Counting Down. Deborah Gold

he seemed more fearless and often found some roundabout way to get the uninsured cars registered, although one of Michael’s most persistent memories is seeing Benny unscrewing a license plate from a neighbor’s car and being told to go back inside.) And every time I see another economy car spray-painted flat black, as theirs was following one of Benny’s close calls with the highway patrol, I wonder why the occupants don’t realize it makes them a more obvious target. However, the overall lack of legal transportation seemed to be one way Benny kept a tight rein on Jessica and corralled her movements. Having lost multiple licenses, Benny really ran the bigger risk, but to me his gallantry in running that risk was one more control trap. Yes, when Jessica wanted something and had a car available, she did drive, although she seemed to prefer that I didn’t know it. In general, though, the notion that she could drive off on her own and be down the road and free, out from under Benny’s thumb, was little more than a fantasy.

      But I don’t think Benny minded her going off with me. At least it didn’t arouse his usual suspicions of cheating—although he certainly didn’t share her excitement about school and her newly forming identity. Jessica loved being the good student, the one who talked in class, who was chapters ahead in the reading. It’s not that Benny was against education itself (the very thing he should have feared, had Jessica taken it much further), but the immediate possibility of Jessica’s meeting other men at the community college set him on edge, she told me. God forbid she might ask some random guy to light her cigarette, back in those days when you could smoke freely in entranceways and parking lots. Of all the forces working against her, from within and without, I’d bet that Benny’s possessiveness was the biggest factor in what ultimately doomed her efforts to take classes.

      As we drove, Jessica shared grueling stories from her childhood; it’s a wonder she survived it and, understandably, generously, wanted better for her kids. It was from her I first understood that the notion of moving on from the past is just one more comfortable myth.

      There’s moving, yes. Moving in spirals, sometimes in and sometimes out. And then there’s moving on, the comforting, hear-no-evil myth.

      “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Like any good twentieth-century English major, I’d learned that from Faulkner. But for the next ten years—and easily foreseeable for the next twenty—I was about to learn it the hard way.

      I NEVER found the right balance of helping versus enabling. To put it mildly. And was a balance even possible? For someone as guilt ridden, class conscious, and habitually apologetic as I was? Someone who went overboard with everything, from grading feedback to birthday presents to counting calories as a once-anorexic teen? Most of all, how was keeping a balance possible when all I wanted was for the boys to have every chance in life? Or at least every chance to survive childhood?