THERE MUST BE a trillion ways to deliver bad news by letter.
I’m sorry to be the one to tell you . . .
By the time you read this . . .
Someday this will all seem like a horrible dream . . .
My mother dispensed with the usual epistolary protocol. On a postcard from Cozumel she wrote:
Guess what! Pete and I were married last week! The dogs are fine, and we’ve moved to Virginia! You’re going to love your new school! It’s co-ed! Love, M.
P.S. Henrietta got a new job.
Like she could fool me with exclamation marks. What she was really saying was:
Listen up, Toots, your life is about to get ugly. I’ve gone and married that sleazy Austrian gunrunner, Peter Beer. You know, the guy that was your father’s best friend? Yeah, him. The one with the accent and the ugly pointy nose. The guy that sweats a lot and doesn’t use deodorant. So you’ve only met him a couple of times, big deal. You’ll get to know him soon enough. And you’ll get to hear us doing it all night long and on Saturday and Sunday mornings because your bedroom is right over ours, and the house is one of those new ranch types they built in under a minute. Whoops! Forgot to tell you we moved to the middle of nowhere. You’re going to hate your new school.
P.S. Pete thought Henrietta was fat and lazy so he canned her. Guess it’s just me from now on! There’s a chore list already up by the back door and you’re down for about sixty hours a week.
Too bad camp can’t last forever, M.
Since my mother was conceived, born, and raised without a sense of humor, I couldn’t regard her bulletin as anything other than the stone cold truth. The few times I’d met Herr Peter Christian Beer were enough to convince me that my new stepfather and Hitler had been littermates. I already knew I hated everything about him. Like the way he answered the telephone with a razor-sharp “Beer here!” Or how when he patted the dogs, he did it so hard they fell over. It would have been more humane if a soldier in uniform had shown up at the door of my cabin with a folded flag.
Summer camp had been sort of a bust that year anyway. I couldn’t figure out who I was supposed to be, nor could I find a niche among the jacks-playing, skinny-legged, madras-wearing Brookes and Whitneys. It was hard to be ghoulish in a cabin by a lake under sun-filtered pines, with campfires, and s’mores, and “Kumbaya” ringing in your ears. After a couple of fruitless weeks combing the Maine woods for hemlock (not that I knew what it looked like) and recording the effects of formaldehyde on bats snared by the camp nurse, I gave in and learned to play jacks (horribly), swam and canoed, and played Capture the Flag.
Next to Breck shampoo, the hottest seller at the Camp Four Winds supply store was stationery. The amount of summertime mail that went in and out of the Sargentville, Maine, post office was of North Pole magnitude. Following lunch there was a mandatory rest period during which letters were furiously penned by the homesick inmates. The rusty springs of ancient bunk beds squeaked with the force of all those Bics, and tears were staunched by autographed stuffed animals and Lilly Pulitzer sheet ensembles. Even I had gone so far as to miss my mother. Whether this was a genuine sentiment, or one born of peer pressure, it didn’t last longer than the time it takes to skim a postcard.
Home was suddenly a low-ceilinged, split-level ranch made entirely of brick—both real and faux, but mostly faux. The floors were brick, the walls were brick, the shelving and the alcoves, the stairs and the basement, they were all brick. There was a brick patio off a living room that had a brick fireplace, and the brick kitchen had plastic brick counters and brick-colored Kenmore appliances and a linoleum brick floor. Even the cupboards had brick-patterned contact paper. It was like living in a kiln that had been air-dropped onto the middle of an eight-acre field. Over the summer, my mother and her new husband, whom she addressed as “my Lord and Master,” had put up ten linear miles of raw wood fencing and erected a barn, into which they had moved four horses: hers, a big gray named Puck; his, a palomino killer named Mighty Mo; Will’s once coveted but now bratty and loathsome pony; and an obese bovine piebald named Beethoven. It was like the Instant Grow version of Green Acres, minus the pigs.
My stepfather was an arms dealer. He and my mother had not been brought together by serendipity alone; he had been my father’s closest friend, their initial bond having been an obsession with all objets de guerre. As manager of an American organization called Interarms, he bought and sold surplus weaponry to governments and civilians all over the world. The founder of Interarms wasn’t picky about who was pushing the shopping cart—Castro, Batista, or Nixon—because he claimed neutrality, and thus was able to equip home guards, national reserves, civil wars, revolutions, defense wars, and insurgencies alike. My stepfather was paid very well, and then some, for his hazardous line of work, and he put the money into his stable of cars, as well as the vault full of gold bricks that he kept in Zurich.
