MY MOTHER WAS nothing if not practical. She owed this trait, her saving grace, to her ancestors. The end product of twelve arrogant generations of New Englanders descended from a handful of Plymouth Colony founders, Leslie Hamilton was the only issue of an army colonel and a melancholic ex-spinster whose sole objective in life was to search out, examine, cross-reference, and interpret every branch, twig, leaf, and aphid of her family tree. According to my mother, her mother’s premature death was due to hypochondria, but I’m convinced she was a victim of genealogical nervosa, a debilitating disease that attacks the brain cells of the afflicted with the speed of a tanker’s oil slick. Research has correlated the illness to membership in societies such as the Colonial Dames Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Mayflower Society. Sadly, there remains no cure, only preventive abstinence.
In a celebratory wrap-up of her first—and final, as she saw it—year of widowhood, my mother relocated us to the arty environs of Georgetown. The house we moved into was a comfortably disheveled federal row house on Reservoir Road. It was painted a peeling biscuit color and was set back from the herringbone-brick sidewalk by a wrought iron fence with the world’s clangiest gate. There were three skinny floors, a basement, and a cool finished attic. Naturally, my brother got the attic.
I had the front room on the second floor, and a bunk bed, which I did not ask for. I am not a bunk bed sort of person. Edward had his crib in a cubicle next to mine. My mother’s master suite took up the rest of the floor. Henrietta had her smoky domain in the basement, and hanging out with her down there, watching TV, shooting the prepubescent breeze, felt like patronizing a grotto nightclub.
Behind the house, a narrow garden ran twenty feet or so down to a freestanding garage barely large enough for my mother’s new Austin Healey Sprite. The garage was accessed by one of the alleys that ran behind the houses of Georgetown like convoluted but biologically necessary plumbing.
Alley life was like ant farm life. The cramped thoroughfares were not only practical, they were highly social. They were where you took a shortcut to the bus stop, or met up with your friends, or roller skated, rode your Stingray, skateboarded, and jumped rope even though there was a continual flow of pedestrian and motor traffic and the pavement was maybe as wide as a 1965 station wagon.
A lot of artists had studios in the old garages and carriage houses, and my mother had hers two alleys over, in a lopsided structure that had once been a car repair shop. Before that, it had purportedly been the shanty of a freed slave, though that was never validated and was probably a stab at historical sensationalism on the part of the Realtor. It was a ramshackle little space made airy by a glass-windowed garage door on one side. When it was warm out, everyone kept their doors up or open, and neighboring artists would trickle by when they grew bored with their own endeavors.
My mother did mostly animal sculptures, stylized turtles and seals and otters and bears that she carved from huge blocks of alabaster and soapstone, or chiseled from stumps of wood the size of small cars. I adored being in her studio. It was at once cozy and macabre, a cross between the school art room and a serial killer’s lair. The room smelled of earth and stone and wood, and everything in it was coated with a lovely soft, carcinogenic dust. Torturous tools of the trade—rasps and files and chisels and mallets—lay about on the worktables amid sculptures in various stages of progress. On the rough wood shelving photographic reference books leaned up against boxes of sandpaper, drills and their bits, and buckets permanently lined with a coating of hard white plaster. Next to an old laundry sink was a ten-pound block of modeling clay, swaddled in thick plastic sheeting to keep it malleable. Aprons, welding masks, and safety goggles hung from pegs along a wall. Sacks of plaster of Paris used to make the molds the finished bronzes would be cast from lay in a heap in a corner. When you opened the sacks up, they smelled divine, just like a dank mausoleum.
Normally our mother didn’t have the time of day for us, but in her studio she took on her birthday persona. We could run amok in there and she just laughed. We ripped into the clay like mice into a bar of soap, and made action figures (Will—soldiers and guns; me—horses and victims for the guillotine), and dipped our arms and legs in buckets of wet plaster she made up for us so we could pretend we were victims of ghastly car wrecks.
