Live Through This (11 page)

At home, Cindy and I shared the bed in the trailer's small back bedroom; Ron soon joined us in that room, and, a year and a half after that, our sister Becky was in the crib against the opposite wall. My parents slept in the other bedroom, hardly any larger, their bed neatly made by the time we got up, not even an inch of sheet peeping from under the smooth spread. After we had our fill of dairy products in my mother's tidy kitchen—my dad got the outdated cream and cottage cheese and ice cream off his milk truck—Cindy and I went outside to play while our mom tended to babies.

I recall that on one of those play mornings, Cindy slung her three-year-old self into the loop of our one swing, its metal chains hanging from an ancient tube structure covered with chipping green paint, and began to pump, higher and higher—feet thrust straight out as she swung forward, then legs tucked tight as she flew back. I sat at the edge of the gravel drive and used a stick to swirl the sticky colors—deep reds and purples—in a small puddle of oil and water that had collected between the rocks. After a few minutes, one hollow side post of our old swing set started thumping—
bam, bam, bam
into the baked earth—and then the whole thing toppled, pitching Cindy into the air midswing. I watched her fly over me, a wingless bird, and fall hard on the sparse grass in our patch of yard. She picked herself up and wiped the dirt from her playsuit, and I went over to try to help her pull the set back in place, a futile effort, before my mother ran outside, anxious over
the noise she'd just heard, worried about us, and before our tired father came home late that night to stand in the middle of the yard and yell at our mother about letting the goddamn kids have the run of the place.

During one of those shouting-match nights, I lay on the edge of the bed turned away from Ron's stinking diaper, my skin cool because of the fall air and the shouting outside—maybe it was a night when my parents were jamming the swing-set legs back into their holes and packing in more mud and concrete, which never seemed to work for long. I was maybe four and a half years old, and already was promising myself to avoid such voices whenever I could—to do what was necessary to make sure that whenever anger came out of my father, it wasn't directed at me.

A few days after the wires went up in our teenage-girl bedroom, they were suddenly gone. Without a word of explanation. Cindy and I figured that it had dawned on our parents that there would be no way for us to get out in case of a fire, so Dad must have cut the metal away and rebuilt the wood frame around the window. A window barely large enough to fit our long and narrow bodies.

Not too many weeks later, I found myself at that unbarred opening. Cindy was off to spend that Saturday with a friend, and I'd gotten up in the dead of the night to slip on jeans and a sweatshirt. I'd stood on my sister's bed in my bare feet and opened the window as wide as it would go. I squeezed the sides of the screen until it popped out. Late autumn air rushed in, as did the jangle of the leaves of the maple tree in our backyard and the clinks of metal chains against the poles of my three-year-old brother's (he was born when I was thirteen) swing set. With one good jump off the bed, I wormed my way out the hole, twisting my midsection across the hard metal lip and sliding my legs over its sharp edge. I scrambled into the ankle-deep grass, blades of it sticking between my toes. The yard was wet enough that moisture wicked up my jeans and made me shiver. I didn't have much of a plan except to follow my breathless crush on a boy who lived on the street behind ours; this, more than anything else, had driven me out into
the dark. The intimacy of staring at his house, his window, in the middle of the night had charged my pulsing blood.

I could have snuck through our back-fence neighbor's hedges and hopped the canal and appeared out on the boy's road, but instead I made my way to the front of our house, hunching under my parents' window so they wouldn't spot my shadow, and started down the long, moonglowed sidewalk. Tiny pebbles got embedded in the balls of my feet and I had to stop and brush them off, the wind lifting the hair from my neck in a way that kept me stiff and scared. I didn't know what I was doing out here, but I kept padding down our block and then up the next street until I stood in the side yard of the boy who'd owned the territory of my thoughts over the past weeks. I'd guessed—without a single shred of evidence—that his bedroom was on this side of the house. I waited for a couple of minutes, sure that he'd hear my heart beating drum-loud and come to the window to see me longing for him. He didn't, and then it occurred to me to be afraid of getting caught—my father's wrath, my mother's disappointment—and I turned to go home through the mysterious dark, past houses that, familiar as my own hands in the daytime, now loomed like prescient forces that sensed before I did my desire for freedom.

