Finally I started begging Mom for more independence. Our downtown was compact, easily walkable, and I wanted to do something on my own after school while she was still at work, instead of just going home on the bus, sitting on the couch, and waiting for her. After a few tense discussions, I convinced her to let me walk to the library from school, one day a week.
The Bridgton Library was a two-story redbrick building, Carnegie-era, simple columns holding up a small portico. At night, it was lit by opaque globes on iron columns, like something Gene Kelly would spin around. The children’s room was in the basement, a cozy area with brightly colored beanbags, but by then I had graduated to the adult reading upstairs. I liked to roam the shelves, pulling down decaying old books of poetry, titles embossed in gilt letters. I always checked the stamped dates on the circulation card, and was especially attracted to books that hadn’t been taken out in a while. I had this idea that every book deserved some attention, so I didn’t want to read what everyone else was reading. There was also a delicious, heightened privacy in reading something that apparently no one had touched in fifty years, something that was all mine. I stuck my nose into those books and breathed deeply, ran my fingers over the worn edges of the pages. Stories and poetry were best, but occasionally I latched onto a research interest—sharks, horse breeds, mythology, and finally, just in time for the eclipse, astronomy.
One day, on my walk to the library, I was listening to David Bowie, the ringing guitars and strings of “Starman” pouring out of my headphones and creating a translucent curtain between me and the rest of the world. Just before the library, I had to pass a park bench notorious for loud, smoking teenagers, but that day I felt less nervous than usual, shielded by sound. I skirted the group, but one of them jumped out in front of me just as I was passing. He laughed and started walking backwards, and he opened one side of his long black jacket. Shielded by the coat, his hand held a little plastic bag full of white powder. He kept laughing and laughing, then spun and ran back to his friends.
I knew he’d shown me drugs, or pretended to, but I didn’t understand why. To scare the young girl? Or was I not a young girl anymore?
There were others who seemed not to think so, like the man who whistled at me from his truck on the street one day. I turned around quickly to see who he was looking at, but no one else was there. Now, when I ran errands downtown with Mom and men called out, I could not be sure to whom they were calling.
After Mom’s death, her friend Ruth told the police that I had been spending a lot of time with friends and leaving Mom alone in the house—that I “had a mind of my own,” a damning charge for a child, especially for a girl. In reality, for a preteen, I was spending only the usual amount of time with friends—occasional weekend sleepovers with Marie and a few others; long, gossipy phone calls in the evenings. And every single time I went over to a friend’s house, it wrenched my heart. When Mom dropped me off, I’d hug her across the car console while she reminded me to be good. I’d linger there, her soft hair falling on my shoulder, and a dizzy panic would wash over me. Suddenly I’d change my mind—more than anything in the world, I wanted her to take me back home so we could watch a movie together, or lie in the sun in the yard. I did worry about her returning to a lonely house, and felt guilty. But my friend would already be waving from the porch. I knew I was supposed to get out of the car, that once I was inside the house I’d no longer feel like crying. So I’d let go, and slam the door, and run up the driveway. I’d perch for a moment on the stairs and blow a big, stagy kiss, my hand sweeping the air in front of my tight throat.
If I felt responsible for her loneliness, if I could barely leave her for a night, and if even her adult friends thought I had a duty to take care of her, what would my love for her feel like today? I am overwhelmed thinking about the hot, dense feeling of that bond, its intense gravitational force. How would I ever have moved away from her? I imagine daily phone calls, worries about her health, about her boyfriend or husband. Is she eating enough? Is that fatigue or sadness in her voice? I imagine my own friends and partners finding it all a bit too intense. I think about the burden of this love, and am grateful, for a moment, for my freedom. And then guilt flashes in my chest like heat lightning, followed by a rumbling quake of sadness.
* * *
I was probably actually furthest from my mother when immersed in my interior world, where I lived most fully. As far back as I could remember, reading had been a perfect escape, an alternate universe where none of the problems were mine. When I was upset at home or at school, I could always pull out a book, or know that one was waiting for me in the next quiet moment. In first grade, encouraged by my teacher, I’d started writing stories, and this was even better: I could create whatever escape I wanted, include whichever characters I wanted to spend time with. Writing gave me power. As the school years passed, each teacher encouraged me in my writing, and I remember Mrs. Anderson, in second grade, advising me to keep my maiden name forever, so that when I published books, she and others would know they were mine. The idea that an activity that I loved could bring me recognition outside of my tiny town, my rural, isolated state, was exhilarating.
That first year we lived in the house, my teachers arranged for a boy from Bridgton Academy—the prep school where Mom and Gwen had painted the dorms—to tutor me in creative writing. He didn’t provide a whole lot of guidance, but the fact that he was hired just for me gave me extra motivation, and, looking back, I am so touched that my teachers went out of their way to hire him. I spent most of my free time in those days making up stories and scribbling them out on the rough yellow paper that I dragged home by the stack, my hands smelling constantly of wood pulp and friction-hot erasers. Even when Mom and I went to dinner with her friends, I would write, pulling out paper and a clipboard when the adult conversation started to get dull.
Late in fourth grade, one of my poems was selected for a national student anthology: a sign to me that, someday, I would be a real writer. I rushed to show Mom the acceptance letter, but her response was uncharacteristically cold. “They just want you to buy that book,” she said. In the moment, I was wounded, surprised—she was so dismissive of this thing that was so important to me, that I imagined building my future around. I’ll never know why she reacted like that. She could have just been in a bad mood. She could have been jealous of the time and attention I gave to writing. Or she could have realized, as I slowly would, that we had found the first thing we would not share.
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