Augusta, Gone (2001)
Martha Tod Dudman
“You want to push away your daughter when
it gets like that. Because there’s too much self-reproach in seeing her
stoned, lying, dirty, lost. The kind of girl you never meant to have. And
it seems as if she is the daughter that you most deserve. So you want to
push her away. Get her out of your life. So you don’ t have to see what
you’ve done wrong.”
Her voice has raised several decibels
throughout our now fifteen minute conversation. I hold my cell phone a few
inches from my ear as I crouch by my computer, hoping my students,
currently captivated with their latest installment of the film Of Mice and
Men, cannot hear their classmate’s mother’s frustration. I can tell
she’s struggling not to cry even as her anger—fortunately not directed
at me—seeps across the line. Her daughter, an honor’s level student,
has been missing from school for a number of days. Thirty-three, to be
exact. I can see her, confronted with the lies she has believed, crushed
by the thought that her honesty with and love for her daughter wasn’t
enough. “I’ve done everything! Counseling, doctors, tests,
restrictions, contracts, you name it!” Again, her frustration and
disappointment is palpable. She is a woman who has exhausted her normal
options with her daughter, and she’s asking me for help. And I am lost.
A few months ago, I lost my mom to breast
cancer. It was a long, drawn out, and miserable experience to witness; I
am simultaneously comforted and hurt more by the closeness we developed
over the past decade. Before that, however, she could have stepped into
the role of the mother on the phone, lacking options and trust and energy
to handle the girl who used to be her pride. The weight of my teenage
rebellion catches me off guard sometimes; it’s long past and I earned
back her trust and, eventually, admiration long ago, but still the
crushing mass will suddenly stomp on my chest, often when I am at the
height of frustration dealing with my fickle adolescent students. Thank
god I am not your mother, I think to myself. Then I blush because I was so
terrible, and I have left so much unsaid.
Martha Tod Dudman found herself in my
mother and my student’s mother’s positions, and decided to document
her helplessness through the twisted mess of her daughter’s decisions. I
have a penchant for memoirs, and Augusta, Gone (2001) is no exception. It
took me awhile, but I figured out what was different about this one. I
normally review memoirs that depict the dysfunctional family through the
eyes of the adult child. I often choose those tinged with (or dripping
with) sarcasm and self-deprecating humor. David Sedaris, Augusten
Burroughs, Robert Leleux, Jeanette Walls. But where are the parents? Do
they get a say? Did it seem logical to them to make the choices that their
children have spun and disseminated as disastrous and dangerous? As a
teenager, I hated, sobbed, thrashed out against my mom. She was
irrational, controlling, and didn’t love me. Right?
In Augusta, Gone, Dudman finds it difficult
to pinpoint exactly when she should have known Augusta was not a normal
teenage rebel. Not that it matters—she would have been at a loss to make
different choices. Like the student whose mother I could not help, she
couldn’t bear the sweet-faced lies that fell so easily from her
daughter’s lips. Reading her lamentation, I cringed. A memory of myself,
huddled by a pay phone with a group of kids I barely knew, taking a swig
from a bottle and dialing home to report my whereabouts in a fake, sweet,
sing-song voice and ignoring the clenching in my gut as my mother bought
my lies. Augusta does the same.
Dudman retrieves her, time and again, from
her hangouts: “I can smell the deceit. I can smell the sad torn sex of
the place, the dirty laundry of the place, the yeast-infections, old-beer,
cigarette-butt smell of the place. The stale pennies, the crumpled dollar
bills, the old-pizza, faded-baseball smell of a place like this.” And
Dudman knows it well because she herself was a true product of the 60s who
drove her own mother wild with anguish.
Augusta, like me, more than likely like my
student, disappears for days at a time. Her mother is consumed by the gap
she leaves behind. “I sit at my nice desk all neat and tidy with my
lists of things to do—all my careful lists of slightly unpleasant or
dull or scary chores and little rewards in the evening—ordering
something out of a catalogue, something that will transform this dreary
October landscape with its slashing skies and windy rain-swept trees and
wild patches of unmelted snow—transform it into yes a summer afternoon
with light light linen clothes in colors that seem like inspiration:
butter, straw, sage, wheat.[. . .]I’d invent words that have never been
used for colors before. I’d invent words that would be understood by the
women who lie on their couches in the evening with their stacks of
catalogues, who roam the Web looking at pictures of things that they might
buy. They wouldn’t even need swatches. These are the colors they would
recognize. Heartbreak. Divorce. Terror. Missing Child.”
I think of my own mother as I read these
words. Of how I came back, unrepentant, angry, un-acknowledging or unaware
of the colors that must have tinged my mother’s weeks.
Augusta’s story (and mine, and with luck,
my student’s) ends positively. An alternative school in Maine presents
an experience that finally reaches Augusta. It was actually the school
that drew me to the memoir in the first place, but it was finally
recognizing my own narcissism in my student and in Augusta that kept me
frantically reading late into the night. Augusta, Gone is a powerful
awakening for any adult child ready to face the music.
Rebecca
James divides her time between teaching and graduate study in Allentown,
Pennsylvania and reading and relaxing in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
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