Blue Mercy: A Novel. (15 page)

Underneath, I was frightened. Food, the staff of life, had become a dangerous substance for Star. To see her standing at the kitchen counter -- throwing down four or five slices of buttered bread while waiting for the toaster to pop -- was frightening. To find her picking something out of the trashcan that she had earlier tossed away in self-disgust was frightening. To see a suitcase crammed full of empty biscuit wrappers and potato-chip packets felt like finding an empty syringe.
 

And when she was out with her friends, was there drugs too? Food was the home habit, but out of the house, she was vacuuming up great quantities of cigarettes and alcohol and, I suspected, speed or worse. In the sixties, drugs had been about exploring our psyches and our perceptions. For Star and her friends, it was the opposite: they just wanted to get "out of their minds".

At night, I'd lie in bed and hear her stumble in, the unsteady fall of her feet so like her father's.

By this time, she was only bringing one friend home: none of the others were willing to abide by my house rules of no drugs, no alcohol. Ginnie was clean (an alcoholic mother) and she and Star were linked by music, being two members of a four-girl band called Vixen. Ginnie's stage name was Venom and she wanted Star to take one too.
 

"Something anarchic, something frenzied, girl, instead of that hippie-dippie handle."
 

Star refused, saying two names were enough for anyone. Ginnie had also grown large in adolescence but she was softer than Star. Her approach to adults was to find a theme and keep up a running riff on it. With me, it was scoffing at my generation's music. Pleased to be communicating at any level with somebody who was important to Star, I held up my side.

"You kids are still listening to our songs," I'd say. "Can't see that happening with any of your lot."

"Wait and see, Mrs M. It's only the best from any era that lasts."

"So who will that be, Ginnie?"

"Venom."

" The Cloquettes? I can't see it, somehow."

"Yeah, I've heard that when you get to a certain age, you don't see too good."
 

Star snorted.

"All I'm hearing in your music, G... Venom, is the same note, over and over," I said. "Anger, anger, anger."
 

"Anger is
the
energy, Mrs M. It's the only sound that makes the bastards sit up and listen."

"Yeah, Mom." Star curled her blackened lip. "Don't talk about things you don't understand. Go listen to some" -- she looked at Ginnie and they simultaneously spat out their grossest insult -- "disco!"

Then they collapsed into giggles at the line they'd obviously prepared to use against me. Not only was I held responsible for the musical and political shortcomings of my own generation, but also those that were following, crumbling our sixties' idealism into glitter-dust. Our generation had done its best to change the world -- a lot more than the Vixens seemed set to do -- but we hadn't understand what we were up against. We thought we were on an inexorable move forward, a rising graph that would one day deliver us all to the land of equality and freedom. Instead, we were discovering how action brings about the opposite reaction.
 

Tit for tat, ebb and flow, lash and backlash...

By that time, my mind was knotted with such thoughts. As I read and worked on my Women's Studies assignments, a fuzziness I had always carried about the workings of the world cleared for me.
 
I saw how my experiences -- of sex, of work, of money -- had been determined by an invisible weave of beliefs. I saw how these beliefs had been as binding of me as any law of the land. I saw the potential for my own transformation if I could unpick them. I saw the potential for social transformation in understanding that what was true of me was true for many, if the many could be brought to its truth.

But now here was my daughter and her friend -- two intelligent, educated and anti-establishment young women -- belittling all that, writing us out of the record already.

"Do you honestly think they didn't listen to us in the sixties? We had far more political impact that you guys are having."

"Political impact!" sneered Star. "Ugh! Pretensho!"
 

This was their word to deflate anything that might be more serious than sex or drugs or rock 'n' roll.
 

"At the beginning, maybe. But all that peace and love?" She stuck two fingers in her mouth and made a vomiting gesture.

"Yeah, Mrs M. You can't win a fight against anyone, especially not the establishment, with peace and lurve."

"Ah, girls," I said. "You can't win anything worth having without them."

When Star and I were alone together, of course I tried to help her.

"Darling, should you..."

"I don't think you..."

"Can't you..."

"Why do you always..."

I organized a nutritionist. A gym. A personal trainer. Each time she got slim, though never as slim as she was the time before. Then, after a while, she got fat again. Fatter than before, fatter than ever. Naturally, I turned to my Women's Studies course for answers.

I read books that told me food was a language, and fat a metaphor, a message to be interpreted: the desire for protection, maybe. The desire to remain unseen, the desire to rebel against imprisoning social ideals.
 

I read books that urged girls and women to stop dieting and instead seek to understand the patriarchal culture that wanted them thin.

I read books that explained, graphically and eloquently, how the body has been used as a form of social control through the ages and how a mature economy can only achieve growth by making us feel abject, hungry and isolated from ourselves and each other. Making us hate ourselves from the inside out ensures we will overspend, over-consume and over-indulge...

I came to hate how everything gets junked in America: the food processed and adulterated with sugar and fat; the clothes cheapened; the TV dumbed down; the sex commodified. So that no matter how much we're given, we never feel sated, we're always craving. I came to see how we're addicted to addiction.

All of which drew Star's complete scorn if I ever tried to tease it out with her. "It's a candy bar, Mom, not the disintegration of society as we know it."

I tried not to preach; tried to appreciate that it had taken me thirty-three years of living to be ready to hear this stuff but all the understanding I could muster didn't stop my eyeballs from wanting to roll whenever I saw her reach for another biscuit, didn't stop my foot from itching to kick the refrigerator closed when she opened it, didn't stop my hand from wanting to reach across the table and close itself across her insatiable mouth.
 

"Whatever happened to 'mother knows best'?" I said one day to Marsha Blinche, a new friend and one of the most articulate women in my class.

