by Laurie Fox
“Berry. I mean, Shiva.” She smiled. “Do you feel like killing stuff? Is that what this is about?” I climbed up on the fence to join her, and scanned the flat, dirty sky.
She kicked the heel of her boot into the fence and we both rocked in place. “Sometimes I feel like a bomb, that’s all I’m saying. You don’t have to be scared or anything. Sometimes I have to go off, too.”
Freeman wandered out the front door to join us, a Sony tape recorder slung over one shoulder. Perhaps he believed that documenting sound actually solved problems.
“Sorry, Dad. Show’s over,” Berry said, hopping off the fence. She took a bow, but her pointed little gesture was interrupted by a squad car pulling up to the curb. We all watched as a chunky policewoman got out and marched up our driveway. She was puffing heavily and looking deadly serious, her nightstick bobbing with each lumbering step.
“Hey, folks. I’m Officer America Fuentes.” Freeman and I each shook her large gloved hand. “We have a report of a young woman at this address wailing awfully loud for this time of night—thought there might be trouble. Could that young woman be you, Miss?” She got down on one knee to look Berry in the eye.
“Yes it was,” Berry answered, amused by all the formality. “But Officer—I wasn’t wailing. I was keening. There’s a difference.”
“Keening,” the policewoman scribbled in her log. Berry raised her hand like she was still in class. “Yes?” the officer said.
“So what time of night is best for such activity?” The officer cocked her head, cleared her throat. “You said I was too loud for this time of night,” Berry said.
America Fuentes grinned and squinched her earth-brown eyes. She released a sigh that seemed to make her smaller, and made another entry in her logbook. “Name, please?” She tossed Berry an inscrutable look. “Name?” she repeated.
“Shiva Darling,” Berry said, and ran off to the house. She keened one last time as a parting shot.
Freeman and I finished up with the officer, promising to be better parents or at least more vigilant ones. She encouraged us to do our best, then raced off to respond to an altercation at a downtown yoga studio. Back in the house we found Berry/Shiva sprawled on her bed, remote and incurious as she flipped through a stack of comic books she had received for her birthday. An hour later, I knocked on her bedroom door. There was no response. I pressed the door open to find her doodling pictures of atomic bombs; a riot of psychedelic pastels lit up her notebook pages.
I telephoned Mother. I wasn’t sure if I wanted her advice, but her insights were always fanatically different from my own, and besides, she had had experience raising me—that had to count for something.
I told her about the scary wailing and kicking, the talk of murderers. “Why is Berry doing this?” I half whispered into the receiver.
“That bitter pill!” Mother said gaily. “She does sound a little wonky. Are you sure she’s your real daughter?”
“What are you implying, Mother?”
“Well, Berry doesn’t really look like any of us.” More ill-timed laughter on her part.
“You’re talking about your own granddaughter, Mummy.”
“Wendy, this is elemental stuff. Are you even paying attention?”
“What are you getting at?” I said.
“You know,” Mother said, “that you can only suppress the shadow for so long before it comes home to roost. You know that, Wends. And when it returns, more fortified and all-knowing, it’s going to bite you in the bum!”
“Uh, what do you mean, for so long?” I asked.
“For so many goddamned generations. You can’t just sweep things under the rug without accumulating dust mice, dear.”
“But I’ve nothing to hide, nothing I’ve swept under. I express everything.”
“I seriously doubt that. But even so, this isn’t all about you. You’ve a very shallow idea of history.”
“Do you mean this is about you, Mummy? Is Berry expressing some of your leftovers?”
“Darling, I may be a narcissist, but I’m afraid I can’t take all the blame. Berry’s behavior could just be the usual, random hostility of adolescents. Or her venting may very well be the culmination of generations of repressed anger—anger that’s never been sorted out from mother to daughter. We’re talking karmic predestination, cellular inheritance. We’re also talking abandonment on a cosmic plane!”
“Abandonment?” I said, shaken by her words. “I’m not your darling,” I told her and hung up.
