Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) (3 page)

I loved the music deeply, consuming it as if it were food, tasting its flavors of genius, of madness, and of the vast, magic world just beyond the land. When I got bored of listening, Mom played Parcheesi with me, always letting me be the red player, because that was my favorite, even when I gave her first pick.

E
very night, Mom slid into my twin bed with me and read me a chapter or two from the books I already loved like family—
Little Women
and
The Secret Garden,
or my favorite book from my childhood,
The Year of Mr. Nobody,
the story of a discontented middle child who feels alienated from his family and so invents an imaginary friend.

With my Sesame Street comforter pulled up to my chin, my mom lanky beside me in jeans and her Guatemalan slippers, her bangles making their familiar music as she turned the page, I felt safe and content, maybe not entirely happy, but at least full of an uneasy peace that was a relief from my normal waiting state. Inside the world of the book, I could forget my own longing and lack. A few months into our new life
on the land, I could read the easy authors kids learn first—Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein.

Mom got a job and put me in a local day care. My only real, vivid memory of the place is how much I hated naptime, already eager for a life filled with constant activity and excitement. The heavy claustrophobia of insomnia rising, I knew I would not be able to sleep. But I was a perfectionist and a rule follower, never tantruming in front of anyone but Mom and Craig, and so I willed myself still.

When I couldn't stand it anymore, I quietly reached for a book. The adults who found me reading couldn't really be angry since I hadn't disturbed anyone. My mutiny was permitted. Reading became a reward for me, and finally, something I could control.

As much as I loved reading, I would have preferred to be at home playing with my own toys, on the land with the other kids who were like me. Being out in the world was always a little fraught. We didn't live like other people. We didn't watch the same TV programs or eat the same food, and as much as my instinct was to fit in, I mostly liked how we lived. It was familiar, and it had an aura of old-timey adventure, like living in
Little House on the Prairie.
Going back and forth between the two realities—carob at home versus chocolate at day care, wooden blocks and tinker toys versus plastic, plastic, plastic—was like being bilingual.

From an early age, I had a list of chores I was expected to complete each week. Instead, I was often hiding away upstairs, tearing through a library book. I hated getting in trouble, but I was like a drunk at the bar in the final minutes before last call, trying to squeeze in a few more precious sips.

The one chore I didn't have to be harassed about was checking the mail. As I stood on the side of the country road that passed by our house, I willed myself to yank open the wooden mailbox. Usually, it was just bills and seed catalogs for Mom.

But sometimes, there was an envelope that smelled exotic yet familiar, its exterior marked with my dad's distinctive handwriting,
which I adored and tried to copy for a time in my teens—my name rendered with lowercase
a
's nestled between a capital
S,
capital
R,
and capital
H.
When I was little, these cards were mostly addressed to Mom. I clutched the envelope to my chest and ran all the way back, always a little surprised when our house came into view amid the unrelenting trees, the skylights glinting in the mellow New En­gland sun. Mom was making a stained-glass window at the table, bent down over the pattern of blue and yellow flowers she'd laid out, her hair falling forward.

“Mom, Mom, you got a letter from Dad,” I said.

She looked up, her face tense, then smiled at me. “Here, I'll open it,” she said.

I held my hand on her bare arm, freckled like mine, as she tilted the card so I could see the painting of an old-fashioned woman holding a brown dog, and read:

“Hi Sue and Sarah, Hope/Intend this catches up with yous. How does bringing Sarah down Sun the 21st or Mon. the 22nd sound and I'll probably bring her back up on the bus, cause I just don't have enough confidence in my bomb.”

My heart leapt in my chest.
I was going to see my dad. I was, wasn't I?
I looked at Mom, but she was focused on reading, not giving anything away: “If it sounds good to you call me collect from the land or otherwise I'll call you Weds. morning. Good luck, good weather with your house, tell everyone I love them, John.”

Mom gave me the card, picked up her soldering iron, and went back to work.

