Fiction Ruined My Family (7 page)

 

 

 

 

WHEN HE WASN'T IN his office, my dad hung around the kitchen, talking about Fitzgerald and reading aloud to my mother from a book of poetry by Keats, pointing out what Fitzgerald had stolen from Keats. I really think it was this kind of undergraduate behavior, lolling about reading poetry aloud and listening to
Don Giovanni
during lunch, that drove my mother into the arms of people like Barbara Taylor Bradford. She wanted to be left alone to flip through Jacques Pépin cookbooks and smoke and nap. My dad used to lament his predicament to me. “Jean-Joe, if I could do anything else I would. In a second.” He was letting me know the deal with writing and by extension, my lunch money. And maybe his relationship with Mom, his marriage. You didn't write because you wanted to, you wrote because you had to. Mom was “livid, absolutely livid” six days out of seven. She had been supportive when they had four babies on a reporter's income, when he moved us all to New York to write a novel, when the job at CBS ended and he didn't get another one but started a second novel. She was running out of encouragement. I would worry about it at night, trying to fall asleep. “What the hell is going to happen to Dad?”

M
OM'S SUMMA CUM LAUDE routine got a little old after a few hundred mentions, and she'd never really had a job. Dad was a really good writer but he hadn't written the Great American Novel. The stories about who we were, who they were, didn't seem to match anything I saw. If we're such longtime Catholics, if our ancestors built cathedrals, why do we go to church only twice a year, bombed out of our minds? If writers are so goddamn fascinating, why do they monopolize conversations and talk about their “projects” until you're about ready to throw your sandwich at their heads? Dad's artistic struggle, our financial high-wire act, meant that we were, I was, building character. Whatever the fuck that was. Their marriage seemed blighted. But they expected a hell of a lot from us. My mother was a stay-in-bed mom and my father was a stay-at-home writer, so I couldn't help thinking, Why do I have to work so hard when you people sit around and drink coffee all day and pretend to do things?

These two layabouts demanded top performance in school, and socially we were supposed to be charming, entertaining, and “presentable.” If I had it right, I was supposed to have the manners of Tracy Lord from
The Philadelphia Story
and the mind of Murray Kempton. You couldn't let your mouth hang open otherwise you'd look apish; a straight back was crucial, no gum chewing, but smoking cigs was well, there were worse things a teenager could do. Manners were everything, unless some investment banker at a cocktail party, some Solomon Brothers jackass, glanced at his watch as you talked about your novel outline, in which case it was okay to call him a horse's ass, and definitely not out of line to throw a drink in his face. Growing up, I thought throwing a drink in someone's face was the most natural thing in the world. You like someone? Ask him what you can get him to drink. Dislike someone? Throw a drink in his face. And yet our table manners—using the right fork, knowing the right way to cut meat, the right way to lean the fork at the top of the plate when you were finished—were constantly scrutinized. Now, if you wanted to stab someone in the temple with that fork during dinner, that was fine, just for heaven's sake know where to place the bloody fork on your plate when you were through.

 

 

 

 

WHAT MY FATHER PRESSED upon me even more than his family being an old St. Louis family was the fact that we were also, as far as he could trace our ancestral beginnings, not math people. I remember my mother reading aloud from the
New York Times
science section about right-brain/left-brain theories. She loved to identify with right brainers, to distance herself from “lefties” (engineers, lawyers, people who could add 7 plus 6 and come up with 13) as much as possible. It seemed to me growing up that my mother used the number forty-five so often (“I've asked you forty-five times to pick up your room,” “That dog has pooped under the dining room table forty-five times this week”) simply because it was one of the few numbers she knew. If there was one area of their marriage that was quite strong it was their mutual disapproval of math. They did the best they could to keep math out of our house and it may have been, for us, the subject non grata even more than God. They were more than happy to discuss and many times actually do my schoolwork for me if they found the subject matter lively enough. When I studied Greek and Roman history in Mr. Shaw's sixth-grade class my dad built me a Trojan horse and my mom had painstakingly fashioned a gorgeous clay Julius Caesar figurine with a knife sticking out of his chest and twenty-three plops of Heinz ketchup around his body on the steps of the Senate building indicating the twenty-three times Caesar was stabbed. My dad wrote plenty of papers for me. He showed real promise on a ten-pager about Saint Thomas Aquinas, but usually he got terrible grades at Bronxville High School, where his obscure and plentiful high literary references—from Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales
to a Voltaire pun to the thick of Faulkner—usually lost teachers. That, or they couldn't pass my father's lack of a decent five-paragraph funnel essay. But I was still expected to pass math class.

