow the butter, shoveling it in my mouth with a big wooden spoon. In seconds I’d become so huge I couldn’t move my legs. The dreams always ended with me making a dent in the earth with my newly acquired mass, and wondering if I’d ever get off the ground again. The child would wander off and I’d grow weak from calling her name. Once awake, I’d feel both heavy and bereft, the weight of her absence adding to my own.

  For contraception, Freeman and I practiced a method lifted from music composition—the John Cage doctrine of chance. So absorbed was Freeman in his work that, when he surfaced, we hurriedly took advantage of life’s little essentials: dining, concerts, movies. Alas, sex was always fourth on the list and so rarely indulged in that we routinely forswore protection. Protection was no use; I knew I would take the familial path. I would have one child—a daughter—just like Wendy, Jane, and Margaret. There was never any doubt. And she would take off into the night without a good-bye kiss to her mother. In that light, contraception could only be seen as an obstacle to destiny, a postponement of the inevitable.

  So it was that, at the indelicate age of twenty-five, when other women were putting off marriage and families until they’d soaked up every drop of free love, I put on the veil, courtesy of B. Boop’s Vintage Frocks, and hobbled down the aisle with a secret growing in my tummy. No, not the child. I told everyone I knew that a baby was in the works. But I couldn’t talk about the cost of being a girl in this family. I couldn’t admit to myself that another Darling would pay dearly for having the nerve, the guts, the utter audacity to grow up.

  * *

  MY outdoor wedding was brisk and uneventful: I kept Mummy and Daddy in the dark and out of the picture. That’s the storybook version. In truth, the whole business was operatic and notable for its multiple rounds of vomiting. For one thing, Mother officiated; in addition to taking graduate classes at the California Institute of Integral Studies (she was planning to become a real psychologist to give her books some heft), she’d taken a correspondence course in Astral Ministry. The ceremony took place in the same rose garden where Dr. Pease had once held court. I was incensed that Mummy had invited the shrink but as she was still sleeping with him, she felt justified.

  The weather for the wedding was classic Berkeley fare—mystic coastal fog begetting midday sunshine begetting rudely chill winds in the afternoon. We had prepared for this and placed Pendleton blankets on the rental chairs for our guests. Shivering and awaiting our cues, Freeman and I cloistered ourselves in the two park bathrooms across the street, knocking on our shared wall like prisoners of love. If I had known Morse code, I might have tapped out SOS. Not Save our souls, but Social obligations suck. There was still time to make a run for it and marry privately in a faraway kingdom where parents aren’t allowed.

  As the ceremony got under way—with a tape-recorded snippet of “It’s the Bugs” followed by a cheerful, well-intended “Wedding Bell Blues”—there was a marked stir among the spectators. Peeking out at my guests from behind the redwood pergola at the top of the amphitheater, I witnessed a lot of neck-craning and crying out. Had Grandma Jane showed up, twenty years off schedule, to properly send me off? How I longed to meet Mummy’s mummy, to understand the forces that had always been at play.

  The disturbance turned out to signal the courtly entrance of Great-Nana, who was carried into the garden by three beefy college students (members of the UC Berkeley Wrestling Team, per their jackets) and set down in the front row for all to consider. She was handed a silver flask by one of the thoughtful young men, who then covered her exposed calves with a special mohair throw.

  Just hours before the wedding, Daddy, too, had whisked in—in his case on a private Gulfstream jet, having exchanged places with the pilot for much of the trip. His navigatory prowess had put him in an especially jaunty mood, which was critical, he let it be known, if he was going to be “on the same continent as the grand divorcée.” That morning, I’d watched from Mother’s backyard deck as he made himself two Bloody Marys in the kitchen. After swilling down the second, he began to cough violently; I thought his chest would explode and the wedding might have to be called off. Finally catching his breath, he wandered outside where he found me, stone-still, taking in the view but comprehending nothing.

  “Nerves?” he asked, grinning.

  “Always,” I answered.

  “Wendy,” he said, steadying himself against a potted palm. I looked away, for he really was too handsome. “Wends,” he began again, squinting at the bay. “It’s obvious that, as a father, I’ve been too . . .”

  “Otherwise engaged?” I said, chewing on a split end. I hadn’t anticipated a lecture this late in the program.

