PRINCESS Among the items we lose over the years are those whose value is incomprehensible to others but unquestionably priceless to us. One such object I remember from my childhood was a small ruby red ball from a miniature bowling set that my aunt had given me when I was about five years old. Today, I cannot recall why I placed such a high value on one small piece of rubber, but I still respond with intense emotion when I think of it because it was intrinsically woven into my symbolic play, a key component in a child’s intellectual and creative development. It was the earth, the sun, the moon, all of the planets, (including Pluto back then) a crystal ball, a coconut, a creature from outer space, and a whole collection of other items, but most of all, it was mine! So when it mysteriously disappeared, as things tend to do from time to time, I fretted over it, searching my shelves, my cabinets and my toy box where unrelated pieces of toys, balls and blocks were haphazardly thrown. Despite my many searches, the tiny ball eluded both my methodical and frustratingly disorganized searches. It was one of those things that never let me rest and led to no solution. So when my friend, who I shall call “Princess,” came over to play and started enthusiastically attacking my toy box, throwing each toy piece here and there, over her shoulder on the floor, I was elated when she pulled out the little ruby red ball I had been searching for so longingly. Found at last! “Oh, you found my ball,” I exclaimed joyfully. “I’ve been looking all over for it.” My joy was so complete that I didn’t even notice that my words had stopped her chubby little hand in midair as an evil look filled her green eyes and a smirk began to form on her mischievous, yet deceivingly cherubic lips. “Thank you, thank you,” I proclaimed, the sheer ecstasy of the moment clouding my judgment and leading me right into her trap. I did not notice that her round pink fingers were closing tightly around my precious ruby gem. She looked at the ball and then looked at me and only then did I notice the diabolical grin on her face and recognize the intentions behind it. I’d seen that look before. I should have known. “You want this?” she asked, her catlike eyes flashing at me, her pupils expanding like something from a horror movie. “Yes, it’s mine. I thought I lost it forever.” I was only digging myself deeper into a hole. “Please give it to me,” I pleaded, stretching out my naïve little hand. “Well,” she paused, already having developed a flair for the dramatic. “You can’t have it.” “What?” I asked, thinking that even she, whose mood swings I’d experienced on several occasions, would stop short of actually stealing something from me. “It is mine and I want it back.” “It’s mine now!” She stood up and placed the hand grasping my precious ruby red ball behind her back. “Finders keepers, losers weepers!” “But it’s mine! You can’t steal it,” I protested to no avail. I mean, both of us were still very young but my mother had taught me about right and wrong I knew this was definitely wrong and I knew she knew it was wrong as well. “Finders keepers…” she chanted as she headed for the front porch where our mothers were sitting. By the time she reached the porch, she was running and I was running after her. From the porch, she bounded to the bush in front of the house as I stopped anxiously to tell my mother and her mother what she had done. I expected that that would be the end of the chase and the recovery of my precious ruby red ball would be at hand. So I thought! “Oh, she’ll give it back,” my mother said in her I-don’t-want-to-make-trouble voice. “Princess, play nice now,” her mother whined in an all too familiar lethargic non-controlling tone. “You can’t catch me!” The princess was circling the tree singing now, and totally ignoring her mother. I started after her. “Stop running around,” my mother commanded. She, however, wasn’t talking to the princess. Just to me. “But she has my…” “She’ll give it back Stop running around the bush. You’ll ruin what’s left of the grass.” “Play nice,” her mother whined again for no particular purpose and with no results. The last thing I remember about that day was watching Princess and her mother walking away down the block with the little would-be royal holding onto the ball in her tight little fist and her mother weakly trying to coax it away. “Play nice now. Give back the ball.” “No.” “Come on now, Prin, give it to me.” “No.” On and on went the same nonproductive banter and no, she never gave it back. “It was just a ball,” my mother reasoned. “It was mine!” I insisted. “You are making too much of this.” “She stole it. It is mine and she stole it.” “Well, I know but .…” Mom didn’t have an answer for that one. Nope, I never saw that precious ruby red ball again and I really, really missed it. I was angry. I was disillusioned. I was disappointed in my fellow human beings and full of righteous indignation. Over the years, the object became less important but the sense of outrage at that which was wrong stayed with me. Along the way, I learned that we suffer many kinds of losses in life and my mother may have been right about how little that one incident really meant in the grand scheme of things. Each time we lose something, we learn new ways of coping with loss but the way in which we lose something can be far more significant than the loss itself. That anyone would not respond to a deliberate and audacious theft with total outrage bothered me more than the lost ball, mostly because it made me question how anyone could trust anyone else in a world where wrongs could not be righted. “No justice, no peace!” The ruby red ball incident had been an opening onto a world of