The Lost Girls Read online

  “Then why do ya sound so bird-brained?” asked a little guy with a skyscraper Afro and a voice that could grate carrots.

  “What?” I said, startled. Neither Great-Nana nor Mother had warned me about being disparaged in The Neverland. I could always feel like a nobody back home.

  “You know, why d’ya sound like a dingleberry?” the little fellow said. The Boys glowered at me.

  “Just because,” I said at last. There, I’d stood my ground.

  “Because why?” he pressed.

  “Because . . . happiness does that. Because when you realize your greatest dream and it realizes you, you are reduced to speechlessness, to groveling, to tears.”

  “Oi, watch out,” Bert warned. “She’s gonna turn on the waterworks!”

  The troupe regarded me with openmouthed stares; I gazed back at them with dreamy equanimity. After a long pause perforated with adolescent snickers, Bert assumed a military bearing. “Blimey, lads, she’s not ’alf the crybaby her mother was. Time to sound off now!”

  And so it was that the Lost Boys, circa 1966, presented themselves to me. Deficient in manners yet educated in the art of hijinks, each boy made an effort to bow, a motion that devolved, naturally, into a pratfall.

  “Beasley!” the freckle-faced youth blurted out, bowing so low he managed a somersault into the spring.

  “Toenail!” cried the slack-jawed boy with an adenoidal twang. On leathery heels, he tried to bend into a backward arch, but fell flat.

  “Junior-Junior!” barked a husky, moon-faced boy in oversized boots trimmed with bright blue feathers. He saluted stiffly, then marched headlong into a tree trunk, faking a knockout blow.

  “Elvis!” said the small boy with the big Afro and a surplus of moxie. After performing a ceremonial bow, he froze in place and appeared to stop breathing. None of the others seemed bothered by this in the least, so I directed my attention to the next boy in line.

  “Theo,” an angel-faced Japanese boy whispered, extending his sleek hand to me. I held it affectionately until, in one well-rehearsed motion, he flung me over his shoulder and pinned me down on the grassy bank. Theo, I repeated to myself, making a mental note.

  Once I was on my feet again, the final boy, a hairy behemoth who’d won the big-thigh contest, paced circles around me, sniffing. I was not surprised to learn his name was Bowser; neither was I thrilled to be sniffed, but, in my family, one accepts attention where one finds it.

  “So that’s the lot of us,” Bert said, ever economical in his speech. He bowed formally and without incident, but I detected a speck of shame sullying his pride.

  At this, Elvis retired his bizarre “statue” pose and began moving to a powerful downbeat; strange, syncopated music blared from a hole in the tree trunk to our right. Bert and the others followed Elvis’s lead, gyrating to the music in an impromptu ring that eventually snaked around—me! I watched the lads shimmy-shake and pirouette, make gravity-defying leaps. The whole performance was less American Bandstand than West Side Story. When at last the dancing fizzled, leaving an awkward silence in its wake, the Boys got down on their knees and bowed reverently, without a hint of devilry. I was so moved that I covered my face with my hands on the chance that my “waterworks” might start up. Then Bert made a daring suggestion: “I got an idear, mates.”

  “He’s got an idear,” the throng chanted.

  “Let’s ordain Wendy as an honorary Boy. We need her more than we could know.”

  “Then how do we know it?” asked Beasley.

  “To know Wendy is to need her,” Bert said mysteriously, and it was all I could do to suppress swooning. “So, ’ow about it?” Bert enthused.

  “Honorary Boy!” the throng cried.

  The unanimous cheering caught me off guard. A bubble of nausea made its way up my throat and I succumbed to a hiccup. For there it was, a small voice inside me wondering, If I was being accepted for who I was, why did I have to become a boy in the process?

  Theo tore off into a nearby hedge of bottlebrush, only to return moments later with a necklace made of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum wrappers and real spearmint leaves. He hung the thing around my pole of a neck, and I attempted a curtsy. “Wow,” I managed to squeak out.

  “’Ere ye, ’ere ye,” Bowser proclaimed. “Wendy is ’ereby declared a boner-fide, gen-u-wine Lost Boy!”