I’D pretty much expected my daughter to serve as my literary muse, assumed she would inspire in me a flotilla of children’s books—each one more daring than the next. Sad to say, then, that she found my fables “spastic.” It wasn’t my words that offended her—words were her friends—it was the cute, furry creatures that she couldn’t stand. Whenever I explained that, in the overmined tradition of Aesop, these animals were stand-ins for real people, she forced the issue: “If you mean people, Mu-Mu, then why don’t you say people?”
It was hard to admit that my daughter’s sensibilities ran darker than my own, but there it was: my stories were l-i-t-e in her eyes. Still, I reasoned, not every child can handle real, live humans in their fables—humans who act oafish, indifferent, or cruel. So it was that I’d regularly regret using Berry as my audience. Those times when I could screw up the courage to read a few pages to her, she would listen politely and then feign a hunger for French fries so great that it could only be quelled by a trip to McDonald’s. Once inside the Golden Arches, she relished collecting those plastic glasses with pictures of famous animals on them. At such times I was a saint.
The afternoon before the publication party for my newest collection of fables, Weasels Are Doing It for Themselves, I alighted on one of two rocking chairs in the living room, and teetered on its edge as what could only be a panic attack set its teeth in me. Its timing could not have been worse. My breathing came shallow and arrhythmic, and my thoughts (my animals are wimps, my animals are fakes, I’m fake) veered recklessly into the oncoming traffic of my mind. A head-on collision, I hoped, would put me out of commission; I could cancel the reading and take to bed.
A cancellation wasn’t to be. Upon discovering her mother unhinged like the Tasmanian Devil, twelve-year-old Berry walked over and stabilized the chair. “Mu-Mu!” she cried, fanning her stocky body across my lap. “Enough.”
So startled was I at this intervention that I immediately ceased having crazy thoughts. Berry threw her arms around my neck and, mimicking her father, asked if I’d like my back scratched by “one of the best in the business.”
“Why not,” I agreed, breath still sporadic.
With stubby, soil-filled nails, Berry began to doodle all manner of shapes on my back, asking me to guess each tickling configuration. Weasel? Hedgehog? Gerbil? I wondered where she got the courage to draw the very creatures she hated reading about in my books.
“Thanks, honeydew,” I said at last, motioning for her to stop. “Now I’ve got a zoo of beasties on my back.”
“Your skin’s all red and gross,” she said dully, then raced towards the doors to the backyard deck.
“Wait!” I shouted.
Berry whipped around. “What now, Mu-Mu?”
“Come here,” I said, gesturing with both hands. “It would be really good for your mother to talk to you before she reads in public tonight. I’d like your blessing before I show this stuff to the world, you know?”
Berry hesitated, her corkscrews rising and falling in the heated current that swept through the room. Then she turned her back on me and faced the plateglass: it was one of those remarkable days when you can see clear to Alcatraz Island: hot and dry and shimmering with gold. I was in competition with the weather, it seemed.
“Please,” I asked more forcefully. Berry obliged me this time, inching her way over as if hobbled by foot pain. Her tiny pillow of a butt settled on the rocking chair next to mine.
“Dearest creature,” I said and bit my l
ips. “If it helps any, I’m not going to read to you.”
“Good,” she said with a chilling conviction, “ ’cause I’m never going to like it.” Spellbound by the sunlight as it streamed through the glass, she regarded the sailboats rounding the bay, the eggshell-blue sky.
Why a child would boost her mother’s esteem only to shatter it minutes later was a mystery I preferred to leave alone. Who knew what poison lurked in those brambles? Still, I couldn’t help compounding the hurt: “Never? You mean, really never?”
“Yep.” She joggled her chestnut curls.
“Oh, I don’t know. Someday you’ll be curious about my stories. I swear it.” I reached over and tickled her tawny belly.
Berry squealed, and for the moment I was in the presence of a regular little girl. Then she slapped my hands and stood up. “Never,” she said softly but coldly, and marched out on the deck. I watched through the glass as she ripped the leaves off a eucalyptus branch and tossed them in the air. The leaves rained down on her head as if fulfilling some biblical prophecy.
