Penelope used to hide in closets. There’s an urgent need to trace my way back like a ball of yarn. And a plan forms in my mind.
13
PENELOPE
Penelope watched the guests and their children arrive at the party. Her mother had told her she was allowed to invite a friend from school. Shannon had been her friend for the better part of a year but for no reason they stopped talking and Penelope was perfectly fine with it.
“It’s just a casual open house and it would be rude to exclude children. But please keep an eye on them,” her mother told her but Penelope was taken aback that her mother would trust her with such a responsibility.
Women’s heels clicked across the marble floors, the men wore casual dress shirts with gold watches on their wrists. She noticed even grown-ups formed cliques. Penelope understood the concept but not the reasoning behind it. The women admired the floors, the walls, the ceilings, they ran their fingers over counters and the men stood on the back patio, looking left and right and toward the neighboring house in the distance where the lawn blurred into the woods. None of this is real, Penelope kept thinking. How her mother chatted on and on about where the chandelier was from or what country in Europe the counters were imported from. It felt like some tedious social experiment.
As she observed the caterers busying about, she was determined to follow her mother’s instructions: smile, stay with the children, don’t bother the adults, and most of all, don’t get into any trouble.
Through the patio doors, those large panes reaching from floor to ceiling, a family arrived with a boy with pale skin and black hair. Her mother greeted them, air kisses and all, and pointed at Penelope across the room as if to say that’s my daughter, you’ll be safe with her.
* * *
• • •
The day after the party, her mother asked Penelope about her “take” on that day as if there was a range of interpretations that lend themselves to an analysis. As if Penelope, at thirteen, could interpret what had happened.
She remembered hiding in a closet until her mother found her. She also recalled the smell of ammonia, and something else—a whole complex array of odors—and her skin itching. Through the slats of the closet door, out of the corner of her eye, she saw flashes of lights in all colors, red, blue, and amber, as if from a rotating beacon.
“Tell me what you remember of that night, Penny. You were there.” Donna was harsh in her delivery, keeping eye contact, not allowing her daughter to falter.
Penelope thought of it as a clever game of realities. She was short in turn, said, “I only know what you told me.”
14
DONNA
Penelope didn’t make it through two months before I was summoned to the Academy. As I parked the car, I recalled my high school and the breezeways thick with the smell of chicken broth, a maze of empty hallways, and a single counselor who was a hideous man in a wrinkled shirt.
The administration wing of the Academy resembled more an office suite filled with conference rooms, upscale furniture, and executive office equipment. A secretary led me into a room and though I wasn’t sure what to expect, I knew it wasn’t going to be good news. The counselor had an untrustworthy feel about him with his small light-brown eyes, bulbous nose, and softly shaped jaw. He wore a flannel shirt and I remember thinking how odd that was for this time of year.
I dropped into a chair and crossed my legs, inspecting the room. I jerked as he closed a drawer. Without much fanfare he told me Penelope led a group of girls attempting to enter the school building at night. They didn’t succeed. “If they had, it would be breaking and entering, assuming they didn’t destroy anything, which would be vandalism on top of that. They were lucky they got caught before it got out of control.” He emphasized she wouldn’t be suspended but we needed to address her behavior. He softened somewhat when I asked why there were no other parents waiting to be seen, why Penelope was being singled out as the culprit and accused him of making her out to be a leader of a rabid gang of girls when it was merely a teenage indiscretion.
He made multiple attempts to gain insight into her motivations. His questions felt intrusive and misplaced for the price we paid at such an institution. I answered sparsely, bewildered by his audacity in thinking a school counselor was remotely equipped to get to the root of who Penelope was.
I’d heard professional opinions over the years, first I consulted a pediatrician who specialized in childhood disorders, and then there was a psychiatrist who recommended weekly appointments during which I sat in the waiting room staring at a red light above a door.
One day I drove her back to school after an appointment and she was in a mood. I pulled into the overflow parking lot of the Academy and told her to walk the rest of the way.
“Drop me off at the front door,” she said and didn’t as much as reach for her seat belt.
“Penny, it’s literally right there, don’t make me drive through this maze of cones and speed bumps every ten feet. Go to the office and give them the note so they don’t count you as absent.”
“I’m not walking, drive me to the front.”
I asked her five times and five times she refused. I had been steadfast in my resolve, but just like water filling small cracks in a rock, as the water freezes and expands, the cracks widen and split apart the rock. I lost my patience.
“Get out of this car and walk into the building and if you don’t, I will pull you out and throw you on the lawn,” I yelled.
Penelope stared at me, still not moving.
I reached for the door handle. Penelope releasing the buckle, opening the door, and storming out was all one action. Putting the car in drive, I looked over my left shoulder for oncoming traffic and simultaneously stepped on the gas. Something told me to look straight ahead and I saw her just in time, standing in front of the bumper. I hit the brakes and the car stopped but her body rocked gently backwards as the car bumped into her. Rule number one had always been, you walk behind the car, never up front. She told Edward I hit her with the car in a fit of anger, which was not even close to the truth. I wondered how far she’d go to prove a point.
After I left the Academy, thoughts tumbled through my mind in restless succession, fears that had been growing steadily. What had begun with a plastic fork at a birthday party embedded in the arm of another child, a shard of glass in a backyard in Florida, had turned into destructive behavior. Another notch in her belt. I felt guilty for thinking this way but one thing I knew for sure: once there was an official stamp on her forehead she wouldn’t be able to erase it.
I tend to be overly dramatic and blow things out of proportion, I know that about myself, but I had to shut this down. I had to shut down the pediatricians and psychiatrists and psychologists, the therapists and counselors. I shut it down for her. For Pea, for Penny, for Penelope. For all of them. I shut it all down before it got away from me.