I Will Do Better, page 5
I am sure my sister is correct. But my ears—less secure, more prone to brooding—heard a different sentence: I wish you had never been born. I heard my mother wishing she had not had me.
Here’s one more line, used when our mother felt we weren’t taking school seriously, when we were disappointing her: “Don’t you see? We’re doing this so you won’t have to.”
Show me a person who does everything out of duty, I’ll show you one furious human.
MEET NINA! THE latest in our revolving door of sitters and erstwhile nannies! Originally from Portugal and ostensibly in the United States to study performance art! Showing herself to be a performance in her own right! Hair a succulent orange bob! Grotesquely oversized eyewear that, remarkably, still accentuated her sharp features! Flannel shirt enveloping her like a yurt! Denim overalls, cuffs rolled with a precision that appeared military! Calf-high Docs! She justified the exclamation marks: her total effect that of a young woman working diligently and successfully to be striking. At once wholly efficient and impossibly funky.
Bending into a crouch, Nina made eye contact with Lily, placed a manicured hand onto Lily’s shoulder. “Do you enjoy music?”
Lily, awestruck, nodded.
“I do too. Do you want to be my friend?”
Lily didn’t respond.
“Let me tell you this: If you don’t like Blonde Redhead, you cannot be my friend.”
Lily thought. “I like Blonde Redhead.”
Nina’s smile was generous and, at the same time, plotting mayhem; she revealed excellent canines.
“Daddy!” Lily turned toward me. “If you don’t like Blondehead, Daddy, you cannot be my friend!”
Thus, the reins of the stroller were handed over, Nina joining the crew, coming on full-time as Lily’s babysitter. A normal family had parents tagging in, providing needed breaks, taking turns being the bad cop, delivering the necessary heart-to-heart, each parent acting both as confidant to the child and as ballast for and against one another; in this home, Nina strategized about how to get Lily to stop sucking her thumb. Nina goaded and teased Lily into eating her broccoli; she instructed Lily through projects that involved significant quantities of water and flour, modeled the latest cool dances, then captured, on her phone, Lily’s flailing imitations. Nina tapped into reservoirs of positive energy previously untapped in my child. I saw how Lily looked forward to her showing up each morning, and I also watched how, returning from one day trip to Central Park and a museum, Nina spoke to Lily in clipped, one- and two-word sentences, making sure Lily took off her shoes, washed her hands. Afterward, Nina let me know how much money she’d spent on their lunch and that she’d wait while I went to the bank machine. Nina made sure to inform me when she had an exam and would have to leave here early.
Then came the day I could see that Nina’s shoulders were slumped, her gas tank empty.
They’d returned from the playground on Second Avenue. Something was on her mind.
She mentioned a little steel counter in the playground. I knew it well. Amid the mandated slides and bridges, it sort of looked like an open-air window space, with metal bars running up each side. Lily enjoyed putting her head in the space, playing storekeeper.
“Is cute, you know?” Nina said. “I ask to buy strawberry ice cream. Lily answers, ‘We are out.’ I say, ‘Vanilla.’ ‘We are out.’ Every flavor are out.”
“Right,” I said, saving a document on my laptop.
“The market is out of everything.” Nina undid the final button of her glittery thrift store cardigan. “I pretend the counter is for clock store. Lily says clocks are broken. I tell Lily I want to buy two broken clocks. No. ‘We’re out of the broken clocks.’”
“The anecdote’s definitely charming, Nina.”
“I am bringing this up for a reason, Charles.”
I turned toward her.
“I am Lily’s advocate. She does something, you get upset, I don’t think is a big deal, I tell you. This is acting normal.”
“Right,” I said. Now she had my attention.
“Refusing to eat the peanut butter and jelly,” Nina said. “I seen this before. Sometimes it is flirt. Sometimes confrontation. But is what the little ones must do in order to express. Part of the growing process. Remember, I was nanny for two years in Lisbon.”
“Something’s up?” I said.
