by Ginny Gilder
Up and down, back and forth; this was our life. A little bit of good infused the great deal of bad. One night she splurged and took us all out for Chinese. We kids were all excited: Shirley Temples, eggrolls, sweet and sour pork, spare ribs, slim pancakes with Mu Shu pork, hot sweet tea, fortune cookies! Mom seemed a bit unsteady and distracted but didn’t fuss. No yelling or screaming. Then after dinner, as we trailed behind her toward the door, Peggy nudged me. A dark, wet stain was spreading down the back of Mom’s dress below her butt. I looked back at her chair, caught sight of the seat dripping, and saw the carpet darkening beneath it. I cringed and hurried out, relieved that at least we’d be gone when the mess was discovered.
Sometimes, though, she would straggle into the kitchen and conjure up a meal that felt like old times. Sometimes she would wash and dress and spend the day out and about, like she used to. There was no predicting her behavior. No wonder Peggy and I developed our own shorthand to alert each other to Mom’s frame of mind at any given moment. “She’s in one of her moods” conveyed the warning of trouble ahead and the imperative to avoid it.
Mom and Peggy continued to fight, and two years into our new life, Mom sent Peggy away to boarding school, Emma Willard in upstate New York. Just like that, I became the oldest kid in the household, with no backup or ally. I lost my partner in crime, my confidante, my fellow prisoner, and my shield. After Peggy left, Mom resurrected some sense of normality during the day. She did laundry, went food shopping, and ran errands. Life fell apart at night when she turned into Mr. Hyde—demanding, erratic, hysterical, cruel—before retreating to her bedroom and passing out.
To ward off isolation, I resorted to nightly phone calls to my friends. Then, in one of her tirades, Mom lost her temper and locked up all the phones except one: the emergency red wall phone with an extra-long cord in the kitchen.
That kitchen. A grimy field of battle. My imagination crawled with thoughts of roaches crouched in the hidden spaces behind drawers, under floor tiles, between walls, stacked on top of each other, wedged everywhere. I knew what awaited me every time I opened a cabinet, a drawer, the garbage can, even the dishwasher. Whenever I needed a plate, a spoon, a cup or glass, a pot or pan, some cereal or rice, a can opener—or to hear a friend’s voice—I had to contend with the enemy. The roaches epitomized the new era in our household. Life seemed normal during daylight hours; after sunset, everything changed.
One night when Mom was sufficiently conscious and composed to prepare dinner, she stuck around to keep us company while we ate. Toward the end of the meal, as she brought the pots and pans to the sink, she saw some slim dark shadows hustle across the floor.
“Ginny, get the Raid,” she instructed, dumping the dishes into the sink. She dried her hands on a dishrag that smelled like old cheese and briskly pulled out the trusty Electrolux vacuum cleaner from the broom closet.
“Back in a sec, Mom.” I dashed to my bedroom and dug into my closet. I didn’t want to miss a moment of Mom’s display of her old, energetic self. I pulled on heavy-heeled boots and raced back into the kitchen, then passed her the tall can of poison from under the sink.
“Ready, Gins?” She snapped off the can’s lid and looked at me with the intensity of a soldier gunning for battle. At the sound of my nickname, I felt a rush of warmth. Mom was back, in charge and ready to face the enemy. In my mind, she was the world champion of fighting off dirt and organizing away chaos. The roaches’ take-over of our kitchen showed how far she had strayed from her normal self. She had given up, but now she was back!
Grimly happy, I positioned myself at the vacuum and picked up the hose, pulling off the rug attachment to leave the metal nozzle naked. Then I nodded, stifling my urge to run screaming from the room. Mom sprayed methodically, releasing poison in a steady stream along every cabinet at its intersection with the floor, then under the stove, the dishwasher, and the sink. She sprayed under the refrigerator, under the stools at the counter, in the broom closet, along the doorways and doorjambs, every possible point of roach entry or exit. The air stank of poison, oddly sweet in spite of its noxious overtone. It was like inhaling at a gas station; I knew the fumes were dangerous, but I couldn’t stop myself from inhaling deeply.
