Nancy’s overall look was beginning to change from flower child to street tough. The workshirts gave way to tight black T-shirts. The patched and faded denim flares yielded to very tight new straight-legged jeans. She wore platform heels, the higher the better. At 5 feet 1 inch, she thought she was too short. She also began to wear a lot of eye makeup and plucked her eyebrows. Her lovely, full chestnut-brown hair was cut to shoulder-length shag and streaked blonde.
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But what was enough for the other kids wasn’t enough for Nancy. She had to get higher. According to Karen, Nancy began to shoot speed when it was available. Karen tried to talk her out of it-she was afraid Nancy would kill herself. That argument, of course, held no water with Nancy. She wanted to kill herself.
“She was always reaching for something that wasn’t there,” Karen told me recently. “She needed for some guy to come along and set her straight, some nice guy. She’d do whatever a guy told her to.”
Years later Suzy told me that one afternoon when she came home from school Nancy called her into the bathroom. She was shooting up. She ordered Suzy to tie her off with the hose. Suzy, always the dutiful sister, did. Then she watched in horror as Nancy repeatedly punched at herself with the needle until she found a vein.
Years later David told me he answered the phone one Saturday morning.
It was Randi. She advised him to check Nancy’s room to make sure she was still alive.
“She took ten Ludes last night,” Randi said. “She took enough to kill a horse.”
David checked. Nancy was fast asleep. He tried rousing her, and, after a moment, was able to get her awake mumbling and cursing, one eye open.
She was alive.
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Even now, I wonder how we could possibly have put up with this. But thinking back, what could we have done? We had tried everything. There was no solution, no hope. All we could do was cope. Most of the time, we felt so defeated that we had no capacity for anger. Anger accomplished nothing but to make us feel worse, anyway. Certainly it had no effect on Nancy. Nothing did. More than once I asked myself Why me? What did I do to deserve this? More than once I fantasized that someone would kill her, put her and us out of our misery. I really did. I’m not ashamed to admit it.
We went through the motions of living. We were prisoners in our own home. We literally could not leave. Then one night both Frank and I had to be out of town on business, Nancy responded by inviting half a dozen couples to sleep over. They took over the house-used our bed, David’s bed, Suzy’s bed. David told me there was humping and moaning and naked people running up and down the stairs all night long, not to mention two very large dogs. He and Suzy were forced to spend the night on the sofa while this went on around them.
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I stared at the misshapen shoes there on the kitchen floor and sighed.
No, I’d never heard of the rock group. But I had heard of what reputedly went on at the sort of party Nancy said she’d just come from: drugs and sex in multiple variations. It was no secret.
Frank and I discussed Nancy’s newest social development at length. It seemed as if every week she got wilder, further and further from our control and our sense of right and wrong. Our morality meant zero to her. She would simply step over the line, draw a new one, and then step over that.
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Actually, we were never really sure how much of the backstage scene Nancy was intimately involved in then. We still aren’t. She bragged about her sexual exploits to Suzy and Karen, providing them with all of the steamy details of her conquests. We never knew, however, how much of it was true.
She told Suzy, for instance, that her first band was Bad Company. The whole band. She ranked each member’s performance. She kept a Bad Company poster on the wall in her room to commemorate the occasion. It said, “Does your mother know you’ve been keeping Bad Company?”
Then there was Aerosmith. She told Karen that after she had taken on the whole group, two of the guys wanted to set her on fire and throw her out the hotel window. She was willing, she said. It sounded like a pretty great way to die, she said. Aerosmith chickened out, she said.
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What worried me most during this period was that Nancy would get pregnant, convince herself it was by some famous rock star, and then want to keep the baby. At one point she actually thought she was pregnant, though she refused to tell me by whom. She simply told me she hadn’t had her period in three months. I took her to my gynecologist. He gave her a lab test, which showed that she was not pregnant, but she refused to believe this. She insisted she was pregnant. To satisfy her, the doctor performed a D and C on Nancy at the hospital. The D and C also showed that she was not pregnant. Furthermore, the doctor advised me, Nancy’s uterus was so underdeveloped that if she ever did get pregnant, she would doubtless have a miscarriage in the second or third month. I never told her that, for fear of upsetting her.
