I never say I'm Margaret's "stepmother"; being a stepmother means that one's motives are always suspect. A direct "Clean up your room" seems to hum to the Cinderella tune of exploitation. And because I'm not really old enough to be Margaret's mother, I have often felt cast in the equally wicked role of stepsister.
     Margaret was fourteen when I, at twenty-nine, became her stepmother. In no time at all, she memorized my wardrobe: "Do you have, like, an oversized shirt I could borrow? I think I remember a blue one." She calls out from the interior of my closet: " Alice, is this new?"
     "Yes. And I have not worn it yet, and don't really want you to borrow it." My jewelry box is another favorite playground of Margaret's, and no one knows its inventory better than she does. I knew Margaret coveted a heart-shaped pendant I often let her wear, and waited until her twenty-first birthday to buy her one just like it. Her mother always bribed her way out of Margaret's life, and I refused to bribe my way into it.
     Margaret was four, in 1968, when her parents separated and joined the Sullivanians, an urban community of psychotherapists and patients who lived in rent-controlled apartments on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Sol Newton, a patriarch-leader with roots in the Old Left, organized his commune into sex-segregated apartments where ideology was delivered as therapy.
     Commune ideology was roughest on the children. They were separated from their parents, assigned therapists, and raised in separate living quarters. Margaret remembers slipping up the "adults only" stairway at night to sneak into her father's bed. She remembers missing her mother. Margaret's therapist was a tactless, ungainly woman who kept insisting that her parents didn't love her: "Liar! Liar!" Margaret screamed.
     Richard left the commune. Emily remained. She broke off all relations with her own parents, as the commune urged, and contacted them only for requests for money. She was a lonely only child, with strong female accomplishments in painting, cooking, and elegant taste.
     Divorced, with her four year-old daughter, Emily was thirty-five and on her own for the first time in her life. She was shaky, and her unrealized ambitions to become a serious painter drew her to the commune, where her ambition met with opportunities as well as emotional support. Some of the most influential and successful artists of the day were also commune members. Therapy confirmed her doubts about her ability for mothering and she became convinced that Margaret was better off without her involvement.
     "Then why did you have me if you didn't want to be a mother," Margaret accused Emily over the telephone in my kitchen. She was thirteen, and had been living at boarding school for the past six years. Confronting Emily about her erratic mothering had become routine for Margaret. I tried to help her grasp the incomprehensible events that led up to her present pain. Blame was uppermost on Margaret's mind, and we fished our way through her past, until Margaret came up with her father, the culprit who had wanted the divorce in the first place: "He must have stopped loving her," Margaret lamented. "What made him stop?"
     "People don't stop loving each other," I explained, "but things can happen to make people realize that they don't want to, or simply can't go on living with each other.
     "What could have happened?" Margaret kept looking for a catastrophe. "It's not necessarily one thing that happens, but people changing the way they feel about the things that happen or don't happen. A marriage ends when each partner loses faith in the other's ability to steer to safety."
     Nine years ago, Emily sabotaged our plan to have Margaret live with Richard and me. Margaret was fourteen, and it had been more than ten years since she had lived in a family. I expected some passive disapproval from Emily and the commune, little else. Our plan, after all, demanded almost nothing from Emily, who knew that Margaret was unhappy to be so far away in Arizona where the commune always sent their children to school. I thought, with Richard and I taking care of Margaret's day-to-day needs, Emily might play the part traditionally reserved for divorced fathers. She could visit with her daughter now and then, and reap the benefits of having a teenaged daughter who was eager to admire her mother's accomplishments.
     The ten days before Richard flew out to fetch Margaret from Tucson were fraught with long- distance phone calls and the exhaustion that comes from having to funnel the fullness of feeling into threadbare telephone wire.
     "She cries and says that she's miserable," Richard explained. "She wants to live with us. That's all she keeps saying."
