Girl called her best friend’s mother collect. Her best friend’s brother refused to accept charges. One thing Girl knew from having one parent in Alaska and one in New York was that telephone operators have an unexpected degree of leeway. She pleaded with the operator and got her to reverse the charges to Mother’s house even though there was no one there to approve the charges. Girl told her best friend’s mother that she needed someone to keep calling Mother and tell her to pick Girl up in Buffalo, seventy miles away, instead of Rochester. All she could do was hope that her friend’s mother could track Mother down. Girl could not wait to make contact before she boarded the next plane. She needed to go, and had to hope that someone would be there when she landed.
Mother and Stepmother greeted her at the gate in Buffalo, so proud that their daughter had figured everything out on her own. Girl didn’t tell them about the Hare Krishnas, and secretly read the Bhagavad Gita in her room. The man had written his address in the back, and after she read it, she planned to write him. When she reached a section detailing celibacy and the rightful place of the man as head of the spiritual family, she closed the book and stopped dreaming of the man with the half-shaved head.
the day the word changed
They changed Stepmother’s diagnosis from clinical depression to manic-depressive, and with the new word came new pills and new instructions. Do not leave her alone in stores, as she might go on a spending binge. (This doctor obviously did not know Stepmother, and how she practically wept every time she opened her wallet.) Stepmother was to avoid large crowds, as they might trigger an episode. There were new behaviors to be watchful for: compulsive spending, hypersexuality, lack of impulse control, all things that signaled a looming break with reality and descent into full psychosis. None of these behaviors had been a problem before; it was only the new word that made them possible. But it was Girl’s sixteenth birthday the next week, and the invitations had been mailed to all eighty girls in her class. The party hall had been rented, the band had been hired.
“Girl, we may have to cancel the party,” Mother said. “Stepmother has been diagnosed as bipolar—manic-depressive. She can’t be around large crowds; it might trigger an episode.”
“But we already invited everyone from school!” Girl said.
“This family’s mental health comes first.”
Girl’s face stiffened like a mask, hard, uninhabited. Inside her rib cage was only cold, blowing wind. Not a hurricane or tornado, but the wind that whips away your body heat and pricks cold needles from the inside out. Girl stayed in the wind for three days, waiting to see if the “may have to” turned into a “we are going to.” She didn’t read books, she didn’t talk to her friends. She waited inside her body-shell to see if this sweet sixteen party would be sacrificed for Stepmother.
It wasn’t that Girl wanted presents. She didn’t mean to be selfish. It was just that at Our Lady of Mercy, she had gone to her friends’ parties. They were the kind of girls that parents fussed over. They didn’t do their own laundry or take the bus downtown or try to hold their mother together. These girls didn’t go to AA meetings at night or smoke cigarettes at the bus stop, and they certainly didn’t spread their legs for boys who didn’t love them. Girl wanted very much to be one of these girls—someone nurtured, protected, loved. So when Mother sat down with her one summer night and asked if she wanted a sweet sixteen party, Girl had exploded into fireworks inside. Mother had picked out light blue paper for the invitations. She ordered pizza and had the cake decorator spell her daughter’s name the new way she preferred since she was fourteen—Girlh, with an added “h.” Mother asked Girl if she wanted to hire one of her teenaged friend’s bands to play, and of course she said yes.
A band and dancing and Girl was so excited that she even agreed to invite only her classmates, no boys, because that was how Mercy Girls did it. And maybe this party would make her acceptable to the girls at school and maybe she could learn to be sweet and protected and feel all the weight of her mother’s love, and not just her fractional allocation. Job/spouse/daughter/son/volunteering/politics. Girl was only entitled to a mother-sliver, but this party meant she would get the whole share for just one day.
Mother decided to let the party go forward. She invited a few of her own friends as chaperones, but they were chaperoning Stepmother as much as the teenagers. Mother would keep Stepmother in the kitchen, where she would have friends and space and not too much chaos.
Girl pulled the top of her hair up into a tiny ponytail so you could see the shaved sides of her head. She put on her black-and-green-striped jumper over a black turtleneck. Her preppy clothes did not match her punk hair, but she wanted more than anything to be like the preppy-punk girls at Mercy—Sandy and Cyn and Sioux and the beautiful, tiny Joelle.
“Let’s just put regrets only on the invitation,” Mother had said. “That way we don’t have to count everyone who is coming, just who is not coming, which is a smaller number.”
Girl had only had gotten a handful
