She had asked to go to a party at a friend’s house—the parents were divorced—and to our question, would the mother be home? Patricia had answered that she thought so.
“Think so or know so?” Patrick asked.
“It’s Melissa’s mother, and she’s always there,” was the reply.
“Well, you have to make sure,” Patrick told her.
The party was coming up Friday night, and still Patricia was evasive. Finally she said yes, Melissa’s mother would be there, but she didn’t convince us.
“Give me Melissa’s number and I’ll check myself,” I told her.
“Mo-ther! Nobody does that. You can’t go around calling parents!” she wailed.
“We can, if you want to go to this party!” said Patrick.
She burst into tears. “It’s like I’m seven years old!” she cried.
“Exactly,” said Patrick. “No. Make it five. At seven you would be able to say definitely whether someone would be home or not and recite a phone number.”
Sarcasm didn’t help. Patricia alternately cried and screamed for the next two days, refusing to give a phone number or Melissa’s last name, and so she was grounded on Friday night.
She spoke only when spoken to. She went about with a determined look on her face, but at the same time, she did all her appointed chores, didn’t quarrel with her brother, didn’t make waves. It seemed she was making sure we could not find fault with anything else she did, and this, for some reason, set off an alarm in me.
On Friday night she went to her room with a stack of magazines and a box of chocolate-covered grahams. She had also, I noticed, carefully polished her fingernails and toenails. Tyler was on a sleepover at a neighbor’s. Patrick and I looked at each other across the living room, where we were enjoying the quiet.
“What’s this? A new era of cooperation from Patricia?” he asked.
“Don’t count on it,” I told him.
About eleven I tapped on her door and looked in. She was still dressed, surrounded by magazines.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Everything’s fine,” she said, biting off her words.
“Well, we’re turning in. Thank you for cooperating tonight, Patricia.” I paused. “We do love you, you know.”
She didn’t answer.
“Good night,” I said finally.
“Good night.”
I lay in bed beside Patrick, who dropped right off to sleep, wishing I could see inside Patricia’s head. Was she angry? Or did she realize we were right to keep her home? Was she plotting some future revenge? If only she’d talk! If only I could ask the right questions. I was a school counselor, for heaven’s sake, good with other people’s children, so why was it so hard to get my own to open up and talk to me?
When an hour had gone by—then two—and I was still awake, I was debating whether to get up and read awhile or stay put when I thought I heard a noise. It was so indistinct, I couldn’t tell if it was inside or out. I opened my eyes and listened. Nothing. I waited a minute longer, then sat up. Nothing. I could have imagined it.
I slid out of bed, into my robe, and went out in the hall. Patricia’s door was closed. I didn’t want to go in her room and wake her if she was sleeping, so I went downstairs to check. The front door was still bolted and chained. I was relieved.
Then I heard another sound, possibly someone talking. I checked the back door. Locked. I tiptoed back upstairs again and softly opened Patricia’s door. I could see her form in bed. The window was slightly ajar, but most of us slept with our windows open on mild nights.
I went over and looked out. No figures in the yard. No ladder. Still suspicious, however, I turned around and gently lifted the covers. There were Patricia’s pillow and stuffed animals arranged beneath, like a sleeping person. I raced back into our bedroom and woke Patrick from a sound sleep. I was almost hysterical.
“Right under our noses!” I kept saying. “She went out, deliberately disobeying us!”
Patrick threw on his robe and came downstairs, checking the door as I had done.
“Both doors are locked from the inside, so she must have climbed out her window and onto the garage roof,” I said. “It’s all I can figure.”
He sat down with the phone book. “What’s Melissa’s last name?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I never got that far with her.”
“Well, I’m going to find Patricia if I have to wake the parents of every friend she has,” he said angrily.
I guess there are bound to be highs and lows in a mother’s life that she will remember forever, and this was one of the lowest. I sat on the couch trying not to imagine what would happen at Melissa’s. Imagining Patrick going after Patricia, walking up to the door and knocking. The kids peering out. Patricia’s humiliation as he dragged her home. Would things ever be the same for us again? Were we about to lose our daughter?
Stay calm, I told myself. Keep a united front. Be firm, but let her know she’s loved. All the things I told other parents with troubled teenagers over and over again seemed to help so little here.
“Hello,” Patrick said into the phone. “Mr. Gordon, this is Patrick Long, and I’m so sorry to call you at this hour, but Patricia has gone out without our permission, and I wonder if anyone can tell me the last name and address and phone number of the girlfriend named Melissa. . . . Yes, of course I’ll wait. . . .”
I sat on the couch, hand over my eyes, embarrassed for Patrick, for us both. I could picture Tom Gordon waking his wife and possibly having to wake Christin, too. Unless Patricia’s friend Christin herself was at the party.
I could wring Patricia’s neck, I thought at the same time I desperately feared for her safety. It seemed like yesterday that Patrick and I were pacing the floor with a crying baby, taking turns in the middle of the night, and how I longed then for her to be older. Now I felt I would give anything to have her in my arms, bawling or not.