If a homework project called for creativity, and she happened to be in town, our mother became a wildly enthusiastic collaborator. The Nagasaki After the Atom Bomb project she helped me build for Social Studies was not to be believed. I considered it the apogee of my five years of combined elementary school training, and if the terrain displayed over the four-foot length of chicken wire and painted plaster was more doomsday lunar crater than Japanese ground zero, the care that went into depicting human carnage and vegetative devastation was justly rewarded. But I couldn’t have scorched the model trees without her knowledge of acetylene torch work.
Gomez and Morticia would have been so proud of my A+.
As it turned out, so was my mother. When I presented her with my inscribed gold star, she stunned me by putting her arms around me and awkwardly kissing the side of my head. I, in turn, nearly forgot myself and leaned in to receive it—but then I remembered that she had only just arrived from Miami and was leaving for Haiti in the morning, so it wasn’t too difficult to remind myself of all the literary mothers she wasn’t, which was one of the formulas for hating her that I followed. Blame it on the lower school English Department.
Lamenting the fact that I wasn’t an Addams was really only 75 percent of the equation; the rest of the time I longed to be my favorite character from A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry, if only to have her mother—the gifted, beautiful, wonderfully vague but fiercely doting Mrs. Murry who was always there to support her nearsighted, ugly duckling daughter, someone I resembled not a little. The fact that Meg Murry’s father (also achingly brilliant) had vanished, and was subsequently found to be not dead but merely on another planet in a glass tube, the prisoner of a giant brain named IT, would have no bearing on my obsession with this book.
Matters ran smoothly at home when our mother was out of town, thanks to the domestic superintendancy of Cassie Diggins and Henrietta. When she was home, everything went out of whack. Like I couldn’t go to the bathroom. Which is why I remember November 22, 1963, the day that President Kennedy was shot, as the day of the Kennedy Poo, because my mother had left for Mexico that morning.
Other than that, things were okay. Meaning, I was mostly having a decent childhood, other than the glaring hole of deprivation caused by my not having a pony. Since my father hadn’t had much of an impact on my life when he was alive, I can’t say I missed him. It’s hard to miss someone you didn’t know in the first place. To save my brother from the dishonor of having to repeat fifth grade and be in the same class as me, Will was sent off to boarding school. But we were already beginning to part ways gender-wise, so I didn’t really miss him either.
The most cherished thing in my possession then was an autographed copy of Charles Addams’s book Nightcrawlers. I had purloined it from my grandparents’ library in the city, along with Homebodies, Drawn and Quartered, and Dear Dead Days. I deserved them more than my grandparents. Besides, they were friends with the Maker himself, referring to him as “Charlie” even, so they could get more copies anytime they wanted. I’d met Him once, when He was over for lunch in the country. I’d been suitably starstruck, and uncharacteristically polite, but He hadn’t found me amusing enough for conversation. The whole thing was reminiscent of my meeting with Walt Disney, when, during our visit to California, my brother and I had knocked on the back door of his Beverly Hills house. Old Walt had actually answered the door himself. I don’t remember what my expectations were at the time. I was five, so undoubtedly they were vast, but they probably weren’t that Mr. Disney, creator of Cinderella and Bambi, would glare at us and snap, “Scram!” before slamming the door in our faces.
Oh, happy mournful day! On September 18, 1965, the Addams Family came to television. Even though I much preferred her two dimensional persona, I stepped up my slavish emulation of Wednesday Addams. I even built a replica of her guillotine. This was a crude but fully functional piece of engineering that I constructed with pieces of wood from my FAO Schwarz riding stable after watching the episode where Wednesday chops off the head of her Marie Antoinette doll. The blade was problematic, since Cassie Diggins would have missed even a piece of Saran Wrap from the kitchen, so I had to make do using a pocket mirror and pair of industrial-sized scissors that I snapped at the exact moment the mirror fell, which was sort of cheating but ultimately had the desired effect.
I quickly ran out of things to decapitate. Will wasn’t around much, and I was too attached to my hamster. I considered martyring the baby, but Edward was too enthusiastic to be a worthy victim. He would have gladly laid his gurgly little melon on my guillotine, but he didn’t deserve the honor. And Mary Falusi, the old lady who sometimes filled in for Henrietta, would die of heartbreak. She loved my little brother like he was the young John the Baptist. (Mary Falusi was very religious.)
