Mother Daughter Me (16 page)

We three girls slept in the living room on various makeshift beds. The only bathroom was in the back of the house, off my mother’s small bedroom. When my mother had a man over, walking through her bedroom in the middle of the night to pee felt too awkward. So we peed into a glass jar and tossed the contents onto a bird of paradise outside the front window.

Throughout the visit, there must have been a few mentions of whether we would like to stay in San Diego permanently, and this possibility—which did not seem out of the question, given my mother’s apparent stability that summer—must have been conveyed to my father and stepmother. My father’s reaction was subdued, but Vivienne wouldn’t hear of it. Years later, I learned that while my passive father would probably have let my mother keep us in San Diego, Vivienne urged him to bring us home to Amherst.

My mother turned uncharacteristically quiet. Soon it was conveyed to us that our father had decided we should return to Amherst and that he had made airline reservations for our return. Then, late one afternoon
just before we were supposed to leave, my mother came home and announced that she had obtained temporary custody.
What? Why?
Sarah seemed ready to stay with my mother. She was spending her time at the beach, hanging out with boys, and my mother not only gave her fourteen-year-old daughter no flak about this but seemed to approve. They were closer than ever. But I wanted to go back, and for the first time in my life, I broke ranks with my sister. Vivienne was hardly a demonstrative or warm woman, and she had made her preference for her own children clear. Still, I craved the order and continuity she and my father now represented.

My mother’s expression turned sheepish when she saw how shocked I was. But her tone was righteous. She told us we would be better off with her. After all, she was our mother. She loved us. Of course, I loved her too. But I had a life in Amherst. I had friends there. I had my own bed—and a built-in desk for doing my homework. I panicked. Somehow I decided that the only obstacle to our returning to Amherst was the lack of a proper home for my kitten, which was bigger now and no longer quite so cute. The day after my mother announced her custodial gambit, I went to the Mission Beach boardwalk with the cat in my arms. I was hugely relieved when I found someone to take it. Now there was nothing holding me back.

Which turned out to be true, though for reasons having nothing to do with the cat. In 1968, soon after we moved to Amherst, my father had obtained temporary custody of us. (In his order, the judge had referred to my mother’s “illness” with enough delicate disapproval to make the reference worthy of Tennessee Williams.) My mother’s hasty action in San Diego must not have been enough to supersede that order, because she finally agreed to send us home in time to start school. Both my father and stepmother picked us up at the airport, and when we pulled in to our driveway, I was overjoyed. I reveled in the cleanliness of the house. I appreciated the spotless red carpet in the hallway leading to the staircase that in turn led up to our large, orderly bedrooms; the fresh tracks left by the vacuum cleaner gave me inexplicable solace. For the rest of my life, staircases, especially those with thick banisters and sturdy newel posts, would symbolize stability. And promise.

At the same time, I sensed that however intact it all seemed, something
wasn’t right. My father and stepmother fought constantly. Vivienne openly favored her own children, picking on Sarah in particular, while my father complained bitterly about my stepbrothers’ laziness and general good-for-nothingness. Still, I convinced myself that it wasn’t so much
whom
I wanted to be with but
what
I wanted to be with: the big open kitchen with a built-in fireplace and cabinets Vivienne had painted in bright mod yellow, purple, and orange; the school bus that stopped at our corner; and my clutch of friends at school. The Amherst house proved there was an alternative to my mother’s lifestyle, which required me to pee into a jar so as not to come upon adults having sex.

Within a few days of our return, my father and stepmother told us that my mother was suing for custody, as well as back child support for the years we’d been living with them. As soon as Sarah and I arrived in Rochester in April 1968, my father had stopped paying. Now my mother’s parents had talked her into staking a legal claim to the support. They had hired an expensive Boston lawyer named Brooks Potter, while my father and stepmother found a less expensive but tenacious lawyer named Selma Rollins.