     The headmaster told Richard that Margaret was rebellious and refusing authority. Our home represented far more than escape from school, he reassured us. It was a chance to live with a parent, a chance for Margaret to make a long-held fantasy a reality. "It would be very good for her," he said. Legally, Emily was the custodial parent, and Richard also feared reprisals from the commune, but the headmaster was willing to take the risk of releasing Margaret in our custody.
     "What did Emily say?" we asked Margaret as soon as she hung up the phone that first day home.
     "She didn't say much of anything," Margaret said. As the day unfolded, I grew confident that Emily would do little to interfere with her daughter's new life. We relaxed. I helped Margaret unpack, and we discussed how we'd make small alterations in her bedroom.
     The public schools were first-rate, we explained. Emily was a snob and had gone to private schools, and Margaret was leery about going to public school. In time, Margaret would grow to trust me, I thought. In time, the love that I felt for this young girl, who had a sweet charm that pretty girls learn early, would ripen into intimacy. There was no point in rushing things that must take their course.
     At dinner, Margaret spoke to our sheep dog, Loki, promising to bathe and brush him so that he might sleep with her. She chided us for allowing the dog to develop the bad manners of begging at the table, and planned to train him.
     After dinner I brought some logs in from the garage and lit the fireplace to take the chill out of the living room. Outside, through the curtainless bay window, the dark trunks of oak trees stood upon the bluff that reached toward the water of Long Island Sound. I spoke of my love for the house and the view, and then I drifted onto talk about our new family. We changed for bed. Suddenly, the dog scrambled to his feet and barked angrily; the brass doorknocker resounded throughout the house.
     "Who the hell is that?" Richard said loudly, and then, without opening the front door: "Who is it?"
     "Margaret! Margaret!" A shrill female voice: "Give me Margaret! I want my baby. My baby!"
     "Oh my god, it's Mom," Margaret said. From the kitchen I saw the beams of flashlights. There were two people at the front door along with Emily. A third beam of light moved from the driveway toward the porch.
     "She's not alone," I said.
     "This is a commune scare tactic," Richard said. "Lock the kitchen door and the porch door. Hurry."
     Margaret ran to bolt the two other entrances to the house. I held the dog by his choke collar so that he wouldn't lunge when Richard opened the door.
     We had to scream to hear each other over the dog's incessant barking. A flashlight beamed into the living room, and I felt invaded. Any second now, Emily would come in. Calming her hysterics would take hours, and I tried to brace myself for the long night ahead.
     "What do you want with Margaret?" Richard called out. He was stalling; I wished he would hurry, let her in and get it over with. That screeching woman is Margaret's mother, I told myself. Richard was married to her for ten years; you don't have to feel so frightened.
     "They're going to try and grab her," Richard said. "I know them. What should we do?"
     I was afraid to look at Margaret, afraid to look her in the eye; she would see me wanting to lock her mother out. She'll never forgive me; during some terrible future argument she'll drag out this grievance and say: "You wouldn't let me see my mother!"
     "I think Margaret should decide," I said.
     "It's twelve o'clock for god's sake," Richard called to the people outside our door. "Quiet that woman down, will you!"
     Margaret followed me into the bedroom, where I felt less exposed. Her brow was furrowed: "I'm sorry Alice," she said.
     "Don't worry about me, Margaret. If you want to talk to your mother, it's all right."
     "Margaret?" Richard asked.
     She hesitated, and then she said: "Well, I think she's being very rude, coming here like this at midnight." I waited for more but there was no more. Of course she was being rude. Were bad manners a good enough reason for turning one's mother away?
     "Does that mean that you don't want to see her now?" I asked.
     "Yes."
     "Come back in the morning, Emily." Richard opened the door a crack, positioning his weight behind it so that he could shut it quickly again if he needed to. "Margaret is tired, it's been a very long day. She'll see you in the morning." There were more screams that seemed hollow now, as if on cue. "I'll call the police," he said firmly, "if you don't leave now."
     The sound of car doors slamming, then headlights flashing as Emily drove off with her entourage. Margaret was full of apologies.
     "Please, it wasn't your fault," I told her. I felt very sad. Something has gone terribly wrong, a woman who was once loved intimately as wife, and still loved as mother, was now an interloper. By keeping Emily out, I feared we had somehow permitted a greater chill to enter.