Roaches started trickling from their hiding places and then flooded the room. Some of the weaker ones rolled over and died in full sight on the floor, but most scurried aimlessly, seeking freedom from the poison.
I turned on the vacuum cleaner and pointed the bare nozzle at the fleeing intruders, sucking them up. I relished wielding my very own weapon of mass destruction, the control I suddenly possessed, and my ability to defend myself fearlessly. To remove all evidence of disorder. In cahoots with my mother.
There were so many roaches. I couldn’t look up from the floor for a long time. I didn’t want to miss any. When I did pause, my mother directed me, “Gins, over there.”
My glance followed her pointing finger. I shuddered, then pointed the nozzle at the wall and let it gobble the roaches crawling there. When I looked up, I saw a couple on the ceiling itself, defying gravity as they scuttled upside down, seeking a crack they could sneak into.
Repelled by the thought of a creepy crawly body falling on my bare skin, I nonetheless pointed the vacuum wand above my head and sucked them in.
We were done. They were all gone, maybe only for the moment, but that was enough for me.
By the end of eighth grade, nearly three years after my father’s departure, both my standards and my expectations had fallen off a cliff. In spite of everything, I kept hoping that somehow Mom and Dad would patch our old life back together and we’d pick up where they’d left off. My mother was strong; she loved me. She knew it was her job to take care of us. She always had before. She would come back. And I had to help; I had to do my job.
But as time passed and nothing improved, I began to blame myself. I was a bad girl. I wasn’t doing my part well enough. I didn’t understand what Mom needed.
It took me those three years, day by painful day, to cave in and give up.
The final straws piled on the summer after eighth grade, when Mom decided to take the three of us kids (she didn’t invite Peggy) to Europe for the summer. Two long months on Italy’s west coast in the picture-perfect seaside town of Porto Ercole, with its daily fruit and vegetable market, butcher shop with feathered headless chickens hanging in the windows, and stone seawall stretching into the Adriatic. But the peaceful scenery and foreign mystique couldn’t compensate for the emotional ups and downs of living with two unstable adults: Mom had acquired a boyfriend, Anton, a swarthy Bulgarian artist at least ten years younger than her, well-muscled, with prominent, well-proportioned facial features and a crown of dark curls that suggested a dark Apollo. His appearance contrasted sharply with Mom’s, whose steady diet of cigarettes, coffee, alcohol, and secret swallows of unidentified pills had jumpstarted her face wrinkling and body sagging well in advance of her chronological age. We didn’t know how they met, but Peggy and I speculated that Mom’s wallet mattered more to Anton than her perfect looks and sparkling personality.
Day after day, week after week, we lurched back and forth between Jekyll and Hyde existences. Mom bantered and bartered with the marketplace vendors in limited but enthusiastic Italian one day, berated me for burning food she had put on the stove without telling me before passing out the next.
Living in an idyllic village, I dreamed of escape. I took long walks through the town and to the end of the pier that stretched into the harbor, but always had to come home to Mom, worried whether she would be all right when I returned and angered that I had to worry at all.
Some of my Swedish family, Aunt Evy and cousin Annica, visited for a week. On the last day of their stay, I sat on the porch of their Porto Ercole rental in the early evening, waiting for Mom, Anton, and the Littles to return from a day trip to Rome. It was late; they were late. The phone rang. Annica and I stared into the streetlights, watching the bats flit in and out of the shadows, while Evy we
nt inside to answer it. She came out a few minutes later, visibly upset.
“Ginny, that was Anton. He’s at the hospital in Rome. There was a car accident.”
Instantly, my worries escalated. Someone was dead. It was all my fault. I had let Muff and Dixie go with my mother and that man, that lunatic, who always drove his fancy sports car a zillion miles an hour with my brother and sister squeezed into the practically nonexistent backseat … What was I thinking?
“What happened?” I didn’t want to know, but I had to. It was my job to know, to blame myself, and to figure out how to solve the mess.
“I don’t really know. Your mother is badly hurt. She cannot leave the hospital tonight.”
Shit! “What about Miss Muffet? And Dixie?”
