“Mom? What’re you doing? Dad’s going to think someone died or something! Why does he need to come home now? It’s ten at night. He’s going to freak!”
“Too bad.” Her mother was completely still on the bed. She looked Kristen in the eye. When Kristen looked into her mother’s eyes she felt nauseous. Something in her mother’s stare was violently frightening.
Nora swung herself off the bed and stormed out of the room. Kristen followed, not saying anything, just watching in horror as her mother stood in front of the bathroom mirror and screamed. Not a high-pitched scream. A wail of such sad frustration and anger that Kristen moved in to try to hold her mother.
“Mom?” she called through the bathroom door. “Mom, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, Mom. Please come out. Let me explain…”
The door flew open and Nora was in Kristen’s face.
“I told you. Get out of here! I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear your voice.
With a vise tightening in the pit in her stomach, Kristen crouched outside the now-closed bathroom door and waited, listening to her mother’s sobs.
After about a half an hour she heard her father’s key in the front door and two seconds later she saw his worried face as he ran up the stairs.
“What on earth is wrong?” He still had on his coat. “Kristen? What’s happened?”
Kristen flew into his arms and, for the first time since this incident began to unfold, cried.
“Dad, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “Please remember that. No matter what happens…I’m so sorry.”
Her father was apoplectic. “Where’s your mother?
The bathroom door opened and standing in front of her frantic husband stood Nora, with clumps of her thick hair wadded up in her fists.
“Oh, my God,” her husband said. “What happened? Will someone please tell me what in the hell is going on here?”
“I’ll tell you what’s going on here,” her mother said as she pushed past father and daughter and made her way down the stairs into the living room. The two followed her as if sleepwalking.
“Your daughter
“Is that what this is all about?” Her father was incredulous.
“Dad, I’m so sorry.” Kristen ran over to kneel at her father’s feet. “It’s my fault. I’m so sorry.”
He pulled her up alongside him on the couch and hugged her. And, before he released her, he whispered in her ear. “We’ll get through this,” he murmured.
Kristen looked back at her mother and addressed her, through her tears. “Mom, please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” her mother mimicked Kristen, putting an emphasis on a different word each time she repeated it. “
“Honey.” Kristen’s father spoke gently to her mother, as if trying to soothe a child. Kristen had never seen her father talk to her mother this way. “Sweetheart, let’s go upstairs for a minute and talk. Okay? Let’s go up to our room.”
But before he could reach down to try to pull his wife up from the floor she moaned again, the way she had when Kristen first told her the truth. The moan was the spookiest of the entire display. It was full of such pain and suffering that Kristen vowed she would never again do anything to hurt or disappoint her mother.
And she kept that promise for many years. Kristen began to dance as fast as she possibly could.
Isabel looks away from Kristen, down the rambling driveway.
Isabel’s eyes are fixed at the space between the two stone pillars.
“That’s when I first tried it,” Kristen is saying as she lights another cigarette.
“Tried what?” Isabel asks.
“Suicide.”
For a week following her mother’s discovery of Kristen’s sexual secret she was under what amounted to house arrest. The first night of what Kristen would come to think of as the Incident, Nora slept on the floor of her room. She demanded to know every detail of Kristen’s and Billy’s first encounter.
Kristen did her best to answer her mother, even though she was petrified to talk about such a personal, and apparently horrific, thing with her angry mother. She told her mother the truth: that she and Billy had decided together that they were going to make love. That Billy had not forced himself on her in any way. That Billy used a condom. Kristen was humiliated, recounting what she had presumed was a wonderful experience to her disgusted mother. Kristen had no idea what she had done was so terrible, but now, seeing her mother react the way she had, she began to see sex as a shocking, dirty, humiliating act.
When her mother asked her where they were when they lost their virginity, Kristen lied. She knew she was forbidden to be alone at Billy’s house (she had also promised that the two would never be alone in Billy’s room) so she told her mother they had been in Billy’s car.
A few nights later, Kristen snuck into her room when her parents were distracted and called Billy. Whispering into the phone, Kristen sketched out the situation for him and told him that she had lied about where they had lost their virginity (“I just want to get our stories straight so if she asks you…”). Kristen heard a thump outside her door.
The vise that still had a grip on her stomach tightened and Kristen got off the phone within seconds.
She opened her bedroom door and there was her mother, crumpled up on the floor at the threshold of Kristen’s room.
“Mom?” Kristen was sick to her stomach. “Mom?”
Her mother pulled herself up off the floor and headed to the master bedroom with Kristen on her heels. Quietly, her mother faced the mirror in the bathroom and again started to pull clumps of her hair out. Kristen grabbed her wrists.
“Mom! Stop it.”
“Quiet!” her mother spat like a feral cat.
“Okay, okay.” Kristen didn’t know if she had any more strength left for her mother’s volatility.
“Go away!” her mother snarled, shoving Kristen out of the bathroom.
Kristen stared at the wood-grain patterns of the closed door. She turned and went into her own bathroom.
Once the door was shut and locked, Kristen opened the medicine cabinet. She scanned the shelves. There was a bottle of Tylenol, but Kristen knew there were more options in her parents bathroom. Options that could release her from the guilty hell she was living in as a result of her repulsive behavior.
She was caught between hope and dread. Between the allure of escape and the danger of deeper trouble.
She decided to wait until her mother came out of her bathroom.
Kristen shuffled back to her room to listen for her mother’s bathroom door opening. She would put an end to all the pain swirling around inside her. The decision made her feel calmer than she had in days.
When Kristen finally heard her mother emerge from her bathroom, she steadied her queasy stomach and opened her bedroom door. Silence. Her mother was nowhere to be seen.
“Mom?”
Kristen timidly walked downstairs to the kitchen, to find her mother who was busying herself by peeling back the tiny square of tin foil that covered the dessert section of the Swanson frozen dinner.
“Mom?” Kristen whispered.
Her mother carried on with the frozen-dinner preparation as if she hadn’t heard a sound.
“Mom?” Kristen’s whisper was slightly louder this time.
Again, no reaction from Nora.
Kristen left the kitchen and went back upstairs, this time to her parents’ bathroom.
