9. Escape

In middle school, I started ditching class. I’d show up at school in the morning and spend the rest of the day hiding in the bathrooms or skulking around the hallways avoiding hall-pass monitors. It’s not like I planned to stop going to class. I simply walked into the school building one morning and didn’t go. I knew things weren’t going end well, but it didn’t seem to matter at the time. It wasn’t an easy feat avoiding other students and teachers roaming the halls, not to mention the whole project was intensely lonely. I have no memory of how I got caught or if I just figured I needed to get back to classes. Whatever the case, I knew there’d be no returning without an explanation of my absenteeism. So, I practiced forging my mother’s signature and wrote a letter with an explanation that Mom had broken her wrist, and therefore I needed to write the letter in her stead. With Mom’s forged signature at the bottom of the letter, I walked into class with the stunning thought that I just might pull this off. The teacher silently read my remarkable (and ridiculous) letter. Then, without hesitation, she asked me to follow her to the principal’s office. The gig was up.

I don’t recall the conversation I had with the principal or the specifics of my talk with the counselor to whom I was immediately referred. I do remember the counselor suggesting I needed help (a no brainer there). The thought that someone might listen to me was both oddly frightening and encouraging. After all, I had no idea why I was skipping class. I was told to wait in the hallway while the counselor called my mother. Summoned back into the office, the counselor left me alone with Mom on the phone.

I started crying. “Mom,” I said, “the school counselor told me I need help.”

“Now you listen to me, ” my mother fumed. “There will be no counseling in this family, do you understand? You pull yourself together and do it now. Your father will talk to you tonight when he gets home from the office.” 

I was allowed to go home because I couldn’t stop crying.

Mom wouldn’t speak to me when I got home and ordered me to my room.  After getting the scoop from Mom, Dad opened the door to my darkened room where he found me facedown on my bed, in tears.

“Have you completely lost your mind?” he shouted.

“I think have, Daddy.”

My father scowled and slammed the door as he left. No further word was spoken about my class-skipping exploits. It was as though my truancy never happened. So I pretended it didn’t happen, too.

I returned to school the next day. Walking into the classroom was a bit surreal. I have a mental picture of standing in the doorway, my eyes fixed on a blonde curly-headed girl, The Perfect Girl. It was like watching a movie where only the main characters are in focus. Perfect Girl looked at me with a mixed expression of curiosity and disdain, as though she knew something was wrong with me but just couldn’t put her finger on it. The longer she stared, the smaller I became. For a flashing moment, I want to yell at Perfect Girl asking if her father was alright, did he stop talking to her, did her father get angry without reason, did her mother come to her side to help with the confusion, did she ever have to help her drunk mother up the stairs? I wanted to scream, “please, somebody help me.”  Instead, with my head bowed, I shuffled to my desk, sat down, and the movie ended with the wicked child dissolving in a cloud of powdery dust.  I could no longer be seen or found. I disappeared. Poof!

Never again would I ditch class. I’d come home after school at 3:30, hide in my bedroom until dad came home from work. Mom and Dad would imbibe their required amounts of gin and bourbon and then we’d sit down for dinner. Afterward, we would gather around the TV to watch our favorite shows and pretend we were the Walton family. 

This odd episode of skipping class was, of course, an “acting out”, a cry for help. For one brief moment help was offered and then summarily denied. 

There’s no question my parents took excellent care of me materially. I’m just not sure they knew what to do with a troubled child. Years later I would learn my mother’s sister, whom I never met, was institutionalized in the Utah State Hospital and died there. Was Mom was afraid her sister’s history was repeating itself in me? For reasons I have never understood, our family failed to address our turmoils. Maybe it was believed that if we didn’t talk about Trouble, Trouble would go away on its own. Avoidance was our preferred method of working through the issues that plagued us. 

My parents had defined expectations for my middle brother, Bill. He was to be the shining success of the family. Expectations of me, however, were more traditional: behave, get into college, meet and marry a lawyer or doctor, have three kids, and live happily ever after. None of that quite happened.

I did go to college where I partied far too much and failed to find a suitable husband. I almost failed college, too, but scampered away before I graduated. After a series of unsatisfactory jobs, I applied for and got accepted as a flight attendant, which was the best job I ever had. My parents had friends who had property on the island of Barbados, West Indies, and who better to get my parents to the island but their daughter who worked for the airlines? I got Mom and Dad’s flight passes and together the three of us took a vacation to Barbados.  

Sitting on the beach, in a bikini, I can only dream of now, I watched as my mother approached a handsome, and tanned young man who was coming out of the blue Caribean like he was in a movie scene, the water streaming off his lean body in glorious sparkles. I groaned because I had a good idea of what my mother was up to. Long story short (and whether I write a detailed post about this beach meeting remains to be seen), I ended up marrying him 8 months later. I think I might have loved him, but in retrospect, I got married because my mom chose him (and I just had to please her), plus, in Winnetka terms, at age 26 I was pushing spinsterhood.

My husband was in the Navy, attached to a then-secret military base on the island. So it was on Barbados we made our home. Our first night together on the island, he came out of our bedroom dressed in coarse black cotton pajamas, far too small for him. Turns out he was wearing the uniform of a dead North Viet Cong Lieutenant and my first thought was “Oh, I’m in big trouble here.” 

The marriage was a disaster from the beginning, salvaged only by the birth of my daughter, Diana. He was verbally abusive, which I felt I deserved and was occasionally threatening. I was miserable and wrote my mother a heartfelt letter about my unhappiness, believing of course, that Mom and I were now woman-to-woman friends. She wrote a single sentence in response: “Dear Bonnie, I don’t know what to tell you about your situation.”

It was the second time I would call out for help. The first when I was in middle school, the second as a distraught newlywed. It would be the last cry for help I would make of her. Mom was, for some reason, incapable of coming to my aid. Perhaps because no one ever came to hers.

The marriage ended in divorce and with nowhere to go, I returned to Winnetka with 9-month-old Diana in my arms. One evening after putting Diana to bed, I sat with my mom in the den of my parent’s home.

Mom looked me straight in the eyes and said, “This breakup. You did shower and use deodorant, didn’t you?” 

“Good God, Mom.”

I got up, walked out of the room, and made plans for yet another escape from a childhood that just never seemed to go away.