by Betsy Bonner
“Expensive,” I said.
“Is Dad paying for it?”
“He said he would. I’m taking out loans. You know,” I said, “you might want to consider a liberal arts college. Dad would pay for you again, and you could study music or something you’re actually interested in.”
“I’m not going back,” she said. “Oh, I have something for you.”
The laminated card she put in my hand said Atlantis Black was born in 1974—two years before her actual birth—and had black hair and brown eyes. The photograph showed her tilting her head down to hide the Irish double chin she’d inherited from our father. She no longer needed that particular ID, she said, and I could use it if I ever wanted to go out in Philadelphia or New York. I shouldn’t worry about the eye color—which was a mistake anyway—because no one ever checked in the dark. We still looked alike, mostly because of our long, dark hair, which we wore loose down our backs. I told her I didn’t care about bars, and certainly didn’t want to get caught sneaking into one.
“It must be nice to be so straight,” she said. “You better keep it just in case.”
·
She talked her way into a telemarketing job, which earned her more money than most nineteen-year-olds made in our town. I had no idea how she spent her time when she wasn’t at work until I came home one afternoon from rehearsing The Diary of Anne Frank, a school production in which the English teacher had created a position for me—assistant director!—and caught her at the living room window, peering through binoculars at one of our new neighbors, a fourteen-year-old girl, next door.
The Girl Next Door was in her yard by the wading pool, playing with her kid sister. Like a little mother, she lifted her sister up and out of the water, and then dunked her back in. We lived close enough to hear their screen door open and close, and when their mom came out in chino shorts carrying a tray of snacks and lemonade, I saw Atlantis’s body tense. I watched her watching their mom set the tray by the pool’s edge and open her arms to the child in the water. The Girl Next Door threw a towel in their direction and curled into a sagging lawn chair with a dELiA*s catalog.
“Do you think she’s straight?” my sister said.
“They are all straight,” I said.
“She has wicked thighs,” she said.
“She’s in eighth grade,” I said.
“On the cusp of teenage dreams. Doesn’t their mom look exactly like Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice?” In an attempt to distract ourselves from the humidity, we’d been staying up late watching the Bravo network.
I sneaked a peek at their mom’s long, tanned legs myself. “You didn’t even know who Lana Turner was until I told you.”
“What color do you think her eyes are?” my sister said.
“Dunno. Brown hair, brown eyes, I guess.”
“Wrong! She has black eyes.”
“There’s no such thing,” I said.
“At her age, I was getting drunk and having sex with those assholes in the Burger King parking lot,” Atlantis said. “I can’t believe her mom lets her wear hot pants to school.”
I tossed my Sassy magazine on the coffee table.
“I’m going to write her a letter,” she said. “Something from the Wolf, to make her wet.” Lately, she had become fixated on some entity that possessed her, which she called the Beast or the Wolf.
“She’ll think it’s from a guy,” I said.
“Duh.” She picked up her guitar. “I’ll address it to her soul.”
·
Every day for the next week, Atlantis waited for nightfall, then put on a bandit mask from Woolworth’s and left love letters for the Girl Next Door in her family’s mailbox. She typed them on our Brother word processor; she never let me read them in their entirety, but I often saw the word princess. Sometimes there was a rose pressed inside. It was bizarre, but I kept her secret. There didn’t seem to be much else for me to do.
“But why her?” I asked her. To me, the Girl Next Door looked like a normal, shy, awkward young teenager.
“She’s astoundingly beautiful. Are you blind?” When she was her age, Atlantis said, she would have loved to have gotten anonymous letters. They were perfectly harmless, they would make the Girl feel awesomely powerful, and they would raise her standards. Without someone or something to wake the Girl up, she’d probably get stuck with one of the dumb locals for a husband. She was too gorgeous to spend her life in Chadds Ford.
