Cynthia came home for Christmas vacation.
When she was about twelve, she had started tearing the skin off her fingers. It was a terrible habit, a disgusting one, and seemed to indicate deep problems. She would start somewhere around the fingernail, and finding a tiny sliver of loose skin, would peel the skin down toward the knuckle. Some days all the fingers of her hands were an angry, naked, injured red.
Daphne had tried everything to get Cynthia to stop. First she had just ordered her to stop doing that. So Cynthia stopped doing it—in front of her mother. But at night, when they were eating or watching TV together, Daphne would look over and see her daughter’s injured hands. Then she tried to bribe her—Cynthia was still young enough to play with Barbie dolls, and complained often that she had three Barbies but only one Ken, so she had to keep killing one Barbie’s boyfriend off so he could be with another, or make him date all the Barbies at once and even commit bigamy. Daphne told Cynthia that if she would stop tearing her skin, she would buy Cynthia two more Ken dolls. But even though, over the next few weeks, Cynthia made a valiant attempt, she could not stop. So Daphne threatened Cynthia with Cynthia’s worst punishment—being grounded so she could not spend the night with her friends or have them over for the night. Even that did not work. Cynthia cried grievously, but she could not seem to help herself.
“All the girls at school do it, Mom. We just get bored.”
Daphne went to see Cynthia’s teacher. He reassured her that this was just a phase that Cynthia was going through, that indeed many of the girls did do it, that it was often a sign of boredom. And Cynthia was so bright—but so bored with many academic subjects—that it was not surprising that she tore at her skin. Preadolescents and adolescents often had many revolting little habits, the teacher said; adolescents all sucked their hair or chewed their nails or, if they were unfortunate enough to have zits, sat all day in class rubbing them. You got used to this sort of stuff as a teacher, and it wasn’t a sign of psychological disturbance or unhappiness.
So Daphne learned to ignore this. She said nothing more to her daughter about it. When Cynthia was twelve and thirteen, she used to wear Band-Aids to school, and when they ran out of Band-Aids, she wrapped Scotch tape around her fingers. Then she sat at school and tore at the tape, tore it in shreds.
She also used to sit, watching TV by herself, and coat her fingers with Elmer’s glue. After it had dried like a second very white skin, she would carefully peel it off. Little curls of dried white glue would lie around on the carpet like hundreds of fingernails.
When Cynthia reached fourteen, she spent more time on her hair and clothes and general hygiene. She didn’t peel her skin quite so much—she painted her nails, and peeled that. She painted them almost every night with two or three coats of thick oily paint, and when she came home from school the next day, her nails would be almost bare, with only a few shreds of color left. And she still, now and then, tore her skin.
She was doing so well in school, and then she was the lead in the high-school play even though she was a sophomore, and she was so happy and popular and outgoing that all of Daphne’s friends agreed that Cynthia’s habit was not the sign of a deep-rooted problem. Pauline White said that when she was a teenager she used to pull her eyelashes out, one by one, and study them for a long time, how the root end was white, how some were longer and thicker than others. Daphne tried not to worry. But she secretly thought: Cynthia peels her skin, tears at herself, mutilates herself, because her father doesn’t love her and never pays any attention to her.
And perhaps she had been right. For Cynthia was still peeling her fingers when she left for California and her father, and now here she was home on vacation, and her fingers were whole and perfect.
When Cynthia had stepped off the plane, Daphne had gasped. Cynthia was so beautiful. And she looked so grown-up, so terribly sophisticated. Her thick blond hair was cut almost punk, very short and slicked back behind her ears and up at her forehead, and she wore long dangling earrings and lots of eye makeup—put on subtly, put on with the hand of an artist. She had lost a great deal of weight. She had gotten taller in the seven months she had been away, but she had also lost a lot of weight.
“Cynthia,” Daphne asked, keeping her voice casual, “are you anorectic?”
Cynthia smiled. “No, Mother. We just eat lots of fruits and vegetables out there.”
Gone were the loose and flapping clothes of yesteryear; Cynthia now wore skintight toreador pants with tight long sweaters cinched at the waist. Cyn was dressed rather like Daphne had been as a teenager in the fifties, but Daphne knew better than to say so.
Clothes. With girl children it was never simple. Two years ago, when David died, Daphne had reacted to his death by gaining weight. She almost didn’t know how she did it—she didn’t pig out or eat obscene amounts. But she was always so tired, and normal life seemed to require such vast amounts of energy that she had to keep eating this and that simply to find the power to get through each day. She had been numbed by David’s death—a loss of yet another person whom she loved and who loved her—and she couldn’t find the strength to diet, or the will to care, for a while, what she looked like. With David gone, really what did it matter what she looked like? She was certainly not too fat to work the word processor or the typewriters. Oh, she wasn’t even really fat, just heavier than normal.
That February, when Cynthia rushed into the house from school, wild with joy, to tell her mother she had been cast as the lead in the spring school musical, West Side Story, Daphne was thrilled and proud. She was usually terribly careful about money, she had to be, but that night, seeing how her enthusiasm buoyed up her daughter, she called Pauline and Douglas White and four of Cynthia’s best friends and took them all out to the most expensive restaurant in town for dinner. She had them all come to the house early, for champagne, which she rushed out to buy and which she let Cynthia and her friends drink (it was a Friday night, and she did not let them drink too much).
It had been a grand celebration, a perfect one, absolutely on the spur of the moment; Pauline had put her casserole in the freezer, because Daphne had insisted that everyone had to celebrate that very night, the night that her daughter had been chosen over all the juniors and seniors for the lead. Everyone toasted Cynthia, who was rosy with happiness, and when the evening was over, Cynthia had come into her mother’s room, in her nightgown, and embraced Daphne.
“Thank you, Moochie,” she said. “That was the nicest party in the whole world.”
“You deserved it, Coochie,” Daphne replied, hugging her back.
