Susan White

Joie de Vivre Means Pain in my Ass, Right?

Remember Susan Smith, the woman from South Carolina who drowned her two children?  Everyone was talking about carjackings back then.  You were supposed to lock your door the second you got in.  Susan Smith said she’d been carjacked, that a black man held a gun to her head and forced her out of the car before he drove off with her kids. 

That story scared us.  Waiting for our low-impact aerobics class to begin, the ladies stretching in front of me whispered that this sort of tragedy would never, ever have happened back when they were girls.  “Maybe things weren’t always fair,” said the one in the purple leotard, “But the world was safer.  A black man would not dare go after a white baby.” 

Waiting for Caroline to finish her acting class at the Alliance, Bootsy Biggers told me about all the ways a man could get into your house when you weren’t looking. 

“Lock your door even if you’re just going back and forth carrying groceries in from the car,” she said.  “You never know who might be waiting to get at you.” 

And then the truth came out, that there had been no kidnapping, that Susan Smith had rolled the car off the boat ramp herself, her three-year old and eighteen-month old strapped inside, crying for their mommy before their cries were swallowed by the cold dark water.  After that only one word was heard at the grocery, at church, waiting in the carpool line at Westwood: monster.  What kind of a monster would do such a thing?

#

Lord help me, but I could relate to Susan Smith.  Not to her actions, but to her thoughts.  Once when Caroline was four, she and I were in the kitchen, in our nightgowns, fixing breakfast while her daddy slept in.  Caroline was standing not a foot away from me when I reached under the cabinet to pull out the iron skillet I use to fry bacon.  Feeling the weight of the skillet in my hand a thought flashed in my mind: what if I were to bring this down on her head?

Quick as I had it the thought was gone and I was asking Caroline how many pieces of oink-oink she wanted and I tried to write it off as that time of the month.

But it lodged in my brain.  Not the urge to kill my daughter—Lord no, that was fast and fleeting—but the fact that I had the thought at all.  Maybe having it meant I had inherited Mother’s craziness and it was just now coming out.  Maybe I wasn’t fit to raise a child. Most disturbing was the fact that such a violent image could enter my mind during a time when I was not even upset with my daughter.  What might happen the next time Caroline acted difficult? 
Believe me, she was not an ideal child.  Not like Charles who came around six years later and was sixty times easier. There were times when I thought Caroline had it in for me, when I thought she was sent to this earth simply to make me snap.

Like the time she was four and kept trying to get my attention while I was on the phone with Tiny.  Tiny was making me laugh so hard, telling me about how she clipped off her husband Anders’s comb-over while he was asleep, that I ignored my daughter, told her I’d give her a dollar if she would leave me alone for ten minutes.  I should have noticed how quiet things got after she left the room.  But it had been so long since I had had an uninterrupted conversation with Tiny that I decided to take the silence as a blessing. 

When I walked into the living room half an hour later, the built-in bookshelves were empty.  Every single one of my hardback books—their bindings, that is—was flung on the floor, ripped of pages.  Paper floated in the air.  I could smell it, the smell of my destroyed books from college, back when I could not wait for my future to begin, when I could not wait for John Henry to propose to me so I could become a wife and a mother.  And there was my beautiful four-year old, her eyes shining, looking up at me with an expression that showed she knew exactly what she had just done, tearing one last page from one last book while I watched, my jaw hanging.

I wanted to cause damage.  I really did.  And I suppose that is the difference between a child abuser and me: I didn’t let myself touch her.  Oh, I knew a spanking was justified, but I also knew that if my hands got hold of her I might do some real harm. 

I turned and left the room and then kept on walking out the front door.  I walked all the way to Peachtree Street.  That’s it, I told myself.  I’m just going to leave this time.  I wouldn’t even go back to get the car.  I would walk to the Amtrak station, which was just a mile down the road.  I would take the first train that was leaving Atlanta. 

I only made it a few blocks down Peachtree before I began worrying about Caroline, in the house, alone.  I wasn’t worried that she might get hurt; I was worried that she might destroy something else.  I turned around and started walking back.  A car honked and I looked up to see Bootsy in her wood paneled station wagon, waving like crazy as she sped past me.  I smiled and waved, just as cheerful as I could be.  I never let Bootsy see me upset.  You had to be careful with that woman.  She was a vicious gossip.  She would believe the most ludicrous stories and then would spread them all over Atlanta.  Once she had Tiny practically ready to file for divorce from Anders even though we all know that Anders adores Tiny and never, ever would have slept with that niece of his who was staying with them over the summer. 

Probably it was a good thing Bootsy drove by because afterwards I was able to transfer some of my anger at Caroline onto her.  By the time I got home I had calmed down.  That is, until I looked into the library and again saw all of my destroyed books, my child trying to stick the pages back into them.

#

The day Caroline started kindergarten was the happiest day of my life, second only, I am sure, to the day she will leave for college. 

Oh, I’ll miss her.  I will.  And there are things I miss already about Caroline and Charles’s baby years: Caroline’s curls, which grew tight as corkscrews until she was five and they loosened, the downy feel of Charles’s hair against my hand while I nursed him. (Though I would have preferred he stopped nursing sooner.  At two he was still trying to unbutton my shirt at the grocery store, wanting a little midday snack.)

