This is the story of the year we left our mother and father in order to live on our own, away from their bad behavior and their infuriating pretense that they were the most splendid parents in all the world.
It was four years ago. Meg was twenty then, I was about to turn seventeen, and Amy was just fifteen. The three sisters. All my life, whenever we’ve walked down the street together, people have smiled at us. Look, sisters. When I walk down the street by myself, I never get those smiles. I have a theory, actually, that people have never noticed me on my own as they do Meg and Amy, though we are all technically pretty, because I’m only interesting to look at in the context of my sisters.
I’m neither the beginning nor the end of the series but the one in the middle, the bridge, the link from adorable little Amy—who is not exactly beautiful, with her pale blue eyes and too-small nose and too-wide mouth (she says), but instead, possesses a wonderful kind of grace and unconscious harmony—to Meg, the reliable competent one, the sweet-tempered romantic with her curly
hair and carefully organized features and strikingly long and pale hands—looks that often remind people of John Singer Sargent portraits.
That leaves me as the let’s-see-now-which-one-are-you sister, but unlike Amy or Meg, I am indifferent to clothing, I whistle on the street, sometimes I stare at people, my hair is cropped short and I never wear makeup, I’m not especially quiet and nice, and I have never minded being defined by what I do rather than how I look.
Which one am I? Through childhood, I was always the author, stage manager, director, and ticket seller for Amy and Meg’s living room musical entertainments, though I happen to have something close to perfect pitch, like our mother, who sings like a lark, while neither of them can carry a tune in a bucket, which is their unfortunate musical heritage from our father.
I appear in very few family photos—which are arranged (by me) chronologically, on a shelf of photo albums in our mother’s study, as no one else in the family is that organized—because I’m the snapshot taker at birthday dinners. It seems that I am the family narrator. My name is Joanna.
Okay, so now I might as well get the usual raised-eyebrow-reaction-to-our-names thing out of the way. Margaret, Joanna, and Amy. So, yes, we were more or less named for the Louisa May Alcott characters by our inventor father and English professor mother (whom we have never, ever addressed as Marmee, not even at the best of times, when her love and approval and goodness bathed our family in its golden light), and no, there are just the three of us, and yes, that’s right, very good, Beth is the one who dies anyway, so you can see why they skipped her and went straight to Amy.
(For the record, we had a painted turtle named Beth for a couple of years, when we were in grade school, though we never knew for sure if it was a girl or a boy, and it turned out that Beth, true to his or her name, was doomed to a tragic and early death, though in his or her case it was a solitary shuffle off this mortal coil under the bathroom radiator.)
Some people can’t resist calling me Jo, but unless they’ve known me all my life (Meg called me Jo-Jo when I was a newborn and so that was my nickname throughout my childhood) it bugs the hell out of me, because usually it’s someone who is utterly convinced that to call me Jo is an incredibly clever, insightful, original, and highly literary act, second only to wondering why our last name isn’t March instead of Green.
We left our mother and father because we were angry. We left our mother and father because they wouldn’t leave each other. We left because our mother was sorry but refused to be guilty, and our father refused to be angry and chose instead to be sad. Neither was a sufficient response. The situation demanded more. We three sisters were part of the hateful situation, and we demanded more, much, much more.
We left our mother and father in the last week of August, four years ago, after a bitter summer of debate and negotiation that was all too cerebral and theoretical and without substance. Our parents had hedged us round with principles. They had made us who we were but they couldn’t live up to the standards we were raised to admire—standards we demanded for others as we demanded them for ourselves. They only had weak words of insufficient explanation. We wanted good strong words that meant something. And then we wanted more than words. The Green sisters wanted action. The Green sisters wanted blood. Somebody’s, anybody’s. Everybody’s.
What happened?
Our mother had an affair and we found out.