Nina worked her nose into a kind of scowl. She thought about what to say next, but instead rubbed at the back of her hamstring, as if this could ease her growing frustration. “I don’t know yet.”
ON THE FIRST Saturday afternoon of June, in the hopes of expressing our appreciation for Nina—her calming presence, the normalcy she’d imported to our home—Lily and I purchased a cheap bottle of wine, then headed down into the full diaper known as the Manhattan subway system. All the lines we needed were out of service or under construction, but we would not be deterred, soldiering on, sweating, waiting for new and obscure transfers, discovering new and exciting body odors.
Dehydrated, sweating, cranky, we emerged onto the mean streets of deepest, newly gentrified Bushwick, and made our way to the open studios, the studio walk, whatever you want to call what was taking place in a converted factory whose elevators were not in service. Fifth floor; requisite corrugated metal pipes and brick and concrete; mandatorily dim studio; casting call–provided hipsters—fifteen or twenty, figure, most of them seated on the cement. Across the room was a makeshift stage. A performance was underway: someone in a goatee producing tortured sounds on a theremin, flailing interpretive dancers, some de rigueur spoken-word bullshit.
My daughter immediately recognized the young woman in the middle of the stage. Lily broke free from my grip and rushed.
“NINA. NINA.”
Lily climbed onto the stage. Lily resisted attempts to get her down—first from “NINA,” then other cast members. She refused to budge, adding to the afternoon’s performance with her own, one that turned howling, if not satanic.
Picture, if you will, the aftermath of this ruined masterpiece, as captured in a children’s picture book. Believe me, if I had talent, I’d draw it for you: musical stands and a chair knocked over, the theremin player/hipsters at the cheese table commiserating, maybe some wires and speakers in the back. Meanwhile, a happily oblivious Lily (adorned in a small pair of overalls) holds Nina’s hand, eats a cookie. Nina, wearing a ridiculous performance outfit (maybe a leotard?), speaks to/lectures an apologetic Charles (hoodie). Nina has a serious expression. Her free hand is in a fist, positioned on her shapely hip. Her dialogue bubble says:
“Have you ever thought of having Lily talk to someone?”
BEING TOLD THAT your three-year-old daughter might be in the throes of mental distress is no-shit horrific.
My first instinct was to deny, avoid, close my ears.
But there was no avoiding the experience of Lily’s defiance, no way to deny the vortex of her tantrums.
All too well, I knew that my mother should have spent her adulthood on meds. Her life would have been better. My dad’s life would have been easier. All of our lives would have benefited.
My dad’s older brother, when he’d been in class at graduate school at Columbia, had suffered a psychotic break. It had affected his ability to think and care for himself, and for the rest of his life, his parents had to support him; when they were too old, my dad took over the bills, while his sister coordinated the logistics of his care. Meaning there were issues on my father’s side too.
I’d been something of the remaindered middle child: my older brothers were athletes with outsized personalities and problems, while my sister was the family’s darling and star. Which is to say, I didn’t quite get the attention I wanted from my parents. I was also a late bloomer, one of those kids who’s always a step behind in junior high school, trying to figure out just who those bands on the concert T-shirts that other kids wore were, why I couldn’t I ever find that music on the radio. At best I was the third-smallest boy in my public high school. What in God’s name was I doing trying out for the high school basketball team? I had faith; my ballhandling skills would impress; similarly, the sharp and worthwhile kids would learn I was bighearted and interesting, possessing good taste in television shows and a honed sense of humor that extended into irony, absurdity, even dry wit. But let’s be real. My malnourished ass was never going to wrangle a spot at the end of the varsity bench, and the scions of dealers and cowboys and Mormons and young Jewish Vegas mafiosi, sure as molasses is slow, they weren’t going to value, let alone embrace, any sort of witticism from of my pimpled mug. And so, instead of wearing a letterman’s jacket, having a girlfriend, going on a date, or even stealing a single kiss during my high school years; instead of being invited to parties and keggers and rooms with a circle of kids passing around doobage—instead of showing off my true and radiant self—I spent a whole lot of time walking the dog at night with my mom.
