trick or treat*

It is Halloween 1983, twenty-five years ago. I am nine years old. Halloween is my favorite holiday, better than Thanksgiving or even Christmas, because of the dress-up factor. I am delighted to be a princess for the night, excited to wear a sparkly outfit and sparkly makeup, and to have a wand to flash around at my subjects; my sisters, Raggedy Ann and a bumblebee. 

We have just come back from trick-or-treating with our neighbor Eileen and her kids, because my dad had to work late and my mother needed to be at our house to pass out the candy to all of the other trick-or-treaters. At the end of our street, Garden Road, there is a house that gives away whole Snickers bars every year, which is unbelievable to me. My parents think the people that live in this house are weird, because he shoots at squirrels in their backyard with a b-b gun as he lounges by their pool in Speedos, but who cares? Whole Snickers bars. 

At our house my mother is giving away mini Milky Ways and mini Three Musketeers, along with mini Peppermint Patties, all candy that she likes to eat. When we get home all of the candy at our house is gone, I imagine most of it is sitting in a lump in my mother's stomach. My sister Raggedy Ann immediately removes her red mop-wig and takes off the turtleneck that my mother made us all wear underneath our outfits because it was cold. She prepares to dump her bag of candy and to sort out the good stuff. My mother stops her.

"Nope, J, not so fast. We have a little errand to run first." Now that Eileen has left my mother seems weird, and my guard is immediately up. I can tell that her eyes look puffy and pink, glazed over and slick. She goes to get her purse and I can see her hands shaking as she digs through it for her keys. She turns to me and hands me her coffee mug.

"Go and get me some more Tab with ice," she commands.

"Where are we going?" I am not happy. I want to sort through my Halloween candy so I can see how much good stuff I got and how much junk.

"Just out on a quick errand, you guys can keep your costumes on. J, put the wig back on." There is no way that my sister is putting the wig back on, it's a miracle she wore the damn thing in the first place. J puts the wig in her trick-or-treat bag.

"Good idea, grab your candy and take that with us too," my mother says, seeing a way that we might cooperate. She herds us through the kitchen and into the garage where our tomato soup-red Volvo station wagon awaits. My mother lets my sisters sit in the "way-back" where they can dump out all of their candy and anesthetize themselves with sugar, but she tells me to get in the front seat. Sensing that something is not right, I climb into the car without a fight, candy bag in my lap, wand at my feet. My mother hands me her Tab.

"Where are we going?" I try again.

"Just shut up and be quiet. I need to think," she hisses at me. We pull out of the driveway and head up the street slowly. My mother is digging through her purse again and this time she finds a cigarette and pushes in the car lighter. "Be careful," my mother commands. The car lighter has a mind of its own and often pops out and launches itself at the passenger seat; the leather seat has scars to prove it. I move my legs away from the potential missile and look out the window sullenly. Something is going on. My sisters are unwrapping candy in the way back, oblivious.

After a few minutes of driving, we round a bend and I see the Carillon Bell Tower. This is where we go for class picnics and field trips. I've never seen it in the dark.

"Is there a Halloween party at Carillon?" I ask.

My mother snorts and takes an extended drag on her Super Slim. "Oh I'm sure there is," she says sarcastically. "Just not the kind of party you're thinking of," she mutters under her breath. Weird, she is being weird and why are we driving around at night with our Halloween costumes on. I ask her this very question and she gets quiet then says, "We're going to find your father. I want him to see you in your costumes."

This shuts me up for a bit. I want to think that we're driving to his office to surprise him, but his office is not near Carillon.

We end up on a busy street that's full of buildings with flashing lights. I peer out the window, taking it in. We stop at a red light at a busy intersection; next to us is a very loud truck sitting high off the ground. I look up and see the man driving the truck looking down at me in surprise. He looks dirty and has a can of something to drink in his left hand. He leans back in his seat so he can see who's driving our car; spotting my mother, he raises one eyebrow and flashes her a thumbs-up sign.

"Jesuschrist," she says. "The shit I have to deal with..." The light turns green and we pull away so quickly we leave rubber behind.

Three blocks later we turn into a parking lot where my mother stops the car. She turns to me and says, "I just need to run inside for a second. I'm going to lock the door - when I come back out, let me in, and don't let anyone else in, ok?" I nod as the door slams and watch her run up to the building. There's a sign in the parking lot that says "Westwood Lanes." It's a neon sign with a bowling ball knocking over two bowling pins in cool blue and pink lights. A bowling alley?

My mother is back. I unlock the doors.