Daphne had gladly driven Cynthia out to the high school for rehearsals and gone again much later to drive the other actors and Cynthia home. She did this over and over. She drove Cynthia out opening night and dropped her off an hour before the performance, then went home to dress for the play and the reception afterward. She had taken Cynthia shopping and let her buy the dress she wanted for the reception—Cynthia chose a slinky black thing that was probably too old for her, but when she put it on, the dress looked appropriate. Cynthia looked ravishing. The dress was too expensive, just as the party had been—but then, Daphne said, sometimes you just had to go a little crazy, especially at times like that.
The play went off splendidly. Cynthia was queen for the night. At the party afterward, Daphne stood in a corner talking with other parents and wondering if what everyone said was true, that Cynthia had special talent, that she could be an actress, that she was magnetic onstage, that she was the real thing. She watched her sixteen-year-old daughter slinking around in the black dress with enormous amounts of makeup on and her hair dyed black for the play. “I made her!” Daphne wanted to yell at people. “I made that child in my body.”
The high school was about five miles out of town, set among fields. When the reception for opening night ended and everyone piled into cars and drove out of the high-school parking lot, Daphne and Cynthia were finally alone together in the car.
“Cynthia, you were wonderful,” Daphne said.
Cynthia burst into tears. “Mother, how could you!”
Daphne looked over at her daughter. “What?”
“How could you have worn that old-fashioned old dress! To my play! And my reception! I wanted to die when I saw you.”
Daphne stared down at her lap in amazement. It was true that over the past few years she had bought many more clothes for her daughter than for herself—that was only logical; Cynthia kept growing out of her clothes and needed new ones. And she cared so much about what she wore and how she looked. And Daphne had a closet full of dresses and shoes she had accumulated over the years. Well, with all the weight she had gained recently, she had bought a few new things for comfort, but she could still squeeze into her old clothes.
She thought she had looked fine for the reception. She had found, at the back of her closet, an old Indian cotton dress, in all shades of purple, with quilted cuffs and bodice, and little mirrors and embroidery all over. It fell full from the bodice and floated loosely down to her mid-calf. It made her hair look very black and her eyes look very blue, and, Daphne thought, it hid her excess weight well.
“I don’t understand,” she said to Cynthia. “To what are you objecting?”
“To that dress!” Cynthia answered, nearly shouting. “Oh, Mother, how could you do this to me?”
Daphne was quiet in response. In the past few years Cynthia had become more and more critical of her mother, sometimes with reason, but this seemed beyond the bounds.
“It is a perfectly beautiful dress,” Daphne finally said.
“It is so out-of-date!” Cynthia said. “No one wears dresses like that anymore! Have you ever seen anyone wearing a dress like that in the past trillion years?”
Daphne took a deep breath. “I think it’s a shame to ruin your opening night, your success, with this kind of discussion.”
“Oh, Mom,” Cynthia wailed, “don’t you understand? How can I feel successful when you’re going around like a … a bag lady? What are you trying to do, announce to the world how you give everything to your daughter? That I’m some spoiled little brat and you’re the martyr of the century?” After a deep pause for breath, Cynthia said, “You would have bought a new dress if David were still alive.”
Daphne drove in silence, trying to interpret this newest message from her daughter. She had wondered how much Cynthia missed David, how much she mourned him. On the one hand, David had been her mother’s friend, and Cynthia was so involved with her peer group that David had been only a tiny dim star orbiting the periphery of Cynthia’s life. But, on the other hand, David had been the grown-up man in Cynthia’s life, out there at the edge of it all, circling, always in sight, someone who gave limits and boundaries to Cynthia as she exploded into womanhood, someone who, with Daphne, provided a sense of safety.
In any case, David had been Cynthia’s only “male role model,” that precious necessity that psychologists and elementary-school teachers liked to terrify divorced mothers with. Daphne had known David for twelve years, and had “gone with” him for eight, ever since Cynthia had been six. Daphne thought that David had come to love Cynthia, and she him. His devotion was great; he attended all her events, brought her birthday presents and Christmas presents, played softball and tennis with her, and he never let her see him in his nasty drunken states. Well, Daphne had had a hand in that. She had worked very hard to protect Cynthia from the knowledge of David’s alcoholism. How could it be explained to a child? There were times when David, kind, gentle David, suddenly staggered and fell down, or cursed or spoke obscenely, or roared and smashed things, or blacked out, slumping, slobbering, in any corner of the room. David carried a monster within him who could erupt at any moment, and Daphne was always on guard, keeping that monster from Cynthia’s sight. She refused David’s repeated offers of marriage because of his drinking, and when Cynthia asked, as she occasionally did, why Daphne and David didn’t marry, Daphne answered her daughter vaguely, “Oh, it’s just not the right time,” or, “Maybe someday, but we like things the way they are now.” And Cynthia had seemed content with that.
Daphne had not been able to protect Cynthia from grief when David died. For that, only time brought relief. Even so, for months Cynthia would occasionally, out of the blue, burst into tears and tell Daphne that she missed David. He had been the closest thing to a father she had had.
But more than a year had passed. Perhaps Cynthia was caught, at some point in the whirlwind of her adolescent emotions, missing David, saddened that he wasn’t there tonight to see her great success. But Daphne thought there was something else, something more, and it had to do with money.
Daphne always had to be very careful with money. There was never enough. Joe regularly sent the monthly child support, but never any extras, and college secretaries did not make a huge amount. Each year Daphne tried to save some money for college for Cynthia, and some for a vacation—this summer, she had carefully explained to Cynthia, there would not be a vacation as such. They would not be able to go away for a week or two to the Vineyard or Maine. She did not go into detail about this; she did not tell Cynthia that there would be no vacation because Cynthia’s clothes this year, which Cyn had wanted so desperately, and because the celebration dinner Daphne had given when Cynthia was told she had the lead, and because even the huge bouquet of flowers Daphne had had sent to the dressing room for Cynthia’s opening night had nibbled away all the money for a trip. Perhaps they would go into Boston for a few days and do the museums and Quincy Market. And after all, they were living in Massachusetts, where people from other states came for their vacations. Cynthia hadn’t seemed bothered by this. She had even decided that she would try to get a full-time job, babysitting, if nothing else, so that she could seriously add to her savings account. For Cynthia had always worked too, babysitting, to help pay for her clothes, the movies, the school trips; she had always worked good-heartedly and without complaint.
