“Arden, do you want us to be unhappy, fighting all the time? I don’t like it. I don’t want to live this way. If there is something bothering you, why can’t you tell me instead of acting like an irresponsible child?”
When her patience went, it went all at once. What trigger did I press? For she was screaming suddenly, incoherent, teary: “I don’t like lots of things! What good would it do me to tell you? You don’t care about us! You go away when you want to and come back when you want to! Why can’t I? I’m not irresponsible! You’re the one who tries to keep me a child with your stupid rules and regulations, you act as if I was eight years old, you just do it to be mean, you hate me, you hate us both, you’re worse than Daddy!”
At which she raced from the room, up the stairs, and into her room, completing the scene with the obligatory door-slam.
Oh, that simmered down too. A week or two later, six months even, she might be teasing me, lying at the foot of my bed watching me drink coffee on a Saturday morning, or cuddling next to me as I sat in bed—I never got over the habit of working in bed—adding up my expense account, or transferring notes I’d scrawled on bits of paper, about f-stops and light and shutter speed, to permanent record books. Toni would be downstairs writing, he wrote all the time then, he rarely came out of his study except to pee or get more coffee.
It would be late morning: a sweet light filtered through the trees outside my bedroom window, and it was quiet. All I could hear was the clatter of birds, Billy and Jonas throwing baskets out in the driveway; I could hear the ball hit the backboard, the boys yell scores, the ball bounce on the concrete garage apron and the shudder of the backboard again, and the call, over and over, like surf.
And Arden chatting and giggling, a cozy domestic scene, it made me happy…confiding in me (the boys all like Binky best they like Jill too but not is there something wrong with me I don’t think they like me as much sometimes I feel jealous of Jill and I hate myself because she’s my best friend and I don’t want to feel jealous of her I love her do you think I’m ugly homely pretty really pretty, really? and it makes me mad that she’s so popular and I’m not but I don’t want to be mad at her I hate feeling jealous why do I am I awful do other people feel jealous do you think she feels jealous of me is that why she said because that really hurt me why does that happen and what can you what can I what do grown-ups do about it?).
During those times I could occasionally get her to dry a dish or clean her room a little at least and she went to school every day and even did some homework. And then I’d go away and come back and she’d be terrible again and I couldn’t understand it because here she was almost sixteen years old and acting this way, you’d think she’d be used to my traveling by now, what was the matter?
I asked her. She blinked, she shrugged, she denied she was angry about my traveling—she just threw that at me when she was angry about other things. She denied that she behaved badly after I’d been on a trip, denied that she was difficult at all. The only thing she didn’t deny was that she was in love with Toni. She told me about this one evening, it was after her sixteenth birthday, Billy was doing homework in his room, Toni was working, and she asked if we could talk and she turned off the television and we poured Cokes and took them up to my room and sat on the bed and she began to discuss her sweet sixteen birthday party, who had said what and done what and what she felt and what did I think that meant?
So I was able to ease the conversation toward her feelings about boys in general, Toni in particular, and sex. Arden was describing Jill’s relations with Len and Carey, and I listened carefully, and then said, “It sounds as if you’re telling me that Jill is having sex with Len.”
My directness took her breath away for a moment. She tried to read my expression. “What if they are? Lots of kids do it. You know, things have changed since you were young, Mom.”
“But, Arden, how much do you all know about what you’re doing?”
Look of disgust. “Oh, Mom! We all know everything.”
“Really? That’s amazing. I don’t think I probably know everything.”
“Really? What don’t you know?’
I just looked at her and we both broke into hysterical giggling.
“So you-all think you’re old enough, and know enough. But then why did you put it the way you did, asking me what I thought? I don’t believe you’re so sure of yourself. And tell me this: how many of you know anything about birth control?”
