Fiction Ruined My Family (10 page)

Kitty went home and I managed to wrest Mom away from her duties as kegmeister and walk her down the street back to our house. When we got there, I found Eleanor and Kate on the glass porch watching
Saturday Night Live
.

“Guess where I've been?”

They were hoping I might wait for a commercial to bug them. “Where?”

“At the Landers', down the street.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, they had a party. Guess who was there?”

“I don't know. Who?”

“Mom. Mom was at the party.”

Eleanor and Kate started giggling. Kate put a needlepoint pillow of a Picasso figure up to her face to hide her laughing.

Eleanor wanted to make sure she didn't miss any more
Saturday Night Live
, so she jumped in: “Look, Jeanne, Mom said she was going to this party down the street. What were we supposed to do?”

“I tried to stop her, Jeanne,” Kate said, laughing even harder. “I swear.”

“Jeanne, you know you can't stop Mom when she's going to do something,” Eleanor said, picking up the clicker, preparing to unmute the TV.

“Right. Because she's five-feet-zero and there are two of you guys.”

“Maybe no one noticed her at the party. She's so teeny, no one probably even saw her except you,” Kate said, drying her eyes with her T-shirt.

“Yeah, no one noticed a forty-three-year-old in a black pencil skirt and panty hose doing beer bongs with Hugh Masterson.”

Kate gasped. Hugh Masterson was the first guy she'd made out with. “No!”

“And Kitty knocked over about five people on the way out.”

“Okay, shush, it's Father Guido Sarducci,” Eleanor commanded.

 

 

 

 

IT GOT QUIET around the house. Mom and Dad stopped going at each other—verbally, nonverbally, Mom throwing wine bottles at Dad, charging at him, slipping once and getting a black eye—and started going away from each other. Attacking each other we understood, moving away was more complicated. A war was upon Eleven Hamilton Avenue. My mother's base of operations was my parents' bedroom, while my father had set up camp in Eleanor's presidential suite on the third floor once Eleanor and Katharine went back to school. My mother wanted everyone's sympathy. Dad wanted her to straighten up and be the old mama, the mama who was game for anything, the mama who thought he was wonderful, exciting, brilliant and talented. Or in her terms, “the cat's meow.”

That kind of time travel was not on her agenda. Instead, Mom came out as a Republican. She had worked on Dad's campaign for president of the board of aldermen in St. Louis, so this was hurtful to him and went against everything his family had done for the poor and for civil rights.

With everyone else at college Mom and Dad waited for me to graduate from high school so they could sell the house and get divorced. I felt like I was a slow eater and the check had been paid and everyone had their coats on still sitting at the table, waiting for me to be finished.

Meanwhile, Mom planned.

 

 

 

 

AS SOON AS I graduated she would move into the city where she belonged. She was a city person, in case we didn't realize this about her. She was unable to get by one more minute without Korean delis and takeout and gay colorists for confidantes. We didn't know. Dad, during the in-house separation, was vulnerable, emotionally but also, obviously, financially. And I felt awful for him.

 

 

 

Mom stopped cooking for Dad. She would make dinner and then as we were eating, Dad would come in the kitchen and chat cheerfully as he always did, only he would be preparing some really disgusting dinner for himself. Olives and some chicken livers. This was what he could afford. We were eating salad, leg of lamb, while Dad was sautéing chicken livers and a hunk of bread. He ate chicken livers four out of five nights. It seemed to me the most depressing thing in the world that someone should be banished from the family meal, made to eat something different, something inferior. Dad was helpless in the kitchen. He had no money, no cooking skills, no ideas about what to eat, really. There was no staff in the kitchen to prepare him a plate where he could sit and talk about working for the white man. He was fending for himself for probably the first time in his life. And I would rather not have watched.

My mother seemed like Idi Amin eating her lamb in front of my father. Had she not studied the Geneva Convention? They were at war, yes, but there were rules. Food is life, theoretically, so if you stop cooking for someone, are you trying to kill them? It seemed to me this is precisely what she was trying to do.