“Am I going to Boston?” I asked.

“We'll see,” she said.

It was like Christmas, Easter, and Halloween all put together, but better, because it was a wonderful surprise I hadn't dared to let myself hope for. Now I just had to wait until his phone call to make sure it was really happening.

“Why don't you go outside and play?” Mom said.

Ever since I'd learned to read, I wasn't so into playing in the woods. I'd outgrown the idea that a little dirt didn't hurt, and I always seemed to be afflicted with a sunburn, even when I'd barely been outside. But this was the refrain of my childhood, and I wanted to behave so nothing would get in the way of my time with my dad. I took my book—its constant presence like an extension of my body—out to the front yard.

Everything on the land had a strong smell; the air never seemed to warm up completely, except for a few weeks in late summer, and in the short, cool afternoons, the earth's odor was sharp and tangy with minerals. I lay on the grass, which was sweet and clean like the aftertaste of milk. It was so quiet I could hear the wind in the trees, a gentle whooshing noise that became hypnotic. There was something supremely lonely about the sound. In order to hear it, there must be no evidence of human life anywhere—no car engines or horns, no television laugh tracks, no human voices talking about the price of potatoes, no electric guitar solo from a classic rock song drifting over from someone's radio. There was nothing and no one, a feeling like the end of the world, an absence and emptiness that created an early, unformed dread; I was all alone, as we were all alone, with nothing but the wind in the trees.

E
very sixth or seventh time my dad vowed to visit, as I stood waiting at the window, my vigilance paid off. There was a flash of yellow through the trees. He was coming. He was really coming this time. It had been more than a year since his last visit, six months since I'd last been down to Boston. He had promised to see me at least half a dozen times in between. But I had believed, and now he was here. Joy and terror filled me in equal parts. I ran outside to greet him, but then held back at the last moment, paralyzed with shyness and the sheer overwhelming fact that my father was there, suddenly, in the flesh. After I had gotten over my initial anxiety, I met him in the driveway.

“Hi, Sarah,” he said, his lazy enunciation of my name familiar and beloved.

“Hi,” I said, watching him closely for guidance.

He squatted down to my height, and I breathed him in and felt his worn green T-shirt under the skin of my bare arms, his little notebook
poking at me from his chest pocket. I tried to hold him tight, but my reach didn't go all the way around.

“My back's been acting up all day,” he said, pushing himself to stand.

His bad back was the number one reason he gave for canceling our visits, and I watched him closely now, afraid it would cause him to leave abruptly.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah, I'm fine, Sarah,” he said. “How are you?”

“Good,” I said, scurrying ahead of him toward the house, which I felt proud of, as if it were a drawing I'd made and now had the chance to show off.

He held back a little, and I slowed my steps to match his. When he caught up, I led him inside. Mom was chopping chickpeas in the blender for fresh hummus. She turned off the loud whirring blades when we came through the door.

“Hi, John,” she said.

“Hi, Sue,” he said, barely able to look at her. “How are yous?”

“We're good,” Mom said. “Sarah's glad you're here.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a bent envelope.

“I'm sorry it isn't more,” he said.

She didn't say anything, didn't reach for the envelope. All of us were silent. He held it out to her. Finally, she took it from him, and I exhaled.

“Thank you,” she said. “Do you want some lunch?”

“Nah, I stopped and got a fish sandwich at McClellan's on the way up. I think we're gonna take a drive.”

“Sarah, have some lunch first,” Mom said.

“I'm not hungry,” I said, even though I loved to eat, hungry or not.

All I wanted was to be alone with my dad. I thought he was somehow more special than the other dads who were a regular part of life on the land, because he lived in a faraway city, and he drove a cab,
which was glamorous, big-city work, and if he could only be with me once every six to eighteen months, then his time must be more valuable than that of the other fathers, who shoveled the driveways and ate the tabbouleh at the potlucks during our regular day-to-day. He was like a touring rock star that only rolled into town when his adoring public and exciting lifestyle allowed him to get away.