“They are okay. Anton will bring them back tomorrow.”
When the Littles returned the next day, they were wearing the same clothes they had left in, now torn and bloodstained. They bore their share of bruises and bumps, but nothing serious. Mom wasn’t so lucky. When she was released from the hospital several days later, she returned with a broken pelvis, a broken arm, a black eye, and bruises all over her body. The doctors had stemmed her internal bleeding and deemed her sufficiently stable to fly home.
By the time we arrived back in New York in late August, I was in emotional tatters, exhausted by the job of monitoring my mother and, even worse, confronted by the extent of my failure to deliver. I had not been able to keep her drug-free, to distract her from drinking, to prevent her from making a fool of herself, or to protect my sister and brother.
Then in early September, Peggy returned to New York to finish her last year of high school at Nightingale-Bamford, which she’d attended for eight years before Mom banished her from the city. “Not asked back” by Emma Willard, her boarding school, Peggy forced our parents’ hand. I was stunned to discover she was not going to live with us at Mom’s, but at Dad’s.
Talk about an unpredictable turn of events: Mom viewed BG as the devil and had tried to keep us as far from her as possible. BG had exclaimed countless times that she didn’t want any children, and Dad never stood up for us when she went off about “no kids,” but just let her rant about what a pain they were. We all knew where the four of us kids stood with her when it came to Dad. She came first. We came not second, but last.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I had heard my mother exclaim countless times on the phone to Dad, “I can’t handle her, Dick. She can’t come home here. It won’t work.” But it all sank in fully the first time I visited Peggy at the new apartment Dad had rented to accommodate her moving in with him and BG. I sat on her bed in her new bedroom, saw the private bathroom tucked into a corner, the big closet, the privacy, the peace, and I suddenly saw my own way out of life with my mother.
Until that instant, I hadn’t realized the extent of my desperation. As I lay on Peggy’s bed watching her unpack her moving boxes, I realized I wanted to move out of Mom’s, too. Now that Peggy was back in the city, I couldn’t tolerate the idea of living with Mom without her. I broached the idea of moving to Dad’s too, testing out the idea of our sharing a room again, and my big sister agreed without hesitation.
We didn’t have to talk about what was going on. Already discarded herself, sent to boarding school a year before, and refused reentry by our mother, she’d waited to find out where she’d get to live and go to school, while our parents tussled about her future. I figured that neither of them wanted her, but didn’t know if Mom manipulated Dad into thinking he won a battle or lost one, if he viewed Peggy as the prize or the punishment.
Now all I had to do was talk to Dad. I heard my inner voice rail at me with all the reasons he would say no, but I had already decided. The possibility of one more denial or another rejection didn’t faze me. Nothing could be as bad as the unendurable at my mother’s. I had nothing to lose.
Peggy agreed to back me up, to tell Dad she supported my moving in with them, and I resolved to call him that night.
I picked up the red wall phone with its long cord dangling nearly to the floor. I dialed the numbers, my forefinger turning the dial each time all the way to the right, trying not to hold my breath.
Dad answered the phone.
Now or never. “Dad, Dad, can I move in with you too?” I rushed right on by “hello” into the heart of the matter, not giving him a chance to decline. “Peggy and I figured it all out. We can share her room, just like we used to. It’s okay with her. Just ask her.”
I ran out of sentences too quickly.
“You want to live here too? Move in with Peggy?” He sounded surprised, but not angry. Well, that was a good start. Maybe he could imagine how awful living with Mom must be. Maybe he dredged up his own memories of his last days with her. Or maybe he just knew it was his turn.
“Sure,” he answered slowly. “I think we can probably work this out. Let me talk with your stepmother to figure out the details.”
I felt a faint lightening of the heaviness I had shouldered over the past three years. The guilt of fleeing would come soon enough. I would have to tell Mom, but for the moment, relief reigned.
I needed help to give Mom the news. I turned to the only one who knew more than I did about how to handle her unbridled fury and the only one I trusted to stand up to her. Peggy could take it. She wouldn’t burn down. Something special ran through her veins, some kind of fire retardant that kept her cool while our mother vilified and belittled her.