But did Daphne? Always work good-heartedly and without complaint?
Well … usually. There had been times in earlier years when Daphne, exhausted with a sick child and sick herself, had complained a lot. Had wept. There had been times when Cynthia would beg for a box of expensive cookies and Daphne would snap, “Look, we hardly have enough money for milk.” But this past semester Daphne had not even mentioned money. She had wanted Cynthia to have a wonderful semester, free of worries, so she could concentrate on school and the play. Really, Cynthia’s criticism was, Daphne decided, unjust.
When they went into their house, Daphne said, “Sit down and talk to me a minute, Cyn,” and turned on the living-room lights. Dickens waddled over and laid his head in Cynthia’s lap, and automatically she opened her hands so he could lick them. Fred, the cat, had died of old age not long after David’s death. “Cynthia, what is all this really about?” she asked.
Cynthia looked at her mother and burst into tears. “I don’t know,” she said. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry. I love you so much. I really do love you so much. I don’t know why I get so mad at you. I don’t know why. Sometimes just the sight of you irritates me so much I could scream! But I really love you! Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think I should see a shrink?”
Daphne went over to sit next to her daughter. She put her arm around her. “I think you’re a teenager,” she said, smiling. “I think you’re just a normal teenager. Now,” she said, “can we have some cocoa and talk about the play? God, Cynthia, you were divine! How do you think it went?”
Then they were okay again. They went into the kitchen and sat up late talking—Cynthia talking, reliving every moment, while Daphne listened, entranced.
The day after opening night, Daphne had found in the mail a letter from California, addressed to Cynthia, from Joe. Daphne held the letter in her hand as if it were a ticking bomb, which in a way it was. Joe had not written to his daughter in all these years, not so much as one birthday note. So what was this? She wanted to tear the letter open and read it herself, but it was addressed to Cynthia, and Cynthia was out. She waited, heart thudding as if she were in a race. As if a war had been declared.
For those few moments in her life, Daphne had no dignity. In the late afternoon she hung around the front hall, pretending to pick dead leaves out of the Christmas-cactus pot, waiting for Cynthia to come in the front door and find the letter waiting, where all mail waited, on the front-hall table. Like a jealous lover, she smiled and spied, watching Cynthia’s face when Cyn came breezing in the front door that afternoon.
“Hi, Mom!” Cyn said, and immediately her eyes went to the table—so she had been expecting this!—and she tossed her books on the hall chair and grabbed up the letter. Daphne, kneeling over her Christmas cactus, heart knocking away inside her, watched eagerness … amazement … ecstasy spread across her daughter’s face.
“What is it?” she asked before Cynthia had even finished reading the letter. She was insane with curiosity.
“Daddy’s coming to see me in the play!” Cynthia said. “Oh, wow, he’s flying all this way just to see me in the play!” She twirled around the room as if waltz music were filling the air.
Daphne rose gingerly, as if in the last few seconds she had aged fifty years and all her bones were so brittle that one slight touch would break them. “How did he know about the play?” she asked.
Cynthia stopped her twirling. She looked at her mother defiantly. “I wrote to him,” she said. “I found his address in your address book and I wrote to him and told him about the play and sent a picture of myself and told him that now that I was an interesting person, he might want to get to know me. I invited him to come see the play.” Her joy overwhelmed her defiance. “And he’s really coming!” she whooped.
“But, Cynthia. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Cynthia asked, eyes wide, moronic.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had written to your father?”
Cynthia shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think you’d mind. I didn’t think he’d write me back, I guess.”
Mother and daughter looked at each other.
“I never have tried to keep you from your father,” Daphne said evenly. “I’ve always made attempts—”
“Mom.” Cynthia bugged her eyes out at Daphne. Then, obviously trying to control herself, she said with ultimate patience, “I know you’ve tried with Dad. But now I thought I should try. This isn’t about you and Dad, Mom. This is about me and Dad.” She looked down at the letter, and in spite of herself, her joy came rippling out of her, brightening her face with radiance. “I’ve got to go call Donna!”
She raced from the room and into the kitchen. Daphne sat in the still eye of the storm and listened to her daughter dial the phone. “Donna!” she screamed. “Guess what! My father’s coming to see me in the play! He’s going to fly all the way from California!”
There were holes in several of Daphne’s underpants, and suddenly she felt a strong desire to mend them right away. She went to her room, took out her sewing kit, and set to work, stabbing and yanking the thread through like a madwoman. She had tried. God, this was a slap in the face, it was Joe saying, “Cynthia, I’ll have something to do with you as long as your mother isn’t involved,” but why should Joe act as if Daphne were the poisonous one? Daphne had always been the one who tried. There had been hate in her heart, but she had kept it hidden, or released it in tearful outbursts only when alone or with Pauline and Douglas. When Joe remarried and moved to California, Daphne had tried to keep him interested and informed about their daughter. Cynthia had been only two when he left, just a baby. Every four months or so for the first few years, Daphne had sent Joe current photos of Cynthia as she progressed from a toddler to a kindergartener with braids and a bike. She sent neutral, polite letters about Cynthia’s ballet or piano lessons, friends, school activities, along with copies of Cynthia’s report cards.
Not once had there been any response. She might as well have sent it all into a black hole. Once a month she did receive the court-decreed child-support payment in a plain white envelope, but never any personal word, never any questions or suggestions or congratulations. It was as if Joe were paying a utility bill, or income tax, a legal necessity, nothing else.
Bizarre. Joe had been the one who had had the affair, but he had been furious when Daphne wanted a divorce. He would never forgive her for not forgiving him. And perhaps that was just. But that he would take his anger out on his daughter, that he would have such a total lack of interest in Cynthia—that was bizarre.
When Cynthia had been very little, Daphne sent her bright funny Christmas cards and birthday cards and presents and signed them “Love, Daddy.” But when she was eight, Cynthia seemed too intelligent for such a charade, and who was this “daddy,” anyway, who communicated only twice a year? Very carefully Daphne explained that Daddy had gone away to live in California so he could teach there and that he was very busy and forgot about holidays. Later, when Cynthia was older, Daphne made Joe out to be a sort of absentminded-professor type. “It has nothing to do with you, sweetie,” she said. “It’s not that your father doesn’t love you. He doesn’t know you. He’s just too wrapped up in his work. Some men are just that way.”