Applying the managerial skills of his business to the home front, the Lord and Master’s first official act had indeed been the brutal firing of my beloved Dewar’s-slugging, Winston-puffing Henrietta, whom he detested. (In a double whammy, Cassie Diggins felt compelled to quit in protest.) My mother had been aghast, but her new husband had bullied her into going it alone. I was bereft. I’d been looking forward to taking care of Henrietta in her demented years, after she had hand-reared my own children. That’s what Scottish nannies were supposed to do—stay on till death. The other side of my family, the happy, well-adjusted Uncle Shirley side I dreamed of belonging to, had one. Her name was Magoo (or something like that), and she was about a hundred and fifty. Her adoptive family had built her a little apartment in their gargantuan house in New Canaan, Connecticut, a place I would have given my heart and lungs to have lived in. Magoo toddled down for meals and babbled in atmospheric Scottish gibberish in her designated corner throughout. Since three, I’d been planning to build Henrietta a wing on my English country estate, complete with her own tap-room and cigarette and candy vending machines.
On the hot September day we arrived at the new house, Will and I stood in the kitchen and gaped at the chores chart the Lord and Master had bolted to the wall. We had never been assigned chores before.
“I changed my mind,” I said, turning to my mother in total neurogenic shock. “I do want to go to boarding school. I do. In fact, I insist.”
“Too late,” my mother said, swinging six-packs of Tab onto the pantry shelves. She was organizing her supplies, something she did on a weekly basis. My mother stocked up like the Russians were scheduled to drop the Big One at 0800. There was a spare for the spare for the spare that was the spare for the item in use, be it salt or Bacardi or Comet. Her personal staples, Lip-ton Iced Tea Mix, strawberry Carnation Instant Breakfast, Metracal shakes and cookies, Sweet’N Low, and Tab, she bought by the case. There was a measurable blast of carcinogens whenever you opened the cabinet doors.
My mother stood back to admire her work. She frowned, and then switched the five jars of Bac-Os with the five boxes of Rice-A-Roni. Still not satisfied, she transferred the Rice-A-Roni to the shelf above, and put the seven bottles of Good Seasons Lo Calorie dressing in their place. Obadiah was rooting for crumbs beneath her, and she kept tripping over him and sliding on his slobber as she struggled to place the Rice-A-Roni far enough back to accommodate six tins of roast beef hash and five of deviled ham on the front of the shelf.
“There!” she said, emerging from the tiny pantry, which was really a cupboard stashed under the back (brick) stairs. “Anyway, Toots, school starts in a week, and you’ll make lots of new friends, just like you always do. Some of them might even be boys.” She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively as she unscrewed a jar of powdered iced tea. I caught a whiff of the nuclear fallout from ten feet away. She spooned some into a glass, added water from the tap, and pulled a tray of ice cubes out of the freezer. Slamming it on the counter, she gave the frosty handle a yank, which sent most of the cubes thumping across the counter and onto the floor. Obadiah dove after them in a commendable burst of energy. My mother wiped her hands on her bikini bottoms. “So you might consider laying off the potato chips for a while.” Inspired, she wrote out DIET!! on a piece of paper and Scotch taped it to the fridge, where a dozen similar notes were already displayed. She claimed these motivational reminders were for herself, but she made a point of being reminded by them whenever I was around.
Will leaned against the screened back door, smirking. He left for school in a couple of days.
“Shut up, jerk,” I hissed, turning on him. “I wouldn’t want to go to your re-tard school anyway!”
“Ah, ah, ah!” cautioned my mother. “Now, that’s a little unfair. Glayden is for kids with dyslexia too.” She smiled at Will as she sipped from her glass. If this affirmation of my brother’s school really being for retards insulted him, he didn’t show it.
“At least I don’t have to live here and shovel shit and wax cars,” he said snidely, and slammed out the door into the stifling humidity.
I went back to staring at the Lord and Master’s work detail. Jeez. The guy had no clue how to go about doing this. He had never been married before, plus he was old. Like forty-something. There wasn’t enough time in the day for all the tasks I was supposed to perform. Spoiled? You bet I was. But this was hardly a case of not wanting to take out the garbage or feed the dogs. This was about mucking out the horses in the dark before school, whitewashing all that fencing in the middle of a heat wave, picking up every Monday after school the shit three dogs had broadcast over eight acres, and waxing one of my stepfather’s stupid sports cars every other Wednesday.
That afternoon found my brother and me doing time with buckets and brushes, working on our own little chain gang. As soon as you applied the paint, the thirsty wood instantly slurped it up like a sponge. After a couple of hours, we felt like we were getting nowhere.
Our mother came out with some Kool-Aid, and her two tortoises, Mr. Turt and Miss Tort. Obadiah greeted her by rolling onto his back and flapping his dinner-plate paws. Will and I collapsed beside him in the long buggy grass and feigned heatstroke.