She shrugged. “Jill’s on the pill. Her mother took her to the doctor and got it for her. And Binky has a diaphragm. Her mother doesn’t want her to go on the pill so young. But,” here Arden lowered her voice and her tone became hushed, awed, shocked, “Gloria Caron, a girl at school, you don’t know her, she had to have an abortion last year.”
“And what about you?”
“Well,” she was scratching a mosquito bite on her leg. “I tried it once. With Len. One time when he and Binky had a fight and weren’t speaking, and he was depressed and he begged me. I told him I was afraid Binky would get mad at me, but he said she wouldn’t. But she did. She wouldn’t speak to me for weeks until I cornered her one day and said we had to talk and we did, we went to the soda shop and I told her how it happened and that I didn’t want to try to take Len away from her, that she was more important to me than Len, and she cried and said she was terrible because she was blaming me instead of Len and she knew that was wrong and she’d try not to, and after that we were friends again. Anyway, it wasn’t much,” she concluded.
“That’s too bad.”
“What’s too bad?” Wary.
“That it wasn’t much. I would have liked your first experience of sex to be beautiful.”
Suspicious. “It can be?”
“It can be. But it has to be right.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, it doesn’t mean screwing some boy to make him feel better about his girlfriend. Or doing any boy a favor.” She stopped scratching. “It is right when you want it, want it very much, and trust the boy you’re with and know that you aren’t going to get pregnant as a result of it….”.
She pondered. “Yeah.”
“Frankly, I think you’re a little young for sex to be right.”
Straight back, angry eyes. “Mommy! That’s not true! All the girls are doing it!”
“I doubt if all of them are doing it. And even if they are, that doesn’t mean they are really enjoying it. I don’t know if this is true, but it seems to me women develop desire later than men. I’d bet most of them are doing it to please the boys.”
“Mmmm.”
I had her. It was a tricky business, capturing her interest and trust, and I couldn’t be sure I’d keep it, but I tried by remaining honest. So I was able to convince her—not that this was made explicit—not to have sex unless she deeply, profoundly, wanted to have sex. I was able to extract a promise that she would let me know if she were seeing someone she desired so much that she would really enjoy sex with him, and we would go together to get her measured for a diaphragm. Things had changed, even young girls could get them now. When I was young, you had to be married.
In time, I moved us on to the subject of Toni. She was relaxed now, my old little girl, lying across my legs, fiddling with her hair.
“Yeah. I do, you know. I love him so much. And he’s so cute. I think about it a lot. And you know?” she sat up and smiled at me with astonishment, “I think I could do it, I could get him if I tried. I think he loves me too, and would like to!” Showing the delight of a little girl who one day realizes she is attractive, I thought. I did not let myself think about how I felt about all that.
“I’m sure you’re right. He does love you,” I smiled.
“But,” she sank back down again, “then I think that if we did I’d keep thinking about who was better, you or me, and that would drive me crazy.”
“That’s an extremely intelligent perception,” I said, every inch A Mother. “That’s exactly what wou
ld happen and it wouldn’t be good for you, it would make you anxious.” Not a word about how it would be for me, or for Toni, or whether he even could under such circumstances, or would, although I suspected that if I gave him tacit permission, he yes he would have, no wonder he didn’t want to screw around, he had all the turn-on he could handle right at home. Arden was beautiful.
We got through that, and afterward Arden seemed to flirt less with Toni. I think. We got through everything in the sense that we went on living together, getting up and going to bed, banging on bathroom doors, eating meals together, talking, cleaning up. But the feel of things changed, was changing, the texture of our lives, the color. Because nothing dramatic happened, we told ourselves—or maybe it was only me—that things were all right. Yet beyond my thought, beyond my awareness, things pulled at me, wore on me like weights; it’s more than time that pulls down the facial muscles, the flesh inside the upper arm. It isn’t just age that makes you walk more slowly, slump when you walk, look weary.