What else was Daphne to say? That Joe was cold, egocentric, reprehensibly unloving? Psychologists warned: Don’t criticize the other parent; the child knows that parent is in her somehow and she will come to hate herself. Daphne had tried to protect Cynthia. She had tried to remain neutral always. She had never ranted, raved, hurled insults about Joe—within Cynthia’s range of hearing.
Now Daphne pricked her finger with the needle and blood spotted the white cotton underpants right at the elastic waist. What she wanted to do right now was to grab that cloth and tear it. She wanted to hear the material shredding, she wanted to feel destruction, the power of ravage. But after all, Cynthia had said a true thing: this was not about Daphne and Joe, this was about Cynthia and Joe. If Daphne could only hang on to her sense and stand back, if she could only control her jealousy and fears, then perhaps Cynthia would have a father in her life.
And wasn’t that what Daphne wanted for Cynthia?
Joe called Cynthia that evening to tell her his plans. Cyn answered the phone—it was infinitely odd to Daphne to hear her daughter say casually, “Oh, hi, Dad.”
Daphne waited for Cynthia to call her to the phone—wouldn’t Joe want to check plans with Daphne, ask her for information? After a few minutes she could stand it no longer.
“Tell your father I can pick him up at the airport if he’d like,” she said.
“He says thanks, but he’ll rent a car in Boston,” Cynthia relayed. “Okay, see you then,” she said to her father. Hanging up the phone, she turned to Daphne with the face of a woman in love. “Mom, he’s got such a nice voice!”
“Mmm,” Daphne said, trying to sound noncommittal. “What are his plans?”
“He’s going to fly to Boston, rent a car, stay at the Westhampton Inn, and see the play on Saturday night. He wants to take me out to brunch on Sunday morning, then he’s got to fly back to California.”
“Quick trip,” Daphne said, smiling, heart thudding. Thank God he’s not staying, she thought. This will be over before I know it.
That Saturday night she did not see Joe; she did not attend the play, but went to the Whites’ to drink and be obsessed. Sunday morning, though, it was she who opened the door to Joe’s knock.
There he stood, on her doorstep, her ex-husband, the man who had changed her life, the man who had married her, impregnated her, wrapped himself around her, and betrayed her. He was bald, and that sign of age made her happy, but he was slim and tanned and he must have been wearing contacts; she knew he needed glasses. With that tan, without the familiar blond hair and glasses, she would not have recognized him if she had passed him on the street.
Joe stood on her doorstep, and Daphne found herself smiling an absurdly friendly smile: if she met him now, she would not find him attractive! He seemed like a pleasant man, but so nondescript. She felt no yank of desire. Her heart floated out of her like a balloon.
“Hi, Joe. Cynthia’s just coming. Would you like to come in?”
“Here I am!” Cynthia called, rushing down the stairs, swinging her purse. “Hi, Dad. See ya, Mom.”
Joe nodded at Daphne and smiled with his mouth, but his eyes stayed cold. He put his arm around his daughter’s shoulder and led her to his rented car. Daphne stood in the doorway watching them walk away. The only thing Joe had said to her was, “Hello.” After all these years. Not even a “How are you, Daphne?” If she read his expression correctly, then Joe still hated her. But why? She was the one who should hate him. Certainly at the moment she had feared him.
And she had been right to do so.
When Cynthia came home from brunch with Joe, she told Daphne that her father had invited her to live with him and his wife in California, and Cynthia had accepted his invitation. Daphne stood in her sunny living room on that clear spring morning and felt her blood turn to venom.
“… and I think it will really be good for me,” Cynthia was saying earnestly. “It will broaden my horizons. I’ll be able to see what a completely different part of the United States is like and get to understand a different culture.”
Daphne looked at her child and thought: I hate you. You are a stranger. You are a monster. You are an ungrateful, spoiled little bitch.
“Don’t look at me that way, Mom. Mom, I knew you’d be this way. Mom, come on. Dad lives in California, he lives near Hollywood. He’s going to give me a car. He says he’s really proud of me, Mom, and he wants to help me be an actress, he thinks he really could help me and I really could be an actress. You’re always complaining about how we never have enough money and you never have any help, and now here I’m going to be getting some help, which will help you—I mean, you’ll be able to spend some money on yourself for a while.…”
“I can’t believe you chose to live with your father instead of with me,” Daphne said. The words were choking her. Her grief was choking her.
“Mom, it’s just for a year. Like I’ve lived with you for sixteen years, right? I mean, Dad has paid child support all along, and he deserves a turn, right?”
“But how could you accept his invitation without discussing it with me? Don’t you care what I think? How I feel?”
Cynthia looked down at her feet. “I guess I was so surprised and excited I just accepted right away at once.” She looked up at Daphne. “Mom, I’ve never even seen California. I’ve never even seen anywhere.”
“Don’t you know how much I’ll miss you, Cynthia?” Daphne said, keeping her voice gentle but not letting it break.
“Well, I’ll miss you too.”
Daphne looked at her beloved only child and thought: I hate you as I have never hated anyone else in my life. I hate you enough to hurt you. I want to hurt you as much as you are hurting me.
“Oh,” Daphne said. “Cynthia.” With great and agonizing control, she walked past her daughter. She grabbed up her purse where she had left it on the hall table and went out the front door. She got in her car and drove off down the street. She drove around for almost an hour before she went to Pauline’s house. When she stood on Pauline’s doorstep, knocking on the door, her eyes were so swollen from crying that she could scarcely see through the puffed and painful lids.
“Oh, God … oh, sweet Jesus God,” Pauline said when Daphne told her the news, and hugged Daphne and then made her sit down and drink quantities of Scotch.
“You can’t blame her, you can’t blame her,” Pauline had said. “Every girl wants her father to love her—to adore her. Daphne, you have to let her go.”
It had not even occurred to Daphne not to let Cynthia go. She would never stop Cynthia from going. But that Cynthia had not even hesitated when asked!
“My whole life has been devoted to raising that child.”