“Honestly, you two,” she said, setting the tortoises down gently in the deep jungle, whereupon they instantly slammed all four doors shut. “You’d think you were being worked like darkies down on the old plantation.” With her face turned to the sun, she managed to locate and remove a tick the size of a baseball from Obadiah’s neck. She flicked it into the grass, sparing its evil little life so it could live to suck the blood of basset hounds again.
I glowered at her from under my paint-streaked bangs.
For the first time since bearing them, our mother actually had to take care of her children. Will was mostly away, either at school or camp, or at our grandparents’, but Edward made up for Will’s absence by being an omnipresent toddler. Without Cassie Diggins we were suddenly, horribly, at the mercy of our mother’s cooking: Early New England Regional Cuisine as Interpreted by an Alcoholic with an Eating Disorder.
Everything went into the Teflon frying pan: Spam, hot dogs, “grilled” Velveeta cheese sandwiches, steak, spaghetti, hearts of palm, fish sticks, and any and all leftovers, which, with an addition of onion, were then relabeled “hash.” Meanwhile, my mother rarely deviated from her own regime of cottage cheese, diet soda, Ayds candies, and raw hamburger meat dipped in Lip-ton onion soup mix—except when she was loaded. Then she sucked up drippings from the roast or frying pan with a straw.
The cook soon became fed up to here with cooking. In the nick of time someone invented Shake ’N Bake, Birds Eye boil-in-the-bag frozen vegetables, and a coffee cake mix in a plastic bag that you added an egg to before squirting it out into its own little baking pan. Those technological advances, along with Chun King sukiyaki in a box, helped my mother evolve.
The Lord and Master left for work at dawn, so it was relatively peaceful in the mornings. Edward would watch cartoons in the living room, while I’d sit at the kitchen counter before school and watch my mother fry eggs in bacon grease. On certain Fridays, I went to visit my grandparents for the weekend. I hated flying, especially alone. I was torn between my fear and wanting a breather from my stepfather’s autocratic domain, not to mention babysitting my little brother, a drudgery that was hardly worth its twenty-five-cents-an-hour compensation.
“I hate flying more than anything,” I grumbled, and refolded my paper napkin so the corners were more perfectly aligned.
“Poppycock,” said my mother, sliding a couple of eggs that looked like brown lace onto my plate. The toaster popped, and she scraped the tiniest amount of margarine imaginable over an English muffin before handing it to me. I glared at her. She herself was so terrified of flying someone had to crowbar her out of the airport bar in order to get her on the plane.
“And just think,” she added, “you get to be waited on hand and foot by those Irish biddies and pork up on butter, and drink Coke until your teeth rot.” She had a knack for making the things you looked forward to sound terrible.
“Yeah, well at least I’ll be away from Adolf,” I said through a mouthful of toast. My mother whipped around from the sink, a bottle of dish soap in one hand, a sponge in the other. She narrowed her eyes at me, like smoke was heading her way. Whether my sobriquet for him insulted her, or whether it hurt her feelings, I couldn’t tell, but clearly she was pissed. Not that I cared. Now that we were at last spending quality time together—something I couldn’t believe I used to wish for—my mother was becoming less of an enigma and more of a liability. The bottle of Dawn slipped from her grasp, beaning the new dog, Dropout, on his massive head. Blue soap leached out like gore as we stared at each other. The arty metal cutouts of turtles and otters and porcupines on the kitchen walls looked down accusingly at me until I lowered my eyes, and my mother bent to clean up the soapy mess, apologizing profusely to Dropout, who squirmed and thrashed his tail like a delighted sea serpent.
(Greta, to no one’s regret but my mother’s, was history. Upon her arrival in rural Virginia, she had adopted the mind-set of a homicidal psychotic. One minute she would be all heroic and Rin Tin Tin-like, posing with her keen eye upon the horizon, looking out for the 101st Cavalry, and the next she’d be enacting the canine version of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. After she’d redecorated the neighbor’s henhouse with the blood of its residents, my mother was forced to ship Greta to the nearest active war zone. On her way home from the cargo terminal of National Airport she picked up a replacement. Dropout, as the name suggested, had failed attack school. He was the world’s largest German shepherd. He was entirely black, sweetly complacent, and lazy—and would eventually get mistaken for a bear and shot to death—an event from which my mother would never fully recover.)
“Yes, yes, yes!” she now said to the behemoth creature. He clicked around her with joy, crashing into Obadiah, who fell over, and Piddle, who snapped at him before retreating under my stool. I gave Piddle my bacon and then put my plate on the floor for Obadiah, who was forbidden to have fried eggs because he liked to drag his ears through them, and then all over the house.
Lightbulb: “Why can’t I just stay with Gaga and Granddaddy, and go to school in New York?”
My mother took a swallow of her morning Tab and sighed, considering this wonderful possibility. “Fine by me,” she said, “but your grandfather would never go for it.”
“Why not?”