I miss their sticky cheeks and their warm breath and the little cards they would color for me on days I felt so down I could not get out of bed, days I would tell them they could watch as much TV as they wanted, eat cookies until their stomachs hurt, just be quiet—please, keep it down.

Probably I should have been on anti-depressants.  If those even existed when Caroline was a baby.  Who knows—maybe a little pharmaceutical help would have been in order.  My mother was a new woman once the doctors discovered Prozac.

#

I used to worry that I might have scarred Caroline.  But she’s turned out better than I expected, so far.  It all makes sense now; it fits together perfectly.  Caroline was difficult because Caroline is an artist.  Does she not have the lead role in every play at Westwood?  Is it not impossible to turn away from her when she is on stage, her presence so burning, so alive?  People could not stop talking about the intensity of her stage presence during Antigone.

I should have been credited.  Surely our difficult relationship helped her develop her onstage fire. 

She’s still incorrigible, only now she’s seventeen and gorgeous, which makes her powerful as well.  Her father lets her get away with murder.  All the men in her life do.  Westwood requires that teachers send a note if a student’s grade drops below a seventy-five.  Once her math teacher—a young man in his twenties—sent home a deficiency notice that ended with the word: “Brava!” 

“Your daughter is a delight,” he wrote.  “She has a real joie de vivre.”

She has to be in homeroom every morning by 8:00 am.  She has her license, and the brand new Honda Accord we bought for her, but don’t think that means she gets to school on time.  Every morning when her alarm clock sounds she punches it off.  I go to her room, knock, and cheerfully inform her it’s time to rise and shine.  She doesn’t move a muscle.  I send her father who taps her on the shoulder before he begins to shake her awake.  She doesn’t budge.  Finally he will carry her, slung over his shoulder, to the bathroom and dump her in the shower.  And half of the time that doesn’t even work!  We will find her, minutes later, slumped against the shower wall, having turned the water off and fallen back to sleep.  It is almost as if she has a neurological disorder.

Last semester she received so many detentions for being late that she was suspended and had to go in front of the Discipline Committee.  Now her drama teacher, another young man in his twenties, gives her a wake-up call every morning.

Really, it’s ridiculous.  I told John Henry that we needed either to send her to military school or to wash our hands of her.  I mean John Henry and I worry so much about her bad grades and her pile-up of detentions that she doesn’t have to do an ounce of worrying herself.  And she doesn’t.  At least not in any way I can tell. 

Yesterday she and I were driving to this little shop off of Peachtree Road.  She had seen a dress there she liked, and I was going to buy it for her to wear to prom.  She had spent the night at a friend’s house, and when she arrived home that morning she smelled like stale beer.  I didn’t say anything.  I just did not want to get into it with her.  See, I have been reading about Buddhism and have been trying to learn detachment.

But it was hard not to say anything with her sitting in the front seat of my Lexus.  The smell of alcohol was overpowering.  I glanced over, noticing her matted curls and the smudge of old mascara under her eye.  She was wearing a flannel shirt of her daddy’s, unbuttoned one too many.  She didn’t just smell like beer.  She smelled like sex.  She smelled like some boy’s dried semen, probably caked on that flat stomach of hers. 

Lord knows what my Daddy would have done if I came home smelling like a sperm depository.  And then that girl had the gall to tell me that she was getting deficiency notices again in algebra and French, (but not chemistry! she added, as if I should be proud of her for failing only two subjects.)

“Don’t worry,” she said.  “I’ve got it under control.”  She said all of this without looking at me.  Not unfriendly, just bored.

I didn’t know what to say.  I did not want to play the same role as always, to yell and plead and look up every tutor in town to try to get her in shape.  I felt a flash of anger—but then—I detached.  I looked at my daughter, at the seventeen-year old who would fit in better on a street corner than in my car, and I just did not care at all.

“I feel sorry for you,” I said.

She glanced at me, mean.  “Why?”

“Life is going to disappoint you, darling, and you will be the main person to blame for the hurt.”

“Mom, I’m fine.”

I smiled.  “For now.  While we pay the bills.  I’m just going to feel real sorry for you next year when you don’t get into any colleges you apply to.  Tiny’s daughter didn’t get into Georgia. You remember that, don’t you?”

“Helen Persons is an idiot,” Caroline said.  “I mean, she really is.  I can’t believe you’d say I won’t get into Georgia just because some idiot didn’t get in.”

This was supposed to be the start of one of our blow out fights, where half of the time I would pull the car over to the side of the road and tell Caroline to walk home.  She’d show up, an hour later, smelling a little sweaty but looking satisfied, like somehow she had won the battle because she could make it home on her own.
 

I just kept driving, loosening my grip on the wheel.  “You know what?” I said.  “It’s your life, not mine.  And frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck anymore about what you do or don’t do.  I’m tired of worrying.  I just do not care at all.”

Caroline started crying, the panicky kind of little sobs that sound the way Charles does just before he has an asthma attack.  I watched my girl cry, watched the tears run down her face, watched her glance at me through her squinted eyes, and I felt as composed as a queen.  I wanted to call all of my friends who had teen-age daughters and tell them: Just stop caring! 

It’s a miracle, I swear to God All Mighty.