Body Leaping Backward

by Maureen Stanton

  April 28, 1974—Today we got a new girl, Sarah Macomb. She is a whore, I think. She wore really tight pants and no bra. Someone said she was pregnant but that could be a rumor. She seemed nice.

  The summer between ninth grade and tenth was like crossing a bridge. Part of my life was ordinary—riding my bike to Bird Park to play tennis with my friends; babysitting; selling hot dogs in the concession stand at Schaefer Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, where rock concerts were scheduled on weekends; swimming on the town team—while drifting into another world, hearing the call. That summer I wrote about playing Flashlight Tag, but this, too: “Had beers and whiskey this morning with Sally, got pretty drunk. Went to Dairy Bar to get an ice cream. Slept in the cemetery for a while.” In June, I wrote, “Me, Alison, and Paula are buying some hits of mescaline. I’ve never done that before but I’m not scared.” Telling myself I wasn’t scared reveals to me that I was, that I needed to convince myself otherwise.

  One night that summer I slept in a tent in Loretta Petty’s backyard with Alison, Paula, and a few other girls. We stayed up late talking, smoking pot, drinking. At four in the morning we took off our shirts and strolled bare-breasted through the empty streets of the projects, half streaking, naked on top, clothed on the bottom, like mermaids, creatures of two worlds, belonging wholly to neither, shapeshifting in that interstice between dark and light, girlhood and womanhood.

  The transformation that summer was not physical—I reached my full height of five-foot-two in seventh grade—but something was happening inside me, some too-fast metamorphosis, like the kid in the Wonder Bread commercial who grew before my eyes. Inside I felt pressure, something wanting to burst out that I had to suppress. Some days just being in the world made me edgy and raw, as if my skin were inside out.

  May 26, 1975—I was in the weirdest mood today. One minute I just felt like crying but I don’t know why and the next minute I was laughing. We had an algebra quiz and I couldn’t concentrate so I got a 44.

  My mother noticed that something was wrong with me. She subscribed to Psychology Today and took evening classes in psychology at a nearby junior college.

  May 30, 1975—It was such a terrible day. Everyone was getting on my nerves and cutting me down so I started crying at the dinner table. Mom wants me to go to a phycologist [sic].

  Psychology was my mother’s answer to what ailed me, and the answer to what ailed a lot of people then. A survey on college campuses in 1975 found among students a “prevailing sadness.” The 1970s were the tail end of psychology’s dark ages, madhouses and loony bins—the last frontal lobotomies were performed in the early 1970s—but also the dawn of the self-help age. There was confusion at the crossroads. When it was revealed in 1972 that Thomas Eagleton, presidential candidate George McGovern’s running mate, had undergone electroshock therapy, Eagleton was branded too crazy for office. But in 1974, First Lady Betty Ford unapologetically admitted that she regularly saw a psychologist and Time magazine named her “woman of the year” for her candor.

  July 14, 1975—Just talked to Mom. I’m going to see a phyciatrist [sic]. I don’t know what I’m going to tell him, but I just want to get myself analyzed. Maybe I have some kind of complex. I have one big, huge cry stored up inside me. It will all come out sometime though.

  I wonder what kind of “complex” I thought I had, or what I even knew about “complexes.” Maybe I’d found the word in one of my mother’s Psychology Today magazines. I remember vividly an article about self-perception, which was accompanied by three illustrations of a woman. The first image showed how the woman viewed herself (homely, wrinkled); the second illustration was how the woman thought others viewed her (glamorous, like Ginger from Gilligan’s Island, copper-haired, with thick eyeliner, a voluptuous mouth); and the third was how she actually looked. The first two images depicted the perspective of someone with an inferiority complex (ugly) and someone with a superiority complex (beautiful), which was “narcissistic.” After reading the article, I suspected that I had a superiority and an inferiority complex. The article bothered me immensely. What if my perception was skewed?