“Because you ain’t a boy, Toots, that’s why.” She scooped a handful of butterscotch Ayds from an economy-sized box and put them in a Baggie. “Better pack these,” she said, handing them to me. “I don’t want to have to go buying you new clothes before spring. Speaking of which, you better hurry up and get dressed for school, and pack your suitcase too. We still have the horses to do before the bus comes.”
Weather took all the fun out of owning animals. It was barely December, but there was already a foot of snow on the ground.
“The neighbors all have farmhands. Why can’t we hire someone to do all this stuff?” I asked my mother. I was cracking the ice out of the buckets in the barn so the horses could drink, while she threw extra flakes of hay into their stalls.
“Oh, stop your grumbling,” she said, though not without sympathy. “You know how Pete is. He thinks we should be the lords of our own fiefdom, but he doesn’t want to pay for the serfs.”
“Yeah,” I laughed, and went to help her buckle extra blankets onto the horses, their warm breath rising in grass-scented steam all around us.
I had to feel for my mother; I was old enough now. Still, I would look at her sometimes and wonder what on earth she saw in her odious husband. I sensed she had little control over her domestic situation, even though she had put herself—and, more importantly, me—into it. It had to have been like toxic shock, her being thrown into all those different layers of servitude. Out in the sticks, Trader Vic’s and Dead Zombies a thing of the past, her studio gone and her artistic life confined to a room in the basement, her children requiring meals at least two times a day, her husband requiring sex the same amount (not to mention slavish devotion in between); when Pete was history, my mother would confess she’d married him because he was the most exciting man she’d ever met.
My stepfather would have been delighted to have me permanently packed off to live in Burdenland. There was no love lost between us. I continued to hate him for any number of reasons, not the least of which was because he seriously sweated. No one in my family sweated like that. They maybe turned pink after a couple of sets of tennis, but never did quarts of perspiration drip from their noses or course in rivers from their pits. The Lord and Master claimed sweating was healthy. He eschewed the use of deodorant and antiperspirants, saying that to block it was unnatural.
“Why do you drink so much if your just gonna sweat it all out?” I had asked him one broiling hot Indian summer Sunday before the weather had turned. My mother had been trying to kill two birds: getting me tanned, while encouraging a little family time. The Lord and Master was intermittently sunning his armpits, elbows raised to the sky, and slurping grape soda from a work crew-sized thermos that rattled with ice cubes every time he hoisted it up. I was working on a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of migrating Assateague ponies, that I had carried out on a card table. (Nothing leveled me better than a few hours spent on a good jigsaw puzzle—other than a stack of CREEPY comics and a big bag of Lay’s.)
“I am like an Olympian, cooling the surface of my skins!” he proclaimed, turning himself slowly, like a vertical rotisserie, beside my mother’s deck chair on the patio. His thick Austrian accent only underscored his operatic delivery of anything—from the time of day, to a lecture on the proper way to simonize a Berlinetta Boxer.
Olympian, my ass. He was a sweaty, disgusting satyr. He might not have had the pointy ears, but he sure as hell had the horns. And I knew from Greek mythology that satyrs went hand in hand with drunken, lewd behavior. They were always fornicating with nymphs, and goats, and little boys.
I repeated my question about his excessive consumption of liquids.
“Because it is excellent for one’s body to sweat!” he sang in reply, mopping his face with a towel. “This is merely thermoregulation! Men who are working, athletes who are running, they produce a gallon of sweat an hour!” His left eye, a wanderer, rolled around in a sickening manner.
“Yuck,” I said.
“And you will see, you will begin to have this sweat yourself, when you will have breasts!”
“Eeuw.”
“Yes, this is true. With this puberty will come these hormones, and these will produce the sweat glands from under your arms, and in your groin, and from your nipples!”
“Gross me out.”
The Lord and Master winked at me, and smacked my mother on the butt. “Women, they love sweat from a man. This is how we communicate our sex drive!”
I stomped off inside, just in time so they couldn’t see the waterworks. Honestly, how could my mother be with such a complete perv?
I may have been an idiot savant in terms of mortuary science, but I still had clichéd ideas of love and sex, Harold Robbins excerpts notwithstanding. Up until my mother’s unfortunate union I’d been able to pretty much ignore her proclivities. Now I felt like I’d been thrown into the carnal sea, not only on the home front, where the newlyweds kept to a regimen of hyperactive coitus in the master bedroom below mine, but at my new school as well.
The Flint Hill Preparatory School had an erudite name, but venerable the place was not. My sixth-grade class was a mixed bag of future hucksters, sluts, and farmhands, albeit in regimental blue uniforms. On the playground with my classmates at recess, I’d watch as the ten-year-old boys stuck their hands in the panties of the obliging ten-year-old girls, withdrawing their fingers for all to smell.