“Yes . . . all right. I’m so sorry to have wakened you,” Patrick said, and hung up. “Christin isn’t sure. She thinks it’s Phillips, but that’s the dad’s name, and he and Mrs. Phillips are divorced. Melissa’s living with her mom and the phone’s under the mother’s maiden name. She said Emma would know and gave me her number.”
“Oh, my God,” I said.
The noise again.
“Patrick!” I said, sitting up straight.
There was the soft thud of footsteps coming up the stairs from the family room, and then Patricia came into the living room, rubbing her eyes.
We stared at her.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Why aren’t you in bed?” I demanded.
“What are you so mad about? I couldn’t sleep and went downstairs to watch TV. I guess I fell asleep.”
Patrick gave me an exasperated look, but I wasn’t fooled. “No, Patricia, you arranged your bed to make us think you were in it. What’s going on?”
She shrugged helplessly and looked at Patrick, as though I was making a mountain out of a molehill. “Nothing! I just didn’t want you to worry if you were checking up on me, which, of course, you were.”
“There’s a TV set right there in the kitchen,” Patrick observed.
“I didn’t want to wake you if you heard it! Jeez! Try to be considerate and you get the third degree!” she said.
Patrick stood up and started toward the stairs to the family room.
“What are you doing?” Patricia demanded. “I turned out the lights.”
“I’m checking anyway,” he said.
“Dad!” Patricia sank down on the couch and covered her face.
And a minute later I heard Patrick’s voice below. “Get out!”
Muffled voices, noises, footsteps on the stairs, and then two boys I’d never seen before and a girl I’d seen only once or twice came parading past me, eyes averted, and stood at the front door staring at the double locks.
“Wait here,” Patrick said. “I’m driving you home.??
?
The girl, a somewhat large brunette, stood with her back to me and was wearing her shirt inside out. Patricia was crying and I noticed that her jeans were partially unzipped. Before Patrick could come back down from upstairs with his keys, however, one of the boys fumbled with the dead bolts himself, opened the door, and in seconds, all three had disappeared.
That seemed to make Patrick even angrier, and he stormed down to the family room to make sure no one else was hiding there.
I let Patricia cry for a while. And finally I said, “What were you thinking?”
“As though you never did anything your dad didn’t like.”
“I didn’t say I hadn’t. But this is about you. I was punished and you will be too.”
“Like how?” she asked tentatively.
“We’ll discuss it when your dad comes up here.”
We both sat silently for another few minutes, and finally I heard Patrick’s footsteps on the stairs.
He was carrying a wastebasket half filled with beer cans. I wished we could discuss the evening calmly, but Patrick wasn’t at his best in the middle of the night.
“Care to explain yourself?” he asked Patricia, sitting down on the couch beside me. “Now that you’ve awakened us, the Gordons . . . ?”
Patricia’s head jerked up. “You didn’t call Christin’s parents?” she cried.
“Yes, we did. I woke up her father, he woke up her mother, the mother woke up Christin. . . .”
“She wasn’t supposed to know about the party!” Patricia wailed. “Melissa told her there wasn’t any . . .” Her voice trailed off and she stared down at her lap again.
“How did your friends get in here?” Patrick demanded.
Patricia’s voice was almost inaudible. “I let them in through a basement window.”
“Who were the boys?” I asked. “They looked older than you and Melissa.”
“Just some guys she knows.”
“And what were you doing?”
“What do you mean?” She gave us a quick glance, then down again.
“What was going on in the family room?” Patrick said in a measured tone.
“Nothing bad. We were just playing cards.”
“Patricia,” I said. “Melissa had her shirt on inside out when she came up. And in case you hadn’t noticed, your jeans are unzipped.”
She immediately gave her zipper a quick jerk, then gave us an exasperated look. “We were playing strip poker, okay? But I still had on my underwear. Nobody was totally naked.” And then she asked defiantly, “Are you proud of yourselves, humiliating me in front of my friends?”
I studied my disheveled daughter. “Are you proud of yourself, Patricia?”
When she didn’t answer, Patrick said, “Whatever, she’s grounded for a month. No friends, no parties.”
Patricia broke into tears again. “A month! You’re so unreasonable! You don’t trust me at all!” she wailed.
It was almost laughable, but I managed not to smile. “You lie to us, you help friends crawl in a window and play strip poker when you make us think you’re asleep upstairs, and we’re unreasonable not to trust you?”
“I only did it because you don’t trust me to take care of myself at a party. I don’t smoke and I’ve only ever taken one single sip of beer, and I wouldn’t ever let a guy go all the way with me, so why are you so worried?”
Patrick had calmed down now, and he was good with her. “Patricia, we trust your good intentions, but what we don’t trust is your judgment. By your own admission, you’ve been to parties where alcohol was provided for minors, strictly against the law. And what about the kids you’re with? Kids who may have had more than ‘a sip of beer’? Who might want to have sex enough to put drugs in your drink? If I could, honey, I would protect you physically for the rest of my life, but I can’t. And so we worry.”
Patricia continued to cry, but I knew she was listening to him. She went up to her room, and Patrick went back down to the family room again to check the basement window. Then we all went to bed.