     Two weeks went by with no word from Emily. Margaret broke the silence to telephone her mother and announce that she'd begun to menstruate: "So what do you want me to do about it?" Emily responded. Margaret lay crying on my bed: "A girl wants her mother at a time like this." Even before I became her stepmother, I was showing her how to insert a tampon and giving her Tylenol and a heating pad.
     For most of Margaret's life, Emily has been a mother by long distance. Twice a year she saw Margaret for one day when she bought Margaret clothes and took her to the dentist and doctor for checkups. Margaret blamed the commune for coming between them. She remembered how her mother always made "perfect sandwiches, no lettuce or anything ever spilled out over the edges."
     "It's been almost ten years. Emily must need the commune to have remained with them for so long," I said.
     Margaret resisted going to school. We talked endlessly, cajoled, and insisted, unsuccessfully. She complained of cramps. The doctor said that she was constipated. The girl was holding back, waiting for Emily's approval.
     After the third week, Emily telephoned: "You have two weeks to return to boarding school. If you don't, I will wash my hands of you entirely. I will never speak to you again or have anything to do with you.
     "How did she sound? Margaret, were these words part of a larger conversation?" I asked.
     "Did she give any reasons, make any arguments for taking such an extreme position?"
     "No. It was strange, she sounded, like, it was as if she was reading a statement, as if she was reading something that was written down."
     "If you ignore the threat, Emily will give in," we told Margaret, but she was not prepared to take the risk. We did not blame her. She never gave herself a chance, and there was no doubt in my mind that Emily had exploited whatever fears Margaret may have had about living with us. We would still be here, we reassured Margaret. The door was always open.
     The day Margaret flew back to Arizona, the house was filled with her absence.
     The late April sun poured into our bedroom and the light seemed mercilessly bright to shine so clearly upon so much emptiness. I closed the blinds, and Richard and I lay down on the bed without touching. We slept like mourners, robbed of a future.
     Margaret finished high school in Arizona. We saw her summers and during winter and spring break. Emily continued to spend a total of two days a year with Margaret, but Margaret never asked to live with us again. Whenever her daughter demanded more of her time, Emily bribed her way out of Margaret's life, encouraging Margaret to befriend wealthy schoolmates and visit with them on school holidays. Emily would pay the plane fare for Margaret to fly to California or Hawaii. Margaret considered herself lucky compared to two other boys at her school who also had commune-member parents: "They never get to go home. Not even for one day!"
     Our house was never really home for Margaret either. She presented herself as a sophisticated traveler who was dropping by for a visit. Her attention seemed focused elsewhere, her talk was of the places she had just come from or was about to see. "Why aren't we rich?" She asked once after enumerating the numbers and styles of luxury cars parked in the driveway of a wealthy friend's house. "Why don't you write a bestseller, Dad?"
     "I always think I am writing a bestseller," Richard quipped. Emily sometimes boasted of the personal deprivations she had undergone so that Margaret could have her hair "cellophaned" at Bloomingdale's salon. She provided Margaret with credit cards to all the exclusive department stores. I knew I had something else to give Margaret; if it didn't come wrapped in a box, Margaret wasn't interested.
     She remained peculiarly uncurious about our lives and refused invitations to be with us and meet our friends. "I have to do laundry, and pack," she said. It was as if we didn't count. It was Emily she wanted, if she wanted anybody, and Richard and I spent most of our time futilely trying to heal the wounds of rejection Emily inflicted on her, again and again. We lived sixty miles away from Margaret's mother, but it might as well have been six thousand for all the times she refused to see her when her daughter was home for an extended stay.
     One Christmas, Richard, Margaret and I made a special trip to the world Trade Center rooftop restaurant where one of Emily's paintings – a large ball of yellow flame –was installed. The three of us sat at a table for four, awkwardly celebrating Emily's prosperity in her ghostly absence. Margaret was full of pride in her mother's success, and Richard and I were happy for her. Why Emily was not in our place where she belonged was a mystery to us. In bed, Richard and I joked our way out of despair. "Did you notice how Emily's canvas resembled the burning bush in Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments?" Emily remained a remote god, an illusion at whose altar Margaret had come to worship.