Will had it just as bad. Burgundy Farms Country Day was an “alternative school.” Before he’d gotten permanently assigned to boarding school, I’d gone there with him for fifth grade. Unmitigated disaster. All I got out of it was a phobia for sandals and a talent for eating mud. Fourth grade had been at the National Cathedral School for girls, praise the Lord. Now I was enduring everyone else’s puberty at Flint Hill.
All of which contributed to my becoming a drug addict by ten.
It began innocently enough—but then that’s what they all say. In New York for the weekend, I’d been stricken with nausea during a routine perusal of Ann Rose’s office. For the record, I have a world-class vomit phobia. I’d rather overdose on rhubarb leaves and bleed from my eyeballs than throw up. After the initial wave, I crawled to the towering cabinet of pharmaceuticals in Ann Rose’s bathroom. Next to the Pepto and the milk of magnesia was a giant-sized bottle of BiSoDol antacid tablets. Panting, I unscrewed the cap and sniffed—mint. My mouth was filling with that nasty gush of saliva you get right before you’re about to blow, so I ate a couple of the thick white tablets. Then I prayed to God not to throw up and guess what—it worked!
You bet I brought the miracle drug home with me. I hid it in the headboard shelf of my bed, behind a propped-up copy of Happiness Is a Warm Puppy. It freaked me out that I became conscious of the BiSoDol’s presence at all times. In the beginning I’d just take the bottle out, open it up, and smell it. Then I started shaking a few tablets out into my hand and looking at them. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was taking one every night before I went to bed. Shortly afterward, I found religion.
It could have just been a chemical reaction from the sodium bicarbonate, but within seconds of ingesting my nightly wafer, an inexplicable urge to worship came over me. The chalky mint would spread over my tongue like a shroud, staunching the flow of saliva, and assuring me that no matter what I had eaten—a whole box of Cap’n Crunch, mud, or an entire jar of Jif—God, and BiSoDol, would keep me from throwing up. Accordingly, I gave thanks, and lots of it. This was a peace I’d never known. My mother would have died if she’d seen me on my knees on my floral Dacron bedspread, swaying like a fly rod and praising Jesus and the Lord Almighty in a whisper.
I’d tinkered with religion briefly as a six-year-old, when, in a desire for what I mistakenly considered to be textbook normalcy, I’d marched over to the local Catholic church and signed myself up for Sunday school. They didn’t seem to care that I was unaccompanied, nor did they inquire if I was a Catholic. In the true spirit of Christianity, they welcomed me with open arms.
Sunday school was a huge disappointment. It was all about coloring pictures of Noah’s Ark or Jesus in the Temple with an incomplete set of Crayola crayons. We sat at a long, oilclothcovered table, and, after a couple of graham crackers and Dixie cups of lukewarm grape juice, the teacher handed out pages torn from religious coloring books for us to work on. The other children filled in the robes of Mary’s dress with whatever colors were at hand—orange yellow, or silver, or salmon—carelessly running amok outside the lines. They scribbled the lilies with pine green and mulberry, but then they all fought for the flesh crayon, even when I showed them you could color skin the same with a very light shading of melon.
The teacher, a kind enough spinster in an ankle-length prairie dress, walked around peering at our efforts. When she stopped at my shoulder, I covered my drawing with my hands. I saw it as vastly imperfect. The teacher asked to have a look, and I shrugged and told her I would have given Jesus rosy cheeks if there’d been any carnation pink.
“I’m done with this one,” I said. “Do you have any others, like of the dead guy coming out of his grave?”
“You mean Lazarus?” the teacher said with skepticism.
“Sure. Anyone’ll do. Or I could work on a puzzle if you have one. But it has to be over a thousand pieces.”
“First let’s see how you’ve done with Jesus walking on the water, shall we?”
I leaned back and uncovered my picture. The teacher looked down at it and put a hand to her throat.
“Oh my God,” she whispered hoarsely.
Ask any control freak and they’ll tell you how brilliant they were at coloring. When everyone’s picture was pinned up on the bulletin board at the end of the class, I already knew I wouldn’t be back the following week. How could I, in good faith, create masterpieces while surrounded by aesthetic imbeciles? The teacher begged me to stay, but I’d lost interest. Besides, I was an imposter—I was Episcopalian.
In the future, I’d be able to resolve all kinds of things by invoking the proverbial “suffering is redemptive” theory. Like if my mother hadn’t married that dictatorial sphincter, I wouldn’t have acquired a sense of self so early in life. Or learned to drive a stick at twelve. And if my father hadn’t killed himself, I wouldn’t have inherited a few million at twenty-one. But that philosophy wasn’t working for me then, and I was as tortured as St. Augustine. I was serving God, but God had yet to reward me by smiting my stepfather. Therefore, He too was torturing me. And I was no Job. Switching gears, I decided to miss my father. It was the first time I’d given serious thought to him since his death four years earlier. A shrink might have told me I was embarking on a deferred period of mourning. I can tell you I was perihormonal, hooked on antacids, and living under the same roof as the Antichrist.