·
One day the Girl Next Door sat behind me on the school bus. I pretended to search for something in my bag, then turned and asked her if she had a pen. She looked up from her homework. Black eyes.
·
The point of the letters, Atlantis claimed, was to lift the Girl above the boring life that seemed destined for her. But of course she grew bored with her stalker game. She wanted to know what the Girl thought about the letters. Did they make her feel special? Did she have any suspects?
So she decided to confess. She wanted to do it in person and asked me to back her up. I was scared to go along—I didn’t know if the father had a gun, as many of our neighbors did—but I didn’t want her to do it alone.
When the mom came to the door, Atlantis asked to see the Girl.
“She’s doing homework.”
“Actually, we’re wondering if we can borrow her yearbook,” Atlantis said.
The mom closed the screen door and disappeared inside. After a couple of minutes, she came back. “She says she didn’t get one this year.”
“Well, what about a bike pump?” Atlantis said.
The mom folded her arms across her chest.
“Look,” Atlantis said. “I’m the one writing letters to your daughter.”
“Why are you telling me?” the mom said.
“She has to know,” Atlantis said. “I thought she’d be flattered. Would you please just tell her that I didn’t mean to scare her? And we can talk if she wants?”
“I think you two better get out of here,” the mom said, and shut the door in our faces.
·
A few weeks before graduation, in the photography class darkroom, I met James, a new kid wearing a Marilyn Manson T-shirt. His family had moved to town from California. We started talking after school in the parking lot. I mentioned that my sister had just moved back from Los Angeles, and I asked him what California was like; the farthest west I’d ever been was Altoona, Pennsylvania. He asked if he could take pictures of me, and soon I had an arty, androgynous boyfriend.
·
That summer, Atlantis found a group of friends at Sisters, a lesbian bar in Philadelphia. She spent weekends away and came home on Sunday afternoons tipsy and reeking of cigarette smoke. Our father tried to rein us both in. He made rules for how late Atlantis could stay out (which she ignored) and said that James and I were no longer permitted to watch movies in my bedroom with the door closed. I asked if Atlantis was still allowed to have girls in her bedroom, or if this was just a ban on heterosexuality. My father didn’t understand what I meant, but my sister was furious. “I cannot believe you just did that to me, Betsy,” she said, and drove off in the Alfa.
She didn’t speak to me for a couple of days—the longest fight we had ever had—and when she finally broke her silence, I apologized for outing her to our father. I had meant to mock his bigotry and I had assumed that everybody already knew about her sexual preference. She told me it was the dumbest thing I’d ever done; our father, along with most of our family, still believed that our cousin Kathy’s longtime partner was her roommate.
“Oh well,” I said. “Soon enough, we’ll both be living in New York.”
SAN DIEGO, MARCH 2008
I had three close calls with three separate producers. This is what made me have a meltdown circa 2004–5. I was in touch with Mark Wallis, who produced U2 and Talking Heads. And then Ian Grimble, who produced Siouxsie and the Banshees and Travis. And then Steve Lyon, who produced Depeche Mode and the Cure. I settled on Steve Lyon bec
ause his repertoire was more similar to my style of music. I flew him out—he offered to record my songs for free. We blocked off four days to record my second album. The album—the album’s title was gonna be More than Opium. We recorded two songs. Then we got pummeled by a snowstorm in Pennsylvania to the point that the power went out. For four days. And then he had to fly to Portugal and Germany to record more famous people. And I was like, Oh my God, my life is over. I was having a personal issue at the time. It was very, very hard on me because I thought I had reached that pinnacle of where I wanted to be, and I thought I’d never be there again.
7.
My mother, Marybeth Heffner, was salutatorian of her high school class and got a full scholarship to Dickinson College. She went on to get a master’s in mathematics, then a PhD in communications from the University of Washington. My father, James Bonner, went from the army into business management, and to night school at Drexel University for his MBA. By the summer of 1975, they’d both ended up working at DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware; they got married the following January, and Nancy was born nine months later. My mother wanted children and didn’t think she had much time left: she was thirty-four, and my father was forty, when they had Nancy.