On the verge of Stephanie's thirteenth birthday and just after Amanda's fifteenth, my daughters' own bids for freedom were gaining terrible force. They had no qualms about doing anything—trying everything—they wanted. Two sisters united in risk and adventure. The drugs they were using, the boys they were involved with: I had only vague notions about these things, strictly not spoken of in my presence. I don't think it occurred to them to be afraid of me, as I'd been afraid of disobeying my mother and father; or to be concerned that they wouldn't be allowed back in our house, as I'd been concerned that I wouldn't be allowed back in mine. My threats were empty and the girls' sense of themselves was as invincible, daring. I'd realized by then too that one daughter's allegiance to me ended where the other's rebellion against me began.

Stephanie's loyalty to her sister hit me on the September day I
stopped by the middle school to pick her up for a dentist appointment and was sent to the counselor, who told me my daughter was gone. She'd crawled out a back window in the middle of math class. The girl who'd been a straight-A student until that semester, the girl who'd been whisked off to the gifted-and-talented classes the year before and who was invited to the popular girls' slumber parties. The other kids watched that girl, my daughter, slip through the open window while the teacher was at the board explaining how to get
x
from one side of the equation to the other. Stephanie, the counselor told me, had run across the long green lawn to meet her sister, waiting on the other side.

"Oh," I said, sitting down on the spongy couch he kept in his office for kids who needed to talk out their troubles while missing science classes. He finished the tale of Stephanie's latest transgression, the most serious yet, and looked at me with a kind of pity I wanted to wipe off his face. I didn't need pity, I needed solutions about what to do here, for it was in this moment I realized that Stephanie had slipped away from me as well. From that day forward, Amanda and Stephanie would do what they wanted, go where they wanted.

"Who's going to stop us?" Amanda had said one night around this time when I told her she and her sister couldn't go downtown for a show by a group called the Detonators, a late-night concert where I pictured acid and ecstasy being handed out like candy.

"You?"

I refused to ask for Tom's help. I'd not yet bothered to make the kinds of friends in Oregon who might round up the girls and get them to behave, as if there were any way to do that. So I dragged my girls to family counseling, where they sat with arms crossed, refusing to say a word; and I tried to find boarding schools I could afford (impossible); and mostly I yelled at my daughters with vacant threats of locking them out, of sending them away—and watched as they walked right by me to go where they wanted to go, to do what they wanted to do.

***

When I opened our front door to come inside one January night, I stumbled over the tent I still hadn't put away since we'd opened it on Christmas morning. It belonged with the lanterns and the sleeping bags and our old rusty Dutch oven in the back storage area, but this evening it was shoved in a corner of our front alcove. I shook the rain off my coat and so did Mary and Mollie behind me. I waited for them to run off to their room to start a game of rubber giraffes against rubber polar bears, wolves against pandas, like most every night, but they stuck close. They followed me to the kitchen, where I tossed the mail on the counter, picked up the power bill with
URGENT
stamped on the front, and set it down again.

When I leaned against the cupboard, Mary backed into me. She took my hands and crossed my arms over her chest, a big
X.
Across the room, Mollie opened the fridge and I smelled something—tuna, maybe, or cottage cheese—that should have been thrown out days before. "What's for dinner?" she said.

We were down to some canned vegetables, pasta, a few tubs of soup in the freezer, and whatever was stinking in the back of the refrigerator. Laundry was heaped in front of the washing machine, and I hadn't asked Mary and Mollie about their homework for a couple of days, which probably relieved and scared them at the same time.

I let go of Mary and reached for the phone to order a medium pizza for the three of us. Three of us, not five of us. For over a week, Amanda and Stephanie hadn't come home. It was raining the night they left and it had rained every day since they'd been gone, harder and wetter, it seemed to me, after darkness set in. For eight days, I'd picked up the little girls after work and come straight home, certain my gone-away daughters would get cold enough, tired enough, lonely and hungry enough to call me to get them off the streets of Eugene.