Nancy would not accept the results of the D and C. Instead, she chose to believe she hadn’t had one at all, but rather an abortion. She mentioned her “abortion” several times over the remainder of her life.
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Nancy did this kind of thing constantly. She wanted to start trouble between us. She had it in for Frank. If he was away on a business trip and I was home with her, she’d keep hammering at me.
“What do you think he’s doing right now?”
“At this very moment?”
“At this very moment.”
“I’d say he’s probably sitting in the Portland airport, waiting for his flight.”
“Do you really believe that’s what he’s doing? Don’t you know what he’s doing? He’s fucking some woman. He doesn’t love you. He told me.
He never loved you. Why don’t you divorce him? Why don’t you dump the sonofabitch?”
We tried to ignore her attempts to drive a wedge between us. It was impossible. We grew farther apart.
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The day Suzy and David were due back from summer camp, Frank and I sat Nancy down and made what I suppose you could call our last possible appeal. We told her she had not, thus far, been a very considerate sister to them; they deserved a peaceful night’s sleep free of nocturnal visitors to her room; they deserved a chance to discuss their schoolwork and activities at dinner without fear of their sister screaming and hurling dishes if someone looked at her “the wrong way”; they deserved a chance to be the people that they wanted to be, that we wanted them to be.
We had previously tried to appeal to Nancy on every conceivable level of decency and courtesy, to no avail. We appealed now for Suzy and David, hoping it would have some effect on her. It did. She went crazy.
“You don’t think I’m gonna take that kind of bullshit from you, do you?
I’ll have you fucking killed. I have Mafia friends! Everybody I know is connected! I’ll have you fucking killed! Don’t think I won’t!”
She continued to scream death threats and obscenities at us for several minutes, then went upstairs and slammed her door.
When Suzy and David got home, she refused to come out and say hello to them. When I told her through the door that the four of us were about to go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner with my mother and that she was welcome to join us, she opened the door.
“Don’t expect the house to look the same when you get back!” she warned.
“Meaning what?” I demanded.
“My friends are gonna wreck it. My Mafia friends. They’ll smash every single piece of furniture. They’ll break every window. They’ll pour paint all over everything. They’ll destroy the whole fucking house! Hear me?”
I turned to Frank. “Let’s go,” I said quietly.
The four of us turned and left, Nancy threatening us as we went down the steps and out the door.
“Go ahead! You’ll see! They’ll dump everything out of the closets and set the fucking place on fire! There won’t be a house left when you get back!
Go ahead!”
We kept going. She stood on the front porch, shouting at us as we got into the car. “You’ll see! Go ahead, you’ll see!”
We drove away.
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I wondered how we could sit there in a restaurant after our eldest child had threatened to murder us and have our house destroyed. I wondered how this could be happening and how we could be so powerless to do anything about it. I wondered, as I did so often, what we had done to deserve this.
Frank and I sat up the entire night talking. This incident was, for us, the last straw. I don’t know why this one particular episode among a sea of episodes put us over the top, but it did. Possibly because it was our home she wanted to destroy now. All we possessed was our home. She’d already destroyed the people inside it-our lives, our dreams. All she had left us with was the physical structure, the shell. She could not be permitted to destroy that, too. And we did believe she could do it. The house, we felt, would have to be guarded from now on, day and night.
We had to do something. This could not continue. She was holding us captive. We could not subject Suzy and David to her any longer. Or ourselves. She would have to leave. Have to.
We had lost her. We could not control her any longer. All we could do was try to save the other two children. We had to get Nancy out for their sakes. And yes, for ours. On this we were in achingly painful agreement.
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We cut Nancy loose, to sink or swim on her own. We set her free.
hexafu 