     Occasionally, Margaret condescended to go clothes shopping with me; she had never heard of Abraham and Strauss, and I felt like I was taking her to Mars, for all her hesitancy and the wary way she eyed the clothes racks. When she found something she liked, it was as though she discovered there was life on other planets after all, and I watched her lose herself, momentarily, in the mirror of the department store dressing room.
     Her satisfaction was short-lived, however, and inevitably, in the car on the way home, she suddenly remembered that there was something else she absolutely needed to have. Her visits became a litany of "buy-me's" that Richard often encouraged by refusing to say no. Her bathroom was cluttered with bottles of hair conditioners, moisturizers, and massage gels made with extracts of fruits and vegetables: olive, aloe, coconut, honey, almond, lemon, lime, and ivy. I gathered up the bottles Margaret left behind: "Maybe we could donate these to the female population of a small Balkan republic and deduct it from our taxes," I told Richard.
     The cost seemed staggering, but I approved when Richard bought "Pretty Boy" for Margaret's fourteenth birthday. As quarterhorses go, he was modestly priced, and there was no charge for boarding the horse on schoolgrounds. We paid for expensive tack and horse blankets.
     Weekdays, Margaret awoke at 5:30; by 6:00 she had mucked out his stall and fed Pretty Boy. As Margaret's "family," we memorized Pretty Boy's genealogy and celebrated his birthdays. Nights when she was home for a visit, she had nightmares about forgetting to feed her hungry horse. When she was gone, we slept soundly, knowing that Pretty Boy was absorbing a measure of healthy teenage passion that might otherwise have been squandered on drugs, sex, or fast cars.
     At seventeen, Margaret was still embarrassed to have me fill in for Emily. She wanted to be "normal," to have a normal" mother-daughter relationship, and Emily continued to frustrate those ambitions: "Let Alice take you to the gynecologist, if she's so great," Emily told Margaret. I was relieved to be the one to discuss birth control with Margaret and to take her to my doctor. Though I didn't fit the "normal" picture either, there were advantages to my big- sister age and attitude. We took care of that business without the Sturm and Drang. By boarding school standards, Margaret was a "late bloomer," and I respected her privacy, sensing that her first sexual experience grew out of the need to see herself as" "normal" and womanly.
     Margaret's craving for the ordinary domestic experiences that girls her age took for granted, touched me and I prepared feasts of mundane rituals. She loved having a boy "come to the house to meet her parents." I minimized my youthfulness and appeared very matronly: "Take a sweater, just in case it gets cold later," I advised her. Steven combined just the right balance of Father Knows Best humor and paternalism.
     We saw Margaret regularly when she came east for college, and added the celebration of all holidays to her repertory: pumpkin seeds were dried and roasted for Halloween, the apple pie was deep-dish Dutch at Thanksgiving, and for late nights after New Year's the Droste's hot chocolate was capped by a cozy Campfire marshmallow.
     When Katherine learned that I was pregnant, however, she thought that I'd gone too far: the age difference between siblings was too excessive to be in good taste; by any "normal" measure, Richard was too old to be dandling anyone but his grandchild upon his knee. I was definitely jeopardizing the dignity of our family in the halls of normalcy.
     Babies also frightened Margaret. In spite of my encouragement, she refused to hold Lila, and there was little I could do to mitigate her uneasiness around diapers. The gurgles, the cooing, the toothless gummy smiles and kisses left her cold. She wondered at my involvement and envied Richard's delight as well. "I love music boxes too," she once told Richard when he bought one for the baby; "buy me one too, Dad."