ambiguous morality, a loss of innocence and the emergence of a rudimentary understanding that true honor was something fought for only in classic novels and old movies. But for me, this was merely an introduction to a series of other kinds of losses. Its symbolism was a mere glimpse into a greater realm of human suffering. When we were ten, Princess and her family were forced to move away when her uncle sold the three-family house they all lived in. We visited from time to time, driving to the next county then instead of taking the short walk down the block we had become accustomed to in the early years. After a while, I heard that her parents were getting divorced and when her father returned for visits, it was apparent that his loss and what he perceived as abandonment by his family had triggered something that had been asleep in him for his whole life. A WWII veteran who served in the U.S. Coast Guard in Europe, he had always been Ed Norton to my father’s Ralph Kramden, a little quirky and comical, but reliable and able to function as breadwinner, family man and friend. He was solid and responded to crises, especially with those involving Princess, with strength and common sense, suggesting that her mother “minimize it” when his daughter’s response to a minor injury or mishap was over the top. But time and unexpected circumstances can cause drastic changes in people. Princess’ father broke when the sleeping demons inside him were awakened by the losses he encountered. While I didn’t hear from Princess anymore, knowing only that she went to college in Upstate New York while I went to college locally on Long Island, her father finally moved into the apartment upstairs in our house after a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital. On medication and under a psychiatrist’s care, his behavior was regulated most of the time but he was never the same as he had been. He’d attend college concerts with my parents and wonder aloud if his daughter was also involved in similar activities at her college. No one ever told him, leaving him out of his daughter’s life entirely. When his psychiatrist suddenly died, he hesitated to find a new one, didn’t take his medication regularly and his behavior became bizarre. After my own father died suddenly of a heart attack, a loss that shocked and confused me, Princess’ father lost all connection with reality, believing he was married to Jackie Kennedy and working for the FBI and CIA. By day, he took down license plate numbers of random cars and at night he relived WWII, marching troops from his bedroom to his kitchen above my mother and me. I struggled to get enough sleep to be able to stay awake in my college classes, and ironically, at my assignment at a psychiatric hospital as my social work fieldwork. My experiences with schizophrenic patients in the daytime merged with the disturbing behavior of my childhood playmate’s father at night. When things got really bad, he was admitted for another stay in a different psychiatric facility. While he was there, neighbors urged us not to let him return, as his battles had eventually spilled out onto the street and were no longer confined to the night. This once quiet man who had started shouting obscenities regularly at the hallucinations that tortured his mind had made him a pariah in the very neighborhood where he had once found comfort and friendship for over twenty years. We were torn, but we finally asked his social worker to find him another place to live. We were sure that he would be better off living in an apartment where he had a separate entrance and more privacy than he had had at our house, where he had had full access to all parts of our home day and night. We had been told that he was not a threat to anyone but himself but we had done our part and needed to have a quiet home where both my mother and I could make a new start, and get on with our lives after completing the grieving process with my dad gone. One Sunday morning, our doorbell rang and my mother opened it to find two well-dressed men who identified themselves as homicide detectives. They said they had some questions about our former tenant, Princess’ father. “His landlady found him….” “Did he take his own life?” my mother asked. “Is there some reason you think he may have?” My mother and I explained the situation and one of the detectives confirmed that he had overdosed on his medication. They were satisfied that there had been no foul play and although we were surprised, we couldn’t say we were shocked. It was a loss that was a long time coming. I remember thinking that sanity, like life itself, is very fragile and unpredictable. Like my little ruby red gem of a bowling ball are the human heart whose beating we take so for granted, and the sanity of the human brain, so precariously balancing on the tightrope of biochemical equilibrium, so precious and yet so vulnerable to loss. Later, years after her father’s death, Princess reappeared periodically in my life to share her trials and tribulations, her insecurities and illusive dreams. We’d see each other at local fairs or she’d call and talk for long periods of time about her inability to find direction in her life. Then she would disappear again. Twenty years passed before I heard from her again making it over fifty years since the ruby red ball incident which had faded in its importance in my own memory and had never been recorded in hers. My husband picked up the phone in the middle of a visit with his cousins from Australia. “It’s Princess,” he said as if the call were a normal occurrence. “Isn’t she a relative or something,” he followed in a whisper. I took the phone without even asking, “Who?” I instinctively knew this was the