·
Mom often napped in the afternoons, and sometimes, when her depression was bad, she would lie down in the pools of sunlight on the living room floor, moving her body a few inches an hour. She looked like Wyeth’s berry picker. But she seldom seemed to be asleep; rather, she was in the unrest of anxiety. She wore the same bathrobe, or the same faded cotton jumpsuit, for days on end.
Things were the opposite when she was manic: brassy colors in outlandish patterns swirled and clashed on her thin frame. She began reading, writing, gardening, and sewing projects—many of which she actually finished—and buzzed around the house like a motorboat without a pilot. Sometimes she shouted: “I hate kids!” and laughed her head off. Nancy, as she did with so many things, made it into a game. She taught me to shout back, in unison with her: “Then why did you have us?”
“I wanted to see what you’d look like,” Mom said.
·
Mom read tarot cards on the sofa, and I noticed that she always put down the same card first: a woman who looked a bit like her, sitting on a throne with lions carved in the sides. She held a sunflower in one hand, a wand in the other, and had a black cat at her feet. Whenever she finished her reading, she offered to give me one. “Yes, please,” I’d say, and inch closer to this woman I barely knew, but who fascinated me. She showed me the Queen of Cups, a good signifier for me, she said, since I was a water sign and a romantic. She told me to think of a question and then cut the cards. I had no idea what I wanted to know. Who would I marry? Where would I live? What would my daughters look and be like?
·
When I was five and Nancy was seven, Mom stopped sleeping with my father in the master bedroom and moved into Nancy’s room, at the opposite end of the house and down a flight of stairs. At that time, Nancy’s room had two twin beds, mine just one. It was a little strange that Mom didn’t send me to Nancy’s room and take over mine. Perhaps she and Nancy protected each other from my father’s outbursts. It seemed like they were having a slumber party, but I didn’t mind not being invited: Nancy and Mom both liked to stay up late talking, while I had my sleep and my privacy.
·
By 1984, Mom had asked my father for a divorce, which he refused her. He wrote her a letter saying that life without God was spiritual suicide and sent letters to her psychiatrist citing her failures as a wife, mother, and housekeeper. Nancy found carbon copies of those letters in his dresser drawer and read them to me, widening her eyes over the parts about how Mom had neglected to pick her up from school when Nancy was sick with bronchitis, and about how trash and dirt piled up in the room they shared. At the time, no one I knew questioned that childcare and cleaning were primarily the wife’s responsibilities, even if she had a demanding job and a higher salary than her husband—as Mom did during the first decade of my life. My father accused her of having a love affair with her boss, and with one of the gardeners on the organic farm where she volunteered on Saturdays. She saved up money to move out, and we all continued to live in the house while my parents argued over custody of Nancy and me.
·
One afternoon, my father put Mom’s tarot cards in the trash, saying they were “of the devil,” and threw her brightly colored paisley dresses, hippie blouses, and mandala-patterned pants on the lawn. Nancy held me while Mom picked up the clothes, packed her car, and said she’d come back for us. She rented an apartment on the outskirts of Chadds Ford and asked Nancy and me how we’d feel about bunk beds. For the next year and a half, we spent weekend nights at Mom’s, where Nancy, maybe just to scare me, kept a knife under her mattress.
·
My mother was a political activist and an environmentalist; this, combined with her mania, got her fired from DuPont. During a lunch break, she told her colleagues that DuPont illegally dumped chemicals in the Chesapeake Bay, poisoning waterbirds and other wildlife, and that they all should organize a protest. Security guards escorted her from the building. Later on, she said she was happy to have lost that job. The most important thing in life, she told my sister and me, was to find something we liked doing, and never to work anywhere too long just for money.