     At eighteen, Margaret began to search through the cardboard boxes in the basement where we stored many of her belongings. "The one thing about Emily, she really knows how to pack things carefully," Margaret said, with seemingly earnest gratitude, as she removed layers of tissue paper and relived her childhood: "I liked to collect things," she said. There were china rabbit and duck reproduction of Beatrice Potter characters, sterling silver cups and spoons, a large carton of dollhouse furniture, and framed watercolors of farmyard animals that Emily had painted for Margaret's bedroom. Sweaters with lace collars were spotless, wrinkle- free. "I had a lot of other really nice toys, antique dolls with porcelain faces, but I broke a lot of things, and spoiled them."
     "You were probably too young for those delicate toys," I said.
     "Then I became a real pris, you know, prissy."
     Margaret never tired of the ritual admiring of the things that represented her childhood. She reiterated Emily's love for artifacts. I imagined Margaret had learned to bathe in that love for things and to steal some of it for herself. The prissy girl makes herself into a doll; Margaret liked Lila best when I dressed her up like one.
     "Make her put her clothes on," Margaret said when Lila was three and fond of running naked through the house.
     Lila learned to knock at Margaret's door: "Can I come in?"
     "No."
     I tried to distract and console Lila, and restrained myself from charging into Margaret's room and beating her to a pulp. But Lila was resourceful, and slid pictures under her door or taped them onto the outside, refusing to take no for an answer. At the dinner table, Lila pursued Margaret with food offerings.
     "I'm on a diet, Margaret said.
     "Well, when are you going to stop being on a diet?"
     "When I'm skinny."
     And then, daily for days afterward: "Are you skinny yet, Margaret?"
     "Do you think I could take Lila with me sometime to meet Emily?"
     Margaret asked me one day; I hesitated.
     "Lila is my sister, after all," Margaret said in explanation, "and I talk about her so much you know, I'd like Emily to meet her, so she knows who I'm talking about."
     "Of course." I felt rather ungracious and guilty.
     "Me and Margaret, we have the same daddy," Lila announced, "but we don't have the same mommy." Richard and I were waiting downstairs while Margaret took Lila to meet Emily. We stopped at Emily's so Margaret could load up our car with Emily's paintings. At fifty, Emily was giving up her studio, twenty years of work, and becoming a computer programmer.
     During that visit, Lila played with Emily's pet poodle while Margaret gathered up the paintings she wanted.
     "How did it go?" We asked afterward.
     "Fine," the sisters agreed, like coconspirators, from the back seat of the car. Later, Margaret said that her mother had found Lila to be smarter than she had expected. What had she expected? I wondered.
     I surveyed the basement in search of a safe dry area to store Emily's paintings. In the fall, Margaret would take some of them back to college for her junior year. In summer, the cesspool sometimes overflowed from Margaret's interminable showers, and I stacked the canvases high off the cement floor; we can't have Emily's oeuvres floating in shit, now can we, I muttered.
     There were a number of paintings of room interiors viewed from bizarre angles: a corner where the ceiling met the wall or a floor. Flooded with light, they illuminated the lonely way rooms withhold shelter. Margaret's favorite was a painting of the three antique velvet dresses she'd worn as a child. A shadowy darkness in the holes for the necks spoke to me of Emily's vision of the girl she once dressed in them.
     In high school, Katherine rarely read books for her own pleasure, but she became a serious college student, proud that her professors had read Richard's books, and proud of herself for excelling.
     Lila continued to idolize her big sister, and Margaret became openly affectionate: "I really can have fun with Lila now." Margaret also felt protective of Lila, and closed the door on our marital quarrels to comfort the child and receive comfort from her.
     Margaret graduated with honors. I don't know what excuse Emily gave for not attending the ceremony. I took photographs of Margaret and her friends in their caps and gowns. We met her teachers, who offered to write letters of recommendation for her and asked her about her future plans: "I'm going to work for a year, and then I was thinking of applying to law school," she said.
     Driving home down the thruway, we asked Margaret when she planned to follow up on the interview at "High Style." Call me when you're ready to work," the personnel director had said, impressed with Margaret's "enthusiasm and good taste."
