Peeping.Something about the word makes me almost physically sick, and at the same time I adore it. Peeping. The word gives me a feeling that's like the tingly nausea jitters you get just before the roller coaster drops. Some people will do anything for that feeling. And, as the song goes, God, I know I'm one.
I've been peeping at Stephanie, Sean, and the boys. Just thinking the word is almost as nauseating and exciting as creeping up to my kitchen window and watching Stephanie pretend to be me. Sleeping with my husband, raising my child, overcooking disgusting hunks of dead cow in my kitchen. To be honest—I'm borrowing Stephanie's phrase here; she's always saying to be honest, maybe because she so rarely is—I'm more fascinated than furious.
Spying on Stephanie in my house is like playing with some weird 3-D live-action dollhouse. As if the people inside were all animated figurines that I can move around. I can make them do things. I can control them with my magic weapon: a burner phone.
Dial the magic number—and the Stephanie doll runs to the window.
Stephanie can have the house, but I want a few things back. She can have the husband, his hopeless stupidity proved forever by the fact that he's fucking her.
I just want Nicky. I want my son back.
Even as a little girl, I was always hiding and spying. Crouching under the windows, lying in the grass, I waited for the grown-ups to do something dirtier and more private than make coffee or look in the refrigerator or (in my dad's case) sneak a cigarette on the porch. I saw where Mother hid the liquor bottles and how often she had to get the big dictionary from the bookshelf. What was the word she needed to look up? Her bottle was behind the book. I saw my mother drink so much that it no longer seemed secret but just like something she did. I didn't blame her. The poor woman was married to Dad, a popular gynecologist and exotic orchid breeder who named his new bioengineered orchid strains after his "favorite patients."
Only rarely did I break the spy code of watchfulness and silence. Drunk Mother sounded so stupid! I put water in her gin bottle. I watched from the window as she drank straight from the bottle, though she would have killed me if she caught me drinking milk from the carton. After the first swallow, she looked puzzled, as if trying to remember how it was supposed to taste. Then she finished off the bottle and put it in a paper bag and took it outside to put in the trash at the end of the driveway.
When I was in junior high, I began to take sips of her gin, then larger and larger swallows. She never noticed, or never said. My parents could have been cardboard cutouts for all their lively interest in me. Working at Dennis Nylon, you hear a lot of people, after a few drinks, talking about how unparented they feel. Every time I hear that word, I think: You should meet myunparents. Though that would be unlikely now. Father's been dead eight years, and Mother is in no shape for a conversation about the mistakes she made as a parent.
Everyone has a hellish childhood, everyone still thinks it was supposed to have been heaven. That everyone else's childhood was pure paradise. That's the message we get from movies and TV. When you're little, you think your family is the only one that isn't as happy and cool as the ones in the sitcoms. The irony is that I would never let Nicky watch the modern versions of those mind-rotting television shows, yet his life (comfy upper-middle-class suburbs with a loving mom and dad) is closer to TV life than Sean's and mine were, and we actually did watch those shows.
I want Nicky to be happy. It's the one thing, the only thing, that I know I want.
When you grow up, you find out that you weren't the only unhappy child, which is nice. Nice if you're the kind of person who is cheered up to find out that someone had the same bad luck you did. Stephanie likes to think that everybody is walking the same rocky road. Even though she talks about how you can never know another person, she thinks you can. She likes thinking that another person is suffering exactly as much as (or worse than) she is. If you have a problem with your kid, it's supposed to help to know that other mothers have the same problem. If your best friend disappears, it's supposed to comfort you to learn about all the women out there whose best friends have vanished.