The last time I’d behaved magnanimously toward Edward was on the night he was born. This event had long been anticipated, mostly with intense skepticism, and had finally occurred when my mother hit the eight-month gestational mark and began running up and down all four flights of stairs. Thirty-six hours later her water broke, three weeks shy of her due date (though she’d later say she’d been aiming for four). She lined the seat of her Willys jeep with a towel, put the top down, and drove herself to the hospital to have the baby on her own goddamn schedule, thank you.
A witness was dispatched from Burdenland to see what color the baby was. Despite all in-house predictions, the squalling pupa in the hospital basinet was the spitting image of his rightful father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and so on. He might as well have had a tattoo of the family crest on his right butt cheek. The signature pink hair and humongous Burden testicles were enough validity, and the baby was hailed as a prince—a boy!—and proclaimed second in line to the throne. The night we heard the news, Will and I had danced arm in arm, celebrating our new sibling. We hadn’t much noticed him since.
The only suitor to have appeared since our father had accomplished the opposite was Charles Thomas, a darkly handsome foreign attaché whom I liked to imagine my mother had fallen hopelessly in love with. For a long time I retained a single, far more saturated memory of him than any of my own father— that of Charles swinging me in his arms in the kitchen while I laughed my brains out. It was my only clear vignette from the weeks after the funeral, other than Henrietta accidentally pouring a baby bottle of boiling water on my hand and me watching in silent awe as the skin peeled back on either side like the biblical parting of an ocean.
Down in the grotto nightclub, watching television on Henrietta’s bed with Obadiah and Piddle, our corpulent dachshund, I’d sometimes ask her what had happened to Charles, but she never wanted talk about him.
Nor did Cassie. “Don’t you go asking about that man” was all she would say, and point to the pancake turner if I ragged on about it further.
Enter Mr. Love.
Mr. Love’s attentions started up shortly after we moved to Georgetown. In the beginning, he seemed nice enough, but then so do most people who arrive bearing gifts, even if they’re as lame as saltwater taffy. When she was in town, Mr. Love took my mother out to Trader Vic’s, and Harvey’s for oysters, and Georgetown nightclubs and discotheques, which he nerdily referred to as the “heppest new thing.” As far as I could tell, my mother didn’t like dancing. She certainly had no rhythm, and from watching Shindig I knew that that was what discotheques were all about, so it worried me that she might like Mr. Love for something deeper than what I imagined people did on a date. Even worse, she seemed to be sticking around town just to date him, and it was wreaking havoc with my bowels.
Mr. Love was so anxious to get at my mother that he always arrived early. It fell on me to entertain him while she did her getting ready thing upstairs. He would mosey on in and make himself a cocktail in the kitchen, like he lived there or something, and then he’d go plop himself down on the living room sofa and read the paper.
For the first few dates I tried to soften him up for her, like I was sent in to warm up the audience before the main act came on. My routine went something like this:
“Hey, Mr. Love, you wanna see me do the Bongo Board? I can do it for an hour straight.”
“Uh, that’s nice, hon,” Mr. Love would reply. “Maybe another time.”
“How ’bout I show you the bullwhip? I can crack it five times in a row. Sometimes I can even break a glass with it.”
“You know, I think I’ll just sit here quietly and read the paper.”
“Wanna see my hamster? Or my guillotine? How about the two of them together? I bet you didn’t know we have a dog that’s trained to kill people.”
This was partially true. My mother had gotten Greta, a German shepherd attack dog, about a week after we’d moved into the new house. She seemed to think being a widow with young children called for accessories like the switchblade she packed in her Gucci handbag, or the bullwhip she kept under the seat of her car. Maybe it was because we were geographically on the wrong side of Georgetown’s tracks. Maybe she thought my grandparents had taken a contract out on her. Sadly, she never divulged to us what the command for Greta to attack was. And Greta wouldn’t do it unless you uttered the one word that she knew meant go ahead and disembowel the indicated target.