     "I need a vacation," Margaret said. "I just graduated and you're putting a lot of pressure on me." Changing the subject to a new diet she was eager to start, Margaret read aloud about the danger of mixing proteins and carbohydrates.
     A month went by while Margaret ate little, slept late and complained about being awakened by the noise Lila made in the kitchen while we fixed the child's breakfast. We pressured her to look for a job. Money was tight. I bought a large supply of Woolite to help reduce her dry- cleaning bill, and Richard told her to call her friends after business hours. "I want to be rich," she said.
     "I want you to be rich too," I said; "meanwhile, economize."
     "Katherine wants you," Richard said on the telephone from the hospital. "Will you come?"
     That morning, Katherine had stumbled into our bedroom with a bruise on her head. She had been up all night with insomnia and at 6:00 A.M. had decided to go for a bicycle ride to tire herself out. It was steaming out, and she was wearing a sweatsuit and had no food in her stomach; she didn't remember feeling faint, but she blacked out.
     I asked Richard to take her to the emergency room while I got Lila ready for school. I knew that Margaret wanted me with her, but I sent Richard in my place. I needed to go to the library and seize an hour to do my own work. The summer was precious work time for me, and after a year of full-time teaching, I was determined to stick to a routine.
     From the library, I went to the hospital and arranged Margaret's tray with the chicken salad, the vanilla ice cream, and the Vogue I'd bought. "I'm starving," she said. An intern came in and asked me to leave while he inserted an IV into Margaret's arm: "It's glucose, nothing serious," he said.
     "She can stay while you do it," Margaret said.
     "I'll be right back. I want to talk to the neurologist, and get some more ice packs, anyway," I said. The neurologist raised an eyebrow incredulously when I introduced myself as Margaret's mother, but he answered all my questions and admitted that the low potassium level in her blood, the heat, exhaustion, and crazy diet could've explained Margaret's blackout. Still, he wanted to do a CAT scan.
     "Her EEG shows an asymmetry—could be normal—but in some cases it's a sign of an obstruction.
     When I returned, Margaret was saying to the intern: "My veins are really hard to find…I know, I just know it's going to hurt." The intern was turning Margaret's forearm this way and that.
     "The last time I needed an IV was when I had my tonsils out, and they stabbed me ten times, I'm not exaggerating, before they got it in. My arm was sore for weeks afterward. Really."
     "Oh," The intern blushed, a mustache line of perspiration wetting his upper lip. Margaret's chatter wasn't helping.
     "Wait a second," I said. "Let's have some positive thinking, that's the first thing. This is not going to be one of those ten-stab tries."
     "That's right." The intern smiles up at me gratefully.
     "Can you see what you're doing?" I asked. His body blocked out the available light as he leaned over Margaret to search for a vein. "Let's put a little light on the subject." I walked over to the bedside and turned on the overhead fluorescent light so that the area around her arm was lit up, and I could see for myself the blank map of her arm, as I held out my own for comparison.
     "Too bad you can't give me the IV," I said, holding my arm next to Margaret's for the intern to use as a guide. "Don't look," I told her; "look away." The intern was about to make his first try. She turned her head and he did it on the first try.
     I moved over to be near his tray and handed him strips of adhesive tape to keep the needle in place. "Do you need any assistance, doctor?" A nurse said when she saw me working.
     I arranged Margaret's bathrobe around her shoulders and helped her into the wheelchair, rolling the IV stand next to her while the intern steered toward the elevator and left us downstairs to wait for the CAT scan technicians.
     "Some of these interns are good-looking," I told Margaret. "Take advantage of your stay and meet a rich doctor, I teased.
     Margaret seemed cheerful as she lay down on the narrow strip and slid her body back so that her head lay between an opening in the great cylinder that scanned the brain. I petted her leg. "See you in a bit." The technicians said I'd have to leave. Outside, in the drafty hallway, I smoked cigarettes and stared out the window into the solid cement courtyard and an overcast sky, a fitting backdrop of bleakness.