But wait a minute . . . if God could stop me from vomiting, maybe he could bring back my father. It seemed like a parallel miracle to me. It was a long shot, but I worked it anyway. Every night when I took my BiSoDol, instead of praying for God to kill my stepfather, I prayed like a fundamentalist for God to produce my father. Initially I referred to him as Daddy, but it sounded really weird to me. I was obliged to ask my mother (when she was toasted—I wasn’t stupid) what Will and I had called him, but she was flippant and said things like “Well I don’t know, for Christ sake, what do all kids call their damn fathers?” When Will and I were together one weekend in New York, I asked him, and he responded by punching me in the stomach.
I didn’t feel the least bit guilty that I hadn’t missed my father before drugs had reintroduced us. It was as if he’d never been there in the first place. I had maybe two memories of him, and both of them were at night. The first was of my father going after a giant bee in my room, which turned out to be a half-dead bluebottle. The second was of being in his arms on the Snow White ride in Disneyland, when the wicked witch held out the apple to our little cart as it swung past on its tracks. I was scared out of my mind, and he protected me.
I remembered protecting him. Whenever it rained during the night, I would sit outside my parents’ bedroom door and monitor the puddles on the street and the sidewalk. I dreaded rain. I was convinced it would never stop, and that the world would flood, worse even than when Noah was around. I’d sit all night outside that door, ready to warn my parents when the water rose and began to tug at the tender walls of our house.
In an attempt to discover any traces of my father, I combed our sterile house, but all I could find was an old check register containing his carefully recorded expenditures, like a check to Best & Co. for thirty dollars and fifty-eight cents (clothes for Willy and Wendy), or one to Johnson’s Garden, fifteen dollars even. I spent hours analyzing my father’s handwriting for clues, trying to identify my DNA in the dot of his i or the curve of his c. I hated having only half of myself accounted for.
That was about all I had to go on in the memory department, so I settled for missing the idea of him.
One is either born with the capacity to believe in God, or not. Apparently, I was not. About the same time I ran out of BiSoDol, I came to the conclusion that whereas God had neither resurrected my father nor drowned my stepfather in the boiling sea of shit and piss and vomit he deserved, He, She, or It clearly did not exist. This led to a disturbing chain of thoughts that culminated in the epiphany that everyone and everything was going to die. More importantly, I was going to die, and there was going to be nothing after that. As in forever and ever and ever. This got me screaming into my pillow, and making lists, and imagining ordered rows of shoes, or trolls, or jellyfish on the tide line of a beach. If you were born just to die, and then be dead for infinity, you might as well have never existed, so what was the point of anything? No wonder my father had killed himself.
My mother, on the other hand, believed in lots of gods. She exhibited the primitivism of early man, and made few distinctions between animals and humanity. She was surrounded by her daemons and totems, and she glorified the animal spirit deities by treating her pets—her dogs and horses and chinchillas and tortoises and prairie dogs and coatimundi and old spider monkey—as equals, even though the latter would spray a fountain of go-away urine on anyone who walked in the door, and then bite them for good measure.
It should come as no surprise that after my brother’s evil pony bucked me off in the field, and I staggered to the kitchen door, my arm like a twisted car wreck, the radius sticking out at a forty-five-degree angle, my mother took one look and said, “Jesus fucking Christ! Is the horse okay?” Luckily, shock had already set in. As red-faced as an India rubber ball, my mother called an ambulance, taped my former arm to a two-by-four, and then walked me back across the field to catch the pony. Hoisting me into the saddle, she grimly reasoned, “Listen, Toots, if you don’t get straight back on, you’ll be scared to do it again.”
She had dealt with my compound fracture in the same pragmatic way she’d administered to Piddle when her throat had been ripped out by a neighbor’s werewolf. Upon discovering the three-quarters-dead dachshund in the garage, my mother had calmly fetched a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a needle and thread. While I held the dog, trying to ignore the gushing blood and exposed windpipe, my mother stitched her throat closed. The vet said he’d never seen such practicality. My mother told him she worshiped the damn dog, so she did what she had to.
A few days after I came home from the hospital, the doctor made a house call. My mother was on her way into town to meet the Lord and Master for dinner, and she fussed about my room in an attempt to hurry the doctor. She was wearing her new Yves Saint Laurent “Mondrian” shift and her favorite black Roger Vivier patent leather shoes with the Myles Standish buckles on them. It may have been late winter, but her legs were bare, and of that peculiar pumpkin color only QT can deliver.
Examining me, the doctor remarked on the size of my stomach.