  “But you’ve never been far away in Daddy’s thoughts,” he continued. “The truth is, you’re extremely important to me. Of colossal importance—bigger than the Concord!” he added, reaching a bit.

  I nodded like a bobblehead doll; I’d heard it all before.

  “I mean it,” he continued. “The idea of you is more compelling than anything I could ever imagine. But the fact of you … well, I’m not good with facts.”

  “You mean children, Daddy. You’re not good with children.”

  He scratched boyishly behind his ear. “My princess is getting married and I haven’t a clue what to tell her!” Then he hiccuped, gulping in air.

  “It’s okay, Daddy.” I patted his back as if he were the child. “Because, you know, I only get married once!” I winked broadly.

  Regaining his balance, he clung to my shoulder and tried to cozy up. His neck smelled of ginger and cloves, and I swooned just a little.

  “The truth is,” he said with a catch in his throat, “the world is too blooming big. Unreachable. Unknowable. I would have urged you to explore it, to steer clear of obligations like husbands. But it’s a bit lonely out there on the limb. So marry the chap.” He gave my shoulders a squeeze. “You and Freeman are doing the right thing with the nest-building, the baby-making. God knows I’m not the best role model—just look at me. Daddy’s a goddamn icon! Everybody loves me and nobody knows me. Just think of what I could have achieved if I’d had a family, too.”

  “You do have a family,” I said.

  “Quite,” he said flatly.

  “Uh, Daddy.” I looked him in the eye. “Is this speech really about me, because if it is, I’m missing something.”

  “Just don’t wish for too much,” he said, checking the horizon.

  “Not a problem,” I told him.

  Then, spotting Mother through the window, Daddy stepped back into the house to greet her, his smile looking cagey again. Mummy had packaged herself in a low-cut, sexed-up crimson gown. “Sears?” he asked sweetly, and winked at me through the glass. Apparently, Mother’s ministry license from the Cosmic Life Church also gave her the license to don a peculiar hat (a yarmulke of confused ethnicity—ribbons and rickrack on madras). Later this outfit would prove successful in drawing attention away from the bride as she grappled with a nasty bout of nausea. For this alone, I’d be grat
eful.

  CONTRARY to what you might expect, being a pregnant bride had a definite upside: for once my chronic queasiness was socially acceptable. Immediately before I made my entrance, I heaved in the park bathroom across the street; then, as if punch-drunk, I wove through the sympathetic crowd at the top of the steps.

  It’s important to add that I looked spectacular. My wedding dress was the same smashing number Great-Nana had gotten hitched in. Naturally it was loaded with Edwardian affectations: it had lace, it had ruffles, it had flounces. It was seeded with pearls and dripping with crocheted balls and flowers. My store-bought veil could have been put to good use by Christo—to wrap the state capitol. In short, I was the wedding cake.

  Daddy was waiting to escort me down the aisle, several flights of terraced stone steps. He looked rakish in the extreme and I fell under his spell all over again. His moussed golden locks were freshly peppered with dark-blonde streaks, but no gray—he regularly saw to that. His silk eye patch complemented the dapper Brioni suit he’d bought for the occasion, and he wore matching black Adidas sneakers.

  After giving me an almost erotic buss on the lips, he brushed the hair from my ear and whispered: “Wendy Amelia Darling Braver-man.”

  “Yes, Daddy?” I said.

  “It’s time.”

  I wriggled my nose.

  “To fly away, ladybird!” Then he flapped his arms like a tipsy pelican. My heart swelled at such extravagant, effeminate swooping; I giggled and cupped my mouth. Not wishing to abandon Daddy, I flapped my arms shyly in a single flutter. The guests applauded. I flapped a second time and could feel the blood rush to my cheeks, shame and embarrassment all mixed up with ancestral pride. Again the guests cheered. Inevitably Daddy and I winged our way down the aisle, a twin blur of black linen and cream silk.

  Amid the bustle, I swear I left the ground. The wind rushed under my sandals; I could feel its tickle, hear its faint thrumming. My nausea momentarily worsened—the smallest change in altitude could go right to my head—then it gave way to a mild euphoria. Thanks to my ankle-length gown, no one noticed the irregularity, save perhaps for Great-Nana, who sniffled bravely into her hanky, then blew a real honker. Mummy was too busy endearing herself to the audience, blowing kisses to friends and strangers alike, and rearranging her décolletage. She winked at Pease so many times one might have thought she had Tourette’s.