     Margaret had telephoned her mother but Emily did not return her call. "I'm so mad," Margaret said. She had someone else call me—a complete stranger, a commune member called to ask me how I was feeling. The person said that Emily was too busy to call, but that she was really worried about me. That's such bull. 'If Emily is so worried about me, she can call me herself,' I told the stranger."
     The CAT scan control-booth door was open, and I overheard the technicians talking and listened for some allusion to Margaret's condition. I tried to reassure myself: there was nothing wrong with Margaret that three healthy meals a day and a good night's sleep would not cure. The diet that had weakened her was Emily's idea. Emily did not come to Margaret's graduation. Emily did not return Margaret's phone call. No matter what I did, Emily was there, pulling the rug out from under our lives; it was my job to pick up the pieces and dust people off. But this time, something might be seriously wrong….
     The next day we found out the CAT scan was negative. I got Margaret back on her feet. The doctor said she could expect to have headaches for some weeks. It was hard to make Lila be quiet around Lila. Then, the child got chicken pox and, because Margaret had never had them, the house became divided into two quarantined halves. I ministered cooling compresses to Lila's itchy body and then inspected Margaret's who suspected every vague redness on her body to be incipient pox. Meanwhile, Margaret hoked up excuses for not following through on her job interview: "I need a resume." We spent days helping her write one. On high-quality paper, she had one hundred copies printed. "Looks very professional," she said.
     "Yes," we agreed, though she never got around to mailing any out.
     It was July. Richard and Lila and I were to go off to Vermont where Richard was teaching at a summer workshop. Margaret was going to stay behind, commute on the train to Manhattan, and job hunt.
     Emily says I can stay over in a spare room in the commune apartment while I look for work," Margaret announced.
     "Perhaps you'll get to see more of Emily, and to do things together," I said, but Margaret denied the plan had anything to do with her yearning for a mother: "It's just for convenience," she declared. We were away for two weeks, when Margaret telephoned us in Vermont: "She was very upset," Richard explained. "She was crying. She's taking the bus and will be here tomorrow."
     "I wish you were my mother," Margaret wept.
     "No you don't," I said, realizing that I wasn't speaking my mind clearly. "I just mean that our relationship would be different if I were your mother." I thought of my mother and myself, and how the intimacy between us could be stifling at times. With Margaret, I was always bridging the distance between us. I had to choose my words carefully to make certain she understood me. "How would it be different?" she asked.
     "Oh, I'd probably be more demanding and more critical of you if you were my daughter, you know, more like the way my mother is with me."
     "You would?"
     I nodded. Margaret had no awareness of my restraint. Didn't she feel how we handled each other delicately, as if we could not sustain the nasty verbal blows intimates hurl at each other when they're in pain?" But it was not our relationship that now made Margaret weep and run away. Emily was "acting weird." I wanted to know more. Margaret told Richard some details about Emily's drinking and constant use of tranquilizers.
     "Tell me," I said, "do you think Emily was always so 'strange,' as you say, and that you just saw her now clearly for the first time?"
     "I don't know. Maybe. I'd say something about myself, and it wouldn't register, she'd just start talking about herself, and go on and on. It was like I wasn't there. And when I withdrew, she didn't even notice. It was awful. I was embarrassed to be seen with her in public. She thinks a shopkeeper she met once is a friend."
     On a number of occasions we had suggested Margaret might benefit from talking to a therapist and now I suggested it again. In college, she had been in therapy for a couple of months. "Do you think you'd like to talk to your therapist now?"
     "No. I just cried all the time, so I stopped going He'd just say . . .he was so sympathetic and understanding that he just made me cry all the time. I felt so bad. I like talking to you," she said.
     "Have you met Richard's daughter? This is Margaret." In Vermont and later back home, Margaret now got a job, made friends with our friends, hung out with Richard's students, and threw herself into our lives as she had never done before.
     "I'd wish that when you introduced me to people you'd say I'm your daughter too, and not just Richard's," she said.
     Margaret wanted a second chance. She wanted me to be the mother I had offered to be when she was fourteen and had come to live with us. Only now she was eager to let go of Emily and cling to me.