“Maybe Cynthia is aware of that.” Pauline used this cruel observation as a form of surgery, as a means of healing, like cauterizing a wound. “Maybe she thinks it’s time you devoted some of your life to yourself.”
“Oh, come on!” Daphne exploded. “It wasn’t like that, and you know it! I didn’t sacrifice my life to hers! I had a good time, I had fun—I had David.”
“Well,” Pauline said calmly, “in any case, Cynthia was destined to leave home soon. In two years she has to go off to college. If you had the money, you would have sent her to some kind of camp. Or prep school. It’s time for Cynthia to go. It’s time for you to move on too.”
Daphne wanted to hiss and spit at her friend. She wanted to coil up in a long rope of frenzied muscles and strike out at Pauline, flicking at her with her venomous tongue. That was the night the snake came to live inside her, coiling deep in her abdomen, that subtle eager creature that lifted its diamond-shaped head, its glittering eyes, and smiled its evil sneaking smile whenever Daphne thought of her daughter. Or her ex-husband. Or any number of other things. It accompanied Daphne everywhere she went, even in her sleep.
When Daphne finally went back home, she found that Cynthia had eaten dinner and done all the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. She was already asleep in her room, at nine o’clock. Or pretending to be. Between the evening of her announcement and the middle of June when she left for California, Daphne and Cynthia said perhaps eighty-three words to each other, most of them repetitive and mundane: “Will you be home for dinner?” “Did you walk Dickens?” They did not discuss Cynthia’s decision again. Clearly Cyn did not want to know about Daphne’s thoughts—or feelings—on the matter. Cynthia was ostentatiously polite and helpful around the house, always making her bed and doing her chores without being asked, as if heading off any explosion that could lead to a discussion. Daphne was polite in return. She would not let Cynthia see how much she was hurting her. She drove around with a realtor, looking for a house she could afford, put a down payment on the Plover cottage, cleaned out the home she had shared with Cynthia for fourteen years and held a mammoth tag sale, sold the huge grand piano that had been her mother’s, found the dilapidated baby grand, and began sewing curtains for the new house, where she would move at the end of the summer. She acted as if she were excited about her future too.
But in a flash, while Daphne still didn’t believe it would happen, Cynthia was gone. The house was empty. Her clothes and treasures were packed and sent off, and her bedroom, which had been cluttered with the signs of a happy active life, sat in the midst of Daphne’s house as still and tidy as a room in a museum. Daphne wanted to set the house on fire and let it burn down around her.
One good thing: she had lost all the weight she had gained after David’s death. For a long while after Cynthia left her, she had no appetite. Wasn’t that odd? When David had died, she ate and ate; when Cynthia left, she could not swallow. Daphne didn’t know what it meant; she did not care to know. She was relieved when she could finally move into the cottage, leaving behind the house where she had lived so much of her life with her darling daughter.
After the night when Jack had kissed Daphne—and she had kissed him back—he had caught up with her in the college parking lot and awkwardly apologized.
“I’m so sorry,” he had said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“It’s all right,” Daphne had said. She had been so exhausted that she had held on to her car door in order not to sink onto the ground. She had spent the night, after Jack’s kiss, wide-awake, thinking—and longing. Not just for Jack, perhaps, but for someone. She had longed to be in a lover’s arms.
Jack had mistaken her pallor and gravity for censure. “I’ve been so stressed-out and confused lately,” he said. “Carey Ann and I … well, this has been a rough spot in our marriage. The move, I mean.”
“I understand,” Daphne had said. If she had had the energy, she would have been touched by Jack’s agitation and misery; she thought he was feeling guiltier than he should. She was older than he was and knew that often, with friends, the sexual undercurrent broke through the dam of propriety. People were always going around mending their dams, tamping back sex.
“I love my wife,” Jack said. “I really love her. I’ve always intended to be faithful to her. I still do. I don’t know what came over me.” He was sincerely baffled.
“It’s just that I’m so irresistibly attractive,” Daphne said, grinning, trying to break the tension between them. She did not want to lose his friendship. She liked him too much. “Who could blame you?”
Jack laughed gratefully. “Well, you are attractive,” he said gallantly. “But I promise to control myself in the future.”
Daphne held out her hand. “Let’s be friends,” she said.
He shook her hand. “Friends,” he answered.
Over the past three months, Daphne and Jack had become real friends. Daphne needed him as a friend. With so many people gone from her life, and as winter set in, she felt gradually more isolated in her little house at the dead end of the road. Few people read as much as Daphne did, and Jack was a reader. They had an endless supply of things to talk about. Sometimes Daphne would put down a book and want nothing more than to call Jack to talk to him about it.
Jack needed Daphne, and she knew that. As the semester wore on, it became clear that Jack and Hudson Jennings were having difficulties settling into a comfortable relationship with each other. Daphne was caught in the middle. She kept trying to explain one man to the other. Jack was adored by the students, and now he ate his lunch every day in the cafeteria at a table packed with students—some weren’t even in his class—and they talked about everything. He never thought to sit with the faculty members, and when Daphne suggested that it might be politic to do so now and then, Jack said, “But the students are more interesting. And I’m a teacher!”
He was a teacher, and that became the focal point of their friendship. He was teaching, in addition to neoclassic lit, three sections of freshman English. He found it a challenge teaching grammar and punctuation to college students who still didn’t “get” it. Sometimes even very brilliant students would have trouble with the basics of sentence structure, while students who were struggling in everything else took instantly to grammar. He almost believed it was genetic, chemical, that there was something physical in the brain that ruled one’s disposition toward language.
Daphne had dug out the old files and lesson plans she had used when she taught freshman English so long ago at U. Mass., and some nights she sat with Jack at his dining-room table, talking about teaching. For Daphne this was as delicious as talking about old lovers with a friend. The pleasures of the classroom! The glory when a student finally got it right!
They had plenty of time to talk, because Carey Ann had become seriously interested in early-childhood learning. Once she had discovered that there were definite things one could do to try to shape a child’s behavior, she attacked the subject with the zeal of a religious convert. She attended her group one night a week, and sat in on a class in early-childhood behavior at a community college two nights a week. She was too late to enroll for credit, but she hoped to start working for a master’s the next semester.