"Why are we at a bowling alley?"

"I thought maybe your father was here." She thinks for a minute. "I just want to try a few more places."

We continue up the street, which is all flashing lights and neon. The next lot we pull into says, "Westwood Motel." My mother gets out of the car again, locks us in, jogs up to the building and goes into a small door marked "Office." A few minutes later she is back.

"Did you find him?" I ask. She tells me no distractedly, driving around the parking lot slowly, examining each car. "Now what?" I ask her. "I thought he wasn't here."

"Help me look for his car," she tells me. "They might have made a mistake in the office."

We continue to drive around the parking lot. I take my new job very seriously, looking carefully for my father's gold BMW. No luck. We drive down the street, stopping at each new parking lot, where we do the same thing - my mother locks the car, goes into the Office, comes back out, and we circle the parking lot in search of my father's car.

I have stopped asking questions.

At the end of the street my mother makes a u-turn and we continue our quest on the other side of the street, which is more neon and flashing lights. The Burnell Hotel, Dixie Inn, East West Motel, Miami Motor Lodge, the All Star Motel.

The last place we pull into is called the Red Horse Motel. The sign has a picture of a red horse chess piece on it, with a knight with a scepter chasing behind it. I remember my wand and pick it up and place it in my lap. I still have my pointy cone princess cap on my head, string pulling it tight under my chin. My bag of candy sits at my feet - the thought of eating it now unappealing. I wait for my mother to come out of the Office at the Red Horse Motel.

When she comes out she is crying. I am so stunned by this I forget my job, to unlock the door. She pounds on the window at me. I let her in.

"Did we find him?" I ask. Maybe this is why she is crying. Or maybe she is crying because we didn't find him. I don't know. She doesn't answer me.

"It's time for bed," she says. She lights another cigarette and we pull out of the parking lot. I turn in my seat and look for the gold BMW. My mother crazylady laughs. "Trick or Treat!" she says brightly as we head for home.

*Halloween is when I first knew something was wrong between my parents, all those years ago.

food for thought

I know that I was shaped by the absence of my mother. She was always there in a physical sense; we shared the same address. But by the time I was ten or so, she had checked out of my life pretty completely when it came to being a mother. She wanted to be my friend, when it suited her; the rest of the time she became someone to avoid. On any given day she was often angry, bitter, tyrannical and cruel. I hated to ask her for anything; often the result would be a venomous rant about how hard things were for her, or how badly my father had screwed her.

She was the worst in the mornings. The house that we grew up in after the divorce had three bedrooms upstairs (two and a den really; my sister J got the smallest room) with one bathroom, and a master bedroom on the first floor with another bathroom. When we moved into the house, my mother had a new shower put into the first floor bathroom, but since this was the bathroom that "guests" would use, she pretty much took over the upstairs bathroom. Imagine four women sharing a tiny bathroom with one sink and a tub. Actually, sharing would be misleading; occasionally my sisters and I would be allowed to use it for a few minutes but it was my mother's domain. Every morning when we woke up she would be locked in "her" bathroom, smoke wafting out from under the door. I would wake up and desparately need to pee, so I would knock timidly on the door and say, "Can I get in there for a minute?"

Let the games begin. She would whip the door open and come out in some stage of undress, hair askew, Virginia Slim Super Slim dangling from her mouth, and mutter "Hurry it up," like this was some huge imposition and not something that happened every. single. morning. Then she would head downstairs to pour herself another mug of Diet Pepsi. No coffee, just a coffee mug full of Diet Pepsi, or Tab. Poured from a two-liter because those were cheaper. Every morning. My sisters and I knew that we had about 15 minutes, tops, to pee, brush our teeth, and do whatever else needed to be done. Whoever entered the bathroom first, usually me, had to hold their breath upon entering because the smoke was so thick it was like walking into a dive bar. Every morning I would wave my hand back in forth in front of me and make a show of coughing loudly and declaring "disgusting." Sometimes this would elicit a crazylady laugh from downstairs; other mornings it only fueled the fire that was coming.

After I would get dressed for school in the clothes that I had carefully laid out the night before, I would head downstairs to the kitchen to eat breakfast. My mother would be leaning against the counter, cigarette in one hand and Diet Pepsi in the other. Smoking, she would look me up and down critically. Every morning. And then the comments would start.

"I hope you're not wearing that," she would say, her voice thick with sarcasm. "It's certainly not doing anything for you."

Some mornings I would ignore her completely; others, I would lash out at her.

