Elizabeth Flock - But Inside I'm Screaming

“All I did was ask if you wanted to come smoke.” Don’t do this, Kristen. Don’t drag me into your personal hell.

“It’s more than that.” Kristen is insistent. “No one else understands me. You remind me of this girl I used to know. Laurel. That’s her name.”

Kristen told only one other person when she had had sex with her boyfriend, Billy. From Laurel she sought reassurance and advice. Laurel gave it in the form of a ten-page letter passed to Kristen between classes.

But one night, while Kristen was out with Billy, her mother, Nora, went into her room to straighten up. When Kristen got home she found her mother in the master bedroom, an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts next to her on the bed.

“What’s going on, Mom?” Kristen was worried. “What happened? Did something happen?” Her mother smoked, but not this much. Kristen could not take her eyes off the ashtray. A couple of half-smoked cigarettes had not been fully extinguished and smoke was spiraling up. She knew, in the pit of her stomach, something was terribly wrong.

And that is when she noticed the letter lying on the bed in front of her cross-legged mother.

Suddenly her mouth was very dry.

“Tell me it’s not true.” Her mother looked intensely at Kristen. “Tell me you have not had sex with Billy. Tell me.”

“What?” Kristen was buying time. “What’re you talking about, Mom?”

“This!” Nora grabbed the letter in her fist and waved it angrily. “This letter is what I’m talking about! Tell me you were just trying to show off to a friend, this Laurel person. Tell me you made the whole thing up just to impress an older girl. Tell me, Kristen.”

Kristen knew she could tell her mother what she obviously wanted to hear and tiptoe to safety or she could tell her mother the truth. She took a deep breath and tried to swallow, but her mouth was so communion wafer-dry that her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she had to take another deep breath.

“It’s true,” Kristen whispered. She couldn’t look her mother in the eye.

Nora let out a guttural moan that seemed to go on forever. She was doubled over as if to get more vocal power. Kristen had never seen her mother like this. She felt alternately sick and scared.

“Mom, I’m sorry—” was all she could think to say.

“How long?” Her mother was talking in a different voice.

“Huh?”

“How long have you and Billy been having s-e-x? ” Her mother didn’t actually spell the word sex, but said it as if it were poisonous.

“Um. Well.” Once again the truth prevailed. “Three months. Something like that. I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe less. Probably less. Less for sure. Two months. I don’t know.”

By now her mother was rocking back and forth on the bed while trying to light another cigarette. She was so mad, though, that her hands were shaking, making it nearly impossible to unite the tip of the cigarette with the Bic lighter.

Nora reached for the phone.

“Mom? Who’re you calling?” Kristen was panicked. She had no idea what to expect.

“Bob?” Her mother had called Kristen’s father, who had stayed in a company apartment in Manhattan for the night because he had an early breakfast meeting.

“Come home right away” was all Nora said into the phone.

“Mom? What’re you doing? Dad’s going to think someone died or something! Why does he need to come home now? It’s ten at night. He’s going to freak!”

“Too bad.” Her mother was completely still on the bed. She looked Kristen in the eye. When Kristen looked into her mother’s eyes she felt nauseous. Something in her mother’s stare was violently frightening.

Nora swung herself off the bed and stormed out of the room. Kristen followed, not saying anything, just watching in horror as her mother stood in front of the bathroom mirror and screamed. Not a high-pitched scream. A wail of such sad frustration and anger that Kristen moved in to try to hold her mother.

“Get away from me!” she shrieked, pushing Kristen out of the bathroom. “ You make me sick! Get away from me!”

“Mom?” she called through the bathroom door. “Mom, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, Mom. Please come out. Let me explain…”

The door flew open and Nora was in Kristen’s face.

“I told you. Get out of here! I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to hear your voice. Get out of here! ”

With a vise tightening in the pit in her stomach, Kristen crouched outside the now-closed bathroom door and waited, listening to her mother’s sobs.

After about a half an hour she heard her father’s key in the front door and two seconds later she saw his worried face as he ran up the stairs.

“What on earth is wrong?” He still had on his coat. “Kristen? What’s happened?”

Kristen flew into his arms and, for the first time since this incident began to unfold, cried.

“Dad, I’m so sorry,” she sobbed. “Please remember that. No matter what happens…I’m so sorry.”

Her father was apoplectic. “Where’s your mother? Nora? Nora!”

The bathroom door opened and standing in front of her frantic husband stood Nora, with clumps of her thick hair wadded up in her fists.

“Oh, my God,” her husband said. “What happened? Will someone please tell me what in the hell is going on here?”

“I’ll tell you what’s going on here,” her mother said as she pushed past father and daughter and made her way down the stairs into the living room. The two followed her as if sleepwalking.

“Your daughter fucked Billy.” Nora was rocking in the middle of the living room floor. Kristen stood at the entrance to the living room and stared at her disheveled mother.

“Is that what this is all about?” Her father was incredulous.

“Dad, I’m so sorry.” Kristen ran over to kneel at her father’s feet. “It’s my fault. I’m so sorry.”

He pulled her up alongside him on the couch and hugged her. And, before he released her, he whispered in her ear. “We’ll get through this,” he murmured.

Kristen looked back at her mother and addressed her, through her tears. “Mom, please forgive me. I’m so sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” her mother mimicked Kristen, putting an emphasis on a different word each time she repeated it. “ You’re sorry. You’re sorry. You’re sorry! ”

“Honey.” Kristen’s father spoke gently to her mother, as if trying to soothe a child. Kristen had never seen her father talk to her mother this way. “Sweetheart, let’s go upstairs for a minute and talk. Okay? Let’s go up to our room.”

But before he could reach down to try to pull his wife up from the floor she moaned again, the way she had when Kristen first told her the truth. The moan was the spookiest of the entire display. It was full of such pain and suffering that Kristen vowed she would never again do anything to hurt or disappoint her mother.

And she kept that promise for many years. Kristen began to dance as fast as she possibly could.

Isabel looks away from Kristen, down the rambling driveway.

One step. That’s all it would take. One truck and one step.

Isabel’s eyes are fixed at the space between the two stone pillars.

One step.

“That’s when I first tried it,” Kristen is saying as she lights another cigarette.

“Tried what?” Isabel asks.

“Suicide.”

For a week following her mother’s discovery of Kristen’s sexual secret she was under what amounted to house arrest. The first night of what Kristen would come to think of as the Incident, Nora slept on the floor of her room. She demanded to know every detail of Kristen’s and Billy’s first encounter.