So three nights a week Carey Ann was out, leaving Jack to baby-sit. Alexandra went to bed at nine o’clock now, and after a month of major war and minor skirmishes and a few more weeks of creative rebellions, she had settled down nicely. Most nights Jack used the quiet for work, but about once a week he invited Daphne down and they would talk about everything—his classes, Hudson, her classes of long ago, the newest novels. Everything, really, but Jack’s marriage. He told Daphne that Carey Ann was happy now, that she had friends, that she loved her night classes. He could see his wife changing before his eyes—as if she were one of his students. He was happy because Carey Ann was happy; a burden had lifted. He was changing too; he was learning that he could do only so much to help his wife and daughter be happy—no matter how hard he worked to protect them, to provide an all-encompassing shelter for them. Life would still find a way to sneak through and wham them, disorient them, discomfort them. Happiness and exhilaration could come to them totally independent of him, too. Jack did not know why this surprised him. After all, he needed his teaching, his work, to make him happy. Carey Ann and Alexandra, in all their amazing beauty, were necessary to him, but he needed his work too.
Sometimes, when Carey Ann got involved in a long telephone conversation with a friend, talking about her course work or her teacher or a rough spot with Alexandra or about food or her period or even a recent argument with Jack, Jack would freeze where he was, listening to his wife with a mixture of satisfaction and irritation. In Kansas City she had spent hours on the phone, and now she was doing it again. He could remember his sister doing it, and his mother. Women channeled the chaos of life into the telephone and came away at peace, as if in the process they had transformed and ordered and tidied up their corner of the universe. He envied Carey Ann the rich pleasure she got from talking on the phone—sometimes her voice was so rich and intimate she sounded almost sexual. He was glad she now had good friends to talk to and good things to talk about. But sometimes he felt left out and sometimes he felt intruded upon, and diminished, as if his wife, with her words, was paring him down, tidying him up, turning him into something much less complex than he really was.
From these telephone conversations he learned that Carey Ann truly did not mind that he spent time with Daphne, that he had drinks with her when Carey Ann was in class, that he spent hours talking to her. According to Carey Ann, Daphne was “as old as the moon.” Sometimes Carey Ann spoke of Daphne with smug pity—she felt so sorry for the older woman because her daughter had left her. Once Carey Ann had spent almost an hour discussing with a friend all the things Daphne might have done to cause Cynthia to leave her for her father. For that was the great mystery—why the girl had left her mother. What had the mother done to cause it? What terrible monstrous flaw was Daphne hiding, what cruel or crazy thing had Daphne done? Had she secretly abused her daughter somehow, verbally if not physically? Surely Daphne had done something wrong, something really dreadful. Carey Ann knew that her own daughter would never choose to leave her; they were so close, they needed each other so much, Alexandra was her sunshine, as Carey Ann was her daughter’s. Well, they would never know about Cynthia and Daphne, they would always wonder. Carey Ann would always be suspicious of Daphne, but she was proud of herself for understanding Jack’s friendship with Daphne. It made her feel mature, that she could be relaxed with Jack liking a woman that she herself did not like.
When Cynthia wrote to her mother—for she did write once a month from California (and Daphne wrote to her daughter once a week, at least, having so many things to tell her, missing her so much, wanting Cynthia to know she was loved even though she had chosen to leave)—that she would like to come home for the three weeks of Christmas vacation, Daphne had felt elated. She had spent every extra moment fixing up the attic bedroom, which until then she had left in a general mess. She had dug the box of Cynthia’s old toys out of the storage room and lugged it up to the attic and left it there, casually, half-opened, in the corner, in case Cynthia wanted to look at them for sentimental reasons.
Now it was Christmastime, and here Cynthia was, sitting on the floor with Baby Betsy, the doll she had had since she was four. She was playing dolls with Alexandra, who was enchanted by Baby Betsy and was intently watching Cynthia change its clothes, so that she could learn how to do it too.
With just four days left before Christmas, Daphne, in a spurt of mushy Christmas neighborliness, had invited the three Hamiltons for dinner. Her house was too small to hold a bigger party, although she was going to have some people in for champagne and dessert on Christmas night. But Carey Ann and Alexandra were leaving on Christmas Day to fly back to Kansas City to spend some of the holiday with her family and friends. Jack would remain at home to use the vacation time to write an essay on twentieth-century writers for an international journal.
This holiday night the Hamiltons and Millers were gathered together with good cheer. Tonight Daphne was wearing a red velvet lounging robe and heavy dangling gold earrings, giving her the majestic look of a Greek oracle or goddess, of warmth perhaps, of comfort. Certainly she had made them all comfortable tonight: a sparkling fire, candles flickering, a British boys’ choir softly heralding them from the stereo. They had just finished their apple pie laced with cinnamon, and were sipping the rest of their champagne. Jack was cozily ensconced on the sofa, Carey Ann nestled against one arm, Daphne leaning near the other, as the three adults looked at old photo albums of Cynthia as a child. On the floor, Cynthia was still enchanting Alexandra with her old doll. When a switch on her back was flicked on, Baby Betsy “crawled” across the floor in stiff, robotlike jerks. Now Cynthia had put Baby Betsy on her stomach and, lifting a hatchway in the doll’s rear end, took out two huge batteries that lay inside the doll like electric intestines.
Daphne laughed. “Is that disgusting or what?” she said.
“Mom!” Cynthia protested. “This was my favorite doll!”
“I know, sweetie,” Daphne said. “I never could understand it. I always preferred those soft cuddly dolls. This doll is hard plastic; it’s like cuddling a kettle.”
“But it crawls, like a real baby!” Cynthia said. She put the batteries back in the baby’s rear end, latched the lid, and held it against her protectively, as if it were a real child. She smoothed its hair—what was left of its hair. The doll had had so much attention over the years that it showed signs of wear and tear—hair gone, eyelashes missing, an overall look of grime coating its plastic skin.