"I don't care what you think Elaine. God!"

"Did your father buy you that outfit?" Thus implying that the outfit I had on was so hideous and inappropriate that she would never herself have allowed me to purchase it.

"Maybe maybe not." Sure to infuriate her more.

"I've always said money can't buy taste," she'd say smugly. "Obbbbbviously."

"Elaine! Leave me alone! Go worry about your own outfit. At least I have on an outfit."

Always her attacks were delivered in the kitchen while leaning against the counter half-dressed, usually in a bra and slip or in a bra and pantyhose. With no underwear underneath. My mother loved to walk around half-naked; she knew it drove the three of us crazy. At the end of the day this same scene would play itself out in reverse; she would come home from work and strip down to her bra and pantyhose standing in the kitchen, smoking and spewing insults. At the end of the day she was usually funnier and less mean; or maybe in the morning it was just harder to handle, especially because it was before the sugar infusion had taken place.

The sugar infusion was our breakfast. A "normal" breakfast would have been cereal, or oatmeal, or toast and fruit, maybe even eggs. In our house there were usually two choices, depending on if she'd gone to Stan the Donut Man or only to 7-11 the night before. If it was the former, our breakfast would consist of donut holes and cheddar cheese; if it was the latter, it would be pre-made cinnamon rolls with pecans that came six to a foil muffin pan. The cinnamon rolls were also eaten with the cheddar cheese, usually a tough block of bright orange cheddar that would require carving pieces from with a butter knife. Oh, and of course, some Diet Pepsi to top it all off. Incredibly healthy, I know. My mother would refer to the cheddar as "brain food." She'd read a study somewhere that said kids who ate protein in the morning did better in school. So, because she was a five-star parent (and chef) she would feed us hunks of cheddar cheese with our sugar each morning. We all got good grades, so of course she was doing a good job; the protein was working.

I'm not sure why she insisted on feeding us such white trash fare in the mornings; we certainly could have afforded to have fruit and cereal like most of our friends at school. We lived in the richest school district there was - although our house was small, it was still in Oakmont, the toniest suburb around. I think the reason for our lack of nutrition had to do with my mother trying to avoid the town grocery, where all of the gossips held court. She'd rather feed us garbage then have to make nice with the women who should have been her peers on the social scene. Instead she had different scenes to play out.

Once we were in high school, she had her part down pretty well. Every year in the beginning of the school year we'd be sent home with a list of books that we had to buy. I was always in honors classes, so my list was usually long and expensive. I dreaded going home with that list. It always set my mother off, ranting about how she didn't have any money, and I was going to have to ask my father, the words "your father" said with such loathing that it was palpable. So that's exactly what I would do, call my father at work; his secretary, Shelia, would always put me right through. Sometimes my dad would greet me with, "How much do you need?" Later that night he would drop off money or a check, which would give my mother time to primp and connive and scheme before he pulled up in the driveway. He would never come into the house; he would just sit in the driveway, waiting; my sisters and I knew to look out for him and to run outside.

I'm not sure what the true financial arrangement between my mother and father was. I know that my dad paid her alimony and child support for each of us until the day we turned 18. I also know that it must not have been enough for us to live on alone, because the minute the divorce was final my mother went back to work as a social worker for Catholic Social Services, which paid next to nothing. My mother wasn't the type who wanted to work, so going out and finding a job must have been a necessity. If I had to guess, I would say that my dad paid her the minimum that he could, but the understanding was that my sisters and I were to come to him for anything we needed and we would always take care of us financially. Which he did, he paid for everything, he paid for the three of us to have countless homecoming and prom dresses, he made sure we each had a car when we turned sixteen, he paid for three college educations with nary a word of complaint. I think it was his way of making sure he took care of us. Took care of us, but not my mother.

go Obama

Watching the half hour Barack Obama TV spot last night made me realize something - sometimes we are shaped more by what our parents don't do than by what they do do. When Obama talked about only knowing his father for a month, and what a lasting effect it had on him, I could relate. Sometimes we are shaped by the absence of a person or presence more than we are shaped by him or her having been there. You can see it in the way he relates to his own girls, always taking time for them, always making time for them, as much time as they need. Obama does this b/c he didn't have a father that did it for him. He wants to be a better father, to give his children something richer than what he had, to give them something that he didn't have. There's a depth to him that I think comes from living a life where something was missing, where things weren't always easy or perfect. A thoughtfulness that comes from having made decisions on his own. A candor that comes from a desire to live life authentically. I hope we elect him President on Tuesday; our country needs someone like him.

tmi

Maybe the reason that I can't seem to get excited to have a kid is that I already played mother to my mother as a kid. I want to want children, but I just don't seem to be catching the baby bug. I'm 34 years old, so I know on a rational level that the clock is ticking, but on an emotional level I can't make myself feel something that isn't there.