"Forget that. A mother's place is in the wrong."

I laughed. "How many do you have?"

"Three."

"I couldn't do this twice."

"Oh, you can set one against the other."
 

We laughed together this time. Marsha was another single mom who had come into our course on the same program as me but her children -- Dan, Larry and Kirsty -- were all in their twenties, all grown up, so she now was on "me time". In truth, Marsha was one of those people who have time for everything, who manage to squeeze their days full but never seem hurried. She adopted all the younger women in our class, doling out care and attention and advice -- and delicious, home-made cakes. She proofread my dissertation before I submitted it and also the revised version that I turned into
A Child Dancing
before I put it forward for possible publication.

"So well written," she told the others in the class, until I squirmed in my chair. I was embarrassed but it also warmed me, I admit it, to have this intelligent woman pressing my vanity buttons. I had never had a true friend before and had always put it down to not having enough time but here I was, busier than ever with work and writing and essays and a dissertation and the home front, still able to meet Marsha for coffee, or have her over for dinner.
 

I wasn't somebody who blurted in the Californian way but nobody could be with Marsha even for the length of a cup of coffee without spilling a secret or two. So, somehow, a few months into that summer after we'd completed our papers and exams, I found myself one morning at her kitchen table hearing her story of having been raped by an uncle when she was seven and then -- astonished at the sound of my own voice coming in at my ears -- telling her some stuff about my father.

She listened, one ear angled towards me, forehead bobbing in encouragement, eyes on my face the entire time. I cried familiar hot tears of shame and she took my hand and we talked it all through, her experience and mine, knowing from what we had learned on our course that all over America, women in pairs and groups were having similar whispered conversations. Feminists, as we labelled ourselves. Pulling back the rug of what we called patriarchy. Revealing the silent slime beneath.

As for Star and me, we were back with Dr Aintree, who said she could no longer talk to me. If she was to carry on with Star, it had to be as her client, and what happened in session would now have to be confidential.
 

It would be up to Star if she wanted to tell me any of it. Surprise, surprise, she didn't.
 

It would be up to Star if she wanted to keep going. Surprise, surprise, she gave up.

The gap between us was becoming a gorge. At the beginning, each outbreak of aggression or blame, each rebuff or denial, each stupid mistake, had felt like an isolated incident. We'd have a period of peace when I would think we were getting some connection again, but then realize that it was only something she wanted, something practical or financial, that was drawing her back to me. Once I'd given or refused it, along would come the next eruption, casting us up into temper then down into the cold chasm, each dip a little lower, a little colder than than before.
 

Until you find you're permanently down there. So far down, you've given up even imagining how you might ever crawl back out.

Poetry helped. I watched television, but that was good only for passing the time. I read novels, sometimes poor ones that passed time a little better, but also stories that were more than that. The Brontës for passion. George Eliot for intellectual fervor. Jane Austen for wit. Toni Morrison for compassion. Henry James and Alice Walker for their, each very different, outsider's eye. But stories took time to digest. When I needed a quick hit of consolation, I turned to poems. The people whose words supported me through all that was to come were Walt Whitman, John Keats, John Donne, Sylvia Plath, William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Percy Shelley. I lay out their names, a list you'll find in any canon, nothing original or pioneering about it but just as I freely tell all here, in the private whisper of mind to mind that is a book, so I want to acknowledge in writing how those writers helped me. How they were, simultaneously, the door on my house and the gap in my fence.
 

"Have you ever considered," Marsha asks, "that there might be more?"

Marsha is the other mature student on our course and we are, as we often do, enjoying a coffee between classes.

"More?"

"Locked away? Repressed? I had only the vaguest memories of what my uncle did to me until I went into therapy."

She invited me to go on what she called a rebirthing weekend, a two-day session that used breathing techniques to bring about the recall of lost memories and through that, transformation. "You'll remember something you've forgotten, guaranteed. It might be your birth, or it could be some other grief or trauma from way back when."

"Forget it, Marsha. I'm Irish. A feed of booze and a two-day hangover: that's our idea of therapy."

"You don't even drink," she said.

"You know what I mean. I'd rather let sleeping dogs lie."
 

"Even if they're silently yowling inside?"

"Is that what you think?"

"You tell me," she said, and looked at me too hard over the rim of her coffee cup.

Over the weeks that followed, I found myself thinking about the word she used: "Rebirth." The idea
 
appealed but the procedure Marsha described made me nervous. She offered to come with me, to be the partner that every participant had to have during the session, to look out for them.
 

"Like a second, in a duel," I said.

"Not a bad metaphor. It
is
like a duel, the better part of you will be slaying a weaker part."

"With breathing!" I laughed.

According to Marsha, she had been a mess before this rebirthing. Chronic pain in her lower back. Disappointed with Danny, her eldest boy, and generally with the hand life had dealt her. Negativity eating her up. This description of herself bore no resemblance to the woman I knew and admired. Negative was the last word you'd use for Marsha, whose slightly protruding teeth were always rushing towards a smile. Not just her teeth, actually. When Marsha smiled, every part of her was gathered into that beam of long white teeth, brilliant as a photographer's flash.
 

She was the most engaged person I knew, in her work as a classroom assistant; in her voluntary activities for the hospice that eased her mother's death; in her exercise routine – swimming and yoga, both daily; in the projects she was forever taking on for the needy: fundraising or second-hand clothes collecting or event-organizing. All this, not to mention the degree she was cruising through, and yet, somehow, she always seemed to have enough time. When she was with you, Marsha was totally with you, giving you full, unhurried attention. When she was alone, she was apparently complete.

Not fretting over "the kids", her tall, successful, non-troubled twenty-somethings.
 

Not restless for other places or experiences.