On the day of the hearing—September 11, 1970, the day before Sarah’s fifteenth birthday—my father and stepmother took the five of us out of school, put us in the van, and drove the eight miles to the Hampshire County Superior Courthouse in the town of Northampton. Having all the children present had been Vivienne’s idea. She was intent on conveying the impression of a happy, cohesive family—a ruse, given the tension at the time, but a pleasing montage to offer up to the judge.

My mother, accompanied by my grandfather and Mr. Potter, was dressed conservatively in a long gray wool dress—also an effect aimed at the judge. I remember being struck by how unlikely such an article of clothing seemed. I was accustomed to seeing her in sporty slacks and the occasional minidress, not Amish-inspired attire. In fact, the playacting on both sides was hard to ignore. Here was Vivienne, who on her best days was a cold fish of a mother, acting like Gaia herself. And then there was my mother—yes, the same one who boasted of her sexual conquests to her young daughters—dressed like Maria von Trapp.

Sarah and I weren’t invited into the courtroom, but our feelings were apparently something the court wanted to take into consideration.
I was interviewed in a separate room, apart from Sarah, and asked where I’d like to live. I remember expressing my preference to remain in Amherst. I was asked to draw a diagram of the layout of my mother’s bungalow, which made it clear that there was only one route to the bathroom: through my mother’s bedroom. This architectural detail apparently sparked the judge’s interest and concern. Selma Rollins was aggressive, if not downright cruel, in her determination to characterize my mother as unfit. By the time my mother emerged from the courtroom, she was ashen. My protective instincts must have kicked in, because I remember rushing to her side. But I don’t remember much else.

The judge was a conservative man raised down the road, in the farming town of Hadley, a swatch of a place known for its fine asparagus. He handled many of the divorce and custody cases in the county and no doubt had seen his share of scandal, but perhaps no behavior quite so blatant as my mother’s. There was plenty to chew on in our sorry tale, but he had focused on one thing: the diagram I had drawn. The placement of the bathroom and the implications of that placement were to become the central fact around which all else pivoted.

The judge awarded permanent custody to my father and stepmother. This was a slap in the face to my mother, coming at a time when women were almost always awarded sole custody, out of the belief that the mother was the most appropriate parent to raise a child. When deciding custody cases, courts embraced this sentiment, which was known as the “tender years doctrine.” (It wasn’t until later in the 1970s that a major shift in custody law reversed that well-entrenched preference for the mother, and the tender years doctrine gave way to a different standard, known in legal circles as the “best interests of the child.”) In 1970, the maternal preference was set aside only when the mother was found to be “for some reason … unfit for the trust.” The principal reason for my mother’s unfitness was, of course, her drinking, which gave rise to a branching tree of unacceptable behaviors.

After the judge’s ruling, my mother and grandfather and the Boston lawyer huddled briefly in the hallways outside the courtroom. Then they were gone.

Sarah was crushed at the outcome. Her allegiance to our mother throughout the court proceedings had been unwavering. I was pleased
by the ruling but also ashamed of myself. I had been proven a traitor to both my mother and my sister, who now sat glum and silent in the farthest backseat of the van. Not only had I expressed a preference for my father and Vivienne, but
I had produced the damning diagram
, complete with the inconvenient bathroom that served as Exhibit A. Still, even as a twelve-year-old, I sensed that Sarah and I were collateral damage. Our feelings were beside the point.

———

M
ATT LYON WAS A BEAUTIFUL BOY WHO GREW EVER MORE STRIKING
over time. He had long, delicate fingers, high cheekbones, and thick curls of blond hair that he pulled back into a ponytail. He was like Tadzio, the fourteen-year-old boy from
Death in Venice
, who represents the very ideal of youthful beauty. And for me, at age thirteen, Matt went from being one of the Lyon boys to my object of single-minded obsession. Throughout the spring of eighth grade, I held my crush on Matt close, telling no one about it. And then, by some miracle, during a weeklong school camping trip at the end of the year, Matt noticed me. He started to single me out, ever so tentatively gravitating to me. We didn’t say much to each other—we were too shy for that. But on that camping trip, everything else melted away as we focused on our intense mutual awareness. On the last night, he crawled into my tent and lay silently next to me, my hand in his, while my tent-mate slept. An hour later he was gone.