  The Boys whistled, stomped, and whooped, after which Elvis recited a poem entitled “Wendy’s Escape from the Land of Mothers”:

  It is written that anyone

  Who trucks with

  The Motherland

  Is a mothertrucker!

  Bowser then hoisted me onto his shoulders and paraded me around like I was a war hero. The others fell in line behind us, singing summer-camp songs without a trace of irony. Our entourage headed off to find Peter; we were a small but powerful force to be reckoned with.

  Three months later, Peter said good-bye to me for good. It’s not that I wasn’t homesick, just a little, for Mummy and the movies and some grown-up conversation—I’d been open about harboring such longings. But it’s easier to say good-bye when someone promises that he will come back for you, when someone gives you his word.

  On the day of my departure—which should go down in infamy—I hadn’t planned on going anywhere on the island, let alone all the way back to Berkeley. For an entire week, I’d been shot down by the flu—sore throat, fever, runny nose, bad cough—and within hours of my first sneeze, the Boys’ routine was paralyzed. They couldn’t manage to feed themselves, clothe themselves, or patch up fights without me. But there was no way I was going to get out of bed and take charge.

  Leave it to Peter, then, to introduce a new face on the island—the face of another girl. In the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that her body was likewise introduced to me, but it was too Amazonian, too perfect, to describe—and so I won’t. Let’s just say I would refuse to take part in a beauty contest of any kind, and my fever spiked within minutes of her arrival.

  “Wendybird, I’d like to introduce a new bird,” Peter had announced with stupendous naïveté. “She’s come all the way from Minneapolis and knows a story or two. Staggeringly good ones, too.”

  “Shut up!” I cried. But that was all. With no energy left to fan the flames of jealousy, I sank back under the bedclothes.

  Once the girl was hustled safely out of the house, Peter had the nerve to speak to me again. “Listen, pet,” he said more gently this time. “You’re out of commission and we Boys need to run a tight ship.”

  “We’re on land, blockhead,” I said, and blew into a hanky made from the flannel nightgown I’d arrived in. By now I’d ripped the gown so much and so often, it had become a minidress by default.

  “That’s it,” he said decisively. “You’re going back.”

  “No!” I cried hoarsely, knowing full well that I’d never recuperate on the island with certain domestic duties forced upon me. And then, as Peter drew nearer, I gripped his wrist and refused to let go. “Just because a girl gets sick doesn’t mean she’s done for. Really! You have to have a little patience.”

  Twisting free from my grasp, he rubbed his hand as if I’d actually caused him pain. “But you’ve been ill practically forever, Wendy, and I refuse to wait. I just won’t do it!”

  And so he didn’t. He had Bert remove me from the strata of blankets and knitted afghans, and bundle me into three of the Boys’ humongous sweaters; then he insisted that I think lovely thoughts. Given my status as a diseased person with off-the-charts head pressure, the only happy thought I could muster was of the rosemary shampoo scent of Mummy’s hair. When I skimmed the ground, just a tad, we were both surprised. Peter shouted “Yes!” and it was a fait accompli: I was aloft in spite of myself.

  Midair, Peter latched on to the collar of my topmost sweater—a cardie, he called it—and endearingly pulled me up above the haze that veiled the island. Then, with a serious face, he made some prepared remarks for which I was unprepared: “Wendy, I know you thin
k I’m thick and a bit wonky, and you don’t care for me gallivanting about the way I do, but . . . I don’t want to botch this. I just want to tell you that you’re a right sweet girl who—”

  “—who will never see you again, right?”

  “Not true,” he said, looking away.

  “How can I believe you?” I asked. “Why would I believe you?”

  “You have my word,” he said quite convincingly. “I guarantee . . . no, I vow on my own mum’s life that I will come back for you next Spring. You’ll see. It won’t feel longer than a fortnight, I promise you. And you have to remember your promise.”

  There are certain things one cannot promise no matter how great the desire. I searched for the truth in his oak-brown eyes, which was not easy to do in the filmy dark cloud we were passing through and, with my red, rheumy eyes, said my piece: “Peter, I want to believe you. It’s just this—the story goes that you’re not so good at returning. That you shine at arrivals and first appearances. For those, you get the highest marks. But reappearances? Not so good.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at my feet, clad in ragg wool socks, kicking in the strong wind. And then I knew the answer: already my feet were growing. “Promise me again,” I whispered.

