Rona Jaffe - Mazes and Monsters

They had Robbie. She hardly ever played the piano anymore. The only free time she had was when the babies were napping, and then she couldn’t make noise. The rest of the time she was doing all the things you had to do for a helpless infant, or chasing after an active toddler, and it was so far from her dreams of the aesthetic gentlewoman’s life that she could not believe she had ever been so naive. She had never known what having children entailed. No one had ever told her. Perhaps she was selfish … She was afraid to tell anyone how she felt, for fear they would tell her there was something wrong with her.

She needed her music: she felt it and heard it in her head, straining along the tendons of her arms and fingers like electricity. When she did have a chance to play the piano she realized she had lost valuable time she might never get back. She wasn’t as good as she had been. And now, at five o’clock each evening, she had begun to drink, “to relax,” and the drinking had become as seductive as the music. She tried to teach the boys to play the piano but they were not interested. They had no talent at all. She began to think that she had deluded herself; that she had no talent either. She loved and needed her music, she missed it, and finding it out of reach she began to will it further away. She would go back to it when the boys were grown. That was what other mothers did. Now she could drink, and forget.

But the truth was she drank to remember. On the outside she had never changed from the quiet, sweet, cool girl who inspired poetry. Inside she was furious. The woman who tried to please everyone, to run a lovely home, to make her husband praise her; the woman whose generosity of spirit saw only good in everyone; that woman was burning inside, seething with anger. All the time she was growing up people had lied to her about life. Her parents had lied, her teachers had lied, her friends had lied, the world had lied; and even her husband, the one who was supposed to love her more than anyone else, had lied. When she got drunk she dared to say what she thought, and then it made other people angry. She had to make an impossible choice: turn her rage against herself and suffer, or vent it on the world and lose everyone. Not knowing which to do she did both.

When Hall was fourteen she found out he was taking drugs. How could his school allow people to sell pills and marijuana to a little boy? How could this happen? She and her husband had moved to the suburbs so their children would be safe. Where were the police? Where was safety, sanity? Hall wouldn’t tell her where he’d gotten the stuff. When she searched his room he screamed at her. When she cut off his allowance he sold drugs to other children so he could get some for himself. Then she found out he’d been going in to New York.

She couldn’t control him. He was almost as tall as she was, and he had become a stranger. He had an addiction, but so did she, and how could she do anything but argue with him and pray for him and cry? When he was fifteen years old he ran away.

His father called the police. He told her that young boys who ran away became male prostitutes, got kidnapped, raped, beaten, killed. The police found Hall and brought him back like a prisoner — the prisoner of his parents. He was desperate and devious and he fooled them both. They thought he had learned how dangerous the world was out there and would stay home and be their son again. They gave him a birthday party to celebrate the fresh, new start they would all have together, all forgiven in love and hope for the future.

He ran away and never came back.

The pain of her failure would stay with her as long as she lived. There was not a morning she woke up without the sense that something hideous had happened, and then there was always that moment when she remembered what it was. She could tell herself that society had betrayed her son, or that he had done it to himself, but she could never really believe it wasn’t her fault, and his father’s, for things they had neglected to do. No one had told her what to do. Life had lied to her again. She wondered what she had done right with Robbie that she had done wrong with Hall, but she would never know.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1980—the start of a new decade. That made it even more exciting, and although all of them pretended New Year’s Eve was silly, it meant a lot to them. Kate was going to her friend Janny’s New Year’s Eve party. The three of them had planned it together; she and Janny and Liz, but it was at Janny’s house. When they made the guest list they discovered they had seven men for every woman, which was awful, so they told people to bring dates. Then they worried that only the women would bring dates.

“The guys will get mad and leave,” Janny said.

“No they won’t,” Liz said. “They get free food and liquor and a nice warm place to hang around in — they’ll stay.”

They had recruited three friends to act as disc jockeys. At midnight they planned to set off firecrackers in the backyard. They wished they could have been able to afford real fireworks, but this would have to do. If people didn’t crash, and if nobody got too drunk or stoned, and if the neighbors didn’t complain about the noise, it would be a terrific party. Kate was only sorry that Robbie couldn’t be there. It was sad to be by yourself on a sentimental night like this, especially when there was a man you cared about.

Cared about … why hadn’t she thought: a man you loved? She really did care about Robbie a lot; she wanted to protect him and cuddle with him and be with him, but was that real love? Love should be your heart turning over when you saw him, a melting feeling when you had sex, being willing to die for him if you had to. Being away from Robbie this Christmas vacation hadn’t been a lonely terrible time. She was happy with her old friends, and she felt warm and comforted every day when he called, but she hadn’t been counting the days until she could be with him again. She knew she’d be with him. Was this why romances at Grant broke up so fast: being too sure of somebody, wondering why there wasn’t more excitement? It made her feel guilty. She knew she hadn’t closed herself off from love this time, because she trusted Robbie completely. Yet, there was something missing in him, spaces she couldn’t figure out. Maybe he didn’t even know what they were.

She didn’t have anybody to talk to about it. Her mother was more naive about love than she was. Liz and Janny didn’t know him, and they didn’t expect anything to last anyway. They would roll their eyes and laugh and chorus, “Next!”

Poor Robbie … But at midnight on New Year’s Eve, when he called as he had promised to, she started to cry. She cried because he was so good and faithful and kind and she didn’t deserve him, and she also cried because the firecrackers were going off in the backyard and she was missing them, and it made her feel like a perfidious rat to care.

When Robbie heard Kate cry on the phone he was so moved he almost started to cry himself. He was at his friend Nick’s party, and there was so much noise he had to hold his hand over the other ear. It was a total free-for-all because they knew it was the last real party before they had to go back to school. Everyone had gotten very dressed up, and they had bought champagne to serve at midnight. The television set in the living room was on, and they had watched it, counting in unison, all excited, as the ball fell down the tower in Times Square. Then they blew horns and yelled, “Happy New Year!” and kissed each other. When it was midnight in California the long-distance circuits were still busy, and Robbie had been panicked that he wouldn’t be able to get the call through to Kate at exactly twelve o’clock her time, and then it wouldn’t count. He liked the ritual of it; it made him feel secure. If he could be the first person to speak to her on the first minute of the first day of her new decade, it would bring them both luck.