In modern times, it would be easy for this version of me to burrow my way toward 4Chan and other back channels. And in eighties Vegas, it’s regrettably true to report, I followed that template to some degree, sort of existing on the periphery. I was a know-it-all, distrustful of society and authority. I had problems following orders, and was far more likely to make a dismissive remark than embrace the unfamiliar. But I never fully descended into conspiracy theories and incel culture. Maybe I wasn’t a fully demonstrative bleeding heart like my sister; nonetheless, my humanist defense systems, meager though they might have been, remained on alert, responding to the empathetic parts of what went on in pawnshops, moving me away from the nasty confrontations my parents got into with customers. That humane instinct—the one that pleaded for my parents to always act first with decency—remained curious, interested in the well-being of others. I may not have fully understood how someone assimilates into the culture at large. I definitely did not want to submit and fit in. But something inside urged me to push back against my chaotic feelings, to find ways to quell them.
This search continued as an undergrad. While I was working on the school newspaper, in the middle of one editorial meeting, our staff advisor—a wonderful journalist named Gary Libman—noticed everyone lagging. Instead of being confrontational, he waited. The next week, when the meeting reached its midpoint, he asked all of us to stand up, stretch, shake out our arms, get some water if we needed it. This made a massive impression on me. Instead of blindly barging straight ahead, instead of indulging my desire for attention, or concentrating only on what I wanted, instead of taking stray remarks as insults, instead of overreacting, lashing out, and just Bocking things up, perhaps I could learn how to recognize the larger reality of what was happening in front of me and respond accordingly, to listen to what someone was actually saying.
I felt certain there was a better life for me, that I could evolve my way toward accomplishment, toward acceptance. With that in mind, whatever meager ambitions I possessed evolved in a specific way. That same exasperated mantra my mother shouted to push me, without success, toward better grades—“We’re doing this so you won’t have to”—transmogrified, becoming further justification, first for not settling for an office job, then for not buying into the ownership society. Instead, I granted myself permission to follow weird dreams, scrounging along on the fringes—as a low-rung sportswriter in Mississippi, a graduate student going back and forth from New York to Vermont, an aspiring novelist—relying on my self-proclaimed truths long past the point where validation was coming my way, where there were tangible reasons to suggest my supposed talents would make good. Similarly, my mother’s wish (whether or not she’d actually wished I’d never been born, that’s what I heard, omnipresent, crystalline) had me perpetually chasing gold stars. Even as I felt myself coming up short, I kept trying to prove I was worthy of an invitation to the proverbial kegger, a date for the prom, a mother’s love.
“He wants awfully to be inside staring out: anybody with their nose pressed against a glass is liable to look stupid,” says Holly Golightly about the narrator in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Reader, I routinely looked worse than stupid. Diana, Crystal, and more than a few others had let me know through the years: I possessed no clue how harsh my reactions could get, nor of the sheer range of my repertoire for expressing derision—squinting and jutting my jaw; staring death at someone who did not do what I wanted the moment I wanted it; turning my face to stone in such a way that it let the person who’d just spoken know that it was a miracle they’d figured out how to say words in the first place; twisting my expression into a rictus of hateful red-hot liquid nuclear obliteration; or just turning inward, but inward in a way so that all life was extinguished, all ambition, all hope, all feeling, and the only thing left was the emanated desire to be doing anything other than dealing with this bullshit.
Nobody consciously wants to be that guy.
And nobody wants the possibility that their little girl might be on her way, might be echoing these awful traits.
THE FIVE BOROUGHS of New York City represent a universe that works on its own terms. Among these terms is the one where Manhattan child therapists don’t accept health insurance. Calls revealed theirs was a cash-centric biz, with rates starting at three hundred an hour. A dive into the web uncovered a support group for youths who’d lost a mom to cancer; the catch, you had to be at least five years old to join. (Let’s acknowledge, up there among the roughest collection of syllables: an age requirement for the grieving youth cancer support group.)
