I had two months left of seventh grade when everyone decided Daphne should leave New York. My aunt and grandmother and father thought it was a good idea. Her friends thought so. Obviously, she needed a break. She should get away from the hospitals, the memories of surgery, all those drugs. She needed a chance to get off Demerol, for good. That was the problem, she said, that day at Gramercy Park. “I should never have mixed Demerol and champagne. Now I know. And no more men, Sue. I promise.”
She decided we’d move to New Mexico. “Remember how we loved it? How beautiful? Our trip across the country?” I asked to stay and finish the school year.
“Where will you live?” she said.
“With Marcy and her parents. They’ve said I could. They want me to.” They also invited Penelope, but my mother was indignant. “Who do they think they are? She’s ten! Surely they realize a ten-year-old needs her mother.”
I was a sleepover expert, polite to the parents, responsive at meals. At home I guided my sister from toothbrush to hairbrush, tugged her tights on, scheduled our dental checkups, thawed peas, scrambled eggs. I’d been doing these things since I was eight. I turned off the television when we’d watched enough. But at Marcy’s, at any of my friends’ houses, I didn’t have to do anything but wash my hands before dinner. As 3:00 neared on school days, I’d look around. Who today? I’d call home from the school office, leaving a message with our service if my mother didn’t pick up. The parents were happy to have me. One time Elise’s father took me aside and said, “If you ever need anything, Susy, I want you to call me. Anything at all.” I thought he was creepy.
My mother tried to talk me out of the Cohens, convince me of something sexier, like the house of the handsome headmaster and his wife. She liked to mock Marcy’s mother: “Did Carla make you a big meal? Did she insist everyone have homemade baked apples?” She said the Cohens were strange, but if they were, I liked it, and that’s where I was going.
The last night we spent together in our apartment, my mother slipped a letter under my door as I was sleeping. She’d written it at dawn, noted at the top of the page. The morning was busy as she and Penelope got ready to fly to New Mexico, and we had our crying and hugs and long looks. I didn’t read the letter until I was at school. She wanted to tell me she was sorry she had disappeared “down the tube into the terrifyingly dead world of drugs.” But, she added, “I’m not sorry for anything that has happened to you if it took all this shit & pain to make a Susanna Sophia.” She went on about magic, how we were all magic, etc. She urged me to send her all my “thoughts & feelings,” and I stuck her pages in my diary and wrote “Ho hum” after them.
At school, my stomach was jittery, half afraid, half excited. One of the boys I liked sat beside me for lunch and made jokes. “There’s a smile,” he said. After school I’d be going home with Marcy, to live, for almost two months. My suitcase was already there, and my mother had sublet our apartment to some singers. “They’ll be staying at our place while they’re cutting the new album,” she told people. I wouldn’t continue at Weight Watchers because the Cohens lived out of the neighborhood, and my mother canceled my gymnastics lessons. “I don’t want you there anymore,” she said. “I heard the lechy old husband’s making passes at the girls.”
My mother called from Taos each night. Marcy’s father would answer, laugh, enjoying something he wasn’t used to, and then he’d call me from homework and hand over the phone. “Do you know what adobe is?” she’d say. “How would you like to be in a play this summer?” “You should see the sunsets.” “Your sister’s school is in a double-wide trailer in a field of sagebrush, and her teachers are hippies.” “Groceries here cost nothing, just nothing.”
She asked about the Cohens, their habits and friends, how Marcy and I were getting along. She asked about my schoolwork and teachers. Did I miss her? Did I miss Penelope? My mother reported Penelope hated Taos because everything was unpaved and people walked around in flip-flops. “But you will love it. I do.” She said the cocaine was cleaner. “It’s cut with better stuff.” She said, “I met someone. A real cowboy. Well, he looks just like a real cowboy.” He was divorced. “This move is so important for us,” she said.
In the mornings, Marcy’s mother lined us up before we left for school and hugged us in turn with hard, long hugs. Her hair was stiff from yesterday’s hair spray, and she had the remote control in one hand, a cigarette in the other. She’d lower the volume on Good Morning America until we were out the door. Once, on my way to school with Marcy, someone on the bus lurched forward at us and said, “Hey, Susy! It’s Barney!” His mouth opened really wide. “I was in Payne Whitney. With your mom! How is she?” I made Marcy get off before our stop.