Of course Peggy stepped up. Neither of us wanted to delay the inevitable. She came over right before dinner the next day, the last Tuesday of September.
Peggy and I sat Mom down in the library. Without preamble or delicacy, Peggy said matter-of-factly, “Ginny’s decided to move to Dad’s. She’s not going to live here anymore.”
Dead silence. Then Mom looked simultaneously horrified and disgusted, her eyes wide, her mouth an O of disbelief with her upper lip somehow twisting into a sneer. “You want to move in with your father and that woman?” she asked.
I nodded slowly, the first pangs of shame wrenching my innards, anxiety burning within me. I couldn’t speak.
Peggy said, “She’s moving out on Friday.”
A switch flipped in my mother, and her face reshuffled. Her teeth clamped together, her mouth became a rigid line, and her eyes glittered darkly. She spat her words at Peggy with undisguised malice: “Who do you think you are? You’re not in charge! You think you can do whatever you want?”
Her Nordic accent thickened with each successive declaration, as if marking her descent into illogic. “I’ll show you what you can and can’t do. I’ll take your father to court, you wait and see.”
She glared at me. “Fine. Do as you please. Go, just go!” She rose with dreadful composure, like royalty offended, and swept out.
Just like that, it was over. I was free to go. I didn’t know how to feel: guilty or angry or sad or relieved. I looked at Peggy and shrugged. “She can go to hell,” I said.
“She’s already there,” answered Peggy. Her voice sounded empty.
That evening after Peggy left to return to her new home, I entered the kitchen cautiously. A veneer of normalcy coated the room. Dinner smelled edible, unburned. The counter was set; the glasses were topped off with icy cold milk; Miss Muffet and Dixie were already seated. I slid onto my stool at the counter next to Muff.
Mother silently set plates down before us. I focused on the food—meatloaf, mashed potatoes, peas—eating slowly, but deliberately.
Suddenly, Mom was behind me. I wished I could shrink down, slip off my stool, and run for the door. Instead, I kept my eyes on my plate, hoping I could avoid triggering her anger. I felt her hands lightly on my shoulders. I hardly recognized this gentle touch. It had been so long.
“How could you do this to me?” she said softly. “How could you leave me?”
“Don’t touch me!” I snapped and jerked my shoulders as if to fling off the guilt her words called up in me. She stepped back in surp
rise. I almost fell off the stool in my haste to escape.
“You don’t understand anything! Leave me alone, just leave me alone!” I howled, then banged through the kitchen doors and raced to my room, finally sobbing.
Mom left me alone for the rest of the evening and never raised the subject again. Ever.
Three days later, I carted my suitcases, my stuffed animals, my record collection, and my cadre of miniature wooden Swedish horses to my father’s apartment. I left much more behind, including my good memories. And worse, I didn’t even notice they were gone.
Only I knew the price Muff and Dixie were going to pay. No one else, not even Peggy, understood how unendurable the previous year had been—how lonely, dangerous at times, chaotic, and slovenly, and how completely the three of us were left to take care of ourselves. Now, I, fourteen years old, was leaving a madwoman who had already repeatedly and irrefutably proven her incapacity to take charge of an eleven-year-old and a nine-year-old. I didn’t know how they would care for and protect themselves.
As it turned out, the answer came quickly, two nights later, just past midnight on my first Sunday night at my father’s. I was still up, talking with BG in the living room, when the phone rang.
My father answered, listened briefly, forehead furrowed, said, “I’ll be right over,” and hung up.
He looked at BG, paling as he spoke. “She says she’s killed Muff and Dixie.”
Years later, Britt-Louise told me what happened that night. “I was sleeping. Then the doorbell started ringing. It wouldn’t stop. On and on. No one was answering it, so I got up. I walked down the long hall, past Dixie’s room, then to Mom’s doorway. She was sitting up in bed, reading. ‘Someone’s at the door,’ I said. She just waved me away. So I went and opened the front door and found two policemen standing there with Dad and BG. I let them in, we woke up Dixie, BG helped me pack some things, and they brought us over to you.”