When summer school in algebra became a distinct possibility, my parents hired the Harvard-bound daughter of their only friends, the other Democrats in Bronxville, Bill and Suzanna Dean, to tutor me. Bill and Suzanna would come over and have drinks in the kitchen with my parents while April and I sat upstairs at my desk, directly above the kitchen, going over parabolas for the fiftieth time. I didn't understand a thing April said but I responded with phrases like “Isn't that interesting?” and “Ah! I see. I didn't get that before,” as I was the host and didn't want my guest to feel awkward. In addition to April I also had my algebra teacher, Mrs. Peterson, tutoring me a couple times a week after school. I just didn't get the shit. When I came home after school one day and told them I had indeed failed algebra and would need to go to Scarsdale summer school, my mother asked me if I had been nice to Mrs. Peterson.

“You catch more bees with honey than you do with vinegar,” my mother said as I cried on her bed. My mother had gone to Villa Duchesne, a Catholic school in St. Louis where the chaste young girls strolled the verdant campus wearing sweaters with “VD” emblazoned on the chest and where apparently a good shampoo would do just as well as a pencil in solving fractions. “Honestly, with that dirty hair the nuns wouldn't have passed me, either,” she told me.

From her point of view, math was a social problem that could be solved with a few well-placed compliments and clean hair. “We're not mathematicians, dolly. But you can pass a class. You just don't care.”

I had timed it so I could tell my mom while Eleanor, Katharine and Julia were out. Failure had two parts: the part between you and your fuck-up and the part between your three sisters and your fuck-up. There would not be a scene of feminine compassion and empathy. (Don't worry, Jean. You'll make a good life for yourself somewhere where decent people can't add or subtract.) No, there'd be a lot of “What? You FAILED algebra?” and “What's wrong with you?” And then one of them would say, in John Merrick's voice, “I am not an id-i-ote!” Eleanor was no Rhodes scholar but she wasn't aiming to be, she was a theater person. Katharine was a very good student and cared about grades and getting into a good college, so she thought I was just a reckless individual. Academics weren't the passion of Julia's life—her two interests were “cruising” with her friends and cruising with her boyfriend J.J.—but she was a solid B student.

 

 

 

 

WITH THIS F, I was now officially on “double probation,” which meant that I could not participate in any sports after school, which was fine by me. If I was too lazy to open a book, why in the world would I want to spend my afternoons running down a field in a hideous tartan skirt with a supersized boomerang in my hand, trying to hit a small ball into another girl's overdeveloped calves?

By junior year, although I showed absolutely no interest, I was being prepped for college and I found myself on interviews at schools I would never get into.

“What are three adjectives other people would use to describe you as a person?” the interviewer at the University of Vermont asked, looking up at me from a manila folder on the desk.

Three seems awfully limited as far as seventeen years of living goes—can we really be expected to have accumulated only three self-describing adjectives? What about faults and weaknesses? Everyone has those, so should I include those in the three? I'm smart, attractive and gassy? I'm clear-complected, a good eater, and violent when drunk? Also, which people describing us are we talking about? Are we talking about my parents? Because they might say I'm a naturally good speller, articulate and don't live up to my potential. Teachers, on the other hand, might say I'm foul-mouthed, lazy and unscrupulous. My sisters could very well opt for: ham-handed, moochy, and dragon-breathed. If the question was posed to my boyfriend, he'd probably lean toward flat-chested, thoughtless and pretty. My friends would go for daring! hilarious! and INSANE! Sit me in that admissions director's assistant's intern's office chair today and I might choose wrinkleless, goal-free and alcoholic in describing my teenage self.

