Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (44 page)

After unpacking her things, she opened the front closet to hang
up her coat. Four beautifully wrapped Christmas packages were on the floor. Each one said:
To Dena. From Mother.
She put her gifts for her mother by the little tree and sat down to wait for her, wondering what was in the packages, especially the big one. That night, every time she heard the elevator door open and heard someone come down the hall, she held her breath; she just knew it was her. But it never was. They all walked on. At about ten o’clock she was starving and there was nothing in the refrigerator, so she wrote a note and propped it up against the Christmas tree.
Mother, I am here! I have gone to get something to eat and will be right back.

She put her coat on and had to leave the door unlocked because she didn’t have a key. She went down the street to a coffee shop and got a grilled cheese sandwich and a Coke and a piece of chocolate pie to go, but when she got back to the building it was locked and she couldn’t get back in. She buzzed her mother’s apartment, hoping she would be home by now. There was no answer so she had to push the manager’s buzzer again.

The next morning she woke up and got dressed and fooled around the apartment all day, killing time. Each time she went out she left the same note in the same place. Two days later she called her school until finally someone picked up. Dena asked if her mother had called and left her a message. They said she hadn’t.

Christmas morning she got up early and made a pot of coffee. She combed her hair and put on her good dress and sat by the window and waited for the phone to ring. Every time she heard the elevator door open, her heart jumped. She knew it was going to be her mother this time. And her heart sank again as whoever it was walked on down the hall. She sat there all day. The window was ice cold but the apartment was warm. At about six o’clock she went in the kitchen and heated up the frozen turkey dinner with mashed potatoes she had gotten at the store and sat down and ate it. She watched the Perry Como Christmas special on the old black-and-white television set in the living room. She waited until eleven o’clock and then she went into the closet, got her presents, and put them in the middle of the floor and opened them. She saved the big one for last. She cleaned up all the paper and went to bed.

All through the rest of the holiday, she waited. Each day, Dena was convinced that her mother was going to walk in the door at any minute. With each day that passed, the feeling drained out of her body, until at the end of the week she was numb. On her last day she packed, called a cab, put on her new blue wool pea coat that her mother had given her for Christmas, went over and turned off the lights on the Christmas tree, locked the door behind her, and went downstairs to wait in the lobby for her taxi. Mrs. Cleverdon came out to see about a hall bulb that needed replacing and saw that Dena was leaving. “Did you have a nice visit?” she asked pleasantly.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Upstairs in apartment 6D a note was on the table. “
Mother, I was here. Love, Dena
.” Three weeks later the note she had left on the table in the living room was still there. Mrs. Cleverdon told her so on the phone. Her mother did not come back. Her mother had disappeared off the face of the earth. But Dena did not cry. Not once. Back at school, if anyone asked how her Christmas had been, she lied. She pretended it had never happened. It took years for Dena to really believe that her mother was not going to come back.

That next Christmas her grandparents wanted her to come and be with them, but she took a train to Chicago and spent the holidays alone in a room at the Drake. The first day she got in a cab and went over to the Berkeley and stood outside the building for a long time and then went back to the hotel. Christmas Day she dressed up and went downstairs and had Christmas dinner in the Cape Cod room. She sat at a table by the window and ordered a lobster. She had never had one before so she decided to try one. People looked over at the pretty girl sitting all by herself with a lobster bib, trying to crack the shell and figure out which part you were supposed to eat, but she did not see them staring at her because she spent most of her time looking out the window as though she was expecting to see someone she knew.

“And you never heard from your mother after that?” asked Dr. Diggers.

“No. Nobody did. Anyhow, that was a long time ago and has nothing to do with what’s happening now.”

“Wait a minute. So you don’t really know if she’s living or dead.”

Dena dismissed it. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Really, it doesn’t matter to me one way or another.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Because—” Dena looked up“—it’s not anything I’m particularly proud of.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know, it’s just embarrassing.”

“Let’s talk about it.”

“Let’s don’t. I am not interested in the past. I don’t even remember most of it; what’s the point? Look, I’m a little old to sit around hugging a teddy bear, whining about my mother. I don’t have time for that; it’s all I can do to keep my head on straight without spacing out or getting myself whipped up about yesterdays. You get one mother and one father and if you’re lucky, you grow up and it’s over, get over it, and become an adult. I didn’t have a great
childhood but I’m not going to dine out on it. I hate whiners. And I don’t need anybody to feel sorry for me.”

Diggers rolled over closer to Dena. “Sweetie pie, I do feel sorry for you. And you have a right to feel sorry for yourself. That was a
terrible
thing that happened to you.”

It was the first time Dr. Diggers had called her anything but Dena and it caught her off guard.

“You are going to have to talk to someone; it might as well be me. OK?”

Dena heard herself say, “All right.”

“Good girl. I know it’s hard for you to talk about but we have to. We have to look at this thing head on and not sweep it under the rug, because until you face what really happened and deal with it, you are not going to know what you are feeling about anything. I won’t lie to you; it is going to be a long, hard process … but we have to start somewhere.”

Dena was really listening to her for the first time.

“Are you willing to start and work with me now?”

“Yes.”