* * *
For the first week of her detention, Patricia was furious. Patrick was out of town for a few days, and when he came back, he said that someone at the office suggested he check Facebook—that Patricia had posted a photo of him he may not appreciate.
“Did he say what it was?” I asked.
“No. We were both leaving work and he had a train to catch. He said someone had sent it to his daughter, and she made the connection.”
Patrick and I went into the den and signed on. We looked up Patricia’s account, to which, strangely, she had never “unfriended” us. As we’d suspected, there was no mention of the party Melissa had been planning to give while her mom was away. Instead, as we scrolled down, we were suddenly confronted with a full-page photo of Patrick’s face, asleep on the couch. I remembered that photo. She had taken it for fun a year ago when he’d dozed off on a Sunday morning reading the Times. His cheeks and chin covered with stubble, glasses askew over his nose, his mouth hanging open at one side, saliva eking out one corner, unwashed hair hanging over his forehead. Underneath, the caption: Meanest man in the world.
We stared at it a moment or two in silence.
“Well, at least she didn’t say she hated you,” I said, and suddenly we burst out laughing.
It was really such a perfect cartoon of an unshaven man at his worst, and it could have been any man on a weekend morning.
“I suppose it could have been me in my underwear,” Patrick said. Then he added thoughtfully, thinking perhaps of the few times one of us had been naked in the bedroom when a kid walked in, “Or no underwear at all.”
“Maybe that’s coming next,” I said.
“What do you think we ought to do?”
“I don’t know. Let me handle it, though. I might get more out of her,” I suggested.
We could tell by the number of calls Patricia was receiving on her cell phone, and the constant ding of her computer when a new message arrived, that friends were reacting to the posting, and she ate dinner hurriedly, eyes on her plate to discourage conversation.
Later that evening as she came through the dining room she found me at the table with her and Tyler’s medical folders there in front of me, cleaning out old papers and bringing their charts up-to-date. And there before me was a large photo of Patricia’s face when her acne was at its worst. Her dermatologist had been on vacation, and she wanted to prove to him when he got back that the medicine he had prescribed was not working. A more miserable girl you never saw. I was holding it out in front of me when she passed my chair.
Patricia stopped, as I was sure she would.
For a few seconds she remained absolutely silent. Then, in a small voice, she asked. “What are you going to do with that?”
I looked up at her innocently. “Well, what do you think we should do with it?”
“Mom,” she said, and swallowed. “Don’t. Please.”
“Don’t . . . ?”
“You know. Post it. On Facebook.” She crumpled into the chair beside me. “Please.”
“How could we ever do such a disrespectful thing to you, Patricia? We love you, no matter how angry we might get at you. Nothing would justify embarrassing you like that.”
She struggled to say, “I’m sorry! I . . . really . . . am!”
“Once it’s out there,” I told her, “you can’t take it back.”
“I know! And . . . and . . . now I feel terrible!” she wept.
“Your dad needs to know you’re sorry. He needs to hear it from you.”
Slowly, Patricia got up and walked into the living room. Patrick was doing a crossword puzzle, and she sat down next to him, newspaper in his lap. I saw her head tipping in his direction until it rested against his shoulder, and I folded up the medical folders and put them away.
* * *
Of her own volition, Patricia made an apology of sorts to her dad on her Facebook page. She insisted the photo was a joke and posted anothe
r of her and him together. Oddly, it was that pathetic picture of her face plus her boredom at being grounded that prompted her to ask what she could use on her skin in the future to hide small blemishes. She pointed to a little red spot on her chin.
Every so often in a mother’s life, the Fates come together and agree to give her a break. Did I see an opportunity here? Do cars have wheels?
“I could let you use some of my concealer,” I offered. “Want me to show you how to apply it?”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
We went upstairs to the master bathroom, and I pulled out all the stops. Actually, I pulled out the drawer with my cosmetics in it.
“Wow,” she said, looking at the array of little jars and bottles and brushes and tubes. “What is all this stuff?”
“Things that women of a certain age use to beautify themselves,” I said, and jokingly added, “Want a makeover?”
She laughed. “What do I have to do?”
“Just hop up here on the counter where there’s good light,” I said.
I envied the deft way she hoisted herself up.
“Just a quick wipe to get everything off that’s on there,” I said, and she allowed me to take a washcloth and wipe her face clean. I looked into the green eyes of my fifteen-year-old daughter. Same freckles I’d had, right there over the checks and forehead. Same heart-shaped face . . .
“Okay,” I said, giving her a hand mirror so she could watch the process. “Free service today. You’re in luck.”
First the moisturizer, then the makeup base, then the concealer over the blemish . . . Creme rouge on the cheeks to emphasize the cheek bones, then the powder . . .
I worked in slow motion, and along the way, we talked.
“When did your mom let you wear makeup for the first time?” she asked.
“Well, remember that from kindergarten on, I didn’t have a mom.”
Patricia sucked in her breath. “Ooh, I forgot. What did you do?”
“Just experimented with stuff that other girls were using. Some days I’m sure we looked hideous.”