  One day in third grade I came home from school to find that my mother had sketched a portrait of me from my school photo. I was amazed at the resemblance, the lopsided curls formed by pink foam curlers worn to bed the night before, the home-sewn tulle shirt and gray plaid vest, that year’s Easter suit. In the photo I showed my big happy smile with the torqued-out teeth. “How did you learn how to draw?” I asked my mother. “I just studied the picture,” she said. I was dazzled by her hidden talent, and pleased she’d chosen to draw me of all her kids, but then I said, “Why did you have to draw the crooked teeth?” My mother grew irritated. “Because that’s how you look!” She wanted appreciation, not criticism, but criticism was my métier. I wanted my mother to erase the diastema “big enough to hold three pieces of corn,” as a boy once said, some random boy standing behind me at the movies. I wanted her to fix—with the malleable lead of pencil—my “twisty teeth.” I wanted her to draw not me.

  July 21, 1975—Mom, Sally, and Sue are going to New York this weekend. I wanted to go but I could tell they didn’t want me. I feel so unwanted lately. I feel like killing myself even. What a sucky life.

  Sometimes at home in my bedroom with noise all around me, kids fighting, someone talking on the phone, my mother cooking or washing dishes, clattering pots and pans, “Chopsticks” or a duet banged out on the piano, the radio playing, a television on somewhere, I felt lonely. As a girl I used to love lying on the grass looking up at the sky, thinking and wondering, finding pleasure in the company of my thoughts. But I’d lost that world unto myself. Sometimes the loneliness felt like someone was tapping me on the head, patting me like grownups used to do when I was a child, except now that hand was pushing me down.

  July 22, 1975—Lately I feel so depressed or something. I can’t figure out what it is. I need someone to talk to.

  I’d agreed to my mother’s suggestion to see a psychologist only if he was in a different town. I was so self-conscious that I thought the entire citizenry of Walpole would somehow find out if I saw a shrink in our town—a measure of my small view of the world, or my overblown view of myself. Narcissist.

  My mother and I climbed a dimly lit stairway in a two-story clapboard house converted to offices, looking warily at each other, the stained walls, the creaky stairs. I don’t know how my mother found this guy; maybe she’d looked in the yellow pages. She knocked on the door and the doctor invited her in for a private chat, then she waited in that shadowy hallway for nearly an hour. Dr. Rosenwald was a heavy man with rosacea on his face, patchy red skin like my father sometimes had. The office seemed shabby, with old-fashioned radiators, the paint chipped, worn indoor-outdoor carpet like we had in the Orange Room. The shrink must have been inexpensive, the only shrink my mother could afford, a bargain-basement shrink. That was my impression.

  After Dr. Rosenwald asked me a few questions (if I smoked dope, cigarettes, if I drank, to which I said yes), he stared at me while I sat silently for the next half-hour. I wondered why he wasn’t saying anything, or why he wasn’t giving me some type of test—Rorschach or word association or something. After the session was over, my mother took me out for ice cream, a rare time alone with her. Maybe that’s all I needed, to go out for ice cream with my mother. I told her I didn’t like Dr. Rosenwald, that he didn’t say anything, but I agreed to try one more time. My second visit yielded only a cryptic note:

  August 7, 1975—Went to the phyciatrist [sic] again tonight. He doesn’t do any good. That was my last time seeing him.

  A week later my father took us on vacation to a cottage in New Hampshire, honoring our family tradition, though it would be the last time. My mother prepared meals for the week so nobody had to cook, her presence felt in spite of her absence. During the day we swam or played tennis, at night played cards or board games. I took my precious diary with me, which shows that my confusion and sadness remaine
d and that I still hadn’t learned how to spell psychiatrist.

  August 15, 1975—Everyone is getting on everyone else’s ass and I’m getting so sick of it. I’m really confused. I feel like crying but I don’t know why. I think I have a problem but I don’t know what. This happens to me all the time and I never know why I feel like crying. The fucking phyciatrist [sic] didn’t do a damn thing.

  Just after I started tenth grade at the high school, where Sally was a junior and Sue a senior, the “big cry” that I’d felt inside me sometimes seeped out, like a broken water main.