One Saturday, I crept out of the Cohens’ before anyone was awake and took a crosstown bus to my neighborhood. Besides the driver, I was the only one on the bus. I phoned the tenants from a pay phone to ask if I could pick up our mail.
“Sure, come up,” said one of the singers, sleepy.
She let me in, then went back to bed, leaving me in the front hall. My apartment was in disarray. They’d moved our furniture around, and there were four or five mattresses on the living room floor. People were asleep. Bottles and ashtrays covered the mantel, and take-out containers and dirty napkins sat on the tables. I recognized the sound of my sister’s door as it opened. A naked man started out of the bedroom hallway. Seeing me, he retreated.
I went to the kitchen to gather the stack of mail, and I phoned the Cohens. I wanted Marcy to meet me at the movies.
“Where are you?” said Marcy’s dad. He sounded angry. “You cannot just leave and not tell us where you’re going. We’re responsible for you.”
“I’m at my house.”
“Come home at once!” He hung up. I started to cry and went into my old bathroom so no one would hear me. I missed my sister. The Cohens were responsible, but they never asked me the questions my mother did, looking for the heart of things, eager for all my “thoughts & feelings.” No one else made me feel really interesting, different, magical. I just wanted to get to New Mexico.
Before my flight I spent the night at my father’s. It was hard to be around him. I wasn’t allowed to talk while he played classical records or had the news on. He moved slowly, yet he was impatient. He resented my phone calls to my friends. He didn’t like my bus pass on the kitchen counter. When I talked in the aimless way of other seventh graders, he turned his face away.
I bore the hours on the plane, drinking black coffee, its bitterness something to do with being unsupervised. The man next to me said I was way too attractive for a twelve-year-old and gave me his card. At the gate my mother was transformed by a suntan and a pink satin baseball jacket, which made me reserved. “Oh, stop that, silly billy,” she said and grabbed me up, and my lips met the skin of her warm neck. She was whispering into my ear, kissing it with nibbling kisses. She wiped mascara from under her eyes and pulled a man over by the arm. “This is Randall,” she said. I shook his hand.
She sat between us in his pickup, legs around the tall stick shift, feet browned in sandals I’d never seen. “Tell us everything,” she said and then interrupted, narrating context to Randall as I tried to report on the last days of school. I didn’t mention the messy apartment. She’d start ranting. She stroked my hand. “Look at our little hands,” she said, holding them up for Randall, evening up our palms and fingertips. “They’re almost the same size.” I pulled back, but she held on, so I curled my fingers in and tried to let her hand encase mine. They were almost the same. She could no sooner envelop mine than I could hers. Randall downshifted on the steep passes and said little. “He owns a movie theater,” my mother said. “He can two-step. He has a little girl.” She wanted me to know him all at once, and I wanted to be interested.
“What’s playing?” I said.
“He’s getting The Turning Point for me,” she said. “I have to see it. Don’t you think it’ll be better than sex? And he’s going to get Clark Gable movies for you, any one you want.” Her finger cut across my line of vision. “The Rio Grande, Sue, look! What about that view? Better than sex!”
By the time we reached the house, her feet were coated in the reddish dust that seeped across everything in Taos, sky, dry ground, riverbed. Randall swung my case out of the truck’s bed and carried it in. My mother gathered my arm and said so he wouldn’t hear, “Just look at that ass.” I had already looked. “Notice their bodies first,” she used to say. “You can always tell if they’re any good in bed.” It was in the wrists, she said, the mouth, the laugh, the Adam’s apple.
We came inside to the sudden cool of adobe walls.
“Have you ever seen a man look so fabulous in cowboy boots?”
“He seems nice,” I said. “Where’s Penelope?”