 

 

 

 

ONE MORNING DAD ASKED me how to use the washing machine and I didn't know so we tried to figure it out together when Mom came in and said she was putting the house on the market.

She had a prescient relationship with real estate well before people made livings as house flippers or devoured TV shows about making a killing selling a house. She just had a sense, which she had worked a few times in St. Louis before we moved to New York. She was like Columbo, being driven around in some real estate agent's Cadillac.

“You want to buy the worst house on the best street,” she'd say, chopping cucumbers in the kitchen. She prided herself on the fact that she had found our house, a house that was in her mind a piece of crap but one that was way up in value. When she sold it she really got into the fact that she had made so much money on it, like she had hoodwinked some suckers into paying through the nose for an illusion, for her illusion, one that she had birthed and paid for with her own money, suffered for, and was now unloading. She was “staging” before there was a word for it. I came home one day with my boyfriend, Martin, to find her tinkering with her mise-en-scène.

“Martin, Jeanne. I need you to sit in the living room.”

“But we were going to watch
The Edge of Night
upstairs in Julia's room.”

“Well, I need you to put a decent shirt on and grab a book, Dickens or better yet,
Jane Eyre
, and sit in front of the fire on the living room floor.”

“Fire? It's seventy-two outside.”

“Do as I say!” she snapped, and then went into the kitchen to put a gizmo in the oven that emits the smell of baking apple pie throughout your house.

We changed our shirts quickly and got in front of the fire and pretended to be reading on the carpet while strangers came through our house and looked into closets and asked about property taxes. She sold our house for five times what she bought it for, in just under four hours.

My graduation, the thing that my parents were waiting for, was almost upon us, but the spring before I was supposed to go to college I had nowhere to go. I had gotten into George Washington University and Boston University but was partying too much to read my acceptance letters, which asked for deposits to secure a space. So I had nowhere to go. My mother and I drove to Washington, D.C., to convince George Washington University to let me in even though their fall class was now full. My mother's version of “making a few phone calls” was to put in a physical appearance, as if she were a celebrity whose name the admissions committee failed to see on my application. “Perhaps you didn't recognize the name? Doris Gissy Darst, child equestrian? Cover of
Sports Illustrated
, 1956? Youngest person ever on the cover until Nadia Comӑneci?” Surely there had to be someone my mother could take out for a drink that would “get it” about my situation. Apparently there was not. We drove home. A few weekends later, in late May, my mother took Eleanor with her to the State University of New York at Purchase, having Eleanor fill out an application form for me in the car on the way there. I must have been accepted because my parents dropped me and a few suitcases off there for Orientation Weekend in late August. I didn't go shopping with my mom for new bedspreads and shower caddies and framed posters of Degas ballet dancers. As mother and daughter we made no lists of things I would need, picked out no special sweaters for the fall classes, we didn't figure out how I would call home or when I would check in with her. My mother told me to watch out for the food, that it would have a lot of starch in it that would make me gain weight. That was about it for preparations and going-off-to-college bonding. I brought my old bedspread and my pillows and some towels from the bathroom and I got in the car. I was set up with a meal plan and given some money and then they gave me a hug and took off. College. No big deal. Just like I suspected.

M
Y BOYFRIEND, Martin, pointed to the light on his desk, the twisty neck of which was pulled down, like a microscope, over a sheet of loose-leaf paper.

“Look,” he said.

Martin was twenty-four to my eighteen; we had begun dating in my junior year in high school and then he had followed me to college, although we never talked about this—one day he just said he was going to college also, my college. It wasn't hard to get in, you could pretty much call the morning you wanted to come and start that day. So he did. And it wasn't going well. I'm the youngest kid—I don't like anyone following me.

“Get under the light. Really get in there,” he insisted.

I bent over the desk and looked at the light's circle.