  “Just have some bloody faith,” he grumbled, and flew on above the cloud cover. The west coast of America beckoned in the distance, but it looked like just another ghostly outline in a world of dreams.

  BY the time I turned sixteen, all of my Springs had become extended vigils—months blackened by starless nights at my bedroom window as I waited for Peter to return, my body moored to the bentwood chair, rocking so hard I wore grooves in the floor.

  I became a fixture of grief. I lived in my blue chenille bathrobe with its appliquéd moons and planets, took meals in bed, and only spoke up when Mummy pulled the plug on the telly. She liked to wrap the cord around her neck in a display of sympathy, which produced hardly a smile from me—more like a stifled sneeze.

  When the thought of waiting another minute for Peter had become intolerable, I went for the instant gratification of dying. I plundered Mummy’s medicine cabinet and, finding a cache of pills in rainbow shades, made my way through the color spectrum. The result was a stomach pumping in the emergency room that emptied me out and hollowed my spirit, too. Back home again, my agitated rocking hardened into immobilizing sadness. And thus every Spring since spelled danger for me.

  At the time, Mother had arranged an alternative armamentarium: Jungian visualization, Bach Flower Remedies, Chinese herbs, and white witchcraft. By the time I was nineteen I’d been subjected to a smorgasbord of bodywork. Against her better judgment, she even took me to see Freudians and behaviorists. But my melancholy was as stubborn as Peter’s youth. Even the most broad-minded therapists encouraged me to admit that my departures to The Neverland had been the stuff of inspiration—or dream—while at the same time congratulating me on my “gift.” One object relations therapist even fessed up to being envious of my fabrications, “that sturdy inner life wherein you take shelter.”

  After I had exhausted all the analysts in the greater Bay Area, Mother thought a trip to London might be just the tonic. We could hang around the quiet, repressed neighborhood where she first grew up, from which she’d navigated her own departure to the island. She wondered if I might feel more validated at the locus where the Story took hold. (Like Nana, Mummy called her past the Story—all Darlings were fond of such euphemisms.)

  I made the trip to London via cattle class and without much hope. Planes make me cringe and sweat—all that confined space and stale air. Mother, on the other hand, was uncommonly frisky on the flight over, chatting up the stewardesses and swilling Dubonnet. For the trip she’d wrapped herself in a frenzy of Peter Max scarves—it was impossible to make out what lurked underneath—and sported a pink-felt beret from which sprang a velvet pansy. Her feet bore her trademark hiking boots. In all kindness, she looked like a cross between Minnie Pearl and Minnie Mouse. When our stewardess inquired if we were enjoying the flight, I said it was not such a big deal, that I flew all the time—or used to. Mother poked me in the rib cage.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Of course, I don’t remember how.” With this admission, I drew my nails across the tiny, moist window.

  “It’s just a temporary glitch,” Mother assured me. But I knew that she had forgotten how to fly, too.

  IV

  IN forty-odd years, I have allowed only two males into my inner circle. The first was a washout, the second my husband. Whether he is a washout too, I cannot say. The jury is still out and is not coming back any time soon.

  Freeman, my sometimes estranged spouse, works for Skywalker Sound, designing bleeps and chirrups to vivify little rubber aliens and big rubber aliens and an entire galaxy of latex and celluloid stars. His sound endows them with personality and makes Freeman feel like God. I am more convinced than ever that he prefers the company of plastic models over human beings. Yet I also take pride in his work, which is admired by millions of impressionable children worldwide, not to mention adults who swoon when they discover he had something to do with both Terminator 2 and Toy Story. Our own special song, in the first years of our alliance, comprised the five signature notes hummed by the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Talk about romantic! Freeman’s lips vibrated these same “erotic” tones whenever I pressed into them, which was often and with considerable greed. Even now, when Close Encounters comes on the tube, I can hardly watch the finale without blushing.