I think it goes back to the way my own mother treated being a mother. She always acted like we were a burden, a swarming brood of needy leeches that sucked her dry. Like we took her life and independence away and left her with this three-pronged cross to bear. Had my parents not gotten divorced, I don't know that she would have been the same way; I suspect so but maybe not to such an extreme degree. I do remember when they were married there were times that my mother wanted to run errands or do something else on her own (as she had every right to) and my father would jokingly say that he was available to "babysit." That used to infuriate her, she would rage at him, telling him that you're not "babysitting" when they're your own children.

Why did they even have children? I won't go so far as to say that they didn't even want kids, because I think they did, my dad especially. For my mother, I think at that point in time it wasn't really even a choice; it was what you did. And I'm sure she did want children, maybe she just didn't want to have 3 children in less than 5 years time. I think that overwhelmed her. Having children certainly sends the mother's life into more turmoil than the fathers; from the very beginning, as soon as you're pregnant, a woman's lifestyle is changed. For many fathers I know, the 9 months of pregnancy is a chance to live life to the hilt for one last time.

I don't think I will enjoy being pregnant. On a purely selfish level, giving up wine, sushi, and getting fat all sound horrific. Not to mention the discomfort of gaining 25-50 lbs on a small frame; I've seen friends who were my height, 5'2", go through pregnancy and it isn't pretty. I know that once you pop the kid out and the nurse puts it in your arms, your whole world changes and the heavens open up and you feel such intense love that you forget all the misery leading up to it - I know. I've heard it from countless mothers. I get it as much as you can get it before you do it yourself. I'm sure I will feel the same way.

But what happens next? You and your husband are sent home with this new baby and it hits you - you're officially in the cult. All of the sudden you've totally sold out to the man, you're solidly an adult, you've got a mortgage and a kid and saving for college to worry about. What you don't have is freedom. Travel, quiet time, beauty rest, adult conversation, going out to dinner, working out, getting drunk, it's all over. And your body? Totally trashed. I'm not talking about weight here, we all know losing weight and getting back (at least close) to where you were before is possible. What I'm not so sure about is getting is getting back the vah-jay-jay. My mother really fucked me up on that one. See, she's always declared that after my sister J was born breech, that her vah-jay-jay wasn't the same. And I'm sure that's the truth. She maintains that it bothered my father so much that he wanted her to have surgery to fix it - while I'm not sure that's the truth , it's wormed it's way into my psyche all the same. In the 80's in the town I grew up in there was a doctor that everyone called "The Love Doctor" who was famous for performing "tightening" surgeries; my mother swears that my father wanted to sign her up for the procedure.

So, in my mind, I equate having children to the beginning of martial woes. My mother always claimed that after the breech birth my dad could never look at her the same way. Not only was he sexually dissatisfied because of her changed body, he also was shaken up by all of the blood and gore that went down in the delivery room the day my sister was born. My mother has always implied that this killed their sex life and that as a result my dad went looking for it elsewhere, because he was no longer attracted to or interested in my mother. He saw her as exactly that, a mother, not as a woman anymore.

By the time my mother got pregnant for a third time, with my youngest sister, B, I think my dad had checked out of the marriage. J was born in November of '75 and B was born in July of '77, so there was a lapse of less than a year between when J was born and when my mother got pregnant with B. As my mother tells it, when she told my father that she was pregnant with my sister B, some time around October 1976, my father wanted nothing to do with having a third child and urged her to have an abortion. My mother refused. They fought incessantly; my mother prevailed. Shortly after my sister B was born, my father had a vasectomy. Seven years later, my father told my mother he was leaving her.

To this day, my mother maintains that my father has intense guilt about the whole thing, and that's why he's babied my baby sister as much as he has. I don't know how much of this is true, but I do know that 18 years later when I ended up in an emergency room with my sister as the result of her botched abortion, my father dropped everything and got in the car to drive to us and to be there. My mother declined to make the trip. Talk about abandonment. That's when I officially became my sister's mother, and began to understand what it's like to live with the guilt, fear and worry that I imagine is part of being a parent.