We survived. In the fall of 1966, after a hellish year—late nights, marijuana, failing grades pulled up at the last minute—Arden went off to college. I felt it was a miracle that she got in to Cornell with her grades, but she had a high IQ and high SAT grades. Many youngsters were failing in those years, drugs were becoming rampant in the schools, and she wanted to be a poet, so maybe they judged her by less rigorous standards than, say, science majors. Before she went she was happy with me: I was buying her clothes, I was helping her pack, I drove her up to Ithaca.
Still, I breathed out when she was gone. Even the good times between us were poisoned, because I never knew what would set her off, could never forget that she could be set off, so I was always edgy with her. It is hard to live with hatred. But after she’d been gone a month or two, I convinced myself that all that was wrong was that she needed a space of her own, and college gave her that. Things would be fine in the future, I thought: because she called me regularly, she sounded cheerful, happy, there was love in her voice. And she was excited and loving when she came home for Thanksgiving and for Christmas—for a few days. Then things deteriorated—as if she went around a corner and found herself suddenly in a sharp dark place, or fell over an edge—she’d lash out and move into a morose rage, in which she took every remark addressed to her, every plan that involved her, every reference to her, or any omission of her, any plan that didn’t involve her, as a slight, an attack, darts aimed at her, lethal. Then she would retire to the corners of chairs using her eyes to shoot poison darts of her own at all of us, especially me. And these states would last for days, would not end until it was time for her to leave again.
In the spring of ’67 I went up to visit her at school. She stayed in my motel while I was there and we sat up late at night talking, laughing. She had gone for a diaphragm by herself, and had tried sex many times by then, each time out of desire, she said. But something always happened, she didn’t know what it was, the enchantment faded—fast. She averaged two weeks with each new boy. I tried to understand this. I remembered my own high desire at eighteen, my belief that love and desire should be untrammeled, free. Still, something felt wrong. But by then I was totally intimidated by my daughter, afraid to say a critical word lest she go into one of her black moods. I didn’t know this then, I couldn’t have said it in those words. I was still in the place where my thinking was entirely practical—what to do about…I never examined myself, I simply tried to cope.
She didn’t come home that summer. She had met a new man, Bill, and at the end of her freshman year she moved with him to a commune way out in the country. It was a small farm without electricity or running water or a toilet. There were eight other people there, some living in a main cabin, some couples in smaller ones. They made music and wrote poetry and raised vegetables. They kept goats and a cow and a horse, and ate only vegetables and cheese and bread, and smoked pot and participated in antiwar demonstrations. She wrote me long passionate philosophical letters, sometimes with a poem enclosed. She was studying wildflowers, and becoming an expert on herbal brews and how to dry flowers, and she picked up spending money by selling bouquets of dried flowers and herbal teas on a grassy corner of Ithaca.
I hoped Billy would stay home more after Arden left. Arden and he hadn’t got along well for the last year or two. But he didn’t. I didn’t think much about it. I was immersed in my career, which was really soaring in those years, and the truth is, I was grateful for the rest, the space. It is arduous work, being a mother—you are constantly overwhelmed by the voices, needs, weeping, arguing, demands of others, you have little or no space of your own. With Arden gone and Billy away from home most weekends, there was some space, some silence in the house. There was only Franny. Toni too was quiet in those years, spending most of his time in his little room near the kitchen, typing, erasing, tearing up papers, typing again. And Billy did spend some time with Franny, he adored her. He taught her to ride her tricycle, how to tell time, and he often read to her. Franny missed Arden, who used to take her for walks and talk about trees and flowers and the look of houses and people, and make up songs about them. But she was a happy kid—she’d had four mothers, and still had three.
Arden came home for a couple of weeks at the end of the summer, but she brought this boy with her, Mike, and expected me to let them sleep together in her room. I said Mike what’s-his-face had to sleep on the daybed in Toni’s study. Toni was pissed at that because the boy didn’t wash, he smoked pot in bed, and he smelled up Toni’s study, and besides, he didn’t get up until eleven and Toni couldn’t work. So I told the boy he’d have to sleep on the living room couch, and even though he sneaked up to Arden’s room late at night (I knew this but pretended I didn’t, learning through parenthood to be a hypocrite), she was angry at my treatment of him and wouldn’t speak to me…oh, it was disgusting. The two of them left in his battered car, Arden and I not speaking. Yet when she called me a month later, affectionate and light-hearted, she’d broken up with Mike, was with a boy named David, and had forgotten the whole thing….