My mother came to stand by the side of the bed and tapped her foot. “I told her to lay off the Fritos,” she said, shaking her head. “But honestly, Doctor, what can I do?”
“I’d say this is more than just a case of snack food,” said the doctor, palpating my distended, rock-hard abdomen. “Your daughter looks like she’s in her second trimester.”
“What!” my mother shrieked. She sank backwards into a beanbag chair, her pocketbook spewing lipstick, change, keys, and switchblade across the carpet. “Are you telling me—I mean, there’s no way she could possibly be—”
“Yes,” said the doctor, sternly. “I’m afraid this poor child is severely constipated.”
My mother made a sound like gas escaping a balloon.
The doctor regarded his Timex, and snapped his black bag shut. “Do you know how to administer an enema, Mrs. Beer?” he said, giving her a dubious look over his glasses.
Mother and daughter looked at each other in profound horror.
Shit. If only I’d read the label on the bottle of BiSoDol. Not for children under 12. Adverse side effects include constipation.
Never has a procedure been invented that so tests the mettle of the participants. My mother and I hadn’t been that intimate since I’d come through the birth canal.
Spring arrived, my arm healed, Piddle was taken off the respirator, and the snowshoes were put away for the year. While the Lord and Master and his bride went scuba diving in the Bahamas, Will and Edward and I went to visit our grandparents in Hobe Sound, Florida.
The Jupiter Island Club was once the most stultifyingly WASP enclave that closed society had ever produced. The town of Hobe Sound itself was nothing, a hole-in-the-wall with a Winn-Dixie and a Bible college. The club was on the adjacent barrier island, in between two game preserves. To be a part of it, you had to own a house on the grounds, but to own a house on the grounds you had to be a member. The Atlantic sparkled along a white beach on one side, and the Indian River, swarming with fat, amiable manatees, separated the island from the mainland on the other. Sun-kissed, fair-haired men, women, and children tooled along on bikes and in golf carts, and behind the Bakelite steering wheels of old Mercedes-Benzs. They went back and forth from the courts or the fairway, to the beach club or the snack bar or the clubhouse, to one another’s houses for cocktail parties. My mother only dreamed of such a Nirvana—sun, the beach, hot and cold running servants, flora and fauna, and an open bar at all hours.
My grandparents honestly tried to make things fun for Will and me, but it was their idea of fun, not ours. Edward was happy to sit all day long in a sandbox with a pail and a shovel and a starfish mold and several doting caretakers, but for us they scheduled tennis lessons and swimming lessons and golf lessons and deep-sea fishing excursions, and even signed us up for tea dances. They rented us ugly bikes and brought Captain Closson down from Maine to drive us around—to no avail. Hobe Sound was my idea of Hell. I hated tennis, I hated golf, I hated swimming lessons, I hated lying in the sun—and I had no friends because I was inept at doing all those things. Lollygagging about the house with the grown-ups was supremely boring, but I endured it because I was too embarrassed to be out with Will, riding around on crappy rental bikes.
Suffering, in addition to being redemptive, can sometimes be portentous. On a day that would herald the close of the Addams era, I was introduced to two wondrous things: Gothic literature and the obituary page.
One of my father’s brothers, Uncle Bob, was staying with us in Hobe Sound. We had all just returned from the beach club snack bar, where the four of us had lunched respectively on stone crab and noon balloons (the club’s signature rum punch with an added floater of 150-proof Myers’s); salad and a glass of milk with two raw eggs in it; and bacon cheeseburgers with fries, multiple Cokes, and a couple of brownies. My grandparents had teetered off to their beds for the usual post-lunch sleep-off. Edward was being forced to do the same, and was wailing his head off in a far corner of the house. Will had (unbelievably) found a friend to hang out with and was gone. It was too hot to do anything other than drape oneself across a Bruno Mathsson chaise and get lost in the newest issue of CREEPY.
Uncle Bob was reading Scientific American. He was blinking heavily behind his thick horn-rims, and making his trademark groany-grunty sound—something he did so habitually that we referred to him as Uncle urr-hhhhh-uuuuhhh Bob. I could see why he’d never been married. With his blue chin and gross hairy back, Uncle Bob often reminded me of Fred Flintstone.
Finishing his article, he came over to see what I was up to. Over my shoulder he studied the black-and-white drawings of a body-snatching that was taking place in a dark, rainy cemetery. Rotting flesh and bone-bared limbs were sticking out of coffins and body bags, and worms were playing pinochle on decomposing snouts everywhere. The omnipresent narrator, Uncle Creepy, leered and cackled his trademark heh, heh, heh all over the pages.
Uncle Bob straightened up and grunted. He asked me if I’d read the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. I shot him a look that said, Are you nuts? Like I would read school stuff on my own? But then he told me the name of the story was “The Body Snatchers.”
“Really,” I said.