This “never” business undid me. For the next hour or so I remained glued to the chair, paralyzed with doubt. My stomach juices roiled, my head throbbed. As absolutes go, never was supposed to be a good thing. The Neverland, also known as Never-Never Land, had always smacked of positiveness; there, positivism, a doctrine that claims sensory perception is the only way we can know the world, was the law. Never-never also suggested in no way, as in “In no way should you fear,” or unprecedented, as in “You’ve never seen the likes of this!” Never was a comfort word: “Never shall you go wanting, be sick, grow old.”
How could I have missed the obvious, that never-never was a double negative, that it could conceivably mean “You will never find your way home.” That “You will never grow up” was a bad thing? To me, never had always been the highest rating, on par with incomparable, ideal, perfect. The Neverland, an ideal that lived on in my mind if no longer in practice, was a place where you were never alone, never hungry or without hope, and most certainly, never crazy.
Great-Nana’s grandfather clock, newly imported from England, struck the hour of four, and I was roused from a vicious cycle of half dreaming, half obsessing. To be candid, I could hardly tell the difference. I pulled my hands through my hair: I still had three hours before the reading during which to gather my thoughts and my composure.
As I shook off the lethargy that had seized my legs, Berry strolled in, arms full of plant life, her hands dusted gray with earth. She’d snapped off the heads of dandelions and was now cradling just the stalks. There was really nothing to say.
“I’m coming tonight,” she announced.
“Oh, really? I’d rather that you . . .” I stopped short and went to my bedroom. Berry followed me into the room. “Please wash your hands if you’re going to grace me with your presence,” I told her.
Without a word, she stuffed her crappy bouquet into a tall, waterless vase on my dresser and stomped out. The air circling in her wake was shot with static. I threw off my bathrobe and collapsed into a summery frock, its flowers belying a certain lack of blood in me. Studying the face in the dressing-table mirror, I saw a woman who looked a little too shocked by life, a woman who had no business raising a child.
THE night-sky was gorged with stars. By the same token Gaia Books was flush with strangers; I recognized a few friends of Mummy’s in the Right Livelihood and Enneagram sections, but that was all. I steadied myself against a bookcase, thrown by the crunch of people milling about. I’d isolated myself for so long and so successfully that the only attendees I knew were those people I met on my rounds: denizens of the coffeehouses where I occasionally worked on my laptop, the postal clerks who sent off my manuscripts. As I made a mental note to nurture a few relationships outside the home, Mummy Dearest barreled through the doorway with Freeman and Berry swinging on either of her arms; she was wearing two shiny buttons—WOMYN TAKE BACK THE NIGHT and U.S. OUT OF MY UTERUS—on a dress woven out of hemp. It looked indestructible. Mummy brushed each of my cheeks, not really kissing them. “Oh-my-goddess!” she cried, flinging her attention on me like a shawl. I recoiled into a shelf of books on Forgiveness.
“Hi, Mummy. Hi, Freeman. Hello, Berry,” I said mechanically. “Let’s all sit down,” I suggested, deflecting the fuss.
“Tish tosh!” Mother said. “You’ve been sitting all day. Now is the time to stand up for your ideas!”
“Mother,” I whispered. “Please don’t raise my consciousness any higher than it is.” She was about to blurt out perhaps another slogan when she saw my face, corrupted by pain, and parked herself in a front-row chair. Berry trailed off to the Ecology aisle, where, one hoped, she could edify herself with a few volumes not penned by relatives. Freeman, set loose to roam, migrated to the Ambient Music bin, where he was captivated by a CD featuring the sounds of whales in labor.
After five minutes of accelerated bustle, somebody clanged a gong and a turbaned black woman spoke commandingly into the mike at the far end of the store: “All right, people, let’s get down to business. It’s my pleasure to introduce Wendy Darling, the author of Ferrets Are Free, Lally and the Blue Hedgehog, and The World According to Chloé the Cat. She’s just published a collection of contemporary fables that is truly divine—a divination of the truth in a way we’re unaccustomed to hearing it. Via animals, that is. Well, I guess there are other authors who use animals as a way in, but trust me, her work is completely original.” I smiled weakly at the audience and flooded with the same fear that had immobilized me all afternoon. “Let’s welcome Wendy Darling to our house, tonight,” the turbaned woman said. The ringing applause gave me a jolt, and I steeled myself for the task at hand.