  Freeman is consumed by his work—you can’t separate the man from the job and still have a living, breathing person on your hands. It’s widely known that the Noise Boys at Skywalker Ranch are perpetually on fire with extravagant ideas—I can almost smell the conflagration from my perch in the North Berkeley hills. Freeman’s studio across the bay is a paradise for him, a place of daily and nocturnal revelation. Unhappily I have been locked out of paradise for many years now; I simply cannot get through to my husband, as much as I admire his commitment to mythic characters. Lest he forget, I am a mythic character too—something he discovered only after he fell in love with me.

  WE met well before I admitted myself to the hospital, but not before I had formed the opinion that men are only boys in disguise—boys determined to race through life in cars and boats and hang gliders, leaving their girls behind in a convenient cloud of dust. We even met in the dust. I was out hiking in the Marin Headlands with my mother, Margaret, who was hauling enough food to feed the thrashers.

  The Headlands begin in the mist and end in the mist, a jut of land that is frequently draped in fog but has its finer moments when one can make out the shoreline, the grasslands, the occasional wood. With the Golden Gate Bridge looming in the distance as a touchstone, the Headlands is a great place to get lost, especially with a good lunch.

  Mummy was dressed that day in a rather twee outfit—billowing skirt, sheer blouse with a clot of ruffles at the neck, topcoat, and lace-up boots—the kind of impractical getup featured tirelessly these days in the pages of J. Peterman. Absorbed in the ferns and wildflowers, she couldn’t have cared less about actually getting somewhere. With her buttoned-up look, Mummy gave off the perfume of orthodoxy, and yet she was wonderfully coarse in the way she clomped around in her boots and cursed. When she stooped to examine the shocking-pink bloom of a wild rose, she pricked her finger and muttered, “Fuck it!” On this trek, like so many others, she’d been lecturing me on the necessity of finding a man along my own garden path—someone who would prove to be the opposite of Peter or, for that matter, Daddy. It seems she no longer took either seriously; her divorce had gutted her regard for her own history and she preferred to trivialize her string of liaisons.

  “Wends, do pay attention.” Mummy sucked on her bleeding pinkie. “Boys are everywhere you look. You mustn’t be so blinkered. Bugger it! There’s still a thorn in me.”

  “Should I wake up and smell the roses, Mummy? Really. I am completely awake.
I am not the dreamy girl you think I am. Look at me. At me, not the damn flower. I can hardly compete with a jolly thing like that.” I forced Mother’s jaw in my direction. “See? I am a twenty-four-year-old woman.” I stuck out my chest and sucked in my gut. “There’s at least five years of woman you’re looking at. Not that that’s a good thing. All this estrogen must have scared Peter off.”

  With a sigh, Mother lowered herself onto a stump—things like stumps seemed to materialize just for her. “Darling. That’s not using the power of positive thinking. Please don’t go there.”

  “Go where, Mummy? The past? I’m not afraid of it like you. Bruno Bettelheim says that tales with fairies in them are healthy.” I sat down beside her in the dirt and toyed with a California poppy.

  “Dr. Bettelheim is a fine example of a man,” Mother said, desirously. “Look at what use he made of his life after the camps. God, I’d love to know his most private fantasies, how he made it through. He’s one of us, Wends. A survivor.”

  Mother stretched her shapely, freckled legs out in front of her, tucking the yards of her prairie skirt between her knees. I couldn’t believe she was equating the Other World with concentration camps. That was a particularly rotten comparison. And, once again, we were light years away from the real subject at hand: my body and its insistence on changing—the source of much misery.

  “You do recall the final blow?” I asked her.

  “Oh yes, your tat-tats. Most certainly the moment they announced themselves.”

  “That’s right.” I nodded.

  “Goodness gracious, we’ve arrived here again. It’s one of those special chats.”

  “Yes, Mummy. It’s one of those.”

  Mother winced behind her blue-tinted sunglasses. Then she tore off the glasses, sprang up on her tree stump, and assumed a boxer’s stance. “Right-o, my pet, let ’er rip!” She cuffed me on the ear.

  How I loved the riddle of Mother, her cheerful anger. She was equally passionate deconstructing the weather or sexual politics. And when it came to matters of the heart, she was consistently outraged. Mother was a vulgarian, and I wouldn’t have changed that for the world.