“She’s at a sleepover. I wanted you to myself your first night. Oh! Penelope’s got a little job! She’s working in Randall’s theater.” She spoke fast. “It’s so cute. Can you imagine our little Penny behind the concessions stand? Do you want a job? We’ll get you a job. All the kids here work. Everything’s so relaxed. The bars let kids in. And I’ve got both of you signed up for auditions—there’s a play they do every summer—it’s Bye Bye Birdie this year—have you seen it? You’ll love it!—that’s tomorrow—all the kids do it.”
“Slow down,” I said. “There’s an audition tomorrow?”
“Need a nap,” Randall said, stretching, and light landed on the flat snaps of his shirt. He grinned at my mother as if I wasn’t there.
“I’ll be along in a minute. I want to talk to Sue first.” Randall left, his boot heels knocking against the tiled floor. Now she’d stretch across my bed, ask about everyone, postpone sex even. No one else could plumb so deep.
She yanked my wrist up. Her party was gone, her bright fizz gone out, and I felt the threat of oh no. Her lips whitened around the edges. “You keep your hands off my man. You want a man? Go find your own!” She released my arm, and the skin stung from her grip.
“I don’t—”
“And don’t sleep with anyone this summer.”
My stomach flopped as if a boy was about to kiss me. The reality that sex was near. “Why would I want to sleep with someone?”
“Well, all the kids here are doing it.” She walked away, and I heard her bedroom door shut. I took my diary out of my backpack and sat on my new bed against the uneven, chalky wall. “FUCK HER!” I wrote. “I have enough goddamned sense not to! How dare she?”
Randall gave me a job at his movie theater, and it was fun. In the daytime Penelope and I rehearsed the musical at the high school. She was in the chorus, and I had the role of a floozy secretary, which required I learn tap. Our lives were overtaken by the new friends forged in the heat of rehearsals. They were high schoolers, because, my mother explained, “You’re more mature than they are.” Randall picked us up in the high school parking lot and drove us to his theater, or one of the older kids gave us a ride into town. Randall let me work the box office, and Penelope stocked candy bars. New boys for new crushes came in every night—Bradley, Owen, Andy, etc., a lot to keep track of. We ate all the candy we wanted and carried around cups of Dr Pepper. If we forgot where we’d set them, we poured ourselves more. We stayed up late in Penelope’s room, getting the names and gossip straight, who was whose brother, who used to go out with whom. Penelope had made lots of friends, and they absorbed me. Kids gave parties, and our mother always said we could go. She was happy and in love.
People around town knew me and Penelope because we were Daphne’s daughters. Our mother of the pink satin and the lip gloss and the sometime-English accent. When we went into the bakery next to the post office people asked first thing where she was. When we showed up at the roller rink, kids asked.
She liked to have us come in her room and talk. Mostly about men and cocaine. The difference between the dealers you could trust and those who were just cokeheads. She gave me coke to try, holding out a tiny amount at first, offering tips for comfort as I inhaled. Eventually I was allowed to use the spoon myself. “A gram,” she was always saying into the phone. She wrote large checks to the dealers and sweet-talked the landlord about overdue payments. Two rooms off, I knew the difference between the long sniff of inhalation and the swift sniff of cleanup, mucus sucked back in. She let me sift new coke through the little grinder. Sno-seals fluttered out of her bag on the post office counter, and I worried that she’d get caught, that she’d have a car accident. “You’re so self-righteous,” she teased me. “Melodramatic.” Her fingers hovered at the inflamed edges of her nose, checking and wiping. She yanked the rearview mirror to view her face before driving. At home she had taken framed pictures off the walls, and they lay on the coffee table, the couch, her bed, kitchen table, skimmed with the translucent dust, tracks left by her razor blades, which were scattered in their paper sheaths. If you needed a razor blade, there it was. “I think we should put these away,” I would say, and she would laugh. “Want a hit?” she’d ask me.
We dressed for men, putting on the pretty things my mother lavished on us—red tights flecked with silver thread, silk camisoles, new necklaces. She had a crush on this married guy, Michael; we weren’t to breathe a word. I had a crush on one of Randall’s friends, who was over forty. His laugh percolated with smoker’s cough, and his breath smelled like Grand Marnier. My mother let him drive me into town in his pickup. She said yes when he offered to cook me dinner alone at his house, and my chest vibrated with what-if. She said yes! But I didn’t get to go. She took it back, called him a pervert and forbade me to see him.