When my dad was with me, I was greedy about his time. His visits with the other families on the land—Lou and Dottie, who'd been my parents' friends when they were together, and Penny, who lived in the house behind ours and shared similar interests and beliefs with my dad—made me restless. As we sat together on the bench in Dottie's kitchen, where he sipped herbal tea from a chunky ceramic mug, I hated losing him to adult conversations I could barely follow. Nevertheless, I stayed close by his side.

“Do you wanna go play?” he said, looking down at me.

I shook my head, determined to wait it out. But as the afternoon dragged on, I became frustrated that his attention wasn't on me. I reached up onto the table and pulled on his big, dad hand, trying to hurry him up. He looked down at me and laughed.

“All right, Sarah, let's go,” he said, making my heart leap.

My dad's visits always found us indulging in one of his greatest passions—driving. He'd held jobs he'd loved delivering auto parts to mechanic shops up and down the Delaware River and parking cars, not to mention his cab driving. I would think of this when I later read Kerouac, because of my dad, of course, always picturing Neal Cassady as my dad during the scenes in which he parked cars with maniacal zeal. My dad's idealization of Kesey and Cassady and all of his counterculture heroes was the cover story for why he couldn't get a real job with the “squares” or be anything like a steady father to me.

I'm sure my dad's long rambles on the narrow coastal roads were due in part to his eagerness to stay out of the house, which must have been oppressive for him, even though Mom was remarkably good at keeping her anger in check, and Craig merely rolled his eyes.

Dad didn't know any other form of parenting, so what was he supposed to do anyhow? His father was a World War II sailor who never acknowledged his paternity and has never been more to our family than a name on a piece of paper. My grandmother Betty, an alcoholic model and hatcheck girl at mobster clubs in the New Jersey Palisades, lost her children to foster care when my dad was three and my aunt Mimi was eleven. After Betty got out of prison for child neglect, my dad's family time was limited to the few weekends when Betty convinced one boyfriend or another to ferry her out to the home of his foster parents, and take him on Sunday drives.

Among the few clear memories my dad has of me as a child is from when I was three: we are in one of his cabs, driving up the coast. He is looking down at me, and he is so happy to be there because, as he says, it is so “far out” to talk to me. I am listening to every word he says in the most intense way possible, creating a feeling within him that he sums up like this: “It's always nice if you can find one other person in the world who listens to you.” Of course I was happy to listen to him. He had shaped me to be his best listener, ever. Grocery store clerks still tell me their secrets to this day.

My father did all of the usual dad pranks of driving with no hands, until I was sure we would crash, barely righting the car at the last minute, or sometimes driving with his knees. All of which made me shriek and giggle and feel as if we were two merry pranksters. Until my dad began pinching his waistline.

My dad had this habit, which he used to distract himself from his severe back pain. I anxiously watched his hand sneak down to the fabric of his shirt. This pain was my enemy. I didn't want it to make him go away. I always wanted to spend as much time with him as possible, and I would have done anything to keep him with me forever.

But I had to make do with his visits. When my dad came up to Maine, he couldn't afford a motel. Our house was small—only 740 square feet, including the bedrooms upstairs—and the only two rooms with doors were the bathroom and Mom and Craig's room. There was
no guest room. For the first few years, we didn't have a couch. And so he stayed in my room with me.

As we settled in at bedtime, I rolled away from him into the crack between my bed and the wall, calming myself with my stuffed lamby and the familiar cool of the Sheetrock against my skin. I loved him more than anything else, but I was scared by the intensity of the love I felt for him, and how it bloomed when I was near him, because he was largely a stranger to me.

He shifted next to me, trying to compact his adult frame into my tiny bed, and I held myself tightly together, careful not to let our skin touch, overwhelmed by everything. I could feel the adult tension like a held breath in the house and couldn't stand that what I wanted most was obviously so hard on everyone else.