  September 6, 1975—I went downtown today. I was walking alone and I started crying really hard. I don’t know why.

  I fought with my mother every morning before school, storming out of the house in tears, tinny clatter from the screen door slamming behind me. My mother complained about the way I dressed—“You’re not going out looking like that!”—the ratty jeans, the wrinkled, stained dungaree jacket. Every day I rubber-banded my wet hair into a ponytail until it dried to straighten the curls, though it left a weird indent in my hair. My shaggy bell-bottoms dragged on the ground, the hems frayed and dirty, my midriff shirt revealing a patch of skin between my hips and belly button. What were my mother and I really fighting about? Probably she hoped that if that grungy outer layer were stripped, the daughter she used to know would be there. She must have thought that the girl I’d been a few months earlier—captain of the cheerleaders, honor roll student, on the basketball team, the softball team—was hiding beneath my attire. But that girl was gone.

  4

  Conti la Monty

  At her job clerking at Norwood Hospital, my mother became interested in the work of nurses, so she enrolled in an eighteen-month program at the Henry O. Peabody technical school to become a licensed practical nurse. The hospital paid her tuition, and the town of Walpole gave her a grant for child care. She attended classes all day like we did and then shut herself in her bedroom to finish her homework, emerging later to cook dinner. We were not supposed to bother her when she was studying, but we found excuses to interrupt, and so she installed an eye-hook lock, which allowed the door to open an inch. I’d stand outside her door, my eye cocked on that sliver, spying on her as she sat at her desk ignoring me. I’d press my mouth and nose into the crack. Mom, I need you. Mom. Mom.

  One day I popped the lock with a knife and barged into the room. I found my mother crying, papers spread before her, book propped open on her desk. “What’s the matter?” I asked, forgetting whatever was so urgent that I’d broken into her bedroom. “I can’t do these fractions,” she said. I didn’t know how to comfort my mother. “Want me to help?” She looked annoyed, or defeated. It must have been difficult to accept that her teenage daughter was more proficient in basic math than she was. But maybe my mother wasn’t crying about fractions; maybe she was crying about the circumstances that reintroduced fractions, those broken-up numbers, into her life. “I have to do it myself,” she said, so I left her alone, and never again broke into her room while she was studying.

  My father, whose bachelor’s degree was in math, helped my mother with her homework, translating American measures into metric, into the apothecary system. In spite of tutoring from my father, halfway through the eighteen-month program my mother considered quitting. She was in classes all day, with hours of homework. She had seven children to care for, the youngest, Mikey, just four, then five. She wasn’t working, so we never had enough money. We ate “plate pancakes” for dinner, the batter so thin the pancakes spread like crepes. My sisters and I urged my mother to stay in school. “What kind of role model will you be for us?” we said. She forged on, and in February 1975 she was listed in the Walpole Times as a graduate of the Henry O. Peabody School for Girls Practical Nursing Program, a girl at thirty-seven.

  At first my mother worked for a nursing agency, driving to hospitals and nursing homes within thirty miles, and into Boston as temporary staff, usually the afternoon shift, 3 p.m. to 11 p.m. On Friday nights my father picked up Mikey. At my father’s apartment, he and Mikey played with clay. My father had taken up sculpture, and his apartment was populated with half-formed figures, a bas-relief of a weary man in repose, a pony mid-trot, for which he won honorable mention in some local art exhibition. Mikey formed an army of tiny weird creatures while my father honed his bust of a woman in brown wax, sculpting and shaping as if he were creating the perfect woman, though over the years the wax woman bent and distorted.

  My father came to get Mikey one Friday night when my mother was at work and her new boyfriend, Ed, was at our house. My mother had met Ed on a trip to her hometown in New York, and after that they took turns visiting each other, my mother driving four hours one way to New York one weekend and Ed making the trip to Walpole the next. Ed was the opposite of my father, like a different species of man. He was short, Italian, blond, blue-collar; my father was tall, Irish, black-haired, white-collar. Ed worked as a millwright at a nuclear power plant and was handy; he could fix or build anything. My father had a master’s degree but was inept at home repair; he generally used tinfoil as his medium of choice for fix-it projects, so much so that at Christmas we gave him industrial rolls of tinfoil. Ed was a hunter, an outdoorsman. My city-bred father was useless in nature. When Mikey’s pet rabbit, Marshmallow, froze overnight in its cage, my father set the bunny in front of an electric heater as if it would thaw out and start hopping.