Her husband of twenty-three years could forgive her, but we, her three daughters who had known her all our lives, could not. We could not forgive her this trespass against us, against our family, this act that made everything into a lie. We just couldn’t. I think Meg tried, but I know I didn’t want to try. Why should I? And
sweet little Amy, the baby sister, the tagalong kid, Amy who still liked to snuggle and sing softly with our mother sometimes before bed—her bitterness and rage were like an eclipse of the sun.
We couldn’t forgive our mother for what she had done, and then we couldn’t forgive our father for forgiving her, and so we left our mother and father and went to live on our own, the three of us, in order to form a more perfect union, to live by the values we had been raised to honor.
We wanted them to be strong so we didn’t have to be strong, but they couldn’t do it, not on our terms. Our mother and father refused to proceed down the path we believed they had laid out for themselves. These were horrifying circumstances which called for horrifying solutions. We wanted divorce proceedings with all the trimmings: cruel threats, vicious scenes, custody battles, rapacious lawyers, selfish declarations, divisions of property, petty accusations, Pyrrhic victories.
We could not imagine life going on otherwise from that moment in time, that motionless pause of the pendulum’s swing between before and after, between not-knowing and knowing, between faith—oh, so much faith—and loss of faith.
They thought everything could be exactly the same and we thought nothing could ever be the same. We three sisters cherished our anger until it grew strong and took possession of us. What did they imagine? That the superior culture of our family, the counterentropy of the magnificent Green family, some essential wonderful Green family-ness, was sufficient to keep everything together? They didn’t get it. Right up to the humid August afternoon Amy and I closed the door on the big, messy West Seventy-fifth Street apartment in which we had lived our whole previously happy lives, they didn’t get it.
A moment: Amy and I are standing in the hallway with our bags, waiting for the elevator so we could walk from our corner of Amsterdam
Avenue down the three familiar blocks to the Seventy-second Street Broadway IRT station, from which we would go downtown to Times Square, to the shuttle to Grand Central Station, to the 4:02 Metro-North train to New Haven, and, finally, to an overpriced taxi ride to Meg’s apartment—our apartment—on High Street. While Amy and I packed our things, they had just sat there on the big floppy green couch in the living room, not getting it, reading left-over sections of the Sunday New York Times in companionable silence, drinking their muddy Ethiopian coffee from their favorite Italian coffee mugs procured on a romantic trip to Italy before Meg was born, offering the Week in Review in exchange for Travel, so very civilized, husband and wife at home on the Monday after a languid weekend at the beginning of a new term.
So confidently evolved and original and in touch as parents that instead of Mom and Dad they had chosen to be called Janet and Lou by their daughters, they failed to notice that we were really moving out and not just being dramatic teenagers. They failed to say or do anything to stop us. They failed to take us seriously. Or perhaps that’s wrong, perhaps they did take us seriously, but in doing so they failed to take us literally.
As I closed the door I made myself look at them sitting there with their newspapers and their certainties, and I made a promise to myself that I would always remember that moment. As I so clearly have. There they are: Lou and Janet on the couch, affecting no concern about the door closing on their two daughters who have announced their plan to leave, to go live with their older sister at college in New Haven.
Is there just a hint of desperation behind the smugness I think I see on their faces? Lou in his weekend yellow Lacoste shirt he’s had since college, Janet with her kind “can-I-help-you” look that makes her so popular with her students—are they really so united in their certainty that we would be back in a few days, so complacent about their theory of indulging us correctly through this
adolescent acting-out festival? At that moment I doubted that I would ever love them again in the way I always had.
They didn’t get it that the poisons of her actions and his failure to take action had transformed the glorious landscape of our perfect little Green family existence totally and utterly into an unrecognizable lunar wasteland, a moonscape with no air to breathe and very little gravity to hold us in place. We didn’t understand what held them in place, and we didn’t want them in place, and we couldn’t remain in that Potemkin village of a family for another moment, yet all that either of them did that day was lift a diffident hand to wave goodbye to Amy and me as if we were merely going out for a walk around the block. And so we left.
J.G.
September 2003