But I am not my mother. I need to remember that. Like my dad has always been a rock for me, I have been the same thing for my mother and later my sister, picking up the pieces where my mother failed. I am tired. Tired of feeling responsible. I've felt I had to be the responsible one since I was eight years old. I'm glad that my husband and I now live a life in a town where not one member of my family lives, so the guilt and burdens that I associate with them are at least able to be pushed to arm's length, or kept away by not picking up the phone. It is a relief. But I still walk around feeling guilty all the time, guilty that I'm not calling more, or reaching out more, or paying more attention. Sometimes I just want to hide out from them, not deal with them, be my own person totally apart from them. I don't know how to do that without totally cutting them out, which isn't an option, because I love them both, they just suck me dry emotionally. I am always the listener, the fixer, the good girl, the normal one, the one to look up to. Nobody ever asks me, how are you feeling, and let's face it, if they do, I deflect the question and ask a question about them. I don't like to share too much of myself because I'm afraid of everyone taking all of me out of me. Everyone in my family (except for my dad) always wants something from me. Which brings me back to having a baby, and why I just don't know if I can do it.

I don't know if I can give all of myself to someone else for the next twenty years. I am afraid I will lose me completely. I guess what I need to realize is that being a parent is supposed to be a partnership, not a cross for only the mother to bear. I worry that I would have to do it all myself, or that I would feel like I was doing it all myself, which would lead to resentment towards my husband, which I guess would lead the dissolution of our happy marriage. Kids = divorce. I can't get past that idea. I always want to love my husband best, to put him first, because that's exactly what he's always done for me. How can I continue to love him first and best if we create someone that's competing for our attention. And how can I tell my husband any of this, I can't do it without wondering how he'll see me. I always try to project this image of being strong and invincible, being weak and vulnerable to someone do not come easily to me. Weak and vulnerable are not what attracted him to me, those traits are not what I advertised myself to be and they're not what he thought he was signing up for when he married me. If I let myself be seen for who I truly am, if I let my true self be shown, I might get laughed at, or rejected. Or divorced or abandoned or not loved. Because the true me might not be lovable. What a fucking catch-22 cluster. Do I really want to perpetuate this cycle with a child? Would it even be fair? Or is that just an excuse so that I don't have to face my fears? I need to try to live more authentically, but that means burdening my husband with all of my baggage. Guess his Christmas present this year is going to be a luggage cart.

freebirds

Of course I did put myself out there, to be laughed at and disdained by my mother, for about another ten years after the "I'm in love" rejection. I was one of those stubborn people that held out false hope that one day my mother would change. Later, when I went to therapy, I would try to talk to her in the same therapeutic terms that I was learning, explaining to her things that had been enlightening to me. I never told her I was in therapy at the time, because I couldn't bear her reaction. I knew exactly what she would say - "Oh, so you're finally in therapy because I was such a bad mother, is that it?" Yup, that's it, thanks. Although ironically the reason that I finally broke down and went to therapy (she'll never believe this) had absolutely nothing to do with her. With my mother, everything comes back to her, so of course the only issues I would have to deal with would stem from her - once again, she's the spotlight, not me.

My musings from therapy never convinced my mother to go to therapy herself. It's not that she doesn't know that she has issues - she knows. She's just comfortable living with herself the way she is - she doesn't want to change, and grow, and feel better. With digging into the past comes a lot of pain but ultimately even more relief. Instead, my mother has a co-dependent relationship with her family physician. She goes to him and tells him what a wonderful job he's doing taking care of her and she walks out with some pills - Prozac, Effexor, Wellbutrin, my mother has done them all. She takes anti-depressants like they're aspirin, popping one daily to relieve her aches and pains. At one point she did have a shrink of some kind, but she never went to him for talk therapy, just for drugs because "that's all I could afford."

Much of my family has been in therapy in some form over the years. It started when we were young, right after my parents got divorced. My mother and father were determined that us three girls know that the divorce "was not our fault" so we were driven to a short, squat concrete building to see a family therapist named Polly every other week. My sisters and I did not like Polly; we did like the fact that her office shared a parking lot with a Wendy's so therapy = Frostys for all.

Polly wore awkward pantsuits and glasses and would usually have the three of us go into her office at the same time to talk with her. None of us wanted to be there, we thought it was weird; why would we want to talk about our parents and our feelings to a complete stranger? Especially after all of the training we'd had from our mother not to talk about the divorce at school or to our friends or their parents. It didn't make sense.