  Ed had thin lips and a long nose, close-set blue eyes. He smoked cigars—always a cigar clamped in the corner of his mouth. He wore a ring with a chunky stone and liked a crease ironed in his jeans. He was a Vietnam veteran. “He went in a private and came out a sergeant,” my mother said proudly. In a hushed voice, she told me that Ed had witnessed the worst carnage of the war. “He can’t eat rice,” she said, a synecdoche for his whole unspeakable experience. Like Arnold Logan, the mailman, also a vet, Ed could not hold my gaze. His eyes skittered away, or he looked at the floor, as if by staring too deeply into his eyes I’d see what he was hiding—some unfathomable, lacerating sorrow.

  Usually Ed left the house for an hour or so when my father was scheduled to come over, but that night he dawdled. My stomach twisted with worry as he lingered ten minutes before my father was to arrive, five minutes, and when my father walked through the door, Ed was in the kitchen holding his coat and keys. Ed extended his hand to shake, but my father frowned, looking Ed up and down, sizing him up. Ed walked past my father and out the door.

  “Why’d you do that?” I said to my father.

  “Do what?” He stood with his hands on his hips, still in his suit coat from work, his shirt unbuttoned, tie hanging loosely. I’d never seen my father treat anyone rudely. He rarely yelled. He was conflict-avoidant, would rather walk away than argue, but his weapon was subtle cutting remarks, a supercilious air that quietly struck you down.

  “Why did you give him a dirty look?”

  My father was taken aback. “He’s living in this house that I’m paying for?”

  “You didn’t have to act like an asshole,” I said.

  I ran upstairs to my room. My father didn’t come after me. Upstairs was almost off-limits to him. I think he was afraid to come upstairs, didn’t want to trespass. Or maybe he didn’t know what to say to me, or was just angry, like I was.

  My father didn’t see that Ed brought us crates of vegetables from his produce stand, a side business, or that he simmered a marinara while my mother was at work, that he fixed whatever was broken around the house. He’d built a wet bar in the Orange Room and a wishing well in the front yard, a stone base covered by a wooden roof, a well with no water, no purpose but to fulfill a wish for my mother. He built a deck for our pool, which made it seem almost as good as an in-ground pool.

  I didn’t see my father’s side, that he’d been displaced from his home, that he’d become the visitor who dropped in, the interloper, not the man who slept there. My parents had agreed that they wouldn’t disparage each other in front of the kids a
nd they never did, which was why the incident with Ed surprised me. In the first couple of years after they separated, my mother and father tried to reconcile, even as my mother was seeing Ed. (Ed said he’d wait two years for my mother.) One night a few months after their separation, my parents went on a date to the movies. Around 11 p.m., after everyone else was asleep, I walked into the kitchen and caught them in a passionate kiss, my mother on tiptoe. I remember my father’s words from our family meeting—“We haven’t been getting along”—how that revelation had shocked me because I’d never seen them fight, but I realized that night in the kitchen that I’d never seen them hug or kiss either.

  Another time my mother and father planned a picnic on a Saturday afternoon. What was it like to date a man with whom you had seven children, to whom you’d been married for fifteen years? My mother wore a sleeveless blouse and purple shorts, the hem high up on her thighs to show her shapely legs. When my father picked her up, I said, “Have fun.” Hours later, after my father dropped her off without getting out of his car, she walked straight into her bedroom. I pushed open the door and found her sitting on the bed, teary-eyed. “What happened?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine what might have gone wrong—something horrible if it made her cry. “I can’t talk to him,” she said. I didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain, or didn’t want to. She said she wanted to be by herself, so I left her there in her sadness.