     Richard went away as visiting Professor to Arizona for six months and Margaret stayed behind with me and Lila. In my absence, Margaret was "the adult" with Lila, but when we were all together, she became a child again. After my long and tiring working day, I'd pick Margaret up at her workplace: "I want to sit up front," Margaret complained. Lila protested against the back seat.
     "What difference does it make?" I tried to get Margaret to humor Lila.
     I'm embarrassed to have people see me getting into the back seat," she said. Who notices? Who cares? I wondered. Sitting in the back seat of the car made Margaret feel like a child; up front, next to me, she was masquerading as an adult.
     Margaret began to sink under pressure. Emily was fifty and nowhere. She left the commune. Eighteen years after her separation and divorce from Richard, she telephoned and told me: "I'm so tired of being angry. I don't even hate Richard anymore." In her little girl's voice she once asked Margaret for money and Margaret wept, complaining to me: "She wants me to take care of her!"
     Before it was too late, Margaret hastened to get away from Emily and applied to a highly competitive graduate school program on the West Coast. Thinking that her life would begin in graduate school, she refused the advances of young men at women and the electronics firm where she worked as a receptionist.
     "You've got to live in the present too," I urged.
     "The men at work just think I'm an airhead, a Valley girl." Other girls did not share her ambitions and dissatisfactions.
     On weekends, Margaret wanted to be my sidekick, to go the movies together and to eat out in restaurants. I couldn't do anything on my own without feeling I was abandoning her. She planned to spend the four-day Thanksgiving weekend with friends from college, and I circled the date on my calendar, like a prisoner awaiting parole.
     She was rejected from graduate school and began to oversleep mornings and miss work. I worried about leaving her home alone all day with no distractions from her cares. She was home for three weeks: "I don't care if they fire me. She sulked, feeling robbed of a promising future. "It isn't fair!"
     "No, but the sooner you stop lamenting over the unfairness of life, the better off you'll be."
     "But I'm so ignorant! All I wanted to do was learn, and they're not letting me!"
     "Not letting you learn? No school has such power. There are many ways to learn. If you're 'so ignorant,' as you put it, then you're in an ideal situation, in a way, because almost anything you do will teach you something new.
     I could tell this conversation was about as comforting to Margaret as a bed of nails. Evenings, she withdrew into her bedroom. She ate dinner alone, and I worried she wasn't eating properly.
     "Have you spoken to Emily lately?" I asked one night.
     "Yes. Some woman is letting her share a tiny apartment, and Emily had to give away her dog. It's so sad."
     Two days before Thanksgiving, Margaret felt sick.
     "Perhaps you'd better come with me to my mother's," I said.
     "No. I want to see my friends over the weekend and if I come with you, I'll miss them."
     On Saturday she telephoned my mother's apartment, "When are you coming home?" she cried. Her friends wouldn't drive out to see her. She was feeling too ill to travel. On Sunday I had plans to go to the museum. I telephoned a good woman friend and she said she'd take Margaret over to her house.
     "I'll be back Sunday evening," I told Margaret. She didn't hide her disappointment and I didn't explain myself.
     Richard came home before Christmas. By New Year's Margaret was resolving to become more social. She took a TV production course, made new friends, and felt confident enough by May to take the funds Richard had set aside for her future education and move to California to live with her old friend Carol.
     The phone rings at 12:30 A.M.
     "I got a job!" Margaret sings over the wire. "It's not a career, but it's fun, that's okay isn't it? I don't want to be doing it when I'm twenty-five, but it's okay for twenty-two, isn't it?
     "Yes, it sounds just fine for twenty-two."
     "I can't wait for you guys to come and see our beach house. It's small, but terrific, so …California!
     On my birthday Margaret wrote to me: "Thanks for putting up with me when I couldn't put up with myself. I love you very much."
     I love you too, Margaret. Bon voyage!
                         August 1988

First published in, Women and Stepfamilies: Voices Of Anger and Love eds. Nan Bauer Maglin and Nancy Schniedewind (Temple University Press), 1989.