Surely I am suffering some exquisite torture, too. I am sensitive. I am good. Surely I am a victim of something, not nothing. I am not merely devoid of feeling, am I? I must be troubled. The troubled are everywhere. There are books and television shows and whole industries devoted to them—magazines for them to read, hot lines for them to call, uplifting magnets to stick on their refrigerators. They surround us, loving too much, crying real tears, confessing their sins and being forgiven.
But there are no twelve-step programs for people who are selfish, or heartless, or shallow, as most people seem to be. There are no Monday night movies about girls who aren’t troubled at all.
Instead, the girls on the Monday night movies are fragile, and big-eyed, and too sensitive for this world, and the bad things that happen to them bother them a lot. Their beauty is the beauty of suffering endured. You can always see their collarbones under the flimsy dresses they wear, and darkness gathers there.
But I have never been able to imagine myself in one of those movies. Until my mother left, my life seemed ordinary, and dull, and untroubled. No “funny” games with uncles. No vague memories of my father torturing my childhood pets. I never had any childhood pets. Just a glimpse here or there of my mother in a bathrobe, looking annoyed. A few dull family outings—my father with a fishing pole, my mother running after a paper napkin that got loose from the picnic basket and flew across the park. There was a trip out West when I was five. I had to get out of the car to pee in the desert and got red dust on my knees. When I climbed back into the car, I asked my father where we were.
“Death Valley,” he said.
I slept all the way to the ocean while a groggy wand of sun moved back and forth across my face.
I remember a beesting at Great Serpent Mound National Park one summer. A twisted ankle at the circus. A Jujube caught in my molar at the movies: I had to go to the rest room to dig it out.
Nothing. Less than nothing. A childhood without trauma. Who ever heard of such a thing?
Even now, I feel just lightness when I consider my life, even more lightness than ever now that my mother’s gone, as if I am carrying a hollow cake with me wherever I go, balancing it on a tray that wants to sail out of my hands like a kite in wind.
What can an analyst possibly analyze out of such a life?
But that’s exactly how it is in the movies: You resist all the lust and tenderness and terror, while your shrink ice-picks at you until your head’s been cracked.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess you helped Mrs. Hillman when her husband left—”
Nothing from Dr. Phaler. Not even a nod. Patient/doctor confidentiality, I suppose. She can’t even clear her throat.
“And, I guess, well, my mother left.”
Now she cocks her head as if she’s heard a flute note in the distance.
A few seconds pass.
She says, “Your mother left.”
I lift and drop my shoulder. The left one. The side of reason, and control.
Or is that the right?
I’m looking at her knees, which are like the flat faces of two owls.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yes.”
“Where did she go?” Dr. Phaler asks.
“That’s an excellent question,” I answer.
TWO
January 1987
“I’M UP HERE!” I HEAR HER SHOUT.
“Over here!”
“Down here!”
It doesn’t matter. I’m locked in. I pound my fists on the lid of this—whatever it is—until my hands ache. She’s out there, telling me finally where she is, but I’m stuck in this cold, locked box. This void. This square cut out of winter air with a pair of very sharp shears.
When I wake up, there’s snow spitting under my window shade, melting mid-bedroom, and I remember opening my window before I went to bed, desperate for fresh air because the smell of her perfume—eau-de-vie—wafting down the hall, leaking up under my bedroom door, had been so strong I thought that I might choke to death on the scent of my mother in my sleep.
IT’S A YEAR TO THE DAY SINCE SHE LEFT—WITHOUT A WORD, without a trace, without her coat, without her purse, without so much as a glass slipper dropped behind her in the driveway, run over, crunched to glittering Cinderella bits.
The first few months she was gone, Detective Scieziesciez would call every few days to ask, again, if we had heard from her, and to assure us that he hadn’t. The flyers his people put up all over town—the ones with her photograph, poorly reproduced, grimacing into my father’s camera on Christmas morning—were taken down or blew away in the winter wind. No one even called with some crank clue, some paranoid theory linking my mother’s disappearance to the sighting of a UFO over Lake Erie.
What can you do? It’s a free country. If a grown woman wants to disappear in it, she can. None of the authorities we’ve spoken to has had any authority over this kind of thing, the kind of thing involving women who turn to dust in the suburbs and sweep themselves up. God knows, as the saying goes, where she’s gone. And He’s not talking.
Nor have any of the authorities expressed much concern. When we went to the Bureau of Missing Persons, everyone we spoke to took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote my mother’s name at the top, then wrote “Adult White Female” underneath it, as though that might conjure her up.
If anything, I imagine they felt sympathy for her. Looking up from that blank sheet to my father’s face, down at that emptiness again, they might have been able to imagine her life, and hoped she’d managed to escape.
“We see a hundred cases of missing wives a week,” a missing persons secretary said, laying a hand on my father’s hand, as if it would make him feel better. She had fingernails as long as hooks, a paperback book hidden under her telephone switchboard, Women Who Love Too Much, and she snuck it back out before we’d even left her desk. It seemed, that year, that every secretary in every office had that book on her desk, spine broken.
When she smiled good-bye her teeth looked false and bright.
Just once, Detective Scieziesciez came to the house. It was morning, and my father had already left for work. “Dad,” I’d shouted down to him from the upstairs bathroom while he was huffing around in the hallway waiting for me, “just go. I’ll walk. I’m going to have to be late.”
“Are you sure, Kat?”
He said it generously, but I could tell he was annoyed. His voice sounded thin, transparent, like a piece of cloth stretched tightly over the mouth of a jar.
Tardiness, in my father’s book, was a sin right up there next to homicide, although I knew he wouldn’t reprimand me for it. Always, we’d had a polite relationship, but since my mother disappeared, it had become even more so. It had become something formal, Victorian, lacking even the intimacy of irritation. When I said I didn’t feel well, didn’t want to go to school, or was going to be late, he never asked me why, and I suspected it might be because he was afraid I might tell him I’d gotten my period, and had cramps, or some other terrible embarassment from which neither of us would ever fully recover.
That morning, I was running late for school because I’d spent too much time trying to decide what to wear. I was upstairs, standing in the bathroom with a pile of my own discarded clothes at my feet, naked except for a flowered bra and matching panties. It had been months since my mother left, and the last thing I expected was that Detective Scieziesciez would pull up unannounced in his unmarked car.