Live Through This (2 page)

While they were gone, the other three of us went about a normal life. Or tried to. I'd put another pot of beans on the stove, fold the laundry, help Mary make a costume for Lewis and Clark Days at her school—she and Mollie and I would sit cross-legged on the living room floor wadding and flattening brown grocery bags until the paper was as soft and pliable as leather, and then I would fashion the wrinkled bags into a pseudo-buckskin vest. I'd drive Mollie to gymnastics practice and watch her balance on the beam; stew about my empty bank account; beg the electric company to keep my power on for another few days. I'd get up at first light to make lunches; work eight hours at my job; go to bed after staring out the
living room window for an hour, for two hours or three, hoping this might be the night Amanda and Stephanie would come home. Not knowing the hour-to-hour habits of my own children, or how to locate them anytime I wanted to, was beyond what I could comprehend. I was mad at them and mad at me, angrier every time a grocery clerk overcharged me for an avocado or some distracted guy cut me off in traffic. I plodded through the mundane, hung on to my little corner of home, and kept pretending with Mary and Mollie that this would be over soon and we'd be us again.

During this time I grew fond of cuddling with the cold stone in my bed—the boulder I'd conjured that let me feel wronged and betrayed by my own daughters. They had hurt me. They had damaged us. That's what I got to believe as long as they were gone. I couldn't learn to love these girls differently or admit to my own role in our problems if they wouldn't talk to me, if they wouldn't come home. So I remained hard. And they remained hard.

Yet during the months Amanda and Stephanie weren't anywhere around, I also tried to hold my daughters in suspension, the same ploy I use to stay awake on an airplane, afraid the plane will fall if, even for a second, I quit willing it to stay in the air. I hung my daughters somewhere like billowy clothes on a line. Safe, untouched, and clean. Sometimes Amanda (though never Stephanie) called me, and my mind allowed this daughter to exist in a phone booth for the minutes it took her to say "We're okay." And then "Nowhere" to my "Where are you?" And "No, Mom" to my "Please come home." The second she hung up the phone, I put Amanda in that suspended state again. With Stephanie. Up where they couldn't get hit or sliced or stabbed or raped or killed. Up in the heavens, in the air, in the heavy autumn mist that fell over our valley. Someplace my daughters could stay whole.

Amanda was cutting herself.

The five of us at a picnic at the riverfront park in Eugene on a Sunday afternoon when Amanda was fourteen and Stephanie twelve, the younger girls nine and seven, three years after my marriage to their father had ended. Mollie was showing me how many times she could cross the monkey bars without resting—without the briefest stop at either end to ease any strain on her arms. She went back and forth, her hands a bright pink, her too-long bangs hung up in her eyelashes, her lips a straight, determined line. I followed her, sidestepping over layers of prickly tree bark put down to cushion falls, keeping my arms scooped under my youngest daughter, sure that her muscled shoulders would give out and that her fingers would slip. But they didn't. She powered along, jutting her hips and kicking her legs to help her grab one bar after the other.

Mary was on a nearby swing, pumping hard, toes aimed toward some perfect weekend clouds. After Mollie jumped down, satisfied by her display of monkey-bar prowess, she ran to the swing next to Mary's and was in an instant competition to see who could go higher. I walked across the sandpit, over the remnants of our chicken and potato salad meal on a blanket laid out on the grass, and toward the bench where my two oldest daughters sat glued together, the hoods of their black sweatshirts pulled up, hiding their faces. Concentrated as they were on a patch of skin above Aman
da's kneecap, which she'd exposed by rolling up her canvas pants, they didn't notice me coming. A few steps away, I caught a glint of what Amanda had in her hand—an unbent paper clip, which she was using to carve into her leg, deep enough that beads of blood bobbed on the surface of her skin.

"What the hell?" I said, swooping in to grab the thin piece of metal but missing.

Stephanie looked up at me with black-lined eyes, ghoulish eyes, while Amanda hurried to roll down her pants as she tossed the paper clip in the grass. "What are you doing?" I said.

"Nothing," Amanda said, pulling herself deeper into her hood, into her sweatshirt, and into the shaded back of the bench.

