And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (12 page)

Nancy needed me—all of me. She was the other reason why I had to end the affair. She was so desperately unhappy. By fragmenting myself, by reserving a small emotional oasis for myself, I was denying her what I had promised her. I had promised her a hundred percent. I wasn't being fair to her.

So I ended it. I was reluctant to give up my special little world, but I did. He called me about once a month for two more years. I liked hearing from him, liked knowing my escape valve was still there. But I never saw him again. I missed my little world, missed our evenings out—more than I missed him.

I didn't reveal my affair to Frank, at least not until about a year
after it had ended. One evening when we went to bed I found him lying on his back, staring at the ceiling. He'd been very quiet all evening, distant and morose. We were still not getting along very well.

“Are you feeling okay?” I asked him.

He didn't answer me.

“Frank?”

“I don't want to be married anymore,” he said quietly. “I want to leave.”

“Why?” I asked, stunned.

“I'm not worthy of you. I'm a bad father, a bad husband. I'm a failure at everything I put my hands on.”

“That's not true!”

“I can't believe this is it.”

“This is
what
?”

“My life. This. This home. This job. These kids—”

“And this wife?” I demanded.

“It's not you. It's me. I shouldn't be married. I can't handle all this responsibility. I should get out. Try something else. Somewhere else.”

I had trouble catching my breath. I felt like I'd been hit by a truck. “Look, honey, I know it hasn't been great. I know that. But tell me what I can do to make you happy. I'll do anything.”

“It's not you, Deb. It's me. I just don't know why I'm here. We got married too damned young. We were a couple of dumb kids. I've never lived by myself. I've never had a chance to have any
fun
.”

“You think I have?”

“I know you didn't, either.”

I saw myself in a flash—a divorcée with three kids, one of them impossible to deal with. Who would want me? Nobody. I'd have to go home to Mommy. Or hide. I'd spend the rest of my life in front of a TV set watching soap operas and getting fat.

I looked down at my husband, sprawled across the bed, an arm across his eyes. I had but one choice, and I'm not ashamed to say what it was. I begged him to stay.

“You're not just going to get up and walk out of here,” I said. “You can't. You just can't. What will I do? What will the kids do?”

He shrugged.

“Frank, this
is
your life. We made it together. If it's not working, we have to make it work. You can't just turn your back on it. You can't turn your back on us.”

“You'd be better off with somebody else.”

“I don't
want
somebody else.”

He said nothing.

“Do you?” I asked. “Is that what this whole thing is about? Is that why you want to leave? Is it another woman?”

“No. There's nobody else. Not anymore.”

It took a second to sink in.

“Not
anymore
?”

“There … there was someone. A while ago. A year, two years. But there's no one now.”

“So you
were
seeing other women. I knew it!”

“You never believed me when I said I wasn't—and I
wasn't
—so I figured if you were already convinced I was fooling around, I may as well just go ahead and do it. You kept bugging me about it.”

“You're saying it's my fault?”

“No, I'm just trying to tell you I shouldn't be married. I'm a rotten husband. Let me go.”

“Well, if you're a rotten husband then I'm a rotten wife,” I snapped angrily.

He sat up abruptly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I was seeing someone, too.”

He just stared at me, in total shock. After a moment his lips formed the word
who
but no sound came out.

I told him. I told him why I started it, why I had continued it, why I had ended it. I told him everything. He told me everything. We talked all night, poured out all of the unhappiness and pain we'd bottled up for years. It was our come-clean session.

Frank was scheduled to go to New York the next morning. He asked me to come with him. Fortunately Mother was able to come stay with the children.

We drove to New York, talked about where we'd gone wrong. We'd been going through the same sort of life crisis at the same time, not realizing it. Both of us felt cheated by life. But we agreed that if life was going to be better, we would make it better together. Seeing someone else was no answer.

Not once did it occur to us that Nancy was at the core of our unhappiness. It would be many years before we would realize that.

We had a very romantic supper that evening in New York.

“Maybe I didn't pay enough attention to you,” Frank said. “Maybe I took you for granted.”

“Maybe you did.”

“Maybe you did.”

“I never will again. I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too.”

“Is it okay if I stay?”

“Only if you want to.”

“I want to.”

“Then it's okay.”

We went back to the hotel and made love. He was my husband again. What he had done was forgotten. What I had done was forgotten. We were together.

When we got back to Philadelphia, I had the birthmark between my eyes removed.

After Nancy gave David the shiner, Frank and I talked about taking her back to the guidance clinic. We chose not to. We decided to believe that her difficult behavior around the house was caused by her inability to make friends at school. We blamed this on the city school system and the types of kids that went there. She was too bright for them, we decided. That was the problem.

We decided to move to the suburbs. The schools there were geared to the bright kids instead of the average ones. The classes were smaller, the curriculum more progressive. The suburbs were the answer, we knew.

We soon found our dream house in a new suburban development in a community called Huntingdon Valley. It was a two-story, four-bedroom colonial on a wide, quiet, gently curving street called Red Barn Lane. It had a big backyard, big enough to maybe even put in a pool someday. A lot of couples our age with young children were moving into the development.

This time Nancy looked forward to moving. She saw it as a fresh start; she promised me she would make new friends and be happy in Huntingdon Valley. We all believed she would, but that proved to be a fantasy. Even so, for the first few months this fantasy of ours was a reality. Nancy did do well in her new school. She did
make new friends. She even found an interest of her own.