My mother welcomed my friends, demanded details in a raucous, friendly way when they picked us up for rehearsal in the mornings or brought me home after the movie theater closed. She invited them to stay and draped them all over the living room furniture. They loved her for her attentive ear, her famous generosity. “She’s so cool.” “I can’t believe your mom.” “She’s awesome.” She had rules: If you were too stoned or too drunk, you slept over. If you brought drugs or beer, you shared. Lincoln came over a lot, rolled joints at our coffee table. Lincoln, I could hardly speak in front of him. He was seventeen, five years out of my reach. I had a major crush on him, staring at his hands as he arranged the dope, but I wouldn’t take more than a toke. Nor did I like the way beer made my head empty and made the boys shout over each other. I preferred cocaine, the wide-awake supervising energy. Kids brought hash and beer; kids brought peyote, but I was scared to try it. “Susy’s our straight one!” my mother would laugh. Skinny Owen brought mushrooms and sat by himself fussing over the rancid little clump. One late night, my mother made me and Owen baked potatoes, and the three of us sprinkled mushrooms over the sour cream and ate them on the floor beside the fireplace. I wished Lincoln hadn’t gone home. “It’s Susy’s first time,” my mother said. “Look at her, looking at the flames! Are you hallucinating, are you hallucinating yet?” The three of us got into her bed to sleep, putting Owen in the middle. We traded innuendo and talked about his body to see how antsy we could make him, which was very.
We went to all the movies. Penelope and I watched Grease for days, acting it out at home. Randall got An Unmarried Woman because we wanted to see it. He gave me old posters, old stills from Serpico and Annie Hall. When The Man Who Fell to Earth came my mother asked me for a special date, just the two of us. First we went out for pizza and she told me how sexy David Bowie was.
Before the lights went down in the theater, two men came in with a girl. She was about five and filthy. They sat behind us, and my mother turned and started to ask where they were from, etc. The men had hippie beards, and probably she had meant to find out if they wanted to score coke. She said to one of them, “Is this your daughter?”
He said no, that they were hitchhiking across the country. He said, “We’re kind of homeless.”
“Oh no!” my mother said. She looked at the girl, at them, at me. “Well, I think she should live with me, until you can sort things out. Okay, Sue?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Please God no. The men ended up taking the girl. My mother leapt up, said, “I’ll be right back,” and followed them out. I watched the strange movie and found her in the lobby afterward. She was agitated.
“I’m so terribly worried about that little girl.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” I said. I wanted her focus to return to me.
“You can’t turn your back on people in trouble, Sue. You have no idea what they could do to that little girl. Thank God you have no idea.”
Randall and my mother broke up a lot. “He’s so bloody jealous. Of everyone! Of Michael!” But we knew Michael had spent the night. He’d come over at one in the morning, and I could hear them making love in the room next to mine. I heard Randall yell at her about it. They’d get back together, and break up again, and so on. “It’s animal,” my mother said. “We can’t keep away from each other.” She said the same about Michael. She told us everything but then seemed to forget, each evening a fresh dance, a new script. Penelope started to stack up grudges against Randall for what he’d said, what he’d done, what he’d shouted at our mother. One night I ran into him in a bar in the plaza, and he sat me down and looked at me hard.
“Look,” he said. “I may call your mother a bitch and a cunt, but I’d never do anything to hurt her.”
“I know that,” I said, but I was preoccupied with my own anger. She was driving me crazy, inviting strangers into the car, doing way too much coke, flirting with my friends. I knew how a person could want to hurt her.
One night when we were working my mother arrived at the theater. “I want to talk to you, miss,” she said. She grabbed my arm and walked me through the lobby faster than I wanted to walk. She stopped by the bathrooms, where no one could see us.
