She asked herself why she’d always been so deathly afraid of taking a stand, any kind of stand. Why she froze up like a deer in a splash of headlights the minute anybody asked her anything more controversial than the time of day.
She sighed. The answer, she supposed, was obvious enough; it was contained, in fact, in what she’d said at the water cooler, even though her presentation had been so inept that the logic of the idea had been impossible to follow.
Childhood was the key, the key to everything. The origins of any adult’s secret terrors and painful inadequacies could be traced back to those few precious years when a young life was molded and shaped like clay on a potter’s wheel.
That serial killer must have had a horrible childhood; people like him always did.
But not just people like him.
Wendy could point to no physical mistreatment that had scarred her as a child. No whippings, no molestations, no incarcerations in locked closets. But there were other forms of abuse.
For her entire adult life, she’d found it painfully difficult to think about her childhood or even to remember it. Those years were masked by a fog of amnesia. She hated that fog. Pieces of herself lay concealed behind it, hidden from her-stolen from her-erased from memory as if they’d never existed. But when she tried to poke holes in the fog bank, when she tried to see the truths veiled by smoke and darkness, her mind usually would make a sharp detour, and all of a sudden she would find herself thinking about what to make for dinner or what to wear at work. Oh, the mind was a wonderful thing, all right, and what it was most wonderful at was protecting itself. It put up walls and smokescreens and No Trespassing signs to keep you away from dangerous, forbidden, hurtful memories.
But sometimes she forced her mind to stay on track, to bring up the past and relive it, no matter how frantically some small scared part of herself tugged like a dog on a leash, fighting to pull free of such thoughts. Then, for a little while, she became a girl again, the timid, frightened girl who’d grown into the woman she was.
That girl’s father, Stanley Marshall Alden, had been the products inventory supervisor for the Cincinnati office of a nationwide manufacturer of metal containers. Wendy had never quite known what a products inventory supervisor was; she’d been afraid to ask. Stan Alden did not take kindly to any question that could be taken as a derogation of his responsibilities, his attainments, his earning power, or his manhood; all these concepts, she’d understood in the wordless way of a child, were intimately bound together in his mind.
Her mother, Audrey, had been a housewife and a Red Cross volunteer. Her duties at the Red Cross, which were never clearly specified, conveniently required her to be out of the house during most evenings and many weekends. Wendy was ten years old before she realized that Audrey Alden used her charity work as an excuse to avoid contact with her husband. She was fifteen before she permitted herself to know that her parents hated each other.
Why they’d stayed married, Wendy had no idea. That was another of those things she’d never dared to ask. She knew they were unhappy, though they tried desperately not to show it. She remembered her mother’s smile, a smile made of gritted teeth, and her father’s medicine cabinet, the shelves lined with antacids and headache pills. The internal pressure of all that unvoiced, unadmitted anger must have been considerable. To survive, her parents had needed a safety valve. They found one; it was named Wendy.
Their common misery, the one thing they shared and nurtured together, had been taken out on their only child. Her parents had been her constant critics, their appraising eyes and chilly voices the ceaseless barometers of her own worthlessness.
Whatever she did was wrong. If she got good grades she was called a perfectionist, a know-it-all, a smarty- pants; if she let her schoolwork slide, she was accused of being lazy, stupid, undisciplined. When she was quiet, she was told to stop acting so damn sullen; but if she forced a smile and fumbled her way through a joke, she was ordered to pipe down. She tried to please her parents by anticipating their criticism and using it on herself, remarking humbly on her clumsiness and obstinacy. “Show some self-confidence, for God’s sake,” her father would growl. Desperately she complied, fixing her hair and wearing her best dress, then announcing how pretty she looked. “Bragging doesn’t become you, young lady,” her mother would say in a flat scolding tone.
She couldn’t win. There was no way to satisfy them. If she changed her behavior, they changed their standards.
At times her parents, perhaps skewered by guilt, actually found something positive to say about her. The rare, unexpected praise only made things worse. She could have learned to accept any amount of criticism, as long as it was consistent; at least then her world would have been predictable. But switching signals were impossible to live with. She felt like a laboratory rat tortured by electrical stimuli that changed without warning from pleasure to pain. She could never adjust to a universe as plastic and shape-shifting as a nightmare.
And so, gradually, she retreated inside herself, hiding from life. As she grew older, she rarely went out, lost the few friends she’d made, began living vicariously through TV shows and books. She became afraid of people, not just her parents but people in general, all people. They were unpredictable and dangerous. She feared their watchful eyes, their closed faces, their secret judgments.
Yet at rare moments, impelled by some unstated need, she still had dared to reach out for life, to take risks. Small risks, to be sure, like a toddler’s mincing hesitant steps, but risks nonetheless.
Moving to Los Angeles had been the biggest chance she’d taken. After four friendless years at a local college, she kissed her folks goodbye, boarded a DC-10, and watched the Ohio River shrink into the haze of spangles frosting the airplane window. She’d never been sure, then or later, quite why she’d chosen L.A. as a place to relocate. Perhaps because it was a place where people went to start over, a big anonymous place without history or tradition, a place where the past didn’t count. Or perhaps merely because L.A. was about as far from Cincinnati as it was possible to get.
Whatever the reason, she’d chosen to make some kind of stand in this city, to become a new and better person, to leave childhood behind. But making a fresh start was harder than she’d expected; changing her life turned out to be more difficult than changing her address. And childhood, she learned, could not be left behind. Not ever.
The sudden shrilling of the phone on her desk startled her. She blinked, coming out of her reverie, and picked up the handset.
“Communications Department,” she said.
“Communicate with me,” a male voice purred.
“Hello, Jeffrey,” she said, automatically lowering her voice, even though there was no company rule against taking personal calls.
“Hello, dollface.”
Nervously she swiveled around in her chair, away from the doorway of her cubicle. “Don’t… don’t call me that.”
“You like it.”
She didn’t, actually, and she’d told him so, but Jeffrey never listened.
“You doing anything tonight?” he asked.
Silly question. Of course she wasn’t doing anything.
“No,” she answered.
“How about dinner, then? Six o’clock at the Mandarin House?”
“Okay.”
“Remember where it is?”
“I think so. The dragon place, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I remember.”
The dragon in question was a large papier-mache model that hovered over the central part of the restaurant, suspended from the ceiling by what looked like monofilament fishing line. She and Jeffrey had agreed it was the tackiest objet d’art they’d ever seen.
“Look, I’ve got to go,” Jeffrey said suddenly. “I think the key spot is melting the wax fruit. See you.”
He hung up before Wendy could reply.
As she cradled the phone, she found that she was smiling. She was glad Jeffrey had called. Even if he never gave her jewelry or… or much of anything.