My parents had contracted a bad case of Bronxville's ivyleague fever.

“I'll give Lattie Coor a call,” my father said when I got home from my interview in Burlington. I told him I didn't really do so well and he came up with the idea of calling the president of UVM, Lattie Coor, someone he knew from St. Louis, to “call in a favor.” My father always knows someone, someone who can get the job done, get you into that college; he knows editors of magazines, people who run theaters, and famous philanthropists, but not one deal has ever been closed on account of these connections, ever. These calls he makes are about as effective and insidery as chain letters. “We drove up together with a WU student to Wisconsin, La Crosse, to campaign for McCarthy—Lattie was provost at the time and trying to stay close to the kids. I'll give him a call after dinner.”

I didn't mention to my dad that I had been totally hungover after doing blow and beer bongs all night at a frat party, that I'd been exhausted after employing my Jackie Chan maneuvers (my tendency to get all ass-kicky when drinking) to fight off trust-fund rapists, and could barely answer the questions I'd been asked at the interview. That stuff seemed like, well, a given.

I thought my problem was academic, Lazie-onnaire's disease, Layme Disease, Dumbentia. Because no one ever said anything about my drinking. We drank on weekends but also did a fair amount of drinking during actual school hours at Bronxville High School. We had daytime kegs at nearby Scout Field. When someone put a sock up on a post in the school courtyard in the morning that meant some people were going to the beer distributor in Tuckahoe to get a keg and there would be a party at “the field” around noon. “Sock's up” somebody would say, looking out the window of Mrs. Ribner's English class that overlooked the courtyard where the sock hung on a post. Apparently a beer smell coming off me in the middle of the day didn't seem unusual to teachers or my parents. Grades became everything but they had yet to weigh in on daytime drinking. When Katharine came home one night with twigs in her hair and said she had decided to take a little nap while walking home from a party and toppled into a pricker bush by the side of the road, it became one of the funny stories we told. The only rule we had around drinking was that Dad did not want us drinking before going out at night. Julia and I were having some beers before a party once and he came in and let us know that he didn't want us drinking before parties. No pre-drinking drinking.

Smoking wasn't particularly frowned upon, either. You couldn't smoke in front of Dad, from his own asthma he seemed to have some idea that children shouldn't smoke, but Mom didn't object too much as long as you didn't smoke her cigarettes. She kept her cartons of cigarettes in a drawer in the kitchen and she was beginning to notice that packs were being opened rather savagely as if by a novice. Julia and I denied smoking her brand and were vindicated when the novices turned out to be rats living in our basement who would come up into the kitchen drawers at night and eat her cigarettes. Her children smoking her stash was bad enough, but rats, they could damn well get their own cigarettes. She promptly called an exterminator.

My dad made me take Princeton Review, the SAT preparation course, on Saturday mornings. It was expensive, over five hundred dollars, and I went up ten whole points after taking it (not the kind of dramatic improvement they advertised). My father then decided I needed more one-on-one help, since that had worked such wonders with April Dean. He hired a tutor named Mr. Burnham to come on Sunday mornings. The first Sunday he came I forgot he was coming and had been out at some swanky party in the woods near the Metro-North train tracks with my friends. There was a knock on my bedroom door.

“Jean-Joe, are you decent? Mr. Burnham's here. Throw some sweatpants on and get downstairs. Posthaste.”

I made my way downstairs and met Mr. Burnham. Unbeknownst to me, I had a giant hickey on my neck.

“Jesus, Jean-Joe, it looks like you were attacked by Cujo last night.” My father put some spit on his finger and tried to rub the mysterious red blot with teeth marks off my neck.

“What in God's name is that?” my father said before I pushed him away and ran to the toaster to get a look.