Eight days earlier, the attendance officer at the high school had phoned me at work to say that Amanda hadn't come back after
winter break. Neither had Stephanie, I found out from the middle school. They'd completely stopped going to classes and it had taken this long for anyone to say so out loud. Every morning, I dropped Stephanie at the front door of her school and Amanda at the front door of the high school and watched them walk in. I drove to my office pretending they weren't meeting each other five minutes after my car disappeared; weren't buying coffee at the drive-through hut on the corner and heading downtown to be with their punked-out friends, those homeless youth anguished over in the newspaper, those disaffected and disenfranchised young people dressed in black and metal.

Now the pretending was over, and I had no choice but to go home and confront my children.

Music throbbed through the walls of our house when I got inside, a bass beat pounding down the narrow hallway. It was Bikini Kill; I recognized the voice and the badass lyrics of Stephanie's new favorite, Kat Hanna. This was a CD Amanda and Stephanie had bought for themselves, tuned in as they now were to grrl bands and only grrl bands, their old Madonna albums tossed aside with embarrassed disdain. I was the one who'd bought them Hole's
Live Through This
a year or so earlier, along with Nirvana's
Nevermind.
I remember the puffed-up pleasure of being a with-it mother who carted the albums home and let her daughters hang a giant poster of a mascara-stained beauty queen on the wall of their bedroom. A few months later, I was blaming that same music for making my kids angrier than they already were and for leading my girls to this scene, this thing, that they apparently couldn't come back from. I hated Courtney Love and her pale, dead husband, hated the bands spawned from them and from which they were spawned, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones, the Pixies, the Dead Kennedys. Hated the thudding beat that ate its way toward me now down the dim back hall of our house.

I stopped at the open bathroom door, where the volume of the boom box balanced on the sink was loud enough to shake the light fixture and to tremble every pink and black droplet covering the porcelain. Amanda's hair was cut into chunks above her shoulders
and dyed jet-black. Her ears and neck were black too, from the dye spread everywhere, on towels, floor, the shower curtain, and on her sister's hands. Stephanie's hair was halfway to becoming the color of cherry Kool-Aid. Both girls had makeup scrawled on their faces: black around their eyes, red on their lips.

Amanda saw me and nudged Stephanie, who lifted her head out of the sink. Amanda caught the back of the door with her foot and pushed it closed. I turned the knob and opened the door again. "You're not leaving the house," I said. There'd be no discussion of missed school and failing grades that night.

"Sure, Mom," Amanda said. She slammed the door again, and this time she clicked the lock.

I got Mary and Mollie out of their coats and sent them off to their room, then I went to the kitchen to call the police. The non-emergency number—I wanted help, not mayhem. I told the woman who answered that my daughters were trying to leave and that I couldn't stop them. She paused before answering. "What do you want us to do, ma'am? Have your daughters hurt you?"

I hung up and went to the front door. I made my body wide. My arms out, my feet spread. I waited there, a joke. If they wanted to go, they'd go. A part of me believed it might even be better just to get it over with and let them be gone. Except this night felt different than the other times they'd left. This time it seemed that what I'd stitched together in our little house was about to follow them out the door as a long, unraveled thread.

Amanda and Stephanie emerged from the bathroom and went into their bedroom next door. A few minutes later they were out again, their backs bent under the weight of loaded army packs, and their wet necks dribbling Manic Panic.

"Get out of the way, Mom," Amanda said. I reached past her and grabbed for Stephanie's skinny arm—that daughter wriggled away, and I pawed the air for a purchase on either of them, but then I stumbled over a chair that was heaped with Mary's and Mollie's schoolbooks and jackets, their wadded lunch bags and art projects. The chair and the stuff on the chair fell sideways and I fell with them, my hip smacking the floor with a thud. Amanda yanked
open the door and she and Stephanie whirled into the night.

The younger girls held on to each other on the far side of the living room. I got off the floor and told them to sit on the sofa. "Stay right there," I said when they'd perched themselves on the couch and stared at me with big eyes. "I'll be right back."