Shortly after Greta had arrived, Obadiah developed a full-blown case of Munchausen syndrome, and started eating his own ears when any attention was paid to the new dog. Piddle dealt with the change in hierarchy by sinking her teeth into all visitors under the age of twelve.
They needn’t have bothered. The words German and shepherd said it all. Greta was remarkable in that she had no personality, except when she was ordered to kill. Then she was a one-dog blitzkrieg.
Mr. Love’s fatal mistake was in allowing me to overhear him (and with such a vested interest, who wouldn’t spy?) tell my mother that she should sell her car and he would sell his car, and then they could buy a new one together. Which almost made me laugh because the guy had nine, count them, nine children and my idea of a new car was more in the line of an Aston, not an airport van.
From then on, it was no holds barred.
The first plan I came up with involved Greta. The idea was to accidentally get her to kill, or at least maim, Mr. Love. So when he arrived for his date, forty-five minutes early as usual, I was crouched with the dog behind the curtains in the living room, whispering every conceivable word of combat I could think of. I even tried saying them in a German accent, but nothing triggered her Teutonic killer reaction. The humorless beast just sat there, calmly panting. With twenty minutes to go, I figured I’d have more success using an accomplice with an established canine compulsive disorder, so I traded Greta for Obadiah. I seated the two of us next to Mr. Love on the sofa and fed Obadiah three plastic cars. Obadiah loved to eat toys. He was never happier than when munching on a cowboy or an Indian or a farm animal. (Trolls made him gag because of the hair.) In lieu of digesting, he either barfed them up later or had his stomach pumped by the vet.
Mr. Love was unfazed. Evidently he was not an animal lover.
With only five minutes left, I made a last-ditch effort and tried to annoy him to death by singing all five verses of “The Worms Crawl In.” By the last one, I was shouting because he hadn’t once looked up from the paper.
Mr. Love raised his eyes from the Real Estate section. “Why do you persist in persecuting me?”
“It’s nothing personal, Mr. Love. I just don’t want you to marry my mother.”
“Who said anything about getting married?” he said.
I told him how I’d overheard his icky line about buying a car together. “And if you think I’m okay with having nine new brothers and sisters, you’re nuts.”
Mr. Love started laughing, and continued until he had practically cackled his Brylcreemed head off his shoulders, and I was in tears. I spun around, heading for the stairs, and ran smack into my mother.
“Hey!” she said, but I streaked past her and up to the second floor.
And when she came into my bedroom later that night, and put her hand on my head in the dark, I kept my breathing in a regular, careful simulation of sleep. Traitor.
By date number five, however, I pulled out all the stops. I answered Mr. Love’s ring at the door in Wednesday’s black cardigan and braids.
“Why hello, Mr. Traveling Salesman,” I said.
Mr. Love gave me an exasperated look and brushed past me into the house. I pretended to be perplexed by his odd behavior, but was all milk and naïve kindness as we Addamses always are when dealing with outsiders, however bizarrely they act. He fetched his drink and went to his spot on the sofa, snapping open the paper after giving me another suspicious look. I glided about the room, pretending to eat bugs off the windowsills. Then I got a vase and arranged some dead flower stalks and sticks from the garden, murmuring, “The thorns are so lovely this year,” à la Morticia. Mr. Love spiked his hairy eyebrows at me, but continued reading. So I went and got Hammy Hamster from my room, got a pan from the kitchen, put him in it, then carried the pan around the living room, chattering about what spices I was going to fry my hamster up with. Mr. Love, widower and father of nine children, wasn’t going for it.
So I marched into the kitchen, slammed the pan down on the stove, grabbed the matches, and twirled the dial so the gas went hissssss.
The living room was over and down a little set of stairs, and you could just see the stove if you were sitting on the sofa. When Mr. Love heard Hammy scrabbling around in the pan, cutting the Teflon to shreds with his desperate toenails, he merely rustled the paper. But when he saw me expertly strike that Ohio Blue Tip on the side of the box and hold it to the gas, which ignited into a bonfire the witches of Macbeth would have been proud of, he leapt to his feet, yelling, “Leslie! Leslie, your crazy fuckin’ kid is cooking the hamster! She’s setting the house on fire and she’s cooking the fuckin’ hamster!”