Opening his address book, my therapist, Mark Roberts, dictated to me the phone number of a center: the William Alanson White Institute. They trained counselors to specialize in children’s therapy. “The center’s graduates are building their patient lists. Sometimes they offer special rates.”
This is how, toward the end of June, I was able to get Lily started: Jennifer Melfi, let’s call her. A kind woman, early thirties, maybe, always giving off a proper, respectable vibe—matching jacket and skirt, a loose blouse and jeans. She shared an office in the West Twenties with other therapists.
The Saturday afternoon we arrived, Lily wore stylish pink shades, a matched plaid dress, and sparkly pink shoes. Dr. Melfi complimented her on her outfit. Lily brushed back her hair. “Thank you. I picked it out myself.”
I stayed in the office while they got comfortable. Lily began to look at the different toys, took out a jar of Play-Doh. She brought it closer to Dr. Melfi, sat on the floor with her.
Lily and Dr. Melfi played dolls, I would learn, eventually.
Lily sometimes had her dolls take the Play-Doh and build ladders to reach the sky, I would also learn.
One Saturday a few weeks later, from her stroller, as we headed home from a session, Lily told me that Jennifer needed to buy more Play-Doh. There wasn’t enough to get to all the clouds.
They also played with the dollhouse in Dr. Melfi’s office. Lily had the doctor take on the mom character. Lily then instructed the mom to yell at the girl doll for being bad. For not listening. The girl was ordered to sleep in the garage, to clean the roof all day.
Lily showed herself to Dr. Melfi as strong-willed, bright, fiery, loving. She showed herself to be normal in many ways, but also as wrestling with denial about Diana’s death, wrestling with guilt, and blaming herself. The girl doll was bad even as the mom doll was pretty, perfect, endlessly kind. Dr. Melfi sometimes took the girl doll’s side during the play sessions, and protested: sleeping in the garage seemed a harsh punishment for not listening. It wasn’t easy to listen all the time.
Lily’s response was to have a dog figure join the girl in the doghouse. The girl and the dog got to be together. Then Lily added, for Dr. Melfi, “Make sure you lock up this house so no other kids can come.”
There wasn’t enough insight yet for definitive answers. Lily’s psyche was still forming and it was hard to get specific about the severity of her feelings. But this much was plain: when we got to the bus stop just as the bus started pulling away; when I couldn’t read on the throne for five minutes without someone tapping on the door and calling, repeatedly, for me; when I’d finally put on and secured her sneakers and she let out a pained cry and I saw they were on the wrong feet; when I entered that space where I looked at her and the only thing I could think to do was wipe her mouth, take whatever thing out of her grip, ask her to put that away; when I hadn’t bathed her for a few days and then sprayed her hair with de-tangler and she grabbed the brush right out of my hands and insisted she could do her own hair; when we reached a massive knot that I could not get the comb through and her screams outpaced anything I’d anticipated; when I muttered, “Mother fuck”; when she kept bawling; when I felt she was sort of milking it and I stopped with the comb and stared out at the ether and could not help myself and said, “Oh, just fuck me”; when I saw her eyes twitch, saw this little wisp of a child slumping, buckling, and once again, too late, realized that I was the instigator? That shit had to stop. I had to do better.
I look back on all this—again, from a safe distance of ten years later—and I see that I was too inside our daily grind to have any perspective, specifically with regards to my grief and how it might have been affecting our daily lives. I sure wasn’t thinking big picture, for instance, about the lineage of mental instability on both sides of my family history, how that might have been affecting my ability to handle fatherhood and widowhood. Nor was I considering the cornucopia of lingering and unresolved issues from my early years, let alone how they might have resulted in a damaged inner child who was, himself, nowhere near ready to care for an actual real-world little girl.
I similarly was not thinking about how formative and destructive my negative influence could be for Lily. I was not thinking about Lily’s unspoken grief, how it might have been rotting her from the inside. Not about the toxic combination of this laundry list of factors or how potent this toxicity might have been.