On one of the weekends that Frank went to New York for business, I went with him, and we saw the new hit musical
Hair
. We enjoyed the show very much—especially the music—and bought the cast album. We always collected the cast albums of Broadway shows we'd seen and enjoyed, like
The Music Man
and
My Fair Lady
.

When I put on
Hair
, something magical happened. Nancy sat right next to the phonograph, totally absorbed by it. A dreamy, happy look crossed her face. The record seemed to be saying something to her. When the side was finished, she turned it over and played the other side. When that was finished, she turned it over again and listened to the entire album a second time. Then a third. From that day on she played
Hair
at least six times a day, over and over again. She played it so often she wore it out and we had to buy another. When we got a cat, she insisted we name it Aquarius.

At first Frank and I wondered if it was okay for Nancy to listen to this rock musical, which seemed to advocate free love, drugs, and war protest. She was only nine years old. But we let her listen because she loved it. It kept her occupied and happy. She got hysterical if I asked her to turn it off when the phone rang or it was time to eat.

We owned a few other rock albums and Nancy was immediately addicted to those, too. We liked the Beatles very much. She quickly became a fanatic for them, particularly the White Album, which she had wanted for Hanukkah that year. Frank and I also liked some of the softer, more folk-oriented performers like Joan Baez. Nancy didn't care for folk. She liked the harder, acid rock—the harder the better. On Saturdays I took her to the record store. Every cent of her allowance went into albums. She bought albums by The Doors, Cream, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Led Zeppelin.

She sat on the floor right in front of the living room phonograph, legs crossed, when she listened to her rock albums, the volume cranked up to full blas
t
. It seemed to hypnotize her, pull her inside the stereo system with the music. The rock musicians were coming from where she wanted to be. She began to wear her chestnut-brown hair long and flowing. It grew to her waist. She dressed in blue jeans and peasant blouses. She looked like a pint-size hippie.

We bought her a guitar when she asked us for one, but she stopped trying to learn it after a few weeks, frustrated that she wasn't yet as skilled as her idols.

We thought it was nice that Nancy had found an interest in something. Though she listened to her rock albums awfully loud, we understood this to be a typical complaint of parents with teenagers. We were happy she was doing something typical, typical aside from the fact that she wasn't nearly a teenager yet.

She started reading
Rolling Stone
because it dealt with rock music, and quickly jumped to popular counterculture books I didn't think she could possibly understand, but did. At ten she was devoted to Sylvia Plath's poetry and her memoir,
The Bell Jar
. She devoured Kurt Vonnegut, Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, J. D. Salinger. She read and reread several times Tennessee Williams' play
The Glass Menagerie
. F. Scott Fitzgerald was another of Nancy's favorites—not only his novels but the numerous biographies about the author's troubled life and turbulent marriage to Zelda.

On Sundays she read
The New York Times
. She was mostly interested in the Vietnam War coverage, particularly the coverage of the antiwar movement. She identified with the war protesters. They were on her wavelength. Frank and I supported the Vietnam protest, but not actively. We came from the uninvolved generation.

One day I came home from the market with a box of Saran Wrap, and she got furious.

“Mommy, I want you to take that back,” she demanded.

“Why?” I asked, confused.

“It's made by Dow Chemical. They're involved in napalm manufacturing.”

“Nancy, I'm not taking it back.” I put the Saran Wrap in the cupboard.

“You
have
to take it back, or the war will continue.”

She waited for me to respond. I didn't.

“Okay,” she shrugged. “You had your chance.”

She went to the cookie jar, picked it up, and went in the living room with it.

“Nancy, where are you going with the cookie jar?” I asked, following her.

She rounded up Suzy and David, who were watching TV. “You,” she said to Suzy, all business. “I want you to get crayons and marking pens. Meet me out front.”

Suzy went off obediently on her mission.

“David, find some shirt cardboards,” Nancy ordered.

David nodded. “Mommy,” he said, “where are the shirt cardboards?”

“Under the sink in the basement, in a big bag,” I informed him. Off he went.

“Nancy, what's going on?” I asked.

“We're protesting you,” she replied. She patted the cookie jar.

“We'll live on these for as long as we have to. For the duration, if necessary. We're not coming back in this house until you take back that Saran Wrap. Are you taking it back?”

“No, I'm not.”

She went out the front door. Suzy and David met her out front a minute later with crayons and shirt cardboards. They wrote
WE PROTEST MOMMY
and
DOWN WITH DEB
on the cardboards and began to picket the house. I watched through a window. Sometimes they chanted “Down with Dow.” Our neighbors drove by occasionally and looked at them curiously. In response, Nancy gave them the peace sign.

After about an hour of this Suzy and David got tired and wanted to come back inside. Nancy wouldn't let them. Instead, the three of them got in my car and ate the cookies.

At suppertime I ordered Suzy and David inside and they came in obediently. Nancy got very angry at them, branded them “Establishment pigs” and “sellouts,” but finally came in herself a little later.

Every week she had a new cause—whatever she read about in the newspaper. After one of her cousins drew a poor number in the draft lottery, she became insistent that we sneak him into Canada at once. There was something precocious about ten-year-old Nancy's political activism, though she was so serious about it. Frank and I were concerned that she was getting too involved. But we felt that her heart was in the right place.