That night, Elizabeth Diggers thought more about Dena. She had grown very fond of her. She could still look at her with a cold, trained, professional eye, but there was more there—something more beyond the usual patient-doctor relationship. Lonely people have a way of recognizing each other. She could see past that beautiful face, past those eyes that did not reveal. When she looked at Dena, she saw that fifteen-year-old who never got out of that room. She was still sitting there, looking out the window, still waiting for her mother to come home. Diggers’s job was to go inside that room, take that girl by the hand, and bring her out. Get her out into the sun and fresh air so she could continue to grow. Diggers knew all the clinical names, all the medical and psychological terms for what was bothering Dena, but it could be summed up in simple, human terms. Her heart had been broken and she had never gotten over it.

Session after session, Dena would close her eyes and try to remember, but she seemed to have a block. What was she like? Dena was even having a hard time remembering what her mother looked like. She tried her best but she was unable to come up with anything but the shadow of a person, darting in and out of the picture. She remembered apartment buildings, smells, long halls, names—the Sheridan … the Royal Arms … the Bradbury Towers—eating alone in big cities—the Windsor Arms … the Drake—afternoons in ladies’ lounges in department stores, reading, coloring, waiting for her mother to stop work when she would have her all to herself, where she could sleep next to her. The Altamont, the Highland Towers, the Hillsborough. She remembered walking past city windows full of warm, soft sofas and easy chairs and rich, dark, shiny tables and chairs; beautiful mannequins in the latest fashions, shoes, hats, gloves, dresses, fox furs. Park Lane, Ritz Towers, Ridgemont. She remembered standing, shivering, waiting for the streetcar in front of a window where tuxedos, tails, and top hats were displayed. Windows with a hundred different glass bottles on display, blue, green, and clear, full of amber-colored perfumes. She remembered riding a hundred different streetcars across strange cities. But who was her mother? What had she thought about, what had she felt, had Dena loved her, had she really loved Dena? Didn’t she know she had a little girl who adored her, needed her? She had faded into the city, disappeared, gone, and as much as Dena tried, the woman she remembered was like someone she had seen in a film, not a real person at all. At times she wondered if her mother had ever really existed, if she wasn’t remembering something from a movie. It was all mixed up. It was as if her childhood never happened and she had simply wakened one day, an adult.

But Dr. Diggers persisted, asking her the same questions over and over. “How did you feel when your mother did not come home?” As time went by, Dena lost her patience. “This is so
stupid
! Why do I have to talk about this all the time? I’m so tired of it I could scream. I don’t want to
do
this anymore.”

Dr. Diggers put down her pad. “Why do you come here, Dena?”

“Frankly—you want the truth—I come here because you won’t give me my damn prescription for Valium unless I come here. Why do you think I come here? For the candy?”

“I think you come here because you’re scared. You need a place to rant and rave and lash out at someone you feel safe with, someone who can see through your bullshit. I know you can walk right out that door and find a thousand doctors happy to give you all the tranquilizers, the mood elevators you ask for; you can charm your way into getting whatever you want and take all the pills in the world. You can do that. You can either become a dope addict or an alcoholic or you can jump out a window, or go through this and get it over with and hopefully feel better.”

“Hopefully?”

“Dena, in life there are no guarantees. But I feel that you are making progress.”

“OK, I know my mother didn’t love me like she should have. She walked out; so what good does it do me? I still feel lousy. It doesn’t make it any better. I don’t care anymore—why can’t you accept that? Why can’t you understand that I just want to forget about it?”

“You can do that, you can put all the Band-Aids in the world on it, but it is still not going to get to the bottom of what is causing your stomach stress and anxiety. And whether you admit it or not, Miss Hickory Nut, you come here because you want to get better. So what do you say we start again, OK?”

Dena, thinking it over, finally said in resignation, “Oh, give me a piece of that rotten candy, then. But you know I hate you.”

Dr. Diggers laughed. “Oh, I know.”

“No, I really do.”

“I’m sure you do. Now, let’s get back to where we were.”

Weeks went by and then one day, out of the blue, Dena suddenly burst into tears and started to cry uncontrollably. “What is it?” Diggers asked. “What are you thinking about?”

“I … always thought she’d come back … but she never did,” Dena blurted out between sobs, “and I don’t know what I did wrong.”

Finally Dena stopped fighting. Dr. Diggers’s hypnotherapy began to help Dena relax and she was remembering more and more each session. Today, she put her under a little deeper. Dena had her eyes closed and could almost see her mother. But she was still an indistinct figure. Then, Dena said, “She had taken me shopping. I don’t know what city we were in … New York, maybe. Oh I don’t know, but I remember we walked by this big store and it had all these pianos in the window. She stopped and we went in … and she walked all around, looking at all the different pianos … and way in the back she saw one … she must have liked. She sat down and opened it up and she had this odd look on her face.…”

“Like what? Describe it.”

“Oh, I don’t know … like I wasn’t there or something. And all of a sudden she started to play a song. I was so surprised. I didn’t even know she could play. She played some sort of waltz, and I remember she looked so happy. I had never seen her look so … well … happy is not right. She looked like she was somewhere else; transported would be a good word. Then this old man who worked there opened the door to his office and he stood listening until she finished. He had some sort of thick accent, and he said, ‘My dear young lady, where did you learn to play like that?’