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe it was nothing. I would have liked to keep thinking it was no big deal when I spotted long, scabby lines on the inside of her forearm a few days later. I wanted to convince myself that this slicing of skin wasn't a sign of danger even after I'd dragged her to a therapist to talk about why she cut and cut and kept cutting. I sat in the tiny waiting room and fake-read
Architectural Digest,
stewing about what Amanda was saying to the middle-aged woman with expensive shoes and gleaming teeth. Complaining about me, that I had hardly any time for her, that I was often impatient? Or worse: saying she wanted to live with her father? I couldn't stand for her to want that.

After nearly an hour, the counselor called me in and had Amanda wait this time with the pile of tedious magazines. "It's not dangerous," the woman told me, her soft hand flitting through the air between us. "It's just something girls do when life feels too painful and something has to be released. Think of it like that, a release."

I might have eased into this line of reasoning, assuring myself that a little bit of cutting was getting the devil out of my angry daughter, but it didn't make sense. Amanda was getting more sullen the more she sliced her own skin and spilled her own blood, becoming a faint and frightening presence in our household—dark and sultry as a storm just over the mountain. I knew the cutting was more than a release. And yet I didn't seek out another ther
apist, another expert, who might give me a different opinion or offer a solution. I simply told myself that my daughter would get past this soon. Then it was too late.

The questions that crowded my mind: Why was Amanda so angry? What had pushed her into a black corner that she couldn't or wouldn't emerge from? And why had Stephanie become her constant sidekick, her doppelgänger, giving up her own friends and perfect report cards and the gushing praise of her teachers to join her sister's budding rebellion?

Part of my daughters' fury and consternation stemmed from my divorce from their father, Tom, who'd remained in Arizona when the rest of us moved to Oregon. On the phone and, during the girls' visits to his house, in person, he often reminded them that
I'd
left
him,
that he'd wanted to work things out, keep the family together, but that the mother of the family had smashed the family apart. I could see on Amanda's and Stephanie's faces how hard it was: they loved their mom but at the same time hated me for hurting their dad. A quandary they couldn't work out. Easier to back away, get isolated, stay isolated.

Again, the accounting. Another nail of self-recrimination pounded in as I scramble for do-overs, the way I used to when I was a kid playing Horse in the driveway with my brother, who was the far better shot. I comb through what I could have done differently: this path instead of that path; these words instead of those words. How could I have moved away so soon, away from their father and to a town where I had not a single acquaintance? I shouldn't have taken a second job after we arrived in Eugene. I should have been less proud about asking for help. And yet what I did, I did. Worried myself sleepless trying to prove I could manage without their father and plowed ahead without measuring or assessing the damage behind us. During these first months, years, after the divorce, the strain across my face and in my voice and the weariness in my body must have upset all four of my children. Other parents have a way, it seems, of conveying that
This stress
you see in me has nothing to do with you.
But in the early days after my divorce, I sent signals I didn't mean: that I was too depleted to fully love my daughters; that they had become a burden to single-mother me. That it was their responsibility to keep me upright and soothed. And, after such tension had eroded us for too long, maybe even that running away was the only thing left to do.

Amanda and Stephanie remembered their parents' marriage better than the younger girls did, and they longed for the family of six—for their father—years after the two of us were finished with each other. Stephanie wrapped Tom's picture in the soft clothes of her underwear drawer. Amanda wore one of his old college T-shirts to bed. I loathed my ex-husband for promising to call the girls and then forgetting; I hated him for using the calls he did make to complain that I'd robbed him of his children, even though he'd made no move to stop me from going and in fact had agreed that Oregon was a good place for them to grow up. I condemned him for coaxing our girls to side with him, while I somehow ignored the fact that I was doing the same: to speak about him in our house brought a stern look from me; their mentioning his name caused me to grow stiff and silent. I waged my own campaign to win the girls' loyalty—mostly I pushed them to see the five of us as family and him as interloper. When he remarried and had another child and withdrew further from his first four daughters, well, that fit my projections nicely. And, lost in my own transformation to single woman, I missed my children's heartache over being shoved to the periphery, hardly noticed by their dad.