Princess, the royal child who had been long ago dethroned by circumstance and her own insecurities. “My mom died,” she began, sounding composed and matter of fact, as if there had never been a long break in our friendship, which was what I saw it as now despite the ruby red bowling ball and all the appearances and disappearances that had intervened over the years. There was no mistaking her voice and the familiarity made it seem as if no time had passed since I last spoke to her. “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I replied quickly doing the math in my head having assumed she had died some time ago. Both our moms would have been in their nineties. “My mom died in ’95. Had she been sick?” “Her husband died and she never got over it.” My mother had always told me that Princess’ mother and father had gotten married “on the rebound.” I never asked for details. I just figured it had something to do with the war. “My mother survived cancer twice and then died of an infection she got in the hospital after a fall.” “That’s not unusual,” she said in a tone that made her seem clear and in control. “I’m sorry. I moved to Florida with my sister but now I feel so abandoned.” I tried to reassure her that we all go through some feelings of abandonment at some time, not knowing exactly what to say. Her life had been a drama of continuing losses and confusion from my perspective. As my husband talked to his cousins about the differences between the United States and Australia, Princess asked the big question. “What happened to me? What happened to that happy little girl who was laughing all the time? I’ve been to many psychics and no one could give me an answer.” While I immediately recognized the irony of her words, remembering the child who choked when she was upset, who was fairly volatile when things didn’t go her way, and always looked for help from the wrong people, I withheld those comments as she continued to question if her mother ever really loved her. Of course she did. Her mother doted on her. Every time someone sneezed in the house, her mother would come running to make sure it was not her princess. Her mother made sure Princess had all the opportunities any kid could have and talked enthusiastically of the dreams she had for her child’s happiness. Of course her mother loved her but all the thoughts that came into my mind would have to be held for another time. I told her the truth, that my husband’s cousins were visiting from Australia and I needed to cut the phone conversation short. I asked for her cell phone number. “Oh, from Australia? Wow, that’s a long way. Of course.” She gave me the number and I told her I’d call her back another day. I wrote the number on an envelope that was on the nearby table. (Well, I thought it was an envelope. Maybe it was a piece of scrap paper or an old shopping list.) When I hung up, a barrage of mixed feelings ranging from sincere compassion to trepidation hit me. We wanted to show our visitors the beach and all the local sights, but the climate change and the long trip had not been good for my husband’s cousin. She was beginning to cough and look pale. She asked only that they be taken to the nearest train station to return to their hotel in the city. We took the scenic route but as she coughed more, we hurried to the railroad station and said a quick goodbye so they could catch the train. A few days later, I searched for the paper with Princess’ number but didn’t find it. I looked, with mixed emotions, again a few times. I felt powerless but didn’t really think I could help much anyway. I was afraid Princess might think I was just one more person abandoning her but then I remembered the times in the past when she had kept me on the phone for well over an hour, when I could not find a way to end the conversation without sounding abrupt. Those calls always depressed me. Sometimes you just can’t help it. Sometimes trying to help only makes things worse. So many years had passed and so many losses had passed through my own life. They hurt! Sometimes they hurt a lot, but for the most part, they have been ultimately bearable. Abandonment for me was temporary. When I think of the losses Princess endured, I can see that my mother was right about the ruby red bowling ball. In the grand scheme of things it was not important and the dynamics that prevented its return had little to do with right and wrong despite my righteous indignation at the time. It was about something deeper and closer to the seat of that insecurity that lived inside Princess. I contemplate loss so many times in my daily routine. I recently lost my brother to cancer. Some friends have lost husbands, and others have lost children, which has to be the worst loss of all. And yet they survive and I try to understand how they do it. I read the newspaper and hear about profound losses everyday and try not to let them consume me, knowing that life gives us no guarantees. I walk a precarious tightrope between compassion and paranoia facing my own mortality and that of my loved ones and hoping that in my life, things will happen in some reasonable order. Sometimes I drive past the house where I was raised, where my mother was born and lived until she died. I drive past the place where Princess used to live, but the house is gone now and I know I will never fully come to terms with all of the losses associated with the changes in the old neighborhood. When we were kids we knew one thing for sure, that being a princess meant living happily ever after. We believed it with our hearts and our souls. Now we know better.
Posted on: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 22:23:20 +0000
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