A headhunter found her a systems analysis job in Huntsville, Alabama, and she surprised my family by taking it. If she liked it, she said, she’d find a way for my sister and me to move down there with her. My father said there was no way that was happening; he believed that Mom was still in the throes of the manic episode that had gotten her fired and that we had to let it run its course. She got rid of the white Volkswagen bug I loved, leased a brand-new sports car, a Chrysler Conquest, and was gone. I was embarrassed to tell my friends, whose mothers stayed at home, that Mom had left our family. I counted the days until Nancy and I were to visit her down South.
·
In 1986, when I was seven, I took my first plane ride, with Nancy, to visit Mom in her new place in Alabama. Nancy stared straight ahead during takeoff and landing, so I knew she was scared, too.
We found Mom waiting for us at the airport, wearing bright red lipstick, dangly clip-on earrings, and a long sleeveless dress with a zebra print. She hugged us both and packed us into the Conquest to show us around Huntsville. It was hot, and the city air was humid and polluted. I wondered where the trees were. But Mom’s condo was cool and full of plants and new, modern furniture, including a fancy stereo. She put on Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” and danced around her new digs, snapping her fingers. I thought that Mom must be making a lot of money. That night, she took us to see Crocodile Dundee and let Nancy and me drink all the Coke we wanted.
Before we left, Mom asked us if we wanted to come back to Alabama and live with her. We both said yes.
·
After several months in Huntsville, Mom had fulfilled her temporary contract but wasn’t offered a permanent job. She returned to Chadds Ford with her once-long hair in a short, frizzy perm; I was relieved that she’d made some kind of arrangement with my father and was moving back home. She found a part-time job teaching technical writing at a community college, gave it up after a year or two, and afterward relied on my father to support our family. He didn’t complain. After all, he’d won, and he seemed to enjoy the role of provider, as long as his wife and children behaved the way he thought we should.
Back at home, Mom kept Nancy and me at arm’s length while she took exhaustive notes on the novels, plays, and history and pop science books that she brought home in piles from the library. I was afraid that her independent mind would prompt her to leave us again. But I came to understand that even if she wanted to, she didn’t have the energy anymore.
·
Our family was essentially isolated. My parents seldom socialized and had no friends they saw regularly. My father, Nancy, and I spent Thanksgivings visiting his brother and h
is family in New Jersey. My mother preferred to stay home; she believed that the Europeans’ arrival in America, and their subsequent domination of Native Americans, was nothing to celebrate.
I did go to see my grandmother and my mother’s sister, Tina, in Coatesville and Lancaster, respectively. But my cousin Elizabeth, who was the daughter of my mother’s and Tina’s brother Sam, and a year older than me, was born in the Philippines, and since my family didn’t travel much—and certainly not overseas—I didn’t really know her as a child. She was taller than Nancy and me, and we grew up wearing her hand-me-downs. When her family moved back to the States, they lived in Westport, Connecticut, and then moved to Seattle.
In the early 1990s, a few years after Mom was home from Alabama, my father accepted a buyout from DuPont that included a decent pension, and he became a stockbroker. He got an entry-level job at Shearson Lehman Hutton, which became Shearson Lehman Brothers and then Smith Barney. After that, we rarely saw him: he worked long hours and sometimes had to spend time in New York. On Christmas mornings, he left packages addressed to Mom, Nancy, and me on the kitchen table before heading to church. After a year or two, we knew their contents without opening them: there’d be three nearly identical sweaters in different colors, and three identical gold necklaces, each with a tiny pearl, gift-wrapped by a clerk. Over the winter, Mom and I would share and trade all three sweaters. Nancy never wore those things our father gave her.
8.
By the summer of 1997, when I was eighteen, James and I had broken up—he was still in high school when I went to college—and Atlantis planned a cross-country road trip that was supposed to be just us girls. It would take two weeks and would cost each of us $500 to share cheap motel rooms and discover America. At the last minute, she invited our mother, who said she’d love to come along.