In the last months of the marriage, in Tucson, I kept the girls busy enough that they didn't notice (I told myself) the first dust and crumble of the coming dissolution. Starting with Amanda. One Saturday that spring, she, ten years old then, and I stood in a long, hot line in a parking lot outside a downtown performance hall; black asphalt stuck to the bottoms of my sandals and the day's heat frying a hole in the top of my head. I'd read in the paper a few days earlier that a traveling acting company from New York was coming to town to put on eight days of performances of
Annie,
and they
were looking for local girls to play the orphans. I'd talked Amanda into trying out, since she'd always wanted to be in a play; it had seemed like a great idea until we were sixty-seventh in line for the audition and I realized I had three hungry kids at home with a father who often forgot about lunch and about checking regularly on the whereabouts of the younger ones. Besides, every dressed-up-pretty and sweetly curled child in Tucson, most of whom held professional glossy photos and blue folders of sheet music, twittered around us. I'd dragged my daughter into something that could end up embarrassing her—that was my worry. I should have figured out that Amanda herself was ambivalent about getting into the play, and that part of her buoyant pleasure at the moment was simply this chance to spend time alone with me without a sister or two along. A whole afternoon. (I'd often promise myself that I'd make time for each daughter alone—a lunch, a walk, a shopping trip—but then I'd quickly revert into my old pattern of taking the whole set of them, or at least half, to whatever function we had to attend or on some errand or grocery trip.) I'd tucked away in my purse the two snapshots of Amanda that we'd taken in the backyard, and I reached over now and then to clean dirt off the bottom of her chin with my shirt. That morning, before we'd left, she and Stephanie had crawled around in our big cactus garden, as they often did, searching for scorpions and spiders. Amanda hadn't swept the mud off her knees or pulled all the twigs from her hair. But no matter. I took another swig of water and passed the bottle on to her, draping my arm across her bony shoulders. We'd get inside, Amanda would sing her audition song, the people in charge would thank her for coming, I'd tell her how proud I was of her for trying, and we'd go home.

But Amanda made the first cut. And the next cut, that evening, nine hours after we'd arrived. The third came Sunday afternoon: she was in the final group of almost-orphans. Late Sunday night, I was drying the last of our dinner dishes when Tom picked up the ringing phone. I could tell by his grin, his flash of glee in my direction, that Amanda had made it. He hung up to tell me that she'd been cast in the role of Pepper, the rascally, tomboyish, ill
tempered orphan, the one most longing for love and acceptance who hid her quivering need behind a scowl.

I don't know how much my daughters had sensed by that soft April night about the slow dismantling of their parents' marriage, which we'd not yet spoken to them about but which was in every molecule of air between us. I pushed away the issue constantly on my mind, to leave him or to stay, as Tom and I climbed the stairs to wake Amanda. We sat on either side of her twin bed to tell her the news about the play, Stephanie resting on her elbow in the other bed to listen in. I remember the glow on Amanda's face and Stephanie's shriek as she leaped over my lap to crawl under her sister's covers. The four of us squeezed together in celebration of this strange acting thing that would soon pull our daughter into its center. The break soon to come—Tom's and mine—wasn't part of anything that night. All of us realized that the months of rehearsals and costume fittings and cast parties, and then the eight-night run of a show that would put Amanda in front of three thousand people at a time, were going to bind us like nothing had for a long time. For me, it was a temporary fix, the marriage too far gone by then, but now I understand: every day Amanda clung to the show as a way to save her family.

The evening of the final performance that warm summer, with Amanda in her lemon yellow dress and black saddle shoes, cheeks pink from makeup and with the flush of this night's fame, signing autographs in the greenroom where Mary and Mollie slept on our pile of coats under a table topped with ice sculptures and bowls of cold prawns—I saw it then. The firm line of her jaw and the taut muscles of her neck. The all-engulfing run of performances was over. Done. Now her sisters would stop the hundred-times-a-day rendition of the "Hard-Knock Life" dance and the "You're Never Fully Dressed without a Smile" song. Now her parents wouldn't have this daughterly activity around which to be united.
Annie
was finished and we were finished.