“Listen, you,” she said. “The theater is Penelope’s territory. She staked it out and claimed it, and for once you aren’t going to take it away from her!” She hit me in the stomach. What? Even though she’d done it before, each time was a shock. She gripped my chin, squeezing her fingertips into the bone. I was crying but I agreed—Penelope should have her own domain. She wasn’t listening to me and went on. “When you were in New York, you called Penelope and said, ‘Oh, I miss you, I love you, you mean so much to me…blah, blah, blah.’ Then you get here and you don’t spend one day with her. You are a phony, Susy, a phony, phony, phony!” Each time she said “phony” she punched my stomach. By the end of her sentence I felt used to it. But I had spent the first three days entirely with Penelope. We sat together at the auditions. We hung movie posters in her room. I’d give up the job, I didn’t care.
My mother left, and I cooled my face with water in the bathroom, checking my expression in the mirror. My mind refused the hitting, turned my body off. I went back to my station by the soda machine. I couldn’t tell if Penelope was mad at me. Soon my mother emerged from Randall’s office. She had her body curved against him, her hand over his ass, and she was giggling into his ear. I hated her. She tried to hug me but I walked away.
Later, at home, she called me into her room.
“Don’t you ever do all that dramatizing in front of Randall again.”
“What do you mean?” I was trying to be stony, still unforgiving about earlier.
“Oh, you know: red-eyed, puffy-faced, et cetera. And stop flirting with my man!”
I don’t want a man, I wanted to scream. I’m twelve.
I wanted to kiss. I watched movie kisses with acute attention and kept an index card tucked into my diary, titled BOYS I LIKE. When I wrote “Lincoln” my chest ached, and I often had to leave the theater during “Hopelessly Devoted to You,” because I was crying so hard. He was every song on the radio, long jags of obsessive talk, lengthy journal entries. My mother would happily listen, explaining that I was attracted to his authority. She added how utterly not her type he was.
“He’s so hilarious,” I said. He wasn’t all that funny, but he was cynical and theatrical, which compelled me. She talked tactics with me, cross-legged on her mattress as she stared down at the spoons and powdery piles, her underpants a visible triangle. Penelope was drawing. I tapped coke into new sno-seals. The Rockford Files was on.
“What if we invited Lincoln for a special dinner?” she said. “Or we could give him a lift to the airport.” She speculated on his kisses. She wanted me to lose my virginity to him, “when you’re old enough. Lincoln would be a good first lover. He’d know what he was doing.”
“But I’ll never see him again!”
“Of course you will. We’re going back to New York in September so you can graduate from eighth grade with your friends, but then we’re moving here for good. I’m going to buy a house.” She looked up at James Garner on the television. “Now that man is divine. One day I will have him.” Penelope and I smirked at each other.
At my mother’s birthday party—her thirty-second—I stayed near the door, distracted and anxious for Lincoln to show up. She had invited everyone. Painters, drug dealers and musicians filled the kitchen, their toddlers against their legs. Teenagers huddled, older girls exiting the bathroom in trios. Lincoln drove a Chevy Nova, his car discernible to me at a distance, even in the dark, because I knew the height and spacing of his headlights. He arrived with a couple of other older kids from the play and smoked pot outside. I watched him leaning back against the door of his car, arms folded as he waited for the joint to come around. He was loud, being sarcastic, which I thought incredibly adult. I hated the mulchy smell of pot, but I wanted to be leaning next to him. He liked to tell me I really needed to get stoned, and I liked to tell him how much better life was without being high.
The night he left for college, I cried extravagantly, stirring up hysteria in my body. Such enormous proof of love. I wanted to soak my pillowcase so it would still be damp in the morning. My mother sat beside me, her hand rubbing the small of my back.
“Little one,” she said. Her voice was gentle. “You really love him. Don’t you?”
“Yes, yes. It hurts!”
“It won’t hurt so much in a while.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. You’ll see. It will stop. What about, for your birthday present, if I bought Lincoln a ticket to come to New York? He could stay with us for a week. Would you like that?”
“Really, Mummy?” She could divine the best remedy, make me and everything special. She was going to fly him to New York for me.
We returned to New York a few weeks later. I had my thirteenth birthday and started eighth grade, reunited with my old friends. I told them Lincoln was coming, but he never did.