“What is that, a pube?”

“Yes, mine. What else do you see, Jeanne?”

I leaned in again, wondering why Martin had to act so bananas all the time. And then I saw it. A teeny little black creature on the pube.

“Is that a flea?”

“I wish it were, Jeanne.”

“Well, what is it then, Martin?”

“You don't know what it is? You have no idea?”

“No.”

“It's a crab, Jeanne.”

“A crab?”

“Yes, a crab. A louse. A pubic louse?” Martin yelled. His roommate, Mark, a Keene State transfer student who was a “nontraditional” student (read: older, loser), like Martin, walked in.

Martin glared at me, which was confusing. If he found lice in his mattress, shouldn't he let Mark know their room had bugs?

“Let's go,” Martin said, swiping the loose-leaf sheet of paper off the desk and dropping it in the garbage. Mark hung his coat up in the closet.

“Later, man,” Martin said.

“Later,” Mark said.

I was about to say, “Later,” but it seemed like it would have been too many.

Martin walked quickly ahead of me. When we got a little way down the hall he turned back and yelled, “You fucked somebody over Thanksgiving break. I can't believe you fucked somebody!” A drowsy, bathrobed student walked past us to the hall bathroom with her little pink plastic bathroom caddie.

“I did not fuck anybody over Thanksgiving.” I had drunkenly made out with a couple people but they'd have to have a pretty bad case of crabs to transmit them to me that way. “This is what I'm talking about, Martin. These wacko accusations.”

“Well, then where the fuck did I get crabs? Huh?”

“Would you relax? Maybe you got them from the sweatpants I stole from the gym.”

The New York Knicks had taken over the school's gym, the least used gym ever constructed on American soil, SUNY Purchase being an arts school. Other than the couple hours a week that the acting department practiced fencing there it was totally deserted. So the New York Knicks took it over and now the parking lot was full of BMWs and Cadillacs and seven-foot-tall men roamed the halls of the gym, asking me if I'd seen their massage therapist. Their lackey would come by “the cage” and dump their gargantuan sweats in the laundry machines behind my desk. The cage was the name of the check-in area where I worked, which housed fencing swords and face nets and squash rackets. I checked IDs and handed out towels to sweaty actors who wrapped them around their necks like Kate Hepburn walking the Connecticut shore in 1942. Mostly I sat at the desk and read because hardly anyone ever came through.

One day I stuffed some of the Knicks sweatpants into my backpack. It wasn't like their financial officer was going to shut down the franchise because of a bloated sweatpants budget. When I got them back to my dorm I realized I'm five-seven. These sweats, while seriously thick and plush and a nice classic navy color, were about a foot too long. You couldn't roll them up, either, because the cuff was so thick your ankles looked like you had elephantiasis. I cut them and made shorts out of them.

The other problem with the stolen sweats was that they didn't say “New York Knicks” on them anywhere, so I'd trot them out expecting enormous recognition for my winning shorts but to other people they just looked like navy cutoff sweatpant shorts.

“Aren't these shorts cool?” I'd say to Emma, my friend from the city.

“They all right. They're not all that if that's what you're askin'.”

“They're New York Knicks sweats.”

Emma looked me up and down. “They don't say New York Knicks.”

“That's because these are their private sweats. You know, like their private collection. These are theirs, not that massmarketed shit for fans. You can't buy these.”

“So where'd you get 'em?”

“I stole them.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. From the gym. From the Knicks.”

“Oh. That's cool.”

“Yeah, that's what I'm saying. They wear these. They rehearse in these.”

“Practice. The Knicks don't rehearse. Shit.”

So I had to have this long, tiring conversation before I'd get the recognition I deserved. It just wasn't worth the trouble. At an arts school, no one's impressed with the Knicks. If they had been sweats that Kevin Kline rehearsed in while doing Shakespeare in the Park with Meryl Streep, somebody might have given a fuck.