I turned twelve in Venice. My grandmother Patsy took us to the Hotel Regina on the Grand Canal. Hubert de Givenchy was staying there, too. My mother said, “He just got on that vaporetto!” She met a man with a teenage son, and we started spending days with them. We went to the Lido Beach to swim, and we went to Harry’s Bar. I don’t remember the museums. The son stood next to me at the glass factory, and our bare arms touched. My mother called him my boyfriend.
One afternoon my mother drew me off from the group—we’d all meet later for dinner—and took me to the Piazza San Marco. She picked a café table beneath the arcade, and we faced the square. “Look up, Sue. Look at the horses.” The waiter came, and she ordered. “Gelati, limone e cioccolato, and two Bellinis, if the peach juice is fresh.
“I think that’s him! That’s Givenchy, over there.” She pointed at a silver-haired, straight-backed man seated several tables away. “Givenchy is following you, Sue.” I tasted the sweet drink and the crisp wafer in the ice cream and knew Givenchy was nearby and looked at the sky marked with birds. My mother said that I was drunk. “Oh, my little lush. You’ll always remember this, you know—Venice, the piazza, getting drunk with me for your first time.”
When we returned to New York I started seventh grade, got braces, taped up pictures of models from magazines, my scissors outlining their bodies. That’s what all my friends did. I had a crush on almost every boy in the class, my diary a catalog of daily preferences. Over the summer my friend Elise had seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Marcy had grown breasts. On Saturday mornings my friends, girls and boys, met outside the Regency Theater. We saw double features of Hitchcock thrillers or Gene Kelly musicals, hands grazing hands in the refuge of the dark. Afterward we jammed the pizza parlor, shrieking about 45s and who was going to be boyfriend-and-girlfriend. I slept over at Marcy’s a lot, her parents washing up after dinner together in their small kitchen. In the mornings her father, dressed in his undershirt, pushed open Marcy’s door and said, “Girls? Time to get up.” Elise taught me to lip-synch in front of the mirror, Tim Curry over and over on the record player as we flounced in my room. She wanted to take me to a midnight show of Rocky Horror in the Village, but my mother said, “Absolutely not.” My class took a weeklong trip to the school’s farm upstate, and we played Run, Catch & Kiss. At lights out the girls ran around and weren’t supposed to be in the boys’ rooms, but we went in anyway. The teacher on duty paused in the hall to listen for whispers, and we muffled our glee.
My mother wanted me to join Weight Watchers. “You’re always going to have a big ass, Sue. Even Norman knew that.” I didn’t mind worrying over my weight, the way a grown woman would. Some girls in my class took gymnastics, and I started with them in a studio overlooking Broadway. When my father came to get me I met him on the street because he couldn’t climb stairs anymore, the MS progressing. The instructor gave me exercises to straighten my spine. “She gets that from me,” my mother told her, lifting the back of her shirt to show the teacher the scars from back surgery.
“I’m mad about that teacher,” she said on the way home.
“Her husband pinched my bottom,” I told her.
“Maybe he’s part Italian.”
A few weeks later, after school, she said the teacher’s husband had come that morning to our apartment. “He wants to have an affair with me. But I sent him away. I told him no.” I told my friends at gymnastics how the husband was in love with my mother.
One April Sunday Daphne took us out for brunch. We walked up Third Avenue, the day dazzling and fresh, my mother pausing at shop windows. “Isn’t that color divine?” Penelope, who was ten, liked to skip ahead, singing to herself, and my mother and I held hands, enjoying her silliness.
The restaurant was popular and crowded. Our mother had had a few dates with the owner, but then he got married. “He’s not happy, you know,” she said. “He tells me everything.” He wasn’t there today, but she got the manager’s eye, and he seated us ahead of other people. He walked us to a corner table, a good table. She asked for a mimosa, and he brought it back, saying it was on him. Penelope and I piled up the sugar packets and traded our ruffled toothpicks when our club sandwiches came. My mother ordered eggs Florentine but left them. She reached over to my plate and pulled the middle layer of bread out. “You don’t need that,” she said. The waiter brought another mimosa.
“Excuse me?” she called. I looked up, but she wasn’t talking to anyone. Her eyes jumped around, her gaze everywhere. She zeroed in on the neighboring table and invited the four people to come and sit at ours. I thought she knew them, but they didn’t move and looked back at each other, so she began to invite people from other tables.
I was annoyed. “Do we need more people?”
She grabbed my hand, which startled me and hurt. “This is an unforgettable lunch, unforgettable,” she said. She was talking through her teeth.
“Why?” said Penelope.
“Why?” I said.
“It’s an unforgettable lunch,” she repeated, her voice pressing. “Don’t you see? People have finally begun to realize that we have magic powers.”
Penelope said, “We do?”
I thought we should leave.
Outside the restaurant my mother hailed a cab and told the driver to take us to Gramercy Park, where my father’s parents lived. We hadn’t planned that. She sat between us and gripped our hands. “You’re special girls, you know that. You’re so special to me. Do you have any idea how much I love you?” When we went over potholes she made terrible faces of pain, her grip tightening, and Penelope looked at me, worried. “It’s just a spasm,” my mother said. “You’re so special. You’re so special.”