Polly was not very good at connecting with the three of us; she didn't seem to know how to relate to kids at all. Sometimes she would ask us to draw pictures of our family, and that was ok because we all liked to color and draw. But other times she would ask us question after question about things we weren't supposed to talk about in the first place. I thought Polly was an intense bore, my youngest sister B didn't seem to have any idea what we were even doing there, but my middle sister J's reaction to Polly was perhaps the most honest - she flat out hated Polly with a passion. J had a passionate hatred for many things in life, like green vegetables, spices and in general any "non-American" food, but at age eight her hatred for Polly was her strongest hatred of all.

One therapy session stands out in my mind. My mother had bundled us all into the Quantuum and bribed us to go to Polly's with the promise of lunch at Wendy's afterward. On this particular day my father was supposed to meet us at the therapist's office and he didn't show up, pleading work demands. This infuriated my mother, and so before we went in for our session with Polly she went in to talk to the therapist for a few minutes alone. As soon as the door shut behind her, my sister J slouched down in her seat as far as she could and mumbled, "hate Polly."

I saw the receptionist giving my sister a look. I, always trying to be the obedient good girl that got praise for acting the best, whispered to J, "Just be nice. If you just talk to her you'll get Wendy's." J had a love of hamburgers and French fries, so a Wendy's single with cheese and ketchup with fries was powerful motivation. No response.

The door to Polly's office opened and my mother came out. Polly motioned us in and in we went, J last and dragging her feet in protest. We sat in the three chairs that Polly had lined up in front of her desk, and Polly went around to her side of the desk and sat down. She folded her hands in front of her and smiled.

"Today we're going to play a game. You girls like games, right?" B and I nodded eagerly; J just twisted her mouth into a sour pucker, like she'd been sucking on a lemon.

"See those bricks over there?" she pointed to a corner where there was a pile of heavy cardboard blocks made to look like bricks. "I want you to take those bricks and build a wall on my desk, high enough so that I can't see you and you can't see me anymore." This seemed to interest J; the idea of blocking Polly out was appealing. We all set to work, scooping up the bricks and building the wall between us. In minutes, we could no longer see Polly anymore.

"OK, girls, that's enough. Now here's what we're going to do. You're going to take turns, and every time one of you tells me about a feeling you had this past week or that you're having today, you get to take a brick off the wall. Once all the bricks are gone, we'll be able to see each other again. The reason for this exercise is that we want to open up about our feelings, not to build walls with them. Ready?"

My sister J looked at me like she wanted to karate chop the wall and Polly along with it. Once again she had slouched down in her chair so that her head and shoulders were resting in the seat and the rest of her body was balanced our in front of it.

"Celine, why don't you begin." I tried to think of a feeling that I didn't care about that I could share with Polly. This really was stupid.

"Uh, ummm...," I mumbled, stalling. Suddenly J sat upright in her chair and began wiggling back and forth, doing a little seated dance. Perhaps she was trying to participate in the "feelings" exercise - she was holding both of her middle fingers high in the air, flipping a double bird at Polly. I giggled. Emboldened, she stood up and began alternately raising her right and left middle fingers at Polly, hopping back and forth from one foot to the other, her shiny bowl cut bouncing along to the beat. I couldn't stop laughing.

Polly stood up and peered over the wall just as J pulled her two middle fingers down into her fists, but she continued to bop back and forth demonically. I tried to appear deep in thought.

"J, let's settle down. Take a seat in your chair," Polly said sternly. She waited until J was back in her seat and then she disappeared from view again, safely hidden behind the brick wall. Instantly the double-barreled "fuck you" fingers rose again. I tried in desperation to think of a feeling I could blurt out but nothing was coming to me. Except a wave of hysteria.

I said, "I felt scared," because I knew we were going to get busted before I could get the words out, Polly's pale face with her greasy glasses appeared over the wall and J was caught in the act, middle fingers and all. Ut-oh.

B and I were promptly excused from the therapy room and my mother was brought in to talk with Polly and J. When they emerged a few minutes later, J looked smug and my mother looked like she was trying to be stern. Quickly we were hustled us out of Polly's office and into the car. Then my mother let us have it.

"What is wrong with you girls, embarrassing me like that?" she said angrily. "You know better than to act that way." She tried to take a swat at J, who was sitting directly behind her in the backseat. J wiggled away from her and raised her double barreled bird again, this time in my mother's direction. My mother screeched, "JJJJJJJJJ!" in horror, then looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders. My mother turned back around, facing the steering wheel and laid her head down on it, shoulder shaking. For a minute I thought J had made her cry, but then I heard her laughing. I started laughing too, and then we were all laughing, J still flipping her birds high in the air.