Cynthia handed the doll to Alexandra, who turned it on. Automatically the doll’s arms and legs started flailing in the air, and it whacked Alexandra in the face. Alexandra dropped the doll, startled. Her face scrunched up and her mouth opened to let out a wail. Quickly Cynthia flicked off the doll and handed it back to Alexandra. “There,” she said. “She’s quiet now. Let’s go up to my room and see what else I’ve got that you’d be interested in. My old stuffed animals are still up there.” She took Alexandra’s hand and led her off.
“What a nice girl she is,” Carey Ann said as they heard the two daughters slowly making their way up the steep attic stairs. “She’s so good with Lexi.”
“Look,” Daphne said. She pointed to a photo: Cynthia at four, at Christmas, with the brand-new Baby Betsy in her arms. The little girl in the picture had long ringlets of white-blond hair, and rosy pudgy cheeks, and plump elbows and knees, and she was wearing a dress Daphne had made for her, a long dress of white velveteen with pink bows and ribbons and lace everywhere. Cynthia looked like a doll herself, or like a sculpture made from candy.
“It’s hard to believe,” Jack said. “Hard to believe that Cynthia was ever that small.”
“I know,” Daphne said. “She’s so terribly grown-up these days.” She ran her finger over the picture of her young daughter, as if she could actually feel Cynthia as a child again. “Those were the sweetest days,” she said. Without realizing it, she almost crooned the words. “I sang her lullabies every night of her life until she was five. ‘Sweet and Low.’ The old Brahms favorite. A southern thing my mother used to sing to me. I think some of the happiest moments I’ve ever lived were spent rocking Cynthia in my arms in her dark bedroom, with the little shepherdess night-light glowing nearby. Everything seemed so good then, so safe. It was almost as if I were being held in someone’s arms.” For a moment all three adults sat in silence, remembering, staring deep into the fireplace, where the solid logs that had once been branches, trees, now smoked and flared, spinning before their very eyes from wood into smoke and ashes and into golden heat, rushing light.
The sound of thumping brought them back into the present. Thud thud thud thud, and here came Cynthia into the room with Alexandra toddling along behind her as fast as her fat baby legs would take her. Cynthia had brought down the cardboard box full of stuffed animals, dolls, dress-up clothes, all the very favorite old toys, all the things that she had insisted not be part of the various tag sales and toss-outs in the past sixteen years of her life.
“Look!” Cynthia said, grinning. She knelt on the floor and began to take things out and hand them to the enchanted Alexandra. “See this teddy bear? This furry thing—look, it’s a hand puppet.” She slipped it on and the green caterpillar began to writhe over to tickle Alexandra under the chin. “And oh, here’s my Alice!” she said, taking out an expensive Alice in Wonderland doll in a blue dress with a white apron. Cynthia looked at her mother. “I’m giving all these to Alexandra,” she said.
“Oh!” Carey Ann exclaimed, enraptured, and fell on the floor next to the box to join in the discovery of the treasures. “Look, Lexi, a kitty!”
Jack saw Daphne’s body tense. But still she smiled, and her voice was light. “Really, Cynthia, are you sure you want to?” she said. “I mean, it’s sweet of you, but all these things—your favorites …”
“Oh, Mother, don’t be sappy,” Cynthia said. “I loved these things once, but that was when I was little. They mean nothing to me now, and they just clutter up your house.”
Daphne rose and went over to stab the brass poker around in the fire. When she straightened up and looked back at her daughter her face was flushed from the heat. “I don’t mind having them around. I like them. They have memories for me too. And I thought you might want to save them for your children.”
Cynthia was sitting on her knees, and now she leaned back on her arms, looking up at her mother. “Oh, Mother, I’m not going to have children for a million years,” she said. “Give me a break. I mean, really.”
Daphne was moving around the room, taking up the champagne bottle, filling the glasses. Carey Ann and Alexandra were having an orgy in the toy box.
“You never know,” Daphne said. “You might fall in love in college. Girls are changing, things are changing. People are having babies young again. In their twenties.”
“Not this girl,” Cynthia said. “I’m not getting married. I’m not having babies when I’m in my twenties. Uggh!” She shuddered in her extreme distaste. She was very beautiful, so blond, her skin as sleek as an otter’s, her eyes clear. She was precocious and sexual and she had her own powers now and knew it.
Daphne could not look away. Her daughter was the most beautiful thing in the world.
“Oh, Mom, I might as well tell you now,” Cynthia said. She stood up all of a sudden and brushed at her skirt, although nothing was there. She tossed her head and gave her mother a defiant look. “Dad’s on sabbatical next year. He’s going to teach in England. I’m going to go too. I’m going to see if I can get into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. If not, I’ll try any other acting school.”
Daphne thought: In all the fairy tales, it is the old woman who is the bad one, it is the old woman who is the witch that traps Rapunzel in the tower, that gives Snow White the poisoned apple, that tries to turn Cinderella into a kitchen slave, and now I know why. And for a split second she felt herself transforming right there in the living room, she felt her fingers contracting into gnarled and twisted claws, her nose growing long and sharp and wart-covered, her chin curving up to meet her nose, her back humping over. She was a hag. She was a hideous old hag, a cackling evil thing.
Why tell me this now?, Daphne thought, and immediately answered herself. Because she thinks the Hamiltons will provide protection. I won’t freak out at her in front of them.
All these thoughts flung themselves through Daphne’s head like a throng of birds, flashing through, now here, now gone. She was left standing with a glass of champagne in one hand and a bottle of champagne in the other. She felt such grief at this casual announcement of her daughter’s that she knew she could crush the bottle back into sand in her hands.
“How wonderful for you, Cyn,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to live in England. How splendid that you’ll have the opportunity.” She poured champagne and drank. She crossed the room and curled up in a chair. “If you take a battery from Baby Betsy and put it in the monkey’s back, it will beat the drums,” she told Carey Ann and Alexandra. She was as normal as oatmeal, except she had forgotten to set the champagne bottle down and was holding it, unwittingly, in her right hand.
Cynthia blinked at her mother’s understated response. She sank down onto the floor and helped Carey Ann with the electric monkey. So much of its fur had worn away, it looked sick. “Well, I may not get into RADA,” she said. “And it isn’t certain that Dad’ll go to England. But pretty certain.”