“Weasels,” I said definitively into the microphone. Then I cleared my throat and began again: “Weasels Are Doing It for Themselves. A silly title, to be sure, but one that both empowers us (well, if we were weasels) and makes fun of empowerment. Now, why would we want to make fun of empowerment?” Here Mother raised her hand, but I shook my head no. “I’ll take questions at the end, okay?” The whole room nodded in agreement. “I make fun because what kind of a world is this where we aren’t naturally empowered, where we have to grab at power?” A woman began to cough spasmodically. “So, I asked myself, what is the essence of the weasel? Mania. Enthusiasm. Eccentricity.” Freeman turned his attention to the ceiling fan, which was making a lovely whirring sound. “I wrote this book of interlaced stories to celebrate mania, enthusiasm, idiosyncrasy, if you will. If you won’t, then it’s just a few stories! Really, I am interested in entertaining you above all else. The politics come second or even third.” Here, I glanced at Mother, who was shaking her head either in a rare instance of concurrence or else ruing the moment. And then I spotted Berry in the last row making what could only be a weaselly face. A little misty-eyed, I nodded in her direction and cracked open the binding of my crisp new book. “How the Weasel Got Its Spots,” I read.
IX
IT’S no secret that my daughter’s disappointments outpaced even my own. So it was that Berry began the seventh grade with a chip on her shoulder. She refused to wear dresses, opting for camouflage pants and tops that didn’t blend in with any environment. She shaved her leg hair in distinct rows, as if cultivating crops. The only makeup she applied was a smear of kohl to her (already spooky) eyes. My baby looked like a raccoon with striped legs. Conveniently the Goths were still in fashion, which might have been a consolation, but most of those kids steered clear of Berry. It wasn’t style that was responsible for her look: her resistance ran deep, erupting on the surface in weird little outfits.
During spring break, I decided to force Great-Nana upon Berry. Perhaps things would end up just the reverse, with Berry preying on her great-great-grandmother, whom she referred to as Triple-Nana or, more simply, Triple. Remarkably, Great-Nana was still hanging in there at the age of 95, though she’d been slowed down considerably. After an unexplained fall from atop her chest of drawers, wh
ereby she’d suffered whole-body bruises, she’d been moved by Daddy to All-Saints Sanitarium just outside of London, where the potty elders of her generation held court.
A Dr. Deepak Wolfe, zealous disciple of R. D. Laing, was in charge of the premises. True to Laing’s doctrine, Wolfe had no problem with the denizens of All-Saints acting out their wishes, fears, and fates within the clinic’s vast grounds. In fact he appeared to encourage chaos. Alas, it happened that, after so many years of being free to “do your own thing,” the patients had pretty much expelled their inner demons, and now Wolfe missed observing these impulses. The current populace, he’d complained to me over the phone, was a rather stable lot, with only a few eccentricities leaking out from time to time—quirks that Wolfe literally applauded. He had worn his hands out clapping for Great-Nana, who upheld a daily regimen of attempting to fly off the second-floor balcony. Whenever the nurses grumbled about the dangers of such whims, Dr. Wolfe pointed out the soft landing of grasses below. As if a few green blades could save a nonagenarian’s life. Ever childlike, Great-Nana still had the capacity to think lovely thoughts, and I didn’t understand why she never achieved liftoff. Nevertheless, I was grateful for her failures.
So, why bring Berry into a climate of old folks’ fading manias? I wondered if she might find kinship here, a community wherein differences were more than tolerated—they were celebrated. I also hoped to scare the living daylights out of her, to stun her into kindness.
For our British Airways flight to London, Berry and I were bumped up to first class. While I hardly ever dropped Daddy’s name in the course of daily life, I wasn’t above cashing in on the Braverman name—all Bravermans were considered airline royalty. And though Brave Hearts had fallen recently on hard times—Daddy desperately needed a financial partner to keep the fleet aloft—its legend appeared secure. Most British pilots had grown up singing the snappy Brave Hearts jingle; based on “Heart” from Damn Yankees, the jingle stuck in the craw of even the most sentimentally challenged fliers: