Authors: Deborah Spungen
And I Don't Want to Live This Life : A Mother's Story of Her Daughter's Murder (9780307807434) (13 page)
We just wished she could hold on to her friends. The Huntingdon Valley girls quickly turned on Nancy, just like the girls everywhere else we'd lived. One day I found a note stuck in the front door from her friend Helene: “Stay away from me, you witch.” Later that afternoon I saw Helene and two other girls staring at Nancy through our living room window while Nancy read on the sofa, oblivious. I chased them away.
Her relationship with Suzy also continued to be poor. We wanted Nancy and Suzy to be sisters, not enemies. In the hope of bringing them closer together, we suggested to them that they share one of the big bedrooms in the new house. When I was a girl I'd often wished I had a sister to tell secrets to and giggle with when the
lights were out. The girls agreed. They picked out matching bedspreads, headboards, and jewelry boxes. They had fun fixing the room up. But they still didn't get along well.
Then, a few months after we'd moved in, the roommate setup backfired. It was on a day that Nancy came home from school in tears. She refused to tell me why, just went up to the girls' room and began to do her homework. Suzy was outside playing. She came inside for dinner, went upstairs, and came back down a minute later, sobbing.
“Look what she did!” Suzy wailed.
“Suzy, what happened?” I asked.
“Just look what she did!” Suzy cried. “Look what Nancy did!”
I went upstairs to the girls' room. Nancy sat on her bed, arms and legs crossed. She stared straight ahead, a sullen pout on her face. Her math book was on the floor next to her bed, the pages twisted and ripped out of frustration.
Suzy's half of the bedroom was totally destroyed.
Nancy had pulled off Suzy's bedspread and ripped it to shreds. Suzy's clothes had been pulled out of Suzy's side of the closet and strewn across Suzy's side of the room, along with the contents of Suzy's half of the dresser drawers. Suzy's jewelry box was broken, the jewelry scattered among the ruined clothes, along with her box of hair rollers, her school supplies, her books.
The sheer precision of Nancy's rampage was frightening.
“Nancy!” I cried.
She just sat there. She didn't seem to hear me or see me.
I repeated her name several times but got no response. So I shook her by the shoulders. Finally I penetrated that vacant glaze.
“Why did you mess up Suzy's things?” I demanded.
“Because,” she replied.
“I want you to put it back together right now. I'm very upset with you.”
“No!” she replied, suddenly petulant.
“Yes!” I declared.
“No!” she repeated.
I left the room, furious. There was no reasoning with her when she was like this. I went downstairs to calm Suzy. When I went back upstairs, Nancy hadn't budged. She still sat on her bed, arms and legs crossed, that petulant pout on her faceâa look we began to see often and quickly dubbed “That Look.”
I cleaned up the room.
Frank and I discussed the situation when he got home. We decided it was unfair to Suzy to ask her to share a bedroom with Nancy any longer. At dinner we announced that we were going to move Nancy into the fourth upstairs bedroom, which had been used as a den. Nancy promptly refused to make the moveâunless we also agreed to give her her own choice of new wallpaper, her own double bed, and her own Princess phone for the calls that never came from the friends who didn't exist. We agreed.
Again, we thought she was disturbed and should be getting some kind of treatment. Again, we wavered.
Until later that week, when I found Nancy standing at the top of the stairs, holding a brown paper bag over the bannister. She was about to drop it to the floor of the entry hall. Her eyes were glazed. She had That Look on her face.
“Nancy, what's in the bag?” I asked.
“Aquarius,” she replied woodenly.
She loved the cat, loved all animals. I couldn't imagine her wanting to harm him.
“But why is Aquarius in the bag, Nancy?”
“I'm gonna throw him downstairs and see if he still lands on his feet, even if he's inside the bag.”
“But Nancy, you'll hurt Aquarius.”
“I want to.”
“No!” I wrestled the bag from her. In response, she tried to smack me in the face. I overpowered her in time, shook her.
She blinked, looked around, looked at me, looked at the bag.
“Mommy, where are we going?”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“Why are we standing here?”
I looked deeply into my daughter's eyes. She wasn't playing a game. She really had forgotten why we were at the top of the stairs, forgotten what she'd been about to do.
“You wanted to hurt Aquarius,” I explained.
She frowned, took the bag from me, and opened it. The cat jumped out and darted away. Then Nancy turned and went into her new room. She stared out the window for an hour, then sobbed uncontrollably for another hour.
The next day I commenced researching the guidance clinics in the area. I found one that appeared to have a good program for pre-adolescents. It was a sprawling, antiseptic institution affiliated with a major private psychiatric hospital.
The director was an older man with a rather prominent bald head. Frank and I met with him and described Nancy's belligerent, disruptive behavior, her violent tantrums, the glazed look she was getting, her inability to hold on to friends, our inability to control her. We told him the findings of the child guidance center evaluations administered to Nancy when she was four. We told him we were concerned that Nancy's crossed eye still hadn't straightened out.
He agreed to test her.
Nancy was angry with us but agreed to submit to a battery of tests. I think she was, deep down inside, becoming as frightened by her behavior as we were. She wanted help. Over several visits a psychology intern administered to Nancy a Bender Gestalt, Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Wide-Range Achievement Test, Rutgers Drawing Test, Draw-a-Person, Rorschach, and Thematic Apperception Test. The evaluation was submitted to the head of the institute on October 22, 1968, when Nancy was ten and a half years old. The examiner described Nancy as a “somewhat big girl for her age who walks awkwardly and speaks in a soft, hoarse voice.”
The results of the intelligence tests were consistent with what we already knew. Nancy's verbal IQ of 135 placed her in the category of Very Superior. Her full-scale IQ of 129 ranked her in the Superior range of intellectual activity. The Wide-Range Achievement Test placed Nancy as highly advancedâcollege levelâin reading (grade equivalent of 12.9, ninety-ninth percentile) and spelling (grade equivalent of 14.5, ninety-ninth percentile), while almost a half-grade behind her expected level of performance in math (grade equivalent 5.7, forty-seventh percentile).
Nancy's performance on the Bender Gestalt and Rutgers Drawing tests yielded the same story we'd heard six years before. The examiner cited “difficulty in the fine motor area with some attempt at compensation through compulsivity.”
But the examiner's evaluation of Nancy offered new insights.
Nancy perceives interpersonal interactions negatively; either as uncomfortable and discordant or as controlled and emotionally sterile. At a deeper level she views her parents as ignoring and rejecting her. Nurturance from her mother, whom she perceives as controlling, is conditional as there is perceived pressure from the latter for independence and intellectual achievement which
Nancy perceives as leading to approval and love.
Nancy feels highly insecure about her inability to do things on her own. She sees herself as small and helpless in relation to a potentially dangerous environment and feels that she needs more support and is not getting as much as she needs and wants. She seems to react to her unmet dependency needs with angry feelings (especially toward her mother) which are anxiety arousing and which she must defend against albeit imperfectly by denial and reaction formation.
It seems, however, that tension can build up within Nancy and that she is hard pressed to deal with it as she senses difficulty in maintaining adequate delay and control. Despite her high level verbal ability she does not have a well developed rich imaginative fantasy life with which to bind impulse and affect. Rather she attempts to use rigid cognitive control as a compensatory mechanism, and she seems to relate to the external world without spontaneity.
Her high level verbal ability is not translated into personality functioning in an in-depth way and one does not see the deeper resources in her dealing with personality concerns. Her difficulty with internal control, though well compensated for at the cognitive level, thus appears to influence personality functioning and may have been initially based on some organic difficulty.â¦
Because there is much investment in dealing with basic concerns centering around support and security, she does not show signs of having reached an appropriate and age expected level of psychosexual development and she finds the area of heterosexual interaction and identity threatening and confusing.
Two weeks later the director of the institute held a diagnostic and planning conference with four other staff members, including Dr. Blake, who was to become Nancy's therapist. According to the report of this conference, Nancy's condition at that time was summarized as follows:
She impressed as an emotionally hungry child who feels herself as receiving less than others. This arouses anger which is displayed with sometimes poor control toward peers and siblings. Thought of accepting responsibility for these angry bouts then is sometimes projected onto others.
In reference to parents she reacts with anger but also with
concern that she will lose love, nurturance, and protection. Her relationship with mother appears particularly conflictual. Self-concept is inadequate as she would prefer to be prettier, and nicer. Nancy's conflicts seem to be partially internalized, and there are evidences of anxiety, nightmares, and possible phobic features. Compulsive striving in academic work is seen as compensatory efforts at establishing her adequacy. Additionally, she seems to use denial and projection extensively, which might represent more characterological methods of defending herself.
Finally, the family environment seems to be one in which hollering and physical punishment are common, which provide both a model and instigation for aggressive behavior.
(I don't know where this reference to physical punishment came from. Frank and I did not believe in it. Nancy might have made it up in an interview for shock value.)
Out of the planning conference came two recommendations: individual therapy for Nancy, as well as both individual and group therapy for Frank and me.
This was relayed to us by the director the following week.
“You two have a lot of problems,” he said. “Until you are able to work them out, individually and as a couple, Nancy will never be okay.”
We were stunned. He was saying it was our fault that Nancy was the way she was. She was disturbed because we had a lousy marriage. Admittedly, ours had not been a perfect marriage. We had had some problems. But we had not said anything to the doctors about our infidelities. We felt that our problems as a couple were working themselves out, that our marriage was solid now. Clearly, the director did not think so. He saw something wrong. He pinned the blame on us. He was saying we were rotten parents. True, Suzy and David were fine, healthy children. But that was just an accident! We were lucky we hadn't destroyed them, too!
I felt awful and worthless as Frank and I crossed the parking lot to our car. Here I had devoted myself to being a good mother and wife, only to turn up a total failure. It meant I was a failure as a human being.
If only I had realized then that doctors are human beings, too. They make mistakes. Their diagnoses are speculation, not gospel. But I didn't know that then. Back then doctors were God to their patients. And I was intimidated.
My instincts told me he was wrong, that something was seriously wrong with Nancyâregardless of her environment. But I couldn't bring myself to doubt the director or disagree with him. He knew what he was talking about. I was a housewife. I remember thinking I had hit bottom. I didn't know then that there was still a long, long way to go.
I went to the clinic twice a week, once for my individual therapy, once for my group. Frank also went twice. Nancy started out just going to individual therapy, but soon she was also in group.
Dr. Blake, Nancy's therapist, wore a red dress to their first session. She was a middle-aged woman with a European accent. Nancy seemed to like her and didn't mind going. But she absolutely detested group and after a few weeks refused to go. I couldn't get her in the car.
“I don't want to go and sit there talking to a bunch of dumb, sick kids,” she protested. “I don't have anything in common with them.”
Dr. Blake said it was all right for Nancy to stop going to group.