Oh my God, it was great.
Henrietta stuck her head out from behind the basement door, took one look, and retreated. Luckily, Cassie Diggins had gone home for the day, or her entire batterie de cuisine would have been taken to my backside. My mother stormed into the kitchen, furiously tucking her orange Pucci blouse into her skintight black Capri pants.
“That’s it, THAT IS IT!” she bellowed. She scooped up Hammy and gently placed him in a Tupperware container, crooning, “There now, there now, you’re fine.” Then she let me have it with a slap across the head.
“Why do you have to be so goddamn macabre all the time? Like the sun is never out?” she growled, shaking me, though not as hard as she wanted to because she was angry with herself for whacking me in front of her date. “You apologize to Mr. Love this instant.”
I looked at my feet and muttered that I was sorry, though all three of us knew I wasn’t in the slightest. After all that wildly imaginative insubordination, my punishment was mundanely formulaic—I was sent to bed without supper.
I sat in the corner of my bedroom and ate all the Reese’s peanut butter cups I had saved from my Halloween candy. Then I reattached the heads of my Barbies with Scotch tape, and reguillotined them. It thoroughly irked my mother, this morbid little world of mine. In fact, it was like it scared her. She must have thought it was congenital. Maybe it was, but at the time I was only whistling past the graveyard.
Turns out I should have cremated Hammy when I had the chance and saved him from a gruesome death. Will, in retaliation for my telling Henrietta that he let me touch his scrotum in the bathroom, let Hammy out of his cage, whereupon Hammy made a beeline for the cellar and gorged himself on the rat poison. When Hammy showed up a few days later he was fat and satiated, but his skin was turning inside out. Ordinarily I would have found this textbook example of rodenticide anticoagulence scientifically fascinating, but it was Hammy—so I went berserk, and my mother, who was home, but packing for the Bahamas, had to take the poor thing out in the garden and bash him over the head with a shovel. To her credit, she killed him with one good swing.
As for Mr. Love, it took voodoo to get him to cave. Among the artifacts and souvenirs brought back from exotic places by my mother and her forebears was a family of stuffed dolls with crudely stitched faces and yarn hair. They resided among the magic stones, Eskimo carved animals, antediluvian ornaments, dinosaur turd fossils, and scraps of ancestral Pilgrim wedding dresses in an old Chinese chest we called the “Beast House.” My favorite thing in there was a long necklace of beads made from human skulls. My mother claimed that each of the beads was from a different skull. The beads all looked the same to me, but I pored over that thing like a nun over a rosary, trying to tell them apart.
The spirit of Mr. Love was transferred to the male doll with an appropriate incantation and a sprinkling of scotch from his bottle in the kitchen. Then I savagely stuck about two hundred pins in him. Mr. Love didn’t die, but he stopped coming round.
It was the kind of sultry Washington, DC, evening when the sky is orange and the humid air is so dense the lightning bugs have to swim through it. I was out in the backyard, rearranging the pebbles over Hammy. I tended his tiny grave like it was my husband’s. A thunderstorm was brewing, and Henrietta was trying to get me to come inside.
“I’ll no’ be telling you again—now get in before you’re struck by lightning!”
“What?” I pretended I couldn’t hear, as a DC-10 screamed overhead on final approach into National Airport.
“I said, get in here now!”
“What for?”
“So you live to be ten. You heard me.”
“But Cassie said I could stay out till bedtime.”
“Rubbish.”
“Okay, well Mommy said I could.”
“Oh, did she, now, lassie. Well I’ll just go and confirm that—”
“Oh, okay!” I finally shouted, and stomped up the back steps just as sixteen-ounce raindrops began to fall.
The new guy was coming to take my mother to dinner. His name was Pete, and I had yet to meet him. Not that I wanted to. I was still smarting from Mr. Love, and had decided to relight the torch for Charles, the foreign attaché. To avoid the new guy’s entrance, I went off to scuba dive in the bathtub.