We pulled up in front of the house on Gramercy Park, and Grey the butler opened the immense black door with the brass lion’s head on it. My mother hugged Grey and asked about his parakeet. I didn’t know he had a parakeet. I couldn’t remember ever being here with our mother, and with her I felt like an intruder, that we’d stepped into a mistake. I loved it there usually, the hush and order, glossy white banisters, red carpets, prisms of surprising light from the chandeliers. My sister and I sat on a couch in the little den with Nana, who held her arms around us, while my mother disappeared to talk to our grandfather. Nana asked Grey to bring us ginger ale, and he returned with two tall glasses, etched with the family initial. Soon my mother collected us, and we climbed into a taxi. She wouldn’t stop crying. “My back,” she cried. “Your grandparents hate me.”
This scared Penelope, her eyes frantic from me to our mother. “No one hates you!”
I wanted my mother to calm down. “What’s wrong?” I said.
“They despise me for leaving your father.”
At our building, she dropped us off at our floor and took the elevator upstairs to Amanda, her best friend. We went into our apartment. The doorbell rang, and in came her friends Meg and Walt, invited but forgotten. The phone rang, and it was my mother. She asked me to put Meg on. Then Meg left and went upstairs. My mother phoned again and asked to speak to Walt. He said things like, “Now don’t do that! That’s just stupid!” I stood close to him, trying to figure this out. Amanda lived in the penthouse with an open terrace. I was scared my mother wanted to jump off the roof. She’d promised me once she wouldn’t commit suicide. “For you two,” she said. “I can endure the pain.”
The grown-ups finally returned, my mother drooping in their midst. They put her in her bed. The doctor came, the father of a boy in my class. He and Meg got her out of bed to take her to the hospital. As they were leaving the doctor said to us, “Your mother has back pains. And she is very unhappy for no apparent reason.” I didn’t like the way he said that. I thought I knew the reason—my grandparents, wasn’t it?—but he wouldn’t understand. Walt stayed with us, and we sat in the living room while he talked on the phone about business and smoked, piling filters into a saucer from the kitchen. Meg came back and said, “For a psychiatric hospital, you know, it’s not that bad.”
They didn’t say how long our mother would be gone. An hour? A day? “We can’t stay all week,” Meg said to Walt. Their drinks left marks on the tables. They slept over. I don’t remember them calling my father (surely they must have?). I saw what was what and was afraid: my mother was really messed up, and no one wanted to take care of us.
The next day our grandmother Patsy arrived from London, a town car bringing her from the airport. Usually she would stay at the Carlyle, a suite, but this time she put her suitcases in my mother’s empty room. Meg and Walt left.
Patsy took us to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, an important name. “At least she’s in a good hospital.” Everything there was beige and pale green and ugly. My grandmother kept saying, “Oh, Daphne,” as if my mother needed to clean up her room. “This can’t keep happening.”
“Darling?” My mother reached her hand out, and I took it. It was clammy, and her face didn’t look good, gray and spooky. “Will you bring your friends to see me? Bring Elise! I miss her craziness. Will you bring her on Wednesday?” I said okay just to answer her and dropped her hand and took Penelope out to the hallway. I didn’t know how to stay in the room.
Back at our apartment, our grandmother said to us, “Daphne will be in hospital for two weeks.” I wanted to call my friends, find somewhere to sleep over, but Patsy wouldn’t let us make any calls. We were sequestered.
But then our mother came home, and she’d been in Payne Whitney only three days. Penelope and I were elated, but my grandmother said, “It’s just for the night. Tomorrow she’s going to another hospital.” I heard her tell my mother she would cut her off without a penny if my mother didn’t go into a five-month treatment program. This worried me, as I knew Patsy gave us money for rent and bills. While my grandmother made us scrambled eggs, the one thing the women of my family knew how to prepare, I sat with my mother on her bed. Would she really leave us for five months? I wanted to ask, but she started talking.
“What do you think, Sue? Do you think your gymnastics teacher’s husband is attractive?”
I said no.
“Are you attracted to any boys in your class?” she asked. “That you haven’t told me about yet?”
The next day she left again. My grandmother had gotten her a private room at New York Hospital. “And it wasn’t easy,” she said. After school, I took my sister to visit.
On the bus Penelope said, “What if we’re late, and they don’t let us in?”
“Don’t worry.” I’d memorized the visiting hours. Our mother had had several back surgeries, so many hospital stays that we didn’t count them. We knew the routine. We behaved in the hallways, made our steps quiet, our walk calm. We knew what “ICU” meant and that the proper name for a shot was injection.
We passed shoe repairs, delis, cleaners and locksmiths on York Avenue, and then we got off the bus. We used the hospital’s front entrance, its doors set back a long way from the sidewalk, the path covered by an awning. I followed signs to the elevator, Penelope’s hand a constant in mine. I let her push “up.”
“Have you been here before?” Penelope said.
“No, but you were born here. Papa, too.”
When we came into the room, my mother was laughing with the nurse. She had set her hair, and it looked nice. “This one’s smart,” she said to us. “She’s not like the other nurses, are you, Monica? You’re not a bitch, are you?” The nurse laughed in spite of herself and shook her head. The time went slowly in the room, and I wanted the visit to be over. My mother used Monica’s name in every sentence, and the nurse stayed. The ward smelled of food that had the opposite effect of making me hungry, and I bet my mother wouldn’t eat it, that she’d order up from a deli or have Monica bring her things she wasn’t supposed to get, that no one else got. Except for the moment of being excited and happy as we rounded her doorway, and the first look at her eyes, there was nothing good about being here.
The next day it rained, and there was a long rubber mat beneath the awning and by the elevators. I felt so angry about it, that things were different. After a few days the nurses recognized us, saying, “Hello, girls. Hello, hello. Won’t Mommy be glad to see you?” Patients called our names as we passed their rooms.
“I tell everyone about you,” my mother said to me. “I want them to be as impressed as I am.”