“Have you been to England?” Daphne asked Jack brightly. So brightly. She was like a faculty wife at a tea party.
So on they talked. They made conversation for almost another hour, until Lexi began to show signs of exhaustion. To her great delight, when the time came to go, Jack put all the dolls and animals back in the huge cardboard box, then put his daughter in on top of them all. She clapped her hands and giggled with glee. Jack staggered out the door and down the road, lugging his daughter and her new box of loot. Carey Ann followed, calling good-night.
It was a clear cold night, no wind. Daphne shut the door against the fresh frosty air and turned briskly back to the house. “That was fun, wasn’t it?” she said. Without waiting for an answer, she began to bustle. Dishes off the table and into the kitchen, glasses off the floor, bustle, bustle, while her daughter trailed along behind, making attempts to help. Actually Cynthia got in the way more than anything. Daphne was so quick at grabbing up everything, it seemed she had fourteen hands. Daphne’s face was set in a pleasant sort of look but her eyes were deep and glazed. She turned to put the apple pie in the refrigerator just at the moment Cynthia moved to put the butter there.
“Let’s leave these dishes till morning,” Daphne said. “I’d like to sit and relax by the fire for a while.” She wandered back into the living room, where she grabbed up the half-full bottle of champagne by its neck and plunked down, not on the sofa, but in front of it, leaning back against it so that she could stretch her feet out and warm them at the fire. Still her face was frozen.
Cynthia sat down on the floor next to her mother, her back to the fire. “Mom,” she said intently, and then was quiet for a while, as if she had just explained everything. Finally she began again. “I hope you understand. About my going to England. I mean, this might be my only chance in my entire life.”
“Well, of course I understand, dear. Whatever did I say that made you think differently?” Daphne said, giving her daughter a cocktail-party smile.
“Mom.” Cynthia sighed. “I knew you would do this. I knew you would. Mother, I’m not leaving you. I’m not choosing Dad. I’m choosing England, I’m choosing excitement, possibilities, things I just couldn’t have if I stayed here. Oh, Mom, come on.”
Daphne cocked her head, bright as an innocent, stupid little bird. Her heavy earrings swung against her face. “Why, Cynthia, I haven’t said one thing against it. I’m delighted for you, dear!”
Cynthia banged her feet on the floor in exasperation, something she hadn’t done since she was five. “Stop it!” she yelled. “Just stop it, Mom! I know you. I know what you’re thinking.”
Then Cynthia saw the anger flash up in her mother’s eyes as brilliantly as the fire behind her, and fade as quickly as it had come.
“Cynthia,” Daphne said, “I do mean it. I really am delighted for you. I’m only tired, dear—this dinner party was a lot more work than I’m used to these days.” Her voice was very gentle.
“You miss David, don’t you?” Cynthia asked. There was something about her mother’s face just then, as Daphne let the happy mask fall to reveal her tiredness, her constrained sadness, that made Cynthia think she could ask the question.
“Yes,” Daphne said. “Yes, very much.” Her eyes were cast down now, her face slanted away from Cynthia.
Cynthia chewed on the skin of her little finger for a moment, thinking. At last she said quietly, “I can’t be David for you. I can’t stay here for you.”
Daphne did not change her expression or tone of voice. Gently she said, “I never said you should, Cynthia.”
There was some loose skin around Cynthia’s thumb, which she began to peel. Although she could not articulate it to herself, this strange act felt like something she could do while she tried to come up with the right thing to do or say. Daphne looked over at Cynthia, and her face was so full of love that Cynthia felt both thrilled and threatened.
“Do you think,” Daphne said, “that you could remember how to play the Moonlight Sonata? I’d love to look at the fire and hear you play that.”
“Well, I haven’t played for ages, and Dad doesn’t have a piano. I’ll make a million mistakes. But sure,” Cynthia said.
She moved to the piano at the far end of the room. Daphne got up onto the sofa, stretched out, and stared into the fire. Cynthia played. The music was slow and soothing, although Cynthia’s rendition of it was not particularly soothing, with all the clunkers she hit. But the music built and repeated and built some more, and when she had finished, Cynthia looked over to see that her mother had fallen asleep. She crossed the room, took up a quilt from her mother’s bedroom, and brought it into the living room. She bent over her mother’s sleeping figure and tucked the quilt around her so that it would not fall off. Daphne’s breath was deep and regular. Cynthia looked into her relaxed face. Then she turned to put the screen in front of the fireplace, and went up the stairs to her little bedroom in the attic.
When Daphne heard the upstairs door open and close, she opened her eyes. She didn’t move. She lay there looking into the fire but seeing instead an encounter that had taken place between her and Hudson that afternoon.
They had been at the college, in the outer office, on either side of Daphne’s desk, which held, in addition to the usual pile of files and papers, a little artificial evergreen tree that Daphne had decorated with candy canes and red-and-white-striped peppermints. It was almost five o’clock and everyone else had left earlier for the Christmas-carol celebration at the college chapel.
Daphne and Hudson were exchanging Christmas gifts. They did this every year. At first the presents had been small, even silly, but with each passing year they became more serious.
Daphne’s present was rather chiding and mischievous; she gave Hudson a book entitled Parallel Lives, a nonfiction book about five Victorian and rather sexless marriages.
Hudson handed Daphne a small velvet box. Inside was a pair of small brilliant earrings: two rubies surrounded by diamonds.
“Hudson!” Daphne said. “I can’t accept these!”
“Please,” Hudson replied. “They will be beautiful on you. With your coloring.”
“But, Hudson, they must have cost the earth. I really can’t accept such an expensive gift.”
“They were my mother’s,” Hudson said.
Daphne looked at him. “Oh, Hudson …” She would have embraced him, but they were separated by the desk.
They were separated by the knowledge of Claire.
In any case, Fred Van Lieu came along then, needing a ride because his car was in for repairs.
“Merry Christmas,” Daphne and Hudson had said to each other. Hudson had left. Daphne had put the little box in her purse, where it was still. She cherished the present. She liked thinking of the two heart-red gems, gleaming valuably, secretly, in the darkness.
She decided to sleep on the sofa tonight. The fire would keep her warm.