I had become resigned to Billy’s absence from home and the knowledge that he was with Brad. I couldn’t speak to him about it anymore, I had such contempt for him. I couldn’t get over the fact that my little prince had turned into a toad. To think I’d have a son like that! Oh, I wanted him to go to school and be a doctor if that’s what he wanted. But it appalled me that he had such a slimy character. How had such a darling boy become a toady, a slimy calculating ass-kisser? Why had my sweet fiery girl turned against me so that nothing I said or did failed to arouse her rage? Like every other mother I know, I concluded all this had happened because of something I had done—or not done. In rage and guilt, I crawled further into a shell.
It turned 1968, the beginning—I know now—of a period when domestic conflict seemed just part of all the other terrible things that were happening out in the world, as if we were all experiencing an earthquake so huge that it shook the entire globe and toppled, not buildings and hillsides, but ways of life. I wasn’t so attached to our traditional way of life that I fought to preserve it, but on the other hand, it was all we knew, and we didn’t know what to put in its place.
That fall Billy joined Arden at Cornell. She’d come home for a few weeks at the end of that summer too, wisely alone. I drove them both up to Ithaca, vainly trying to calm the furious squabbles that erupted throughout the trip. The first one was over whose baggage occupied more space, and it set the tone for the rest:
Billy: Arden has too much gear, there’s no room for mine, she has lots of stuff up there already; I’m going up for the first time! It’s not fair!
Arden: I don’t have that much and I need everything I’m taking. He’s the one with all the junk!
Billy: Yeah, you need that guitar!
Arden: And you need all that stereo equipment! At least a guitar is a musical instrument, something artistic, whereas a stereo is just another concession to bourgeois consumerism.
Oh?
cried Billy. And what was that rug she was taking back with her, Mommy’s rug that she took right off Mommy’s floor!
Arden bristled into fury then, screaming about the cold floor of her cabin, and that Billy wanted her to develop pneumonia (the same argument she’d used, more quietly, to persuade me to give her the rug). There was a long argument about where to stop for lunch, and Arden pouted and refused to eat because we could not find a vegetarian restaurant. After that no one spoke at all. Arden sat in the backseat smoking furiously, as angry with me as with Billy. Billy and I spelled each other with the driving, silent.
We planned to drop Arden off first, at the commune, and have tea and cake there. Following her directions, I turned off the main road at a place unmarked, a narrow rocky dirt road, and bumped along it steeply uphill. After a couple of winding miles, we came out into a green plateau surrounded by hills, with four or five old wooden buildings set randomly among trees. It was beautiful, I could see why Arden loved it. There was a fenced meadow for the horse, another for the goats; and in a sunny field protected by a high fence, there were corn and potatoes and cabbages and lettuce and tomatoes and green beans.
As we got out of the car, some young people drifted out of the house. They greeted Arden without enthusiasm, except David, who bounded out of the house and ran and hugged her. The others stood staring at Billy and me. Billy and I looked at them and—I could feel his feelings—drew back into ourselves. It wasn’t the men’s beards or the women’s long tangled hair, the shabbiness, even filth, of some of their clothes, or the long print skirts the women wore, their headkerchiefs, their plain, unmade-up faces, all suggesting a kind of submissive role—no. It was the way they stood, the way they looked at us, with angry suspicion, wariness, as if they believed that we were there to destroy them or at the least, disapprove. They were embodiments of the paranoia Arden felt when she was in her black moods. Was it generational, then? Or had a group of paranoiacs simply found each other? Was Arden mentally ill?