Was it a red-letter day or what. That very morning I’d been in my grandparents’ bedroom, rearranging my grandmother’s jewelry and makeup on the dressing table while she had her breakfast in bed with the octogenarian poodles and Edward lay ripping up Babar books by her side.
My grandfather was in the bathroom with The New York Times, doing big business with the door open, as usual. We heard the toilet flush and he shuffled back into the bedroom, the ties on his Savile Row pj’s undone, the bottoms half off and trailing over his long pale feet.
“I say, Peggy, look at this.” My grandfather rustled the paper in the direction of his wife and cleared his throat to read.
“Babar!” shrieked Edward, and stuffed a page in his mouth.
“What is it, Popsie?” my grandmother said, her eyes locked onto the Today show.
“In the obituaries there’s a woman who’s died. Some Bolshevik. Name seems familiar.”
“Mmmm hmmmm,” my grandmother replied, sucking on the pit of a prune, eyes riveted to Barbara Walters.
“See here, Peggy.” He squinted at the paper with his glasses down his nose. “This ‘aide of Lenin,’ they call her. Well wasn’t she that female your mother used to have those nonsense séances with?”
Brffffftttttt. “I’m sorry, darling?” My grandmother was following the directions the guest chef was giving with small movements of her cereal spoon, building the Pineapple Surprise right along with him.
“What’s an obituary?” I interrupted.
“Ca-ca! Doggie ca-ca!” laughed Edward, lunging for a poodle turd on the floor.
“Yes, I’m certain that was the woman. A hawkish type. Dour. No wonder,” my grandfather said, padding around with one hand scratching his stomach. His pajama bottoms suddenly dropped to the floor and he stepped out of them.
“What’s an obituary, Granddaddy?” I asked louder.
“What?” He looked at me, surprised as usual by my existence, and said, “Look here, that’s an obituary.” He handed me the paper, pointing to a few columns with a fuzzy photo of a woman. Then he wandered off to the closet to get dressed for his tennis game. A commercial had come on, so my grandmother offered an explanation.
“An obituary is a story they write in the newspapers where they tell about a famous person when they’ve passed away.” She reached for her lipstick on the bedside table and began to haphazardly apply it.
“Gaga! Gaga, ca-ca!” said Edward, holding the turd out to her.
“Do they talk about how the person died?” I asked, suddenly remembering that early sighting of my father’s.
“Thank you, dearie,” she said to Edward. “Sometimes they do, but only if it’s because they were killed in an avalanche or sank with the Titanic, like that poor Astor cousin. You are too young to remember. Think of it as a sort of book report on a distinguished person’s life.”
“Huh,” I said, scanning the rest of the page, but there were no interesting details. Then I had a completely brilliant thought.
“Gaga, do all papers have them?”
“Right-o, dearie,” my grandmother mumbled through tissue, blotting her lips. The poodles exchanged positions, and The Today Show returned from station identification.
“Right-o, Gaga,” I said, and trotted off to the kitchen to see if there was anything more explicit in the Palm Beach Post. There wasn’t, but in due time I would discover British journalism.
The next day, Uncle Bob returned from town with a couple of books, both of collected short stories. The first was by Edgar Allan Poe and the second by Stevenson. By lunchtime I had read “The Body Snatchers,” and by dinner “The Raven,” with Uncle Bob’s help in translating that bugaboo “Night’s Plutonian Shore.” By bedtime I had penned my first obit—a heartfelt, if sophomoric, send-off for the Lord and Master:
Peter Christian Beer, an international arms dealer, died yesterday of horribly severe and unnatural causes. He was around 50 . . .
I could have built a substantial career on the thousands that were to follow.
When I returned to school after spring break, I decided to reinvent myself. Throughout the fall and winter terms I’d put in my usual time in the principal’s office for misdemeanors ranging from Extremely Poor Attitude to coauthorship of a slam book, which is basically a compendium of the filthiest words in the English language.
Now I resolved to become a good student, starting with my English class. I remember exactly what I was wearing when I finally got an A for something other than an art project. It was free dress day and I was proudly dressed in geometrically patterned go-go boots, beige windowpane tights, a faux leopard hip-hugger miniskirt with a white plastic belt, and a black skinny-knit poor boy sweater. God, I was cool.
“My, my,” said the teacher as she handed out graded papers to the class. “Somebody had a wake-up call this vacation. Either that, or some very much needed tutoring.”
I accepted mine from her and checked out the big beautiful A. “I’ve been reading,” I said.
The bell rang and students started leaping out of their chairs. Miss Gleason rapped her desk with a ruler for attention. “Quiet down! Now listen, it will be your own choice for next week’s book report, so I will expect creativity. And remember, comics and record liner notes do not count.”
I smiled and patted my book bag. I was halfway through “The Monkey’s Paw.” Future book reports would practically write themselves.