Pete had gotten my mother seriously into scuba diving, probably because it involved a bathing suit. She in turn was trying to get me interested in it, probably because it involved getting a tan and exercise, which usually leads to a loss of weight. She’d enrolled us both in the diver’s certificate course at the YMCA. Will escaped by being away at school, but if two-year-old Edward had been able to swim, she would have enrolled him as well. Breathing underwater was the easy part. Learning decompression charts in order to avoid getting the bends was proving more difficult. Hey, I was lucky to maintain a D+ in math. However, it delighted my mother to see me making an effort to do something that might alter my body shape, so she got me a small scuba tank and a regulator, and I practiced at home in the bathtub.
I was pretending I was on a deep-water dive in the Indian Ocean, looking for great whites, sea snakes, box jellyfish, and anything else listed in the course manual as hazardous to divers, when the flipper of a leatherback sea turtle poked me. It was my mother, in a bright pink linen skirt and fitted jacket, looking like a scoop of tutti-frutti sherbet. I sucked in my stomach (always my knee-jerk reaction), and then surfaced, even though I knew I would die getting the bends from coming up so fast.
“Listen, Diver Dan, it’s going to thunder and you can’t stay in the tub during an electrical storm because it’s very dangerous, so you need to get out, okay?”
My mother’s concern surprised me, so I said okay, but as soon as I saw she was leaving, I slunk back down in the ocean. Only now I was Honey West, on a dangerous aquatic assignment in the Bahamas. Bruce, my pet ocelot, was swimming beside me in a specially constructed wet suit, and we were going after suspects in a hidden treasure heist. Suddenly, a shadow loomed from above. But instead of it being the hull of the get-away yacht, there was my mother again. Even from fifty feet below, I could see she was tapping her foot. I was alarmed enough to surface.
“Believe it or not, this is for your own safety, Toots. Out.”
I tried to mumble, through the thick black rubber in my mouth, that it wasn’t even thundering.
She squatted down beside the tub so her face was closer to mine. She smelled deliciously grown-up, like hairspray and perfume and alcohol. I went so far as to take the regulator out of my mouth so I could breathe her in, and I waited for an argument strong enough to convince me to do as she said.
“Pete says he had a friend who was electrocuted while swimming in the Amazon.”
“Wow!” That sounded terribly exciting to me.
“Pete says that if lightning were to strike the house, you could be killed. Water conducts electricity—you know that.”
“I don’t see any lightning,” I remarked, getting fidgety.
“Well, Pete says—”
“Pete says, Pete says!” I snapped. “Charles would’ve let me stay in the bath!” I couldn’t believe I said that, but now I was on a roll. “And why doesn’t Charles visit anymore?” I continued, fanning the flames. “Charles’s who I want you to like.”
“Enough!” She snatched a towel from the rack and stood up. “Charles isn’t coming back, okay? Now, get out.”
“But . . .”
“That’s enough!” she shouted. “Charles is not coming back. Period. End of story.”
She was as angry as I’d ever seen her. Well, two could play this game. I popped the regulator in my mouth and slid back down under the water. Even a monkey could have lip-read the ensuing barrage of “brat,” “bitch,” and “allowance,” but the steady whoosh of my pressurized breathing had a tranquilizing effect. Hell may have been breaking loose above, but all was amniotic peace in my little world below.
Stark raving livid, but not inclined to ruin her outfit hauling a child with scuba gear out of a bathtub, my mother threw the towel at me and stormed out of the bathroom.
I pretended I was on the deepest of deep-water dives, and the fish around me all had lanterns on their heads and huge sets of pointy teeth, while my mother was yelling at me to get out. I was down Guinness Book of World Records-deep—like five thousand feet—but she was really really mad, so I had to do what she said without stopping to decompress, and all the nitrogen in my bloodstream was boiling up in my body and clogging my arteries, and I was becoming paralyzed and was without a doubt, according to the manual, going to die.
I sat up and took off my mask, and oh God, there was Cassie Diggins, her dark face about an inch from mine, her pancake turner cocked and ready to strike. She gave the surface of the water a tsunami slap, and my ocean reverie dissolved into the murk of tepid soapy water. I scrambled from the tub, scuba tank clanking, just as a colossal clap of thunder rolled heavily over the roof of our house.