Then summer arrived. I had been planning to go to California to see my mother and was waiting for her to call with details. I never called her myself, though I did write her letters. I had been crushed too many times after dialing her number and hearing her answer the phone drunk and clearly disappointed to hear the voice of her daughter. She called us sometimes but only if something pressing—usually involving logistics—needed to be conveyed. A week or two before I was to leave for California, she called to say she couldn’t have me come after all. She “wasn’t up for a long visit.” Perhaps she was drinking, or getting over a binge, or felt she might tip over into one, or just plain didn’t have the emotional room to have me there. Whatever her reason, I was devastated. My stepmother had been standing near the phone, and when I hung up she consoled me, tut-tutting as she went. The subtext was clear: My mother was an unreliable, unpredictable, selfish woman, and that judge in Northampton had made precisely the right call.

I persuaded my father and stepmother to send me to a theater camp on Long Island instead. The night before I was to leave, magic happened. I was staying in my stepsister’s room on the lower level of the house, because she was away, working as an au pair in Belgium (“Anything to get out of there,” she told me years later). The back door opened directly to the lower level of the house, and my stepsister’s room was just inside the door. Hearing a tap at the back door, I opened it, and Matt came in and climbed into my bed. My recollection is that we simply lay there, too terrified to do more than hold hands. At around midnight, we heard footsteps coming down the stairs. It was my father, coming to check on me. Matt dashed into the closet, my father opened the door, peered in, then shut it again. Matt emerged from the closet, tiptoed back to the bed, and finally left at 5:00
A.M.

I spent much of my summer on Long Island preoccupied with thoughts of Matt, wondering what would happen in the fall. I wrote him several times, but he didn’t respond. I began to wonder if I had dreamed our night together.

While I was at camp, Sarah, who had fallen in with a group of college kids, hung around Amherst, then decided that she was going to
visit my mother regardless of her state. Sarah wanted desperately to get away from home. The atmosphere was poisonous. My father, who was now repeating the pattern established with my mother ten years earlier, spent most of his time at work. When he was home, he and my stepmother fought frequently, usually about Sarah, whom my stepmother had come to dislike and distrust. So Sarah set off to California with a new boyfriend I had yet to meet. All I knew was that he was an Amherst College student named Derek.

At the end of the summer, after both Sarah and I had returned, she invited Derek to dinner. Before he arrived, she told me all about her beau: so smart and wise and mature, and, best of all, she said, “Mom loves him!” My stepsiblings still hadn’t returned from their various summer getaways, so when Vivienne set the formal dining room table, it was for just the five of us. The moment the boyfriend entered the house, I knew the evening would not go well. Tall and gaunt, he wasn’t merely unshaven; he was dirty. He wore a blue work shirt and jeans that looked as if they hadn’t been washed in weeks. After an uncomfortable silence, Sarah ran up to him and threw her arms around his neck. He kissed her passionately. I squirmed. It was all so discordant. Sarah had reached the height of a young woman without having shed the soft features of childhood. And here she was, engaging in a kiss that was like something in a movie she was too young to see.

My father and Vivienne made an effort, asking him polite and uninteresting questions. “You attend Amherst College, Derek? And when do you graduate?”

“I guess when I feel like it,” the boy-man answered. He had attacked his plate of food as if it were prey, utterly without appreciation.

At Hampshire, where he taught undergraduates, my father had seen plenty of college students like Derek. They’d been to Woodstock and dropped acid and opposed the Vietnam War and despised authority. But this one was in my father’s house, eating my father’s food, and sleeping with his fifteen-year-old daughter. Things turned from awkward to unpleasant. My father began to lecture Derek. He had made a decent home for his two daughters, he said. He suggested that Derek look around and appreciate it. Derek then delivered a speech of his own. He told my father that this cloistered and stifling place was not the best atmosphere
for Sarah, that she was old enough to be independent. Then he announced the apparent reason for the visit. “Sarah isn’t happy living with you. I think it would be best for her if she came to stay with me.”